Biden’s Successes, December Tribulations

In 2016, the mainstream media managed to get Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) into the White House, and it now seems to be pushing GOP candidate wins for the next two election cycles. Most of the news focuses on inflation, COVID, and the problems with Build Back Better, President Joe Biden’s proposed jobs/infrastructure bill. Missing is any focus on Biden’s successes such as the following.

Biden has signed bipartisan legislation examining disparities in VA disability ratings and benefits, provide military personnel jobs at federal facilities, promote tuition equality for military family survivors, and give a wide range of programs and benefits to mothers. Before Biden, DDT denigrated veterans, attempted to privatize the VA, and removed DDT benefits. He frequently lied he was responsible for Veterans’ Choice which President Obama signed in 2014. 

According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Amazon must permit their Alabama workers a second chance to form a union because the company illegally interfered  has directed that Amazon workers in Alabama get a second chance at forming a union after finding that the company illegally interfered with an earlier union election. Amazon spent millions for anti-union consultants and police to intimidate workers the union supporters and installed a mailbox at the warehouse for workers to mail their ballots. The company likely surveilled the mailbox. Amazon is already lobbying against the union with its statement that workers have a choice but unions are not “the best answer for our employees.”

After a five-month break, world powers began talks to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The reward for the Iranians is liberation from hundreds of western economic sanctions if they stop building their nuclear program, started after DDT took the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018. Talks are among Iran, Russia, China, the UK, France, Germany, and the EU, but Iran doesn’t allow the U.S. delegation to be directly involved. Iran has new demands including financial compensation from the U.S. for previous sanctions and a guarantee that the U.S. will not again leave the new agreement. Time is of he essence: Iran may be only four to six weeks away from its amassing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapons.

The agreement was easier to effect the first time in 2015 because Iran now has a much more conservative government than now. Without an agreement, Iranians promise to “further escalate its nuclear program.” Iran is already enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, beyond the levels permitted by the earlier agreement, and now taking steps to increase the process to 90 percent. The deal was working until DDT pulled out despite advice from all top members of his national security team. At that point, Iran became much more dangerous, and the situation continues to be more serious with DDT’s failed policy.

Although Biden isn’t yet stopped drilling on public lands and waters, he recommends increased charges for oil and gas companies. The Interior Department report also wants no leasing in areas conflicting with wildlife or conservation and prioritizing leasing areas with resource potential.

Biden is proposing a 20-year ban on oil and gas drilling in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and its ten-mile radius, a sacred tribal site. The Bureau of Land Management will set aside the land for two years to conduct an environmental analysis and gather public comment. Existing leases and drilling rights will not be affected. The government also will prioritize improving public safety for Native Americans who have sought assistance for 2,700 unsolved killings and 1,500 missing persons cases in their jurisdictions.

Biden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate potential illegalities in high gas costs. He wrote that “the price of unfinished gasoline is down more than 5 percent while gas prices at the pump are up 3 percent in [the past month]. This unexplained large gap between the price of unfinished gasoline and the average price at the pump is well above the pre-pandemic average.” U.S. oil and gas companies have amassed significant profits with two of the biggest ones nearly doubling their net income since 2019, according to Biden. “They have announced plans to engage in billions of dollars of stock buybacks and dividends this year or next.” Biden has no control over gas prices, but he has released 50 million barrels of oil from reserves.  

Five other countries—China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the UK—are taking similar actions. Both Democratic and GOP presidents have taken oil from reserves about 20 times since they were created in 1975. In an attempt to make himself look good, DDT lied about how the “reserves are meant to be used for serious emergencies, like war, and nothing else.” He also lied about the Reserves being empty when he took over—they weren’t—and that how he “filled them up three years ago, right to the top”—he didn’t because they are far less full when he left. DDT also claimed he had bought the oil, but the government gets the oil in royalties for drilling leases. Thanks to unfettered capitalism, the oil industry is making enormous profits.

Most coastlines along continental U.S. may have offshore windfarms from lease auctions for up to seven new areas. Federal approval for the first U.S. commercial-scale offshore wind farm in May. The first leases will be on the East Coast because the Pacific waters are deeper close to shore than on the East Coast, causing difficulty in attaching turbines to the seafloor. Turbines in the Gulf of Mexico must have to cope with hurricanes and soft soils.

For months, GOP senators have blocked Biden’s diplomatic appointments, and top Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) wants his colleagues to stop stalling the 60 pending foreign-policy nominations on the Senate floor. The most constant obstructionists, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), have accepted only four U.S. ambassador nominations, either former senators or their widows. The rest are being held up because Biden lifted sanctions on the Russia-backed company behind its gas pipeline to Germany, Nord Stream 2. 

Obsessed with the one-month increase of inflation in the U.S. to a 6.2 percent annual rate, the media ignored its rise around the world. In 46 countries, 39 are higher than the 2019 third quarter with 16 of them over 2 percent higher. The U.S. has the eighth-highest annual inflation rate among these countries. The pattern is largely the same: inflation stayed flat during the worst of the pandemic and rose when countries worked their way back to something like normal.

The economy, however, has good markers in consumer spending data and job creation. In October, retail sales rose 1.7 percent, and new jobs reported large increases in August and September revisions. For June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported underestimated job growth by 626,000 jobs, the largest underestimate of any other comparable period back to 1979. Job revisions don’t get the same media attention as initial monthly figures, thus fewer people are aware of these successes. The job growth reports have been vastly underreported since Biden was inaugurated. The inaccurate, pro-DDT numbers come from DDT-appointed William Beach, the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics who had previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and a Charles Koch research center. Beach is also responible for the Consumer Price Index, recently claiming massive price increases. 

Last week, Reuters reported the 71,000 drop of weekly jobless claims to 199,000, a 52-year low, and a reduction of 60,000 to continuing claims. With 531,000 new jobs in October, unemployment dropped to 4.6 percent, not seen since November 1969. The third-quarter GDP growth was revised up to 2.1 percent with the possibility of 8.6 percent for the last quarter. The goods trade deficit also sharply narrowed last months with surging exports.

GOP congressional stalling has led to a December time crunch. If both chambers don’t agree on funding the government by December 3, the government closes down. In September, Congress passed a continuing resolution with the December deadline; it could pass another CR until February or March to finalize the 2022 appropriations bill. In this omnibus bill, the House has passed ten of 12 smaller spending measures, but the Senate has been successful for only three of them.

The debt ceiling must be raised by December 15 so that the government can pay its bills. The U.S. has never defaulted on its debt, which would be catastrophic, but many unprecedented events have ocurred in the past five years. No matter how destructive to the U.S., Republicans don’t want to vote for raising the debt ceiling despite the way they and DDT increased it by $7.9 trillion during DDT’s time in the White House.

In addition, Democrats in the Senate want to pass Biden’s $1.9 trillion reconciliation bill, Build Back Better, which requires dealing with Democratic senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Krysten Sinema (AZ). And there’s more—the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual must-pass bill. The NDAA has passed Congress every year for six decades despite the need one year to override DDT’s veto. One glitch is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) attempt to connect it to the U.S. Innovation and Competition ACT (USICA) for $250 billion to oppose China’s technological and defense gains. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) also wants to remove military sex crimes prosecution from the chain of command and include women in the draft. The NDAA has 1,000 amendments, including repealing the 1991 Gulf War and 2002 Iraq War authorizations.

December 1 opens more opposition from the Republicans to anything helping the country.

November, Three Trials about Racism

Thanksgiving is over. Memories of the fights at the table are fading although Republicans are still manufacturing outrage from about VP Kamala Harris’ spending $500 of her own money in Paris on kitchen ware while remaining silent about taxpayers forced to pay $765,000 for golf cart rentals by now-Deposed Donald Trump (DDT). Rentals from DDT’s personally-owned resorts.

MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, brought out fewer than 20 people at his protest against Fox outside its Manhattan headquarters because they haven’t uniformly spread the lie about election fraud. The Daily Beast was the only outlet present at the non-event, where even Lindell didn’t appear and thus failed in his promise to reveal names of plaintiffs in his non-existent filing to the Supreme Court. Lindell said he was crossing the U.S. to persuade state AGs to co-sign his election-fraud complaint. He followed the impotent protest with his “Thanks-a-thon,” the 96-hour marathon on his personal YouTube chаnnel which he claimed would reveal election fraud detail. It didn’t. Instead, he complained about AGs not following his lead and the Salem conservative Christian network, declaring he was pulling his ads. He still heavily advertises on Fox.

Three court trials, all dealing with racism, were part of the Thanksgiving conversation. Although the first decision was delivered the week before the holiday, the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse in the killing of two men and wounding of another one with the successful claim of self-defense increased the nation’s polarization between different ideologies. The wounded and murdered men were all white, but the protest in Kenosha (WI) concerned a police officer shooting an unarmed Black man in the back seven times, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and sustaining serious internal organ damage. The defense attorney even referenced this shooting in her closing statement: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, other people in this community have shot somebody seven times — and it’s been found to be OK. My client did it four times.”

Although Rittenhouse’s friendly judge and his $2 million for defense caused many people to expect him to get away with murder, the “self-defense” was laughable: he brought an AR-15, obtained illegally when he had barely shot before, across state lines and sought out people to shoot while falsely claiming to be a paramedic.

Rittenhouse’s far-right supporters, including congressional QAnon believers, have tried to make him into a hero. The nuttiest of representatives—Madison Cawthorn (NC), Matt Gaetz (FL), Paul Gosar (AZ)—have fought over which one of them gets him as an intern, and Lauren Boebert (CO) said she will challenge Cawthorn to a “sprint” to get Rittenhouse as an intern; Cawthorn is wheelchair-bound. Gaetz also wants to pass a national “stand your ground” law, something that the three wounded and dead men were doing. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) introduced a bill to give him a Congressional Gold Medal. It’s an uphill road for her. She needs co-sponsors from two-thirds of both House and Senate and presidential authorization.

DDT, who called Rittenhouse a “nice young man,” brought him to Mar-a-Lago for a photo shoot in front of a photograph of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

After showing his favoritism for Rittenhouse, the judge in the case treated the defendant like a pet, allowing him to select the final dozen jurors from a raffle drum that held the names of the original 18 who heard the case. In Wisconsin, the judge typically selects the numbers of remaining jurors, but he gave Rittenhouse that piece of theater. The judge rescinded MSNBC’s journalism privileges because a freelancer supposedly followed a juror van, but he approved of Fox’s Tucker Carlson filming the event for a documentary. The longest serving circuit judge in the state, the 75-year-old judge has been elected unopposed for seven six-year terms. His next election would be in 2026.  

A sweet-looking 18-year-old Rittenhouse cried on the stand, and the judge yelled, “Don’t get brazen with me!” at the prosecutor. The judge ordered the prosecutor to find an expert testifying that using the zoom on an image doesn’t distort it—“within minutes.” When a juror said he didn’t think he could be impartial, the judge stopped him from talking. In the Rittenhouse acquittal, citizen vigilantism won.

Almost 800 miles south of Kenosha, three White men ages 65, 35, and 32—also vigilantes—were convicted the day before Thanksgiving of chasing down 25-year-old Ahmand Arbery while he was jogging and murdering him. The jury, composed of nine White women, two White men, and one Black man, deliberated over 11 hours in two days after eight days of testimony with 23 witnesses. The verdicts. Travis McMichael, who fired the fatal shots, guilty of all charges – malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit a felony. Gregory McMichael, Travis’ father who rode armed in the bed of his son’s pickup, guilty of all charges except malice murder. Neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan Jr, who made the video that helped seal the verdicts, guilty of felony murder, one count of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit a felony. He was cleared of the other charges.

The sentencing date for the men has not been made public. Prosecutors plan to seek sentences of life in prison with no parole. Gregory McMichael’s attorney said she was “floored with a capital F” and will appeal as will the attorney for his son. Another defense attorney maintained the McMichaels thought their actions were “the right thing to do” and is disappointed and saddened. The McMichaels, also indicted on federal hate crime charges, will go on trial in February—two years after the murder—for interference of rights and attempted kidnapping as well as a charge of using, carrying, brandishing and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.

Black, unarmed, and on foot, Arbery tried to elude the three armed white men in the vehicles pursuing him. They claimed they believed he had committed a crime. They said they conducted a citizen’s arrest and acted in self-defense, but the video shows no indication of that happening. After national notice of the murder over two months later, Bryan gave the video to a radio station. Supported by a district attorney, he thought it would exonerate the three men. Under oath, Travis admitted he had lied to the police when he said Arbery grabbed his shotgun and told Arbery he was making a citizen’s arrest. The law allowing citizen’s arrest in Georgia, now repealed, went into effect before the Civil War when slave patrollers used them to capture runaway slaves. Travis was the only one of the three to testify.

The trial was notable for two major racial highlights. The defense attorney complained about Al Sharpton sitting with Arbery’s family and said he didn’t want any more “black pastors” in the courtroom. Another defense attorney criticized the jury because it didn’t have enough “Bubbas,” meaning White men over 40 years old who were born in the South and had no four-year college degrees.

Attention to the murder was stalled for over two months because assistants in the office of Brunswick (GA) district attorney, Jackie Johnson, told police that the three men should not be arrested. The assistants did indicate a conflict of interest: Gregory McMichaels worked in the DA’s office for over 30 years and called her shortly after the shooting. Johnson then immediately contacted George Barnhill, DA for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, who watched Bryan’s video and stated that the three men could chase and kill Arbery in self-defense. Johnson recused herself, and Georgia’s AG Christopher Carr appointed Barnhill to prosecute the case. After five weeks, Barnhill finally admitted a conflict of interest but repeated his “self-defense” ruling in a letter to the Glynn police department. Another DA was appointed to prosecute the case.

Because a local journalist, Larry Hobbs, stayed on the story, the outrage against the Glynn police department, already being investigated for corruption, went national 61 days after the murder. A week later, Bryan went public with the video, believing it would exonerate him. State officers arrested the three men, and the case was moved to Atlanta, 270 miles from the killing in Brunswick.

A grand jury indicted Jackson for violating her oath of office and obstructing police, using her position to discourage the arrest of the McMichaels. The indictment also states Jackson favored Gregory McMichaels. 

Charlottesville (VA) hosted a third trial about racism in November, this one a civil lawsuit against five white nationalist organizations and 12 individual defendants responsible for the murder and other violence in August 2017 in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally. The defendants are to pay over $25 million in damages to the nine plaintiffs suffering physical or emotional injuries, including over $12 million for the death of Heather Heyer, deliberately run down by a self-declared neo-Nazi. He is already sentenced to life in prison for his murder conviction. 

The verdicts in these three trials raise questions. Would Kyle Rittenhouse be acquitted without a $2-million defense and a sympathetic judge? Would Ahmaud Arbery’s three killers be convicted without the video that one of the three men made public because of advice from Georgia’s elected officials? Or without an intrepid journalist pursuing the story? And would the white supremacists in the Charlottesville lost if they had competent defense instead of their own egotistical and racist testimony?

Today’s Events: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Good:

The House passed President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) Act by 220-213 on its way to an uncertain future in the Senate. Seniors will benefit because Medicare can negotiate lower prices for some medications, saving Medicare $262 billion, and they will have coverage for new hearing aids every five years. Seniors and people with disabilities can also have more home healthcare services, and the bill increases wages and benefits for caregivers.

Drug prices are skyrocketing. Part of the $21.70 increase in Medicare comes from the $10 additional cost from the high price of the new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, $56,000 a year per patient. People in the U.S. pay almost three times as much for drugs as they would in dozens of other countries. Although critics express concern about less research and development of new drugs, pharmaceutical companies use billions of taxpayer dollars for R&D and spend more on advertising than on R&D. The drug industry is now flooding the media with ads claiming people with serious illnesses can’t get vital medications. Yet 93 percent of people—90 percent of Republicans—believe lowered prices won’t damage the ability to develop drugs.

Other benefits of the bill include free universal preschool for children ages three and four, gives four weeks of family leave (still much shorter than in most of the world), addresses climate change, and increases Pell grants for college tuition. Costs will be covered by increased corporate taxes and IRS enforcement. Other provisions include affordable housing investments and a cap of child care at seven percent of income. (Amounts above are for ten years, not one.)

Maine’s Jared Golden was the only “nay” vote; all Republican representatives voted against the bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will cost about $1.7 trillion in the next decade, $170 billion a year. Funding for IRS reinforcement will decrease the deficit $127 billion by 2031. Lawmakers applauded the bill’s passage, clapping for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and chanting “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.”

The Bad:

In opposition to the bill, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) spoke—frequently slowly—for eight hours and 28 minutes, the longest continuous speech in the House for over 110 years. His statements, sometimes rambling and incoherent, failed to mention the pandemic except for his perception that China was at fault. Yet he complained about such issues as reasonable costs for insulin, vital to save diabetics’ lives.

McCarthy’s delay means that the vote happened during the day, in much better media time, instead of late in the evening. He claimed he was “talking to the American people.” McCarthy assured “the American people” he would “always fight for you, fight for your family” while he is fighting for higher drug prices, no paid leave, greater housing costs, less health care, higher costs for education and child care, etc. Instead, he talked about Reagan’s missile defense initiative, his friend Elon Musk, and other non sequiturs in addition to a long detour into the painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River which hangs in his office.  Although he criticized China, he praised the country, saying China wouldn’t force payment of taxes as Democrats did in the BBB bill.

McCarthy was briefly silenced during the speech. When he declared, “Nobody elected Joe Biden to be FDR,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called out, “I did!” Another person said, “Me too.”

When McCarthy finished at 5:04 am (EST) on Friday morning, he yielded the floor to Pelosi who had left the chamber several hours earlier. A few sleepy Republicans applauded his endurance.

McCarthy’s only accomplishment with his speech was to delay the vote a few hours, but he’s working hard to show he deserves to be Speaker if Republicans take over the House in 2022. Mark Meadows, former chief of staff for Dictator Donald Trump (DDT), is advocating DDT for that position; the Speaker doesn’t need to be an elected representative. DDT called the idea “very interesting.” He has already made clear that McCarthy hasn’t been his loyal supporter, especially after McCarthy said immediately after January 6 that DDT “bears responsibility” for the insurrection. (McCarthy spent the next nine months trying to walk back that statement.) DDT has repeatedly indicated that GOP leaders aren’t fighting the Democrats. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) praised McCarthy after the speech for his “fight.”

On Steve Bannon’s radio show, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) blamed Republicans for the passage of BBB in the House because 13 of them helped pass the earlier infrastructure bill that has now become law. Gaetz described McCarthy’s speech as “a really long death rattle. The outcome was already determined as a consequence of poor leadership and poor strategy.”

House rules permit leaders to talk as long as they want when they are recognized for one minute of floor time. In 2018, Pelosi talked for over eight hours about the Dreamers bill for young undocumented immigrants. Ocasio-Cortez said if McCarthy “wanted to outdo [Pelosi], he should’ve done it in stilettos.”

The Ugly:

Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, walked free of any charges after illegally obtaining an AR-15-style rifle, crossing state lines, and searching for protesters in Kenosha (WI) with militia members when he was only 17. He killed two men, wounded another, and endangered two more in a claim of “self-defense.” Rittenhouse escaped counts of not only two charges of homicide and one of attempted homicide but also two of reckless endangerment for shooting at others, including a videographer.

Supporters, most of them encouraged by conservative media and social media, raised Rittenhouse’s $2 million bail soon after he was indicted. When out of jail, he was seen drinking in a bar and flashing white power signs while being “loudly serenaded” with the Proud Boys anthem. He also moved from one home to another without notifying the court. The bail was provided by hundreds of supporters responding to conservative news sites and social media, as well as from gun activists.

A question about his exoneration is what part the judge, highly sympathetic to Rittenhouse, and the even more supportive conservative media played in the “not guilty” verdict on all counts. The verdict cannot be appealed; it’s a done deal The judge has consistently appeared friendly to Rittenhouse and his defense while critical of the prosecution. After the reading of the verdict, the judge said he “couldn’t have asked for a better jury to work with.”

Rittenhouse escaped counts of not only two charges of homicide and one of attempted homicide but also two of reckless endangerment for shooting at others, including a videographer.

Rittenhouse claimed he was a trained EMT; he wasn’t. As a vigilante, he searched for people hostile to him and his militia group, claiming he was offering medical attention. His only prior experience with the rifle was firing 30 rounds during a weekend before heading to Kenosha. Prosecutors said that Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim was invalid because his use of deadly force was unreasonable.

Rittenhouse has jobs waiting for him: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), under investigation for sex trafficking and other crimes, has offered the killer a congressional internship as has Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), censured by the House this past week for his anime cartoon threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and draw swords on Biden. Gosar tweeted he would “arm wrestle” Rep. Matt Gaetz in order to “get dibs for Kyle as an intern.” Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) offered an internship to Rittenhouse on Instagram and is using the verdict to celebrate with guns. He stated, “Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.” [Right: What a congressional intern looks like.] 

DDT used the verdict in his fund-raising email, praising the acquittal and claiming the trial was “nothing more than a WITCH HUNT from the Radical Left” who “want to PUNISH law-abiding citizens, including a CHILD, like Kyle Rittenhouse, for doing nothing more than following the LAW.”

People can expect more worship of Rittenhouse. Fox network’s host Tucker Carlson sent a film crew to shoot footage for a documentary and plans to interview Rittenhouse next week.

The verdict announcement in favor of racist vigilantism lacked any surprise, even from those opposing Rittenhouse’s actions. He could, however, face federal charges for crossing state lines with the rifle. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has called on DOJ to investigate the possibility.

And More Ugly: 

Thanks to DDT’s General Postmaster Louis DeJoy, who tried to block mail-in voting by horrible USPS delivery service, shipping will temporarily cost more for the holiday season between From October 3, and midnight Christmas Day, supposedly to cover “extra costs.” Prices go between $0.75 for flat rate boxes and envelopes to $5 more for packages as large as 70 pounds. Last year, the USPS raised costs for commercial customers; this year’s increase is for everyone.

DeJoy’s time in control of the postal service may be short-lived. Biden will not nominate Ron Bloom, the Democrat running the USPS board and DDT-supporter John Barger, for another term after their current ones expire on December 8, 2021. Bloom was surprised he was not re-nominated. The Senate must confirm Biden’s two nominees. When Barger’s and Bloom’s terms expires, the remaining seven board members will have three Biden-appointed members; one of DDT’s four appointments is a Democrat.  

Legal Issues Face GOP Despite Its Violence

In an update for Veterans Day, almost 4,500 current and former U.S. military service members, along with their families, are to be sworn in as citizens through over 90 ceremonies this week. President Joe Biden also plans to bring back deported veterans and family members to the U.S. Of the almost 900,000 immigrants serving in the military in the present and past, over 190,000 were active members in 2017.

This news, however, was eclipsed by the announcement that a grand jury has indicted Steve Bannon, an architect behind the nefarious actions of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT), for criminal contempt in refusing to comply to a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee.  Bannon faces two charges, one for refusing to appear before Congress and one for refusing to submit documents to Congress. This is Bannon’s second indictment in the past year. DDT pardoned him for the last one, defrauding donors by taking about $1 million from an internet funding request for the wall at the southern border.

Although Bannon has not been connected to the White House for several years, he claimed “executive privilege” for his refusal. Even DDT’s claims of this privilege may not be valid. Bannon has still broken the law because he didn’t appear in front of Congress to give this excuse. Each of the two counts carries between 30 days and one year in jail with a fine of $100 to $1,000.

AG Merrick Garland’s indictment clarified that Bannon has no such privilege when he described Bannon as a “private citizen,” employed “approximately seven months in 2017, more than three years before the events of January 6, 2021,” and didn’t work for in any “federal government position” since his departure from the White House. No executive privilege. DDT’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows may face the same indictment as Bannon after he refused to comply with a subpoena.

This week, the public learned that the U.S. leader on January 6, DDT, has supported his followers in chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on that day while they attacked the U.S. Capitol and put the mock-up of a noose outside on federal land. In a taped interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, DDT calmly said he thought Pence, hiding on a loading dock in a parking area on that day, was “well-protected.”

Asked about the protesters’ chants calling for Pence’s violent death, DDT said, “Well, the people were very angry.” He added that Pence should have tried to overturn the election—and the country—because of “common sense” that Pence lie about a win for the man who received far fewer popular and electoral votes to keep him in the White House.

As DDT watched rioters break into the Capitol on television news, he tweeted:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

DDT’s supporters see him as a warrior with a gun as shown by the shirts and posters they sell outside his rallies. His head is depicted on the body of a muscle-bound male carrying a gun or riding a velocirapotor firing a gun.

Meadows goes so far as to suggest that DDT is still president. In August—2021 after Biden’s inauguration as president—Meadows called DDT “a president who is fully engaged, highly focused, and remaining on task.” He added about DDT and his team, “We met with several of our cabinet members tonight.” Meadows also has a history of possibly illegal activity while in the White House, including visiting Georgia after the 2020 election to get more votes for DDT.  

DDT hasn’t stop playing the leader of the free world. This week he issued a statement about appointing Ric Grenell his “Envoy Ambassador” who visited the Kosovo-Serbia border to highlight this important agreement” that DDT had supposedly brokered. An “Envoy Ambassador” doesn’t exist, former inhabitants of the White House don’t have international diplomatic teams, and DDT accused officials from the Obama administration of being criminals when they met with foreign officials. He wanted the DOJ to prosecute them. A strong supporter of authoritarian governments, Grenell has openly pushed the lie about a “stolen” election since November 2020.

Since the 2016 election of DDT, the problem of violence among Republicans has geometrically increased after his insistence that non-supporters be beaten up at his campaign rallies. For the past few years, more and more officials, from local ones such as election officials and school board members, through state Democratic leaders to congressional members, even Republicans if they don’t vote the straight GOP party line of opposing Biden. New representatives such as Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Madison Cawthorn (R-SC), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have used threats for what they perceive as political gain. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) went so far as to release an animated video in which he kills Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and threatens President Biden with a sword. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) makes no comment about their violent threats while making his own threats of stripping all GOP congressional members who voted in favor of the extremely popular infrastructure bill.

Republicans who don’t follow the party line are afraid if they don’t go with the mob. Last December, the GOP leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate said she was afraid she’s “get my house bombed.”

In Kenosha (WI) the prosecution has rested in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. When he was 17, he stole an AR-15, crossed state lines, and deliberately joined militia at a largely peaceful protest against a white police officer who shot a Black man in the back seven times and left him paralyzed. Rittenhouse, who cried on the stand, called his killing two men and wounding another an act of “self-defense.” The judge, a DDT supporter, refused to permit the term of “victims” for the dead and wounded people, instead calling them arsonists, looters, and rioters.  

The violence has evolved from Republican lawmakers convincing the “white working class” that all of them, including DDT, are victims. With 70 percent of DDT’s supporters lacking a college degree, they want to control others with more education and are afraid of lost status. Their solution is racism, superiority to anyone who isn’t white. The “America First” excludes non-whites, 40 percent of U.S. residents. By taking the vote from minorities and the poor, whites can take over the law-making process. Claims of a “stolen election” is on this path.

Vaccines have contributed to the politics of victimization as people refusing to be vaccinated associate themselves with true victims such as persecuted Jewish people forced to wear yellow stars. The feeling of victimization results in following leaders who encourage these aggrieved feelings and swear revenge toward those they perceive as “oppressors”; i.e., all Democrats. According to these “victims,” violence can recreate their perception of the moral order. All DDT’s 30,000 lies and his Twitter attacks demonstrated grievances against himself and his supporters but never any solutions.

Watching DDT initially succeed with this strategy, farthest-right Republicans in high offices used this pattern of creating egocentric victims who never take personal responsibility and who always believe they deserve more than they get because they get no breaks and must settle for less that they should have. Solutions don’t help because they need the feeling of being victims.  

Reasonable people have become so accustomed to lies and corruption among GOP leadership that two stories have drawn attention:

After Gosar faced the possibility of censure by House members for his promotion of violence against leading Democrats including the U.S. president, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said House GOP leadership had “lost their moral compass” because they said nothing about the video Gosar’s staff created and he tweeted. She called Gosar an “avowed white nationalist and accused McCarthy of having a “lack of strength.” She also talked about the threats, including death threats, received by 13 GOP members who voted for last week’s infrastructure bill, threats pushed by other GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Gosar’s answer to cricitism was the “gross mischaracterization” of the video” which he called “truly a symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy.”

Despite the gory scenes of killing and other violence, Gosar’s digital director, declared that “the left doesn’t get meme culture. They have no joy. They are not the future… Nor was violence glorified.” dismissed the criticism in a statement Monday night.

In the other unique event, the losing candidate for the New Jersey governor, Jack Ciattarelli, conceded to the winner, Democrat incumbent Phil Murphy. It took ten days but he admitted the election was fair and square—and that he lost. DDT hasn’t made that admission after a year although his opponent, President Joe Biden, received seven million more popular votes and 74 more electoral votes than DDT—306-232. Murphy is the first New Jersey governor to win a second term since 1977. And he won fair and square, just like Joe Biden.

Insurrection Investigation Continues on Veterans Day

Today is November 11, 2021—Veterans Day. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals commemorated the day by temporarily declaring Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) above the law by blocking the National Archives from delivering his administration documents subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee investigating the insurrection. DDT keeps pleading “executive privilege” although he is no longer the federal executive and President Joe Biden has twice approved the release of the documents. Arguments on the case are set for November 30.

In 1977, the Supreme Court determined, “The [executive] privilege is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic.” The ruling was in answer to former President Nixon’s attempt to shield his tape recordings and documents. When Nixon threatened to destroy the tapes, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, changing ownership of official files from private to public. In that case deciding whether a former president could assert executive privilege, the court voted 7-2. In the earlier 1974 United States v. Nixon, the court determined Nixon’s privilege was not absolute.

Last year, the high court expressed concern that congressional demands for presidential documents could interfere with DDT’s duties, but these have now disappeared. Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan used Supreme Court precedent in ruling against DDT’s plea to stop the National Archives from releasing records. She wrote:

“At bottom, this is a dispute between a former and incumbent President. And the Supreme Court has already made clear that in such circumstances, the incumbent’s view is accorded greater weight.”

She added:

“Presidents are not kings, and the Plaintiff is not President. He retains the right to assert that his records are privileged, but the incumbent President is not constitutionally obliged to honor that assertion.”

Chutkan rejected DDT’s pleas a day later when he continued his attempts to stall the documents from going to committee members. That committee wrote that “the potential harm to the public is immense” because “our democratic constitutions … are at stake.” In 2020, the Supreme Court rejected DDT’s claim that the House lacked power to subpoena documents but returned the case to lower courts. Chutkan said the reasons for the high court’s apprehension no longer exist because Biden is president, and DDT does have the personal-privacy grounds cited in Trump v. Mazars.

Biden has already determined that executive privilege doesn’t apply to “events within the White House on or about January 6, 2021; attempts to use the Department of Justice to advance a false narrative that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud; and other efforts to alter election results or obstruct the transfer of power.”

People have taken note that one of the January 6 defendants was sentenced to 41 months in prison, but even more notable is the commentary from GOP columnist Jennifer Rubin, an attorney for decades:

“By definition, every member of a conspiracy is responsible for the crimes of others that were reasonably foreseeable. Former president Donald Trump and his White House cronies need not have had contact with, or even know the identities of, specific defendants to face legal risks; so long as they took action to further the violent uprising as a last resort to halting Congress from carrying out its certification of electoral college votes, they could be in jeopardy. Trump’s refusal to take action during the hours-long Capitol siege lends credence to the argument that he had expected, or even welcomed, the riot after his ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and months of fomenting the ‘big lie’ of a stolen election.”

About the seemingly slow pace at the DOJ, she explained that it can go after the “small fry” and “wait for the evidentiary nuggets uncovered by the House.”  

This week’s sentencing does not bode well for upcoming defendants from January 6. Despite his history of assault cases and his punching a police officer, Scott Fairlamb got three months under the recommended time. Yet U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth told the crying man that he was lucky and warned upcoming defendants who assault police they will not get off so easily. Lambeth said he felt “spun” by a previous defendant in another case, possibly Anna Morgan-Lloyd. She was shown sentencing leniency with no jail time or probation before going on the Fox network to minimize her conduct and crime.

In the U.S., about 19 million living veterans have fought around the world to protect the United States from foreign governments, but DDT’s officials are still supporting the treasonous insurrectionists trying to overturn the nation on January 6. Thus far the January 6 Committee has issued 35 subpoenas to people and groups:

Close DDT allies:

• Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff
• Daniel Scavino, former White House deputy chief of staff for communications
• Kashyap Patel, former Defense Department official
• Stephen Bannon, former DDT adviser
• Organizers of rallies and events preceding January 6 attack
• Amy Kremer, founder and chair of Women for America First (WFAF)
• Kylie Kremer, founder and executive director of Women for America First (WFAF)
• Cynthia Chafian, submitted the first permit application on behalf of WFAF for the January 6 rally, and founder of the Eighty Percent Coalition
• Caroline Wren, listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “VIP Advisor”
• Maggie Mulvaney, listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “VIP Lead”
• Justin Caporale, of Event Strategies, Inc., listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “Project Manager”
• Tim Unes, of Event Strategies, Inc., listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “Stage Manager”
• Megan Powers, of MPowers Consulting LLC, listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “Operations Manager for Scheduling and Guidance”
• Hannah Salem, of Salem Strategies LLC, listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “Operations Manager for Logistics and Communications”
• Lyndon Brentnall, of RMS Protective Services, listed on permit paperwork for the January 6 rally as “On-Site Supervisor”
• Katrina Pierson, former DDT campaign official, reportedly involved in the organization of the January 5 and January 6 rallies as well as in direct communication with DDT about the rallies
• Ali Alexander, connected to permit applications for the “Stop the Steal” rally
• Nathan Martin, connected to permit applications for the “Stop the Steal” rally
• Stop the Steal, LLC, organization affiliated with “Stop the Steal” rally

Department of Justice:

• Jeffrey Clark, former DOJ official reportedly involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election

DDT campaign officials:

• William Stepien, DDT 2020 campaign manager
• Jason Miller, former senior adviser to DDT 2020 campaign
• John Eastman, an attorney who helped craft DDT’s argument that the election was stolen
• Michael Flynn, former DDT national security adviser involved in meeting about how DDT’s campaign wanted to promote the lie that the election was stolen
• Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to DDT’s 2020 reelection campaign
• Bernard Kerik, participated in a meeting at the Willard Hotel centered around overturning election results

DDT’s White House officials:

• Nicholas Luna, DDT’s personal assistant
• Molly Michael, DDT’s special assistant to the President and Oval Office operations coordinator
• Ben Williamson, DDT’s deputy assistant to the President and senior adviser to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows
• Christopher Liddell, former DDT White House deputy chief of staff
• John McEntee, DDT’s former bagman and White House personnel director
• Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to then-VP Mike Pence
• Kayleigh McEnany, DDT’s former White House press secretary
• Stephen Miller, DDT senior adviser
• Cassidy Hutchinson, special assistant to DDT for legislative affairs
• Kenneth Klukowski, former senior counsel to Clark, Assistant AG

As former VP Mike Pence continues plodding forward in his 2024 presidential campaign, at least five of his allies may willingly testify to the House January 6 committee about how DDT and his colleagues pressured Pence to overturn the government by rejecting legal electoral votes. DDT was furious with Pence when he refused to put DDT back into the White House. 

On January 6, DDT’s senior DOJ officials made several calls to not only Pence but also congressional leadership, law enforcement, and military officials although the White House didn’t call for hours after the insurrection began. Then-acting AG Jeffrey Rosen talked twice with Pence.  

The Army may give Purple Heart Medals to soldiers wounded in the January 2020 Iranian ballistic missile attack on their base in Iraq. DDT had dismissed injuries, including over 100 traumatic brain injuries. The medal is awarded for service members killed or wounded by enemy actions and provides such entitlements as priority healthcare after retirement, preference in federal hiring, and eligibility for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Biden’s administration also plans to help veterans exposed to burn pits, common at U.S. bases during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, used to destroy dangerous materials from electronics to human waste and releasing carcinogens and other toxic fumes into the air. In August, the VA began processing claims of asthma, rhinitis, and sinusitis from exposure to these pits. The agency will begin to examine links between these environmental hazards and other illnesses including constrictive bronchiolitis, lung cancers, and rare respiratory cancers, such as squamous cell carcinoma of the larynx or the trachea and salivary gland-type tumors of the trachea.

On the hundredth anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Plaza, people were able to walk on the memorial and leave flowers near the memorial, a unique opportunity not again planned.

Bits of Hope, Accountability

COVID keeps killing, the Building Back Better jobs/infrastructure bill hasn’t yet passed despite promises, and President Joe Biden keeps getting bashed. At the same time, the first infrastructure bill passed Congress, courts without appointments by Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) keep making constitutional ruling, and President Joe Biden makes progress. Some recent news:

The most recent ruling against DDT rejected his request to conceal White House records during his time in the Oval Office. DDT’s claim of “executive privilege” didn’t work, and the documents must be turned over to the House January 6 Committee by November 12, 2021. The decision was handed down in under 24 hours; DDT plans to appeal.

Fox celebrity Judge Jeanine Pirro may have destroyed DDT’s claim of executive privilege to keep his inner circle from testifying to the subpoenas from the House committee. The day after subpoenas were sent to DDT’s allies working in the Willard Hotel “command center,” the war room orchestrating the election takeover for DDT, media pointed out a report that Pirro had supported the participants in the request for DDT to pay for the hotel bill. Her comments led to DDT’s campaign paying Bernard Kerik’s personal business for the rooms and other expenses in connection with the insurrection planning, destroying validity for the executive privilege excuse. Attorney Richard Ben-Veniste explained that “the use of campaign funds ‘further undermines a wildly broad assertion of executive privilege.… Executive privilege is typically limited to the protection of communications involving a president’s official duties—not to those relating to personal or political campaign matters.'”

Sworn testimony from DDT’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who tried many of the cases attempting to support the myth of a “stolen” election, stated they had not done much to verify the fake claims that they purported in court. Giuliani said it wasn’t his job to look up “evidence,” and Powell said the truth was not one of her objectives.

Republicans, including those who voted against Biden’s first infrastructure bill, are hoping to give GOP lawmakers credit for the money flowing into their states. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), retiring next year, credited DDT for the achievement despite his failure to pass anything in his weekly Infrastructure Week. DDT is having none of it: he worked to destroy it so that Biden couldn’t get a “big and beautiful win” to benefit Democrats. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), one of 13 House members voting for the bill, said DDT “laid the groundwork for this infrastructure.” She overlooked DDT’s abandoning his infrastructure bill to spite Democrats.

Republicans voting against the infrastructure bill may have difficulty taking credit for it. Newspapers in GOP-controlled states throughout the nation have touted the funding their states will receive, at the same time announcing in large print that their representatives and senators in Congress voted against it. The source could be a PR push, perhaps from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) office, to point out who supported funding for their states. With the excitement for infrastructure repair and expansion, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) may want to think twice about his possible plan to strip all committee assignments from the 13 House representatives who voted in favor of the bill. 

McCarthy will be in an even more awkward place if he does nothing about Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) after he arranged to put together and tweeted an anime film in which Gosar’s character kills a character with the face of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and physically attacks another character with the face of President Biden. The question is whether MCarthy will punish GOP members for their votes but condone Gosar for his violence, thus promoting more from both House members and conservatives throughout the United States.

Positive statistics from the past few weeks:

The economy created 531,000 new jobs for October, and 235,000 more jobs were created in August and September than previously reported with a total of 5.6 new jobs since Biden was inaugurated. DDT created no new jobs in his four years.  

The unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent, down from 6.3 percent in January when Biden was inaugurated and two year ahead of anticipated.

The vast majority of deaths from COVID are in unvaccinated people, meaning the vaccines are successful.

The deficit for fiscal 2021 shrank by $360 billion, and it’s $897 billion less than predicted in February. This drop follows the pattern that Republicans raise the deficit while Democrats pare it down. (Red = GOP; blue = Democrats)

Biden will ease U.S. tariffs on European steel and aluminum, and Europe will drop a large number of tariffs on some U.S. products—motorcycles, boats, peanut butter, whiskey, etc. The 25-percent tariff on whiskey dropped U.S. exports to Europe by 37 percent, and it was due to double in December. The distilled spirits industry supports 1.7 million people in the U.S., and Harley Davidson has another 5,600 manufacturing workers at Harley Davidson.

The U.S. will have some of the nation’s strongest regulations against methane emissions from oil and gas drilling in history, according to Biden’s announcement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. The new EPA rules will cover 75 percent of the country’s methane emissions. Although methane accounts for a smaller percentage of gas emissions than carbon dioxide, its molecular structure drives significant short-term warming because it more readily absorbs thermal radiation. That gives methane 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide in a 20-year period. Sixty percent of methane emissions comes from human activities with agriculture two-thirds and fossil fuel production and use most of the remainder.  

The U.S. will again participate in nuclear talks between world leaders and Iran, according to Biden. With the leaders of Germany, France, and Britain, he warned that Tehran was accelerating “provocative nuclear steps.” Iran stopped complying with the 2015 agreement after DDT withdrew the U.S. and reimposed sanctions.

A month ago, Biden canceled 44 miles of border wall contracts, this time in the Laredo and Rio Grande Valley areas. Funding will be redirected to innovative border security technology. People in the Rio Grande Valley have been fighting to keep their property. Biden has already returned some property.  

The NRA is being sued for $35 million because of allegedly using shell companies illegally running ad buys for seven GOP Senate candidates. The lawsuit comes from Campaign Legal Action Center, a watchdog gun safety advocacy group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), shot and badly wounded while campaigning several years ago. Political candidates include congressional members Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), former Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

A federal jury in Tacoma (WA) ruled the GEO Group owning and running a large detention center owes 10,000 former detainees $17.3 million in back pay for such tasks as cooking meals and cleaning. Workers were paid only $1 a day, a violation of the state’s minimum wage law. The class action suit was consolidated with another one by the state accusing GEO of unjustly enriching itself by violating state labor law. GEO made $18.6 million in profits from the detention center in 2018 and had previously acknowledged it could have paid more to the detainees. The company must also pay Washington state almost $6 million “in unjust enrichment gained.”

In a unanimous decision, a racist, sexist Alabama judge has been removed from the bench for hundreds of comments demeaning both employees and citizens. Talledega County Probate Judge Randy Links took office in 2019 with no legal background although he is responsible for adoptions, estates, wills, guardianships, conservatorships, and involuntary commitments. Jinks, who believes the election was stolen from DDT, also oversees elections.

DOJ AG Merrick Garland announced he was restoring the Office for Access to Justice, working to reform the use of fines and fees by state and local courts, protect the right to counsel for juvenile and indigent defendants, and increase access to civil legal aid for those who could not afford lawyers. In 2018, then-AG Jeff Sessions shut down the office.

The DOJ, State Department, and Treasury Department have collaborated to indict two men, a Russian and a Ukrainian, for cyberattacks on U.S. companies and announced sanctions against them.

Zillow’s project of flipping houses may be dropped after the company lost $1.4 billion in two years, selling only two-thirds of the houses it buys. The current $3.8 billion inventory has vastly grown since only $491 less than a million a year ago. When Zillow started the scheme in 2019, it lost $109,000 a flip. Because Zillow overbid for the houses, it inflated prices for individual purchasers. The company’s shares are down 62 percent from the February 2021 high.

 Pennsylvania has another case of voter fraud to prosecute: Gov. Tom Wolf admitted his wife dropped off his ballot for him.

COVID Insanity from Conservatives

The COVID insanity continues, promoted by selfishness and rejection of scientific knowledge. Far-fetched fears of vaccination have gone from lies about simple microchips being implanted through the vaccine to egg-producing parasites and ways to change people’s DNA. All accompanied by the non-stop cry of “freedom” as anti-Vaxxers deny everyone else their freedom. A three-judge panel from the 5^th Circuit Court covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas temporarily blocked the new vaccination mandate President Joe Biden placed on all businesses with over 100 employees exempted by weekly testing at the employees’ cost. Judges stated that the issue is legislative, not executive. Two of the judges were appointed by Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) and the third by Ronald Reagan. The White House urges businesses to continue its requirements for vaccinations.

When Green Bay Packers’ Aaron Rodgers tested positive for COVID this week, he (1) was unvaccinated, (2) lied about it, (3) ignored COVID protocol, and (4) has been getting his medical advice from podcast host Joe Rogan. Rodgers also lied when he said FDA-approved vaccines were untested. He prefers Rogan’s “homeopathic treatment”—taking a very small amount of natural substances—and Invermectin which has not been yet vetted. He tried to cover his lies by saying his treatment “immunized” him. Now Rodgers blames the “’woke’ mob” and cries about “cancel culture”—whatever he thinks that is. 

Newsmax has followed Fox in ordering its employees to get vaccinated and provide copies of their vaccination cards. Despite its hosts opposing vaccinations, Fox employees went along with the order for vaccinations or weekly testing, but Newsmax’s Steve Cortes continues his opposition to mask mandates, instead supporting fake cures such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. After the order came out, he said no one has to get vaccinated and doesn’t plan to follow the directive. Newsmax has taken Emerald Robinson off the air for a conspiracy theory; she was a favorite journalist of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) at his press conferences. Even the far-right network couldn’t cope with Robinson’s bizarre tweet:

“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked. Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”

Newmax debunked the information in Robinson’s tweet, and Twitter temporarily removed her account. She formerly worked at One America News network so she may have trouble finding another place. The evangelicals may take her: last week she tweeted, “I don’t want a multi-cultural society. I want a Christian society.”

Conservatives have done a good job spreading lying disinformation about COVID. A poll found 78 percent of U.S. adults either believe or aren’t sure about at least one of eight false statements about the pandemic or vaccines. Unvaccinated adults and Republicans are the most likely to hold these misconceptions: 64 percent of unvaccinated people are almost three times to be unsure about at least one statement than vaccinated adults at 19 percent. Almost half (46 percent) of Republicans are unsure of at least half the statements, compared to only 14 percent of the Democrats. Percentage is of people who believe or are unsure about the false statement:

• 60 percent: the government exaggerates the number of COVID deaths.
• 39 percent: pregnant women should not get the COVID vaccine.
• 35 percent: the government intentionally conceals deaths from the COVID vaccine.
• 31 percent: the vaccine causes infertility.
• 28 percent: Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID.
• 24 percent: people can contract COVID from the vaccine.
• 24 percent: the COVID vaccine contains a microchip.
• 21 percent: the COVID vaccine can change DNA.

News resources play a big part in beliefs: over one-third of people who trust information from CNN, MSNBC, network news, NPR, and local television news do not believe any of the eight false statements, and small shares of them, between 11 percent and 16 percent, believe or are unsure about at least four of the eight false statements. Of those who believe or are unsure about at least half of the false statements, 36 percent trust the Fox network, 37 percent trust One America News, and 46 percent trust Newsmax.

The rate of COVID-caused deaths between red and blue states has been higher than ever during the past month. The reason is most likely the rate of vaccinations—86 percent for Democrats and 60 percent for Republicans.  Looking at difference between red and blue counties makes the much higher rate of deaths in GOP-dominated areas even more stark. Left-leaning communities, even suburbs, have such high levels of vaccinations among Democrats that even the unvaccinated are partly protected.

Yet the Delta variant has hit conservative communities hard. In counties where DDT received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed 47 out of 100,000 people in the past four months but only ten out of 100,000 in counties where DDT received under 32 percent of the vote. During October, the death rate in DDT’s counties was over three times that of Bidens—25 per 100,000 compared to 7.8 per 100,000. Conservative writers’ excuses for the difference such as weather or age don’t hold water. 

Two major reasons for the low vaccination rate among conservatives are their resentment at being told what to do and their rejection of science and empirical evidence. Republicans are so stubborn that their far-right pundits purport the low vaccination rate comes from liberals trying to persuade naysayers to get vaccinated. John Nolte argued that “a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a lifesaving vaccine.” He maintained that liberals want “their opponents to drop dead.” The chart above left was for months before the latest surge.

Anti-Vaxxers won’t believe the government, but a few people on the edge of getting vaccinations might pay attention to the new report about immunity. Unvaccinated people who had already contracted COVID are five times more likely to be re-infected than those who are fully vaccinated, debunking the myth of “natural” immunity. In another report, the Director National Intelligence found the coronavirus causing COVID “was not developed as a biological weapon.” It also “probably was not genetically engineered,” and “China’s officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 emerged.” The report indicates that agencies think the infection came from an infected animal or “a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

This two-minute video should be enough to terrify anyone into getting a vaccination. New X-rays, 10,000,000,000,000 times more powerful than a typical X-ray exam, reveal the 3-D internal details of organs down to a scale about 100 times smaller than that of a CT scan. This one was done at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The video begins with a normal lung and moves on to showing the restriction of airspace in the lung of a person who has died from COVID. The focus is on the acinus, air sacs called alveoli at the end of a bronchial tube where oxygen is absorbed into the blood and carbon dioxide diffuses it. People each have about 300 million alveoli in the lungs. With the infection, alveoli literally collapse, eliminating airspace for the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange. Suffocation. 

The ESRF-hosted Human Organ Atlas has more videos of lungs and other organs.

Almost two weeks ago, the Supreme Court refused to block Maine’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers although Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito dissented, wanting to stop the mandate until a ruling emerges from the appeals process. The mandate had a religious exemption. On November 8, 2021, a federal judge in Texas ruled that United Airlines may continue its employee vaccine policy, one of the most stringent in the nation.

Arizona’s GOP legislature decided to put all its wish list into a budget bill, but the state Supreme Court ruled against them. At the top of the list that Republicans lost was their ban on mask mandates and vaccinations in schools as well as the GOP prohibition on “vaccine passports” and other pandemic-related restrictions on private businesses, schools, and churches. The ban against “teaching CRT” was a no-go too as were laws blocking future governors’ use of emergency powers after Doug Ducey leaves office in 2023. Restrictive voting laws also disappeared as did more punitive ones in other areas.

The Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that states upheld the authority to enforce compulsory vaccination laws, ruling that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. The court wrote:

“In every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand. Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own liberty, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

Personal liberty or religious exemption do not trump a public health threat.

Moscow (ID), a Template for Theocracy

Christ’s Church in Moscow (ID) may be a template for the evangelical attempt to take over the United States for a theocracy; it even has the goal “to make Moscow a Christian town” by taking over the town of at least 24,000 population. Behaving like the biblical version of Jesus might not be a huge problem, but Christ’s Church opposes secular government, browbeats perceived opponents, harasses elected officials regarding COVID restrictions, and takes over land and businesses to transform the nation into following its ultra-conservative moral ideology.  

Controversies began with Douglas Wilson, the church’s founder and pastor, and has continued with his son who threatens political violence. YouTube removed Wilson’s blogpost “A Biblical Defense of Fake Vaccine IDs,” based on the conspiracy theory that the vaccine is President Joe Biden’s “power play. He also urged readers to “resist openly” in the civil war because it is not “rebellion against lawful authority” but “an example of a free people refusing to go along with their own enslavement.” The church has grown to about 2,000 since its founding in the 1990s and draws people to the area with the hope that northern Idaho will become a conservative fortification against U.S. modernity.

Sexual abuse and theological subordination of women: In 2005, Wilson asked a judge to be lenient in the case of a former student at a Christ Church-aligned college who was convicted of sex offenses involving children. Wilson married the student in 2010 who Wilson met through a then-Christ Church elder and now pastor in Colville (WA).

Slavery: In the 1990s, Wilson co-wrote the book Southern Slavery As It Was with the co-founder of the neo-Confederate organization the League of the South. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/doug-wilson%E2%80%99s-religious-empire-expanding-northwest    A year ago, Wilson distributed flyers on at the University of Idaho at Moscow advertising an upcoming conference featuring himself and his co-author, Stephen Wilkins. The flyer included excerpted “highlights” of the book:

• “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.”
• “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. …
• “Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”

Theocracy: Wilson’s 2016 book describes the church’s aim as “a network of nations bound together by a formal acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ,” as opposed to secular society ruled by “civil governments, [which] are in necessary degrees satanic, demonic, and influenced by the god of this world, who is the devil.”

Non-profit abilities: Christ Church doesn’t need to report income and maintains tax-free status, and Wilson has developed a profitable network of educational institutions, publishing houses, churches, and national associations that he founded and controls with a small group of men, many of them from his own family, that exert power in both his organization and Moscow. For example, the town’s New Saint Andrews College (NSAC) has Wilson, his son-in-law, and his pastor on the board of trustees; another of Wilson’s son-in-laws is college president. Wilson and his son Douglas are on the faculty along with Wilson’s brother, who believes the world was created in seven days, as senior fellow of natural history. These college employees draw salaries.

Town influence: A founding director and former trustee at NSAC, Andrew Crapuchettes, was CEO of Moscow’s largest private employer, EMSI, for over 19 years until the company was sold in June 2021 to become EMSI Burning Glass. The company, announced by Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) as Idaho Small Business of the Month for July 2021, provides labor market data for education. EMSI employees 55 NSAC graduates of the total 635 people since its founding in 1994. The COO/CFO at EMSI is a Christ Church elder and a teaching elder at the church’s suburban offshoot church, and Wilson’s son-in-law, the NSAC trustee, is EMSI’s executive VP of higher education. Crapuchette has started an employment website for church run or founded organizations and companies belonging to other church members. He also expanded into property development and gained legal “annexation” of 27 acres of land on Moscow’s south-western edge for a new, 109-unit subdivision, Edington.

Wilson’s ideas about slavery came from theologian Gregg Singer who rediscovered writings of Civil War Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s chaplain, Robert L. Dabney, in the 1960s. Singer joined another far-right theologian, Rousas John Rushdoony, to develop the view of the pre-Civil War South as a religiously ordered society overtaken by rationalist and anti-religious thought. The theologians used Dabney’s work which described Blacks as a “morally inferior race, a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste”—lies to opposed the Civil Rights movement. Rushdooney’s book Institutes of Biblical Law, established him as the founding thinker of Christian Reconstruction, a “reconstructed” society following the Old Testament. Equality has no place in Rushdoony’s society of classes with differing rights.

Rushdooney’s strategy planned the development of Christian homeschooling and private schools to train a generation that would follow his guidelines. His influence led to the collaboration between “orthodox Christians” and “Confederate nationalists,” and Wilson’s Logos School, a private Christian academy in Moscow, follows Rushdooney’s plan. Logos is now one of 165 “classical schools” teaching students Greek and Latin in the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, also founded by Wilson. Thousands of students order their books from Wilson’s Canon Press which publishes and sells 31 titles. Graduates from a three-year training program in the 20 churches in the Confederation of Reformed Evangelicals (CRE), another of Wilson’s inventions, must promise to engage in “cultural reformation”; they have started several churches around the country. Rushdooney and Dabney are considered foundational thinkers like Plato and Aristotle at Wilson’s college NSAC.

In Alabama, college professor Michael Hill founded the League of the South with Wilkins. The organization called for a second Southern secession to create the “revitalization of general European hegemony” in the South. People would be welcome in his new South only if they obeyed Hill’s religious rules, including its “Anglo-Celtic” nature. His ideas all followed those of Rushdoony. The group now has 15,000 members in 87 chapters throughout 16 states.

Wilson tries to maintain he isn’t a Christian Reconstructionist and the movement is “dead,” but his theology is almost identical to Reconstruction. He and Wilkins have been instrumental in building the neo-Confederate theology far beyond pro-slavery. Some of these positions:

The goal is “the overthrow of unbelief and secularism.”

Children are “foul—unclean” if “neither parent believes in Jesus Christ.”

“Government schools” are godless propaganda factories.

Woman “was created to be dependent and responsive to a man.” They should be allowed to date or “court” only with their father’s permission and then Christians with other Christians.

A rapist should pay the father of his victim a bride price and then marry her with her father’s permission.

Gay men and lesbians are “sodomites” and should be exiled.

Cursing parents is “deserving of punishment by death.”

Christian parents “need not be afraid to lay it on” when spanking and used for children as young as two years old for such “sins” as whining.

Other evangelicals follow the pattern set up in Moscow (ID), according to a new study from Public Religion Research Institute. A growing number of other religious and non-religious people in the U.S. want the United States to be a place where people follow diverse faiths, but 57 percent of white evangelical Christians want them to be only Christians. The values of Islam are at odds with U.S. values and ways of life, according to 75 percent of white evangelicals. In opposition to minorities, white people in other religions, and non-Christians, only 47 percent of white evangelicals want undocumented people to find a path to citizenship. Almost as many want to see them deported. A large majority of white evangelicals, 60 percent, also think that the election was stolen, and one-fourth of that religious group are QAnon followers. Also 26 percent of them want violence to “save the country.”

The number of evangelicals may be shrinking because of COVID. Only 45 percent of white evangelicals say they will definitely or probably not get the vaccine, compared to 90 percent of atheists and 77 percent of Catholics.

‘Finally, Infrastructure Week!’–Joe Biden

Thanks largely to Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Congress failed to pass the Build Better Back (BBB) jobs/infrastructure bill. With the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure framework (BIF), states will get money for roads and bridges, and the current loss of BBB means no paid leave, expanded healthcare, lowered Medicare drug prices, child care, climate action, housing, immigration reform, education, etc.

Republicans have always opposed BBB, a reconciliation bill requiring only a simple majority vote in Senate instead of the 60 percent normally required with the filibuster. Both Sinema and Manchin negotiated on the watered-down BBB and before backing out again. Manchin’s question is “what’s the hurry” while many women cannot go back to work without help with child care,

BIF did pass by 228-206 with the support of 13 Republicans and the loss of six Democratic House members who objected to separating the two infrastructure bills. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) cautioned that BIF’s success lost the “leverage to get Build Back Better through the House and Senate, and I fear that we are missing our once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the American people.” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) bragged about her vote for BIF and gave truth to Tlaib’s warning when she said, “I weakened their hand. They have no leverage now.” She claimed that passing BIF will cause BBB to be “drastically weakened” in the Senate or “die altogether.”

Conservative House Democrats also opposed the annual $175 billion for BBB although the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House, and the Joint Committee on Taxation found that it is paid for and may actually reduce deficits. These representatives demanded an official score, which will take weeks, before passing BBB. Democratic holdouts for BBB are Reps. Ed Case (HI), Jared Golden (ME), Stephanie Murphy (FL), Kathleen Rice (NY), Kurt Schrader (OR), and Abigail Spanberger (VA). Their constituents support BBB by large margins, but the politicians have been well-paid by corporate interests that lobbied against BBB’s key provisions. Four of the holdouts stated:

“We commit to voting for the Build Back Better Act, in its current form other than technical changes, as expeditiously as we receive fiscal information from the Congressional Budget Office—but in no event later than the week of November 15—consistent with the toplines for revenues and investments.”   

The $1.2 trillion BIF over a decade which is ready for the president’s signature includes $40 billion for bridge repairs and replacement, $39 billion for transit, $65 billion for broadband internet, and $74 billion toward power and clean energy, among other provisions. Passing the Senate three months ago, it provides $550 billion in new federal spending and reauthorizes several existing programs.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), removed from her committee assignments because of her incessant repetition of conspiracy theories, called BIF a “Communist takeover.” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) tweeted back to Greene:

“Infrastructure=communism is a new one. Eisenhower’s interstate system should be torn up or else the commies will be able to conveniently drive! Red Dawn in real life.”

When 19 GOP senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), joined independents and Democrats to pass BIF by 69 to 30, DDT threatened to primary Republicans who support the bipartisan infrastructure plan. Their fear is for any “victory” for Biden even if Republicans need BIF for a safer infrastructure. 

BBB, still waiting, would provide help for middle- and lower-income people which would be paid for by new taxes for large corporations and the wealth—slashed by the GOP 2017 tax law—and the recovery unpaid taxes by strengthening the IRS. Large corporations would be subject to a 15 percent minimum income tax and a one percent surcharge on corporate stock buybacks. A surtax for millionaires and billionaires would close a loophole permitting wealthy U.S. taxpayers to avoid a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on their income. Moderates (aka conservative Democrats) forced the elimination of two years of free community college plus dental and vision coverage in Medicare. The original 12 weeks of paid family leave was reduced to four weeks.

Objections to the BBB by GOP/Manchin/Sinema:

Lowering drug costs: people in the United States pay between 64 and 78 percent of the pharmaceutical industry’s profits for the world. In the U.S., people pay 3.5 times more on average per dose of medication, both brand-name and generic, than Europeans. The money comes either out of patients’ pockets or by insurers that raise premiums to pass on the cost. Moderna managed $3.3 billion profit for just the third quarter with a planned $8 billion to $9 billion for the year. Yet U.S. taxpayers own the patent on key spike-protein technology used in several coronavirus vaccines, including Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s. Many congressional members, including Sinema, receive huge donations from the industry. 

Families with infants: Cost for access to high-quality care is an average of $16,000, twice the monthly cost of a home mortgage in some areas.

Baby boomer population growing older: the cost of long-term care for older Americans will be prohibitive to many families.

Corporate taxes: Workers have to pay taxes, but many companies don’t, even if they make huge profits. An example is Shell which “reported $2.7 billion through offshore havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes,” according to journalist Akela Lacy. Walmart avoided $2.6 billion of taxes by routing money through a fictitious Chinese subsidiary and reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despit having up to 75 of them, according the Quartz.

And more to be covered later.

Manchin’s and Sinema’s insistence on cutting back the proposed BBB already reduced it in half. Another reduction to $1.5 trillion over ten years would support 2 million fewer jobs. Every state would lose jobs as shown by these maps; Manchin’s own state of West Virginia would have 9,880 fewer jobs annually, a 1.33 percent loss of the state’s employment in manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and social assistance. Sinema’s state of Arizona would lose almost the same percentage in the same job areas. The reduction also cuts back the economy to threaten its recovery.

Republicans call infrastructure “Communism” and “Socialism,” but they supported the building of the interstate by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, almost 70 years. Long before that, a Republican and sixth president of the U.S., John Quincy Adams, called for internal improvement in his first annual message to Congress. Named an “American System” by then-Speaker of the House Henry Clay, this national market included roads, canals, a national university, a national astronomical observatory, and other initiatives. Despite criticism, Adams succeeded in beginning his projects, according to Margaret Hogan:

“Through the use of military engineers for survey and construction operations, public land grants, and governmental subscription to corporate stock issues, the administration achieved considerable progress in support of harbor improvement and road and canal development. Some of the specific projects included extending the Cumberland Road into Ohio with surveys for its continuation west to St. Louis, beginning the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, constructing the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and the Portland to Louisville Canal around the falls of the Ohio, connecting the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana, and enlarging and rebuilding the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.”

Abraham Lincoln, another Republican president and who led his party to invent the U.S. income tax, wrote that the “legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities… The desirable things … embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”

Moody’s Analytics, a highly respected economic research company, has reported that BBB would “strengthen long-term economic growth, the benefits of which would mostly accrue to lower- and middle-income Americans. The legislation is more-or-less paid for on a static basis and more than paid for on a dynamic basis through higher taxes on multinational corporations and the well-to-do and a range of several other pay-fors.” The report also stated, “Concerns that the plan will ignite undesirably high inflation and an overheating economy are overdone.” Manchin’s reduction in the “provides a modest increase in infrastructure spending and it thus supports only a modestly stronger economy. The reconciliation package is much larger and thus meaningfully lifts economic growth and jobs and lowers unemployment.” Long underinvestment in “infrastructure and social needs [with slowness] to respond to the threat posed by climate change [has] mounting economic consequences… [F]ailing to pass [this] legislation would certainly diminish the economy’s prospects.”

Maybe that’s what the Republicans want in their efforts to get re-elected. Especially after Hugh Lowell (Guardian) tweeted: “Regardless of the politics, the passage of a $1.2T bipartisan infrastructure bill is a towering legislative achievement for Biden—and one that Trump never came close to matching.”

More Off-Year Election News

With 95 percent of the votes counted for New Jersey’s and Virginia’s governors, the top two contenders in each state are both separated by 2.3 percent. The only difference is that winner Phil Murphy in New Jersey is a Democrat and winner Glenn Youngkin in Virginia is a Republican. Oh yes, the other difference is that Republicans found Virginia’s vote to have “integrity” whereas New Jersey’s election of a Democrat is a “fraud.” The sour-grapes loser refuses to concede and wants people to “report any perceived or real irregularity” to the sour-grapes party’s “voter integrity hotline.” The GOP has found another campaign against democracy. As Dana Milbank wrote, “Heads I win, tails you cheated.”  

The day before these elections, Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) declared:

“I am not a believer in the integrity of Virginia’s elections; lots of bad things went on, and are going on.”

Since the GOP win in Virginia, not a peep from Republicans about “integrity” in that state’s election. Republicans try to keep Democrats from winning; when they don’t, they delegitimize the winner and discredit another “free and fair election.”

Virginia did have at least one case of attempted fraud: the 17-year-old son of the GOP winner tried twice on Election Day to vote. Minimum age for voting in Virginia is 18. In opposing education making white students “uncomfortable,” the governor-elect promised to teach children “how to think … not what to think.” He might want to teach his son, Thomas, how to look up voting laws.

Despite the GOP wins for Virginia’s governor and the state assembly, the Senate has maintained its Democratic majority, meaning a strong possibility of gridlock there. On the other hand, New Jersey has a Democratic majority in both legislative houses.

The night of Election Day, former Atlanta two-term mayor Kasim Reed was in second place for Atlanta mayor, allowing him into the runoff for finalist on November 30 against Felicia Moore. When all the votes were counted, however, he was replaced with city councilman Andre Dickens. Both the top two winners had complained about corruption scandals while Reed was in office causing him to politically disappear after his departure from office in January 2018. On his return last summer, he promised to solve Atlanta’s crime problems.

Federal campaign finance is regulated by the independent agency Federal Election Commission (FEC), but the rules are at the discretion of its six members unless federal law is specific. Foreign contributions to federal, state, and local candidates are specifically made illegal, but the group with four DDT appointees and two George W. Bush appointees are dabbling in donations for other areas. The FEC has now decided that foreign nationals can donate as much money as they wish in ballot initiatives which change and create statutes and amendments, which includes congressional redistricting. The agency has determined that these measures are not technically “elections.”

Therefore, an Australia mining giant can fund opposition to a Montana ballot measure tightening water pollution rules for the mining industry. A Russian-owned oil giant can shut down U.S. oil companies through ballot initiatives. A foreign car manufacturer can break unions through ballot measures if state legislatures haven’t already done this for them. Other foreign donations can fund pro-gun, pro-militia measures to damage U.S. security.

The vote to permit foreign donations was 4-2 with a consensus among DDT’s appointees using loophole made possible by the Supreme Court. In 2010, the majority ruling for Citizens United loosened the law and permitted foreign interests to avoid the foreign donation ban by using domestic subsidaries. In 2014, Russia’s Internet Research Agency tried to secretly influence U.S. elections through thousands of social media accounts, and Robert Mueller’s report in 2019 described Russia’s attempts to undermine the 2016 and 2018 elections.

Seven states have made foreign donations to ballot measures illegal; the other 43 states still have open season from around the world on elected decisions for ballot initiatives. Yet the Supreme Court recently ruled in United States Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc. that “foreign affiliates are foreign organizations, and foreign organizations operating abroad have no First Amendment rights.” The case came from state and local laws and ordinances to keep foreign money out of their elections. Corporations had claimed the First Amendment free speech rights that the Roberts court gave them in Citizens United. States passing these laws against foreign interference in state elections, include Washington, North Dakota, and New Hampshire.

November 2, 2021, was an important off-year election for many states but vital for hundreds of QAnon followers who traveled to Dallas (TX) where they waited for John F. Kennedy to return and decree DDT as “king of kings.” DDT would then become the 18^th president of the United States because all presidents since 1871, the date when the Sovereign Citizen movement made the U.S. a corporation, is “illegal,” according to the QAnon fantasy world. Then DDT would step down to make Kennedy, born 104 years ago, president for seven days before his son, John Jr., dying in a plane crash in 1999 supposedly orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, returns to take over. Disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would become Jr’s vice-president. Followers can find this set of lies on Whiplash347 which has 250,000 subscribers. Negative 48 on Telegram has a different point of view: Jr will become DDT’s vice-president.

The faithful of QAnon gathered in Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was assassinated almost 58 years ago. Kennedy didn’t show up, but 58-year-old Michael Brian Protzman, considered the manifestation of God on earth, was there. By building his cult, he developed over 100,000 followers on his Telegram channel, spreading ant-Semitic content and pushing suspect financial investments to desperate people. A Holocaust denier, Protzman supports the film pushing the false belief that Jews created Communism and start both world wars by provoking innocent Nazis trying to defend themselves.

Protzman said:

“There are no Jews. Period. Anywhere. Period. There is no Jewish race. And the Jewish leadership are basically the British empire, the Roman empire, it’s just the criminals.”

Protzman’s followers believe his system of numerology, gematria, the Jewish system of assigning a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase based on the letters used and making up a spiritual or mystical meaning behind the phrase. Based on English instead of Hebrew in a method developed by English occultist Aleister Crowley, Protzman’s system links Christianity, QAnon, and the Kennedys as proof for his lies. The Kennedys are descended from Jesus Christ after he married Mary Magdalene and had four children with her. The Christ bloodline has blood-type O, and the “New World Order” is using COVID PCR swabs to find these people. John F. and Jackie Kennedy are the physical second incarnation of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, their son JFK Jr. is the Archangel Michael, and DDT is the Holy Spirit.

After Kennedy failed to appear on Tuesday, many of his followers went to a Rolling Stones concert where they claimed to meet Michael Jackson.

QAnon may be front and center in Arizona’s primary this coming year: Ron Watkins, suspected of having invented the series of conspiracy theories as “Q,” has said he will be running for the U.S. Congressional District #1 from Arizona. Three other candidates have officially signed up, but the field will likely grow. The district he has chosen currently has a Democratic representative, but it has changed lines since redistrict after Arizona picked up another representative for a total of ten. Watkins moved to Arizona within the past three weeks.

The year-long lies of a “stolen” election by DDT and his minions continue to haunt the courts. In Wisconsin, a Dane County judge ordered Assembly Speaker Robin Vox to turn over secret records of his opaque review that Republicans have conducted since last summer. Documents include calendars, emails, and internal reports.

The judge also accused Vos of a “shell game” to hide records by changing the people responsible for the records. Vos waited too long to make arguments against producing them, according to the judge. With a taxpayer-funded budget of $676,000, the project is headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who began by claiming the presidential election was stolen from DDT despite courts repeatedly upholding President Joe Biden’s victory. Gableman refuses to give the names of his staff of five.

Now we’re launching into a year of primaries and lies culminating in the midterm election on November 8, 2022 for 435 House seats, 34 Senate seats, and more governors, state legislators, ballot measures, etc., etc.