Bombshell allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and using an “overzealous” January 6 investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights.
Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations.
He was declared absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses.
This American hero, the father of two small children, has blown up his “dream career” because he could not live with his conscience if he continued to be part of what he sees as the unjust persecution of conservative Americans.
“I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,” he told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject in the Jacksonville, Fla., area. “I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.”
Friend, who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said he told his immediate boss twice that he believed the raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy and the subject’s right under the Sixth Amendment to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.
Friend served as a SWAT team member.
Multiple violations
In his whistleblower complaint to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, obtained by The Post, Friend lays out multiple violations of FBI policy involving J6 investigations in which he was involved.
He says he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J6 cases sent from DC. He was told “domestic terrorism was a higher priority” than child pornography. As a result, he believes his child exploitation investigations were harmed.
He also has reported his concerns about a politicized FBI to Republican members of Congress, among 20 whistleblowers from the bureau who have come forward with similar complaints.
Among Friend’s allegations:
The Washington, DC, field office is “manipulating” FBI case management protocol and farming out J6 cases to field offices across the country to create the false impression that right-wing domestic violence is a widespread national problem that goes far beyond the “black swan” event of Jan. 6, 2021.
As a result, he was listed as lead agent in cases he had not investigated and which his supervisor had not signed off on, in violation of FBI policy.
FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages. These tips are turned into investigative tools called “guardians,” after the FBI software that collates them.
The FBI has post-facto designated a grassy area outside the Capitol as a restricted zone, when it was not restricted on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to widen the net of prosecutions.
The FBI intends to prosecute everyone even peripherally associated with J6 and another wave of J6 subjects are about to be referred to the FBI’s Daytona Beach resident agency “for investigation and arrest.”
The Jacksonville area was “inundated” with “guardian” notifications and FBI agents were dispatched to conduct surveillance and knock on people’s doors, including people who had not been in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021, or who had been to the Trump rally that day but did not go inside the Capitol.
Friend says he was punished after complaining to his bosses about being dragged into J6 investigations that were “violating citizens’ Sixth Amendment rights due to overzealous charging by the DOJ and biased jury pools in Washington, DC.”
His top-secret security clearance was suspended last week because he “entered FBI space [his office] and downloaded documents from FBI computer systems [an employee handbook and guidelines for employee disciplinary procedures] to an unauthorized removable flash drive.”
FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Friend alleges.
In a Sept. 16 letter from the head of FBI human resources, he was told he was losing his security clearance also because he “espoused beliefs which demonstrate questionable judgment [and demonstrated] an unwillingness to comply with rules and regulations.”
Reprisals from bosses
In his whistleblower complaint, Friend describes “reprisals” from his supervisors after he voiced his conscientious objections.
He says they ignored his complaint about “manipulative casefile practice [which] creates false and misleading crime statistics, constituting false official federal statements.
“Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from an isolated incident at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.
“At no point was I advised or counseled on where to take my disclosure beyond the reprising officials above; the threatened reprisal constituted a de facto gag on my whistleblowing.”
On Aug. 19, he first told his immediate boss, Supervisory Senior Resident Agent Greg Federico, that he believed “it was inappropriate to use an FBI SWAT team to arrest a subject for misdemeanor offenses and opined that the subject would likely face extended detainment and biased jury pools in Washington, DC.
“I suggested alternatives such as the issuance of a court summons or utilizing surveillance groups to determine an optimal, safe time for a local sheriff deputy to contact the subjects and advise them about the existence of the arrest warrant.”
Federico told him it would have been better to just “call in sick” rather than voice his objection and “threatened reprisal indirectly by asking how long I saw myself continuing to work for the FBI.”
Friend refused to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects.
Four days later, Friend was summoned to Jacksonville to meet his next-level bosses, Assistant Special Agents in Charge Coult Markovsky and Sean Ryan, about his refusal to join the SWAT raid.
He told them about his concerns over “irregular” case handling of J6 matters that he believed were in violation of a legal rule known as “Brady” that requires prosecutors to disclose evidence that would exonerate a defendant.
They asked if he believed any J6 rioters committed crimes and he replied: “Some of the people who entered the Capitol committed crimes, but others were innocent. I elaborated that I believed some innocent individuals had been unjustly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced.”
Markovsky then asked Friend if J6 rioters who “killed police officers” should be prosecuted, even though no such thing happened. When Friend pointed out that “there were no police officers killed on January 6, 2021,” Markovsky told him he was being a “bad teammate.”
Both agents “threatened reprisal again by warning that my refusal [to go on the SWAT raid] could amount to insubordination. References were made to my future career prospects with the FBI.”
Friend was labeled AWOL the day the raid took place and stripped of his pay.
A week later, he was told to meet the top agent in Jacksonville, Special Agent in Charge Sherri Onks, who told him he needed to do some “soul searching” and decide if he wanted to work for the FBI.
When he told her “many of my colleagues expressed similar concerns to me but had not vocalized their objections to FBI executive management,” she told him his “views represented an extremely small minority of the FBI workforce.”
She then shared the emotional experience of fearing for her own life on Jan. 6, 2021, when she was sitting on the seventh floor of the secure J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, after protesters one mile away “seized the Capitol and threatened the United States’ democracy.”
Agents used as ‘pawns’
Friend says his concerns are shared by large numbers of rank-and-file FBI agents across the country who believe they are being used as pawns to pursue the political agenda of the bosses in Washington, DC.
These kinds of abuses of the law are a “morale killer” for field agents, he says.
Many agents, who joined the FBI in the wake of 9/11, are keeping their heads down because they are close to their 20-year retirement with full pension. But he says they are equally disgusted at being forced to take part in the politicization of federal law enforcement.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is working with these heroic FBI agents, has been trying to introduce legislation to strengthen the bureau’s woefully inadequate whistleblower protections. Friend’s complaint will be a test case.
FBI Director Christopher Wray ignored Grassley’s letter alleging malfeasance at the bureau.
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Aug. 11, Grassley alleged that a committee of FBI field agents had been to see Wray to express the concerns of agents in all 56 field offices across the country that “the FBI has become too politicized in its decision-making.” Grassley further alleges “those concerns were removed from this year’s final report” of the FBI’s Special Agents Advisory Committee.
Wray ignored Grassley’s letter along with a dozen other letters from the dogged Iowa senator alleging gross malfeasance at the bureau.
But unrest is growing among field agents about the weaponization of the FBI against the Biden administration’s political opponents under Wray. He can’t ignore it for long.
The FBI should be shut down completely and all employees at all levels fired. Then a special panel of American citizens should be convened to interview every single one of them to determine if they deserve to be rehired. No, there should not be a single politician or bureaucrat on the panel. Yes, I mean it. – The Liberator
[A Liberal’s Confession…and a “must read”. – The Liberator]
Naomi Wolf, Brownstone Institute
When, in Fall of 2019, I moved out of what had been my home in the West Village, I thought I was simply moving from one place to another. I was excited to build a home again, this time in the South Bronx.
Brian and I ultimately lived in the South Bronx for only four months — until March 11 2020, when we looked at one another and realized we had to get into his SUV and keep driving North. As I described in my book The Bodies of Others, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Broadway was closing — just like that, a CCP-style state fiat, not an American-style individuals-dealing-with-an-emergency announcement — we both realized that bad things were coming, though whether natural or political we could not yet tell.
So twenty years of my possessions had stayed for the past two and a half years in a storage unit.
I was opening boxes now that were not just from another place — as is usual when you move; not just from another time; but I was opening boxes that were from literally another world. I don’t know that such a thing has happened in quite this way in history before.
Some items memorialized normal losses and change. Others, though, revealed that long-revered institutions had lost all morality and authority.
Here was a grey sweater that had belonged to my father, who had been a writer. It still had the line of loose threads along the clavicle, the little gaps opening up in the sewn-together pieces, that were characteristic of his distinguished-but-absent-minded-professor look. Dr Leonard Wolf could wear a moth-eaten sweater such as that one, on a street in New York City, and still look like a Byronic poet preoccupied with his latest sonnet. He looked stylish even when he was bedridden — even when advancing Parkinson’s meant he could no longer communicate with words, his treasure. He was charismatic even when gestures failed him; when my husband, an Irish raconteur, sat by his bedside, telling stories to make him laugh. He managed to have elan even when Brian had to ask him to make a sound to let him know if he wanted the stories to continue, and my dad could only groan: yes, more stories.
The stories have ended now for my father; at least the earthly ones. But the sweater still carries that wintry, breezy scent that was his while he was on this earth, telling us stories, more stories.
I folded my father’s sweater for the mending pile.
A small brown dog toy surfaced, chewed so thoroughly in one section that the white lining of the toy remained. The little dog who had enjoyed the toy, of course, the much-mourned Mushroom, is no more. His dog tag is nailed to a tree that leans over the river in the woods, near where we now live.
I put the chewed-up toy on the discards pile.
There was the little white wooden armoire I had hand-painted — amateurishly but with love — for a child’s room. The armoire was not needed any more. Everyone had grown up.
There were boxes and boxes of what had once been exciting, culturally meaningful CDs and DVDs. I sighed — what to do with these now? The technology itself was obsolete.
Then there were the pillows. Floral pillows. Tufted pillows. Even I knew these were tasteless, and I’d known that even at the time I had bought them. When my loved ones were old enough to notice aesthetics, they would chorus, when I brought home a new find: “Mom! Please! No more florals!”
I saw that I had been obsessed then with accumulating not only florals, but warm colors — cranberry and scarlet, terra-cotta and apricot and peach.
With the eyes of the present, and now in a happy marriage, I realized what had been pushing me to acquire all of these redundant soft florals. I had longed for domesticity and warmth, but had been, as a single mother then, dating the wrong kind of man to get domesticity and warmth. So I had unconsciously kept choosing softness and coziness in decor, because I had missed it in my relationship.
The man, a gifted, mercurial charmer, had also, in the past few years, passed away; young; of a wasting cancer.
I sighed again, and put the floral pillows in the “donations” pile.
Other items in the opened boxes, however, did not speak of organic loss and change but rather of worlds of authority that had seemed sparkling and real in 2019, but that have revealed themselves since then to be seething with rot.
Here, for instance, was the brown, pleated, Grecian-style dress, with the bared arms and gathered waist, that I had worn to a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 2000s.
Brown is a color I almost never wear, and I had never worn that Grecian style of formal dress briefly fashionable in the Friends era; so I remembered, as I shook it out into the sunlight of two decades later, that I had felt quite daring that night.
The wedding had been in an event hall nestled in the dunes. Local seafood hors d’oeuvres had been passed on silver trays. The bride had been smoldering and lovely in a white lace Vera Wang (always Vera Wang) dress. All was as it should have been.
The wedding had brought together White House politicos, Washington Post op-ed writers and reporters, brash young New York City political speechwriters and campaign managers, and trendy nonfiction writers who were already making names for themselves chronicling the scene. We were all in our mid- to late 30s — we were fomenting change, approving of ourselves, making a difference; we were kind of like The West Wing, we thought — (one of our friends consulted for it) — idealistic, unintentionally a bit chic, madly hopeful.
We were the scene.
I almost recoiled now with sorrow and anger. I folded up that dress, thinking about those institutions that had undergirded our optimism that warm night, when our confidence and certainty had rung out onto the warm, salty breezes, along with the sounds of the ultra-hip blues band.
The major newspapers? The once-young journalists? The last two and a half years showed them to be shills for what have been revealed to be genocidal imperial powers. They became media versions of sex workers, scheduling time to deliver blow jobs to whomever would write them the biggest checks.
The once-young, West-Wing-style politicos? The last two and a half years showed them willing to become policy wonks for a global march to tyranny that instrumentalized a murderous medical experiment on their fellow humans; on their very constituents.
Where now were those institutions that at that wedding in the early 2000s, filled us with pride and a sense of mission as we took part in building them?
Imploded morally; left without a shred of authority or credibility.
I put the brown dress on the Goodwill pile.
I turned to an old scheduling notebook — it recorded some visits to Oxford. We’d been at a dinner party in North Oxford, hosted by the Warden of Rhodes House, attended by the Vice Chancellor of the University, as I recall, and by many other luminaries. Indeed, the evolutionary biologist Dr Richard Dawkins had been a guest, pestered, as he no doubt often was, by a dinner attendee who had wanted to talk to him about his atheism.
It had been a sparkling evening, elegant and urbane. I’d felt privileged to be at a table where some of the greatest of minds of my time were gathered, and where the very leader of a great university was helping to convene us.
I loved Oxford with a pure love. The university had sustained a vibrant commitment to the principles of reason and to freedom of speech, for over nine hundred years. It had supported the asking of questions when it was dangerous to ask questions; from just after what used to be called the Dark Ages; through the High Middle Ages; through the Reformation; through the Enlightenment. It had tended faithfully, through the darkest of times, the bright, unquenchable flame of the wakeful mind of Europe.
That – the legacy of critical thinking of the West – was Oxford’s legacy.
But —in 2021— it had complied with a requirement that its students endure “online learning”— a demand that had no basis in reason or in the natural world.
This damage done to its trusting young people was a travesty, in my mind, of the great innovation that the University of Oxford had given to the world – the tutorial system, in which being physically present with a couple of other students and with a Don (professor) in his or her study, opens up the dimension of rigorous scholarly discourse in a magical and irreplaceable way.
‘Online learning’? In Oxford? An institution that had survived plagues and epidemics that dwarfed the respiratory disease of 2020-2022, that had survived wars and revolutions, and that had taught students nobly in the face of crises of all kinds?
I did not know if I would ever go back to Oxford; and, if I did, what I would find there or how I would feel. I did not even know if today’s Oxford would welcome me back, being, as I was now in 2022, though I had not been in 2019, a “reputational refugee,” having been cancelled institutionally in most of what had been my traditional intellectual homes.
My heart hurt once more. I put the old notebook in the pile for “storage.”
I unfolded a tablecloth I had bought in India. I’d visited a literary conference in Tamil Nadu in about 2005, and had brought the lovely fabric home as a souvenir.
A flood of memories surged as I looked at the once-familiar pattern.
I’d hosted so many parties in my little West Village apartment, centering on that hand-blocked tablecloth. I’d set a big pot of turkey chili — my go-to option, the only dish I could not ruin — pile cut-up baguettes on platters, and assemble bottles of cheap red wine on that tablecloth. Thus I could, as a broke single mom, affordably entertain — and those parties, as I recall them, were fantastic. Crowded, lively, buzz-y, with a sexy, intellectually engaging vibe. Filmmakers, actors, journalists, artists, novelists, academics, poets; a handful of the less-boring venture capitalists; all crowded together, spilling out into the kitchen, the hallways. At a certain point in the evening the noise would crescendo — (my neighbors were tolerant) — into the happy roar of new ideas clashing or merging; new friendships, new contacts, new lovers connecting and engaging.
In 2019, I had been part of the New York City social scene. My life was full of events, panels, lectures, galas, the watching of rehearsals, theatrical opening nights, film premieres, gallery openings. I thought that my place in the society in which I traveled was unquestioned, and that I was in a world in which this calendar of events, these parties, this community, above all this ethos, would last forever.
Where was that society now? Artists, filmmakers, journalists — all of the people who are supposed to say No to discrimination, No to tyranny — they had scattered, had cowered, had complied. They had groveled.
The same people who had been the avant garde of a great city, had, as I have written elsewhere, gone right along with a society in which a person such as I am, cannot enter a building.
And I had fed those people. I topped up their drinks with my affordable red wines.
I had welcomed them into my home.
I had supported their careers. I had fostered connections on their behalf. I had blurbed their books, had promoted their gallery openings, because — because we were allies, right? We were intellectuals. We were artists. We were even activists.
And yet these people — these same people — had complied — eagerly! With zero resistance! Immediately! With a regime that is appearing day by day to be about as bad in some ways as that of Marshal Philippe Petain’s in Vichy France.
Unthinkable now that I had treated them once as colleagues, as friends.
I had been made into a nonperson, overnight. Now it turns out, as America First Legal found via a recent lawsuit, that the CDC had actively colluded with Twitter officials, in reaction to an accurate tweet of mine calling attention to menstrual problems post-mRNA vaccination, to erase me from the worlds of both legacy media and digital discourse. A smear campaign that was global in its dimensions had been orchestrated with Twitter by the CDC’s Carol Crawford, as the internal emails revealed by America First Legal seemed to show. This past week, another lawsuit, by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, revealed that the White House itself colluded with Big Tech to censor American citizens. My truthful tweet was in that tranche as well.
As if we were characters in a Lewis Carroll book, the world of meritocracy had been inverted.
The highest level of government collusion was directed at me the minute I did just exactly what I have done for 35 years; that is to say, the minute I raised, in the summer of 2021, a grave women’s health concern. Confusingly, my advocating in exactly this way for serious women’s health journalism and for proper medical responses to women’s emerging sexual and reproductive health issues, had made me a media darling for 35 years. Indeed, this practice had made me a media darling among those very people, who had eaten my food and drunk my wine, while sitting around this very tablecloth.
But now, when I did the exact same thing for which they had long applauded me, I was cast immediately into social outer darkness.
Why? Because the times had changed.
And because the scale of the revenue generated for them by supporting flat out lies, had changed.
Did any of those right-on people — many of them famous feminists, male and female – speak up for me? Did any of them publicly say, Wait a minute, whatever the truth may turn out to be (and I was right, right, right) – this is a serious women’s health issue? Let’s explore it?
Not. A. One.
The bold, brave, edgy New York City avant-garde, whom I had hosted for twenty years?
They were scared off by Twitter.
That world surely shunned me, and made me a nonperson, overnight. The power of the Federal government is pretty stunning, especially in collusion with the biggest content companies in the world, when you are on the receiving end of being erased by them.
That world rejected me.
But I rejected it right back.
I live in the woods now. Instead of the glitter and din of galas, the chatter of the literati, Brian and I are surrounded by crowds of tall, solemn trees; the excitement of our days centers on sightings of cranes and hawks; the dramas we face involve living near coyotes and rattlesnakes, and evading while yet marveling at the resident adolescent bear. We are making friends with those who grow food, in anticipation of needing to be self-sufficient. We just picked up from farmer acquaintances, to store in a massive freezer, something that was described with a phrase I had never heard in my previous, DoorDash life: our quarter of a cow.
I was gifted a .22 by Brian. He recently bought me a Ruger as well. The world is falling apart even as a new world is emerging. A peaceful person though I am, I realize that we may someday need to hunt for food or perhaps need, God forbid, to defend our home. I am learning to shoot.
The old world, the pre-2019 world, is a scene of wreckage and carnage to me.
The old world I left behind, and that left me behind, is not a post-COVID world.
It is a post-truth world, a post-institutional world.
The institutions that supported the world that existed when these 2019 boxes were packed, have all collapsed; in a welter of corruption, in an abandonment of public mission and public trust. I look at them now the way Persephone looked backward without regret at Hades.
I am living in a new world already — a world that most people can’t see yet as it is still being envisioned and built up – painfully, daringly, laboriously. Though it exists at this point in history more conceptually and even spiritually than it does materially and politically, this new world is my home.
Who else lives in the new world?
My husband, who was not afraid to fight for America, and who is not afraid to defend me.
A new constellation of friends and allies, that have emerged since these boxes were packed away, and since the worlds that are represented as if sealed inside them, collapsed with rot.
I work and party now with people who love their country and tell the truth. The people with whom I spend time now are this era’s versions of Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Phyllis Wheatley and Ben Franklin. I don’t know how these folks vote. I don’t know that they know how I vote. I don’t care. I know that they are sterling human beings, because they are willing to protect the cherished ideals of this beautiful experiment, our native land.
Life experiences don’t unite these people with whom I hang out now; social status does not unite them — they come from all walks of life, from every “class,” and they pay little or no attention to status or class markers. Politics don’t unite these people. What unites them in my view is the excellence of their characters, and their fierce commitment to liberty; to the ideals of this nation.
Oddly, living now in the purple-to-red rural America that my former “people,” the blue-state elites, are conditioned to view with suspicion and distrust, I also have more personal freedom than I did as a member of the most privileged class. The most privileged class does not have the greatest privilege of all, that of personal liberty: it is a class that is continually anxious and status-insecure, its members often scanning the room for a more important conversation, its collective mind continually exerting subtle control, both socially and professionally, over other members of the “tribe.”
My former elite network paid lip service to “diversity;” but there was a deadening sameness and conformity in our demographics, and that conformity also policed our world views, our voting patterns, even our kids’ schools and our travel destinations.
In contrast, people here in deep purple-red country, the ones whom we know anyway, give each other the assumed permission to differ, to have uncensored opinions, to be free.
Even my social media community is not the world I left behind in 2019; I can’t even get on those platforms any more, as I am extra super duper ultra cancelled.
But I don’t know if I’d even want to be in those conversations now; the discourse of the elite left these days, “my people,” seems fearful and in-lockstep, scolding and rigid, when I hear exchanges of it.
Now, in 2022, my online community is made up of a world of people whom I never knew existed — or rather a world of people I was conditioned ignorantly to stereotype, and to fear; I am in contact now with people who care about America, who believe in God or in a greater meaning in this world, people who put family first, and who turn out — who knew? — to be vastly open-minded, civilized and decent.
I spend time with people who love their communities, speak out for their actual brothers and sisters, meaning humanity; risk themselves to save the lives of strangers; and care about actual fact-based journalism, actual science-based medicine, actual science-based science.
These days I chat online with people who tell me, unfashionably but beautifully, they are praying for me.
In spite of fighting an apocalypse every day, how can I help but be so much happier now?
I no longer want to sit at a table with people who call themselves journalists, but who deny or trivialize injuries to women at a scale that beggars belief; who give Pfizer and the FDA a pass, and ask them no real questions.
These people, “my people,” who were once so erudite, so witty, so confident, so ethical, so privileged – the people of the elite world contained in the 2019-and-before boxes — pretty and well-spoken as they once were, turn out, with the twist of just a couple of years, and just a bucketload or two of bribe money, to be revealed as monsters and barbarians.
I left the rest of the boxes to open another day. There is no rush.
The institutions the boxes memorialize are dead; and maybe they never really existed, as we believed them to be, in the first place.
I put the red, purple and blue tablecloth on the “wash and store to use again” pile. Then I took it home with me.
People who still have their honor intact, will sit around our table.
Voluntary assigned days off and one additional paid day off (Unions had sought 15 paid sick days. Currently, rail freight workers don’t have any sick days)
Guaranteed time away for medical visits;
No disruptions to current health care plans;
An immediate wage increase of 14% and 24% over the next five years;
Annual lump sum bonuses of $5,000.
When was the last time you received a 24% raise, or even a 14% raise? And when was the last time you received a $5,000 annual bonus for doing nothing? Right. Joe Biden is a moron to think the American people will applaud this deal. – The Liberator
Now they are coming from all over the world. Imagine America’s future…it is not bright. Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorcas must be impeached and convicted, and removed after the mid-term elections. Non-negotiable. – The Liberator
The current US president finally said it during a 60 Minutes interview: “The pandemic is over.” Though obviously true by the classical definition, Biden’s comment seemed almost accidental, said as an echoed response to a direct question.
Consider, however, that many times as many people die from Covid daily in the US (300-400) than when the US first announced the outrageous lockdowns of March 16, 2020. In those days, deaths were approaching 50 per day, mostly in New York. It will very likely get worse over the winter months.
Instead of today’s calm and relaxed attitude – just chill because infection, disease, and death are just part of life – there were banshee screams from the whole of governments and media. People were running around with their hair on fire, dousing themselves with sanitizer, wiping down groceries, and hiding under their sofas from the “invisible enemy.”
Back then, if you raised any doubts about closures, masks, forced separation, domestic capacity restrictions, or suggested it might not be the worst thing to keep businesses open, or were caught getting a haircut, you were shamed, shouted down, and banned by social media. You could even get fired.
Ask yourself: why the panic then and the calm now? What precisely has changed?
In those days, every new death – even every new case! – was blamed on the Trump administration. People even today say that Trump had no choice but to lock down because otherwise the criticisms would have been globally deafening. So Trump and his closest advisors sat in their Oval Office hothouse and listened to the wise council of Fauci that the only way to deal with a virus is to stop all human activity.
So here we are today, all nonchalant and casual about the whole thing even as the CDC chart on community spread looks like this right now.
Receiving less attention was Biden’s immediate follow-up. “If you notice, no one is wearing masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape.”
Hold on there a minute. Is it really all about such casual perceptions of one guy touring a car show?
If everyone was wearing a mask – the Biden administration is still appealing its right to impose a mandate – would it be evidence that the pandemic is still on? If so, might that help explain why the Biden administration was so intent on pushing for mass masking? It served the cosmetic purpose of whipping up public panic…for political and not medical reasons.
If that is true, we live in a dystopian world in which the government itself can create and uncreate a pandemic depending on the political priorities of the day.
As for the eyeball test that everyone Biden sees is “in pretty good” shape, that was true throughout the entire period of panicked and egregious statism. The demographic subject to medically significant outcomes was always very small. The 99.8% of people were always going to be in pretty good shape, but for the astounding psychological, economic, and public-health disaster imposed by the lockdowns themselves.
Yes, the “new virus” is now endemic and wholly manageable, due to mass infection and recovery. It was never going to end any other way. We knew this from February 2020. It’s the way every pandemic of this type of virus ends, all extremely well-documented over the past 100 years or, really, thousands of years.
The policy response to the pandemic is what was the outlier. After spending two and a half years watching the unfolding of the great public-health disaster of our lifetimes, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that this has always been about politics and the manipulation of public perceptions. The reality that we chose to see was heavily informed by media propaganda and political priorities.
That’s a terrifying reality.
For example, it’s impossible to avoid the observation that the pandemic response was motivated at least in part by the desire to drive Trump out of office.
What better way to crush a presidency than to panic the president himself into wrecking the economy that was his strongest selling point during a critical election year? It was a masterful plot and you don’t have to be a dreaded “conspiracy theorist” to see it.
Moreover, it was not just about Trump himself. It was about much larger agendas and directions that the administration was headed that threatened some very powerful interests, the investigations of which should consume years of work. Theories abound about the real reasons – Fauci and gain-of-function research, WEF and its agenda, an experiment in unleashing hipster techno-primitivism – and we are still a long way off from knowing the full truth.
Why Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and other presumed Trump partisans in the inner circle could not see it is the question. For that matter, why couldn’t FOX see it? Why couldn’t the Trump partisans in think tanks and magazines see it?
It was perfectly obvious at the time that this was precisely what was going on. Why did observing the obvious become so completely unsayable?
In the same way, it is perfectly obvious that the new calm that Biden is hawking is all about creating an environment of normalcy leading to midterm elections just 6 weeks away. The Democrats obviously need every advantage. Declaring an end to the pandemic provides some help on the margin.
It should rattle any concerned citizen of the US – or just any rational person – that such a massive issue as a deadly pandemic could be turned on and off by perception management by powerful elites in government, tech, and media. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming that we have seen just such an operation at work over these pandemic years.
Even now, despite more sophisticated data collection and distribution than we’ve ever had, we are at a loss to state with precision just how severe this pandemic truly was. Between wild inaccuracies of PCR testing plus rampant death misclassification, not to mention the ongoing confusions over infections vs cases, there is no real consensus on the basic measurements one might need to make a scientific assessment.
To be sure, there are those who believe that the arrival of the Omicron variant is itself a good enough reason for the shift from panic to calm. The variant is said to be more prevalent but less severe. But this is a confusion: such variants do not arrive with a preset severity stamp on them, programmed to impact the population in a particular way. It always depends on preexisting immunities.
Whether and to what extent these viruses are nothing alarming or massively devastating is largely contingent on the immunological mappings of the population itself. It was exposure to previous Covid variants that resulted in less medically significant outcomes from the mutations that occurred later.
An isolated tribe in the Outback or Amazon rainforest that had never been exposed to any coronaviruses could face terrible disease and death from the variants that the developed world now regards as mild. For such people, Omicron could be just as devastating or more so than the original wild type. (I owe this point to the ever-brilliant Sunetra Gupta.)
In addition, one might suppose that the end of the panic would also mean the end of the restrictions and mandates. Not so. The state of emergency is still on. People are still being fired for refusing the vaccine. My unvaccinated friends from the UK, Australia, and Europe are still not even allowed into this country! The whole thing is outrageous and embarrassing.
Now the President is declaring that the pandemic is over as the Justice Department is defending pandemic policies in various courts. Even if one were to argue that the policy should be reviewed as supported at the time, the continued viability of the policy can now be questioned in light of the President’s own statements. The President’s comments also highlight the fluidity of pandemic policies. While we often look to the CDC on such status statements, it is the President who ultimately decides federal policies on pandemic measures.
Interesting phrase: the fluidity of pandemic policies. Keep in mind that most of the powers that allowed them to lock you in your home, quarantine the well, shut churches and schools, restrict travels, even prosecute people for holding parties, weddings, and funerals all still exist. There has been no rollback of any powers presumed by the CDC. Their website even now lays out their own quarantine plans for the next time.
There must absolutely be a serious challenge to all these government powers. They were abused for political reasons and ended up brutalizing the whole population here and around the world, in violation of all law and tradition. There have been no apologies from the top, only vague promises of reforms that end only in more centralization and funding. This must change before the whole disaster is repeated.
It is not enough for the president to declare an end. It does not end until we end the emergency powers and get an ironclad guarantee that nothing of this sort can ever happen again. One might suppose the Bill of Rights would have been enough but it was not. We need more. And it needs to be explicit and enforceable. That cannot happen until there is a full accounting of the outrages that have been visited upon the country. Only then can we say that everything and everyone “seems to be in pretty good shape.”
Regardless of the source of the virus’s release – but the timing was entirely suspect – the response to the virus was clearly political, and the motive was the defeat of Trump. The lawsuits and indictments must continue until there is no doubt as to cause and motive, and the identification and punishment of the perpetrators. THIS MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN! – The Liberator
Reflecting on the country’s last 15 presidencies, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Joe Biden, conservative radio legend Michael Savage argued that Biden is the “worst” president to lead the country during his lifetime, claiming a “criminal enterprise [is] running the country,” while highlighting the current border crisis, the recent Afghanistan withdrawal, the return to energy dependence, and the “authoritarian” COVID-19 mandate.
Detailing “the good, the bad, and the ugly” aspects of the presidents who ruled America over the last several decades, Savage weighed in on today’s issues during his latest podcast.
Having been born in 1942, when Roosevelt was president, Savage claimed “we are now living under another Democrat President called Joseph Biden, who is not really a president in any sense of the word.”
Arguing the way to objectively judge a president is by his “domestic and worldly successes and failures,” Savage explained why it was up to the individual to decide if the president met these standards.
“With a very small cadre of extreme far-left or Marxist-light so-called presidential historians as the only source to answer our question, we really have to rely upon our own observed realities,” he said.
“We can’t rely upon so-called presidential historians — they’re all part and parcel of the same machine that’s destroying this country,” he added. “They’re of the far-left variety, the socialist variety, the Marxist variety.”
For example, he noted, “almost all Americans would say they respect and love” John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.
“Is this a product of a sort of mass hypnosis? Media propaganda? Or his actualities?” he asked. “Likewise, in reverse, most knowledgeable Americans know that Jimmy Carter was an abject failure.”
“Both domestically and on the international stage, Carter was a disaster for this country,” he added.
Open Borders
According to Savage, we are currently “living with a presidency that seems to be a foreign power dominating this country rather than an actual presidency in a party of the United States of America,” especially considering this administration has “welcomed 4 million illegal aliens” from South and Central America, Africa, and the Middle East, “almost all of whom have not been vetted for terrorist ties, for diseases… nor for plain old criminal activities such as smuggling drugs.”
As a result, he added, one can conclude “that when they’re bringing in a population larger than that of some states, we have a criminal enterprise running the country.”
Though Savage admitted there have been other presidents “who were weak, like Jimmy Carter,” or “whose loyalties were questionable, such as Barack Obama,” and yet others “who may have been as corrupt as Joseph Biden,” the country has never “had a package of such evil and corruption as we currently have.”
Savage accused Biden of creating “the worst border crisis in American history.”
“He has literally melted down our border with Mexico,” he said. “Four million illegal aliens have not only come in, but have been invited in.”
“That’s larger than some states,” he added, as he pointed to the fact that many are “diseased,” “criminals,” or “drug carriers,” often appearing as “gang members.”
Noting the problem “isn’t abating,” Savage accused the media of turning US Border Patrol agents into “dummies.”
“They’re made into the enemy of America instead of the guardians of America,” he lamented.
Afghanistan Withdrawal
He called attention to Biden’s actions in Afghanistan, which he urged Americans to “never forget.”
“A shamble of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, [it is] one of the low points of his presidency and one of the lowest points of American foreign policy since the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War,” he said. “He left $175 billion of military equipment picked up by Islamic radicals.”
In addition, Savage stated, the Biden administration “assured the country that the withdrawal would be orderly and the Afghanistan government was stable upon America’s departure.”
Calling it a “massive failure of intelligence” after the Afghan government collapsed and the radical Taliban took over the country in just weeks, Savage also detailed how Biden “abandoned our Afghani partners,” and armed terrorists.
“He gave equipment to the Taliban and other Islamic radicals — American equipment — they’re now wearing American uniforms and driving around in American Humvees,” he said.
Energy Dependence
Savage also accused Biden of “taking us back to energy dependence.”
Though during the Trump presidency, the US “became a net exporter of oil for the first time in 75 years,” according to Savage, the “psychos in the Biden administration took away this strategy.”
“Instead, these sickos encourage an increase in green energy at the expense of fossil fuels and good clean nuclear energy,” he said.
“These renewable energy zealots are a long way from meeting global energy needs, and Biden put more regulatory burdens on the oil and natural gas industry slowing its production considerably,” he added.
Most importantly, Savage argued, “the nutcases in the Biden administration shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project to move oil from Canada to the United States while effectively greenlighting the financing of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry natural gas to Germany.”
Domestic Threat
Addressing the “disaster of the Joe Biden presidency,” of which “we’re only halfway through,” Savage insisted “our country is facing an existential threat, where an enemy within has finally shown its face, and it’s nakedly saying it wants to destroy and intimidate its way into a transformed state and nation, a transformed nation that we cannot recognize.”
He also compared the Biden administration to a “radical vigilante woke mob that knocks down and steamrolls anything and anyone that gets in their way:”
They attack the American way in a clear and intensifying manner. They stifle dissent. They’re using the FBI as a personal Gestapo. They publicly shame parents who stand up to the perverse agendas of the radical, perverse left. They encouraged the violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They perverted, distorted the realities of our great history, not only tearing down monuments and buildings, but tearing down the American spirit itself.
Savage then accused the current administration of encouraging the “mobs of wokesters” to “go after the family unit, go after parental rights, go after the traditional moral values, tear down the meaning of the church, [and] tear down fact-based education.”
“We’re all watching as this evil group tries to brainwash our young babies into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable nation,” he said.
The Biden administration, Savage argued, has “denied science and data.”
“They say that a boy is a girl and a girl is a boy if they say they are such.”
In addition, “they trample over personal liberties that are enshrined in the Constitution, throwing teachers out of jobs who refuse to bend their knee to their perverse agenda,” he continued. “They take to the streets like criminals, burning, looting and destroying everything in sight while we are told by the vermin in the media that these are mostly peaceful and passionate protests.”
Big Tech and Media
Savage also called out “big tech moguls in Silicon Valley” as “the only arbiters of truth, deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public squares that they own.”
“We watch the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that do not align with their preferred narrative, only to see the truth seep out months later at a more politically expedient time,” he said.
“The enemy within has taken over media,” he added.
Noting that “corporate boards, professional sports, foundations, [and] professional institutions have steamrolled and left no corner of our lives untouched,” Savage suggested what could be done in response.
“The first thing to do is have knowledge of what the enemy within is doing to us,” he proposed. “Only by knowing what they’re doing to us can we stand up to defeat their false pretenses and predetermined narratives and false promises.”
As a result, Savage argued, “we must know more about Biden than we already know,” as he ripped the media for its portrayal of the “disaster” taking place at the southern border.
“The security at the southern border is an ongoing disaster, given almost no coverage by the worthless stooges in the legacy media,” he said. “The Jake Tappers, the Wolf Blitzers; they are nothing but mouthpieces for a Stalinist regime.”
“The massive spike in border crossings [was] initially excused by the Biden allies in the media as a ‘seasonal problem,’” he added. “Yeah, well, it was really ‘seasonal.’ It was called ‘open borders’ season.”
COVID-19
Savage then slammed the Biden administration’s “authoritarian COVID-19 mandates” whereby “private employers and other organizations with over 100 [or] more employees [were] to enforce a vaccine mandate, despite [Biden] saying that he didn’t think it was exactly constitutional.”
“This liar tried to turn us all into guinea pigs for this unproven vaccine, not really tested except on a massive population,” he added. “And we still do not know what the long-term effects of this vaccine are.”
Crime
In addition, Biden’s presidency has seen “an explosion of violent crime” that began in the summer of 2020, Savage stated, in a trend that was “exacerbated by the Democrat-controlled media tied in with the ‘defund the police’ movement.”
“In fact, because many Democrat-run cities made good on this slogan by defunding their police departments and stemming the use of proactive policing, the criminals are running wild in the streets: rapes, murders, beatings, robberies, break-ins,” he said.
“Cities that defunded police agencies make the list of places with the largest increases in violent crime,” he added.
However, Savage noted that now “these so-called city leaders are changing their tune and restoring police funding after much of the damage has been done, but it will never be good again because not only have the police been defunded, they have been demoralized.”
“They’ve been turned into the bad guys instead of the good guys,” he added. “How many times over the years did I tell you that the thin blue line was the only thing standing between us and total and absolute anarchy? I was right.”
Economy & Ukraine
On the economy, Savage noted today’s rising inflation as he called out the president for having said inflation would be a “temporary problem” his administration had a handle on.
“Right now we have unchecked inflation,” he said. “And they can’t control it because they’re printing money, and they’re spending money on a foreign war that nobody voted for.”
Savage blamed President Biden for having “dragged us into a proxy war against Russia.”
“We all want to see poor little Ukraine survive. We all don’t like the evil wolf or the big bear of Russia. But putting aside what we like and don’t like, it’s not our business,” he said.
“Putting aside the fact that he’s sending our military equipment and billions and billions of our money, billions and billions of our tax dollars, to Ukraine,” Savage continued, “how much of it is being tracked?”
“How do you know how much of this money isn’t going into the pockets of the corrupt officials in Ukraine? How much of it is being kicked back to Democrat officials in America? Do we know?” he asked.
Trump Supporters
However, “worst of all,” Savage argued, is that President Biden “attacked Trump supporters.”
“He called those of us who support Donald Trump a threat to democracy. He used U.S. Marines as political props during [his] September 1 Mussolini speech in Philadelphia,” he said. “The president said ‘We’re not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy. There are far more Americans from every background and belief that reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it.’”
Addressing the president, Savage asserted that “most Americans accept the MAGA ideology.”
“What does it really stand for? It stands for ‘America First,’” he said.
“That’s not a good thing, Biden?” he asked. “It stands for borders, language and culture. That’s not American, Mr. Biden? Which side are you on, Mr. Biden?”
Savage concluded by stating that “some of us can see the future, some of us can see around corners.”
“I hope you understand,” he said. “I’m one of those.”
Last month, following the FBI raid on former President Trump’s estate, Savage accused the Biden administration of having brought a “nightmare” upon America as it “dragged us into the Dark Ages” and “raped half the nation,” as he slammed hypocritical “liberals” for “cheering” on “fascism.”
The list of criminals enabling this takedown of America by Biden & Co. is deep and wide…even worldwide. It makes a normal, red-blooded, patriotic American ask the obvious question, “Why are they doing this to the greatest country in world history? What could possibly be the agenda of so many disparate groups?”
The list of enablers includes the mass media, social media, Big Tech, Education, Hollywood, the lawyers, corporatists, globalists, Wall Street, our military leaders, Democrat politicians, the bureaucratic swamp, too damn many Republican politicians, Europe, the United Nations, Canada, Mexico, nearly all third world countries, and nearly half of our own voters including, saddest of all, the majority of our young citizens.
It seems as though the only groups standing in support of America as founded are Main Street USA, a few million conservative citizens, and a small army of voices in the conservative media. I hate to say it, but it feels like we’re going to have to fight the Revolutionary War again to save the country! – The Liberator
“They attack the American way in a clear and intensifying manner. They stifle dissent. They’re using the FBI as a personal Gestapo. They publicly shame parents who stand up to the perverse agendas of the radical, perverse left. They encouraged the violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They perverted, distorted the realities of our great history, not only tearing down monuments and buildings, but tearing down the American spirit itself.” – Michael Savage on the Biden Legacy
