United 93
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Written by Paul Greengrass
Starring David Alan Basche, Olivia Thirlby, Liza Colon-Zayas, J.J. Johnson, Gary Commock, Trish Gates
I finally saw United 93 for the first time yesterday. So let’s get this out of the way:
I didn’t see the movie when it came out in 2006 because “too soon,” and didn’t own the DVD when the 10 year anniversary rolled around. But the 20th anniversary fell on our usual movie night, so it was finally time.
And it was every bit as tense and nerve-wracking as I expected it to be.
United 93 covers, in low-key, docudrama fashion, the events of 9/11 from the viewpoints of passengers and crew on the doomed airliner, flight controllers on the ground, Strategic Air Command, and even the terrorists hijacking the plane. Except for the terrorists, no one understands what’s happening. First one, then another airliner stops answering air traffic control and turns their transponders off. Even after the first plane hits the World Trade Center off-screen, no one understands what’s going on. Rumors fly as different government functionaries (some playing themselves) try to get answers from different agencies for a situation none of them understand.
And the movie’s almost an hour in before the terrorists hijack United 93.
This is a great film. It’s also a harrowing, tension-filled one despite knowing the ending. There’s no sensationalism, no money shots, no moralizing, no foreshadowing, just an excellent ensemble cast playing ordinary people struggling understand what’s going on and make decisions on limited information.
United 93 is a better film than The Departed, which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2006. (It was Martin Scorsese’s makeup Oscar for Goodfellas.) I would have to see The Lives of Others (which won for Best Foreign Language film the same year) again to determine which is better.
Joe Rogan interviewed Bret Weinstein and his wife and fellow evolutionary biologist Heather Heying on a variety of topics.
On the eternal Flu Manchu struggle:
“Garrett Vandenbush said this is going to become a pandemic of variance, and he talked about immune escape.”
They have failed to produce natural immunity, they have produced very narrow immunity…what he argued was that the fact of these vaccines being very narrowly targeted. These vaccines contain a single subunit of a single protein, and they’re being deployed in a way that is unusual they’re being deployed into an active pandemic. When we immunize against something like measles, the expectation is you will develop your full immunity with almost no chance of encountering measles. In this case, what we have are vaccines that are leaky, in which they do not provide full sterilizing immunity. They are narrow, and we are effectively creating an intense evolutionary pressure to cause the spike protein, of which this one subunit is what is contained the information [in] the vaccines. We are putting intense evolutionary pressure on it to change, so that the antibodies and other immune cell recognition mechanisms that are trained by the vaccines, are incapable of finding the pathogen. What it gets in this is what causes breakthrough cases, that the immunity that’s been created is evaded by the pathogen.
The result: A radiant of variants for which the vaccines are less and less effective for providing immunity.
“We the public need to recognize our interests are not being served by the public health apparatus. It is making errors that it doesn’t need to make, and that has implications for all of our individual health, and our collective well-being, that requires a rethink.”
And here’s a discussion of the “horse dewormer” narrative:
“We all need to be on team skeptic.”
Heying: “That’s exactly right. We’re all being told ‘you’re on team blue,’ effectively ‘you’re on team mainstream, or you’re someone else, you’re persona non grata and you’re going to become a second class citizen.'”
“Something is just not right about our way of doing journalism anymore.”
Anthony Fauci was yesterday revealed to have clearly lied to congress when he told them we didn’t fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. That was obvious when he said these things, but everyone assumed he had defined the terms in some way that would justify that claim. No, it was just a lie. So here we have somebody who you know lied to us about masks, has lied to us multiple times, and was also apparently a key to conducting funds in violation of our own ban on gain-of-function research. Conducting funds to the Wuhan Institute [of Virology], which may well have caused the pandemic. How is the person who is in the position to have circumvented a congressional ban on this kind of research, and possibly therefore have played a prominent role in producing the pandemic, how is he also in charge of keeping us safe? And why are we tolerating him lying to us?
“Something is is very far off that this thing just keeps running, no matter what evidence of dishonesty emerges.”
Rogan has interviewed Weinstein before, and their discussions are always interesting.
Yesterday Joe Biden launched a sneak attack on American freedom, and tomorrow is the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. Still working on the Afghan piece. Plus more Australian madness.
But: Biden is excluding postal workers from this mandate. If the unvaccinated are such an existential threat to the republic (spoiler: they’re not), then why exempt the one class of federal employee whose members are out among the general public touching their mail eight hours a day? The answer, of course, is that they have a powerful union.
At the start of the pandemic, Australia determined to squeeze out COVID with lockdowns and travel restrictions and, as an island nation, had considerable success. It was the last of the G-20 countries to hit 1,000 total COVID deaths.
But this created an unrealistic expectation that Australia could have “COVID zero” as a goal for the duration, and use targeted restrictions and surveillance (“circuit-breakers”) to maintain it.
As the pandemic has dragged on, this has become completely untenable and done violence to liberty and common sense in a great English-speaking nation.
Lockdowns have cut a swath through the norms and conventions of an advanced Western democracy, from the suspension of a state-level parliament to the banning of protests to military enforcement of the COVID rules.
With the Delta surge, more than half of Australians are locked down, often in response to a tiny number of cases.
ustralian authorities don’t fool around. State premiers have vast powers, and use them. In Melbourne, located in the state of Victoria, a curfew is in place, and limits apply to people leaving their homes. There are hefty fines for noncompliance.
The spirit of the lockdowns was perfectly captured a few months ago by the chief health officer of the state of New South Wales who warned, “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that.”
Ah yes, the public-health threat of over-chattiness.
The Australian news media might as well be an arm of the public-health bureaucracy, producing stilted and hysterical reports about lockdown violators worthy of some dystopian future.
The state of South Australia has developed an app to enforce home quarantines. As a news report explains, “the app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.” If they fail to do so, the health department will notify the police, who will send officers to check on the possible malefactor.
Unrestricted travel is a hallmark of a free society, but Australians can barely leave the country. Travel has been cut off between states, creating an arbitrary patchwork of states trying to isolate themselves from COVID cases elsewhere.
Tens of thousands of Australians have been trapped overseas, unable to come back home because of monthly limits on returning Australians.
All of this economic and social disruption and coercion hasn’t been enough to stamp out the Delta variant, which is outrunning the government controls.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison finally admitted the obvious the other day: “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country.”
And Australia’s lockdown has failed:
Cases in Australia are up 15,800% since the Washington Post said they had almost eliminated COVID by putting faith in science.
They’re up 5,863% just since late June when Sydney locked down and brought back masks.
But it’s not enough just to snatch away Australian’s freedom, they’re also seizing booze from locked-down Aussies. “In New South Wales — a southeastern state encompassing Sydney — alcohol deliveries to apartments under COVID-19 lockdown are being confiscated if booze volume exceeds limits mandated by the Ministry of Health.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Remember the women at the L.A. spa who claimed a dude exposed himself and it was dismissed as a “transphobic hoax”? Yeah, charges have now been filed against the man, who is a registered sex offender.”
UNC Journalism Dean Worried ‘Diversity of Thought’ Would Interfere with Social Justice ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones Appointment. Understand that our political, educational and journalistic elites value social justice above all other values and act accordingly.
Peter Boghossian: “My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.”
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
The White House is planning to withdraw David Chipman’s nomination to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this week amid bipartisan pushback over his gun control advocacy, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.
President Biden nominated Chipman, who worked at ATF for more than two decades before joining the gun control group led by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), in April.
Gun owners were absolutely opposed to the Chipman nomination from the git-go, not only for Chipman’s gun grabbing proclivities, but also for things like lying about the Branch Davidians shooting down helicopters, wanting to ban the AR-15, and general hostility to both gun owners in specific and conservatives in general.
Gun Owners of America, among many others, strongly opposed the nomination.
The ability to stop Chipman shows that gun owners and Second Amendment advocacy groups in America still have a lot of political power and influence in America, despite the NRA’s self-inflicted wounds.
I had no intention on doing another post about using ivermectin in treating Flu Manchu (and Rolling Stone‘s shabby Oklahoma hit piece), but too many links of interest on the subject have popped up to ignore.
Again, I’m not a doctor, and can’t pretend to knowledgeably evaluate the competing claims and evidence of using ivermectin to relieve coronavirus symptoms. But a whole lot of The Usual Suspects in the Democratic Media Complex who have been wrong about almost everything when it comes to Mao Tze Lung seem suspiciously anxious to attack the possibility it’s efficacious. Such claims should be evaluated not for whether they help or hinder Democratic Party policy goals, but for results shown in well-constructed clinical trials. (And not the “Hey, we gave Ivermectin to coronavirus patients without zinc, vitamin D or antibiotics and they didn’t get any better” variety.)
So: Some links.
First up, here’s Joe Rogan discussing his own coronavirus treatment including Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, Z-pack, Prednisone, a NAD drip and a vitamin drip:
The there’s this piece pointed out by commenter Alec Rawls, which cites much lower coronavirus morbidity among Africans who regularly took Ivermectin for parasite control than among those who didn’t:
In the graphic above, the blue area shows the countries of Africa that distribute ivermectin once or twice a year for the control of parasites. The brown area is the countries that don’t. The brown line is the daily deaths from Covid per one hundred thousand people in those countries. The blue line is the same for the blue area — which is enjoying a far, far lower Covid death rate. A lot of the poor and backward countries of South America, Africa and Asia have now approved ivermectin for Covid.
It’s worth taking a bit of time first to understand the basis behind the excitement for ivermectin as a possible agent against Covid-19, as well as the reservations expressed by the medical establishment. Ivermectin, much more than a “horse dewormer,” is a genuinely useful anti-parasitic medication, used widely in our own species primarily for tropical diseases like onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis. While never tested in human subjects for possible antiviral properties prior to the arrival of SARS-CoV-2, it had been studied in the laboratory setting for theoretical properties against multiple viral pathogens. The potential for anti-inflammatory properties – the sort that, like fellow old generic, dexamethasone, could prove useful against Covid-19’s infamous cytokine storm – was also known. Topically applied, it has been shown to be anti-inflammatory, and is prescribed for the autoimmune skin condition, rosacea; and systemically, there exists some in vivo evidence (albeit in mice).
What are the chances that an antiparasitic with mere hints of anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties would amount to the most effective medication on the face of the planet against SARS-CoV-2 on both counts? Slim, indeed. Much of the skepticism that I, and most of the medical establishment, felt towards ivermectin can be explained through that lens: the prior probability of these rather remarkable assertions being true was so low, that the bar for evidence was set rather high.
The evidence stacks up in rather complicated fashion. If your blister pack of ivermectin is half-full, you might find the arguments in favor of ivermectin’s efficacy convincing. Biological plausibility for its antiviral potential was established in April, 2020, by an Australian team led by Dr Leon Cary, Dr Kylie Wagstaff, and Dr David Jans, who showed that, in a laboratory in vitro setting, ivermectin rapidly cleared SARS-CoV-2 RNA from cells. Doubts were raised that real world human dosing of ivermectin could ever reach those experimental concentrations, but a single modeling study concluded that it would at least be a possibility in lung tissue. In any case, the race to study ivermectin in humans was on. Given the dismal circumstances in the spring of 2020, many regions, especially South America, began both to embrace and to study the use of ivermectin against Covid-19 on the premise of this hope.
The positive reports have been numerous. There are country-level, “ecologic” reports of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths improving after large scale distribution and/or deployment efforts, such as in Peru. The most visible supporter of ivermectin among physician groups, the controversial Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (“FLCCC Alliance”), led by respected intensive care specialist, Dr Paul Marik, and his protégé, Dr Pierre Kory, is keen to share anecdotal reports of physicians seeing remarkable success via prescribing ivermectin both as prophylaxis (prevention before becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2) and treatment of early/mild as well as severe disease. A multitude of favorable observational studies has been published, which generally involve studying how patients treated with ivermectin did in contrast to those left untreated; these are described in detail on the FLCCC Alliance position paper. Finally, dozens of our evidential gold standard, the randomized control trial, have been performed, and the vast majority have found benefit to using ivermectin. A recent ivermectin meta-analysis by outspoken ivermectin advocate, Dr Tess Lawrie, Dr Andrew Bryant, and their team, combining data from 24 such trials, found an overall 62% reduction in risk of death when used for treatment, but has been fairly questioned for including a fraudulent study. Another meta-analysis by Yuani Roman et. al., which had excluded the study in question, expressed concerns over trial quality and concluded that ivermectin was “not a viable option” for covid-19 treatment, but did find a similar mortality benefit of around 60%, albeit without statistical significance.
And if your blister-pack is half-empty? There are many valid reasons to view the data on ivermectin with healthy skepticism. Ecologic studies, anecdotal reports, and case series are useful in science, but primarily to signal the need for higher quality studies, not as validation for adopting a novel treatment. Regional epidemic curves shift and swerve constantly, for a variety of reasons which can confound any effort to attribute causation to one factor; some of the same people who credit improvements in Mexico or India to ivermectin campaigns are less sanguine if told that a lockdown or mask mandate was the cause of a Covid-19 outbreak leveling off. As a physician, I might be tempted to give a patient a steroid injection for an arthritic knee because my personal experience tells me that I am usually a hero afterwards; but broader study of this practice tells me I should not overvalue my own experiences.
Most importantly, there are real concerns about the quality of the many RCTs performed on ivermectin. Many trials were unregistered or unreported (opening the door for mid-stream protocol changes and publication bias); a large number were self-funded; and the only trial performed at what might be considered a major medical academic center, at Spain’s University of Navarra, was one of the only trials with negative results. While I might be termed an “-ist” of some sort for saying this, it’s easier for me to trust the scholarship of major institutions oozing with grant money and filled with talented researchers skimmed from the rest of the world than from places with a very limited history of performing and publishing clinical trials.
Adding to these concerns, the issue of fraud has reared its head on several important ivermectin studies. One of the first papers claiming a mortality benefit for ivermectin in hospitalized patients was taken from the tainted (or quite possibly imaginary) Surgisphere database, and was quickly retracted (but not before influencing policy in South America). So, too, was the hugely influential Elgazzar et. al. study from Egypt, which claimed a 90% reduction in mortality, but was rather convincingly exposed to be fraudulent this past July. Finally, the remarkable study from Argentina’s Dr Hector Carvallo, finding a head-scratching 100% effectiveness at preventing Covid-19 infection among health care workers (none of the 788 workers taking ivermectin and carageenan contracted the disease, while 57% of those using standard PPE did), fell at the end of August, with compelling arguments that it is nearly inconceivable that it even happened as advertised.
To be clear, I do not see any suggestion of a Big Pharma conspiracy or cover-up here. Surgisphere’s other biggest retraction was related to the study which unfairly bashed the safety of ivermectin fellow-traveler, hydroxycholoquine. Oxford researcher Andrew Hill, one of the most visible, respected scientists supporting the utility of ivermectin in Covid-19, retracted his team’s positive meta-analysis once the Elgazzar study was withdrawn. Even biologist-turned-podcaster, Dr. Bret Weinstein, high on the list of vocal ivermectin supporters, has concurred that Dr Carvallo will not share his data from Argentina, and that “we should rate the evidentiary value of this study as zero.”
Where does this leave us? Cautious, I would say, but still curious. Evidence of fraud is not evidence of ineffectiveness.
Plus a discussion of dosage debate and possible side effects, and a warning not to self-dose with animal formulations:
For the curious: a typical 7.3 gram tube of veterinary equine-grade 1.87% ivermectin is about 135mg of ivermectin, or ten times a normal dose; as someone who has had to calculate mg/kg doses at midnight on pediatric wards, this sort of math always makes me nervous. What really makes me nervous is the Proprietary Component A, B, and C that make up the other 98.13% of the tube – please, please do not ingest this stuff.
Dr. Hollander also urges vaccination.
Kevin D. Williamson notices a pattern that applies to recent ivermectin reporting:
In 2015, I taught a journalism seminar at Hillsdale College, the subject of which was Sabrina Erdely’s 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” which related the story of a horrifying, brutal sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a crime that — and this part still matters! — did not happen. The story was a fantasy, a concoction, and a libel — and Rolling Stone’s report was, in the words of Erik Wemple at the Washington Post, a “complete crock.”
A crock of what precisely, though?
Like most of the phony hate crimes and fabricated racial and sexual insults that have for years been an epidemic among young Americans, especially on college campuses, the Rolling Stone rape hoax was a neurotic casserole of familiar ingredients: social and romantic disappointment, weaponized envy, prejudice, mental-health problems, and a progressive-activist culture in which the effort to discredit and abominate cultural enemies — more often than not dishonest — takes the place of argument.
These things follow a pattern: When Lena Dunham made up a story about being raped while a student at Oberlin, her fictitious villain was not a member of the chess team or the president of the campus Sierra Club chapter but a swaggering College Republican; when North Carolina Central University student Crystal Mangum made up a story about being gang-raped, the malefactors were the Duke lacrosse team; the UVA hoax author, Jackie Coakley, falsely claimed that she was gang-raped by members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity as part of an initiation ritual. When feminist activist Judy Munro-Leighton made up a story about being raped, she chose as her assailant Brett Kavanaugh, who was at the time a Supreme Court nominee in confirmation hearings. Jussie Smollett alleged that he was assaulted in the wee hours by . . . weirdly bitey Trump-loving Empire fans who just happened to have a length of rope and a quantity of bleach on their persons as they roamed the freezing streets of Chicago on an early January morning.
In all of these cases, the story wasn’t about what the story was about.
None of those fabricated rapes was presented as a mere crime of sexual violence — a crime that happens every day in these United States, disproportionately affecting not college women (who are, in fact, less likely to suffer rape than are women the same age who are not in college) or well-heeled activists but poor women in isolated urban and rural communities, women with little education, women on Indian reservations, illegal immigrants, etc. The stories and the data associated with some of these places are shocking.
But here’s the thing: Nobody cares about those women.
Not really. Of course, they’ll say they do. In reality, the kind of women our newspaper editors and magazine publishers care about are college students, white tourists abroad, and celebrities. But the most important variable in these hoaxes is not any of the personal qualities of the fictitious victims but the cultural resonance of the fictitious attackers. If you want to see a Native American leading the nightly news, put him in front of some white high-school kids wearing MAGA hats.
Magazines such as Rolling Stone, the major newspapers, the academic establishment, and the professional-activist class are not staffed in the main by people who grew up on Indian reservations or in dysfunctional mountain villages, people who dropped out of high school, people who have been incarcerated, or other people from the margins. You may find one or two or those at any given media property, but you’ll find a lot more Oberlin and UVA graduates. Their interests, anxieties, and obsessions are those associated with their class. They don’t know — or care — what’s happening at Pine Ridge or in Owsley County. But they do know what sort of class-adjacent people they like and don’t like, they do know what sort of lifestyles and cultural affiliations they disapprove of, they do remember being snubbed or insulted (even if they only imagined it) by some frat goofus at UVA, and they do know what sort of people they resent.
They don’t know much, but they know what they hate.
And so these made-up rape stories are not stories about rape — they are indictments of fraternity culture, or jock culture, or Southern institutions, or Republicans, or anybody else who wanders into the cultural crosshairs of the hoax artists. The Oklahoma ivermectin story works in the same way, fitting into a prefab politico-cultural narrative that is not strictly speaking connected to the facts of the case at hand. Stephen Glass’s fictitious report from CPAC is another example of the same thing at work. No one questions tales of victimization involving people they assume to be, always and everywhere, victims. No one questions tales of depravity discrediting people they believe to be depraved. Joe Rogan can’t be a half-bright meathead who sometimes says things Professor Plum doesn’t like — he has to be a monster, responsible for the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. Of course the corpses of those rubes in Oklahoma are piling up like cordwood — Joe Rogan has to be stopped!
There’s just too much quotable material in that Williamson piece:
For progressives who see those who do not share their political priorities not as having different views but as enemies, publishing a made-up story about deranged gang-rapists at UVA pushes all the right buttons: white privilege, rich-jerk privilege, male privilege, Southern brutality, maybe even Christian hypocrisy if you can figure out a way to shoehorn it in there.
You can be sure that if someone had come forward with an unsubstantiated, loosey-goosey story about having been gang-raped by the staff of Rolling Stone, that claim would have received a good deal more scrutiny — not only at Rolling Stone, but at any mainstream-media outlet. Not because they are personally connected to Rolling Stone staffers, but because they live in the same world as Rolling Stone staffers. Southern fraternity members and college athletes are natural bogeymen to the media-staffer demographic, and so claims about them, however outrageous, are treated sympathetically. Oklahoma, on the other hand, inspires more fear among big-city progressives than the terrifying prospect of . . . being made to pay their own property taxes.
Snip.
This is a problem of political bias, but political bias is part of a larger cultural bias, a particular social orientation. Rolling Stone has always been left-leaning, but it also was for many years the home of great writing from conservatives, notably P. J. O’Rourke and Tom Wolfe. But we have closed ranks, socially, in recent years, for a variety of reasons, many of them just blisteringly stupid. This has coincided with certain social and economic changes that have undermined the quality of American journalism. It is not that we do not know how to get it right, or even that we do not have the resources to get it right — it is that our petty hatreds and cultural tribalism have led us to believe that it does not matter if we get it right, that lies and misrepresentations about cultural enemies are virtuous in that they serve a “greater truth.” And this is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon: Donald Trump’s lies, and the distortions and misrepresentations of right-wing talk radio and cable news, are excused and even celebrated on the same grounds.
The test of a political claim in our time is not whether it is true or false but whether it raises or lowers the status of our enemies.
The line spread the next day with a retweet by Rachel Maddow — the real patient zero of this mess — followed by tweet-pushes by MSNBC executive producer Lauren Peikoff, the Guardian, the Business Insider, the Daily Mail, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, Daily Kos, Occupy Democrats, Reid, moral mania all-star Kurt Eichenwald, the humorously dependable wrongness-barnacle Eoin Higgins, and of course my former employers at Rolling Stone. My old mag got most of the catcalls on social media, after adding a full written story that widened the scope beyond Oklahoma to note in a tsk-tsking tone that “even podcaster and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan bragged” of taking ivermectin.
The original report would have been sensational enough, if true. McElyea told stories of backed-up ambulances, patients “in worse conditions than if they’d caught COVID,” and “scariest” of all, “people coming in with vision loss.” Nonetheless, in the game of Twitter telephone that led from KFOR to the Stone, details were magically added. Reid somehow knew the hated overdosers not only swallowed “horse paste” but had done so “instead of taking the vaccine.” Occupy Democrats knew for whom the horse-pasters voted, noting that “so many Trumpers are overdosing” that emergency rooms are full.
Snip.
The problem lay in the reason the error spread, which happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. These include everything from wrong reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, to tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, to the pee tape, to Julie Swetnick’s rape accusation, to the Covington high school fiasco, to Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, to Bountygate, to the “mass hysterectomies” story, and dozens beyond: the media business has become a machine for generating error-ridden moral panics.
I note that all the stories here with the exception of the hysterectomies one (which I don’t remember receiving nearly the play of the others) all involve MSM outlets hyping fabrications to bash Trump.
News has become a corporatized version of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which the goal of every broadcast is an anxiety-ridden audience provoked to the point of fury by the un-policed infamy of whatever wreckers are said to be threatening civilization this week: the unvaccinated, insurrectionists, Assadists, Greens, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Russians, the promoters of “white supremacy culture,” etc. Mistakes are inevitable because this brand of media business isn’t about accuracy, but rallying audiences to addictive disgust. As a result, most press people now shrug off the odd error or six — look at Maddow leaving her tweet up — so long as they feel stories are directionally right, i.e. aimed at deserving targets.
Are there people out there damaging themselves with overdoses of veterinary ivermectin? It wouldn’t surprise me. There are a lot of stupid people in the world. We know that outpatient prescriptions for ivermectin increased earlier this year, but actual certified medical reports of ivermectin overdoses seem pretty thin on the ground.
The reluctance of the Democratic Media Complex to skeptically investigate claims that fit into their narrow worldview, especially in reference to populations they regard as political enemies, is a far greater threat to the body politic than any ivermectin abuse.
My blogs were down this morning (both BattleSwarm and https://www.lawrenceperson.com/), and some features (like tag auto-population) still don’t seem to be working. No explanation from BlueHost for the outage except “There are too many process, I killed all the process but it keeps re-generating,” which is a symptom of the issue, not the issue itself.
Anyway, the upshot is no real blog post this morning, so instead enjoy a compilation of random Golden Retriever videos.
They fixed the problem, twice. That’s the good news. The first time filmmaker, former BBC and Channel 4 journalist, and Rebel Wisdom co-founder David Fuller put together a video criticizing ivermectin advocates was on August 4th. Called “Ivermectin For and Against,” it was taken down by YouTube, on the grounds that it constituted medical misinformation.
Fuller appealed the decision for a variety of reasons – more on those later – and won. He continued investigating the subject, and taking on the claims of ivermectin advocates, hoping to conclude with a video called “Vaccines and DarkHorse: A Final Word.” This last piece included footage of well-known ivermectin advocates Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, whose DarkHorse podcast was previously featured on this site after YouTube banned some of their material.
Of course, Fuller was including the DarkHorse clip – not one of the banned ones, incidentally – to criticize it, not endorse it. But the Google/YouTube algorithm appeared confused, and Fuller’s work was not only taken down, he was also given a strike under YouTube’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” program. He appealed again, but this time lost, leaving only one option: the media.
ok – it's even worse than I thought – YouTube has rejected the appeal – AND applied a community guidelines strike to the channel. for running a piece evaluating and CRITICISING the anti-vaccine claims made on the Dark Horse. YT actively supporting vaccine misinformation… https://t.co/yJQL8ao0be
It’s an unfortunate fact, but the human beings at the Google/YouTube press team have repeatedly proven to be the last, best option for fixing errors in some of the more bizarre content moderation cases. In this instance, when I reached out to YouTube to ask if they’d made a mistake, and perhaps confused Fuller with the people he was criticizing, the company quickly fixed the glitch, unstruck the strike, and restored his video, with the statement:
Upon further review, we determined that videos posted by Rebel Wisdom and Peak Prosperity were incorrectly removed. The videos are not violative of our policies and as such they’ve been reinstated.
Problem solved, right?
Not exactly. Not only was Fuller’s case just one in a recent series of deletions and strikes doled out to makers of reports about Covid-19-related issues, but the episode showed how dicey even discussing any of these issues has become for independent media figures. Fuller has done plenty of work for mainstream outlets and could have done so with this topic, but intentionally went the alternative route to take on ivermectin.
“I deliberately chose to tell the story on Rebel Wisdom rather than pitching it to a legacy media outfit,” he says. “I didn’t want to give Bret’s fans the chance to paint it as an ‘MSM smear.’”
In other words, Fuller was making a conscious effort to use an independent editorial approach, as a means of side-stepping the credibility concerns that some audiences have with mainstream outlets.
The problem is, in its zeal to clamp down on “misinformation” about everything from vaccines to perhaps-potential alternative treatments like ivermectin, YouTube and other platforms have had to rely upon algorithmic tools that can’t distinguish between critique and advocacy.
“Algorithmic tools” may indeed be at work here, though they appear to be pretty stupid ones: Any mention of using ivermectin to treat Mao Tze Lung is verbotten. But in the past, we’ve seen a lot of YouTube/Twitter/etc. censorship that seems to have been instituted by some disgruntled social justice employee aimed at conservative critics that dared violate the narrative of the moment.
Fuller, however, is also a critic of the mainstream approach of dealing with such issues, which often involves simply deploying ad hominem insults at anyone with interest in ivermectin or concerns about vaccines. “The assumption that anyone who questions the vaccines is stupid is clearly wrong,” he wrote, in a recent Medium piece.
He adds now that “these topics, especially ivermectin, have become swallowed whole as culture war signifiers.” As a result, “we’re now in a world where the mainstream won’t ‘platform’ alternative claims for fear of ‘false equivalence’ and are trying to keep alive a broken system of gatekeeping.” Fuller believes this is counter-productive, and his idea is to meet issues head on, including as much relevant information as he can, even if he ultimately comes down strongly against ivermectin and in favor of vaccines.
Both former Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein and any discussion of Ivermectin seem seem to earn special targeting deep within the bowels of social media giants.
I have no idea whether Ivermectin is effective at treating the symptoms of coronavirus or not. Ditto hydroxychloroquine. (By contrast, there seems to be a lot of unambiguous evidence that a combination of vitamin D, Zinc and broad spectrum antibiotics are effective.) But there seem to be a lot of organizations heavily invested in punishing those who dare stray from The One True Holy Narrative of the coronavirus treatment regime, and who treat those investigating alternatives not as mistaken, but as heretics to be crushed.
Rolling Stone put up a piece that painted a devastating portrait of the horrors unapproved use of Ivermectin to fight Flu Manchu has wrought in Oklahoma:
The rise in people using ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for deworming horses or livestock, as a treatment or preventative for Covid-19 has emergency rooms “so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting” access to health facilities, an emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said.
This week, Dr. Jason McElyea told KFOR the overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce.
“The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated,” McElyea said.
“All of their ambulances are stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient in and they don’t have any, that’s it,” said McElyea. “If there’s no ambulance to take the call, there’s no ambulance to come to the call.”
Shocking!
But there appears to be one tiny little problem with Dr. McElyea’s horrific portrait of Ivermectin-ravaged Oklahoma ERs: It’s made up out of whole cloth. A correction at the top of the article now reads:
UPDATE: Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah issued a statement: Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our community’s support.”
So basically they added a note at the top that said “Whoops, everything below is complete bunk!”
You may remember Rolling Stone from other journalistic hits like “We printed shameless lies about a University of Virginia gang rape that never happened and had to pay $1.65 million to settle.” Why do they keep falling for fabulists telling outlandish stories? Easy: Because they want to. Because the tale told fit so neatly into the mainstream media narrative of the moment they’re trying to sell, be it an imaginary “college rape epidemic” to those ignorant redneck freaks of JesusLand poisoning themselves rather than blindly supporting whatever the Democratic Party/CDC/MSM conventional wisdom is for treating coronavirus this week.
Since Matt Taibbi left for Substack, it’s hard for me to think of any reasons for anyone to read Rolling Stone anymore.
Kulaks were “wealthy” only relative to the very poorest other farmers. For example, owning a single cow could get you labeled a Kulak and shipped off to a camp.
One reason the terror famine affected the south so strongly was that was where restive non-Russian ethnic minorities (Ukrainians. Tartars, Volga Germans, Kazakhs, etc.) lived, and the terror famine was used as a policy tool to crush the will to resist communism among those minorities.
Conquest’s estimates of the death toll for the Holodomor and related repression was 5 million in the Ukraine, and 14.5 million for the entire collectivization/dekulakization period (The Harvest of Sorrow, page 306).
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I’m going to coral all the Afghan Debacle news for separate post, probably next week. In the meantime: Texans are winning political battles, and Australians are losing their damn minds.
Texas finally passes the election integrity bill. Now on to the governor’s signature. Hopefully this will prevent the mass vote-harvesting and manufacturing shenanigans Democrats are so fond of…
Speaking of Democrats, they seem to be waking up to the fact that Biden and Harris suck and will drag them down:
We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however, you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.
This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging, incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence. Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3 percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.
Explanation of why the 25th Amendment won’t saved them snipped.
And why should it, given that getting rid of President Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If, today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less popular than the old one. This would be absurd.
Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries.
Like many, I’ve wondered who’s actually pulling the strings in the Biden White House. (It’s clearly not Sundown Joe.) I’ve seen various people suggest it’s actually Ron Klain, Valerie Jarrett or Jill Biden. Former Trump intelligence director Richard Grenell says it’s Susan Rice:
Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped last December by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.
“Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.
Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.
She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.
For all the (justifiable) heat the 87h Legislature has taken over its failure to deliver on conservative priorities, it seems to have written the Texas Heartbeat Act in a way that makes it difficult to challenge in court:
[Supreme Court Justices] denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed.
Enacted in May, the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as S.B. No. 8, prohibits a physician from performing an abortion (other than in a medical emergency) “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The fetal heartbeat is usually detectable at six weeks of gestation. The Act specifies an effective date of September 1.
In an ingenious effort to prevent abortion providers from blocking the Act from taking effect, the Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the Act in any way. It instead authorizes any private person to bring a civil action in state court against anyone who performs a post-heartbeat abortion or who knowingly aids or abets a post-heartbeat abortion. (Federal restrictions on standing — on who can sue — in federal court do not apply in state court.) It entitles successful plaintiffs to at least $10,000 in damages for each violation as well as to injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.
Because state officials are barred from enforcing the Act, the usual path that abortion providers would take to prevent the Act from becoming effective — suing those officials to prevent them from enforcing the Act — is a dead end. Instead, abortion providers would be able to challenge the constitutionality of the Act only if and when private individuals pursued civil actions against them. (And they’d have to confront the widely overlooked fact that the Act itself explicitly confers on abortion providers an “affirmative defense to liability” in the event they demonstrate that a lawsuit brought under the Act “impose[s] an undue burden.”)
In mid July, nearly two months after enactment of the Act, various abortion providers sued eight defendants in federal court: the Texas attorney general and four other state officials, a state district-court judge and a district-court clerk from Smith County (one of 254 counties in Texas), and a pro-life activist. But their lawsuit faced overwhelming jurisdictional hurdles. Among other things, none of the defendants was threatening to enforce the Act against them (so how was there even a live controversy?), and all seven of the governmental defendants had strong claims to sovereign immunity.
To make a long story short, when federal district judge Robert L. Pitman last week ruled against the governmental defendants’ sovereign-immunity claims, the governmental defendants exercised their right to immediately appeal the ruling against them to the Fifth Circuit. Pitman then realized that he had lost authority to proceed against the government defendants and had to cancel the preliminary-injunction hearing against them. (The Left viciously faults a Fifth Circuit panel of conservative judges for the cancellation that Obama appointee Pitman had ordered.) The abortion providers suddenly found that they had dug themselves into a deep ditch: The September 1 effective date was fast approaching, and they had indefinitely sidetracked their own effort to obtain a preliminary injunction.
On August 30, the abortion providers made a desperate request to the Supreme Court to block the Act from taking effect. Set aside that they had waited two-and-a-half months to file their preliminary-injunction motion with Pitman. Set aside that they were asking the Court to rule on a set of issues that neither Pitman nor the Fifth Circuit panel had yet addressed. What’s even more remarkable is that because Pitman had never ruled on their request to certify statewide defendant classes of judges and clerks, injunctive relief against the only eight defendants in the case wouldn’t remotely prevent the injury the abortion providers allege they faced.
The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Harris County $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract to One-Woman Firm Draws Scrutiny. Newly released documents show a $7 million bid was scored more highly, but Hidalgo’s office intervened to instead give nearly $11 million to a politically connected firm at a higher cost.”
Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”
Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.
It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It almost like the entire purpose of the welfare state is to channel money from the wallets of taxpayers to the pockets of leftwing cronies…
In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
The idea of owning a beauty clinic in an iconic downtown Melbourne retail centre once seemed like a promising business opportunity. So promising, in fact, that I opened a second store nearby, and expanded my total payroll to 20 employees.
Capital costs across the two stores came to $1.6 million; while monthly expenses included $11,000 in loan interest, equipment leases totalling around $30,000, and rent at almost $40,000 (all figures in Australian dollars). It’s a substantial commitment, but this was a vibrant locale. And our market research indicated that demand would be high enough to sustain the necessary investment. Fortunately, the customers showed up—enough to meet wages, pay the bills, and allow me to put money away for a rainy day.
That day arrived last year, in the form of COVID. And not just the disease itself, but also the draconian, one-dimensional response from government officials: throughout the state of Victoria, 600,000 small business owners like me—men and women who collectively employ millions of people and generate a substantial share of the region’s economic output—have been marginalized in the name of public health and safety.
Small-business entrepreneurs are, by nature, both aspirational and pragmatic. We pay our taxes like everyone else, and understand the role government must play in managing national emergencies—including pandemics. But we also expect leaders to avoid imposing unnecessary and unreasonable regulatory burdens and operating prohibitions.
One of the lessons learned over the last year and a half by small business owners is that Australia’s flawed, multi-layered government structure can easily enmesh an owner in overlapping forms of red tape. This has forced us to reflect on what type of society we are becoming, and whether, in Victoria at least, it is still worth setting up businesses here.
Plus police specifically targeting vocal lockdown critics for fines.
“Fauci strongly endorses COVID treatment that the media tried to criticize Ron DeSantis for supporting…Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to agree when it comes to the use of monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.”
Joe Rogan contracts Flu Manchu, takes everything the MSM says you shouldn’t take…and throws off the disease in three days:
“All kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-pack, Prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip.”
NAD evidently stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid, and the drip combines some other common vitamins in a intravenous cocktail that seems really frigging expensive ($750-1,000), which is fine if you make Joe Rogan money, but ordinary people may want to stick to a multivitamin (which you should be taking daily anyway).
Commie Antifa teacher boasting of indoctrinating his students is on the run:
the heroes at Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a proud antifa communist teacher bragging about how he has 180 days to indoctrinate his students and make them Marxists. How does he do it? He “scares the f*** out of them.”
Now the proud commie peacock is running scared. He refused to defend himself to another Project Veritas reporter. He claims he fears for his safety, and is worried about his brainwashing teaching gig, which means he KNOWS what he was doing is wrong.
Even his fellow Antifa clowns aren’t happy with him.
In the tweet below, fellow antifa stains bemoan [Gabriel] Gipe’s willingness to spill his commie guts to an undercover Project Veritas reporter. They also question his over-zealous approach to indoctrinating young high school kids and turning them into fellow Marxist comrades.
Some highlights from the undercover video:
Gipe gives extra credit points to students who attend far-left extremist rallies
He has an antifa flag and a Mao poster hanging on his classroom wall
Gipe believes taking up arms against the “state” is a good thing, though it always fails
He shamed a student who claimed the antifa flag made him uncomfortable
The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.
After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.
Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.
Shocking video from yesterday’s Portland riot shows antifa robbing female photographer @MaranieRae & hitting her to the ground. She goes to retrieve her equipment & is hit w/pepper spray. Video by @JLeeQuinn: pic.twitter.com/rCkaybcfUR
However, with building news about the number of withdrawn vendors, it’s possible that the costs of the other events would surpass what they would expect to make from a crowd that was already predicted to be less than half of normal. I was seeing 35,000 as a predicted attendance batted around the interwebz, and that assumed full exhibit hall, no restrictions, and a full weekend of activities. If word of mouth about reduced exhibitors managed to knock another 10,000 off of that prediction, I don’t know enough about their financial obligations & forecasting to know if that would drive it into the territory of losing money or not.
Snip.
The Board & Wayne LaPierre are desperate to look like NRA members stand by them, so visibly empty halls with far fewer attendees in already wide aisles would make for press photos they may believe they can’t afford.
Add to this that the ILA Leadership Forum, at least anytime I checked the pages, never had more than the big Texas politicians (Abbott, Cruz, Cornyn, and Crenshaw) along with Mark Robinson from North Carolina listed. It appeared that they couldn’t get commitments from big national names to attend which would have, again, signaled a loss of influence and interest that NRA can’t really afford to be a story.
LaPierre and his cronies seem desperate desperate to cling to power, no matter how far down they drag the NRA with them.
