Last week, the Biden administration announced that — in line with prior administrations — they would be embracing the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) have a “working definition” of anti-Semitism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of […]
Democrat impeachment manager Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) falsely claimed that constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley supported the belief that former presidents should be tried for impeachment.
Are you satisfied with life in America right now? Before you answer that question, consider more than just politics. Taking an overall view that encompasses every aspect of our society, are you generally satisfied with how our society is functioning at this moment or not? Needless to say, we are coming off a very tough year, and 2021 has not started smoothly either. The COVID pandemic continues to drag on, we are mired in the worst economic downturn in more than 70 years, and there is civil unrest in our streets on an almost nightly basis.
All of these trials and tribulations have taken a great toll on us emotionally, and so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a new Gallup survey has found that the American people are less satisfied with how our nation is functioning than they ever have been before…
Americans’ satisfaction with seven broad aspects of the way the country functions is collectively at its lowest in two decades of Gallup measurement. This includes satisfaction with the overall quality of life in the U.S., assessments of government, corporate and religious influence, and perceptions of the economic and moral climates.
The average percentage satisfied with these seven dimensions has plunged to 39% at the start of 2021. That compares with 53% a year ago, the highest average in more than a decade amid strong economic confidence and before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S.
For the survey, Gallup specifically asked Americans about the following seven areas…
The overall quality of life
The opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard
The influence of organized religion
The size and power of the federal government
Our system of government and how well it works
The size and influence of major corporations
The moral and ethical climate
Satisfaction for every one of those areas was way down.
In fact, for six of those categories the decline from last year was in double digits. Shockingly, the only category that declined by just single digits was “the size and power of the federal government”.
Of course whenever economic conditions are harsh, the overall population is not going to be happy, and we have been through a really tough stretch economically.
According to Gary Halbert of Halbert Wealth Management, last year was the worst year for the U.S. economy in 74 years…
Last Thursday the Commerce Department released its first estimate of 4Q Gross Domestic Product showing the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.0% in the final three months of last year. That followed the 3Q record expansion of 33.4% (annual rate) as the economy rebounded strongly following the COVID-19 lockdowns.
2Q GDP plunged by a record-shattering 33.4% (annual rate) following the 1Q slide of 5% in the first three months of the year. For all of 2020 the economy shrank by 3.5%, the worst annual decline in 74 years (WWII).
Sadly, this year has not started very well either. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits each week continues to be at nearly four times the pre-pandemic level…
The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits last week edged down but remained elevated as the coronavirus pandemic continues to trigger a high number of layoffs.
Figures released Thursday by the Labor Department show that 779,000 Americans filed first-time jobless claims in the week ended Jan. 30, lower than the 830,000 forecast by Refinitiv economists.
And the percentage of those without jobs that are considered to be “long-term unemployed” is approaching a record high…
Almost 40% of jobless workers in January were long-term unemployed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
The share has grown steadily since the spring and is approaching the record set in April 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. At that time, nearly 46% of the unemployed were out of work at least six months.
Our system is supposed to provide a helping hand to those that are out of work, but the help doesn’t always get to those that need it.
Even though I write about our economic problems on a regular basis, even I was shocked by a brand new survey that discovered that “just 30% of unemployed individuals are being reached by the unemployment system”…
Congressional Democrats are trying to fast-track a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus relief proposal that would extend the existing supplemental unemployment benefits, but new research suggests that the jobless aid is not reaching millions of out-of-work Americans.
At most, just 30% of unemployed individuals are being reached by the unemployment system, according to a report published this week by Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist at the University of Illinois. That means roughly three out of every four jobless workers aren’t receiving aid — or about 8 million of the 11 million people counted as unemployed in December.
But for millions of deeply hurting Americans, there is good news in the short-term. Congress is about to pass another COVID relief bill, and soon more stimulus payments will be going out to the American people.
Of course borrowing and spending another 1.9 trillion dollars that we do not have will make our long-term debt problems even worse and will push us even farther down a highway to hyperinflation.
In the end, most Americans don’t really care that we are literally committing national suicide. They just know that they are in pain and they want some help as soon as possible.
If economic conditions begin to significantly improve in the weeks ahead, the American people will start to feel better about how the country is doing.
But even if there is some sort of a short-term boost, the long-term outlook is bleaker than ever, and the American people are not going to be able to handle the long-term pain that is coming very well at all.
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
A federal judge in Texas on Tuesday extended the suspension of Joe Biden’s illegal 100-day deportation freeze.
Biden signed an Executive Order a couple weeks ago putting a “temporary” 100-day freeze on deportations of illegal aliens.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton immediately filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration for its illegal deportation freeze.
Two weeks ago U.S. District Court Judge Drew Tipton in the Southern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, temporarily halted Biden’s deportation moratorium and today he extended his suspension.
Judge Tipton extended his suspension through February 23rd and said it will give the parties more time to “provide for a more fulsome record” to assist the court in “adjudicating Texas’s motion for a Preliminary Injunction.”
The judge also cited “the irreparable harm that would accrue to Texas if an extension” was not granted.
“Border states like Texas pay a particularly high price when the federal government fails to faithfully execute our country’s immigration laws,” Paxton wrote last month in his lawsuit.
Texas was the first state to sue the Biden Admin and AG Paxton won in under a week.
J&J CEO Says Annual Covid Vaccine Needed "For Years" As MSM Warns Virus Will "Circulate For Decades"
In recent days there has been a flood in good news on the covid front. Consider that a recent report from Bank of America, which notes that "COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to plunge" we read the following encouraging data points:
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US has declined dramatically to 81,439, or 51,035 (down 39%) from the peak which occurred on January 5th – a rapid turn in the crisis. The decrease is broad-based (50 states + DC, except for AK, which saw a minimal 2-person increase over the past week).
The weekly percentage change in US COVID-19 hospitalized is consistent with the largest declines seen during the coronavirus crisis. Moreover the 7-day test positivity rate has declined to 7.2% from the 13.6% peak on January 8th. Since hospitalizations are lagged relative to time of infection,US coronavirus outbreaks peaked back in the second half of December.
Finally, the vaccine rollout in the US accelerated to more than 2 million doses per day over the weekend and a cumulative 41.2mn doses had been administered through February7th.
The recent widespread improvements prompted Goldman to get this close to declaring the all clear: in a Monday note from chief economist Jan Hatzius, he writes that "the global virus situation has improved significantly, with both new confirmed cases and the positivity rate down meaningfully since December. It is still too early for a significant impact from vaccinations, so we would attribute the improvement to other factors such as new restrictions, greater caution in individual behavior, and perhaps partial herd immunity in some places."
More notably, Hatzius notes that "the renewed improvement in the UK is particularly noteworthy because of the concerns about new variants, in this caseB117, which surfaced first there…. the UK’s response to its B117-heavy infection surge in December was similar to France’s response to its surge in October. The fact that both countries saw their infections decline in similar ways after the ELI increase suggests that B117 has not been a game changer, at least so far."
So much for worries that mutant strains would render both the response strategy and vaccines moot.
And yet despite this impressive improvement in the pandemic, some are hinting that covid may be here to stay for a long, long time. Take the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, Alex Gorsky, who told CNBC that people may need to get vaccinated annually for Covid-19, Gorsky told CNBC the virus can mutate as it spreads causing it to have different responses to therapeutics and vaccines.
“Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate,” he told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event. “Every time it mutates, it’s almost like another click of the dial so to speak where we can see another variant, another mutation that can have an impact on its ability to fend off antibodies or to have a different kind of response not only to a therapeutic but also to a vaccine.”
"We’ll be getting a Covid-19 shot just like we would a flu shot. What that shot is going to be comprised of, I don’t think we know today. But I think we could all imagine a future where we’re living with this. But where we can keep the science at pace with the virus, so that we can keep on living our lives" Gorsky said.
Of course, the CEO of J&J – a company which stands to make billions from selling the covid vaccine year after year – has a clear conflict of interest and would like nothing more than to sell vaccines indefinitely… and to see Covid circulate within the population forever. After all, that would not only pump up JNJ’s stock price but the CEO’s compensation as well.
What is more troubling is that the narrative that covid will never actually go away is one that the mainstream media is starting to trumpet as well. As the WSJ reported earlier this week, while "vaccination drives hold out the promise of curbing Covid-19, but governments and businesses are increasingly accepting what epidemiologists have long warned: The pathogen will circulate for years, or even decades, leaving society to coexist with Covid-19 much as it does with other endemic diseases like flu, measles, and HIV."
“Going through the five phases of grief, we need to come to the acceptance phase that our lives are not going to be the same,” said Thomas Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think the world has really absorbed the fact that these are long-term changes.”
So does that mean masks and social distancing forever? Perhaps:
Endemic Covid-19 doesn’t necessarily mean continuing coronavirus restrictions, infectious-disease experts said, largely because vaccines are so effective at preventing severe disease and slashing hospitalizations and deaths. Hospitalizations have already fallen 30% in Israel after it vaccinated a third of its population. Deaths there are expected to plummet in weeks ahead.
But some organizations are planning for a long-term future in which prevention methods such as masking, good ventilation and testing continue in some form. Meanwhile, a new and potentially lucrative Covid-19 industry is emerging quickly, as businesses invest in goods and services such as air-quality monitoring, filters, diagnostic kits and new treatments.
Of course, it also means that while some zombie companies will exist only thanks to billons in periodic PPP bailouts, other companies will make unprecedented profits as they directly benefit from a perpetual pandemic.
More importantly, it will means constant media propaganda, because any time the administration needs to pass a multi-trillion stimulus – say when ratings sag – it can just crank up the panic dial to max and greenlight itself another multi-trillion fiscal boost which makes the economy ever more artificial and unable to survive on its own two feet absent constant government handouts.
Most importantly it means that tens of millions of people will become perpetual financial wards of the state, cementing any political system that promises constant handouts to all those who no longer have a chance of coping, or survival in a world where universal basic income – which is gradually becoming the norm – is pulled away.
(Note: Thank you for supporting American businesses like the one presenting a sponsored message below and publishers like Gateway Pundit. We appreciate your support!)
Alan Greenspan Reveals Washington’s Nasty Trick to Destroy Your Savings… Here’s How Americans are Resisting…
In October, U.S. government debt surpassed a record $27 TRILLION.
It took 200 years to rack up the first $1 trillion in debt. But today, it’s soaring. In fact, Washington racked up the last $1 trillion of debt in UNDER 4 MONTHS.
And now that Biden is pushing another $1.9 trillion into the economy as his solution to economic fallout from the pandemic, deficit spending has gone parabolic! With each passing day, it’s destroying the savings of the American public.
Former head of the U.S. Fed, Alan Greenspan, once put it simply: “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”
As the government spends its way through this contagion, are your savings protected from this “hidden tax”? Do you even know how to prepare?
If you have an IRA or 401(k), here’s one way to prepare (before it’s too late)…
To combat this scheme, Greenspan offers one simple piece of advice: Gold. In short, he says, “Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.”
And one of the best ways to move into gold and silver is to convert your IRA or 401(k) into a “Self Directed” Gold IRA.
While you still can: Get a no-cost info kit on gold, and the IRS Tax Law to legally move your IRA or 401(k) to precious metals.
This free 20-page “insider’s” kit on Gold reveals precisely how this IRS Tax Law works, and how you can start moving your IRA or 401(k) as soon as today… without paying any taxes on the transfer. It’s all explained in this free info kit on gold.
I must remind you, there may not be much time left to make this critical switch. As Biden starts to run the debt to infinity, the value of your savings are plummeting faster and faster.
I have some of these FREE Info Kits available to send today – request yours now.
Last Thing: Now that the Democrats control the White House and BOTH houses of Congress, they can spend whatever they please. With every additional dollar they put into the system, the value of your savings faces another threat. Request your info kit on gold now – while you still can.
Two startling developments have occurred regarding the controversy over the 2020 election in the past several days:
Time Magazine’s Molly Ball with Nancy Pelosi
First, Time Magazine published an article with what appears to be the full cooperation of powerful members of what Time’s own reporter Molly Ball describes as a ‘shadowy cabal’ of people who conspired together to ‘fortify’ the 2020 Election.
The second development is that the Supreme Court made the announcement that it will hold a conference to discuss five 2020 election-related cases. The cases the justices will take into consideration include the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania lawsuit, the case Sidney Powell filed in Michigan, Lin Wood’s lawsuit in Georgia, as well as the suit filed by PA Representative Mike Kelly.
Despite the constant media narrative that the controversies and scandals surrounding this last election are over and everyone has moved on, that’s simply not the case. No one seems to have notified the Supreme Court of this. And, I find it interesting that both these rather curious things happened just in advance of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial at the U.S. Senate, which is scheduled to begin this week.
Beneath the Propaganda, Startling Admissions
At one point, the Time article mocks former President Trump by admitting that “in a way, he was right” about the 2020 election having been “rigged.” But then Molly Ball goes on to helpfully make the case that the secret cabal made up of corporate CEO’s, corporate media, Big Tech and anti-Trump GOP was not “rigging” the election at all – they were “fortifying” it to stop the evil Trump’s ‘assault on democracy’. After more than three full months of furious censorship and attacks on anyone claiming the election was rigged, all of a sudden, we get what amounts to a confession in Time Magazine, which furiously attempts the spin that the rigging was necessary to save the Republic from Trump and MAGA.
Targeting election laws in key states, the cabal engaged in lawfare through a phalanx of lawyers led by Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, and successfully circumvented the state legislatures to ram through changes that made mail-in ballot fraud far easier to accomplish. While that was going on, corporate CEO’s like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of carefully selected election officials in carefully selected areas to ensure increased Democratic turnout.
My research for this column shows me that Molly Ball at Time Magazine was far from the first to attempt a fantastic spin of the election rigging as evidence of it began emerging. When the facts about Zuckerberg’s $350 million in donations to election officials first began surfacing, NPR on December 8 was the first to leap in front of the cabal and claim with this article that far from attacking or rigging the 2020 election, Zuckerberg & Co. was, in fact, saving it.
The Rigging That Failed
As I’m watching all the media furor that the Time article has caused, with a multitude of articles across the media spectrum discussing it, no one has pointed out the obvious: despite everything this powerful cabal had done over the preceding year to ensure a Trump defeat, he was still cruising to a significant victory on election night. All that careful rigging preparation failed. Despite all their careful planning, they were forced to take extraordinary measures on short notice.
It was Trump himself who pulled back the curtain on this shadowy cabal. He forced them to come out into the daylight to steal the election in plain sight. After the legal deadline of November 3 had passed, the entire country watched them spend more than a week manufacturing a Biden win after-the-fact. Ponder that for a minute.
Even after this supposedly all-powerful cabal spent more than a year working furiously behind the scenes, changing all the election laws in these key states, streaming hundreds of millions of dollars to key election officials, Trump was cruising to an election night victory anyway.
I’ll say it again: Donald Trump forced them to come out of hiding and steal the election out in the open, where everyone could see it.
The Incongruity of the Cabal Admitting What it Did at This Time
What makes this Time Magazine piece so compelling is that it was published just five days before Democrats in Congress plan to put former President Donald J. Trump on trial for “inciting an insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6.
How does the impeachment article claim Trump incited an insurrection? By making a claim that the 2020 election was rigged. We’ve gone from four months’ of being told the election was fair and not rigged at all to…an admission it was rigged, and it’s a good thing it was rigged because it saved the world from four more years of that awful monster, Donald Trump.
What could possibly have evoked this admission just two weeks into the new Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration?
One viewpoint is that this admission is being made at this time out of sheer arrogance. They know they’ve gotten away with it, so why not? Why not brag about what they did? But it seems to me that this is the worst possible time to be making the admission that a powerful cabal of elites conspired to rig the 2020 election. The Biden administration is floundering. Each passing day reveals two things: how radically progressive the Biden White House’s agenda is, and how little real national support there is for such an agenda.
Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos To Step Down As Company’s CEO | Forbes
Top cabal members such as Jeff Zucker at CNN, Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Thomas Donohue at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are suddenly announcing their resignations from their immensely powerful, influential, and lucrative jobs. Donohue made the announcement he was stepping down from the Chamber of Commerce just two days after the Time Magazine article was published – February 6. This was not some transitory job for Donohue – he had been the CEO of the Chamber since 1997.
Is This an Attempt at a ‘Controlled Explosion’?
I return to the point that this strange admission that a cabal of powerful elites conspired together to rig the 2020 election was made just four days before Trump’s scheduled Senate trial. Making this admission about a secret cabal working furiously behind the scenes to rig the election just four days before Donald Trump is to go on trial in the U.S. Senate might seem counterproductive. But it is a well-known media tactic.
Media critic Andrew Breitbart coined the term ‘controlled explosion’ to explain the news media strategy of attempting to spin damaging revelations by making admissions of guilt, but shaping the media narrative to downplay the admissions and limit the damage from the scandal. If the shadowy cabal that rigged the 2020 election has reason to believe that a large amount of their activity is about to be exposed, it would behoove them to approach sympathetic media outlets to launch preemptive narratives that will put the best possible spin on their activities.
Get Your Narrative Out First
Former Navy intelligence analyst J.E. Dyer at Liberty Unyeilding sheds some light on why the cabal may have participated in the Time Magazine article: they believe Trump could show something in his defense at the trial, and they want to get out there first and set their own narrative about their election rigging.
It could also be they anticipate some of what they did will be exposed should the Supreme Court agree to hear any of the five election-related cases and they are forced to move into the discovery phase of the cases. This tells me the powerful election-rigging cabal has grown increasingly nervous as more and more of what they did has come to light.
They should be nervous. They are riding a tiger, and they don’t dare hop off. They rigged the election to install an incredibly weak illegitimate President who could then begin ramming through their radical progressive agenda while bypassing the Congress. And now the fraud they perpetrated on the country to install Biden in the White House is coming out.
There never was any real popular support for Joe Biden. A fact this is going to become painfully and increasingly apparent over the next several weeks.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” Twitter: @drawandstrike SubscribeStar: Brian Cates Epoch Times: Brian Cates
Palm Beach officials are reportedly considering a petition from former President Donald Trump’s neighbors, looking to bar Trump from living full time at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The former president and his immediate family — wife Melania and son Barron — reportedly chose to move to Florida following his departure from the White House in January […]
AJ Louderback, Sheriff of Jackson County in Texas, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday night that it was “absolutely true” that the Biden administration was releasing illegal immigrants into U.S. communities without giving them a COVID-19 test. “It’s absolutely true,” Louderback said. “It’s even, if I can continue, Tucker, the memo, the memo […]
In October, U.S. government debt surpassed a record $27 TRILLION.
