Hispanic voters shifting to the GOP stems from former President Donald Trump’s values and the Republican Party can lock in the gains provided GOP officials remain focused on the same values, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says.
Rubio, a Cuban-American, told Breitbart News that Hispanic voters in Miami swung to Trump in 2020 in part because they’re against socialism.
“These are communities made up of people who value commonsense wisdom and working class values,” Rubio said.
“That’s what their life is built on. Those are two things the left has abandoned. You hear lots of people talk about whether it’s socialism. Socialism is a part of it. Socialism is a part of the commonsense part of it. In their mind, if I were to step in the shoes of someone who maybe voted for Obama in 2012, then voted for Donald Trump in 2020, they would say to you: ‘Look, I came from a socialist country. I fled it. Why the hell would we do that here?’ It makes no sense to them.”
According to exit polls, Trump saw more support from Hispanics in 2020 than 2016. In several key areas, Hispanic votes shifted significantly. For instance, in Florida, 35 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump in 2016; in 2020, that figure was close to 50 percent, according to a CNN exit poll. Overall, Democrat Joe Biden, who won the election, won 65 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote.
A poll conducted in April (pdf) on behalf of the National Republican Senatorial Committee found that a majority of Hispanic voters said they support capitalism over socialism and worry that America is declining so much that their children will not have the same opportunities that drew them to the country in the first place.
About 50 percent of respondents said that Democrat policies end up hurting Hispanic families and generally aligned with conservatives’ views on biological males playing in women’s sports, cancel culture, and the power Big Tech holds.
“If you look at these poll numbers, Hispanics across the country are Republicans,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told reporters in Washington last month.
Latinos vote at a polling station in El Gallo Restaurant in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2016. (David McNew/Getty Images)
New Mexico Democratic political consultant Sisto Abeyta told Axios recently that Democrats need to turn their attention to areas previously believed to be solid blue.
“Democrats need to change the narrative and start talking about jobs,” Abeyta said. “They need to invest and engage and not take these districts for granted. These voters are up for grabs now.”
The shift toward the GOP among Hispanics will be permanent, Rubio told Breitbart, provided Republicans continue to focus on the values that Trump promoted.
“I think President Trump was doing a lot of things based on common sense. In their mind, it made all the sense in the world. They don’t understand why their side is against it. And then working class values—most of these people here don’t care what you do with your life, they don’t want to tell you how to live your life, who to marry, who to love, and so forth—but you’re asking them to abandon three or four thousand years of accumulated human wisdom because a handful of crazy professors have convinced people everything we knew was true is no longer true on things like gender, on this or that,” Rubio said.
“These guys just got turned off by all that, and I think it accelerated through the summer on the pandemic and the rioting and all of that. I think that shift is permanent unless we as Republicans go back to being who we used to be—then we give these people no political home.” Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieberFollow Zachary on Parler: @zackstieber
A suspect is detained by Australian police in a sting against organized crime in this undated handout photo released on June 8, 2021. (Australian Federal Police/Handout via Reuters) US News
Hundreds of suspects have been arrested and tons of drugs seized in one of the largest and most sophisticated global law enforcement operations ever, which relied on an FBI-developed encrypted messaging app that became popular with members of criminal networks and used to ensnare them.
In a series of large-scale sting operations across 16 countries over the past few days, European law enforcement agencies, along with the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), made more than 800 arrests and seized over 32 tons of drugs—chiefly cannabis and cocaine—along with 6 tons of synthetic drug precursors and over $48 million in currencies and cryptocurrencies, Europol said in a release.
Suspects are detained by Australian police in a sting against organized crime in this undated handout photo released on June 8, 2021. (Australian Federal Police/Handout via Reuters)
The operation, called Greenlight/Trojan Shield, is further expected to lead to “countless spin-off operations” in the weeks to come, Europol said, potentially leading to more seizures and arrests.
“This operation is an exceptional success by the authorities in the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and the other European members of the Operational Task Force,” Europol’s Deputy Executive Director Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said in a statement.
The operation relied on an encrypted messaging app developed by the FBI, in close coordination with the Australian Federal Police, called ANOM. Its aim was to target global organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering operations. Over time, ANOM grew to service with more than 12,000 encrypted devices used by members of over 300 criminal syndicates operating in over 100 countries—including the Italian mafia, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and international drug trafficking syndicates, Europol said.
Australian Federal Police are seen during an operation against organized crime in this undated handout photo released June 8, 2021. (Australian Federal Police/Handout via Reuters)
The FBI, along with agencies from the 16 other member countries of the coalition, then exploited the intelligence from some 27 million messages obtained by monitoring ANOM as its “criminal users discussed their criminal activities.”
In developing the messaging platform, the FBI took advantage of the huge demand among criminal networks for encrypted communication platforms to facilitate their criminal activities. After law enforcement agencies in 2020 and in 2021 dismantled two encrypted messaging platforms popular with members of criminal organizations, many migrated to the FBI-developed messaging app.
“The goal of the new platform was to target global organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering organizations, regardless of where they operated, and offer an encrypted device with features sought by the organized crime networks, such as remote wipe and duress passwords, to persuade criminal networks to pivot to the device,” Europol said.
The high-quality information gathered by way of ANOM is expected to continue to help law enforcement identify operating high-value criminal targets on a global scale, the agency said.
“Encrypted criminal communications platforms have traditionally been a tool to evade law enforcement and facilitate transnational organized crime. The FBI and our international partners continue to push the envelope and develop innovative ways to overcome these challenges and bring criminals to justice,” the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division Assistant Director Calvin A. Shivers, said in a statement.
“We have been in the back pockets of organized crime,” Kershaw said at a media briefing. “All they talk about is drugs, violence, hits on each other, innocent people who are going to be murdered.”
He said the messages were brazen and ANOM users made no attempt to hide behind any kind of code.
“It was there to be seen, including ‘we’ll have a speedboat meet you at this point,’ ‘this is who will do this,’ and so on,” he added.
One murder plot that authorities got to know of involved plans to attack a cafe with a machine gun, while a family of five was also targeted. Authorities said they were able to prevent these attacks.
A total of 525 charges have been laid but authorities expect more in the coming weeks.
Reuters contributed to this report. Follow Tom on Twitter: @OZImekTOM
When Fulton County, Georgia, poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden—except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they’d been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.
Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.
In short, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine.
“All of them were strangely pristine,” said Voyles, who said she’d never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.
She wasn’t alone. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden processed by the county, and they have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they looked fake.
Now election watchdogs have used their affidavits to help convince a state judge to unseal all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton and allow a closer inspection of the suspicious Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. They argue that potentially tens of thousands may have been manufactured in a race that Biden won by just 12,000 votes thanks to a late surge of mail-in ballots counted after election monitors were shooed from State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
“We have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,” said Garland Favorito, the lead petitioner in the case and a certified poll watcher who runs VoterGa.org, one of the leading advocates for election integrity in the state.
He said the suspect ballots remain in the custody of the election officials and inaccessible from public view.
“We have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,” Favorito said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations.
He and other petitioners were ordered to meet at the warehouse May 28 to settle the terms of the inspection of the absentee ballots. But the day before the scheduled meeting, the county filed a flurry of motions to dismiss the case, delaying the inspection indefinitely.
“We will be in court on June 21 to resolve these motions,” said Favorito, calling them another “roadblock” the county has tried to throw in their way. He expects talks over the logistics of the inspection to resume after the Fourth of July holiday.
Fulton county workers continue to count absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 6, 2020. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
As part of his May 21 order, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero requested officials guard the warehouse around the clock until an inspection date can be set. But just eight days later, a breach in security was reported after sheriff’s deputies left their post for a couple of hours.
“The front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order,” Favorito said.
County officials confirmed that a motion-detection alarm was triggered Saturday, May 29, shortly after the deputies drove away from the building in their patrol cars around 4 p.m. But they said a locked room where the ballots are kept “was never breached or compromised.”
Favorito is not convinced, and his lawyer is seeking to obtain the video footage from building security cameras. “How do we know for certain there was no tampering with the ballots?” asked Favorito, who said he did not vote for Trump.
News of the security lapse caught the attention of former President Donald Trump, who has claimed his loss to Biden was marred by fraud. In a statement, he implied election officials in the Democratic-controlled county are trying to hide evidence of fraud. “They are afraid of what might be found,” he asserted.
Trump is also closely monitoring the ongoing election audit in Arizona, another red state that turned blue in 2020. If evidence of fraud is found in these key swing states, it might help confirm suspicions the election was “stolen” from Trump and the 74 million who voted for him—as a recent poll found 61 percent of Republicans believe—as well as provide the proof of voter fraud that Democrats and major media have long claimed doesn’t exist.
The cases could potentially give other battleground states incentive to take steps to tighten election security and root out fraud, including passing legislation to limit the use of controversial mail-in drop boxes and require the verification of signatures on such ballots. In Georgia, relatively few mail-in ballots were rejected for invalid signatures in the November general election, even though several thousand had been disqualified for signature issues in the primary election.
In a move that inspired national boycotts alleging voter “suppression,” Georgia recently passed a law limiting, but not removing, the drop boxes. The state had installed them for the first time in 2020 under pressure from Democratic groups, who argued officials needed to make voting easier for minorities who didn’t trust the mail and feared going to the polls during the COVID scare.
The 38 drop boxes Fulton distributed throughout the county in the November election will be cut to eight in the future. The boxes had been largely unregulated and unattended—located outdoors, open 24 hours a day and available for drop-offs until the evening of Election Day, prompting complaints of ballot stuffing and double voting. But now they have to be located inside election offices or early voting locations, and can only be available during the hours when early voting is permitted. The new law also requires ballots be printed on special security paper.
Voting by mail traditionally was limited to voters who had clearly defined and well-documented reasons to be absent from the polls. But Democrats in key swing states lobbied to relax the rules in the middle of the election and amid the coronavirus pandemic.
A ballot is dropped off at an official ballot drop box in Monterey Park, Calif., on Oct. 5, 2020. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
Mail-in or drop-off ballots create opportunities for voter error and fraud. In a typical election, one in 20 mailed ballots are rejected, according to recent studies. More than 534,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during the 2020 Democratic primaries alone.
Still, both Republican and Democratic officials in Georgia say they have found no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the general election. Democrats, as well as many major media outlets, have written off Favorito’s group’s allegations of fraud as “conspiracy theories.”
“This is nothing more than a circus that’s being put on by those who promote the ‘big lie’” that Trump won the election, said Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. “Where does it end? The votes have been counted. The elections have been certified. It’s over.”
Pitts effectively controls the county elections board through his Democratic appointee Mary Carole Cooney, who runs the board. They are in charge of securing the pallets of disputed Biden mail-in ballots awaiting inspection in the county warehouse.
But Judge Amero, who federal elections records show is a Democratic donor, felt compelled to unseal the ballots for a forensics review after reading the sworn affidavits submitted by election monitors. Here are key witnesses in the case:
Suzi Voyles, a veteran Fulton poll manager who audited the Nov. 14 recount at Georgia World Congress Center, testified she examined several stacks of ballots of about 100 ballots each from a cardboard box marked “Box No. 5—Absentee—Batch Numbers 28-36.” She said these ballots “came from the ballot [drop] boxes that had been placed throughout Fulton County.”
“Most of the ballots had already been handled; they had been written on by people, and the edges were worn. They showed obvious use,” she wrote in her Nov. 17 affidavit. “However, one batch stood out. It was pristine. There was a difference in the texture of the paper,” and these mail-in ballots hadn’t been folded even though they ostensibly had been removed from envelopes.
All but three of the 110 ballots in the bundle—which had been labeled “State Farm Arena”—were marked for Biden and appeared to be “identical ballots.”
The most “alarming peculiarity” was the identically marked ovals next to Biden’s name. In every ballot, “The bubble next to ‘Joseph R. Biden’ had a slight white eclipse in the bubble,” she said, leading her to believe that the batch of 107 Biden ballots had been “copied” from a single ballot.
Voyles speculated that “additional absentee ballots had been added [for Biden] in a fraudulent manner” at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on election night.
Filing boxes sit off to the side at an absentee ballot processing room at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 2, 2020. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
The void she and other auditors witnessed in the exact same spot of the oval filled in on 107 ballots for Biden “was alarming to us,” Voyles said in an RCI interview. “Every single bubble was precisely alike. I had never seen that before in 20 years” of election monitoring.
But when she and other recount workers raised concerns with county election officials, “we were told not to worry about it,” she said. “They seemed uninterested in the [integrity of the] ballots.”
After Voyles later blew the whistle in affidavits and state election hearings, she was fired as a poll manager by the Fulton County Department of Elections. “I got the boot for speaking the truth,” she told RCI.
Robin Hall, a certified Fulton County recount observer, also testified she witnessed a number of boxes of absentee ballots marked “100 percent for Biden” that appeared to be “perfectly filled out as if they were pre-printed with the presidential candidate selected.” She stated: “They did not look like a person had filled this out at home. All of them looked alike.”
Judy Aube also worked at the World Congress Center on Nov. 14 where she observed the same thing: “suspicious batches” of mail-in ballots for Biden whose markings appeared identical, as if they had been duplicated by a machine and not filled out by a voter at home.
Barbara Hartman, another election official auditor, also doubted the authenticity of absentee ballots she handled that she said were never folded, as would normally be the case for ballots returned in an envelope by mail or dropped in a box. “The absentee ballots looked as though they had just come from a fresh stack,” she swore in her affidavit. “I could not observe any creases in the ballots and [it] did not seem like they were folded and put into envelopes or mailed out.” Also, “The majority of the mail-in ballots that I reviewed contained suspicious black perfectly bubbled markings for Biden,” Hartman stated, adding that “they looked as if they were stamped.”
The veteran poll watchers found no plausible explanation for the anomalies other than possible fraud.
However, election officials have offered an explanation for why the mail-in ballots examined in the stacks did not have folds or creases. They say ballots are sometimes copied onto other paper when they are too damaged to be fed through one of the scanning machines during tabulation. The mailed ballots can be torn or crumpled by postal workers during delivery or by poll workers while opening them and removing them from envelopes, which could prevent the machines from reading them.
But Favorito suspects the hundreds, if not thousands, of allegedly duplicate absentee ballots for Biden might be connected to spikes in votes for Biden he observed late on election night in Fulton County after election officials cleared monitors from State Farm Arena and pulled cases full of ballots out from under tables and began scanning them.
“There’s always the chance it was an inside job,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who’s been a leading advocate for Georgia election integrity over the past two decades.
On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed monitors that they were shutting down the State Farm tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.
Employees of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections process ballots in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Brandon Bell/Reuters)
“Election workers don’t bring ballots in after the supervisor has delayed processing until the morning, hide them under a table, and then bring them out for scanning and tabulation after the supervisor tells [monitors] they are done scanning for the evening and they go home,” Favorito said.
“Once scanning [was] completed, an election line feed showed an unprecedented vote spike that turned the election in favor of Biden,” he added. In fact, “just over a half hour after workers scanned the potentially fraudulent ballots, an election line feed showed a 100,000-plus vote spike for Biden.”
“Where did those ballots come from and why did they handle them so suspiciously?” Favorito asked.
Voyles noted that the county elections supervisor who oversaw the secret scanning of the cases full of ballots also helps run the warehouse where the suspect ballots are being stored.
Phone calls and emails to Fulton County went unanswered.
Similar Anomalies, Other Counties
Favorito pointed out that the potential for counterfeit ballots exists in other Georgia counties, not just Fulton.
In fact, two Democrat poll workers blew the whistle on similar anomalies they witnessed in neighboring DeKalb and Cobb counties, where the election process also is controlled by Democrats.
Carlos E. Silva, for one, declared in a Nov. 17 affidavit that he observed a similar “perfect black bubble” in absentee ballots for Biden during the recount he worked in DeKalb County. And while overseeing the Cobb County recount, he swore he “observed absentee ballots being reviewed with the same perfect bubble that I had seen the night before in DeKalb. All of these ballots had the same characteristics: they were all for Biden and had the same perfect bubble.”
Added Silva, a registered Democrat, “There were thousands of [mail-in] ballots that just had the perfect bubble marked for Biden and no other markings in the rest of the ballot.”
Another registered Democrat, Mayra Romera, testified that while monitoring the Cobb County recount, she noticed that “hundreds of these ballots seemed impeccable, with no folds or creases. The bubble selections were perfectly made … and all happened to be selections for Biden.”
In a recent article pooh-poohing complaints of fraud in Georgia, as well as Arizona, The New York Times portrayed Favorito as “a known conspiracy theorist” and suggested he was a 9/11 truther. As evidence, it cited a 2002 book he published “questioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Asked about it, Favorito responded: “My book did not propose any theories on what happened on 9/11. I don’t mention anything about explosives” planted in the World Trade Center, as truthers have speculated. Rather, he said, he questioned Bush family business connections with the bin Laden family and other wealthy Saudis, and argued that the war on terror benefited the Bushes. He also faulted the Bush administration for “obstructing” FBI investigations into the attacks.
Favorito says he is a “constitutionalist” and neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 27, 2021. (Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times) Executive Branch
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed to The Epoch Times on June 3 that his efforts to get to the bottom of how the CCP virus—also known as the novel coronavirus—spread from China to the United States met with sustained opposition within the U.S. government.
Asked about revelations in a June 3 Vanity Fair report that key officials deep within the State Department sought to keep the public from knowing that U.S. funds had supported gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Pompeo described a “contentious battle.”
That research, which focused on techniques for reconfiguring naturally occurring viruses to make them more virulent and transmissible to humans, was partially funded as far back as 2012 with U.S. tax dollars through the National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit foundation known as the EcoHealth Alliance.
The Vanity Fair analysis “found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step.”
“In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it,” the article reads.
China has insisted since the virus first appeared in late 2019 that it had spread from bats to humans via an open-air meat market in Wuhan. Some government and public health officials, private sector scientists, and investigative journalists, however, have said since early in 2020 that there’s substantial evidence that the virus spread somehow from the WIV.
Then-President Donald Trump and Pompeo, as well as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), publicly noted the existence of such evidence in April 2020 and called on Chinese officials to allow independent investigators to access the WIV and its records. China refused to do so.
After the November 2020 election, Pompeo pushed within the State Department and the Trump administration for public release of as much evidence as possible.
He issued a Jan. 15 statement that includes a significant disclosure, that WIV researchers appeared to have suffered virus symptoms months before the disease spread throughout China and to other countries, including the United States.
The statement also notes the gain-of-function research taking place at WIV and asks whether U.S. funding may have been diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.
But even getting that statement out was a struggle, Pompeo told The Epoch Times on June 3.
“I became aware at the end of 2020 that we now had an increased level of confidence in the datapoints that supported what we put out in the middle of January. The clock was clearly running, and I was fighting very hard inside the State Department and even more broadly,” he said.
A major roadblock was the fact that significant portions of the evidence were held by intelligence agencies that opposed their public release.
“There were places outside of the State Department that owned the dataset inside the intelligence community, so we were banging away to get them to give us as much space to write as much as we possibly could,” Pompeo said.
“We were drafting language that protected classified things that needed to be protected but we wanted to make sure that we got this information out in the public space.”
The former secretary of state said he viewed it as important at the time, and continues today to say that the American people should know all the facts, and the Chinese government should be held accountable if the virus did escape from the WIV.
“There were two reasons for that. One, it was a matter of transparency and, two, we wanted the Chinese Communist Party to have to explain what we knew as well, so we had a very high degree of certainty around what we did,” Pompeo said. “The statement was very carefully crafted, but it is unambiguous about what it said.”
A former senior State Department official with direct knowledge of these matters, who spoke on background, told The Epoch Times that Pompeo made clear to everybody involved in the State Department’s investigation of the source of the virus that they were to pursue facts wherever they led.
When told of internal opposition to the effort, the former senior official said that Pompeo responded with a salty aphorism reflective of his Army career.
“He said, ‘Screw them and tell them the secretary of state said do it.’ And he also said something that’s very, very important. He said: ‘I don’t care what conclusion you guys dig out. It may be something we like to hear, politically, or something we don’t like to hear, but I want the truth.’ That was exactly the attitude throughout the whole investigation this group was doing.”
Congressional correspondent Mark Tapscott may be reached at mark.tapscott@epochtimes.nyc.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 11, 2021. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP) Pandemic Ties to CCP
The United States gave over $800,000 to the top-level laboratory in China from which some believe the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus escaped, according to newly released documents.
Internal emails from officials with the National Institutes of Health and an office inside the agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), show they discussed in 2020 a question from Republican members of Congress regarding how much the agencies sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The total amount sent between Fiscal Years 2014 and 2019 was $826,777, according to the officials.
The funding went to EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled money to the lab for the purpose of “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”
The total amount is different from the amount that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, told members of Congress the Wuhan lab received from the U.S. government.
“We had a modest collaboration with respectable Chinese scientists who are world experts on coronavirus and we did that through a subgrant from a larger grant to EcoHealth. The subgrant was about $600,000 over a period of five years,” Fauci told members of the House Appropriations Committee during a hearing last month.
NIAID did not respond to a request for information. The agency has not returned repeated requests for comment.
The newly released emails show one chain involving Fauci in April 2020. In it, a top NIAID official, Dr. Emily Erbelding, informed Fauci and others that a new grant to EcoHealth was for $3.6 million. Of that, about $750,000 would go to the Wuhan lab. About $75,000 had already been sent to the lab during year 1 of the grant, she said.
“This is higher but not extraordinarily higher than I originally indicated which was for some earlier work,” Hugh Auchincloss, another agency official, wrote to Fauci, who responded, “Thanks.”
In another message around the same time, Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins were informed by health officials that the White House “has strongly embraced concerns” raised by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) regarding the U.S. funding for the bat coronavirus research in China.
“HEADS UP: Wuhan lab research,” Lawrence Tabak wrote, labeling the email as “high” importance.
Fauci and Collins were told that the multi-country study in question, which included sites in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma, was given $3.7 million over six years and that the Wuhan lab received approximately $826,300 and would get about $80,000 more per year for the following four years.
“More by phone,” Tabak said.
The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch.
“These new documents show that funding for the Wuhan Institute was greater than the public has been told,” Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog, said in a statement. “That it has taken a year and a federal lawsuit to get this first disclosure on COVID and Wuhan is evidence of cover-up by Fauci’s agency.”
Previously released emails obtained through a separate request showed Fauci and his team scrambled to respond to people wondering whether the CCP virus, which causes COVID-19, escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Fauci has insisted the grant funding went for appropriate research that could only be done properly in China.
“Clearly the bats that have the coronaviruses are in China. They are not in Fairfax County, Virginia, or in New York. That’s where the bats are,” Fauci told Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last month.
Some experts say the funding went to “gain of function” research, or efforts of making coronaviruses more transmissible, but Fauci has said the money did not go towards that work.
Kennedy asked how Fauci was sure that Chinese scientists, often working under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, did not shield their true work.
“We have seen the results of the research that were done and that were published. And the studies are public, and on public databases now. None of that was gain of function,” Fauci said. Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieber
Anyone still believing the USA (and other FREEDOM LOVING/PRACTICING COUNTRIES) can still “play ball with the CCP”, is (are) only asking for a bat to be shoved up their collective ass. (And not the squeaky furry cave dwelling and flying type bat that the CCP attempts to hang responsibility on for their own (CCP’s) unleashing and active concealment of yet another deadly virus upon the world. It’s happened before and may very well happen again.)
As bad as it has been…. please don’t be distracted or lured into some false sense of security that the worst is over. Always watch what the other hand is doing in multiple arenas – from the South China Sea all the way to an orbiting space station or CCP moon outpost. We have been in a war for our country’s very survival for a long time without truly being cognizant as to the depths of betrayal by our own treacherous politicians – but thankfully everyday is a classroom packed full of factual information for those paying attention. Like the bumper sticker says “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention”.
Speaking of paying attention, and if not doing so already, PLEASE watch OANN (One America News Network) and spread the word to family and friends who also care about the survival of OUR COUNTRY because make no frigg’n mistake…..this IS OUR “RED DAWN”.
God Bless America and all her FREEDOM LOVING PATRIOTS!
A human rights group urges Tufts University to close its Confucius Institute in Somerville, Massachusetts on March 13, 2021. (Learner Liu/The Epoch Times) China-US News
An exclusive report by Campus Reform, America’s leading college news website, detailed a recent investigation into the Chinese regime’s operation in American classrooms.
Through public records requests in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, Campus Reform obtained 32 universities’ contracts with the Confucius Institute Headquarters.
In several documents, Beijing dictated control over the curriculum taught within the Confucius Institute.
For instance, the contract between the University of Toledo and Hanban, the Confucius Institute Headquarters in China, states that “The Institute must accept the assessment of [Hanban] on the teaching quality.”
Hanban is an agency under the Chinese regime’s education ministry, which is known to severely censor language course material and distort history to mislead students in China.
Baruch College in New York said it more clearly in its agreement with Hanban. “Baruch College acknowledges that the Headquarters has the final right to determine the programs to which it provides funding,” and Baruch College has the obligation to “accept the project assessments conducted by the Headquarters,” according to the contract.
Similarly, Central Connecticut State University agreed that “The University Institute shall review evaluations and recommendations made by the Confucius Institute Headquarters on the quality of the programs and make any necessary modifications.”
Communist Propaganda
James Giordano, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University and a senior researcher in biosecurity, technology, and ethics at the U.S. Naval War College, told Campus Reform that the language in the agreements explicitly revealed that “what is taught, and what is promulgated at the Confucius Institute only occurs under the auspices of the central political system [of China].”
He believes that Confucius Institutes are not an independent entity, but a direct outreach program of the CCP, which controls American classrooms in an attempt to reshape people’s view about China.
“Any and all information that is promulgated through the Confucius institutes about China, the country, its history, its culture, its prior or current political status situation, posturing and or near term and intermediate to far term intent, in terms of engaging the global relationships is all done wholly under the auspices and examination of the [Chinese Communist Party],” he said.
Campus Reform quoted Seth Cropsey, the Director of the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute, who said that surrendering academic freedom to a foreign nation hostile to the United States should raise serious red flags.
The existence of the Confucius Institute is “silly and pernicious on its face,” Cropsey remarked. “There are plenty of Americans who study Chinese political thought going back thousands of years… so it’s not necessary to go to an organ of the Chinese government in order to find… teachers who can teach.”
Resisting Confucius Institute
Although the Confucius Institute is advertised as a language and cultural exchange, Pompeo-led U.S. State Department designated it as a “foreign mission” of the People’s Republic of China, pointing out that the program operates “under guidance from the CCP’s United Front Work Department” and pushes out “skewed Chinese language and cultural training for U.S. students as part of Beijing’s multifaceted propaganda efforts.”
As early as 2014, the American Association of University Professors warned that Confucius Institutes further the political goals of Beijing’s leadership and threaten “the independence and integrity of academic institutions.”
Previously, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri pushed for legislation to close all Confucius Institutes in the United States or increase oversight. The Transparency for Confucius Institutes Act sponsored by Senator Blackburn passed unanimously in the Senate last year, but failed in the House of Representatives. She is continuing her effort this year. On March 29, she declared in a Twitter post: “Tennessee is determined to lead the way as the first state to ban the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institute from public universities.”
According to data from the National Association of Scholars, as of May 18, there are still 47 Confucius Institutes operating in the United States, including 41 inside universities and colleges, one at a private educational organization, the China Institute, and five at K-12 public school districts. Fifteen of these 47 Confucius Institutes are set to be closed before the end of this year.
Cole Hill on his ranch in Kinney County, Texas, on May 25, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Immigration & Border Security
‘They’re banging on the walls, everything,’ one rancher’s wife said in a frantic phone call earlier this year By Charlotte Cuthbertson May 25, 2021 Updated: May 30, 2021 biggersmallerPrint
KINNEY COUNTY, Texas—Living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere is the epitome of the American dream for many Texans. They keep to themselves, help their neighbors, and work hard.
But in the past few months, ranchers have been getting unwelcome visitors who destroy their property, steal their vehicles, and scare their families.
They’re the illegal immigrants, usually adult males who have evaded Border Patrol and are heading to a large city where it’s easier to disappear.
Cole Hill, his wife, and their three children, ages 9, 7, and 5, live on a ranch in Kinney County, about 35 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border. The property also flanks a Border Patrol highway checkpoint, and those who want to evade capture tend to walk a wide berth around it.
Hill said he’s dealt with illegal aliens traversing his land for years, but only around 25 people a year, on average; sometimes, months would go by with no activity.
Illegal immigrants are captured on a game camera as they traverse Cole Hill’s ranch in Kinney County, Texas. (Courtesy of Cole Hill)
“I’m going on about six weeks straight now with illegal [aliens] on my property on a daily basis, or multiple groups a day,” he said during a local meeting on May 22.
His house is set “way back in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “We could have a full-blown gunfight on our front porch, and nobody would know about it.”
Hill’s first encounter with illegal aliens this year took place on Jan. 20, when his dog alerted him to a man on the front porch dressed head-to-toe in camouflage clothing.
“It obviously alarmed me. I’ve had plenty of encounters with illegal aliens over the past 10 or more years, but I’ve never had one that close to the house,” Hill said. “I stopped him. I told him to backtrack and get away.”
He also called Border Patrol but doesn’t know whether they caught the intruder.
“That was just kind of the beginning of this giant snowball that’s occurring,” he said.
“I keep getting told that this isn’t a new problem that we’re dealing with. Obviously, we all know illegal immigration has been going on forever. But to me, in my setting, at my house, at our ranch, this is certainly a new problem.”
Illegal immigrants are captured on a game camera as they traverse Cole Hill’s ranch in Kinney County, Texas. (Courtesy of Cole Hill)
The next encounter happened about three weeks later, when Hill and his oldest son were working out on the ranch and his wife called to tell him that a group of illegal immigrants had surrounded the house.
“They’re looking into windows, they’re at the back door, they’re at the front door, they’re banging on the walls, everything,” Hill’s wife told him.
He raced home and found one man on the front porch, while the rest had hidden as his truck approached.
“I made it pretty quickly to the individual on our front porch, I got him off the porch, and I promptly escorted him out of the yard,” Hill said. He eventually cleared the rest of the group out of his garage and sent them away.
Again, he called Border Patrol, but it took agents more than an hour to get there.
Border Patrol agents detain about 50 illegal immigrants after they cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on May 24, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
“I live about 12 miles from the checkpoint. On a good day, they can be at my house in about 15 minutes,” Hill said.
“I hate to think of what five men could do if they wanted to do harm to my family and they could get into my house as quick as they possibly could have.”
After that encounter, the Hills kept their normally free-range kids closer to home, unless they were outside with them.
“After that happened, we don’t even want our kids playing outside in the yard anymore,” Hill said. He kept the kids mostly in the house for a few weeks, but let them run loose as he tackled some yard work one Saturday.
“I didn’t get halfway done mowing my front yard and the kids are all playing in the backyard … and sure enough, here comes five more dudes … slipping out of the brush, and they’re hitting a jog on the way to my house, coming straight to my house.
“I shut the mower down, I holler for the kids to get inside, I start yelling at these guys to stay back, I run inside and grab a firearm, and as soon as I came back out, they stopped, they changed their course and they took off.”
Hill again called Border Patrol, but it was more than an hour before they responded.
“Yesterday morning was the fifth group that I’ve had at my house since January 20 this year—and this was at 3:30 in the morning,” he said at a local meeting on May 22.
Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Austin L. Skero II said Border Patrol is stretched thin.
Cole Hill on his ranch in Kinney County, Texas, on May 25, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
“We are currently apprehending an average of over 900 migrants during this seven-day period in the Del Rio Sector,” Skero told The Epoch Times via email.
“Due to this 433 percent increase in apprehensions over last fiscal year to date, agents are frequently occupied with transport, processing, and detention duties.
“This has absolutely impacted our ability to respond quickly to illegal activity on private property. We are doing the best we can and will respond to every call prioritizing emergency situations.”
Record Numbers
Kinney County, with a population of 3,400, shares just 16 miles of the international border with Mexico, but it’s on a direct smuggling route from the Del Rio area to San Antonio. On April 21, it was the first of 28 Texas counties to declare a local disaster over the border crisis.
The county sits within the Del Rio Border Patrol sector, which is experiencing record levels of illegal alien apprehensions.
Over four days starting on May 20, Del Rio Border Patrol apprehended more illegal border-crossers than the population of Kinney County. On May 20, May 21, and May 23, agents apprehended more than 1,000 illegal aliens each day in the sector, according to Customs and Border Protection.
Law enforcement officials told The Epoch Times that people are currently paying Mexican smuggling groups $2,200 per person to cross the river into the United States. That’s $2.2 million per 1,000 that cross.
Border Patrol agents detain illegal immigrants after they cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on May 23, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The number of those who evade Border Patrol is also increasing. More than 42,000 illegal aliens evaded capture along the whole southern border in April.
“We don’t know who they are, where they’re from, or what their intentions are,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said.
On top of those that Border Patrol knows have evaded arrest, “it’s very fair to say that there’s a large number of people that are able to get away that we don’t even detect,” Judd said.
Hill said he’s had plenty more encounters with illegal aliens while he’s out on the ranch working alone.
“I do everything that I can to try to subdue them or hold them down for Border Patrol,” he said, but it’s getting more difficult.
“Sure, there’s probably some good apples in there as well. But I don’t think the good apples are 35 miles off the river trying to evade every law enforcement they can as aggressively as they are.”
The damage to his property is also increasing. In the past few months, he’s had his perimeter fence cut seven times, most of the time from top to bottom, and in three cases, an entire section was pulled out.
Hill’s water troughs and pipes are also getting damaged.
“Next thing you know, I got 100 head of cows that are out of water just like that. And that can turn into a pretty terrible crisis in itself,” Hill said.
He blames the Biden administration for the border surge and the spillover impact it’s having on Texans. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
“I feel like there’s only two ways that this problem is going to get solved. And it’s either going to be ‘We the People’ or the people up top. I sure don’t like to think about ‘We the People’ taking care of it, but, who knows,” he said.
“I do know that we need to do everything that we can and contact our elected officials and try and do this the right way.”
The Washington Post quietly walked back its claims regarding the theory that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The paper in February 2020 published an article claiming the idea was a “conspiracy theory” that had been “debunked.” The article attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who called for an investigation into the origins of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
But The Post alleged the theory the lab was involved was debunked, quoting a political science professor and a professor of chemical biology to support the claim.
“There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was quoted as saying. “The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”
The headline for the article was changed in recent days, from “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” to “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”
In addition, The Post added a correction.
“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus,” the paper said.
The Post did not respond to requests for comment. Neither the paper nor reporter Paulina Milla Firozi have appeared to alert readers to the update. The original tweet promoting the article is still up, without a notice that it has been dramatically altered.
Ebright told journalist Michael Tracey that when he spoke to The Post, he discussed the lab leak theory, but those comments were not included in the paper’s article.
Transmission electron micrograph of particles of the CCP virus, or SARS-CoV-2, isolated from a patient. (NIAID)
“I again discussed both the genome sequence and the lab-accident hypothesis—this time, both on the record—with WaPo. I was surprised that the February 17, 2020 article in WaPo quoted only my comments on the genome sequence and not my comments on the lab-accident hypothesis,” he said.
Cotton did not return multiple inquiries. The senator on Fox News last week addressed the wave of corrections and updates to stories about the lab leak theory, saying: “The media last year was singing a very different tune. That’s because I was pointing out that common sense says this virus probably came from those labs; I mean, it originated just a few blocks down the road from them in a city larger than New York not exactly known for its large bat population.
“But because the media doesn’t like my politics, and because [former] President [Donald] Trump said the same thing, the media lied and they spun and they covered up for the Chinese Communist Party, in effect,” he added. “There needs to be an accounting for all of the reporting from last spring that denied this reality now that almost every mainstream outlet is acknowledging that it is not only possible, it is probably the case that this came from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Some reporters have said that they disregarded the lab leak theory because Republicans were largely the ones promoting the idea.
Hollywood executive Chris Fenton said John Cena’s controversial apology to China after he called Taiwan a country during a promotional interview for “Fast & Furious 9” alienated both his fans in the West and in China, inadvertently providing the star with an opportunity to lead the charge against Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship in the U.S. film industry.
Fenton told NTD’s “Focus Talk” that Cena’s apology ended up missing the mark on both fronts, alienating his fans in the United States while failing to satisfy Chinese netizens.
“Boy, did he step into it,” Fenton said of Cena’s video apology, in which the Hollywood star spoke in Mandarin. “I felt badly for him, and I was quite shocked.”
Following the apology, conservative news outlet the Daily Wire ran a sharply-worded op-ed headlined “John Cena Begging China For Forgiveness Proves That Money Beats Morality Every Time.” The platform’s co-founder, Ben Shapiro, said in a Twitter post: “Taiwan is a country. Hong Kong should be free. If you are unwilling to say these things because it might hurt your bottom line, you are a pathetic coward.”
Republican lawmakers took to Twitter to lambaste Cena’s remarks.
“Pathetic,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in a one-word tweet, while Rep. Andy Briggs (R-Ariz.) alleged Cena “is owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” while reposting a message from House Republicans stating, “Taiwan is a country.”
While Taiwan is a de facto independent country with its own military, democratically-elected government, and constitution, the Chinese regime considers it a breakaway province and claims the island as its own, repeatedly threatening to unify it by force.
Fenton said Cena’s apology failed to satisfy his fans in China and the West.
“He has a very large constituency of fans on the athletic side because of his wrestling, which sometimes is more on the conservative side of the aisle, and then he has a huge fan base in Hollywood, which is more on the left side of the aisle. So, in a way he’s alienated two sides of the United States of America and, quite frankly, the Western world,” Fenton said, before referring to calls from Chinese netizens that Cena explicitly declare that Taiwan is part of China, which he didn’t do in his apology.
“And he also didn’t really do the job that he needed to do with the netizens and the fans in China.”
In a 68-second clip posted to Chinese social media platform Weibo, Cena struck a particularly contrite tone.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry for my mistake. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. You have to understand I love and respect China and Chinese people. I’m sorry.”
Cena’s apology elicited mixed responses from his more than 600,000 followers on Weibo, with some giving him credit for apologizing, while others said he needs to explicitly say Taiwan is part of China or his apology is meaningless.
Fenton argued that the multi-pronged backlash is an opportunity for Cena to change course and lead the way in pushing back against the broader trend of Hollywood kowtowing to the CCP.
“What he might want to do is rethink this and say, ‘Well, how much is China worth to me versus the rest of the world?’ And I would argue that there’s a real opportunity for him to take on this Muhammad Ali effect, where he actually leads—because he’s in this situation—this effort to stop pandering to the CCP and to actually say enough is enough, and to see if he can get other filmmakers, other actors, other celebrities, other basketball players and athletes, and other companies to follow him into this new path forward when it comes to the engagement with China,” he said.
Fenton, a former executive at DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, authored the book “Feeding the Dragon,” a behind-the-scenes look at how Chinese censors shape American films. In the book, he argues that Hollywood’s business relationship with China strengthens the CCP’s authoritarian outreach.
Asked whether he believes the situation with Cena could be a watershed moment that reverses Hollywood’s appeasement of the CCP, Fenton struck a hopeful tone.
“I think this situation with John Cena … it’s happening on the left, it’s happening on the right, it’s happening in between. People are starting to get very aware of this situation, and I think what’s great about that is now there’s going to be pressure, both on the pocketbooks of the consumers to do what’s right … but it will also put pressure on politicians and journalists to stay on this subject, to not get distracted.
“It will also cause a push for people like John Cena to maybe say: ‘Hey, I’m going to take a stand. I want to lead by example. I’m going to get some of my peers and colleagues to join me and some of the companies that we work for, and we’re going to push back.’”
Any movie that wants to be released in China must abide by strict censorship rules, including that the movie’s story, footage, music, actors, and directors not oppose the communist regime. Fenton said he sees growing opposition in the West to such censorship.
“We’re getting to that tipping point where enough is enough and this John Cena example is something that really is an eye opener and something that hopefully catalyzes a change,” he said.
