Category: Deceit O’ The Day

BLUF
At this point, after multiple ignored corrections, it’s a stretch to pretend that the president’s misstatements are accidental; he obviously doesn’t care about their truth. What’s important to him and his supporters is achieving their policy goals, even if they have to lie to do so.

President Biden Lies About Guns. Again.
Amidst official hysteria over “misinformation,” the president continues to willfully misrepresent the facts on firearms.

Government lies aren’t new; political fibs have such deep roots in history that you could open a museum of official mendacity and have enough rotating exhibits to keep things fresh. But now, amidst much hysteria over “misinformation,” we see a resident of the White House misrepresent facts in pursuit of restrictions on legal ownership of firearms and ignore corrections. President Biden’s claim that bullets fired from AR-15’s are impossibly speedy is only the latest example of his continuing lies about guns.

“There’s no justification for a weapon of war. None. The speed of that bullet is five times that that comes out of the muzzle of most weapons. It can penetrate your vests,” President Biden huffed last week. “What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for?” he added.

This wasn’t the first time the president insisted on the supposed superpowers of so-called “assault weapons” and especially of AR-15s, which are popular among gun owners.

“Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun, five times—is lighter—and can pierce Kevlar?” he insisted on August 30 while touting his administration’s “Safer America Plan,” which includes tighter firearms restrictions.

Really? Well, no.

“President Biden’s statement that a bullet shot from an AR-15 travels 5x faster than a bullet shot out of ‘any other gun’ is false,” Greg Wallace, a Campbell University law professor who focuses on Second Amendment issues, told The Washington Post early in September. As for bullets fired from AR-15s piercing Kevlar, “that is true of almost all centerfire rifle bullets. Body armor protection against rifle bullets require steel, ceramic, or composite plates.”

“Biden was clearly wrong in his statement this week,” the Post‘s Glenn Kessler concluded.

In fact, the 5.56x45mm round most commonly fired by an AR-15 (which can be chambered in multiple calibers) is faster than many rifle rounds with a muzzle velocity of roughly 3,100 feet per second, but slower than others (a few exceed 4,000 fps). And speed only partially measures the lethality and utility of a cartridge. Military types, hunters, and enthusiasts are forever debating the issue. So is Biden.

“A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,” the president improbably claimed in May about the popular handgun cartridge, again while touting gun restrictions. Knowledgeable people had fun pointing out that Biden seemed to have confused the round with a cannon. But Biden lies about cannons, too.

“When the amendment was passed, it didn’t say anybody can own a gun and any kind of gun and any kind of weapon,” Biden insisted with regard to the Second Amendment in February. “You couldn’t buy a cannon in—when the—this—this amendment was passed.”

“As other fact-checkers noted when Biden made versions of this claim at least twice before, nothing in the Second Amendment said that citizens could not own cannons, and there is no evidence that any federal or state laws barred possession of the weapons at the time,” the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org pointed out.

Biden had been called out on precisely that point the previous year, by The Washington Post, and in 2020 when PolitiFact rated his claims as “false.” So, the fibs appear deliberate, not just slips of the tongue. So are his misstatements about legal protections for the firearms industry.

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BLUF
The fact that so many things once deemed “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be true harms the credibility of the scientific community, especially those working in or in league with the federal government. To turn that around, there needs to be honesty and transparency. You aren’t going to get that from the Biden administration, though.

Another COVID-19 Vaccine Claim Collapses, No Apologies to Be Found

Over the course of the last several years, there have been a series of claims about the COVID-19 vaccines that have collapsed in light of various studies.

Most infamously, the idea that the vaccines stop the transmission of the virus permeated all the way to the highest levels of government, including the President of the United States. Those false assertions then formed the basis of federal mandates, including a vicious campaign against the “unvaccinated” that never made any scientific sense.

Unfortunately, there’s another example to add to the list after it was revealed that prior claims about mRNA not being transferred through breast milk were false. That despite “fact-checks” back in 2021 asserting that wasn’t possible.

Here is the summary of the study, which gives the nod to the vaccines before noting that breastfeeding mothers were never tested by the CDC to see what was being transmitted.

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BLUF
It’s about those “weapons of war” the violence monopolists are trying to swindle the people into turning their backs on and surrendering. It’s about tricking Americans into thinking it’s all about hunting (which they then regulate through licensing, restrictions, and lead ammunition bans that are extended to the non-sporting gun owner population). And by appointing known prohibitionists and masking their affiliations, the Hunting and Wildlife Conservation Council is doing its part to help spread the deception.

Hunting Council Masks Hostility to Founding Intent with Gun Banner’s Appointment

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “The Hunting and Wildlife Conservation Council’s purpose is to provide recommendations to the Federal Government, through the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture, that (a) benefit wildlife resources; (b) encourage partnership among the public; sporting conservation organizations; Federal, State, Tribal, and territorial governments; and (c) benefit fair chase recreational hunting and safe recreational shooting sports,” the Council declares on its website.

A name included among primary council members raises a red flag, particularly in how it is presented:

“Ryan Busse (Unaffiliated) representing shooting sports interests”

“The appointment of Ryan Busse to the Hunting and Wildlife Conservation Council, a federal advisory committee, is a farce and demonstrates the contempt the Biden administration holds for lawful gun owners who hunt on America’s public and private lands,” Mark Oliva, the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Managing Director of Public Affairs tells AmmoLand News. Busse was listed as ‘unaffiliated,’ but that is not true. He is not an unaffiliated shooting sports interest expert.”

“He is an advisor for the Giffords gun control group and has openly advocated the ban on the most popular selling centerfire rifle in America – the Modern Sporting Rifle (MSR),” Oliva explained. “He has published a book advocating radical gun control policies.”

“Glaringly absent, however, is any representative from the firearm and ammunition industry even though the industry is responsible for the vast majority of conservation funds through the Pittman-Robertson excise tax,” Oliva continued. “To date, the firearm and ammunition industry has provided over $15.3 billion to wildlife conservation since 1937 and over $1.1 billion of the conservation funds apportioned to the states last year was directly tied to taxes paid by firearm and ammunition manufacturers.”

“The Biden administration has politicized this advisory council to legitimize Busse and the far-left gun control policies he and the gun control group he represents,” Oliva concluded. “This is a sham and doesn’t come close to representing the interests of lawful gun owners who hunt and are faithful stewards of the precious wildlife resources our nation enjoys.”

Readers here are well aware of Busse and the danger he represents to the right to keep and bear arms. Once a highly compensated industry insider, he now masks his (that is, his Giffords benefactors’) citizen disarmament goals with the obligatory big “but” qualifier:

I believe in the Second Amendment but…

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2A Reality isn’t “falsehood,” no matter how much you scream

The text of the Second Amendment is, all in all, surprisingly clear for a bit of law. The same can be said for most of the Bill of Rights, of course, but the Second is particularly important, and it’s the reality of that we need to talk about. After all, few disagree that people have the right to assemble, worship as they please, or petition the government. The idea that people should be protected from unreasonable search or seizure is also pretty well agreed upon.

But there is this weird perception of the Second Amendment that simply doesn’t conform to anything real.

You see, there are still those who think the individual right to keep and bear arms is a modern invention and call any claim to the contrary a fabrication.

Like this dipstick from The Hill:

The gun lobby’s triumphs have been due in large part to two coordinated and well-funded disinformation campaigns. The first was designed to revise legal scholarship around the Second Amendment and the second flooded Americans with false information about the benefits of firearms. These campaigns use what is called a “firehose of falsehood” strategy, a type of disinformation campaign that is challenging to counteract and has four foundational features:

  1. It is high-volume and multichannel
  2. It is rapid, continuous and repetitive
  3. It lacks a commitment to objective reality
  4. It lacks a commitment to consistency

The first firehose deployed by the gun lobby was intended to change the interpretation of the Second Amendment itself. The book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” found that before 1960, every law review article on the Second Amendment rejected the “individual rights” interpretation touted by the gun lobby, which was trying to claim that the Second Amendment should be applied to an individual, not just to a group (such as a militia).

And?

What? I’m supposed to be moved that law review articles–which are authoritative in many ways, but are not how we are governed, nor should they be–found something that makes absolutely no sense?

See, the author is trying to use law review articles and a review of them to deflect from some very simple facts that don’t require legal expertise.

First, there’s the fact that the Second Amendment plainly says, “the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Nowhere else in the Constitution is “the people” taken to mean the right is collective, rather than individual. There’s no understanding that the Fourth Amendment only applies to society as a whole rather than you as an individual.

So why would that suddenly change in the Second Amendment and not before or afterward in the Bill of Rights?

Second, what law reviews say is less than meaningless in this discussion because what ultimately matters is what the Founding Fathers intended, not what some lawyers decades or centuries later thought.

From the Founding Fathers’ own quotes, it was clear they intended gun rights to be individual rights. The Buckeye Firearms Association has a nice collection of those quotes. Here are a few highlights:

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776

“To disarm the people…[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them.”
– George Mason, referencing advice given to the British Parliament by Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adooption of the Federal Constitution, June 14, 1788…

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.”
– Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787…

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country.”
– James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789…

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
– Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

So it seems pretty clear that regardless of what some people wrote in various law reviews, the Founding Fathers saw the Second Amendment as an individual right.

And really, why wouldn’t it be?

In what reality would the government need to preserve the right for the government to have guns? On the very surface, that makes no sense and no amount of law school is going to change that.

Oh, but our author at The Hill was far from finished in distorting reality.

The second firehose of falsehood strategy was designed to convince the public that firearms make people safer. The U.S. has a long history of gun ownership for hunting, but in the 1970s and 80s, the gun lobby’s focus shifted substantially to promoting guns for self-defense. When research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demonstrated that a firearm in the home substantially increased the risk of death, the gun lobby successfully petitioned their allies in Congress to threaten the CDC with massive funding cuts if such research continued. This greatly hampered the production of new research, as well as the dissemination of such research to the public.

Except that the research was fundamentally flawed and would never have been tolerated on literally any other subject.

We’ve already seen a lot about how gun research is heavily biased toward the anti-gun side and how pro-gun results are routinely stifled.

And that’s a gross misrepresentation of what happened. The CDC was always permitted to carry out whatever research it wanted. The threatened cuts to funding were from anti-gun advocacy. The fact that the CDC interpreted their research as advocacy is telling, of course, but only in so far as it revealed their own biases.

The truth of the matter is that the “falsehoods” the author seeks to debunk are nothing of the sort. He simply cannot fathom that reality refuses to conform to his own beliefs. Well, that’s just how life is sometimes and he’ll learn to deal with disappointment.

Or he won’t and can be miserable for his entire life. I honestly don’t care.

But he should be aware that the only one peddling falsehoods here is him.

BLUF
Documentarians have an obligation to present the facts of history, even if those facts reflect badly on their favorite president.

PBS Holocaust documentary perpetuates well-worn myths to glorify FDR, says historian
Streaming this week, historian Rafael Medoff says ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ misrepresents President Roosevelt’s actions leading up to and during the genocide

Early in his new film “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” documentarian Ken Burns claims the United States admitted more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany than any other country on Earth.

The problem with this statement, according to historian Rafael Medoff, is that it flies in the face of publicly available data on refugees from that period.

Clocking in at six hours, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” begins airing on PBS this week. In recent press interviews, Burns said he attempted to handle Roosevelt “more critically” for “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” compared to the previous, somewhat glowing treatments of FDR in his other documentaries on the period.

Calling Burns “seriously mistaken” about the issue of Jewish refugees, Medoff told The Times of Israel that the discrepancy is connected to several other “well-worn myths” that appear in “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” These myths, said Medoff, run the gamut from why the US could not rescue Anne Frank to Roosevelt’s role in the “St. Louis” affair, alongside the perennial debate on bombing the tracks to Auschwitz.

Medoff is an American professor of Jewish history and the founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, DC. He is the author of “America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History,” among other works on the Holocaust and Zionist history.

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The Pandemic Is NOT Over, Says the White House
If Biden doesn’t represent the Biden administration, who does?

By now, the pattern is familiar: President Biden says something stupid and/or insane and/or contradictory to his administration’s stated policies, and his beleaguered staffers need to run around denying that he meant what he very clearly said. This might be the first time they’ve had to do so twice in one day, though.

First they had to walk back Grandpa Joe’s comments on Taiwan. And now, inevitably:

Twitter avatar for @betsy_kleinBetsy Klein @betsy_klein

President Biden told CBS the “pandemic is over,” but those comments do not constitute a change in the administration’s Covid-19 response policy, an official tells CNN White House says Covid-19 policy unchanged despite Biden’s comments that the ‘pandemic is over’ | CNN PoliticsThe Biden administration is largely downplaying President Joe Biden’s comments declaring the coronavirus pandemic “over,” suggesting his remarks signal a continuation of the White House’s evolving stance toward the pandemic over the past few months.cnn.com

September 19th 2022

Did you get that? The president of the United States doesn’t speak for the White House. Biden is not in charge of the Biden administration.

So… who is?

Who’s running the show? It sure isn’t Kamala. And Jill — excuse me, Doctor Jill — is just barely more lucid than her husband. Who’s the boss of that house? Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Ex-PFC Wintergreen? What the hell is going on?

FAKE WOKENESS: Two New Junk Science ‘Studies’ Suggest Racism, Fears of Blacks Drive Opposition To Gun Control.

Remember the RAND study that found only 123 of 27,900 gun control studies actually used the scientific method to come to their conclusions? Well, gun control advocates have trotted out two fresh, steaming new “studies” and the flies are already swarming. The University of Wisconsin has promoted a new finding that whites own guns and oppose gun control because of racism and a fear of blacks.

And within days of squeezing out that specimen of woke clownishness, the American Psychological Association published their own “study” that — you guessed it — whites who support gun rights are racist.

Interestingly the same study showed that when whites support gun control they’re racist too! So you’re racist. I’m racist. We’re all racists! To the uber-woke racists at the APA, if you’re white, you must be a racist.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, gun owners and gun rights supporters — whatever their color — are some of the most open-minded, tolerant and welcoming people in our communities. Contrary to what the racial hucksters, the Grievance Industry and critical race theory practitioners are selling, most Americans aren’t racist. And frankly, most Americans oppose racist gun control laws, too.

Most normal people rightfully reject claims of inherent racism in whites (or anyone else), or any of the other woke, social justice nonsense peddled by the gun-hating left in America.

In fact, plenty of black gun owners would dismiss this Wisconsin Badger junk science (or the APA’s trash “science”) as nothing but poppycock.

The folks over at The Federalist have the deets on these new “studies” . . .

White people own guns — and oppose gun-control legislation — because they are racist and fear black people. Two new studies advance this dangerous narrative building among our academic elites. While such rhetoric is perhaps unsurprising among political pundits or celebrities, otherwise serious academics are now ascribing racist motives to gun ownership and opposition to gun control. These studies are not only based on a slew of bigoted assumptions, but also bad science.

The University of Wisconsin recently promoted a new study contending that in U.S. counties where black people were enslaved in 1860, gun ownership is higher today. In fact, gun ownership, they say, is correlated to the number of slaves formerly in each county. To support this more-slaves-means-more-guns theory, the authors construct a historical narrative that whites feared newly freed slaves, bought guns for self-defense, and then this fear somehow trickled down over 160 years.

But interestingly enough, just last month, National Public Radio ran a story on how black people are the fastest growing group of gun owners. If gun ownership is a product of white people being racist, then this is quite curious.

The University of Wisconsin study suffers from a series of flaws, even apart from its poisonous premise that white people believe or feel certain things because they are white. You’d never say the same about other races, and we shouldn’t give a pass to academics who traffic in the same type of racism…  

A few days after the release of the slavery-predicts-gun-ownership study, the American Psychological Association (APA) released another study contending that whites support gun rights because they are racist, and when whites oppose gun rights, that’s also racist.

Rest assured, gun control advocates will try to use these junk studies — like thousands that came before them — to paint patriotic, gun-loving Americans of all colors and persuasions as racists no matter their race, sex or religion.

And why not? Using pseudo-scientific hokum to support claims that gun control laws prevent criminal misuse of guns is actually less scientifically accurate than claiming drinking milk causes car accidents. But they have no fear of anyone in the media debunking the junk science on which they base their calls for civilian disarmament.

Plus most politicians and low-information types will probably believe it…so they keep pushing the politicized garbage to further their disarmament narrative. And so it goes.

Well, SloJoe has always been known as a liar, so…

Fact Check: Biden Claims Mass Shootings ‘Tripled’ After ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Ended

CLAIM: During his speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden said mass shootings “tripled” after the 1994-2004 “assault weapons” ban expired.

VERDICT: Mostly False.

Biden said, “Back in 1994, I took on the NRA and passed the ‘assault weapons’ ban. For ten years, mass shootings were down.”

He added, “But in 2004, Republicans let that ban expire, and what happened? Mass shootings tripled.”

There are two things to unpack here: First, his claim that the ban itself was successful while in effect and, second, his claim that mass shootings “tripled” once the ban expired.

On February 19, 2018, Breitbart News looked at a report by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ), which found that the “assault weapons” ban could not be credited with any reduction in crime.

The NIJ report was written in 2004 as the ban was about to expire.

The Washington Times quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, author of the NIJ report, saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

The NIJ report observed, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

So much for the claims of all the great things the ban accomplished. Now consider the claim that mass shootings tripled after the ban expired.

Breitbart News noted that the Washington Post fact-checked the claim about mass shootings tripling when Biden first made it in early June 2022.

The Post reported:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

The Post added, “The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.”

The claim that mass shootings “tripled” after the “assault weapons” ban expired is mostly false. There was a modest increase in such shootings, but the expiration of the ban does not seem to be causal in that rise.

What the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Tell Us About Guns

It’s hard to fool an honest man or woman who wants to know the truth. Unfortunately, many of us depend on the media to bring us much of our news, and lying to us — or withholding key parts of the story — today makes it easier to fool us tomorrow.

Most of us feel horrible when we see news stories about violent crime. Beyond the emotional shock of the story, though, we are seldom told what the story means. Is that newsworthy event a common problem or is it rare? Are there good solutions that make us safer most of the time?

Besides the violence shown in movies and TV dramas, it’s almost as if the news deliberately keeps us in the dark about real violence and its causes. We can’t make good choices unless we have perspective. For a minute, let’s shed some light on the reality of armed citizens and guns

We’re told that guns cause crime. That’s odd because a lot of criminals didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Only one out of twelve violent crimes are committed with a firearm. If someone says they need to disarm honest people in order to stop violent crime, they are going to leave about 92 percent of those violent crimes untouched. No wonder gun control laws don’t make us any safer.

If guns cause crime, then honest gun owners haven’t gotten the message either. Ordinary citizens like us own a lot of guns. About 40 percent of Americans live with a gun in our homes and we own hundreds of millions of firearms that are never used in crimes.

These are the guns you never seem to hear about. The news media don’t want to admit that firearms are ordinary tools that a huge portion of Americans lawfully own and use on a daily basis.

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Observation O’ The Day

There is a new trend, and it is battlespace prep. In both the US and Canada there is now a coordinated effort by the political/MSM class to portray every kind of dissent from secular progressive authoritarianism as nothing less than violent insurrection and terrorism. In the Canadian media, people who object to vaccine mandates have been promoted from Nazis to a vast network of violent insurrectionists. In the US, we are told that people angry about the Mar-A-Lago raid are about to commence terrorist actions against civilians, even using dirty bombs.

How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary
Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

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I’ll take ‘Almost Everything’ for $500, Alex

What the News Media Gets Wrong About Guns & Armed Defense

We know that the news media distorts our view of the world. We see it every day in the way the mainstream media selects and edits their stories. I’m sure you see unusual things in the news that I miss. That is because each of us sees this media distortion most clearly in the individual subjects we know best. For the last decade, I’ve studied what our neighbors do with guns. I see where the news media dangerously twists the truth about armed defense. As ordinary citizens, we need to know more about the world than to be simply fed a copy of the police report after a crime. In fact, ordinary citizens keep their families safe every day but the media sells us a different story. Here is what the mainstream media won’t say.

Evil exists. We face real dangers. The world is simply not the way we want it to be. On average, someone in our family will be the victim of a violent crime during our lifetime. Merciless criminals use force to take what they want and the police are not there to stop them. It is not safe to be defenseless, not even at home. To begin, we face about 30 thousand home-invasion robberies a year, and two thirds of sexual assaults begin with a home invasion. Being unable or unwilling to defend the people we love is not a virtue. Those truths sound obvious to me, but they are absent from our contemporary news.

The media wildly over-reported stories where we were victims of violent crime. At the same time, the media horribly under-reported the many stories where we successfully defended ourselves. It is almost as if the news media didn’t want us to know that we faced dangers and saved lives.

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Democrats’ Lame Attempt to Flip the Narrative on Crime: Claiming 2nd Amendment is Anti-Police

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, with rising violent crime a top concern for voters, the vast majority of Democrats are now working overtime to distance themselves from their prior support for the “Defund the Police” movement. Increasingly, however, it appears that they’re linking this professed newfound support for law enforcement to another pillar of Democrats’ far-left agenda – gun control.

After backlash to the “defund” movement contributed to dozens of House Democrats losing or facing closer-than-expected races in 2020, the party slowly began changing its tune on policing. While some, like Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, have continued their calls for “dismantling” police departments, the White House and Democratic leadership are now saying that they in fact support police and have always supported police – even accusing Republicans, who spent all of 2020 and 2021 vigorously defending police from attacks by left-wing politicians and news outlets, of not supporting them.

As Axios reported late last month, Democratic candidates in Ohio, Georgia, Florida, and other states are “spotlighting law enforcement to boost their credibility on fighting crime.” Party strategists are now privately admitting that “the defund debate damaged Democrats’ reputation on crime,” and many “fear a voter perception that Democrats don’t recognize the problem with violent crime and don’t respect the role police play in keeping communities safe.”

But as part of their effort to mask their complete reversal of position when it comes to support for police, many Democrats—including Biden himself—have attempted to make the issue of rising crime about guns rather than policing, implying that support for the Second Amendment is incompatible with support for law enforcement.

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When CNN Quotes Everytown Troublesome Facts Kick In

Over the weekend, CNN reported on gun control laws passed so far in 2022, adding this reference, “There is a direct correlation in states with weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun deaths, including homicides, suicides and accidental killings, according to a January study published by Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit focused on gun violence prevention.”

However, an article in the Keene Sentinel, a newspaper serving southwest New Hampshire, reveals a small problem with Everytown’s research that might raise an eyebrow, if not some serious questions. Headlined “New Hampshire paradox: State gun laws remain loose as violence rate remains low,” the story’s lead paragraph tells a different tale.

“National rankings indicate New Hampshire has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, and yet the state also maintains a low rate of firearm violence,” the newspaper says.

The report also quotes State Senate President Chuck Morse (R-Salem), who told the newspaper’s editorial board recently that gun-related violence is a problem of people, not guns.

“I don’t believe it’s a gun problem because look at New Hampshire.,” Morse reportedly stated. “We have more guns than probably any other state per capita. We have open carry, we passed constitutional carry, and we’re one of the safest states in the nation.”

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Google hands over home security camera footage to police without a warrant

Google and Amazon are letting the police access data from smart home cameras without a warrant, if they are told this footage is needed because of an “emergency.”

Meanwhile others who sell similar devices and services, like Arlo, Apple, Wyze, Eufy, claim their policy is the opposite, CNET writes.

It was first reported that Amazon was cooperating with law enforcement in this way, and it has now emerged that Google is treating its customers’ privacy the same way.

In the US, Amazon and Google say that “in most cases” the police have to provide some kind of legal justification to access video from their devices installed in people’s homes, be it a warrant or subpoena. Any other policy, such as making exceptions like the “emergencies” one, is not something a company can be forced to do, reports say, suggesting that Amazon and Google have chosen to adopt such an approach to users’ privacy.

Nevertheless, the two tech giants are proceeding with this policy; Amazon has revealed that it turned over data 11 times when the police submitted “emergency requests,” while Google does not provide any details in its transparency report.

The company has an information request policy that addresses this scenario, to say that if it “reasonably believes” giving footage to the authorities who have no warrant to obtain it will prevent death or serious physical harm, it “may” do so.

Some examples given of when “reasonable belief” comes into play while making these decisions are bomb threats, school shootings, kidnappings, suicides, etc.

“We still consider these requests in light of applicable laws and our policies,” Google promises.

And when Google decides to give law enforcement their data because the company believes there is an emergency, users may never learn that this happened. According to a Nest spokesman quoted by CNET, they do “try” to notify users, though.

Amazon, on the other hand, didn’t even bother to disclose, when asked by both CNET and The Verge, whether or not, and in what circumstances, it lets users know that footage from smart cameras has been shared.

This is just the latest controversy plaguing the “smart home surveillance” market, with others mostly related to security issues.

Dr. Deborah Birx: I knew shots would not prevent COVID infection

Defenders of federal officials, including President Biden, who declared one year ago that people who received the COVID-19 vaccines would not contract the disease argue “the science” changes over time.

But the White House coronavirus response coordinator at the time the vaccines were developed and rolled out said in an interview Friday she wasn’t surprised that people who were quadruple vaccinated, including Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci, contracted the disease.

“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines,” Birx told the Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto.

Birx, who is promoting a new book in which she confesses she manipulated data and quietly altered CDC guidance without authorization, was responding to the question of what she would say to unvaccinated people who in light of the ineffectiveness of the vaccines in preventing COVID might ask why they should bother getting the shots.

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