PrairiePundit

 DC Daily Journal: The Left pretends they’re open and tolerant. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the White House was caught strong-arming and screaming for censorship behind closed doors. Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed to podcaster Joe Rogan that members of President Biden’s administration pressured and even berated his employees, demanding they remove certain content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking candidly, Zuckerberg recounted the intense challenges his company faced in balancing freedom of expression with government demands. Meta’s recent announcement to end its controversial fact-checking practices and lift restrictions on speech marks a significant shift in policy. According to Zuckerberg, the decision reflects the need to “restore free expression” across its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. “During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program,” Zuckerberg explained, “they also tried to censor an...

 Blaze: Blaze News original: Let us never forget the left's reprehensible behavior toward fellow Americans who refused COVID jabs After COVID-19 vaccines became available in early 2021, not everybody in America was down with the getting the jabs. Typical vaccines take years of testing prior to approval, but since the COVID vaccines were produced with lightning speed, lots of folks were concerned and resisted getting the shots. Readers of Blaze News won't soon forget what happened next. Vaccine mandates and steadily growing pressure to get the jab turned into an all-out assault on "anti-vaxxers" by the government, businesses, the mainstream media, celebrities, politicians, and the medical community. In September 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring federal workers to be vaccinated; that same month, he announced a sweeping vaccination mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees, which the Supreme Court later blocked . In October 2021, ...

 Red State: ... Speaking to Rogan, Zuckerberg revealed that representatives of the Biden administration would call his employees and "scream and curse" at them over content that made their narrative over COVID and the vaccines look fragile. This included memes. "These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse," said Zuckerberg, noting that this is all documented. Rogan asked if any of the phone calls were recorded, to which Zuckerberg said sadly they weren't, but that there are emails in the open now that prove just how crazy the Biden admin got with them. "It basically got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not going to take down things that are true, that's ridiculous,'" said Zuckerberg. "They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how ten years from now you're going to see an ad that says 'Okay, if you took a COVID vacc...

 Daily Mail; China is reportedly being ravaged by a mysterious viral outbreak that is overwhelming some hospitals. Videos on social media appear to show hospital units overrun with patients in face masks, and parents holding sick children in long lines in pediatric units. There have also been unverified reports that crematoriums and funeral homes are being overwhelmed. The alarming scenes and lack of official commentary have led some to draw similarities to the early days of the Covid outbreak in China. Local news reports have blamed a little-known virus called human metapneumovirus (HMPV) — which normally causes a mild cold-like illness — for the latest outbreak, though officials have yet to confirm this. The situation is similar to winter 2022/23 when China was hit with a wave of mycoplasma pneumonia cases, a condition dubbed 'white lung' , which is also normally mild. That outbreak was blamed on children having low natural immunity due to the effects of China's harsh lo...

 NY Post: Spy chiefs “silenced” researchers in the Defense Department and FBI who discovered strong evidence that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese lab, The Post has learned. As a result, their findings were kept out of an August 2021 report to President Biden on the origins of the global pandemic. That report concluded that the virus behind COVID “was probably not genetically engineered.” After the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, China, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency began trying to figure out exactly where it came from — whether SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats into humans, or whether the virus was man-made and came from a lab accident. The “zoonotic origin” theory was backed by powerful members of the public health establishment, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and questions about a possible “lab leak” were repeatedly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. But the researchers’ analysis compiled dozens of data points in favor of a lab leak — compared with a “paucity...

 DC Daily Journal: ... The FBI is reportedly abusing its security clearance process to “purge” political conservatives from the bureau, according to recent whistleblower disclosures reviewed by the New York Post. The federal law enforcement agency’s Security Division has been allegedly suspending or revoking clearances for employees whose political affiliation or COVID-19 vaccination status are suspect. A supervisory special agent who formerly worked in the division alleges this is the case. The unnamed agent, described as “a registered Democrat” and represented by the nonprofit Empower Oversight, claims that high-ranking officials in the division believed “if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as security concerns and unworthy to work at the FBI.” In Marcus Allen’s case, a former FBI staff operations specialist (SOS) suspended without pay for more than two years, officials ignored “possibly exculpatory information” and overruled inv...

 Federalist: Former NIH Director Admits Government Was Top Source Of Covid Misinformation  Former NIH Director Francis Collins admits there was no ‘science or evidence’ to support social distancing the government used censorship to push. There was poor leadership at all levels in pushing the false narrative. 

 American Action News: The blue city of Madison, Wisconsin, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in COVID-19 relief funds to illegal immigrants, according to the Institute for Reforming Government (IRG). The funds were appropriated by the federal government to Madison’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds ( SLFRF ) and intended to aid city residents in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic and public safety lockdown measures. Roughly 10% of the total SLFRF were funneled by Madison into nonprofit organizations providing aid to illegal immigrants, equating to about $700,000 dollars, according to an IRG Center for Investigative Oversight (CIO) probe, the results of which were released on Wednesday. “It is troubling to learn that the City of Madison is funneling taxpayer dollars intended to help Wisconsinites to illegal immigrants. Taxpayers need answers,” IRG’s General Counsel and Director of Oversight Jake Curtis said in a statement on Wednesday. “Our team at the Center fo...

 Headline USA: Secret Gov’t Grant Proposal May Offer ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of COVID Origin 'We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident...' See also:  Esteemed molecular biologist warns of 'smoking gun' evidence COVID-19 was engineered by researchers at Chinese lab ... American and Chinese virologists lobbied to receive a $14 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, for funding to engineer bat viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 to examine how they could jump to human transmission. According to the Wall Street Journal , "The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site." The proposal involv...

 NY Post: Amazon ‘censored’ COVID-19 vaccine books after ‘feeling pressure’ from Biden White House: docs The results of the vaccine were that it did not prevent people from getting Covid.  Censoring those who questioned the efficacy of the vaccine meant that it took longer to find a better solution.  It turned out that the Biden regime was guilty of spreading "misinformation" about the efficacy of the vaccine. See also: ‘Who Can We Talk To?’: White House Leaned On Amazon To Suppress Vaccine ‘Propaganda,’ Emails Show And:  DCNF Reporter Reveals How Biden Admin Is Quietly Funding A ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ In Congressional Testimony And:  Jim Jordan Subpoenas National Science Foundation For Communications Discussing ‘Content Moderation On Social Media’

 City Journal: It’s instructive to observe where Americans are moving, and where they are leaving. Such comparisons are particularly revealing when made during, or immediately following, a crisis, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. States dealt with that crisis quite differently. Movement statistics from recent years help to establish which of the 50 “laboratories of democracy” responded best to the pandemic. The Census Bureau publishes annual data on each state’s net domestic migration—that is, how many U.S. residents have moved to a given state, minus the number who moved from that state to elsewhere in the U.S. The second quarter of 2020 (from April 1 to June 30 of that year) was the first quarter to take place entirely after Covid-19 was known to have hit our shores; the most recent statistics available are from July 1, 2023. Looking at net domestic migration over that 13-quarter span yields some interesting results—and some clear winners and losers. Among large states (tho...

 American Action News: U.S. public pensions have invested more than $68 billion in China and Hong Kong over the past three years despite the country’s struggling economy and allegations of human rights abuses, according to the bipartisan advocacy group Future Union. In total, 42 states have at least one public pension that has invested in Chinese or Hong Kong assets in the last three years, and a total of 29 out of 74 pensions have made new investments in the past year, according to a report from Future Union. From the start of 2023 through October, institutional investors have pulled out over $31 billion in stocks and bonds from the Chinese financial system, culminating in the worst outflow since 2001 as stockholders grow increasingly pessimistic about their investments amid the country’s economic uncertainty. California pensions have the most allocated to adversarial assets, with the California Public Employees Retirement System having invested more than $4.8 billion in the las...

 National Review: Michael Shellenberger’s first brush with social-media censorship came in 2020 when he was censored by Facebook for sharing accurate information about climate change. In the years since, Shellenberger has reported extensively on what he calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a network of government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and social-media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials for holding disfavored views. Shellenberger was “shocked” by the internal Twitter documents that Elon Musk shared with him and a handful of other independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. The documents, which served as the basis for their Twitter Files reporting series, revealed examples of U.S. intelligence and security organizations, including the Department of Defense, working with the platform to censor information. “I sort of knew that was happening, but I...

 Just the News: GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says that he believes that pharmaceutical company Pfizer may have lied about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the effectiveness could be as low as one percent.  "In this case, we're pretty sure they were lying about the efficacy and the effectiveness of this drug, saying that this ... vaccine was 95% effective, when in reality, it may have been less than one percent effective," Paxton said on the Wednesday edition of the " Just the News, No Noise " TV show.  Last month, Paxton announced a lawsuit against Pfizer, claiming that the company misrepresented the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine to its consumers.  "Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines. Whereas the Biden Administration weaponized the pandemic to force illegal public health decrees on the public and enrich pharmaceutical companies, I will use every tool I have to protect our citizens who were misled and harmed ...

 The Hill: Senate Republicans called on President Biden to restrict travel between the U.S. and China in response to a rise in respiratory infections among children in China. Since mid-October, China has reported an increase in respiratory diseases, which officials attributed to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. Chinese authorities have said these infections are being fueled by known pathogens like the flu, RSV, COVID-19 and a common bacterial infection caused by mycoplasma pneumoniae. In their letter to Biden, however, Senate Republicans repeatedly made references to a “mystery” and “unknown” illness affecting children in China. “As you know, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a long history of lying about public health crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCP’s obfuscation of the truth, and lack of transparency, robbed the United States of vital knowledge about the disease and its origin,” the letter stated. The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring the situat...

 Reuters: Pfizer (PFE.N) has been sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who on Thursday accused the drugmaker of misrepresenting the efficacy of its widely-used COVID-19 vaccine. In a complaint filed in a Lubbock County state court, Paxton said it was misleading for Pfizer to claim its vaccine was 95% effective because it offered a "relative risk reduction" for people to who took it. Paxton said the claim was based on only two months of clinical trial data, and vaccine recipients' "absolute risk reduction" showed that the vaccine was just 0.85% effective. He also said the pandemic got worse even after people started taking the vaccine, developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech (22UAy.DE) . "Pfizer intentionally misrepresented the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine and censored persons who threatened to disseminate the truth in order to facilitate fast adoption of the product and expand its commercial opportunity," the complaint said. The ...

 Washington Times: More whistleblowers have stepped forward to tell Congress that high-ranking FBI officials are targeting agents, specifically former military members, for their political beliefs and trying to force them out of the bureau. A Marine and other military veterans at the FBI have been accused of disloyalty to the U.S. because they fit the profile of a supporter of former President Donald Trump, according to two disclosures sent to lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee. The Washington Times obtained copies of the disclosures. The whistleblowers said Jeffrey Veltri, deputy assistant director of the bureau’s security division, and Dena Perkins , assistant section chief, specifically pursued employees who served in the Marine Corps or other military branches. They stripped the agents of security clearances, which sidelined them on the job and pushed them toward the exit, according to the disclosures. The whistleblower disclosures say Mr. Veltri and Ms. Perkins eith...

 Fox Business: With all the chaos and heartbreaking loss of life around the world today, few noticed the Treasury Department drop a financial bomb: The deficit for fiscal year 2023 was $1.7 trillion, growing 23 percent in a single year as the Treasury used $879 billion just to service the federal debt. But "Bidenomics" means the worst is yet to come, and multi-trillion-dollar deficits are the new normal. The impetus for these massive deficits is federal government spending, which tipped the scales at $6.1 trillion last year. Government receipts, meanwhile, were $4.4 trillion, woefully short of the $5 trillion previously forecasted. A slowing economy and counterproductive tax increases were key drivers behind the $457 billion drop in receipts from the prior fiscal year. Yet, even these reduced revenues would have resulted in a balanced budget if President Biden had simply allowed spending to return to its pre-pandemic level. Instead, Treasury outlays are up 38 percent today ...

 NY Post: Feds spent $3.3B on office furniture while employees worked from home during pandemic This looks like government waste. 

Bloomberg:   Office prices in the US are due for a crash, and the commercial real estate market faces at least another nine months of declines, according to Bloomberg’s latest Markets Live Pulse survey. About two-thirds of the 919 respondents surveyed by Bloomberg believe that the US office market will only rebound after a severe collapse. An even greater majority says that US commercial real estate prices won’t hit bottom until the second half of 2024 or later. That’s bad news for the $1.5 trillion of commercial real estate debt that according to Morgan Stanley is due before the end of 2025. Refinancing it won’t be easy, particularly the roughly 25% of commercial property that is office buildings. A Green Street index of commercial property prices has already fallen 16% from its peak in March 2022. Commercial property values are getting hit hard by the Federal Reserve’s aggressive tightening campaign, which lifts a key cost of owning property — the expense of financing. But lender...