Pathogen Pipeline: Chinese Agents In Canada Shipped Deadly Pathogens To The Wuhan Institute Of Virology The most likely source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/chinese-scientist-exported-deadly-pathogens-wuhan-lloyd-billingsley/

It is “extremely unlikely” that the virus causing Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), but for the World Health Organization there’s more to the story. According to WHO mouthpiece Peter Ben Emerek, the issue does not even warrant further study. 

“Phew. That’s China off the hook, then,” wrote Miranda Devine of the New York Post.

Contrary to Emerek, a food safety and nutrition specialist, not a virologist, the WIV warrants plenty of further study. Consider, for example, recent revelations from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Two Canadian government scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory amidst an RCMP  [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigation and internal review have been let go from the Public Health Agency of Canada,” Karen Pauls of the CBC reported on February 6. Canada’s health agency gave no explanation for the dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a virologist from Tianjin, China, and her husband, Keding Cheng.

As Pauls explains, in 2017-18 Qiu made at least five trips to China, including one to train scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “which does research with the most deadly pathogens.” According to Canadian government officials, Qiu was acting in response to the WIV’s request for virus samples.

In July, 2019, Cheng, Qiu and her students from China were removed from the National Microbiology Lab (NML), Canada’s only Level 4 lab, over a possible “policy breach” and administrative matter.

The Left’s Sinister Conspiracy to Silence Conservatives What are leftists afraid of? David Limbaugh

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/tyrannical-lefts-sinister-conspiracy-silence-david-limbaugh/

Why does the left want to silence conservatives? Why do rank-and-file Democrats go along with this abomination? Leftists have bad intentions, but how about the Democrats who enable them? I prefer to think they’ve being manipulated.

As worried as we should be about the hyperexploding national debt and our inevitable fiscal catastrophe, I am even more worried about the left’s success in turning America into a police state (ironic, given its simultaneous war on the police).

People still able to summon their rational faculties during this pandemic have to be concerned about this insane, concerted effort to control people’s thoughts and speech. How can those who purport to rage against the fascism of former President Donald Trump, which was an abject Democratic and media myth, promote actual fascism in our culture?

It strains the mind to imagine that fair people can deceive themselves into believing that silencing and canceling people for “offensive” views is consistent with our liberty tradition. Some rationalize that because government is not the moving agency in this censorship, and because the Constitution only restricts state action, not that of private entities, there is no violation of our constitutional principles.

Video: What’s Up With Fox News? An investigative reporter provides his findings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/video-whats-fox-news-frontpagemagcom/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Investigative Reporter Peter Barry Chowka.

Peter discusses What’s Up With Fox News?, providing his findings after his investigations and analysis.

Don’t miss it!

Slouching Toward Post-Journalism Martin Gurri

https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting

Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting.

The digital age exploded this business model. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. The survival of the rest remains an open question.

Led by the New York Times, a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall. This approach carried its own risks. The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm.

Yet Another Big Lie Behind Biden’s $1.9 Trillion COVID Bill

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/15/yet-another-big-lie-behind-bidens-1-9-trillion-covid-bill/

Last week, governors and mayors from around the country came to the White House with cups in hand for COVID aid and found a president eager to listen to their pleas of poverty.

“They’ve been working on their own in many cases,” President Joe Biden said, promising to come to the rescue with $350 billion in federal “relief” funds.

It was a good act.

But back home, states across the country are reporting huge surpluses, thanks not only to previous federal COVID handouts (which totaled more than $400 billion) but because tax revenues are surging as the economy rapidly rebounds.

As the City Journal reports, “Undoubtedly some states and cities have faced challenges, but nationwide, state and local governments have seen tax revenue rebound to pre-pandemic levels, even as they have continued to receive a large influx of federal funds.”

Don’t believe it? Look at this sampling from recent news accounts about states’ running budget surpluses, some of them at historic levels, many of them a surprise to local lawmakers.

Police call for apology after U of M student fabricates account of police misconduct

https://alphanewsmn.com/police-call-for-apology-after-u-of-m-student-fabricates-account-of-police-misconduct/

One has to start wondering how many anti-police lies are gotten away with because there’s no video to show what really happened. I’d feel a lot better if the organizations which profess to want better interactions between police and civilians would come out and condemn this student because what he did will inevitably cause people to question others’ stories claiming police misconduct. DPS

Police leaders are calling for an apology after a University of Minnesota student falsely accused campus police of mistreating him because of his race.

Earlier this month, a student posted on Instagram that he was stopped by campus police because he is “a brown man” and said he was afraid he “would be shot.”

Officers with the University of Minnesota Police Department were searching for a suspect in an armed robbery just before 2 a.m. on Feb. 1 and believed the student in question matched the suspect’s description. The student was stopped about a block away from the site of the robbery.

“I was able to show the officer my University ID saying that I was a university student just trying to clear my mind by taking a late night stroll but they wouldn’t believe me. After multiple questions, they turned off their lights and left me alone: no apology, no explanation, nothing. Just me: mentally and emotionally tormented with an experience that will last a lifetime,” the student said, claiming he had his “hands up” while the officers had their “hands on their guns.”

Impeachment: McConnell’s Verdict

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/impeachment-mcconnells-verdict/91420/

It is one of the ironies of the trial of President Trump on a charge of incitement of insurrection that the remarks most likely to be studied by historians is the speech delivered after the verdict — not guilty — was brought in. It was after the Senate ordered the outcome be sent for safekeeping with the Secretary of State, and the court of impeachment was adjourned, that Senator Mitch McConnell unloaded.

His speech is likely to go down as one of the most remarkable ever delivered in the Senate. It was a constitutional highwire act worthy of the Great Wallenda. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it might well prove to be more damning to Mr. Trump than anything said by the prosecution — more damning, even, than a guilty verdict from the Senate would have been, though that can be but guesswork.

Mr. McConnell had just finished voting to acquit a former president he has clearly come to detest. He evidently felt that he had to say something to justify, or explain, that decision. So he opened with a five-word sentence. “January 6th,” he said, “was a disgrace.” Americans “attacked their own government,” “used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like,” and “beat and bloodied our own police.”

They also, Mr. McConnell said, “tried to hunt down the Speaker” and built a “gallows” while chatting “about murdering the Vice President.” They did this, he added, “because they’d been fed wild, falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry. He lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

The Far Left, the Far Right, and Democracy in Germany James Kierstead

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-far-left-the-far-right-and-democracy-in-germany/

“Out of the ruins of one of history’s most destructive tyrannies, West Germans built one of the modern world’s most advanced and successful examples of the liberal democratic state, the city of laws, the Rechstaat. They did it while an offshoot of the other of the great tyrannies of the twentieth century carried on its work behind the Iron Curtain in the country’s eastern half.”

On February 5, 2020, Thomas Kemmerich, of the centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) was elected premier (Ministerpräsident) of Thüringen, the former East German state (Land). Elections of state premiers don’t usually make headlines, but this time was different. Kemmerich was elected after the incumbent premier, Bodo Ramelow of the far-left Left Party (Die Linke), had failed to gain a majority in two previous rounds of voting. In the third round, the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, “Alternative for Germany”) dropped its own candidate for the premiership and voted for Kemmerich, who was then elected as premier with the support of members from the AfD, FDP and the CDU (the centre-right Christian Democratic Union). It’s not clear whether the FDP and CDU members knew that the AfD were going to support Kemmerich.

Whether they did or not, in accepting the votes of the AfD, these parties (or at least their Thüringen caucuses) violated a clear taboo in contemporary German politics. Ever since the emergence of the AfD as a significant force in the 2017 federal elections, all of the country’s major parties have agreed to lock out the newcomers, refusing to ally or co-operate with them. In accepting votes from the AfD, even if they also accepted votes from two other parties, Thomas Kemmerich was seen as having broken that compact, as were the Thüringen caucuses of the FDP and CDU.

And since the CDU is currently the senior partner in Germany’s coalition government as well as the party of Angela Merkel, things didn’t stop there. The day after Kemmerich’s election, Merkel, speaking from South Africa, pronounced the vote “unforgivable”. Merkel has been Chancellor since 2005, making her the longest-serving current head of government in the European Union. She’s widely respected both internationally and in Germany, where she’s often known affectionately as “Mutti” (Mum). It should come as no surprise, then, that her swift and clear condemnation of Kemmerich’s election made waves, in Thüringen and in the CDU.

Black Lives Matter Rioters Bite Cops, Assault 72-Year-Old Man Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/black-lives-matter-rioters-bite-cops-assault-72-daniel-greenfield/

It’s okay. Impeachment over that “insurrection” is over so it’s okay to start launching new insurrections.

Police arrested nearly a dozen anti-NYPD protesters and a member of the press was assaulted during a demonstration in Manhattan Friday night, according to the NYPD.

From the very neutral language, you know these weren’t conservatives. 

The demonstration was peaceful until an American flag was burned and protesters rushed at police officers, according to the NYPD.

It was mostly peaceful until the violence began.

The situation quickly dissolved into chaos as police vehicles were vandalized and a mob attacked a Daily News photographer, police said.

Lots of passive voice. Events happen for no apparent reason. The “situation” somehow becomes “chaotic”. It’s like this is a natural phenomenon with no connection to human behaviors. Imagine media coverage of the Capitol Riot describing how the “situation quickly dissolved into chaos as some protesters grappled into police while others wandered through Congress” as opposed to, “Mitt Romney was seconds from death at the hands of a mob determined to kill everyone.”

The Daily News identified the photographer as Sam Costanza, who said a group of 10 to 15 protesters attacked him. The photographer said he might have a broken nose, according to The Daily News.

That’s about as many members of the press as were injured at the Capitol Riot.

The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story  Like so many fake news stories about Donald Trump and his supporters, millions of Americans believe the Sicknick story as truth; even a correction won’t change their minds. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/14/the-new-york-times-retracts-the-sicknick-story/

In a quiet but stunning correction, the New York Times backed away from its original report that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by a Trump supporter wielding a fire extinguisher during the January 6 melee at the Capitol building. Shortly after American Greatness published my column Friday that showed how the Times gradually was backpedaling on its January 8 bombshell, the paper posted this caveat:

UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.

The paper continued to revise its story within the body of the original January 8 story: “Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.”

What’s missing, however, is how the Times first described what happened to Sicknick. “Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.”

The account of Sicknick’s death was reported as fact, not speculation or rumor. Further, it appears that the anonymous sources were not law enforcement officials but people “close” to the police department—which means they could have been anyone from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to inveterate liar U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser.

Not only was the Times’ untrue story about Sicknick’s death accepted as fact by every news media organization from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, political pundits on the NeverTrump Right also regurgitated the narrative that Sicknick was “murdered” as did lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

In an outrageous effort to create more favorable optics before the impeachment trial, House Democrats honored Sicknick in a rare memorial at the Capitol Rotunda on February 3. Joe Biden, in a statement issued after Donald Trump was acquitted Saturday afternoon, repeated the lie about Sicknick. “It was nearly two weeks ago that Jill and I paid our respects to Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who laid in honor in the Rotunda after losing his life protecting the Capitol from a riotous, violent mob on January 6, 2021.”