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The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us
By Ron Paul
The recent felony conviction and eight month prison sentence of January 6th protester Paul Hodgkins is an affront to any notion of justice. It is a political charge and a political verdict by a political court. Every American regardless of political persuasion should be terrified of a court system so beholden to politics instead of justice.
We’ve seen this movie before and it does not end well.
Worse than this miscarriage of justice is the despicable attempt by the prosecutor in the case to label Hodgkins – who has no criminal record and was accused of no violent crime – a “terrorist.”
As journalist Michael Tracey recently wrote, Special Assistant US Attorney Mona Sedky declared Hodgkins a “terrorist” in the court proceedings not for committing any terrorist act, not for any act of violence, not even for imagining a terrorist act.
Sedky wrote in her sentencing memo, “The Government … recognizes that Hodgkins did not personally engage in or espouse violence or property destruction.” She added, “we concede that Mr. Hodgkins is not under the legal definition a domestic terrorist.”
Yet Hodgkins should be considered a terrorist because the actions he took – entering the Senate to take a photo of himself – occurred during an event that the court is “framing…in the context of terrorism.”
That goes beyond a slippery slope. He is not a terrorist because he committed a terrorist act, but because somehow the “context” of his actions was, in her words, “imperiling democracy.”
In other words, Hodgkins deserved enhanced punishment because he committed a thought crime. The judge on the case, Randolph D. Moss, admitted as much. In carrying a Trump flag into the Senate, he said, Hodgkins was, “declaring his loyalty to a single individual over the nation.”
As Tracey pointed out, while eight months in prison is a ridiculously long sentence for standing on the floor of the “People’s House” and taking a photograph, it is also a ridiculously short sentence for a terrorist. If Hodgkins is really a terrorist, shouldn’t he be sent away for longer than eight months?
The purpose of the Soviet show trials was to create an enemy that the public could collectively join in hating and blaming for all the failures of the system. The purpose was to turn one part of the population against the other part of the population and demand they be “cancelled.” And it worked very well…for awhile. MORE.
Herzog: Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex https://t.co/CPbaGyZExm
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 29, 2021
Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex
Via Zero Hedge
Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog’s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her first story focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. “Wokeness,” as one doctor put it, “feels like an existential threat.”
Katie’s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic. And it shows how the true victims of that denial are not sensitive medical students but patients, perhaps most importantly, transgender ones.
Some of you may find Katie’s story shocking and disconcerting and perhaps even maddening. You might also ask yourself: How has it come to this? How has this radical ideology gone from the relatively obscure academic fringe to the mainstream in such a short time?
Those are among the questions that motivate this newsletter. We feel obligated to chronicle in detail and in primary accounts the takeover of our institutions by this ideology — and the consequences of it.
So far, it has taken root in some of our leading medical schools. Some. Not all. But I’m left thinking: What state will American medicine — or any other American institution — find itself in after being routed by this ideology?
During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.
“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”
His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”
“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”
It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”
Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”
When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”
In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.
The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes. MORE.
‘They’re Getting Robbed’: ‘Shrinkflation’ Hits Consumers While Biden Inflation Roars. https://t.co/1qtZ8GqcEK
— Thomas Paine (@Thomas1774Paine) July 27, 2021
‘They’re Getting Robbed’: ‘Shrinkflation’ Hits Consumers While Biden Inflation Roars
Via True Pundit
As inflation has risen in recent months, customers are noticing another trend, “shrinkflation,” in which companies package their merchandise in such a way that they sell less product while maintaining the same price.
Steve Reed, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explained the term to ABC News: “’Shrinkflation’ is a term used to describe implicitly increasing the price of an item by slightly decreasing the amount or quantity in a package … the conventional explanation would be that consumers may not notice small decreases in size or quantity or react less negatively to them compared to an explicitly higher price.”
“Many of these size changes are subtle, like making candy bars sold in multipacks smaller than ones being sold individually, or changing the shape of their products so you can barely notice the difference in weight,” Business Insider reported. “Though manufacturers have always sought to cut costs and the trend is nothing new, it seems to have accelerated in recent months, as companies face sharply higher prices for raw materials and seek creative ways to cut costs,” The Washington Post reported in June.
Some examples of products whose packaging has changed: Walmart Great Value Paper Towels kept the price the same while reducing 168 sheets per roll to only 120; Frito-Lay’s regular bags of Dorito’s shrank from 9.75 ounces to 9.25 ounces; General Mills shrank its “family size” boxes from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces; Hershey’s Kisses diminished roughly two ounces from an 18-ounce pack. MORE.
Republicans Will Defend Their Corporate Friends But Not Their Voters
Via American Greatness
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has so many problems to solve right now. A crime wave leaves hundreds of Americans dead and has turned our cities into war zones. A border crisis allows hundreds of thousands of illegals to enter our country. A domestic war on terror threatens basic civil liberties.
But none of these crises have persuaded Graham to go to war. No, the civilizational question that demands his full zeal has to do with . . . a fast-food chain.
The Republican senator promised this month to go to war for the sake of Chick-fil-A. The restaurant beloved by conservatives apparently is in mortal danger. Two—yes, just two—students at Notre Dame University called for the chicken sandwich joint to be banished from the campus. University officials denied their request.
This serious threat to the entire Chick-fil-A empire lit a fire within Lindsey Graham. “It’s disappointing to hear some [Notre Dame] students and faculty want to ban Chick-fil-A from doing business on campus because they disagree with the values held by the Chick-fil-A founders,” Graham tweeted. “What a dangerous precedent to set.”
He added: “I want everyone in South Carolina and across America to know I have Chick fil-A’s back. I hope we don’t have to, but I will go to war for the principles Chick fil-A stands for.”
Remember, this in response to two random students complaining about the chicken franchise on a college campus in Indiana. There is no need to go to war for Chick-fil-A. It’s not under any grave threat.
But Graham wasn’t the only Republican to pick up his sword and shield to defend the helpless fast-food chain. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent out fundraising texts about the danger posed to Chick-fil-A, telling recipients that its fate is endangered by the “socialist Left.” And the only way to support Chick-fil-A is to give money to Republicans!
The GOP never misses a good time to grift their own supporters, and this is a stellar example. It has all the marks of quintessential GOP “action”: there’s absolutely nothing at stake, and the GOP could do nothing about it even if there were. MORE.
Imagine If They Hadn’t Lied To Us For The Last 18 Months https://t.co/vBfk8X7JAw
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 29, 2021
Imagine If They Hadn’t Lied To Us For The Last 18 Months
Via Townhall
Everybody wrap something around your face again even though they said you wouldn’t need to if you got vaxxed! But they didn’t lie – no, apparently a bunch of people – and not just those evil white nationalist-Christian-gun-Jesus-flag people – are refusing to get the vaccine, and the reason is that they are moral defectives somehow in thrall to Tucker Carlson’s Svengali-like powers of persuasion. You see, the people who won’t get it are stupid people who hate science because they refuse to trust the people who have spent the last year-and-a-half lying to them.
I don’t blame those folks a bit.
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine our ruling class was not as utterly corrupt, dishonest, incompetent and downright stupid as it manifestly is. I know that’s hard, but go with me.
This weird new virus appears and starts spreading. Instead of leveraging it to take down Trump, the Democrats appear with the Republican president and GOP leadership to announce they are working together to solve the problem. Imagine that instead of shaming people, first about wearing masks, then about not wearing masks, then about not wearing two masks, then no masks, then masks again, they went with transparency.
“We are not sure how much, if at all, masks work. We’re running test trials to see and we’ll tell you what we find as soon as we have the data. In the meantime, let’s all wear them just in case.” And then, when they ran the studies, they would tell us the answer.
Have you seen any studies about masks? We get a lot of that fascist gnome and others telling us to wear masks (after initially telling us they were useless – remember that memory-holed narrative?) but where’s the actual science?
See, you have to believe the science, and believe them when they tell you what it is yet won’t show you. Obey!
But trust is earned, and these people act like it is their right to have our trust, that we owe them to take it on faith that whatever these people say is the Gospel. Except they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing. When you don’t trust people who are perpetually wrong, that’s not denying science. That is science – you are making observations, and drawing reasonable conclusions. In this case, the observation is that our establishment sucks, and that it can’t be trusted. MORE.
Be sure to stop by at Def-Con News to get the morning started off right.
