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Column: Joe and Kamala’s Fact-Mangling Debut

The new Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris debuted in Delaware on August 12, followed by the typically frantic competition in partisan sugar-sculpting on cable “news.” But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell took the saccharine prize by claiming that there was not a single false utterance in 35 minutes.
The energetic promoters of “independent fact-checkers” – who want “real-time” fact-checking for Trump — couldn’t muster any effort to evaluate this thunderclap of leftist rhetoric echoing in a nearly empty high-school gym. Let’s list a few fact-mangling whoppers. Start with Biden.
1. Trump/Pence gave us “four years of mismanagement and coddling of terrorists and thugs around the world.” Did Trump “coddle” Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS? No, he’s dead. Did Trump “coddle” Iranian terrorist Qasim Soleimani? He’s dead, too. Biden opposed taking down Osama bin Laden, so he should sit a spell.
2. Trump has no “plan” on the pandemic and “no real help for the states and local governments trying to fill the vacuum of leadership from the White House. No real help for children and educators, for small businesses and front line workers.” We didn’t allocate $3 trillion on mitigating the pandemic, aiding governments and businesses and vaccine development?
3. Trump was referring to neo-Nazis and racists when he said “there are very fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville protests in 2017.  This is transparently false…and yet fact checkers like PolitiFact go limp and let Biden unspool this lie. Reporters at the time prodded Trump and he explicitly condemned the neo-Nazis and racists.
4. Trump is “on track to leave office with the worst jobs record of any American president in modern history.” In January, FactCheck.org reported “The economy added 6.7 million jobs, and unemployment fell to the lowest rate in half a century.” We’re now in a pandemic which shocked the economy, but it’s now recovering. Does anyone think if this happened under President Hillary, the “fact checkers” would let a Republican blame the Democrats for the economy?
5. Likewise, Kamala Harris said “The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” And Trump “inherited the longest economic expansion in history…And then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground.” Did Democrats oppose the lockdown, kicking and screaming? Shouldn’t they share responsibility for it?
6. Harris insisted “After the most competitive primary in history, the country received a resounding message that Joe was the person to lead us forward.” That’s a joke. There were a huge number of candidates, but it didn’t end up competitive at all, in part because of the pandemic. It certainly didn’t match Obama vs. Clinton in 2008.
7. Harris said “I cannot wait for America to get to know my husband Doug and our amazing kids, Cole and Ella.” Our? Facebook labels claims like this as “Missing Context.” They’re Kamala’s stepkids from her 2014 marriage, and they’re now 24 and 18.
8. Speaking of terrible context, Harris tried to compare the coronavirus pandemic to the Ebola outbreak of 2014: “Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job. Only two people in the United States died, two. That is what’s called leadership.” These are apples and oranges in epidemiology. Ebola is much deadlier to someone infected than the coronavirus. But the spread isn’t nearly the same, since you’re not infectious with Ebola until you have symptoms, and you’re quickly bedridden.
The nation’s most influential newspapers largely skipped over many of these troubling quotes in their accounts. Did that occur because they knew how unfactual these claims were?

via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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WATCH: Rioters Tear Down George Washington Statue at L.A. City Hall


Rioters tore down a statue of George Washington in Grand Park near Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday evening, the latest monument to fall in the ongoing left-wing demonstrations around the country.

The monument to the first President of the United States was apparently vandalized and draped in the American flag when it was toppled.

Unconfirmed video and images of the tearing down and the aftermath circulated on social media (language warning):

Local CBS affiliate KCAL-9 reported:

Seven people were arrested Thursday night after a statue of George Washington in downtown Los Angeles was defaced and torn from its base, the L.A. Police Department said.

According to initial reports, a group of protesters gathered in Grand Park at about 7 p.m. and defaced the statue, located on Hill Street between Temple and 1st streets, before forcibly removing it from its base.

The statue has stood in the city since 1933, KCAL noted.

In 2017, when asked why he opposed removing Confederate monuments, President Donald Trump said that the left would not stop there, but would soon seek to tear down monuments to American heroes, including George Washington.

“So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Trump asked. “And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

The media mocked Trump at the time for his prediction.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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Sweden Hits COVID-19 “Triple Whammy”: No Lockdowns, Low Deaths & Minimal Economic Damage

Sweden Hits COVID-19 "Triple Whammy": No Lockdowns, Low Deaths & Minimal Economic Damage

Tyler Durden

Fri, 08/14/2020 – 05:30

Perhaps the biggest example of the Western media’s inherent biases surrounding its coverage of Sweden’s approach to tackling COVID-19. Plenty of media outlets decried the country’s "massive" fatality rate compared to its lockdown-favoring neighbors, but failed to add the context necessary to see that the difference was only a couple thousand deaths, and that Sweden’s per capita mortality rate was still lower than Britain’s, and other countries that favored lockdowns.

When Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s strategy, said during an interview that he would have done things "differently" if given a second chance, the Western press, including the NYT, rushed to frame this as an admission of guilt for failing to order the types of restrictive lockdowns seen in other European countries. Tegnell later clarified that this isn’t what he meant at all.

What’s more, in Sweden, deaths have declined nearly to zero. And since the country’s economy has remained open this whole time, there’s little risk of resurgence when whatever minimal restrictions are still in place are finally lifted.

In a column published Thursday, The Telegraph’s Allister Heath argued that Sweden’s success at fighting the virus while minimizing economic damage elucidates the depth of the British medical establishment’s incompetence, as it was Britain’s health experts whose advice PM Johnson assiduously followed.

Read an excerpt from the column below (courtesy of the Telegraph):

So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame: their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Suez or the ERM fiasco. Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years, with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.

Pandemics always come with large economic and social costs, for reasons of altruism as well as of self-interest. The only way to contain the spread of a deadly, contagious disease, in the absence of a cure or vaccine, is to social distance; fear and panic inevitably kick in, as the public desperately seeks to avoid catching the virus. A “voluntary” recession is almost guaranteed.

But if a drop in GDP is unavoidable, governments can influence its size and scale. Politicians can react in one of three ways to a pandemic. They can do nothing, and allow the disease to rip until herd immunity is reached. Quite rightly, no government has pursued this policy, out of fear of mass deaths and total social and economic collapse.

The second approach involves imposing proportionate restrictions to facilitate social distancing, banning certain sorts of gatherings while encouraging and informing the public. The Swedes pursued a version of this centrist strategy: there was a fair bit of compulsion, but also a focus on retaining normal life and keeping schools open. The virus was taken very seriously, but there was no formal lockdown. Tegnell is one of the few genuine heroes of this crisis: he identified the correct trade-offs.

The third option is the full-on statist approach, which imposes a legally binding lockdown and shuts down society. Such a blunderbuss approach may be right under certain circumstances – if a vaccine is imminent – or for some viruses – for example, if we are ever hit with one that targets children and comes with a much higher fatality rate – but the latest economic and mortality statistics suggest this wasn’t so for Covid-19.

Almost all economists thought that Sweden’s economy would suffer hugely from its idiosyncratic strategy. They were wrong. Sweden’s GDP fell by just 8.6 per cent in the first half of the year, all in the second quarter, and its excess deaths jumped 24 per cent. A big part of Sweden’s recession was caused by a slump in demand for its exports from its fully locked-down neighbours. One could speculate that had all countries pursued a Swedish-style strategy, the economic hit could have been worth no more than 3-4 per cent of GDP. That could be seen as the core cost of the virus under a sensible policy reaction.

By contrast, Britain’s economy slumped by 22.2 per cent in the first half of the year, a performance almost three times as bad as Sweden’s, and its excess deaths shot up by 45 per cent. Spain’s national income slumped even more (22.7 per cent), and France’s (down 18.9 per cent) and Italy’s (down 17.1 per cent) slightly less, but all three also suffered far greater per capita excess deaths than Sweden. The Swedes allowed the virus to spread in care homes, so if that major failure had been fixed, their death rate could have been a lot lower still.

* * *

Source: Telegraph

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Second Source: Mitt Romney Blocking Sen. Ron Johnson From Subpoenaing Comey, Brennan… To Protect Paul Singer

On Wednesday, a Senior Republican Senate source told Gateway Pundit that Senator Mitt Romney is leading an effort to block Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson from subpoenaing James Comey and John Brennan.

“Romney was for impeachment. He has been against Trump every step of the way. Now he is obstructing going after the leakers and liars who went after Trump,” the initial senior senate source said on Wednesday.

On Thursday, a second source, one close to the Mueller investigation, reached out to The Gateway Pundit to say that not only is Romney behind it, but he is doing it to protect Paul Singer.

“It’s pretty simple. Romney is covering for the role his billionaire supporter Paul Singer played in pushing the Fusion GPS dossier,” the source said.

Of course, before the dossier was ever written and got into the hands of the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS research was financed by the neoconservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, which is funded largely by Singer, as opposition material for the Republican primary. One of the sources mentioned that this could potentially be messy for certain members of the GOP.

A source with detailed knowledge of committee rules explained that while Senator Johnson may have consent to subpoena anyone he wants on paper, there was likely an agreement made prior to the committee approving the investigation. He explained that it is likely that Johnson agreed not to subpoena certain high profile individuals without unanimous consent.

He believes that Johnson accidentally said too much when he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he was being blocked.

“We had a number of my committee members that were highly concerned about how this looks politically,” Johnson told Hewitt, who pressed the Senator to name the Republicans blocking him.

“Hugh, I’m just not going to be naming names that way,” Johnson replied.

The Committee gave Ron Johnson unilateral subpoena power in June of this year.

Johnson is now back peddling and claiming that he does have the subpoena power, but that he wants to get the documents naturally without having to subpoena them.

“We have a committee process and I respect that,” Johnson told Martha MacAllum on Fox News, adding that he wants to respect the “legitimate concerns” some committee members have.

The post Second Source: Mitt Romney Blocking Sen. Ron Johnson From Subpoenaing Comey, Brennan… To Protect Paul Singer appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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Former Kamala Harris Press Secretary Nick Pacilio Works for Twitter


Nick Pacilio, the former press secretary to Kamala Harris, recently chosen as former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate, has reportedly secured a communications role at Twitter where he could be part of the decision-making process when censoring tweets by President Donald Trump.

In a recent article, National Review reporter David Harsanyi noted that Nick Pacilio, Kamala Harris’ former press secretary, had been hired to a communications role at Twitter. Pacilio’s hiring was first noticed when he tweeted about the removal of a tweet posted by the official account of President Trump’s re-election campaign.

Federalist co-founder Sean Davis tweeted that Pacilio was hired to police President Trump’s tweets:

Harsanyi notes in his article that Twitter alleges that Pacilio is not involved directly in the decisions to remove tweets from the President and his team, but Pacilio’s tweets about the removal of a tweet by the President’s re-election campaign do seem to imply he at the very least has knowledge of the reasoning for the removal.

Harsanyi questions whether people would have such little issue with the hiring of a conservative to police a Democrats tweets, writing: “But could you imagine what the nightly reaction on CNN and MSNBC would be if Mike Pence’s former spokesperson was seen censoring Joe Biden’s tweets during a presidential election? I have no doubt Democrats would be calling for congressional hearings.”

Harsanyi notes that Sarah Isgur, the former spokeswoman for Jeff Sessions, faced intense scrutiny when hired by CNN with the newsroom, which employs former Obama official Jim Sciutto, feeling “demoralized” by her hiring at the company. Harsanyi notes: “Conservatives, and it’s probably fair to say that Isgur is a pretty moderate one, aren’t welcome in mainstream journalism.”

Read the full article in the National Review here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

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L.A. County Seeks Restraining Order Against John MacArthur And Church After Lawsuit

Legal counsel for a prominent evangelical church in Los Angeles announced on Thursday that the county is seeking a temporary restraining order against the church and its pastor.

The order comes a day after the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit against California officials on behalf of Grace Community Church and its senior pastor, John MacArthur, who were recently threatened with fines and imprisonment for holding in-person worship services.

As The Daily Wire reported, the lawsuit contrasted the California government’s “onerous” treatment of churches compared to how it handled the mass protests that roiled the state after George Floyd’s death. The complaint read in part, “Having irreparably damaged the confidence of Americans – and Californians especially – who now realize that the pandemic restrictions are neither necessary nor good, on Sunday, July 26, 2020, Grace Community Church decided to resume worship services—joining millions of Americans in deciding that enough is enough.”

During a Thursday interview with The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan, MacArthur’s attorney Jenna Ellis joined the pastor to discuss both the case and the county’s response to it.

“We just got notice from the county attorney that L.A. County is now seeking a temporary restraining order for two things,” Ellis said. “They’re trying even this Sunday — so the hearing’s going to be tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time — they are seeking to restrain Grace Community Church from allowing any form of indoor worship and also outdoor worship that does not comply with its ridiculous mandates.”

Ellis continued, “So they are now — even though my co-counsel and I spoke with them yesterday, we said, ‘Please have the Health Department read our lawsuit. We feel that we have really good arguments under the Constitution. Maybe this will help them understand our position more.’ Well, no, they didn’t even hear it. They just went out, they are trying to restrain Grace Community Church and we, of course, will defend their constitutionally protected rights.”

Ellis went on to explain how “This is not Pastor John and Grace Community Church defying the law. The law in America and the state of California is the Constitution and those protections. This is Grace Community Church standing on the side of the law against these overreaching tyrants that are defying their oaths of office when they are commanded, mandated by the Constitution to preserve and protect our right to free exercise of religion.”

The law firm representing L.A. County did not immediately respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment.

In a similar case just north of Los Angeles, Ventura County and its public health officer, Dr. Robert Levin, sued to stop Pastor Rob McCoy from opening his church, Godspeak Calvary Chapel, in defiance of coronavirus lockdown orders. County Judge Matthew Guasco slapped McCoy and up to 1,000 parishioners with a restraining order forbidding them from congregating inside the church building.

According to the Ventura County Star, Judge Vincent O’Neill Jr. denied the county government’s request for an order directing the sheriff to “take necessary actions” to ensure the church stays closed, but left open the possibility of the church and pastor being found in contempt of court during an Aug. 21 hearing.

Related: ‘Compliance Would Be Disobedience’: Prominent California Church Defies State Lockdown To Resume In-Person Assembly

The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

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Dartmouth Student Petition Demands Sanctions Against Conservative Newspaper


A petition circulated by students at Dartmouth College demands that administrators sanction the college’s conservative student newspaper over its publication of “hateful ideologies.” The petition calls on administrators to end the college’s official relationship with the paper.

According to a report by the College Fix, nearly 1,000 students at Dartmouth College have signed a petition that calls for sanctions on the college’s conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review. Famous conservatives including Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham wrote for the paper during their undergraduate education.

The petition calls on the university to disassociate with the conservative newspaper. “At this time, we call on Dartmouth to decisively and publicly dissociate itself from the Dartmouth Review and to hold student staffers accountable for their bigotry,” the petition reads. “We further demand that the College compel this publication to cease and desist from using the Dartmouth name as part of its brand.” 

The petition references several pieces published by the Dartmouth Review that have been criticized by leftist students and faculty. The petition specifically mentions columns published as far back as the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the petition criticizes the paper for using a controversial Dartmouth symbol as part of its branding. The symbol, a 90-year-old weathervane, was removed in June after leftist students criticized its depiction of a Native American.

The Dartmouth Review and its associates have consistently spurned the College’s mission to embrace diversity and build a community of mutual respect. Their methods include divisive articles (see Keeney Jones’ blatantly racist 1982 piece “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro” or any of these insidiously racist pieces of recent years), engagement in anti-LGBTQ bullying, antisemitic statements (including the portrayal of President Freedman as Hitler), harassment of Black professors, and repeated offenses against indigenous students. Even the Dartmouth Review’s current logo flaunts this position, featuring a scene from the recently-removed campus weathervane deemed by President Hanlon to “represent an offensive portrayal of a Native American.”

In a response to the petition, Dartmouth Review writer Brian L. Drisdelle argued that the petition is a form of “intellectual cowardice” that destroys academic freedom.

“It’s unfortunate that this type of intellectual cowardice has come about on campus, and I would argue that it is antithetical to the pursuits of liberal institutions such as our own wherein debate ought to be a fundamental in the search for higher truth,” Drisdelle wrote. “I guess in the post-modern age, truth no longer matters much.”

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

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Poll: 54% of Conservative Students Will Self-Censor on Campus This Year


A new poll published this week reports that a majority of conservative college students will self-censor this fall to avoid upsetting their leftist peers. By contrast, only 15 percent of Democratic respondents claim that they will censor their own political beliefs due to social pressures.

According to a poll conducted by the College Fix, 54 percent of conservative students will self-censor this fall due to social pressures from their leftist peers.

The poll asked student respondents if they will self-censor this fall to avoid upsetting their peers. “With the current political climate, do you expect to self-censor yourself in class this semester so your professors or peers don’t take offense at your ideas?” the poll reads.

Breitbart News reported in February on a column in the Atlantic that highlighted the tendency of conservative students to hide their political beliefs around their liberal peers. The column also highlighted a statistic that suggested that many liberal students now believe that it’s permissible for them to shut down speech that they find offensive.

Nicole Neily, the president of the First Amendment advocacy group Speech First, told The College Fix that liberal students are using various tactics to pressure their Republican peers into keeping their mouths shut.

“Beyond disciplinary proceedings, students also credibly fear their peers, who are increasingly intolerant of differing viewpoints,” Neily said. “Rather than leverage the tools of discussion, debate, and persuasion, students now seem inclined to strong-arm their peers into compliance through canceling and doxxing — allegations that last forever on the internet, and have the very real possibility of ruining someone’s future professional opportunities.”

Spencer Brown, the spokesperson for the Young America’s Foundation, claimed that the poll confirms that college campuses are a hostile environment for conservative students.

“The resulting institutional reality is one where trigger warnings and speech codes take precedence over the Constitution, where students are taught to say ‘ouch’ when they hear something they disagree with, and where—confusingly—both speech deemed unpopular and silence deemed inappropriate are treated as physical violence,” Brown explained.

Breitbart News reported in October 2016 on a survey conducted by Yale students that revealed that conservative perspectives were “unwelcome” on Yale’s campus. Over 75 percent of respondents agreed that Yale “does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues.”

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

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