Last week, I took part in the Freedom Center's Webinar series. My topic was, "Essential Rights and Non-Essential Governments."

And you can see talk and the question and answer session here.



While governments presume to decide which of us is or isn't essential, government is non-essential, and it is our rights that are truly essential.

Stay tuned for future Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century events.

Richard Quest, CNN's Business Editor at Large, recently announced on the show that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. "I just have a nasty cough, which, thankfully tonight because of our excellent technical staff, you haven't heard me too much spluttering away," he announced.

Whom exactly is that intended to reassure?

Quest is the third CNN anchor with the virus after Chris Cuomo and Brooke Baldwin. It’s unlikely that three anchors, the highest profile figures in a news network, would have contracted the virus without having received it from or passed it on to other CNN employees. In any other profession, there would be an investigation of a cluster of cases around one single company. But the media won’t self-investigate.

How many coronavirus cases does CNN have? Good question.

While the anchors, most notably Chris Cuomo, have received the most attention for their viral stunts, CNN has been much more tight-lipped about the infection rate among its staff. Last month, there was a report that a senior CNN staffer had tested positive. And that’s about all we know.

It’s highly improbable that three anchors and only one staffer at CNN have the virus.

CNN has 4,000 employees. It would be quite a feat of epidemiology if out of the four known CNN coronavirus cases, 75% were anchors. Or that out of 4,000 CNN employees, only anchors seem to get it.

Are CNN anchors somehow magnets for the virus?

Or do they have better access to testing than the genuinely vulnerable seniors who need the test do?

While seniors dying in New York nursing homes were unable to be tested in a timely manner, Governor Cuomo’s brother had no trouble getting tested. Neither did any of his fellow CNN anchors.

Meanwhile CNN has failed the basic metrics of transparency that it demands from those it investigates.

A recent email by CNN boss Jeff Zucker failed to address any of the staff or anchors who had tested positive, but did mention that 10 percent of staffers were working at the news network’s offices.

How is that possible when so many small businesses have shut down and so many are out of work?

Governor Cuomo exempted the news media from shutdowns as an essential organization. What’s essential about the media that allows CNN to keep putting people at risk in its offices? Cuomo’s brother does work for CNN. And he’s a case study when it comes to demonstrating why CNN can’t be trusted.

CNN falsely claimed that Chris Cuomo was emerging for the first time from quarantine in a completely fake segment after he had already been documented breaking quarantine and travel restrictions. Instead of acknowledging his misconduct, the news network chose to double down on the lies.

How many New Yorkers have CNN personnel irresponsibly infected with the virus?

The same media that constantly serves up matchstick videos and graphs showing how many people can be infected by one ‘spreader’ while urging everyone to stay home, won’t address the subject.

And CNN isn’t alone.

The one subject that the media loves and hates to talk about is itself. Even while CNN promoted Cuomo’s coronavirus antics, it has failed to be transparent about its staff infection rate. Other media outlets have also widely promoted stories about infections among its top personnel, but not staffers.

ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos has tested positive for coronavirus. Tony Greer, a cameraman, also passed away from the virus. Stephanopoulos described Greer as a "total pro" and "a consummate gentleman". How many other ABC News staffers have tested positive?

Like CNN, ABC News only disclosed one staffer.

CBS News however disclosed six staffers having tested positive. It cleaned its studios and then reopened them. Countless small businesses where no one has tested positive haven’t received that privilege.

Maria Mercader, a CBS journalist, later passed away.

At NBC News, an equipment room employee passed away and someone working on the Today show had tested positive. Despite that, the show went on with a little social distancing after the diagnosis.

Try doing that in any small business.

How serious of a role is the media playing in the spread of the coronavirus? Because the only sources for documenting the spread come from the media, it’s hard to know just how bad it really is.

An unknown White House correspondent tested positive for the virus. An infected attendee at a journalism conference led to an infection watch for over 1,000 journalists. A radio reporter who had been covering a hot zone brought it back to a party resulting in two deaths and countless infections.

But the media has been reluctant to document the spread of infections in a profession whose job it has been to go to hot zones, to interview people in close quarters, and travel around the world.

There are good public relations reasons why the media wouldn’t want to cover its own risk factors.

While prominent anchors may be working from home, the façade that the media is staying home is just that. The anchors may no longer be willing to risk their lives in studios, let alone reporting from the field, but there are still plenty of media personnel working in offices and the field.

You can’t keep a news network, newspaper, or major media outlet running by working from home.

The media was misclassified as essential, not because it actually is, but because local governments have deep conflicts of interest when it comes to the media. Much of what the media does is cover politicians. And most politicians want the coverage. This conflict of interest may be killing people.

At a time when ordinary folks are being arrested for going to the park and politicians solicit tips on barbershops that are staying open, the media is making its rounds, attending press conferences, and evading the social distancing that it demands for a whole range of other people and professions.

Bystander videos of anything from press conferences to protests show camera crews and reporters clumping together in violation of social distancing policies while covering these events. Revealing footage like this doesn’t appear on the evening news for the same reason that the media has failed to disclose the full scope of the coronavirus outbreak in its ranks. The media can’t be trusted to cover itself.

A complete picture of the media’s role in spreading the virus would increase pressure on the entire profession, not just a few talking heads, to stay home the way so many others are forced to do.

And that’s why the media is determined not to provide one so that it can continue running its own outbreak. It’s highly improbable that the outbreak at CNN was limited to three anchors, at ABC News to its chief anchor, or at NBC to NBCUniversal’s CEO. Those are the people at the top of the food chain.

While the media treats us to their stories, it has failed to fully disclose how many of the rank and file have been infected, and how many ordinary people its personnel have infected. And it never will.

The media can’t be trusted. That’s the one thing most Americans agree on in countless polls.

That’s why the media ought to, as it tells us so often, #StayAtHome. We’ll all be safer if it does.

Joe Biden has been chasing women all his life. The lucky ones were able to run for it. The unlucky ones had to stand up on the stage while he kissed them, sniffed their hair, or groped them in front of their husbands and fathers. And they had to keep quiet so as not to ruin their chances in politics.

Illustration by Bosch Fawstin

Shyness has never been one of Joe’s problems. He tracked down his current wife, a college senior, after he saw a modeling photo of her on a bus shelter. He became infamous for swimming nude in front of female secret service agents. But at 77, he has never needed women as much as he does now.

60% of the Democrat electorate is female. Many of them are black.

That’s why everyone who is anyone in politics is telling Biden to find a black woman. Or a woman. And back in the gloomy Bidenbunker in Wilmington where the crooked hack sits in his basement rec room, taping a confused podcast and rambling on CNN, there are entire binders full of women for Joe.

The media has been happy to play political dating service for the creepy guy in the basement.

"Joe Biden said he would pick a woman VP," the Boston Globe's op-ed section clamors. "Stacey Abrams should be that woman."

"Why Joe Biden should pick one of these two black women as his vice president," the Daily Beast belabors.

But then it gets confusing.

"Joe Biden vowed to pick a woman for vice president. Why not a Latina?" argues NBC News.

Why not a black Latina? Or a man? Wait, let’s not get crazy here.

“Warren: If Biden asked me to be VP, I would say yes,” quotes The Hill.

Senator Elizabeth Warren might try to pass herself off as Latino, but the mind quails at any attempt to remake Warren as a black woman. Some doors shouldn’t be opened. They should be welded shut.

Meanwhile somewhere a dozen female Senate Democrats are dancing around singing the Matchmaker song from Fiddler on the Roof. Except their only possible match is a creepy senile lecher. The dating pool is full of chlorine. The only thing standing next to Joe Biden gets you is six months of hair sniffing.

We might speculate about the virtues of some of Harvey Weinstein’s victims, but not Joe’s.

The DNC is looking for a strong, smart woman to stand next to Joe Biden and pretend to smile while he kisses the back of her neck, chews on her hair, and whispers, “Mommy, where am I?”

That seems like a waste of a strong, smart woman. And no actual smart, strong woman would do it.

The theory behind picking a woman or a black woman or someone who claims to be a woman is that the Democrat electorate wants someone on the ticket who looks like them. At least to a white man. But if that hypothetical electorate had really wanted a woman, there were a whole bunch running. If it had wanted a black woman, Senator Kamala Harris was in the race. And got nowhere with those voters.

Progressive pundits have spent the primary months struggling with a politically incorrect electorate that turned down all the women, black and white, to vote for a confused old man with capped teeth.

But the heart wants what it wants.

What people want and what they are supposed to want aren’t the same thing. Your average Democrat doesn’t want a strong, smart woman. He wants a confused elderly man who says, “Malarkey.”

If the DNC is going to be sensible about it, it should find another old creepy white political hack.

Chris Dodd, of Ted Kennedy waitress sandwich fame, is two years younger than Biden. Bill Weld, a former Republican, tried to run against President Trump in a campaign managed by his stepson. And really, the obvious answer is Bernie Sanders. Biden and Sanders are the two top Dem vote getters.

The two most popular Democrat candidates are two old white men who can’t finish a sentence.

It seems quite obvious what Democrat voters want, and it’s not a smart, strong black woman, or Elizabeth Warren trying to find a DNA test that will show she has an African ancestor, but old white men. If the DNC were to use some common sense, it would give its voting base what they clearly want.

But some Democrat desires are inappropriate and some lusts are just too politically incorrect.

Even if Democrats have made it very clear that the only strong women they want are named Joe and Bernie, that’s impossible to reconcile with the proud lefty commitment to identity politics. The Dem base may consist of black women who don’t seem to want a black woman, but they’ll get one anyway.

To be a Democrat is to know what’s good for other people even if they don’t want it. Democrat elections end with the party leadership dismissing what people want and replacing it with what they should want.

Who needs democracy to be a Democrat?

Democrats are supposed to be diverse. But the top three Democrat candidates came down to three old white people from New England. Democracy failed to produce diversity, so diversity has to be rigged.

It’s not about what Democrats really want, but the virtues whose desire they have to be seen signaling.

The Democrats are conflicted between who they really are and who they want to be. And who they really are is not a strong woman of color, but a sepulchral crooked hack. Sticking any one of the dozens of female Democrats auditioning to be sniffed during Biden’s concession speech won’t change that.

Democrats need women. Joe Biden needs women. But do women need Joe Biden?

Long ago, Joe tracked down a college senior whose photo he saw on a bus shelter ad (with an assist from his sleazy brother Frank who has made a career out of lucrative business opportunities based on his last name) and, when he isn’t sniffing her or chewing on her finger, is using Jill as a human shield.

Jill decided that she needed a sleazy guy nearly a decade older than her to get her through life.

And Democrats, from Elizabeth Warren to Stacey Abrams to Kamala Harris, are clamoring to be used by Joe and then use him in turn, at the cost of their feminism and their dignity. It wasn’t all that long ago that Kamala had been all but accusing Biden of perpetuating racial segregation. Now, like any common gold digger, she can’t wait for the opportunity to stand at his side and hope that he dies in office.

After all the talk about shattering glass ceilings and a new female century, the Democrat idea of a “strong” woman turns out to be Anna Nicole Smith.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Whichever “strong” woman, Joe and his brain trust finally pick will wear a frozen smile, walk down the political aisle with him, and put up with being pawed by the senile lecher in the hope that he dies.

This is the brave new feminism that the DNC is offering its top female legislators.

“Strong” women like Warren, Abrams, and Harris are elbowing each other on the worst season of the Bachelor ever for the opportunity to collect a withered rose and a bony grope.

Over 7,000 of the country’s coronavirus deaths emerged out of nursing homes.

Of the 4,377 coronavirus deaths in New Jersey, over 1,700 died due to infections in nursing homes. That nearly 40% of coronavirus deaths in one of the hardest hit states took place in nursing homes casts a stark light on the misplaced priorities of blue states battling the pandemic by locking down houses of worship and small businesses, while putting few to no resources into protecting nursing home residents.

New Jersey’s coronavirus deaths were part of the coronavirus outbreak in 425 nursing homes. At one nursing home, after an anonymous tip, police found 17 bodies being stored in a shed.

Nearly 7,000 nursing home residents in the state have tested positive for coronavirus.

In neighboring New York, nearly 1 in 4 coronavirus deaths emerged from nursing homes. Those 3,060 deaths are only part of the story and represent an extremely incomplete picture. The Health Department had battled against releasing the information, claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents. Even when the people pleading for the release of the information were their own loved ones.

In one facility, 17% of the residents have died. In 5 others, more than 10% are dead.

And even now, only data from a fraction of nursing homes in the state has been made public.

Why were New York authorities so reluctant to release the information? Even the partial data makes it all too clear that the severity of the death toll was not due to urban density, but poor oversight and response. If urban density were the issue, Manhattan would have some of the highest numbers. Instead it has among the lowest, while boroughs with sizable nursing homes have the highest numbers.

The actual nursing home death toll in New York may be closer to 3,316

In New York City, while the official numbers peg it at 688, the actual numbers may be over 2,000.

And the death toll, actual or estimated, is only a part of a bigger picture with 8% of nursing home residents in the state testing positive for the virus. Those numbers make it painfully clear that the dying is likely to continue and that authorities have utterly failed to secure our most vulnerable population.

The Cuomo administration is blaming nursing homes. And while nursing homes often provide poor care and personnel often work in different facilities at the same time spreading the infection between them, it was the state that ordered facilities to accept coronavirus patients returning from the hospital.

Governor Cuomo's Department of Health had issued an order that, "no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19" and also prohibited requiring testing of returning patients. Sending hospitalized patients with coronavirus to the same mismanaged nursing homes was a death sentence for countless seniors in those facilities.

As Betsy McCaughey, the former Republican lieutenant governor, has said, "One Covid-positive patient in a nursing home produces carnage.”

Is it any wonder that the Department of Health obstructed the release of nursing home fatalities?

In Connecticut, 40% of coronavirus fatalities emerged from nursing homes.

In Virginia, the majority of the coronavirus outbreaks have taken place in nursing homes. Like New York, Virginia’s Department of Health is refusing to release the names of the facilities with outbreaks.

That means loved ones have no way to know if their families are at risk.

Governor Ralph Northam's administration is continuing to engage in the cover-up even as a quarter of the population in one facility died of the coronavirus. That outbreak was the deadliest in America.

In Illinois, Governor Pritzker's administration had fought against providing the numbers of deaths and the identity of the nursing homes with outbreaks by claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents, but finally began putting out some numbers about coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.

1 in 4 coronavirus deaths in Cook County, an area which includes Chicago, took place in nursing homes.

In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer's administration also refused to release the names of infected facilities. What information reporters have put together indicates that over a third of coronavirus deaths in Wayne County took place in nursing homes. Every nursing home in Detroit is infected.

“We have a crisis in our nursing homes,” Mayor Mike Duggan admitted, as 35% of nursing home residents tested had the virus.

In California, 29% of the deaths in Los Angeles County have taken place in nursing homes. In nearby Long Beach, it’s as high as 72%. In one Central Valley home, 156 residents tested positive and 8 died.

The Newsom administration, like its blue state counterparts, dragged its feet on releasing nursing home information, until its feet were held to the fire.

Governor Newsom is now claiming that nursing home residents are his top priority. “This state has a disproportionate number of aging and graying individuals, and we have a unique responsibility to take care of them and their caregivers.”

Except that California, like New York, was forcing care facilities to accept coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals. Newsom, like Cuomo, has blood on his manicured hands.

The ten deadliest outbreaks in this country have taken place in nursing homes and care facilities.

While officials around the country shut down churches and synagogues, arrested people for surfing and playing catch, and sent drones flying over their backyards, little was done to secure the estimated 4,100 nursing homes out of over 15,000 in the country where coronavirus was known to have taken root.

Even though the first coronavirus outbreak in this country took place in a nursing home in Washington, and killed 43 people, the CDC failed to track the spread of the virus to nursing homes nationwide.

Instead, the CDC has been relying on "informal outreach" to track the spread and has not updated its numbers since March.

The CDC's estimate of 400 nursing homes is only about 10% of the national total.

The Trump administration took an important step by ordering nursing homes to report coronavirus deaths to the CDC, and to the residents and their families. This move puts an end to the state stonewalling that covered up coronavirus cases and their own malfeasance.

It’s the beginning. Not the end.

Coronavirus disproportionately affects the elderly and the ill. Securing nursing home facilities would cost a fraction of the money we have lost by shutting down the economy and passing massive bailouts. And as death tolls remain a major barrier to reopening the economy, saving lives in nursing homes will also save the economy. It’s the right thing to do for our parents, grandparents, and for our country.

Protecting nursing home residents isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than shutting down America.

We don’t need to stop people from planting flowers in their yards or going to the beach. Instead, blue state and local governments, where the pandemic death toll is concentrated, failed to do the most basic and decent thing because it wasn’t in their political interest and didn’t offer the same allure of power.

Thousands of lives could have been saved if they had done the right thing. And they still can be.

Blue state governments lied, deliberately covering up the scale of nursing home deaths, while playing up the pandemic risks and the lockdown. Their decisions killed the weak and the elderly, devastated the economy, and transformed the entire relationship between the people and their governments.

The appeal of imposing social distancing measures on everyone proved irresistible to blue governments even while they neglected to track virus cases in the places where they were most likely to emerge.

At least 7,000 seniors paid the price. And, in our own ways, we all paid the price.

As the numbers trickle in from recalcitrant blue states, the truth is finally coming out. That truth should carry its own consequences for the bureaucrats who let so many die while chanting hollow slogans. It should also transform our coronavirus policy from the federal level to state and local governments.

Let the truth be spoken and let the lies fall.

On Monday, April 21st, members of National Nurses United (NNU), a radical union that advocates for socialized medicine, gathered outside the White House to protest against President Trump.

Video of the protest was carried on Facebook Live by the same dot com monopoly which had banned ‘Reopen’ protests as being harmful. After the rally, protesters clumped together with reporters, and there was no social distancing in sight. Despite that Facebook did not take down the NUN page.

And the media celebrated the protesters. "Nurses protest unsafe conditions in front of White House," CBS News headlined its coverage. "We're Beyond Angered," the Washington Post blared.

“We’re feeling like martyrs,” MSNBC shrilled.

There wasn’t even a hint of a suggestion that a protest was inappropriate under lockdown. Especially by a group that is at far more risk of spreading the virus than any of the shuttered small businesses.

The White House protest was one of multiple NNU protests around the country, some thinly disguised as ‘vigils’ or concerns over PPE, but ultimately a larger push for a socialized medicine takeover.

But it wasn’t just protests by health care workers that benefited from a political double standard.

In the same weeks as the ‘Reopen’ protests against state lockdowns and for reopening businesses were taking place, a parallel series of protests against President Trump were also happening across America.

Police cracked down on the ‘reopen’ protests, arresting an organizer in New Jersey, while the media condemned them, spun conspiracy theories trying to tie them to members of the Trump administration, and falsely accused protesters of causing an increase in coronavirus in Kentucky.

Facebook deleted protest groups in coordination with state governments, labeling the protests, illegal.

Blue state governments, dot com overlords, and the media all warned that protesting in the age of the coronavirus was dangerous and illegal. Even if the protesters were in cars or maintaining social distance.

But meanwhile Refuse Fascism, a radical leftist organization created by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, was holding its own anti-Trump protests with no interference from the authorities.

And no negative coverage from the media.

While New Jersey State cops had arrested the organizer of the ‘Reopen’ protest in Trenton, the Philadelphia Inquirer described members of Refuse Fascism Philly, at least one of them outfitted in 'Handmaid' garb, driving to dump fake body bags at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey while "police officers wearing respirators monitored the peaceful demonstration" and made no arrests.

The paper, which has blasted the "reopen' protests, offered positive coverage of the anti-Trump protest.

The Communist organization’s Facebook site, including links to its protest and photos from the event, is still standing. The social media giant has refused to take it down the way it has ‘Reopen’ sites.

While Facebook has claimed that it views protests during the coronavirus lockdown era as illegal, it is treating protests against the lockdown where conservatives wave American flags very differently than it does protests against President Trump by Communist activists. The patriots are banned from Facebook while the Communists are welcome. The political bias is unmistakable and the agenda is all too clear.

Facebook isn’t banning protests during the coronavirus lockdowns. It’s banning conservative protests.

The local CBS affiliate in Chicago covered a protest by Refuse Fascism on April 18th and offered no criticism of the irresponsible behavior of going out to dump body bags outside a Trump building at a time when everyone is being told to stay home to avoid spreading the virus.

SFBay covered both the reopen protests and a Refuse Fascism protest in front of the San Francisco Federal Building, condemning the former, while writing positively about the latter. Bloomberg whitewashed the Communists protesters as “critics of Trump’s slow response to the crisis”.

There was no media condemnation of the Refuse Fascism protests, even when they took place at Trump Tower or in Times Square in New York City, the city hardest hit by the pandemic. Or, as the Communist organization put it, “In the midst of the #Covid-19 virus, Refuse Fascism did this action in Times Square.”

The sight of protesters dumping body bags outside Trump properties and federal buildings was an effective piece of street theater. What is curious is how only a handful of media outlets covered it.

Much of the country has been locked down. Countless Americans have lost their jobs and their hope.

The media is well aware that the sight of resistance hipsters parading around with body bags and protest signs might be infuriating at a time when the country is going through a national trauma. And so the media has made a selective choice not to cover protests that it knows quite well are taking place.

This coverup has been conducted at the same time as it has hatefully covered the Reopen rallies.

The smears of the Reopen rallies serve the media’s political agenda, while covering the Refuse Fascism rallies would not. The media doesn’t oppose the Communist rallies, it just understands that even the people who repeat back everything the media tells them might pick up on the hypocrisy of accusing Reopen protesters of spreading coronavirus and endangering their states while cheering the Commies.

While the media has played down lefty protests in this country, it has been more enthusiastic abroad.

When lefties rallied against Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, the media cheered. "Israelis Just Showed the World What a Socially Distant Protest Looks Like," Time gushed. "This is what a socially distant protest looks like," CNN smirked. There was nothing safe about 2,000 radicals crowding into Kings of Israel Square, with the overflow spreading into nearby streets, while synagogue prayers are restricted.

Israel’s Netanyahu is a longtime media hate object and the media supports the protests against him. And it’s safe to promote protests in Israel that won’t affect or infuriate Americans under lockdown.

The double standard on anti-Trump and anti-lockdown protests by the media, by Facebook, and by state authorities is evidence of bias, of discrimination, and of selectively censoring political speech.

New Jersey arrested a Reopen protest organizer while letting Communists protest as they liked. Her real crime was ‘protesting while conservative’ under Governor Murphy’s post-Bill of Rights regime.

The pandemic is being used as a pretext by blue governments and by Facebook to silence conservatives.

If leaving the house to go to church or to play catch is a public health hazard, why have the authorities allowed the National Nurses United and Refuse Fascism protests to continue without tickets or fines?

If a protesting is a public health threat, as Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg insists, why is his platform continuing to host videos of Refuse Fascism and National Nurses United protesting in public?

The wholesale suppression of the First Amendment by governments and dot com monopolies would be bad enough. But the suppression is selective. As it always has been long before the pandemic arrived.

If you’re protesting against President Trump, the authorities won’t touch you. But if you gather to demand the right to reopen your small business, they will fine you and even arrest you.

And Facebook will delete any attempt to organize peaceful protests by small business owners waving American flags, while hosting protest content from Communists who want to destroy America.

These are not pandemic precautions. The crackdown on the Reopen rallies is political persecution.

It is up to Attorney General Barr and the DOJ to stand up for the civil rights of the people being arrested, fined, threatened, and censored, not because of the coronavirus, but because they are conservatives.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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Thank you for reading.

On April 9th, as California passed 500 Wuhan Virus deaths and 19,000 cases, Senator Dianne Feinstein dispatched a letter on Senate stationary to the President of the United States.

The letter did not ask for help for California, but for Iran.

Senator Feinstein wrote to express her unhappiness that President Trump had blocked Iran from getting $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund. She urged him to help the Islamic terror state, which has murdered countless Americans, get the money in the "interests of international security".

While Americans were dying, the Senate Terror Caucus was hard at work… for Iran.

In late March, Connecticut's two Democrat Senate members, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, along with Hawaii's Schatz, Maryland's Van Hollen, New Mexico's Udall, Maryland's Cardin, Virginia's Kaine, Vermont's Leahy, Oregon's Merkley, Delaware's Carper, and Ohio’s Brown, had dispatched a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging lowering economic sanctions on Iran and Venezuela while claiming that easing up on two terror states was “the right thing to do from a national security perspective.”

Two days earlier, Leahy, Udall, Carper, Brown, Merkeley, and Van Hollen had sent another letter to the Secretary of State on behalf of Hamas, claiming that “as of March 24, the first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the Gaza Strip" and insisted that it is, “in the national security interest of the United States” to help the Hamas territory.

Joining the Tehran Six were Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The only reason Bernie Sanders hadn’t signed the Tehran Six letter was that he thought that it didn’t go far enough. Instead he joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and other terrorist supporters in calling for a suspension of sanctions on Iran.

In an embarrassing moment, the draft text of the letter was posted on the website of NIAC: described by many as the Iran Lobby in the United States. Earlier this year, Senator Tom Cotton, Senator Ted Cruz, and Senator Mike Braun had sent their own letter asking Attorney General Barr to investigate NIAC for acting as an agent of the Islamic Republic.

While Republicans wanted to hold NIAC accountable, Democrats were collaborating with it.

After Iran’s attack on our military bases, Sanders and Warren had participated in a conference call with NIAC. House Dem participants had included Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Barbara Lee.

The Cotton letter noted that, “NIAC's Swedish-Iranian founder, Trita Parsi, had arranged meetings between Javad Zarif, Iran's former ambassador to the United Nations and current foreign minister, and members of Congress.”

The Democrats who met with Zarif included members of the Tehran Six, Senator Murphy, who had initiated the Iran letter, and Merkeley, and Van Hollen. Murphy has spoken at NIAC events and the Iran Lobby group had described the Democrat as a “fearless ally” of its cause.

Lobbying for an Islamic terror state during a pandemic is “fearless” all right.

While the calls for suspending sanctions were couched in claims that Iran needed to be able to fight the Wuhan Virus, the proposals by Tehran Democrats went far beyond the virus.

The Sanders-Cortez-Omar letter demanded a suspension of sanctions that would “encompass major sectors of the Iranian economy, including those impacting civilian industries, Iran’s banking sector and exports of oil.”

Why does Iran need to export oil to fight the coronavirus?

Signatories to the letter calling for Iranian access to the banking sector, which it has used to fund terrorism, and to export oil, likewise, included longstanding members of the Democrat Senate and House Terror Caucus including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Ed Markey, Rep. Joaquin Castro, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Marc Pocan, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Gerry Connolly, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Debbie Dingell, Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and, Rep. Hank Johnson: who had compared Jews to termites.

In total, 34 House and Senate Democrats, had signed an Iran Lobby letter during one of the worst crises in American history, where many of their own constituents were dead or dying.

Official endorsees on Bernie’s Senate site included NIAC.

While the Sanders letter had started out as an extreme position, a few days later, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, urged President Trump to ease sanctions on Iran and “streamline channels for banking”. The beneficiaries of such measures wouldn’t be ordinary Iranians, but the regime’s terror elite and their international financial partners.

Within the space of a week, a fringe position advocated by Sanders, Cortez, and Omar had become incorporated into the official stance of the Democrat nominee for the White House.

The rapid pace at which suspending sanctions and sending billions to an Islamic terror state had become a mainstream position conveyed the incredible influence of the Iran Lobby on D.C. There are only two or so Senate and House Republicans who lobby for Iran, but a multitude of Democrats who don’t even bother asking, “how high” when the Iran Lobby tells them to jump.

To measure the scope of that influence, 6 out of 10 Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had signed their names to some version of the Iran Lobby letters.

A majority.

In the middle of a nationwide pandemic, the Iran Lobby was able to swiftly corral House and Senate Democrats into dispatching multiple letters as part of their pressure campaign.

There are two Americas. There’s the country we know and the bubble in Washington D.C.

During a pandemic, top Democrats were ignoring their dying constituents while laboring frantically to meet the demands of the Iran Lobby.

Whom do these Democrats serve?

While their letters insisted that American national interests were served by suspending sanctions on an Islamic terror state, giving it access to the banking system, and letting it export oil, none of this was in our interest, but in the interests of some of our worst enemies.

The Terror Caucus consists of many of the same members who put the interests of terrorists ahead of Americans. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib are only some of the more visible figures among bland Terror Caucus members who often represent Islamic constituencies. And since South Carolina, Omar’s ally, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the Farrakhan fan who handed the state to Joe Biden, is increasingly setting the tone for the Biden campaign.

The Terror Caucus is not a minority among the Democrats. It is driving the clown car off the cliff.

After the attacks of September 11, Joe Biden proposed, “this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”

His future boss would go on to illegally send billions in foreign currency on unmarked planes.

But Biden’s remark didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2002, shortly after his $200 million check proposal, he addressed the American Iranian Council. The AIC had been founded by Housang Amirahmadi, who ran for the presidency of Iran. Three times. Later that year, Biden was raising big money from Iran supporters and urging that Iran be allowed to join the WTO.

Biden is not a pawn of the Terror Caucus. He’s a founding member.

Joe Biden had celebrated the Islamic takeover of Iran. During the Iran Hostage Crisis, he had opposed the rescue of American hostages. In the nineties, he had called for an end to US broadcasts into Iran.

"Biden's political games have made him Tehran's favorite senator," an opinion piece in the Washington Post noted. Now he can be Tehran’s favorite president.

After his old boss.

Nothing conveys the deep corruption of the Terror Cause better than the frenzied Democrat lobbying for Iran in the midst of a national crisis. Even while Biden and Bernie were still battling for the nomination, they took time from their schedules to lobby for sanctions relief for Iran.

The Democrat Terror Caucus isn’t just selling out this country it’s putting terrorists ahead of Americans. At a time when President Trump and Republicans have put everything into fighting the Wuhan Virus, the Democrats are fighting just as hard to get more money to Iran.

If this is what the Terror Caucus does during a pandemic, imagine what it will do afterward.

Over two weeks after Tara Reade, a former Biden Senate staffer, accused him of sexually assaulting her, the media finally got around to tackling her and the threat she poses to Biden by calling her a liar.

The New York Times' article dryly titled, "Examining Tara Reade's Sexual Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden" by Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember seeks to discredit Reade's claims.

"No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade's allegation," the article insisted. "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable."

Then that awkward paragraph with its mix of admissions and denials went down the memory hole.

The same Lisa Lerer who tackled Reade's allegations had sat on a PBS panel which had previously discussed Biden's misbehavior with women, including the allegation by Lucy Flores. At the time, Biden hadn't yet entered the race, and Lerer opined that the Democrat positions on "standards around gender and consent" had shifted and that Biden had to "get right on those issues with where the party is now."

But now that Biden is the nominee, Lerer suddenly has never heard of a pattern of misconduct.

Last year, Sydney Ember had co-written a New York Times article titled, “Biden’s Tactile Politics Threaten His Return in the #MeToo Era.”

Biden had not yet announced that he was running and the story mentioned that, “two more women told The New York Times that the former vice president’s touches made them uncomfortable.”

The pattern of misconduct that Ember and the New York Times had reported on in 2019, had somehow vanished in 2020.

In 2019, Ember had written that, "the list of women coming forward is growing." Now they’re all gone.

Back then, Ember had told the story of "Caitlyn Caruso, a former college student and sexual assault survivor" who described how "Mr. Biden rested his hand on her thigh — even as she squirmed in her seat to show her discomfort" at an "event on sexual assault at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas."

Ember and Lerer were not only aware of Biden’s “pattern of misconduct”, but they had discussed it in their line of work before Biden had entered the race. Now that he’s the nominee, there’s no pattern.

Before Biden entered the race, he was a fossil who might weigh the field down. Now that he’s the nominee, the New York Times, Ember, and Lerer have to bury his accusers out on West 41st Street.

But the Reade story and the response to it showcases the larger hypocrisy of the #MeToo movement.

Reade was first interviewed by Katie Halper, a writer for Jacobin magazine, and then was followed up by an article at The Intercept. Both are fanatical pro-Bernie outfits. Halper had previously written a Jacobin article attacking Ember as an anti-Bernie shill for Biden. Of course, Halper is an anti-Biden shill for Bernie. The tawdry state of the #MeToo movement has reduced it to three women trading accusations and denials of sexual assault on behalf of two old men and their respective male bosses, A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the family business that is the New York Times, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the publisher of the Jacobin, and the former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The #MeToo movement exhausted its obvious targets, known predators like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, and after taking down a string of media second bananas, became a purely partisan weapon to be wielded against Republicans. At the New Yorker, Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow pushed Deborah Ramirez's smears of Justice Kavanaugh, before Mayer turned around and tried to rehabilitate Al Franken by smearing his accusers in the same publication. The hashtags of the #MeToo movement were a farce.

The central defense of Franken supporters had been that his first and most famous accuser had become a conservative. The feminist choir member who had also accused Franken was carefully overlooked.

#BelieveAllWomen had become “Believe all Democrat women when they accuse Republicans.”

Not all women. Not all Democrat women. Just Democrat women who accuse Republicans.

The #MeToo movement had begun as a revolution against abuse and ended in the same partisan weaponization of sexual harassment in the nineties that embraced Anita Hill, while dismissing Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Paula Jones, not based on the facts, but out of pure political cynicism.

The media killed #MeToo just as it kills everything that it touches.

We don’t need to believe Reade to dismiss the New York Times hit piece on her as an inevitable political attack . Ember and Lerer could acknowledge that Biden had touchy problems before he ran, or even before he became the nominee, but not now when he’s on the verge of his coronavirus coronation.

We shouldn’t believe all women or all men. And we should never believe the media.

Individual men and women can have a presumption of honesty, but the media staggers along under an impossible presumption of dishonesty. There is a reason why the #MeToo scandal burned hottest and brightest in the media, taking out chunks of 60 Minutes, NPR, and network news operatives. It’s also why the media can’t be trusted when it deploys its dueling #MeToo hit pieces and coverups.

The media is a deeply corrupt institution. Its external fake news mirrors its internal abuses.

The #MeToo movement brought down actual villains, but it was still a lynch mob. A witch hunt doesn’t stop being a witch hunt just because there are actual witches. The #MeToo movement insisted that the problem was more important than the process. And somehow the media, whose ranks and bosses included some of the worst #MeToo abusers, became the arbiter of whatever process there was.

That’s how we ended up with the Kavanaugh lynch mob and the Biden whitewash.

Is Joe Biden a predator?

His creepy misbehavior has been documented in countless photos and videos. But that doesn’t mean that Reade’s claims are true. There is probably no way to know what really happened between Biden and his former Senate staffer. Reade filed a criminal complaint against Biden a few days before the New York Times story went live. It’s hard not to believe that she joggled the Old Gray Lady’s wrinkled hand.

It’s in the hands of the authorities now.

As Americans, we don’t want our political system governed by media lynch mobs and witch hunts, by accusations that cannot be challenged and by accusers whom we are obligated to believe.

Biden’s political future, what there is of it, won’t be determined by what really happened in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building some 27 years ago, but by what he does and says now.

And that’s the way it should be.

Rep. Clyburn, the top Dem whose endorsement handed Biden a victory in South Carolina and the nomination, who had previously defended Rep. Conyers when he thought his accusers were white, complained that Biden had “become a victim of the #MeToo movement.”

Clyburn argued that Biden was “just a feeler, toucher kind of guy” and that his candidate was struggling because he was “afraid to touch anyone”. Social distancing has temporarily cured Biden of his conflict about whether to grope or not to grope on the campaign trail. But if social distancing ends before the election, the telltale hands may emerge and reveal exactly the kind of man that Gropin’ Joe really is.




Coronavirus - Essential Freedoms and Non-Essential Governments

Join the webinar on Thursday the 23rd, 7 PM EST, 4 PM PST

State, local and big governments tell us that their authority is essential and that everything we do, from running our businesses to leaving the house to planting in our backyard, are non-essential.

The truth is that we are essential and government isn't. Even during a pandemic.

Thousands of Americans have died of the coronavirus. But ‘Gaza Firster’ Democrats don’t care.

Eight Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, dispatched a four-page letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, demanding to know what America was doing about the coronavirus.

Not in America. In Gaza.

According to the Senate letter, “as of March 24, the first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the Gaza Strip.”

That’s two cases. Two. The United States has over 200,000 as of now.

By the time you read this, there will be many more.

Bernie and Leahy’s Vermont has 293 cases. But Sanders cares more about Gaza than Burlington. Warren’s Massachusetts has 6,620 cases. Van Hollen’s Maryland has 1,660 cases. Udall’s New Mexico has 315 cases. Thomas Carper’s Delaware has 319 cases. Jeff Merkley’s Oregon has 660 cases. Sherrod Brown’s Ohio has 2,199 cases.

None of these eight Democrats represent states that are free of the pandemic. All of them represent states that have far more severe coronavirus problems than the terrorist occupied West Bank or Gaza.

Unfortunately, they’re Gaza Firsters.

The Democrats whine that Gaza has a “weak public health system”. Maybe that’s because Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group in charge of Gaza, has put its money into rockets, not health care.

Lefties love lecturing about how much health care a jet or tank could pay for. They can take their anti-war lecture tour to Gaza and explain to Hamas how many ventilators they could get for one missile.

But Bernie Sanders has repeatedly urged cutting off military aid to Israel, while pouring more money into Gaza. The lefty theme is, “No missiles for Israel, lots of missiles for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The letter quotes an article claiming that in Gaza, “health ministry officials” whined “that just one person infected with the deadly virus would end in ‘complete disaster’"

The health ministry officials are Hamas terrorists. They're just as illegitimate as officials of Al Qaeda or ISIS.

And the article is from March 9th.

There has been more than one person infected with the coronavirus in Gaza. And a month later, there's no disaster.

Senate Democrats are searching for a coronavirus disaster in Gaza that isn’t there while ignoring the one in their own states. This bizarrely treasonous Gaza Firsting is wildly irresponsible when the people who elected them are dying. And they’re demanding that we urgently focus on the Gazans who aren’t dying.

The eight Democrats complain that President Trump cut off aid to UNRWA. The reason we did that is because UNRWA's employees in Gaza were Hamas members and the UN group's facilities were used as staging grounds for terrorist attacks.

They demand that the State Department inform them of what steps President Trump is taking to "provide the Palestinian people with access to adequate medicine, medical equipment, personnel, and other resources to combat the threat of a major coronavirus health crisis?"

Here's a thought.

Perhaps the United States government should make sure that every American health care worker has protective masks and gloves, and every coronavirus patient in this country has access to a ventilator, before anyone even thinks about sending a single piece of medical equipment to Gaza.

Just last week, Trump administration officials caught USAID officials shipping the protective equipment they were trying to secure for American health care workers off to foreign countries. We're already providing aid to close allies like Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and, Pakistan. Maybe we can hold off on shipping stuff to Hamas that we could use in the United States.

But it’s not just the eight Gaza Firsters in the United States Senate that are running the Gaza show.

Reps from the EU, the US, the UN, and Russia talked on the phone about the UN's $2 billion coronavirus plan with a "focus on Gaza."

It’s a good thing that the EU, which has a horrific death rate in Italy and Spain, and Russia, which just shut down much of the country, and the UN, have nothing to worry about except the Hamas territory.

According to the Quartet article, there are nine cases in Gaza.

Meanwhile Italy is turning away elderly people from the hospitals and leaving them to die in their homes and on the streets. But the European Union and the United Nations are focused on nine cases in Gaza.

Where is all this pressure to focus on the non-existent coronavirus crisis in Gaza coming from?

Robert Malley, the CEO of the Crisis Group, a former top Obama advisor who had been dumped by the Obama campaign because of his backdoor contacts with Hamas, has been beating the drum. The Crisis Group is a George Soros project, with assistance from the Rockefeller Brothers and the Islamic terror state of Qatar, which is a major backer of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood parent group.

George Soros, with his fortune, could make a big difference for his adopted country at a time when American health care workers are struggling with basic supplies and equipment. Instead, Malley and the Crisis Group are focusing on the coronavirus in Iran, Syrian, Yemen, Libya, and Gaza.

What do all of these places have in common?

They're dominated by Islamic terror groups and the United States has sanctioned their governments or endorsed efforts by allies to battle the terror groups or regimes.

The coronavirus is a thin pretext for aiding Islamic terrorists.

Iran has a coronavirus outbreak. Most of these countries do not. Neither the United States nor its allies are preventing humanitarian aid, medicines, food, or medical equipment, from reaching them.

False claims of sanctions on medical aid are being used to help Islamic terrorists get cash and weapons.

It’s an old and despicable routine tying together Democrats, radical lefty media outlets and non-profits, who have chosen to ignore thousands of senior citizens dying in Europe and America, to rally support for an imaginary coronavirus crisis in Islamic terror territories combined with a heavy dose of bashing Israel.

Israel's Teva donated six million doses of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus in the United States. Israeli open source ventilator technology is being released free of charge.

What have the “Palestinians” done for us in this crisis for all the billions we’ve given them?

A Gaza imam praised the coronavirus as a soldier of Allah. The Islamic preacher, speaking on Al-Aqsa TV, a broadcast system run by Hamas, praised the virus for having "hit all 50 states. An hour ago, they said on TV that in California... They said that they expect 58% of California to be infected within two months. They talk about 25 million infected people in just one of the 50 states. Allah be praised."

"Are there people infected with the coronavirus? Allah be praised!" the hateful cleric ranted on Hamas TV. "The numbers in Italy: 450 victims yesterday. There is a victim there every 8 minutes... China is second to Italy with 3,300 victims. What is going on? Allah be praised! This the greatness of Allah."

"The Muslims are the people who are least infected," he went on to claim. "I contacted senior doctors, and they told me that as of this moment, there is not a single case in Gaza."

That was in late March. How about we take the word of this top Gazan expert broadcast on the station run by the terrorists in charge of the area.

Not a single case in Gaza. Only non-Muslims fall victim to this biological soldier of Allah.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Pat Leahy, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Senator Thomas Carper, Senator Jeff Merkley, Senator Tom Udall, Sherrod Brown, and other Gaza Firsters are welcome to contact this gentleman for more details about the non-existent coronavirus crisis in Gaza.

Preferably in a personal briefing.

Meanwhile, Hamas has threatened to begin shelling Israel, and use the coronavirus as a secondary weapon, if it doesn’t get the Qatari money on time. The Islamic terror group boasted that it “can send half of Israeli society into the bomb shelters, which will increase the number of coronavirus cases.”

That would make the virus a literal “soldier of Allah.”

There is a reasonable response to threats like this in a pandemic and it isn’t sending more money. When Islamic terrorists openly talk about weaponizing the virus, the response should involve actual weapons.

Meanwhile the Gaza Firsters, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pat Leahy, and the rest should be asked why they keep demanding that American taxpayer money be diverted from helping people in this country to helping Islamic terrorists who openly cheer the coronavirus as a soldier of Allah.

The shadowy alliance between Iran and the Taliban has killed countless American soldiers over the years. But Iran exported more than just IEDs and training to Afghanistan. The social problems of the Islamic dictatorship traveled along the same highways as the IEDs. But they didn’t kill Americans.

Iran has a huge meth problem. Now, so does Afghanistan.

Under President Trump, the United States has begun bombing Taliban meth labs as the junior Islamic terror regime in Afghanistan began imitating the meth export business of its big brother in Iran. But when Islamic republics get into the drug business, it’s their own people who get addicted to the stuff.

Iran’s coronavirus outbreak, like its meth crisis, has also been exported to its good friends, the Taliban.

The virus crosses Shiite-Sunni barriers as seamlessly as it does international time zones. And the estimated 500,000 infected in Iran are translating into rising infections in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan wasn’t the only country to be infected by Iran. Americans were also infected by Iran.

The first confirmed case in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, was a traveler who came from Iran. But Iran’s shared border with Afghanistan and the millions of Afghans living in Iran, as workers, religious students, and terrorists, makes the spread impossible to stop.

Iran has a huge Afghan population. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, 200,000 Afghans fled the disease-ridden terror state for their home terror state and brought the disease along with them.

And the Taliban are getting nervous.

The Islamic terrorist group had famously gone after health care workers as part of a joint bid with Islamist allies in Pakistan fighting against the polio vaccine. But now the Taliban are promising not to kill health care workers and begging WHO to come back after previously banning the organization

“Our Mujahideen are helping the health workers to spread out the messages about the dangers of COVID-19,” a Taliban spokesman declared.

The Taliban's General Commission for Public Health has issued bulletins advising Afghans to resist the virus by wearing masks, gloves, eating Vitamin C, and Halal foods. Taliban fighters have begun detaining and quarantining Afghans coming back from Iran. While the Taliban's official position is that the coronavirus was sent by "Allah" because of the "sins of mankind" which is to be fought by reading the Koran, its willingness to embrace western medicine, from test kits to PPEs, shows it's worried.

In an unprecedented move for an Islamic organization that had murdered vaccine aid workers and treated medicine as a conspiracy against its regime, the Taliban is telling supporters that, “safety guidelines issued by health organizations, doctors and other health experts must be observed.”

In a further sign that its leadership fears that the virus might spread to its Jihadists and decimate their ranks, a Taliban spokesman announced that, “If, Allah forbid, the outbreak happens in an area where we control the situation then we will stop fighting in that area.”

What really has the Taliban so worried?

The Islamic terror movement has Iran as a cautionary example. Like Communist China, Iran lied to its people about the scope of the outbreak. Its death tolls and case numbers are equally unreliable.

Iran caught the pandemic from China. Both regimes chose to maintain open access as part of their alliance. Instead of protecting its people, the Iranian leadership prioritized its relations with the PRC. While the Iranian regime continued lying to its people, it was carefully taking precautions to protect its leadership, including its 80-year-old leader, even as the pandemic was quietly spreading across Iran.

Officially there was no coronavirus outbreak in Iran. In reality, it was burning through the country.

China’s dishonesty infected Iran and then Iran’s dishonesty infected Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia (the first confirmed fatality in that country was an Afghan), Syria, and spread outward to the United States.

Religious Islamic ties were behind the spread of the coronavirus to Iran with 700 Chinese students studying in seminaries in the Islamic sacred city of Qom identified as the source of the outbreak. Afghans returning from Qom, many of them fellow Shiites, then helped spread the disease into Afghanistan.

The IRGC, Iran’s terror hub, had been recruiting Afghan Shiites to fight in its wars, including in Syria. The Assad government has become an Iranian puppet and so failed to stop travel from Iran to Syria.

Iran needed China, Syria needed Iran, and the Taliban also need Iran. That’s how the virus spread.

The IRGC had provided the Taliban with IEDs, MANPADS, and political support in any “peace deal”. Despite the Taliban’s hostility to Shiites, the Sunni Islamist terror group was reliant on Iran, but it also had the inside information through its IRGC contacts of just how bad the situation in Iran really was.

That is what likely panicked the Taliban.

The pandemic has been at its worst in New York City's dense urban grid. And at 27,000 people per square mile, it's certainly dense. But Kabul, now under coronavirus lockdown, has 12,000 people per square mile. The Taliban would like to take Kabul, but they fear there may not be anything to take.

And the Taliban, like many Islamic terrorist groups, including ISIS, are worried that the virus spreading through the ranks of its fighters could be particularly deadly and cripple its terror campaign. If the virus gets into its training camps, then its entire force infrastructure could be badly compromised.

Even ISIS, which had been frantically urging foreign supporters to come and join the group to supplement its declining numbers, has asked them to stay away during the coronavirus crisis.

But the Taliban, despite being on track to take over the country from a conflicted government, can’t stop the flood of Afghans fleeing Iran and can’t sever its ties to the Islamic terror regime which has been training its Jihadists and providing it with weapons. And that’s why the Taliban are panicking.

While Iran has been happy to supply the Taliban with weapons to kill Americans, it’s not going to bail it out during a pandemic. Not when its own people are dying. If the Taliban needed any evidence of that, it comes from the Afghans in Iran who have come down with the coronavirus and been denied care.

And if the Taliban become infected, the next vector would be through the porous Pakistani border. Infected Afghans have already been detained trying to enter Pakistan, but the Taliban are interlinked with a variety of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, as well as Pakistani and Chinese Islamists.

If the Taliban become ‘super-spreaders’, they could take down quite a few other terror groups.

The world’s Islamic terrorist pipeline begins in Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan, and flows outward across the Middle East and Asia. Its interlinked nature, uniting unlikely allies like Iran and the Taliban, is uniquely vulnerable in a pandemic. A wide variety of Islamic terror groups have been trained in Iran, many then check into Qatari hotels, and make contacts with Islamists in Pakistani and Turkish cities.

These secret networks have proven resilient in the War on Terror, but are vulnerable to the coronavirus where every contact potentially compromises everyone whom he comes into contact with ad infinitum.

The network’s very circuitousness, its dependency on human contact across different countries, makes it the best ally of the pandemic. It’s no wonder that the Taliban, ISIS, and other Islamic terrorists are worried. Even as their political Islamist allies dismiss the threat, the Jihadists understand that the pandemic risks destroying the global infrastructure that makes Islamic terrorism an international threat.

Islamic terrorism is dependent on a handful of ‘backer’ countries, on couriers and training camps, and the coronavirus risks making the entire network of Islamic terrorism into a pandemic vector.

5:00 AM - The alarm clock goes off at an ungodly hour. I hit it to turn it off. It only plays Beethoven's Fifth louder. So I hit it again and again. Then I wash my hands. I get up, put on gloves, and wash my hands. Then I open the window, look out into the darkness, remember that I got up so early to go shopping. And groan.

I put on my ski mask.

"Let's do this," I tell my sleeping wife in a poor imitation of Edward G. Robinson doing Al Capone.

Then I wash my hands again.



5.30 AM - I stagger groggily down an empty street. A huge poster looms overhead. "Stay at home," a cartoon bear dressed in drag announces. "We're in this together."

I pass a shuttered hair salon. Mucinex has paid some illegal aliens minimum wage to paste up posters on its windows. "Listen to facts, not opinion. Don't touch your ears. You're safer at home."

It's a good thing a major corporation is paying people to leave their homes and put up posters telling everyone to stay home.

If the hair salon ever does reopen, Mucinex will not be paying to remove its smug thinly disguised ads. That will be yet another burden on another small business.

A bus passes. Unlike everything else, public transportation hasn't been banned. Its sound system blares. "Stay home. We're in this together."

"Who's we," I wonder.



5:50 A.M. - I get to the local supermarket of a multinational conglomerate that shall remain nameless just as the last of the seniors are leaving with their haul of cardboard toilet paper made in Indonesia.

The line to get in crosses the entire breadth of the shopping plaza. Posters warn that no one without a mask will be allowed inside.

To promote social distancing, only one person per 1,000 store feet will be allowed inside. Outside, 40 people are lined up with hardly any distance between them.

It's illegal to go to a synagogue or a church, but these are the new communal prayers of people crammed into a small space and hoping to be allowed inside to buy food.

And not catch something while waiting.

Finally, Blue America is discovering what life under socialism is like.



6:20 A.M - The line has hardly moved at all. I consider trying to make a minyan on the line and wonder if my religious activity will immediately be deemed non-essential and I'll be arrested.

Fortunately, because of the ski mask, I'm given plenty of space.

I'm the only one wearing a black ski mask in Southern California and I stick out a little bit among the line full of Californians wearing colorful surgical masks as if everyone had fulfilled their mothers' dreams and gone into medicine. The ski mask is a legacy of a trip to Chicago during a polar vortex.

It's the only mask I own.



6:40 A.M - I shouldn't be here.

I'm not short of toilet paper or hand sanitizer. I've been preparing for the apocalypse since I was thirteen. I buy in bulk as a reflex. I have enough toilet paper to last until the election and enough hand sanitizer to be busted by the People's Redistribution Committees going door to door to spot hoarders. Nobody's going to be making toilet paper when we're all living under the cannibal warlords.

But eventually the soul pines for some fresh fruit. And you can't eat hand sanitizer. Not even if you add lemon.



6:50 A.M -  Someone has passed out inside the store. Two ambulances arrive and everyone is evacuated from the store. A store employee has to pry toilet paper out of one evicted woman's hands. Since the package was ripped, the toilet paper has  to be thrown away. There are audible gasps on the line.

Thus far, coronavirus hasn't killed anyone in a supermarket, but standing on line has probably sent someone to the hospital.

The posters on the walls of the nameless conglomerate declare, "We are all in this together."




7:10 A.M- The line begins moving again. I can hardly see it though. Or anything at all through the mask.

Unfortunately they're checking not only for masks, but taking temperatures, and wearing a ski mask meant for a Chicago winter in SoCal has sent my temperature rising too high.

"Sir, you can't go in," a morbidly obese store employee says, spitting out the 'sir' as if it were a poppy seed caught in her teeth.

"Why not?" I demand.

"Your temperature's too high. See, it's 99," she points one thick finger at a digital readout that actually says, "Battery low."

"99 is within the normal human range," I retort.

"Not for nameless multinational conglomerate," says the line commissar, who is of that breed meant to be checking id's and telling people that they can't have things while making "Sir" and "Ma'am" sound like slurs.

"My temperature's only this high because I'm wearing a ski mask. Can I take it off?" I ask.

"Take it off and we can't let you in the store," she snaps. "Now move along. People are waiting."

The line behind me growls with the unfulfilled aspirations of the proletariat for toilet paper.

"I can't get into the store because of my mask and you won't let me in the store without it," I follow up, trying to understand the exact logical parameters of the Catch 22.

"Yep."

"But the mask is my religion. I'm Muslim."

"Uhh go on in."




7:15 A.M - The store is almost empty except for the produce and dairy sections which are packed.

Hungry faces look through the windows, imploring me with their wide eyes to get them some toilet paper.

A greeter at the entrance puts a jealously guarded dab of hand sanitizer on my gloves and tells me, "We're all in this together."

"Two legs bad, four legs good," I reply.

The produce section is reasonably stocked if you like diseased avocados and strawberries that were frozen during the Great Depression as part of FDR's Great Strawberry Reserve project. The only toilet paper is some see-through stuff made from recycled copies of the Whole Earth Catalog. Not that I need any. My neighbor subscribes to the New York Times. The Times isn't on display here, but Prepper Magazine is. I had no idea land mines and MREs were so cheap now.

Every 5 seconds, the loudspeaker blares, "We're all in this together. And sometimes together is apart."

People elbow past each other in the produce section. Meanwhile every synagogue and church within 50 miles has been shut down.

Thank Newsom.



7.30 A.M - I only got half the things I wanted. And they're the wrong half. But at least there's no line for the cash register.

I head to the self-checkout line, where plexiglass barriers protect the machine and me from giving each other any diseases. An automatic sprayer hits me in the face with disinfectant and then sprays every single piece of produce I bought with toxic chemicals.

For my protection.

After every poisoned product is scanned and every inflated price is read off, in a smug robotic voice, the self-checkout machine proclaims, "We're all in this together."



7:40 A.M - I'm finally out of the nameless supermarket. I weave past a vast line of people. And they begin to cheer as they haven't cheered for any of the "heroic health care workers".

Has the line begun to move? No.

Then I finally realize it. I'm the only shopper leaving the supermarket with no toilet paper. I've left some toilet paper for the starving masses.

For them.

Tears run down my eyes at the tribute.

And then I wash my hands.

As the coronavirus was doing its deadly work, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Senator Elizabeth Warren dispatched a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services demanding racial and ethnic data about the sufferers. Why demand information of that sort? Identity politics for profit.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez made that agenda even more obvious by tweeting, "COVID deaths
are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities. Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions. Inequality is a comorbidity. COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations."

New York City’s government had made the death toll much worse by ignoring the coronavirus and focusing on racism instead. New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot had wrongly told New Yorkers that they couldn't catch the disease on the subway while focusing on her "racial equity lens."

The racialization of the coronavirus is a cynical attempt to shift the subject from fighting the virus to divisive identity politics. But the “wealth gap” and “environmental racism” are not killing people.

While coronavirus cases have spiked in poorer areas of New York City, they’re highest in the wealthiest areas of Los Angeles. What Beverly Hills and the Bronx have in common isn’t wealth or race.

Why else does Beverly Hills have twice as many cases as Compton?

At the same time, in some places, black people are dying at higher rates than white people. And while lefties reflexively respond to any instance of disparate impact by crying racism, the reasons are more complicated than the cynical political narratives being advanced by Elizabeth Warren or AOC.

The coronavirus hits the elderly hardest. And the elderly are most at risk in multigenerational households. The groups that are suffering the worst from the coronavirus are multigenerational.

Asian people have the highest rates of multigenerational living in the United States at 29%. 26% of African-Americans live in multi-generational households, but only 16% of whites do.

In New York City, a city that has largely lost its white working class, the white multigenerational numbers are far lower. Much of the white population is upscale, young and single. That is a group that is far less vulnerable to the coronavirus than the older multigenerational black families living in the Bronx.

But the coronavirus is also killing the remaining multigenerational white communities in the area.

An Italian-American woman and her three children all died of the coronavirus while four other family members were infected after a family dinner in a high-profile case in nearby New Jersey. Orthodox Jews, who are as likely as Asian-Americans to live in multi-generational household, have also been suffering.

What unites these groups is not racism, but a more traditional way of life.

The coronavirus has been hitting blue urban areas where white people are less likely to live in traditional ways. As the virus heads deeper into the country, going beyond the urban and suburban enclaves where immigrants and tourists nurtured the pandemic, it will impact more traditional white communities.

And yet, because dense urban areas like New York are its best feeding ground, it’s possible that there will be racially disproportionate numbers. But it will be due to the collapse of the urban middle class, not racism. The same trends that priced the middle class out of major cities, leaving no middle ground between poor urban welfare housing and a white upper class, are responsible for these numbers.

The white working class and middle class may have been saved by being forced out of the cities. But this is a collateral effect caused by the wealthy white elites who are Warren and AOC’s biggest backers.

The Chinese virus does not have to affect minorities more. It hit those parts of Los Angeles that are older and more prone to socializing. Why is Beverly Hills so much harder hit than Compton or Boyle Heights? Its average age is also much older than Compton. Bel Air has the fourth highest average age in Los Angeles. So it’s not surprising that it’s among the places hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Bronx in New York has a much higher average age than Compton or Boyle Heights in LA. That’s why it’s badly affected by the coronavirus, while Compton and Boyle Heights, outwardly similar, aren’t. While high real estate prices hit the white working class of New York City hardest, there has also been an ongoing exodus of black millennials from the city. The Bronx has become more diverse and older.

Lefties like AOC want a simplistic narrative of racism, but that ideology is exactly what politicized the disease and initially led her allies in New York City to insist that fearing the virus was racist.

Black people are dying because Mayor Bill de Blasio and his allies put race ahead of public health. Warren and Cortez want to do the same thing all over again. And there will be blood on their hands.

Identity politics is a tragedy. And it’s another reason why black people are dying of the Chinese virus.

"Something that is scaring me, when I read the comments and some of the reactions, my people, black people, please, please understand that coronavirus is ... you can get it," Idris Elba had posted on social media after coming down with the virus. "There are so many stupid, ridiculous conspiracy theories about black people not being able to get it. ...That is the quickest way to get more black people killed."

Elba was addressing the widespread memes on social media which claimed that black people were immune because of melanin. Memes falsely claimed that there were no coronavirus cases in Africa. Media editorials by African-American writers urged black people not to believe that they were immune.

The real racism was an internal belief in racial superiority spread by hate groups like the Nation of Islam.

“The good news is, we should not be overly anxious about an attack or about a virus, but what we should be anxious about is our slowness to disconnect ourselves from a nation that is in the crosshairs of the Lord of the worlds," Farrakhan's spokeswoman, Minister Ava Muhammad of the NOI, had claimed.

Democrats, including Barack Obama and Rep. Jim Clyburn, a close Biden ally and the third-ranking House Democrat, who is in charge of coronavirus stimulus oversight, have met with the hate group leader.

In Milwaukee, ProPublica, a left-wing site, documented a higher black death rate even as it noted the, “pushback among those who recalled other painful government restrictions — including segregation and mass incarceration — on where black people could walk and gather."

This is an attempt at racializing cultural differences and then blaming racism.

The multigenerational vector of the coronavirus reveals multiple tragedies. The Chinese virus is a social evil that seems to attack good social behavior, like going to churches and synagogues, socializing across generations, and making sure that grandchildren interact with their grandparents, while rewarding bad social behavior, isolation and distancing. It’s almost designed to further fragment American social life.

Its impact also reveals the preexisting social distancing caused by the collapsing American family and the tribalism that fragmented multicultural communities living side by side, and yet infinitely far apart.

Instead of healing the nation, Warren, Harris, Booker, Cortez, and other Democrats divide it even more.

At a time when the country should be coming together, their only thought is of how to tear it apart for their political profit, racializing the virus and then blaming it on racism, instead of on Communist China, which lied about the pandemic, may have created it, and then cornered the market on protective gear.

But blaming China doesn’t serve Warren or AOC’s political interests. They would rather blame America.

This year, Americans will have a choice between President Trump, who is uniting Americans in the fight against the Chinese virus, and Democrats, who want to divide us along the lines of identity politics.

Our true test as a nation will come when we choose between racial division and national unity.