Trans Activism_The Case Of The WDBJ Murderer: Vester Lee Flanagan II

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

ABC News received a 23 page fax at 8:26 a.m. allegedly sent by Flanagan[53] titled, "Suicide Note for Friend & Family". In the document, Flanagan described his grievances over what he alleged to be racial discrimination and sexual harassment committed by black men and white women in his workplace, believing that he was targeted because he was a homosexual black man.[8][17][54] He claimed to have been provoked by the Charleston church shooting, two months before, and made threatening comments about Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of that crime.[51] Flanagan described the church shooting as a "tipping point", saying that his anger had been "building steadily" and describing himself as "a human powder keg ... just waiting to go BOOM".[8] A spokesman for the Franklin County Sheriff's Office said that Flanagan "very closely identified" with "individuals who have committed domestic acts of violence and mass murder, as well as the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S."[55] Flanagan said that Jehovah had told him to act and expressed an admiration for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who perpetrated the 1999 Columbine High School massacre; and Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.[17][56] Flanagan said in the note, "Yeah I'm all fucked up in the head."[57]
[SOURCE]

ByABC News
August 26, 2015, 2:03 PM

A man claiming to be Bryce Williams called ABC News over the last few weeks, saying he wanted to pitch a story and wanted to fax information. He never told ABC News what the story was.

This morning, a fax was in the machine (time stamped 8:26 a.m.) almost two hours after the shooting. A little after 10 a.m., he called again, and introduced himself as Bryce, but also said his legal name was Vester Lee Flanagan, and that he shot two people this morning. While on the phone, he said authorities are “after me,” and “all over the place.” He hung up. ABC News contacted the authorities immediately and provided them with the fax.

In the 23-page document faxed to ABC News, the writer says “MY NAME IS BRYCE WILLIAMS” and his legal name is Vester Lee Flanagan II. He writes what triggered today’s carnage was his reaction to the racism of the Charleston church shooting:


Vester Lee Flanagan II, the suspect in the Virginia shootings of a news reporter and cameraman, faxed a 23-page document to ABC News.

“Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…”

Sources say Flanagan's firearm was legally purchased from a Virginia gun store.

“What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them."

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What We Know About Suspect Vester Lee Flanagan in Virginia On-Air Shooting

It is unclear whose initials he is referring to. He continues, “As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …(deleted)!!!” He said Jehovah spoke to him, telling him to act.


Vester Lee Flanagan II, the suspect in the Virginia shootings of a news reporter and cameraman, faxed a 23-page document to ABC News.

Later in the manifesto, the writer quotes the Virginia Tech mass killer, Seung Hui Cho, calls him “his boy,” and expresses admiration for the Columbine High School killers. “Also, I was influenced by Seung–Hui Cho. That’s my boy right there. He got NEARLY double the amount that Eric Harris and Dylann Klebold got…just sayin.'"

Sources familiar with the investigation tell ABC News that in his attack, Flanagan used a Glock 19 -- a firearm similar to one that Cho used in his mass attack.

In Flanagan's often rambling letter to authorities, family and friends, he writes of a long list of grievances. In one part of the document, Flanagan calls it a “Suicide Note for Friends and Family."
He says he has been attacked by black men and white females
He talks about how he was attacked for being a gay, black man
He says has suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work

A source with direct knowledge of his complaints against the station said a pair of tweets sent today and attributed to him accurately reflect previous complaints he lodged against the two people he killed today. These are the two Tweets: “Alison made racist comments,” and, “Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!”



Nowhere in the document does he make specific threats against anyone from WDBJ.

In his manifesto, he says he encountered "nasty racist things" while working at WDBJ-7 in Roanoke, and that drove him to sue the station. "I marched down to the courthouse and sued WDBJ7 by myself and they settled! HA!"

He continues: "I can remember one day in particular... leaving the courthouse... feeling overwhelmed... confused... even some fear. But by golly I knew I HAD to fight. ... They truly f----d with my life and caused an awful chain of events." He says he even killed his cats in a forest "because of them."


Flanagan says that, "Hell yeah, I made mistakes," noting that he "should not have been so curt" with photographers in Roanoke. "[B]ut you know why I was? The damn news director was a micromanaging tyrant!!"

And, he writes, "the photogs were out to get me at WDBJ7... one went to HR after only working with me one time... the chief photog told his troops to [record video of] me if they saw be doing something wrong."

Flanagan then suggests that, after leaving WDBJ-7, he was offered a job at a station in Pennsylvania, but WDBJ-7 persuaded the Pennsylvania station to rescind the offer.

"I got to the point, this time around, where I wasn't even looking for a job. I don't need to deal with workplace bullies anymore. THAT is what lawmakers need to focus on," he adds.


Vester Lee Flanagan II, the suspect in the Virginia shootings of a news reporter and cameraman, faxed a 23-page document to ABC News.

“Yes, it will sound like I am angry," he writes in his manifesto. "I am. And I have every right to be. But when I leave this Earth, the only emotion I want to feel is peace....”


“The church shooting was the tipping point…but my anger has been building steadily...I’ve been a human powder keg for a while…just waiting to go BOOM!!!!”

He chronicles the "tough times" he's faced, including some "financial crashes." He says he used to work as a male escort but, "I am proud of it" because he "made thousands."

"[I] tried to pull myself up by the bootstraps," but, "The damage was already done and when someone gets to this point, there is nothing that can be said or done to change their sadness to happiness. It does not work that way. Meds? Nah. It's too much."

"And then, after the unthinkable happened in Charleston, THAT WAS IT!!!"

"Yeah I'm all f----- up in the head," he concedes. [SOURCE]

Trans Activism_The Case Of The Nashville Bible School Massacre: From the lips of the trans activist who vowed, "Religion Won't Save"

The mass murderer who killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville left instructions for the media to refer to her by her transgender name “Aiden,” believed deeply in extreme gender ideology and critical theory, and believed death constituted part of the “deconstruction” of an old society that would be followed by a “reconstruction” ushering in “LGBTQ rights.” Hale idolized the Columbine high school shooters and hated “conservative religion.” On one page, she appears to have drawn an inverted cross and the number 666.

Nearly 18 months after the March 27, 2023, school shooting claimed the lives of three nine-year-old students and three staffers, the media have released more of killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s writings describing the reasons behind the deadly rampage. The Biden-Harris administration’s FBI encouraged the Metro Nashville police chief to bottle up Hale’s “confusing” writings for fear they would stoke “conspiracy theories.” Authorities then suppressed the writings over an alleged “ongoing investigation,” and a court ruled this July that the writings could not be released due to copyright infringement.

But on Tuesday morning, The Tennessee Star published a PDF of the nearly 90-page journal Hale kept during 2023, including the days leading up to this shooting. “On July 31, 2024 we appealed the trial court’s ruling to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We expect to win our appeal,” explained Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO of Star News Digital Media Inc. and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star. “[W]e have had the First Amendment right to publish these writings since early June when we first received them.”

The Tennessee Star had published dozens of stories detailing the journal’s contents. But the full journal — released 526 days after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, a Christian school operated by a local Presbyterian church — contains additional information and new details about the killer’s beliefs and motivations.

The journal, which the Star refers to as “The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal,” is a Mead Five Star notebook with the name “Aiden” written on the red cover. In the upper-lefthand corner, Hale emblazoned a symbol which adorns many pages that speak of the impending mass shooting: an octagon with a black cross in the center.

The journal’s contents reveal the depth of her commitment to extreme transgender ideology and her mystical belief that, by dying, she would be reborn into a male body that could carry out sexual relations with “brown girls” in the afterlife. She seems to indicate death is part of nature’s process of inverting negative political forces into progressive political change toward “civil rights.”

“Why does my brain not work right? ‘Cause I was born wrong!!!” the journal opens. “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save.”

“Everything hurts,” she writes repeatedly.

Much of the journal notes Hale’s deep depression at her inability to keep a job or succeed in a creative field. The pervasive tone of suicidal depression clings to every page. “My soul worth nothing but my dead body will be worth more,” she writes. “I hurt bad enough & long enough that I need to die,” she continues. “I hurt too bad. Too many tears. I want to die.”

One page recounts her list of failures, accomplishing only one of four tasks she desired. Hale appears to have considered herself a tortured genius. “My mind is creative, brilliant, but a living hell at the same time,” she writes. “Having a brain like mind has its godliness but also prone to make poor a** decisions.”

“I am shining outside, but my heart is black,” writes Hale.

Hale believed that her death in a mass murder-suicide would open the door to the male sexual experiences she longed to enjoy on Earth — and implied it somehow embodied part of a supernatural change toward “LGBTQ rights.”

After her impending violent death, she writes, “The caccoon [sic] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me. If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****.” 

Hale appeared to draw an inverted cross and 666 next to that line.

Hale also despaired over politics, in an entry praising everything from transgender ideology to the Second Amendment. A journal entry on February 20, 2023, on politics declares, that “now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary. … Soon this g******** country will turn out no fun like England or Europe. No guns, no gender rights, no freedom of speech or pursuing of radical ideas, no mischeif [sic]. … Disabled have rights. Civil races have rights. LGBTQ have rights. Gun owners have rights. … So now because of all of you, I wish death on myself ‘cause of the pure hatred of my female gender. With no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

Her writings clearly indicate that she held no belief in human exceptionalism. It is “human nature to kill. Humans kill humans and themselves. Animals kill animals. Bugs kill bugs.”

In a previously unreleased passage seemingly inspired by critical race theory, she continues her view that death is a redeeming aspect of nature. The “deconstruction” of “nature” will undo “racism, gay killings, poverty, asylums.” The “reconstruction” will “change” those things into “civil rights, LGBTQ rights, food banks, [American] Disabilities Act.” Sex will transform into “safe sex,” AIDS into “medical care,” gun violence into “gun laws,” and “death” into “life.”

At one point, Hale refers to herself as a “white nothingness” and draws a schematic drawing of her mind. Her brain produced thoughts of “white privilege [sic], an embarrassment to self.”

The 28-year-old Hale obsessed over “brown girls” and repeatedly writes, “No brown girls, no love.”

“I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind,” she writes. In a previously unreleased drawing, Hale sketches a diagram of anal sex with “a beautiful young brown girl with a big a**” but realizes it will never happen. “Too bad I am a sad boy born w/a puny vagina.” She came to realize she would never have a relationship with most women, who are attracted to men, not women who identify as men. It is a “major blow to girls: I am a boy that has no penis,” she writes.

“I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender,” she writes. “If there is no love, there is no life. And no life is feeling dead. It’s only natural, wanting to die.”

The writings reveal Hale’s deep commitment to transgender ideology, so much that her birth gender had the power to ruin her day. “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead,” she writes. “I hate society [because] society ignores to see me. I’m a queer; I’m meant to die.”

On February 21, she felt happy a worker at a comic book store called her “bud” and “bro,” but it made her feel “embarrassed of my female body. I SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS BODY!!!”

“My body doesn’t make me a female,” she asserts. “When I’m called a lady and ma’am — d*** it, it makes me not want to exist. The [male] body in me exists only to me. I’m just d*** tired of being called & identified by a gender I am not AT ALL. … disgusted at being in a female body. Makes me think about dying.”

On March 8, she writes, “I need a transdoctor … This female role makes me want to not exist … My therapist now is the best I could get 4 autism.”

She also bashed her parents for trying to bring positive, Christian influences into her life. In a passage dedicated to a friend, Hale complains:

“Aren’t parents manipulative? It’s total ignorance when parents step in and try to change their child’s environment. Make them go to youth group & force Christian friends into thier [sic] life because the old ones were a ‘bad’ influence. … Parents actually believe religion can change nature. That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves … Kids are not robots. We are the future. That’s how it’s ment [sic] to be.”

She blasted her parents, especially her mother, who do not entirely and immediately affirm their child’s chosen gender identity, blaming it on “thier [sic] preference of conservative religion — gay s***.” Parents should be “willing to listen to their children, not the other way around.” Speaking of puberty blockers, “I’d kill to have those resources.”

A March 11 entry titled “My Imaginary Penis” carries Hale’s transgender ideology to its furthest extent. “My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m a male,” she writes, illustrating her journal with a crude image and describing her fantasy of committing sodomy on another woman. During her “tortured” childhood, she “tried to be feminine. But that didn’t last long after high school ended and no longer had to fear being called a dyke or a f*****. It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible.”

She began “thinking of porn and doing surgery on my boy stuffed animals,” who identify as male but had no male anatomy. “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.” Eventually, she realized this consumed too many of her waking hours. “I am such a pervert,” she writes. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”

Much of the notebook is dedicated to “P.A.P.,” an apparent reference to Paige Patton, who played basketball with Audrey in eighth grade and stayed in touch periodically. Other pages are dedicated to a deceased fellow teammate. Patton, now a Nashville radio host who goes by the name Averianna, revealed that Hale texted her a message the morning of the shooting stating, “I'm planning to die today.” Patton asked Hale not to harm herself and called the suicide prevention hotline, which suggested she inform the police — who did not see the message until that afternoon.

In an entry dated last February 20, she wrote, “It’s infamous to die young! Dying young is my destiny.” On March 2, she wrote that her friend “will live a legend and I will die a shooter — hopefully to become infamous. No one will forget neither [sic] of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.”

“If I ever cry all day, it’s ‘cause I need your love,” says one page. “All I see is you. … I yearn for you,” she writes. In an entry to her departed friend she writes, “maybe, just maybe you’ll give a kiss to me in heaven. God knows I can’t get it down here. … I’d die to know, Literally.”

“Audrey is not my name but when you say it I am just the little 1 I was back then. I can be a kid again … even if I can’t really be with you,” she writes. “God is love, so are you.”

“There is a better place than being in these bodies, forced to live in [them],” she continues. “You like showing yours. I’m in the wrong body … so … I can’t wait to get there.”

Yet Hale, who began psychological counseling at age six and remained in counseling until her death, felt her neurodivergence held her back. “Love cannot be real if my autism is,” she writes. “Love will find me once my body loses me. (I will be whole again.)”

“I’m told I’m bi-polar by some prideful b****. No one gets me. Everyone misunderstands autism,” she complains at another time.

“I think God will enter me in heaven. If do get there, I’ll be waiting there for you,” she writes to Patton. “I’ve always been different. … My thoughts are a neverending abyss. A DARK ONE.” In another entry, Hale referred to herself as a “cursed soul.”

“Idc [I don’t care] if people die as I am the shooter because I am going 2 die too,” she vows. “My only true motivation = mass suicide [leading to] death.”

Hale infamously hated her father and intended to return home to murder him. In an entry titled “Dad problems,” she writes: “I hate his old cranky-man existance [sic]. All cranky good-for-nothing mentally ill men SHOULD DIE. They’re useless pieces of s***. … I DON’T CARE IF YOU DIE. I WANT TO KILL YOU.” Later, she adds, “A whole day w/o a father will be a better day …”

“I’m sorry innocent lives will be taken,” she writes on March 13, two weeks before the mass murder. She adds she has honed “a plan to near perfection.”

The octagon shape — which is sometimes black with a white cross — appears to represent “dark abyss, my only existence [sic].” She continues, “I think about death every day & fascinated/curious with the idea of dying too much. I know it’s unhealthy, but I just don’t care if it is anymore. … It’s too late now. I’m ready to die.”

Hale makes a number of references to the Columbine high school shooting. “I want my massacre to end in a way that Eric & Dylan would be proud of,” she writes. She also notes the date of the shooting in the notebook.

At one point near the shooting, she refers to herself as “just A.E. (not Audrey Elizabeth). I don’t like that name, never have, never will.”

She left explicit instructions for the news media to refer to her by her transgender name, Aiden, “For media: ‘A.’ A.E. (legal initials). Aiden (illegal name haha). A.E. Hale. Aiden Hale,” she writes. The legacy media strangely insisted on referring to the trans-identified mass child murderer by her birth name and reported that her gender identity was fuzzy.

As time went on, Hale’s resolve strengthened. On the morning of the shooting, March 27, she writes, “Forgive me God. This act will be inglorious.”

On “Death Day,” Hale confesses, “Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am.” She adds, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”

“Can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m ready … I hope my victims aren’t.”

“My only fear is if anything goes wrong. I’ll do my best to prevent anything of the sort. (God let my wrath take over my anxiety),” The killer wrote. “It might be 10 minutes. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count.”

The journal goes on, “Ready to die haha Aiden.”

These writings are different from a spiral-bound notebook police found in Hale’s vehicle at the scene of the crime. That other writing has yet to be released in its entirety. Conservative activist Steven Crowder obtained and released two pages of the spiral-bound notebook, including a “Death Day” itinerary of Hale’s shooting plans and poem dated February 3, 2023, titled “Kill those kids!!!” which reads in its entirety:

“Kill those kids!!!

Those crackers [an anti-white slur],

Going to private fancy schools

With those fancy khakis & sports backpacks,

With their daddies’ mustangs & convertibles.

F*** you little sh***

I wish to shoot you weak a** d**** with your mop yellow hair,

Wanna kill all you little crackers!!!

Bunch of little f******

W/your white privileges.

F*** you f******.”

It is not clear how many more pages of the spiral-bound notebook remain unreleased. You can download the full red Mead notebook from The Tennessee Star here. [SOURCE]

Trans Activism_Latest Victims: Generous elderly man donates his space for activist group of trans, only to be stabbed to death afterwards when their money ran out

 

((Collage by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times. Photos: Sonoma County Sheriff's Office; Thomas Young))

Story by Jessica Garrison, Brittny Mejia

As he prepared to give up the beloved pre-WWII-era ship he lived on in Half Moon Bay and move into a trailer on a lot he owned in this scrappy city on San Pablo Bay, Curt Lind made a fateful decision.

Lind, then in his late 70s, invited an eccentric group of folks living on a neighboring vintage tugboat to come along and become his tenants.

The neighbors — a group of computer savants and vegan activists committed to the study of human cognition, most of them trans women — moved box trucks on his land. It seemed like a win-win for the free-spirited Lind: They needed a place to stay, and he had a dream of making a little money by transforming his ramshackle lot into cheap housing for artists, woodworkers and other “makers” who were being squeezed by Bay Area prices.

“We talked a lot, and I thought we were good friends,” Lind said in a 2024 interview with The Times. “They were going to stay at my yard for four months.”

That’s not what happened. The pandemic hit. The tenants, according to Lind, stopped paying rent. And in 2022, when Lind, then 80, tried to evict them, some of those same tenants staged a brutal attack, slashing his body and stabbing out an eye, according to a criminal complaint filed by Solano County prosecutors. With a samurai sword still lodged in his body, Lind whipped out a gun and shot back, wounding one tenant and killing another.

And then, the story really took a turn.

Because as horror-movie Gothic as a samurai sword attack on an octogenarian in a desolate corner of the San Francisco Bay might sound, it was only the first in a series of alleged violent crimes that law enforcement authorities have linked to members of the strange group Lind had welcomed into his motley community.

Over the past few years, several members of the group have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of interest in incidents that resulted in six deaths across the U.S. The parents of one of the vegan associates, Michelle Zajko, were slain in the dark of night in their stately home in suburban Pennsylvania in late December 2022. Zajko, who authorities allege had a pistol similar to the one used in the crime, has been named a person of interest in their deaths. She has not been charged.

Last month, a Border Patrol agent was shot to death on a snowy Vermont highway during a shootout with two other associates of the group, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national, and computer science student Teresa Youngblut, 21. Bauckholt was also killed in the shootout, and Youngblut arrested.

And then there was Lind: He had survived the samurai attack and loss of an eye, and was preparing to testify against the tenants charged in his assault. But three days before the Vermont shootout, Lind was knifed to death in broad daylight outside his Vallejo lot. Another person with links to the group, Maximilian Snyder, a graduate of an elite Seattle prep school, was charged with Lind's murder and trying to silence a witness. Snyder has not yet entered a plea.

Authorities in jurisdictions across the country have said little about the group or what evidence they have gathered in the far-flung cases. But court records, blog posts and interviews with family members and acquaintances paint a picture of a group whose members splintered from the Bay Area's rationalist community — an intellectual movement exploring the underpinnings of human reasoning — and allegedly turned violent.

In the Bay Area's rationalist community, they are known as the Zizians, a reference to Jack "Ziz" LaSota, a trans woman whose prolific blogging attracted a following. Many of her adherents attended fancy schools, are gifted with computers and worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence. They were often seen dressed all in black, or sometimes, wearing almost nothing at all.

By many accounts, the origins of the group go back almost a decade, to the time when LaSota, a computer science graduate from Alaska, landed in the Bay Area.

LaSota, who is now 34 and uses feminine pronouns, would at one point be declared lost at sea, then turn up very much alive near the scene of violent crimes on both coasts. She has not been charged in any of the killings.

But this was well in the future. In 2016, she was, as she wrote in her blog, hoping to "contribute to saving the world." It was rough going. She was fired from a job at a gaming startup and struggled to afford Bay Area housing.


She eventually landed on unemployment, according to her blog, and developed a kinship with another trans computer whiz, Gwen Danielson, who was affiliated with the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on safe development of artificial intelligence.

Danielson, who comes from a family of engineers and intellects, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to Rice University. Her father, Brett, said she was working on three degree programs — neuroscience, neurological engineering and electrical engineering — but dropped out after a year and a half.

"There was something really deep I hadn't had before in being able to just think and bounce ideas off someone equally interested in schemes to save the world for weeks on end," LaSota wrote of Danielson.

LaSota also began to believe, according to her blog, that the astronomically high housing prices in the Bay Area were an impediment to "anyone who wanted to actually try to save the world."

The friends hit on an elegant answer: They hatched a plan to acquire old boats and use them for housing. They called it "The Rationalist Fleet." Brett Danielson, Gwen's father, said he allowed his daughter, LaSota and a third person to join his cellphone plan so they could run their operations.

In 2017, LaSota, Danielson and others acquired a World War II-era tugboat, the Caleb, and sailed it down from Alaska to Half Moon Bay.

The group grew to include Emma Borhanian, a talented programmer who had moved from North Carolina to San Francisco for a job at Google. After rising in the ranks, her mother wrote on social media, Borhanian “retired” in her mid-20s and dedicated her life to "animal rights, transgender rights and AI safety."

But the dream of building a utopian community of rationalist boat dwellers did not come to fruition, Brett Danielson said, in part because another member of the partnership with deeper pockets left. Also: maintaining old boats to the satisfaction of local authorities is really hard.

Almost immediately, the Caleb was in trouble with the law, according to San Mateo County public records. In October 2017, Coast Guard officials warned Gwen Danielson of the environmental dangers posed by the boat, noting it had “around 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board along with other hazardous petroleum products.” Two weeks later, the Coast Guard declared the boat “an imminent threat to the public health or welfare of the environment.”

As the group struggled to sort out their boat troubles, LaSota's blog posts — dense pronouncements on rational decision-making meshed with earnest personal stories — drew in more followers. She eventually broke off from the larger rationalist community, penning posts critical of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.

In 2019, LaSota, Danielson, Borhanian and one other member of the group took this philosophical rift to the redwood forests of western Sonoma County. On the afternoon of Nov. 15, according to law enforcement reports, sheriff’s deputies got a call about a group of people dressed in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks outside Westminster Woods, a retreat center where the Center for Applied Rationality was holding a gathering. According to local news accounts, the robed intruders passed out fliers asserting the center “no longer aspires to teach the true path of rationality, if it ever did.”

The four were arrested on multiple charges, including trespassing and wearing a mask while committing a crime.

Brett Danielson said he maintained only sporadic communication with his daughter, but he did hear from her after the arrest. He said his daughter told him the group had been peaceful, and alleged abuse at the hands of authorities. The group later filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over the incident.

He feared his daughter was going down a dangerous path. Nevertheless, he helped pay her legal bills and hoped the trouble would pass.

It was around this time that some members of the larger rationalist community began to raise alarms.

"The purpose of this document is to warn you not to join them!" one person wrote on a site called Zizians.info. "Ziz is a master manipulator; she is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas about decision theory and ethics that defy not just the 'rules of rationality' but basic common sense."

As their cases moved through Sonoma County courts, the group's boat in Half Moon Bay continued to generate conflict with authorities. As it happened, one of their neighbors in the harbor, Lind, was familiar with the Caleb.

“It used to belong to one of my best friends,” said Lind, who had a long history of acquiring old boats.

Lind could sympathize with their regulatory troubles. Over the years he had faced his own issues because of his devotion to dilapidated vessels from bygone eras. He had recently been embroiled in a dispute with officials over the MS Aurora, a 70-year-old cruise ship that had been an inspiration for the TV show "The Love Boat." “It’s a sickness,” he told The Times of his love for old ships.

When Lind sold his own boat, the Robert Gray, a 120-foot Army Corps survey boat, and moved to his trailer lot in Vallejo, the Zizians came along, moving into box trucks and trailers. But the harmony of their communal solution to the housing crisis was soon replaced by acrimony, especially as the unpaid rent began to accrue.

“We were all concerned about it,” said Lind’s good friend, Thomas Young, who lived with Lind on the Robert Gray.

Young said he dined with Lind at least once a week, and his troublesome tenants were a frequent topic.

“They did all kinds of things to be unpleasant,” Young said, adding that Lind believed they threw rocks at his trailer in the middle of the night to disturb him, and also “would parade around during the day, half naked, just to shock the neighborhood more than anything. He just wanted them out.”

But with the pandemic raging, no one was going anywhere.

Meanwhile, Danielson, at that point the registered owner of the Caleb, was under increasing pressure to relocate the listing tugboat. In May 2022, shortly after group members stopped responding to authorities' entreaties, the boat sank.

And then another shocking development: In August of that year, Borhanian and a companion placed urgent calls for help, saying LaSota had fallen off another boat into San Francisco Bay and disappeared into the watery depths. Rescue teams searched and found no trace of her.

“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug. 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” read the obituary in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Around the same time, Danielson, too, went missing.

In fall 2022, with the pandemic waning, Lind got a judge to issue an eviction notice for his tenants.

“The court awarded me some $60-odd thousand,” he recalled in a 2024 interview with The Times. “I didn’t think they had any money, so I didn’t go after that. But I could kick them out for non-payment.”

A week before the sheriff was scheduled to come, Lind said, his tenants asked if they could stay for two more months. “I told them ‘No.’"

He had a bad feeling about it, he said, and so he began carrying a gun.

Around 2 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, another friend of Lind’s, Patrick McMillan, who also lived at his property, was inside his own trailer when he saw someone outside wearing a headlamp, he would later tell police.

Knowing of the dispute with the Zizian tenants, McMillan said he called Lind. Lind asked him to call police, according to an account filed in court by prosecutors. McMillan called 911, according to the account, but police did not come.

Hours later, around sunrise, McMillan told authorities, he was rousted from his bed by Lind's panicked screams. McMillan said he opened his door and beheld Lind holding a gun and bleeding from multiple wounds.

His tenants had stabbed him, he later told The Times, echoing allegations prosecutors would bring in a criminal complaint, so "I pulled out this pistol and started shooting."

Police did respond this time. Borhanian had been fatally shot. Another group member, Alex “Somni” Leatham, was wounded but survived. A third person, identified as Suri Dao in court papers, was on scene, but not wounded.

Police arrested Leatham and Dao and charged them with assaulting Lind. They also charged them with the felony murder of Borhanian, though Lind had shot her, because of their role in the attack.

From behind bars, Leatham has repeatedly written to the court professing innocence. Dao's attorney, Brian Ford, told The Times that the "trial hasn't happened yet. When it does, and all the evidence is presented, when the dust settles, everyone is going to realize Suri is not overly involved in any of this."

There was someone else on scene the night Lind was stabbed: LaSota. Not dead after all. The revelation came in court papers filed by an attorney in the Sonoma County case.

Lind did not name LaSota as one of the tenants involved in the attack. She was not charged.

Less than two months later, the parents of Zizian associate Michelle Zajko were murdered on the other side of the country.

Rita Zajko, 69, and Richard Zajko, 72, were discovered shot in their bedroom in suburban Philadelphia on Jan. 2, 2023.

A subsequent police investigation, detailed by the Boston Globe, revealed that two people had parked a car in the couple's driveway just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. At some point, according to footage from a Ring camera, someone shouted “Mom.”

An investigation into their deaths led Pennsylvania state troopers to the Candlewood Suites in nearby Chester City on Jan. 12, 2023. Michelle Zajko was staying there, and authorities were searching for the gun used to kill her parents, according to court testimony.

Instead, while searching a second room associated with Zajko, they found LaSota. In an affidavit, State Trooper Matthew Smith, using male pronouns, said LaSota “immediately became limp, closed his eyes, and refused to comply with any commands.”

LaSota, who Smith said is 6-foot-2 and around 200 pounds, was physically carried into a nearby hospital, where a doctor said there was nothing medically wrong. Yet, according to Smith, LaSota would not “open his eyes, walk, or move on his own or make any verbal announcements.”

LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct. After being released, she failed to appear for a court hearing, according to the Delaware County district attorney’s office. A warrant was issued, but once again, LaSota was gone.

Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, Dao and Leatham, the two charged with stabbing Lind, were giving California officials all manner of trouble.

Leatham was accused of trying to escape from custody twice, on Nov. 28, 2022, and again on Feb. 6, 2023, according to court documents. Dao was accused of trying to escape in the summer of 2023.

As authorities on both coasts worked their cases, Brett Danielson said he heard from his daughter Gwen for the first time in years.

"'I'm in hiding; I'm under an alias, please don't divulge where I am, or that I'm even alive,'” he said she told him.

Lind, meanwhile, was trying to move on with his life. He had children, grandchildren and a host of friends who were helping him recover. And prosecutors were counting on him to provide crucial testimony in the case against his former tenants.

Lind and his supporters were anxious to put the episode behind them. Young said that after the sword attack, he had entered the tenants' trucks and found dozens of computers, all expertly encrypted. “I’m an engineer,” Young said. “I can recognize the high level of skill these people had.”

On Jan. 16, Solano County prosecutors asked the court to speed up the trial date, noting that Lind was 82.

The next day, a man dressed in black and purple accosted Lind outside his Vallejo property and cut his throat as neighbors watched in horror. The old ship captain was dead. The man who killed him fled on foot.

Young said he is convinced someone wanted to keep Lind from testifying. He said he called and emailed Vallejo police, informing them that he still had all those computers and hard drives the tenants had left behind. Perhaps they would prove useful in figuring out who these people were.

But no one got back to him, he said. It wasn't until late February, after he complained to local media, he said, that the district attorney's office called.

On Jan. 14, a hotel employee in Vermont called law enforcement to report that two young people had checked into the hotel and were acting oddly — wearing black tactical-style clothing and carrying a gun.

Investigators spoke briefly with the pair, whom they identified as Youngblut and Bauckholt, who claimed they were in the area to look at property, according to a law enforcement affidavit filed in federal court.

On the afternoon of Jan. 20, Border Patrol agents pulled the pair over as they drove along Interstate 91 in a Prius. Youngblut, the driver, allegedly drew a handgun and fired, according to the affidavit. In the subsequent exchange of fire, both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David Maland were killed. Maland, 44, was an avid outdoorsman and engaged to be married, according to his obituary.

Undated photo of Border Patrol Agent David Maland with his service dog. ((Department of Homeland Security))© (Department of Homeland Security)

Four days later, Vallejo police arrested Snyder outside a shopping mall near Interstate 5. He was charged with Lind's murder.

Police have not said publicly how Snyder came onto their radar. But public records from the state of Washington provide a clue: Months earlier, Snyder and Youngblut had applied for a marriage license. It’s unclear if they ever married.

And there were more threads: Zajko had purchased the firearms that Youngblut and Bauckholt used during the shootout, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Vermont.

Last week, authorities caught up with her, too. According to a statement from the Maryland State Police, Zajko was arrested Feb. 16, along with LaSota and a third person, Daniel Blank.

A property owner in Frostburg, Md., had contacted authorities to say three people with two box trucks were trespassing on his property, according to a law enforcement affidavit. They dressed all in black and “appeared suspicious.”

When police got there, according to the affidavit, they found Zajko with a SIG Sauer handgun in her waistband. There was another gun in one of the trucks. All three were charged with trespassing and obstructing a police officer. Zajko and LaSota were additionally held on gun charges.

They pleaded not guilty at a hearing on Tuesday, and are being held without bail.

Lind’s friends are still trying to wrap their heads around it all.

They remember Lind for his delightful eccentricities — living on ancient boats, jousting with authorities, befriending wild geese. And they remember him for his warmth. He loved his family. He made friends wherever he went, and he inherently trusted everyone he met.

In the end, they said, that may have been his downfall.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. [SOURCE]

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Reality Check: DOGE Success Report_Over 1 Billion in budget cuts in just 3 weeks

 

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena, in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Amid Democrats’ pushback, lawsuits, and threats to DOGE employees, the cuts keep coming—including almost $1 billion announced on Feb. 10.

By Nathan Worcester
2/11/2025Updated:2/11/2025

After three weeks, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made over $1 billion in cuts, according to to numbers from the White House.
Some of the biggest savings reckoned by the White House stem from the cancellation of more than 100 contracts relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Trump’s day-one executive orders included one seeking to end DEI in the federal government. The White House estimates those cancellations alone saved over $1 billion.

DOGE also ended a $748 million contract for a new embassy in South Sudan.

Smaller cuts hit subscriptions for the news outlet Politico from NASA—$500,000—and $26 million in contracts for “executive coaching” and “strategic communication.”

DOGE’s X account unveiled almost $1 billion in additional cuts on the evening of Feb. 10.
They encompass $101 million worth of DEI-related training grants from the Department of Education, a department that Trump has floated eliminating, along with $881 million in other contracts involving it.
DOGE also publicly announced the end of $9 million in contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including for a “Women in Forest Carbon Initiative Mentorship Program” and “Central American Gender Assessment Consultant Services.”

Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah), co-chair of the bipartisan House DOGE Caucus, told The Epoch Times DOGE was “going through and creating some waves—and they’re definitely creating some airwaves.”

Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) told The Epoch Times that DOGE was designed “to take from the poor to give to the rich.”
“I feel that a lot of it is illegal,” he added.
The DOGE FightDOGE is a time-limited organization repurposed from the United States Digital Services and situated in the Executive Office of the President. Before Election Day in 2024, Trump announced his intentions to create DOGE and place tech entrepreneur Musk, by that point a key campaign benefactor, at its helm.
Trump issued the executive order establishing DOGE on the first day of his new administration. The order mandates DOGE teams of at least four in every agency, placing them under a temporary organization “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.”

Its interactions with other executive-branch agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Treasury Department, have sparked protests attended by Democrats from the House and Senate, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and other Democrats protest outside the Department of Labor in Washington on Feb. 5, 2025. Labor groups and Democrats were opposing access to department data by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk's time-limited commission. Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times

DOGE and its advocates have toted up wins and losses in the courts, where litigation concerning the commission and its employees is proliferating.
On Feb. 7, a D.C. federal judge, John Bates, ruled against restricting DOGE’s access to Department of Labor data in response to a lawsuit from various unions.
The next day, in a ruling on a different DOGE-related lawsuit, federal Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, issued a temporary restraining order preventing DOGE employees from obtaining Treasury payment system data and requiring that they destroy any materials they may have obtained.

A hearing in the case is scheduled for Feb. 14.
Musk took to his social media platform, X, to call for the judge’s impeachment, describing him as “a corrupt judge protecting corruption.”
The Department of Justice sought to lift the restraining order in a Feb. 9 filing, arguing that it could be construed to prevent Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from accessing Treasury payment system data.

The cuts and legal maneuvers are playing out as Musk and DOGE’s engineers face threats, including on social media.

A review of material on the social media platform Bluesky by The Epoch Times found numerous posts naming and, in multiple cases, threatening Musk and DOGE staff. One anonymous user named various DOGE engineers, referring to them as “Nazi scum” before adding, “The only good nazi is a dead nazi.”
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, has vowed to pursue those who break the law in threatening or harming DOGE employees “to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

As Musk and his engineers surf a wave of reaction, economists concerned about the debt and deficit have responded to DOGE’s cuts with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

Ryan Bourne, who co-authored a report on DOGE for the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email that DOGE “could have a big qualitative impact, both on permanently changing the character of the civil service and undermining public trust in certain programs through a drumbeat of stories about wasteful spending.”
But Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute wrote on X that DOGE’s declamations ring hollow given the scope of spending during Trump’s first administration and his unwillingness to make serious cuts to social spending and at the Pentagon—both significant contributors to persistent deficits.

“You have to stop cutting taxes and then address Social Security, Medicare, defense, and a lot of other popular programs. Wake me when the GOP goes there,” Riedl wrote, adding, “Don’t brag about your coupon-clipping frugality at the same time you are buying a $250,000 Ferrari.”
DOGE’s newest targets include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as well as the Pentagon. In a Feb. 9 Fox News interview, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was looking forward to partnering with DOGE.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), a retired Navy Seal, is handling the Veterans Affairs and Pentagon portfolios for the House DOGE Caucus.

“I could very, very reasonably cut tens of billions of dollars and improve veterans’ experiences, health care outcomes, education benefits. And we can do the same thing with the Department of Defense—get rid of these legacy programs that aren’t working, and then we’ll increase lethality and readiness,” he told The Epoch Times.

He would not comment on whether the outcome would be a lower overall Defense Department budget—a sticking point for many congressional Republicans seeking more money for the Pentagon.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), another pro-DOGER, said DOGE’s concern with Medicare or Social Security is confined to spotting “improper payments.” Medicaid, he told The Epoch Times, presents more opportunities for immediate reform.

“I think there are ways we can make these systems work and save quite a bit,” he said of the federal government’s large social programs.

“If we get to that point after we address the low-hanging fruit and we still have a problem, then at that point, we can address that,” Burlison added.
John Cochrane, a Hoover Institution economist, wrote in an analysis of Trump’s tax policy that the spending pinpointed by DOGE “is the means, not the end.”

“The US does need that great reform. But this isn’t the time. Get through the first year, maybe build a record of success,” Cochrane wrote on his blog, The Grumpy Economist.

Bourne, of the Cato Institute, also sees DOGE as a potential on-ramp for larger changes.

“Some might argue that the only way to get buy-in for entitlement reform in the future is to show the public you’ve made every effort to root out waste, mismanagement, and non-priority spending areas from the budget already,” he told The Epoch Times.

He said he suspects federal lawmakers must act to shore up DOGE’s moves—a goal that could face resistance in a narrowly divided Congress caught in perpetual battles over funding.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) has signaled that Democrats could use the government shutdown deadline, now little more than a month away, as leverage against DOGE.
Schumer has announced a four-pronged plan to fight the Trump administration that includes a panel for government employee whistleblowers—and he and his counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), have introduced legislation to curb DOGE’s Treasury data access.

On the other side of the aisle, Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) have introduced packages of DOGE-related bills. Ernst created the Senate’s DOGE Caucus, of which Lankford is also a member.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) speaks during an interview with The Epoch Times at his office on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 30, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Moore, the House DOGE Caucus co-chair, told The Epoch Times pro-DOGE lawmakers were engaged in “parallel work,” independent of Musk and DOGE, though with some communication between Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and DOGE.

Moore said he had not recently communicated with DOGE, though there was some communication when it began.

In time, the parallel work in the executive and legislative branches “will converge,” Moore added.[SOURCE]

Reality Check_Surfacing For Air After So Long: Schadenfreude for us for once

February 11, 2025
Confessions of Schadenfreude

By Rob Jenkins

It’s difficult to catalog the range of visceral emotions I feel as I watch President Trump, Elon Musk, and his team of whiz kids at DOGE dismantle the Deep State, piece by piece.  Anger.  Joy.  Disgust.  Grim satisfaction.  Schadenfreude.

We’ve known for years that our federal government has been robbing us blind.  We’ve felt it in our bones but been unable to prove it, while those who gorge themselves at the public trough — politicians, contractors, media figures, lobbyists, lawyers, NGO execs — become rich beyond most of our wildest dreams.  To see all that graft and corruption finally dragged into the light of day, with receipts, is almost more than I can process.

As I write, when I find it hard to express my thoughts, I often turn to narrative.  So let me start with a little story, a true story, one I’ve thought of many times in the past two weeks.

Last summer, my wife accompanied me to the Washington, D.C. area, where I was helping conduct a three-day workshop for a group of conservative college kids sponsored by The Leadership Institute.  She often comes with me on these trips, now that we’re empty-nesters, especially if I’m going someplace interesting or somewhere she’s never been.  Usually my expenses are paid, and all we have to do is buy an extra plane ticket.  And since D.C. has always been one of her favorite places to visit, as an ardent American history buff, she was happy to tag along and see some of the sights while I worked during the day and with me at night. 

One fine evening, after a rain shower had cooled things down, we decided to go for a walk in the obviously rather affluent neighborhood right behind our upscale hotel in Arlington.  Lining the quiet, tree-canopied streets were quite a few stately older homes, several smaller older homes, and whole slew of large, modern, brand-new homes, some still under construction.

Out of curiosity, my wife pulled up Zillow on her phone and began looking at home prices, using the function that allows you to see the estimated value of every house in the vicinity all at once.  I heard her exclaim, “Oh, my gosh” and looked over her shoulder at the app.  Even the oldest, most run down house on the block was valued at over $1.5 million.  The larger ones were in the $2–3 million range, with the new homes pushing $4 million.

“Where do all these people get that kind of money?” she asked.

“From us,” I replied.

I understand that’s a bit of a generalization.  Some of those homes have been owned by the same people for years and simply appreciated in value.  Then again, you can see on Zillow when a home has been sold, and most of the ones we were looking at had changed hands at least once within the last five years.

I also understand that not everyone in D.C. makes his money directly from the federal government.  Indeed, most federal employees can’t afford to live in a neighborhood like that, which is why they live far from downtown and commute an hour or more to work.  (Back when they used to commute, I mean, before they all started working from home — something else Trump is putting an end to.)

And yes, it’s true that other metro areas, like San Francisco and Chicago, are also very expensive, because they have lucrative industries that draw people to them.  In the Bay Area, for example, you have Big Tech, which seems to be creating new millionaires every day.  People who are interested in the technology field, and who want to make a lot of money, are drawn to the area.

That’s not to say everyone in the Bay Area works in the tech industry, or that everyone who lives there is rich.  It’s just that the tech sector is the main driver of the area’s economy and the main reason so many rich people live there.  If the tech companies all went away, the economy in the Bay Area would collapse overnight.  (That very thing may be starting to happen.)

So what about Washington, D.C., which is nearly as affluent and expensive as San Francisco, if not more so?  What is the main industry there?  What is the driver of its economy?

You know the answer.  It’s the federal government.  That’s what draws people to D.C.  Not the climate or the food or the history.  People looking to make lots of money are drawn there by Big Gov, with its virtually limitless funds.  And what is the source of those funds?  Why, we are.  We the people, the taxpayers of the United States of America.  Under our Constitution, the government is essentially us.

Here’s where the schadenfreude comes in.

My wife and I have worked hard all our lives to achieve some level of success.  We make a decent living.  We’ve lived frugally.  We sacrificed to put four kids through college.  We haven’t taken on a ton of consumer debt, and we pay our bills on time.  We’ve saved and invested.

Now I look at my portfolio and, factoring in the last four years of inflation, I calculate that I may need to work until I’m 72 or older just so we don’t run out of money in retirement.  On one level, this is fine.  I enjoy what I do, and I’m not actually looking to retire anytime soon.  Nor am I complaining about the hard work.  I was raised to expect life to be like that.  We brought up our children the same way.

But then I stroll through a neighborhood like that one, in (or very near) our nation’s capital, and I see all these people who are making their money — most of them, anyway, directly or indirectly — from the federal government, the government I pay taxes for, and they’re ten times richer than I’ll ever be.

That’s a bitter pill to swallow — that any amount of my hard earned money, however small, goes toward enabling someone else to buy a $4-million home, a home I could never afford if I work until I’m 102.

Then Elon and his wunderkinds come along and show us that we were right all along, that we are being robbed, that the treasury is being plundered, that money — our money — is being funneled to people and places we would never approve, into worthless projects that, besides flouting our values, are mostly just money-laundering schemes to help the rich men north of Richmond get even richer.  

And then Elon and company begin to turn off the spigot.  Suddenly, the trough is no longer filling up.  And the Deep State operators and all their cronies and minions panic.  They’re being starved.  What will they do?  What will happen to the value of all those multi-million-dollar homes they’ve purchased with our money?

Hey, maybe in a couple of years I will be able to afford one of those after all.

Image via Pixabay.

DSSO_Piercing The Veil_Rand says, “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal."

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Robert Spencer 
11:09 AM
February 10, 2025

In comparison to the massive waste and fraud that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already uncovered, this is just a drop in the bucket. It is not so much a matter of money saved, however, as it is of rolling back the left’s sinister and destructive practice of forcing the celebration of its key figures as heroes. Anthony Fauci is no hero, and he doesn’t deserve a museum exhibit. Axing this exhibit is a step toward reclaiming the culture from the sinister authoritarians who have dominated it for far too long.


It's everywhere. There is, for example, a Little Golden Book and several other children’s books lionizing Kamala Harris and introducing budding young leftists to her alleged “achievements.” There are no children’s books about J.D. Vance. Fauci is likewise the hero of a Little Golden Book, and the museum exhibit was certain to offer more of the same: here, kids, is a selfless public servant. There was no chance that the exhibit would have gone on to tell the truth, as in something like “If you grow up to be like him, you’ll be celebrated everywhere for imposing authoritarian restrictions upon Americans, including measures that you knew didn’t work, in order to meet the challenge of a wildly exaggerated crisis!”

Fox News reported Sunday that “the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) canceled more than $180 million in contracts over 48 hours, including a nearly $170,000 contract for an Anthony Fauci museum exhibit.” $170,000 isn’t very much money at all when the government is showering billions upon terrorists, but it’s actually $170,000 more than the government should be spending to hail Fauci.

DOGE announced Friday that “in the past 48 hours, HHS canceled 62 contract [sic] worth $182 million. These contracts were entirely for administrative expenses – none touched any healthcare programs.” Now there’s a significant little detail. DOGE added: “This included terminating a $168,000 contract for an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the NIH Museum." This comes after Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail, as well as after Old Joe Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon, even though the alleged hero hasn’t been charged with any crime.


At the time that the pardon was issued, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote: “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed. Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception. Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime.”

Related: Donald Trump is Striking at the Heart of the Left's Central Belief

Paul added on Feb. 2: “I think, Anthony Fauci accepting the pardon, he doesn't escape judgment. I think history is gonna judge him harshly. So in some ways, from that point of view, I think he made a huge mistake accepting the pardon. If he wanted people to think he was innocent, you can actually reject the pardon. There's also supreme court [sic] precedent for when you accept a pardon, accepting guilt. And so in many ways, he has accepted guilt. Now his pardon is unspecified. It's preemptive and nonspecific, but that also means that it's going to be the burden on him to try to prove that he was innocent after accepting a pardon." This is the kind of man who should be celebrated in a museum exhibit? The NIH at this point should be trying to give the impression that it has never heard Fauci’s name.

It started with pulling down the statues of Confederates and renaming military bases that, in an earlier attempt to bind up the nation’s wounds, were named for them. Then the leftist thugs targeted not only statues of Confederate generals and slave-owners but of General Ulysses S. Grant, who led the great war to free the slaves; President Theodore Roosevelt, a “progressive” environmentalist; George Washington; Thomas Jefferson, and even the abolitionist Abraham Lincoln. In their place, we got statues of George Floyd, and you can be sure that if the left had succeeded in solidifying its hegemony over American culture, we would have started seeing statues of Obama, Kamala Harris, and Fauci in due time. They may still be coming if Trump and Musk don’t succeed in defeating the corrupt authoritarians they have confronted. At least for now, however, Fauci will not get his museum exhibit. That’s one small step in the right direction.[SOURCE]