stay 3 mask lockdown

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one prong? trump campaign/coup?

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see morano BS climate lockdown globalist BS

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Pro-Trump donors in huge cash drive to boost doctors pushing states to reopen

This article is more than 6 years old

Save Our Country coalition, with links to Trump administration, building support for new tax cuts and curbs on Covid-19 spending

Peter Stone in Washington

Mon 1 Jun 2020

A powerful conservative coalition whose key members have strong Trump administration ties, is seeking to raise $5m to back hundreds of doctors pressing states to open rapidly and to build support for new tax cuts and curbing pandemic spending, say its leaders.

The Save Our Country (SOC) coalition was launched in April by veteran advocates of small government policies who lead rightwing groups like FreedomWorks Foundation, Tea Party Patriots and the shadowy state policy network the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).

Nearly all top public health voices, like the White House adviser Dr Anthony Fauci, urge caution in reopening states. There is broad consensus among most public health experts worldwide that too swiftly ending lockdowns risks a potentially devastating second wave of infections in a pandemic that has already cost more than 100,000 American lives.

But the Tea Party Patriots have spearheaded a drive, in radio and TV interviews, to mobilize doctors urging states to move faster. It is now attracting broader financial support from rightwing donors and groups in the shape of the SOC. Doctors in the group have also pushed unscientific theories about the pandemic in ways that have sparked anger and criticism.

The Tea Party leader Jenny Beth Martin said the group has about 800 members and its mission is to “educate the American public about the unintended side-effects” of the shutdown. Martin said 800 doctors signed a letter in May to Donald Trump which called the lockdowns a “mass casualty” event causing depression and other ills and urged Trump to end the “national shutdown”. A copy of the letter is going this week to governors nationwide.

The coalition’s key groups are dark money non-profits that historically have been funded by a mix of wealthy donors, corporations and conservative foundations. One leading figure in the loose-knit coalition is the FreedomWorks economic adviser and free markets advocate Stephen Moore.

The coalition’s economic and health agendas are drawing fire from scientists and economists of all political stripes

Brandon said the SOS coalition has raised just over $800,000 towards a $5m goal for projects including new ad efforts – online, radio and print – to rev up grassroots pressure to reopen states faster, plus curtail more federal spending and promote business-favored tax cuts.

Los Angeles-based Dr Simone Gold, who has been prominent in the doctors’ drive, was featured over Memorial Day weekend at a rally in Los Angeles which drew the conservative radio host Dennis Prager.

According to the Associated Press, the Council for National Policy Action, another SOS member, on 11 May held a call about the doctors’ effort with Trump campaign officials who indicated they plan to launch a similar drive soon. Gold told the AP that there was “no scientific basis that the average American should be concerned about” Covid-19 – something that downplays all medical evidence about the pandemic’s risks.

Gold has also used talk radio to tout the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine – which Trump has taken in hopes of blocking Covid-19 – despite growing scientific evidence it carries big health risks.

The coalition’s economic and health agendas are drawing fire from scientists and economists of all political stripes.

“The fact that these organizations have found doctors who are willing to support a rightwing agenda designed to help Donald Trump against all scientific evidence and appropriate public health practices is shameful,” said Irwin Redlener, a professor of public health at Columbia University.

Critics notwithstanding, Brandon said the coalition recently spent $50,000 for videos on Facebook, Hulu and Twitter targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.

FreedomWorks, which boasts an arm whose tax status permits lobbying, has also been prodding the Senate “to pump the brakes on new spending”, Brandon said referring to the $3tn-plus that has already been allocated for corporate relief and the pandemic’s painful fallout for tens of millions.

Besides coalition projects, Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks have tapped their email lists and social media to mobilize activists to join “liberate” demonstrations in more than 10 states including North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia and Michigan, with the latter attracting some gun-toting activists.

Key groups in the SOC coalition, which has 200 members, have been funded by prominent billionaires, including some who have been active in the sprawling big-money network led by the oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.

Tea Party Patriots, for instance, received almost $2m in 2017 and 2018 from Richard Uihlein, whose net worth in early 2020 was almost $25bn according to public records. Charles Koch, whose net worth Forbes last month pegged at $46.5bn, has been an Alec funder. The Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, whose net worth in February was $6.5bn, has backed Job Creators Network which also belongs to the coalition.

The coalition and some member groups have held strategy conference calls that include some wealthy donors and underscore White House ties. FreedomWorks and Brandon hosted one such call on May 21 with Vice-President Mike Pence and Moore.

A GOP source who heard the call said Pence offered mostly familiar rhetoric about “restoring American greatness” and congratulated the call’s “distinguished” participants.

In turn, Moore stressed FreedomWorks support for a payroll tax cut, an idea Trump has pushed but which has faced bipartisan Senate opposition in part because it mainly helps workers with jobs, and not the tens of millions newly unemployed.

Jerry Taylor, who heads the non-partisan Niskanen Center and used to work at Alec leading a taskforce on energy and the environment, faults the coalition’s economic and health analyses.

“The political actors involved with these groups are united both in their hostility to mainstream science – which they consider a conspiratorial leftist plot to destroy free market capitalism – and their superficial understanding of economics. Fully reopening the economy will not produce an economic recovery until the coronavirus is contained and can stay contained,” he said.

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the lever CMD

earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.

But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.

Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

The academy is the newest initiative designed to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.

That campaign’s most recent success came earlier this month when Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined together to pass a symbolic measure to repeal a Biden administration rule requiring large corporations to mandate vaccines or regular COVID tests for workers.

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign originally started, and how it has continued to supplant public health experts and hijack the governmental response to the pandemic.

The War On Public Health

When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.

To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.

Tip Jar

“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection”

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.

The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration’s website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.”

But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren’t verified.

AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly$1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network also pocketed nearly $3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.

In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER’s trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops.

Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch’s foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs.

IFrame Content

Bhattacharya, Gupta, and representatives of AIER did not respond to requests for comment. Kulldorff insisted that he has never received money from the Koch network.

“Koch-affiliated foundations funded pro-lockdown COVID research by Dr. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, but they have never funded me, either directly or indirectly,” said Kulldorff. “Lockdowns have generated huge profits for Koch and other big businesses while throwing children and the working class under the bus.”

“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government”

The Great Barrington Declaration and its natural immunity strategy were widely derided by scientists around the world. The strategy was condemned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association while World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” Thousands of medical professionals called on governments to disregard strategies that rely on natural infection.

“Never in the history of public health has anyone suggested infecting the entire population with a pathogen with which we have no long term experience as a strategy for managing a pandemic,” said epidemiologist and physician Robert Morris, who has advised several federal agencies.

Nevertheless, the declaration and its authors were embraced by a number of political leaders, since their arguments provided their laissez-faire approaches to the pandemic with scholarly validity.

This list included President Trump. Two months before the release of the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump welcomed the document’s authors to a White House meeting, even though the administration’s COVID-19 advisor, Deborah Birx, warned colleagues that the doctors were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience.”

Trump’s COVID-19 adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, appeared to be one of several staff who supported the declaration’s strategy. While Atlas has denied urging the natural immunity approach, he publicly claimed that masks do not help curb the virus and called the idea of mandating vaccines for young people a “denial of science,” a claim that has been thoroughly disproved.

The president became enamored with herd immunity and the quick fix it promised for his reelection campaign. In mid-September 2020, Trump began trotting out the concepts that would soon be codified in the Great Barrington Declaration. He declared at an ABC News town hall, “And you’ll develop…a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.”

Following Trump’s lead, a number of Republican-led states adopted hands-off pandemic strategies.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the resumption of most commerce in November 2020, including indoor dining, and barred localities from enforcing mask mandates and social distancing.

Declaration co-author Bhattacharya advised DeSantis on his approach and called the governor “extraordinary” for his handling of the pandemic. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation banning vaccine mandates statewide.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Recently, Abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates, which a federal judge recently ruled unenforceable because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s central arguments also found support overseas. In September 2020, co-author Gupta met in London with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been slow to impose lockdowns and implement testing after the coronavirus was first identified in his country. A month after this meeting, Johnson sent a series of texts echoing talking points from the declaration, including that the virus wasn’t a real risk to people under 60.

The London meeting was also attended by Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist for Sweden, a country that became well known for its rejection of lockdowns. In April 2020, Sweden’s public health director asserted, “There is no clear correlation between the lockdown measures taken in countries and the effect on the pandemic.”

“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”

A Devastating Toll

Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to COVID-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced a COVID massacre.

At the time of the declaration’s publication, roughly 200,000 Americans had died from the virus. Since then, that number has quadrupled, the highest known number of any country.

Florida has become a COVID-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths at the time.

Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved. Last week, University of Texas researchers warned that the Omicron variant could lead to the largest surge to date in the state.

International efforts to reach natural herd immunity haven’t fared much better. A scathing report released in October by British lawmakers — many from Prime Minister Johnson’s own party — found that the country’s failure to respond to the virus quickly and aggressively was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” and led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”

And in Sweden, where roughly 11 out every 100 people had been diagnosed with the virus, COVID-19 fatalities stand at 1,476 deaths per million, many times that of its closest neighbors.

“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School”

Despite the costs, right-wing messaging against public health measures continues.

At first glance, lockdowns may appear beneficial to some big businesses, especially those that were deemed essential businesses and boasted robust online marketplaces. But social epidemiologist Justin Feldman, of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, noted that “some regulations directly cost businesses money.”

Feldman explained that “paid quarantine and isolation means workers will be paid to stay home instead of working,” vaccine mandates could “make hiring difficult during a labor shortage,” and mask mandates “signal to the public that there is danger and they will then not patronize businesses.”

That’s likely why in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions. In May, DonorsTrust issued a press release claiming lockdowns hurt workers.

In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.

And earlier this month, the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

President Joe Biden hasn’t embraced herd immunity through infection the way Trump did, and he instituted a vaccine mandate for large companies that has faced court challenges and pushback from Republican and conservative Democratic lawmakers.

But Biden, whose COVID-19 response team is headed by former investment firm CEO and so-called “businessman’s businessman” Jeffrey Zients, has continued his predecessor’s push to keep the country open, even prematurely declaring “independence” from COVID-19 on Fourth of July last summer.

Earlier this month, Biden assured reporters that lockdowns would not be returning, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and continued spread of Delta. According to a recent scientific simulation, an eight-week stay-at-home order in response to the new surge could save 300,000 lives.

Last Friday, the White House’s coronavirus response team put out a statement reaffirming its limited approach, a stance Biden reiterated in his remarks on Omicron on Tuesday: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work & school for the vaccinated.”

The defeat of lockdowns is only part of big business’ takeover of the country’s COVID-19 response.

The country’s eviction moratorium was allowed to lapse after it faced multiple legal challenges funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation — at the same time as Charles Koch began making new investments in real estate. A subsequent moratorium put in place by the Biden administration was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

And while one of Biden’s first presidential promises was to clarify COVID-19 workplace safety standards, the resulting guidelines ended up limited to a small subsection of workers, following months of lobbying by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and other corporate interests have also pushed for a corporate liability shield to protect employers from COVID-19-related lawsuits and have also been fighting against ongoing efforts to release the vaccine intellectual property at the World Trade Organization to speed up global vaccination.

The right-wing push against public health measures shows signs of success. Support for pandemic lockdown measures dropped significantly over nine months from the start of the pandemic. A Gallup poll from November 2020 found that a plurality of 49 percent of Americans said they would shelter in place in response to a serious outbreak, down from 67 percent in March. The decline was mostly due to a “sharp drop” among Republicans.

“A Shining City On A Hill”

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors continue to push herd immunity through COVID-19 infections. Gupta co-founded a U.K. nonprofit called Collateral Globaldedicated to exposing alleged negative impacts of COVID mitigation measures, which has Bhattacharya on staff.

Bhattacharya, meanwhile, published an op-ed last January claiming that vaccinating people in his native India was “unethical” because most had “natural immunity” and the risk of adverse reactions outweighed the benefits of inoculation. A month later, the country experienced its worst-ever surge.

All three co-authors are also now affiliated with the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit founded by former AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker in May 2021 to prevent “the recurrence of lockdowns.” Bhattacharya serves as the organization's senior scholar, Kulldorff is a senior scientific director, and Gupta is an author.

According to Yamey at Duke University, the institute has been actively promoting vaccine disinformation.

“Time and time again, they have peddled dreadful misinformation and disinformation about vaccines,” he said. “They are, for example, vehemently opposed to vaccinating children, even though we know that unvaccinated children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. They very sadly went on television to say that health workers don't need to be vaccinated because they falsely claimed vaccination has no effect on transmission.”

Now declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, as well as former Trump advisor Scott Atlas have surfaced yet again, as the first three “fellows” at the new Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale, a private non-sectarian Christian school, has long been a factory for conservative thought. In 2016, during a Hillsdale commencement speech, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called it a “shining city on a hill.” Statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adorn a section of its campus known as “Liberty Walk.” Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.

Hillsdale refuses to accept public funds so it can be free from government mandates. Instead, it accepts large sums from the foundations and donor conduits of right-wing corporate executives and their families. The Charles Koch Foundation has donated over $300,000 to Hillsdale since 2015, and DonorsTrust gave over $3.6 million since 2014, including $2.5 million in 2020. The school has also found generous benefactors in the DeVos family, known for their Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos’ parents, the Princes.

According to the academy’s recently launched website, the new academy will work “to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.” To do so, the academy plans to host scientific workshops and conferences, publish academic papers, and engage in “media and government outreach.”

But Feldman isn’t buying it.

“They have no interest in science,” he said. “They have been wrong about the pandemic time and time again. They use their stature as 'experts' to push for policies that are indifferent to ongoing mass death.”

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JUNE 29, 2021

The War on Small Business

Former investment banker Carol Rothargued that government bureaucrats used the COVID*19 pandemic to crush small businesses and make Wall Street richer. This virtual event was hosted by the Pacific Research Institute in Pasadena, California.

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NOTE DATE 12 23

Fox anchor Bret Baier compares Biden’s vaccine mandates and student loan relief to Trump’s attempted coup | Media Matters for America

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https://www.alternet.org/wisconsin-supreme-court-judge-wikipedia/

no lnx an 8 23

Right-wing Wisconsin Supreme Court judge’s edits to Wikipedia page may be 'conflict of interest': watchdog

Maya Boddie August 15, 2023

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley recently logged into her personal Wikipedia page and made a few edits, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel watchdog columnist Daniel Bice reports.

According to the report, @arizonasunblock on Twitter last week wrote, "Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice @JudgeBradleyWI is currently engaging in an edit war on her Wikipedia page under an anonymous username that she also uses in her personal email. You cannot make this stuff up."

Bice discovered the Twitter user was correct, with the username "rlgbjd," standing for "Rebecca Lynn Grassl Bradley, J.D."

The columnist writes:

In her email to the Journal Sentinel, Bradley said she had to make these changes because members of the media aren't doing their job.

"Clearly, the media has made no effort to report honestly so public officials have no choice but to correct the record for them,'" Bradley said.

:{:{}:

"I hope this clears up the great Wikipedia issue facing our state and allows you to focus on the constitutional crisis created by my colleagues," she concluded, referring to actions taken by the new liberal majority on the court.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

"Republicans have become the party of book banning, but as always, Rebecca Bradley goes one step further and wants to erase the Internet," Scot Ross, former executive director of the progressive group One Wisconsin Now told the news outlet.

Bice writes:

:{:{}:

According to her Wikipedia page, in May 2020, Bradley "compared the state's stay-at-home orders to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II," a case known as Korematsu v. the United States.

Here is what Bradley actually said, according to video of the teleconference of the May 5, 2020, oral arguments:

I'll direct your attention to another time in history, the Korematsu decision, where the court said the need for action was great and time was short and that justified, and I'm quoting, "assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers" during World War II.

:{:{}:

Could the secretary (of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services), under this broad delegation of legislative power, or legislative-like power, order people out of their homes into centers where they are properly socially distanced in order to combat the pandemic? . . . The point of my question is, what are the limits, constitutional or statutory? There have to be some, don't there, counsel?

Bradley replaced the words from her original oral argument, writing, "Although headlines may sensationalize the invocation of cases such as Korematsu, the point of citing them is not to draw comparisons between the circumstances of people horrifically interned by their government during a war and those of people subjected to isolation orders during a pandemic. We mention cases like Korematsu in order to test the limits of government authority, to remind the state that urging courts to approve the exercise of extraordinary power during times of emergency may lead to extraordinary abuses of its citizens."

According to Bice, the judge made two additional changes, including editing "the description of her majority opinion in the 2021 redistricting case aimed at setting new political boundary lines in the state," and amending "a summary of her 2022 decision outlawing the use of drop boxes to cast absentee ballots in Wisconsin."

READ MORE: Wisconsin Republicans threaten to impeach newly elected Democratic State Supreme Court justice: report

The columnist notes Bradley received backlash from a Wikipedia editor who says the judge may have generated a conflict of interest.

Wikipedia informed Bradley, "Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic," noting the website's guidelines, "which suggested users 'avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors.'"

READ MORE: Liberal victory in Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a 'five-alarm warning to Republicans': WSJ editorial board

Daniel Bice's full column is available at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/trump-politics/

an 7 23

kentucky MAGA Republican James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has been exposed as basically a con manwith his phony Hunter Biden bribe witness. Now he is trying to rewrite the history of Trump and Covid.

Comer’s latest stunt to try to whitewash Trump’s role in the unnecessary death of at least a half-million Americans is to argue — nonsensically — that the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab and therefore something, something, something Trump is not responsible. He’s doing this with House Oversight Committee hearings this week.

The reason Comer and other MAGA Republicans are working so hard to push this perennial theory (which may be true, but so what?) is that they think directing the nation’s attention to the Wuhan lab — which got collaboration and minor funding from Anthony Fauci’s realm of the government — will point us at Fauci and thus distract us all from how many Americans Trump let die and why.

And it’s the “why” Trump intentionally let a half million Americans die unnecessarily where our media, and the Democrats, are really missing the story.

April 7, 2020 was the day everything changed in America. And hardly anybody realizes it.

It was the day that caused Jared Kushner to decide that letting Black and Hispanic Americans in Blue states die of Covid — yes, intentionally using the force of law and social pressure to push people into death’s jaws — could become part of what he called “an effective political strategy” to help them win the 2020 election, and Donald Trump signed off on it.

The most unreported story of the pandemic, the one that seems destined to be overlooked as histories are being written, is what Trump did when he learned the Covid coronavirus was largely killing Black and Hispanic people and mostly sparing whites.

The moment he came to that realization he completely altered the US response to the pandemic, leading to the unnecessary death of 300,000 to 500,000 Americans.

Deaths that he and his advisors apparently believed (correctly) would be, outside of nursing home residents, disproportionately Black and Hispanic people.

It’s an amazing story and the evidence is easily found. But even Congressman Jamie Raskin missed an opportunity to point it out when he corrected Comer during yesterday’s hearing to say:

”[E]ven if the virus came from a lab, as indeed it could have, we don't know that yet, that would only deepen Donald Trump’s culpability because he was the one who repeatedly and enthusiastically praised China’s early handling of the pandemic and assured us that he was working closely with President Xi on the response to it.”

But when you line up the timeline and events of 2020, a much more sinister picture of Trump’s willingness to let Americans die — and the reason why he was willing to let particular Americans die — emerges that is pretty damn compelling.

Here’s how it played out. It’s the story of the crime of mass death done entirely for political purposes.

Through January of 2020, Covid was limited to a few clusters in the US.

Trump — who’d privately told Bob Woodward the disease was a “killer” that “rips you apart” — kept downplaying its severity and assuring Americans there was nothing to worry about.

On January 30th the World Health Organization declared the outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern.”

Louise and I joined two of my brothers and several of their and our kids on a family cruise the next day; when we left the ship and flew home on February 8th most of us were sick (we still don’t know if it was Covid) and the 3,700 passengers and crew of a different ship, the Diamond Princess, were getting headlines around the world, quarantined off the coast of Japan for two long weeks with hundreds of cases of Covid.

March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here in the United States. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.

Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes. We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.

Within those few weeks in March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut downboth of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged Jared Kushner with responding to the crisis.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.

By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.

The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.

Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.

They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.

But then came April 7th, just one month later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States. It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.

It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.

Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not White people.

As The New York Times reported on April 7th:

“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…

“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”

Republicans responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”

Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:

“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”

And here it was:

“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation.”

It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and arealso over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.

It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people are going to die more frequently from coronavirus.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7th front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading or making the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox “News” host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now, Tucker said:

“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”

“The rest” are white people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get back to work appear to be disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:

“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.

“Black and Latina women were particularly ‘overrepresented as essential workers’ at greater risk of coronavirus infection ‘with Latina women making up 22% of women grocery store workers and Black women making up 27% of women home health aide workers’…”

On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly white — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere people could work from home, most employers were making accommodations.

But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose. He knew that if he wanted to win in 2020, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.

Particularly if they were Black or Brown.

Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news guy,” intoned:

“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”

Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.

Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and his rightwing media believed most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, things were suddenly very, very different.

Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and Brown people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease!

On April 12th, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”

On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commercepublished a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.

The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid-deaths and -injuries lawsuits.

Three days after that,Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”

Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”

One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in mostly-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.

One that drew particularly high levels of media attention — complete with swastikas, confederate flags, and assault rifles — was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.

This was around the time long-standing rightwing networks began to awaken and coordinate with each other. They reached out to members of Congress and the Senate and found allies. Trump explicitly encouraged them to require low-wage essential workers to return to their jobs.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill — unnecessarily — a half-million Americans.

NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline:

“Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”

When Rachel Maddow reported on meat-packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, theconservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Courtpointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick people were mostly Hispanic and Black.

He essentially said, “No big deal.”

The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio. Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get less sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.

Then came news that bigger outbreaks than we realized were now happening in meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).

Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly of all races were dying in nursing homes.

But the death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was relatively low.

It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base. And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, they might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.

At year’s end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.

The lasting legacy of Trump’s changes in policy and encouraging Covid skepticism is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness, period. He’d thrown his unqualified slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner at something even a professional would’ve found the challenge of a lifetime. And then manipulated it to help him in the upcoming 2020 election.

More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.

Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic people, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.

Former Attorney General Kennedy’s grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the administration’s volunteers, who blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote forThe New Yorker:

“Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the [Blue] states.’”

As that report released from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus reported just a few months ago:

“In the first half of 2020, African Americans and Latinos had death rates from coronavirus that far outweighed those of whites. While 62% of the population age 45-54 in 2020 was white, this population accounted for only 22% of coronavirus deaths in that age range. …

“Disparities were even more pronounced in some states such as Louisiana, where where in April 2020, African Americans represented 70% of coronavirus deaths despite being only one third of the state’s population.”

And once Trump and Kushner put that death-based reelection strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red state white people became infected.

As Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx in mid-April and she reported in her book Silent Invasion: The Untold Story…:

“‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’ His pupils hardened into points of anger… I felt the blood drain from my face, and I shivered slightly.”

Trump’s change — from a policy of prevention to a policy of “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.

That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.

Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.

But he didn’t do either. All because he knew the virus disproportionately killed Black and Brown people and he was willing to do anything to win the election.

And sure enough, as Congress reported last December, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy — among Black and Hispanic people.

If that’s not racial mass slaughter, aka genocide at a Serbian war crimes level, then the phrase has lost much of its meaning.

Jack Smith: are you listening?

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