Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Thursday, July 30, 2026
ANN COULTER: The Princess Diaries of Anthony Fauci
The Princess Diaries of Anthony Fauci
I thought of various clever-seeming ways to organize this cornucopia of quotes from the diary of former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. But that would mean cutting some of these gems. So here they are, in ascending order of embarrassing awfulness.
1. Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:
— “Apparently, a lot of people at the Pentagon admire me very much …”
— “The nurses went absolutely wild to see me, they were squealing and laughing and clapping. It was something to behold.”
— “Did I mention he’s easy on the eyes?” — Fauci, quoting The Anthony Fauci Fan Club Twitter account (which he does at length).
2. If the Real Housewives had a baby with George Santos, it would be Anthony Fauci.
— “A Gala event was held tonight… It was the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC.”
— “One person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more
sexy than she was. She [said] ‘that is true and my mother is in love
with you.’ Zing 
”
— “I am such a valued spokesperson and a good communicator…”
— “Wonderful brunch… the typical Washington A list was there.”
3. His obvious humble brags. All this adoration is ridiculous!
— “The ridiculous attention to me continues; fan clubs, Swags, am constantly on TV; countless profiles of me.”
— “Many print profiles and features on me. Ridiculous—too numerous to count!” (Kind of like those myocarditis deaths.)
— “A photographer from across the landscape shot me and focused on my polkadot socks. It got tweeted around the country. ‘Birx has her scarfs and Fauci has his socks.’ Geeeez.” (It must be very exciting to be tweeted all around the country.)
— “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous. You can buy Fauci T-shirts, mugs, donuts, sweat shirts, candles, pillows, etc. Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.”
— “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on.”
(If you’re going for merch, how about autographed Anthony Fauci coffins?)
4. He’s disturbingly impressed with celebrities.
— “[Julia Roberts] embarrassed me somewhat when… she put her hands in front of her mouth and said ‘Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci, he is here.’ Then she went on to say that I was her personal hero…”
— “Joan Baez texted me tonight asking me about what she should wear for the State Department dinner…”
— “There was a wonderful series of testimonials to me from an amazing group of people: Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola … Maria Tomei…”
— “Noteworthy is the fact that I had an extraordinary podcast interview for one hour with famous actor Alec Baldwin.”
— “It was a star-studded evening and I had pleasant conversations with people some of whom I had met before such as Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Mike Ferrone, among many others.”
5. He was more interested in Fauci bobbleheads and Fauci donuts than the number of elderly people dying alone in hospitals.
— “Bobblehead raising money: Fauci bobblehead raises $100,000 for American Hospital Association.”
— “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.”
— “Fauci Bobblehead Raises $200k for Healthcare Workers”
— “Spoke with Robyn Ross of the Washington Post Magazine. She is writing a piece on my Bobblehead” (And get this: they’re all made by pangolins!)
He writes about the Fauci donuts eight times in his diary—or eight times more than he mentioned Sweden. (From the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden imposed no lockdowns, advised citizens against wearing masks and had less excess mortality than the U.S.)
6. He’s obsessed with how famous he is, boasting about his fame dozens of times.
— “I was beset by a horde of at least 20 paparazzi who followed me … walking backwards surrounding me and flashing lights that blinded me.”
— “The problem is that now I am one of the most recognizable and well-known people in the world.”
— “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world.”
— “Multiple TV cameras and hundreds of camera clicks followed me out of the Rayburn Building as I had a car waiting for me to take me to the Oval Office.”
7. Fauci’s amazing adventure! (While you were quarantining at home.)
— “Amazing night at NATS Stadium where I threw out the first pitch to open the 2020 Baseball season … Unfortunately, I threw a bouncer to the right of the plate. I felt really badly but the overwhelming public reaction to it was sympathetic and positive. … I signed a Nats Jersey that will hang on the wall in Nats stadium next to a similar shirt signed by President Obama.”
— “After the gala we were invited to another gala at the Cafe Milano …”
— “I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump. It took place at the Cafe Milano. …”
–”I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me.”
— “Last night I received another humbling honor associated with the honorary doctorate in science that I received from Rockefeller University in New York City. … the audience at the celebratory dinner was giving me a standing ovation, … This will have been my 58th honorary doctorate.”
8. With all the time he spent being photographed for magazine covers, it’s no wonder that Fauci lacked basic knowledge of COVID, such as the fact that the survival rate for people under the age of 70 was 99.95%.
— “Did major photo shoot with People magazine.”
— “Nature magazine picked me as one of Nature’s 10—people who shaped science in 2020.”
— “[White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows] did not like the fact that I did an InStyle piece and did not want any more profiles of me.”
— “Over the past three weeks I have been on the cover of Time magazine X2, once as one of the 100 most influential people in the world again as the ‘guardian of the year.’ Also, on the cover of People magazine.”
9. He has remarkably thin skin.
— “It’s no secret that I have been clearly targeted by rather radical elements who just keep attacking me every day, all day—Fox News, Breitbart—all those other crazies.”
— “The onslaught against me by the radical right continues….Some of the valid press such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others are calling out the lies of the far right.”
— “General Mark Milley came up to me put his arms around my shoulder and said ‘the only person who was getting his balls kicked more than me in Washington is you.’ I responded by saying ‘no shit.’”
10. He is thrilled to be asked for selfies.
— “I got completely surrounded by ‘well-wishers’ who wanted selfies and/or to shake my hands.”
— “Every young intern as well as seasoned veteran in the WH coming over to me congratulating me and thanking me for my work and even asking for selfies.”
— “I was totally mobbed for selfies.”
— “Several women civilian employees as well as military officers came over to me wanting selfies… One of them actually broke into tears.”
— “I took the time to visit them and there was the usual selfies galore.”
— “The people at the Abyssinian church or extremely kind to me… And all of them wanting to take selfies with me.”
— “Went to do PSAs with the White House digital Comms team. They all wanted selfies with me.”
— “I was totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)”
— “As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies.”
I’d end it there, but his next sentence was this: “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”[SOURCE]
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
COVID TALES: Never Forget_When they mocked the deaths of those who doubted
Scientists are paying a huge personal price in the lonely fight against anti-vaxxers
Anti-vaccine protesters at a Los Angeles rally (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
By Michael Hiltzik
Business Columnist
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Oct. 20, 2023 3 AM PT
Business Columnist
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Oct. 20, 2023 3 AM PT
In the preface of the new book by vaccine expert and pro-science crusader Peter Hotez, there are several acknowledgments of a kind that may never have appeared before in a book like it.
There, Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments “for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.”
The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party.
— Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez
These words tell a story all their own: how the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics.
Things have only gotten worse since then, as Hotez reports in his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” A professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor and a courageously outspoken advocate for public health, Hotez documents how agitators on the extreme right have graduated from trying to sow mistrust in science to targeting individual scientists such as himself.
The heart of his book is a call for government agencies and professional organizations to wage an aggressive battle against anti-vaccination and anti-science propaganda. What’s needed, he says, is something akin to an interagency task force to address the problem, because the scientific community as it’s currently organized can’t do so on its own.
“The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What you see instead are responses that skirt around the edges. You’ll see public health agencies step up their pro-vaccine messages, and sure, that’s important, but it doesn’t get to what’s really driving this.”
Hotez identifies several reasons for scientific organizations’ ineffective response to the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation. “They don’t have the skill set or the background to know how to deal with this,” he says.
Then there’s their traditional commitment to political neutrality. “They say, ‘We’re a scientific or health organization, we have to be politically neutral.’” He cites the observation by Elie Wiesel that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
On Oct. 13, Hotez received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America for his long public campaign against anti-science propagandists. The battle came at a considerable personal cost.
Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been “doxxed” through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.
Hotez is not alone. “I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,” Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in “Shot in the Arm,” a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda. (The documentary will open at the Angelika Film Center in New York on Nov. 2 and the Laemmle Glendale in Southern California on Nov. 17.)
The film includes a clip of Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer, addressing an audience with the words: “Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body? Anyone that believes in the right to bear arms to stand up against your government, I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then.”
Hotez’s book and the film both trace the evolution of vaccine science, starting with the discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s that people exposed to cowpox via inoculation would be rendered immune from the much more dangerous smallpox (“vaccination” derives from the Latin for “cow,” vacca), and the evolution of the anti-vaccine movement.
“As both a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines and a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” Hotez writes, “I have had a front-row seat on the modern anti-vaccine movement in America.”
Anti-vaccine activism had existed almost for as long as there were vaccines, but the movement got an enormous shot in the arm, so to speak, from a notorious article in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, in 1998. The paper by a team headed by British physician Andrew Wakefield purported to identify a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. After an investigation, British medical authorities effectively revoked his medical license. Countless subsequent scientific studies have established that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Nevertheless, Wakefield’s paper promoted an almost immediate plummet in MMR childhood vaccinations in Britain and its claim remains central to the anti-vax movement to this day — a movement that continues to lionize Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., as a truth-teller.
The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.
The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as “medical freedom” and “health freedom” — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting “picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,” Hotez says.
There, Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments “for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.”
The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party.
— Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez
These words tell a story all their own: how the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics.
Things have only gotten worse since then, as Hotez reports in his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” A professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor and a courageously outspoken advocate for public health, Hotez documents how agitators on the extreme right have graduated from trying to sow mistrust in science to targeting individual scientists such as himself.
The heart of his book is a call for government agencies and professional organizations to wage an aggressive battle against anti-vaccination and anti-science propaganda. What’s needed, he says, is something akin to an interagency task force to address the problem, because the scientific community as it’s currently organized can’t do so on its own.
“The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What you see instead are responses that skirt around the edges. You’ll see public health agencies step up their pro-vaccine messages, and sure, that’s important, but it doesn’t get to what’s really driving this.”
Hotez identifies several reasons for scientific organizations’ ineffective response to the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation. “They don’t have the skill set or the background to know how to deal with this,” he says.
Then there’s their traditional commitment to political neutrality. “They say, ‘We’re a scientific or health organization, we have to be politically neutral.’” He cites the observation by Elie Wiesel that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
On Oct. 13, Hotez received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America for his long public campaign against anti-science propagandists. The battle came at a considerable personal cost.
Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been “doxxed” through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.
Hotez is not alone. “I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,” Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in “Shot in the Arm,” a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda. (The documentary will open at the Angelika Film Center in New York on Nov. 2 and the Laemmle Glendale in Southern California on Nov. 17.)
The film includes a clip of Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer, addressing an audience with the words: “Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body? Anyone that believes in the right to bear arms to stand up against your government, I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then.”
Hotez’s book and the film both trace the evolution of vaccine science, starting with the discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s that people exposed to cowpox via inoculation would be rendered immune from the much more dangerous smallpox (“vaccination” derives from the Latin for “cow,” vacca), and the evolution of the anti-vaccine movement.
“As both a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines and a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” Hotez writes, “I have had a front-row seat on the modern anti-vaccine movement in America.”
Anti-vaccine activism had existed almost for as long as there were vaccines, but the movement got an enormous shot in the arm, so to speak, from a notorious article in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, in 1998. The paper by a team headed by British physician Andrew Wakefield purported to identify a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. After an investigation, British medical authorities effectively revoked his medical license. Countless subsequent scientific studies have established that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Nevertheless, Wakefield’s paper promoted an almost immediate plummet in MMR childhood vaccinations in Britain and its claim remains central to the anti-vax movement to this day — a movement that continues to lionize Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., as a truth-teller.
The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.
The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as “medical freedom” and “health freedom” — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting “picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,” Hotez says.
U.S. vaccination rates against COVID show a partisan slant, with counties that voted for Trump in 2020 falling well behind those that voted for Biden. COVID death rates show the same pattern, with red counties showing higher rates than blue.
“It was mutually reinforcing,” he told me. “The anti-vaccine groups were getting attention and PAC money that they never had before, and the far right got a new set of adherents and a new faux outrage to rally the base. It just became part of the canon.”
The anti-vaccine and anti-science movements exploit and amplify the lay public’s ignorance about the scientific method and the technical aspects of how vaccines work.
“Vaccines were compelling because vaccine-preventable diseases were compelling,” Offit explains in the documentary. Smallpox, polio and measles were recognized nemeses when they ranged the world untreated. Smallpox alone took the lives of an estimated 500 million people over the centuries, but thanks to vaccination it was judged eradicated from the world by the late 1970s.
The introduction of the polio vaccine in 1955 and the measles vaccine in 1963, accompanied by public mass vaccination campaigns, dropped the number of U.S. deaths from those diseases to zero by the early 1980s. Since then, those diseases have recurred only in discrete communities where vaccine resistance reigns, and among the unvaccinated.
Yet “vaccines are a victim of their own success,” Offit observes. “When vaccines work, nothing happens. I think that’s what makes them a little less compelling. People don’t really see what they’re doing.”
When once-common photographs of children hobbling on crutches, confined in an iron lung, or consumed with the bright red measles rash, much less perishing from the diseases, disappear from news reports, people forget how devastating the diseases once were.
“I understand how easy it was to appeal to the notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good” — a common feature of anti-vaccine hysteria — “because we weren’t seeing the vaccine-preventable diseases and their harm,” Offit says.
When the affiliated anti-vaccine and far-right movements turned their firepower on the COVID-19 vaccines introduced in 2021, the consequences were dire. Hotez estimates the unnecessary toll at 200,000 American lives lost because of vaccine refusal and anti-vaccine propaganda.
The partisan character of this outcome is manifested in a distinct divide in COVID vaccination rates between blue and red counties, with the latter having notably lower vaccination rates and higher per-capital COVID death rates. The partisanship is curious, given that Donald Trump has boasted that the development of the COVID vaccines was spurred by his own Operation Warp Speed. But COVID vaccine resistance has also been spurred by his persistent efforts to minimize the severity of the pandemic.
Despite his own efforts and those of other science advocates, Hotez sees only minor glimmers of hope that the trend toward science skepticism can be beaten back. Medical boards have fallen woefully short in enforcing their own regulations against physicians spreading misinformation and disinformation.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a repeal of one of the very few state-level regulatory initiatives — a law passed only a year ago that empowered the state medical board to treat COVID misinformation as an element of professional misconduct. The original law’s critics argued that the board already had the power to discipline doctors for spreading misinformation about COVID — and the law had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge on grounds that it infringed on doctors’ free-speech rights.
On the federal level, debate over science policy has been ceded to the Republican right wing, which has held hearings to try to humiliate scientists who have done unrefuted studies identifying the origin of COVID as a natural outbreak from wildlife to humans, debunking the factually unsupported partisan myth that it was produced in a Chinese government lab.
“They’re not even pretending at anything other than political theater,” Hotez says. Even moderate Republicans shy away from questioning the GOP right’s position.
“I don’t see mainstream Republicans coming to the defense of science,” he says. “But we’re not really hearing from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Health and Human Services agencies are pretty quiet.” He says he’s had conversations with like-minded scientists “about how we get organized better to respond to this. But it’s slow going.”
The real danger, as Hotez sees it, is that anti-science politics will become globalized. “It’s not going to stay in the U.S. We export movies, we export music, we’re going to export this stuff.”
In the past, he says, a sort of social auto-correction counteracted anti-vaccine activism. In the past, if vaccine resistance led to an outbreak of measles or pertussis, word would spread across the community, creating pressure on resistant parents to vaccinate their children.
“I don’t see that, even after 200,000 lives lost. These were victims of a predatory disinformation campaign,” Hotez says. Instead, the vaccine opponents “are doubling down, just telling a bigger lie, blaming the vaccine and the scientists. I don’t see that getting any better, at least until the 2024 election. And what happens after the election is anybody’s guess.” [SOURCE]
THE FAUCI DIARIES: How Bad Was It Really?_The 'Science' explains it in his diary
🚨 Anthony Fauci literally wrote in his diary Covid was only a 0.2% fatality rate
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 30, 2026
Anthony Fauci is confronted over writing in his diary that Covid 19 was essentially just the flu but then and locked down for a global pandemic and mandated vaccines
“Dr. Fauci, you admitted in… pic.twitter.com/mmYs4UPHxY
REALITY CHECK: The Tide Has Turned_Sitting US Senator explains it best
Q: "Senator Moreno, Why do you suspect Fauci is pleading the fifth after testifying 200+ times before?"
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) July 30, 2026
Moreno: "Because he's a piece of a sh*t.” pic.twitter.com/8ejSkwOAvV
DR FAUCI: What We Know Now
Dr Fauci will go down in history as evil, mentally-deranged, MASS MURDERER who committed Hitler/Goebbels-like crimes against humanity. But everyone is missing the REAL crime right in front of your eyes- he conspired with Dem Party, CCP and Deep State to steal 2020 election from…
— Sir Wayne Allyn Root - TV & Radio Host (@RealWayneRoot) July 29, 2026
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Reality Check: AI & Predictive Policing_how it gets used against us
Hacked data shines light on homeland security’s AI surveillance ambitions
The ICE building in Washington. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Photograph: Anadolu/Anadolu Agency
Records show DHS tech incubator spending large sums on partnerships that would expand surveillance capabilities
Hacked data from the Department of Homeland Security’s technology incubator shows it funding a variety of companies that would expand its surveillance capabilities with artificial intelligence, the Guardian can reveal.
The projects at the Office of Industry Partnership (OIP) include automated surveillance in airports; adapters allowing agents to use phones for biometric scanning; and an AI platform that ingests all 911 call data nationally and builds “geospatial heat maps” to “predict incident trends”, which appears to be a form of predictive policing.
The data throws new light on the department’s surveillance ambitions in the wake of the agency’s unprecedented $165bn funding boost in last year’s tax and spending bill, and controversies over agents’ apparent gathering of visual and biometric data on protesters in Minneapolis.
The data was gathered by a pseudonymous “cyber-hacktivist”, and provided to reporters by transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Although some of the data was already publicly available, the leak also exposed more than 6,000 companies that bid with the agency – not all of whom were funded for their projects – offering a window on the full scope of the private sector’s appetite for homeland security work, and the technologies the DHS considered but did not pursue.
Those parts of the data that were already public match the data provided in the leak.
The Guardian emailed the department a detailed request for comment. The Guardian also emailed the hacktivist for comment using an email included with the materials.
Jeramie Scott, a senior counsel and director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: “It very much feels like sometimes these people are watching dystopian science fiction movies and thinking, ‘Oh, that looks good!’”
He added: “That’s not the lesson from dystopian science fiction. They’re taking the wrong lesson from it.”
The data
The OIP sits within DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, managing programs including the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) initiative, which funnels federal money to small-to-medium enterprises to develop prototypes addressing specific technology needs.
The data as supplied to the Guardian consists of two structured databases: a registry of more than 6,800 companies that have bid with OIP, and a separate database of more than 1,400 funded contracts. Each contract record includes a proposal abstract written by the company, describing the technology it pitched to the DHS.
The SBIR program, mandated by Congress in 1982 and reauthorized in 2022, requires that proposals be evaluated in part on their “potential for commercial application”. The program was designed to ensure that publicly funded R&D produces self-sustaining businesses rather than one-off prototypes.
Contracts typically begin as phase I proof-of-concept awards of around $100,000-$175,000 before graduating to phase II prototype funding of $1m or more. The leaked data spans two decades of this pipeline, from 2004 to late 2025, covering more than 1,400 awarded contracts worth a combined $845m.
Biometrics
Contracts issued since Trump’s inauguration include several focused on enabling agents to harvest biometric data using cellphones.
On 7 May 2025, three contracts were issued for the development of these technologies, and all three promised to make them available beyond DHS.
Idea Mind LLC received $174,464 for a technology it calls Vibe, an adapter that connects fingerprint and iris scanners to phones via USB-C or Lightning, offering “plug-and-play compatibility with Android and iOS devices without requiring custom drivers”.
Intellisense Systems received $174,990 for its similar Flow device designed so that a phone and biometric scanner can be “handheld effectively as a single unit,” supporting “handheld fingerprint (4 slap) and iris peripherals, and face and contactless fingerprint capture using the phone’s camera”. Integrated Biometrics received $167,627 for Bios Link, and wrote that its technology would serve “DHS components, interagency stakeholders, non-federal entities, the intelligence community, and international mission partners”.
Intellisense was spun off from Physical Optics Corporation in 2018. Together the two companies have received 59 DHS research contracts worth more than $17m since 2004, according to the leaked data. Intellisense alone received three contracts on 7 May, including Flow and two other projects involving airport surveillance AI and video deepfake prevention. Like Intellisense, Integrated Biometrics, based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is an established government contractor that manufactures FBI-certified fingerprint sensors and similar devices for law enforcement, military and government clients around the world.
Idea Mind LLC, based in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, had no previous DHS contracting history.
ICE and CBP agents’ harvesting of biometric data and use of facial recognition technologies came into focus during DHS’s January “surge” into the city, after rightwing influencers highlighted longstanding allegations of childcare fraud in the city.
The Guardian contacted all three companies for comment.
Airport surveillance
Four further contracts awarded on 7 May, totaling $699,000, funded technologies for surveilling passengers approaching TSA airport security checkpoints.
All four use AI to analyze existing airport CCTV feeds and automatically catalog passengers’ physical characteristics. Intellisense’s Ossca system would “detect and track individuals; identify anthropometric characteristics, clothing articles, shoe types, and visible accessories” and which agencies can use to “automatically alert operators with flags and detailed reports for adjudication”.
The standalone behavior detection officer role was quietly eliminated in 2016-2017. An ACLU investigation found the program had been used for racial profiling at airports including Newark and Chicago.
DHS’s own earlier attempt at technology-assisted behavioral screening, the Fast program was quietly wound down in the wake of EPIC’s disclosures.
On Fast and its apparent successors, Scott, the EPIC counsel, said “not only is it highly unlikely to work, but there are issues in terms of the risk it creates, in its disproportionate impacts, in turning the state apparatus on people who haven’t done anything wrong, in the waste of money, and in the potential for those tools to be used to undermine democracy.”
Predictive Policing
Also on 7 May, three contracts totaling $524,000 were awarded for AI platforms that would ingest 911 call data, with one apparently promising to identify and predict crime patterns.
All three were awarded under the same DHS topic seeking tools to centralise and analyse data from the nation’s 5,000-plus 911 call centres.
The most far-reaching is Cimas, the Consolidated Incident Management Analytics System, built by a newly-registered firm, Cassius LLC.
Its proposal describes “a high-availability data lake integrated with AI-driven analytics” that would collect and anonymise 911 call and incident data from public safety answering points nationwide, generating “geospatial heat maps” and using AI models to “predict incident trends” and “deliver actionable insights to responders.”
Cassius LLC, based in Bangor, Maine has no previous DHS contracting history. Cassius’s website describes it as a utility IT consulting firm; it names no team members, and its “our team” page is non-functional.
The Brennan Center for Justice has described predictive policing as “tech-washing” that “gives racially biased policing methods the appearance of objectivity, simply because a computer or an algorithm seems to replace human judgment.” Leading police departments including Los Angeles and Chicago abandoned their predictive policing programs in 2019-20.
The Guardian emailed Cassius and Zachary Canders, listed as the firm’s partner in DHS documents and Maine company filings for further clarification of the proposed technology.
In an email response, Canders wrote to The Guardian: “Hey, that’s really great” adding: “Could you do me a favor? Let’s write a story about me taking your mom out to dinner. We have an amazing seafood buffet. Lots of laughs lots of hugs probably a few kisses, then I never call her back.”[SOURCE]
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FBI Files_A Threat To Democracy: When the town square school board meeting is the honeypot for the Police State
Published
Oct. 7, 2021
Updated
Oct. 8, 2021, 2:48 a.m. ET
American parents are organizing to fight racist critical race theories being taught in their kids’ schools. Attorney General Merrick Garland, once touted as a moderate, has responded by asking the FBI to treat them as domestic terrorists.
As befits the Biden administration, this over-the-top authoritarianism is accompanied by the stench of corruption, as it turns out that Garland’s son-in-law is in the business of selling educational materials on CRT.
Garland’s self-dealing and thuggery are grounds for resignation. But that isn’t the worst thing that’s happened. Bad as it is, the Biden administration’s poisonous combination of graft and authoritarianism can be remedied by getting rid of the administration — something that, if polls are any indication, is eminently doable.
The bigger problem is that school boards all over America seem to be growing ever more authoritarian themselves. Instead of serving as bastions of small-scale representative democracy, boards seem to regard themselves as above accountability to the voters and parents.
It was, after all, the National School Boards Association
that, citing shaky claims of “threats,” asked the administration to
investigate anti-CRT parents as “domestic terrorists,” specifically
invoking the Patriot Act in its letter.
People hold up signs during a rally against critical race theory being
taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg,
Virginia on June 12, 2021. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
That claim of “threats” is an old move. Some readers may remember a story from Brooklyn five years ago, in which a father was arrested after complaining to a teacher. The teacher had refused his son permission to go to the bathroom and kept the son sitting in his own excrement for hours. When the father, quite understandably, showed up to complain, the teacher told police she felt “threatened”; the father was arrested, charged and subjected to an order of protection.
The magic words “I feel threatened” are now used by bureaucrats to escape accountability for their own misbehavior. That’s what the NSBA has done, on a larger scale, in the face of widespread parental dissatisfaction with curricula that tell white and Asian students that they are inherently racist and black students that they are permanent victims.
The go-to response: How dare you criticize us, peasant!
In Shakopee, Minn., the superintendent reported a single mother to her employer for the crime of taking to Facebook to criticize how the board chairwoman handled testimony from the mother of a special-needs child at a hearing. The complaint led to her suspension and possible firing, causing Minnesota state Rep. Erik Mortenson to accuse the chairwoman, Kristi Peterson, of “abuse of power” and “straight-up bullying.”
Public education is justified on the grounds that it has a civilizing influence. Behavior like this by its leaders makes me wonder.
And as I’ve noted in these pages before, teachers and administrators in Loudoun County, Va., ran a mailing list aimed at taking action against parents who took issue with their system’s commitment to CRT. One of them, school-board member Beth Barts, now faces a special prosecutor investigating her for misconduct. Barts is accused of asking members of her group to target, harass and even hack parents opposing the teaching of CRT.
The campaign of intimidation doesn’t seem to be working: Groups representing 427,000 parents responded to the NSBA letter, and they weren’t having any of it: “NSBA cites a tiny number of minor incidents in order to insinuate that parents who are criticizing and protesting the decisions of school boards are engaging in, or may be engaging in, ‘domestic terrorism and hate crimes.’ NSBA even invokes the Patriot Act. The association of legitimate protest with terrorism and violence reveals both your contempt for parents and your unwillingness to understand and hear the sincere cries of parents on behalf of their children.”
But it’s a disgrace that such a campaign exists at all and that our public schools are under the control of people who think such a response to criticism justified or appropriate.
As some Americans focus on cleaning things up at the national level, it’s also clear that people need to be paying a lot more attention on the local level. Want to make a difference? Run for school board.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.[SOURCE]
FBI Files_‘Kidnapped At Gunpoint’: Pro-Life Activist Testifies About Harrowing FBI Raid Of Home
DailyWire.com
Paul Vaughn testified about the Biden administration's targeting of pro-life activists.
A Christian pro-life father of 11 described before Congress on Wednesday the armed FBI raid on his home in Tennessee after the Biden administration brought charges against him over a peaceful pro-life protest.
Paul Vaughn, of Centerville, Tennessee, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on the Constitution and Limited Government on Wednesday to speak about his experience being prosecuted by the Justice Department under the FACE Act. The FACE Act is a Clinton-era law that was supposedly to protect both abortion facilities and churches from violence. In practice, the law has been used by the Biden administration to prosecute peaceful pro-life activists across the country.
The FBI arrested Vaughn on October 5, 2022, after he was involved in a peaceful protest at the Carafem abortion facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, in March 2021, where protesters prayed and sang Christian hymns. Vaughn was charged with violating the FACE Act and engaging in a conspiracy against rights, a Reconstruction-era charge meant to crack down on violence by the Ku Klux Klan.
“My house was assaulted, my wife and children were terrorized, and I was kidnapped at gunpoint by four armed men,” Vaughn told lawmakers of the arrest. “I had just sent three of my children to the car so I could take them to school when the house began to shake from a loud banging near the front door. I heard men shouting from my front porch, ‘Open up! FBI!’”
Vaughn said that he saw two unmarked SUVs with flashing lights outside his home and men with automatic rifles and a pistol aimed at his door.
“I opened the curtains on my front door to find three men with guns trained on the front door,” he said, adding that the federal agents did not identify themselves.
“I later learned at the same time three of my children, ages 12, 14, and 18, were being detained in the side yard on the edge of the woods by a fourth armed man. I was taken without the presentation of a warrant or identification when requested. Make no mistake: this was an armed conflict and I was unarmed. Lethal force was abused to abridge my God-given and constitutionally secured rights.”
Vaughn said that the FACE Act was passed as a tool to “stifle free speech and abuse the rights of Christian conservatives.” Data show that 97% of all prosecutions of the FACE Act since its inception have been against pro-lifers. Under Biden, the Justice Department has brought 24 FACE Act cases with all but two coming against pro-life activists.
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“The FACE Act was ostensibly passed because of violence. But as my family knows very well, all it did was give violence the cover of law and place it in the hands of the government,” Vaughn said.
Paired with the felony conspiracy charge, the activists have faced over a decade in prison and hundreds of thousands in fines. Multiple pro-lifers are currently serving prison sentences, including Cal Zastrow, one of Vaughn’s co-defendants in Tennessee.
Vaughn, who was convicted in January, was sentenced over the summer to three years of supervised release and has been prohibited from leaving the Middle District of Tennessee. He was given a special exception to travel to D.C. for the hearing.
Other testimony during the hearing came from Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Erin Hawley and Thomas More Society lawyer Steve Crampton, who has served as lawyer for many of the pro-life defendants prosecuted under Biden.
The hearing was led by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Dan Bishop (R-NC). Roy has consistently called for the FACE Act to be repealed and demanded that the Justice Department keep its records of the pro-life prosecutions.[SOURCE]
FBI Files_Weaponization: The Arrest of Roger Stone
Congressional Republicans said on Wednesday they want answers from FBI Director Chris Wray about the tactics his agents used last Friday to arrest Roger Stone, a longtime adviser and confidante to President Donald Trump.
Stone was taken into custody, and his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home searched, in a pre-dawn raid by a swarm of agents in armored vests and brandishing long guns. The raid came after a seven-count indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Since then, Stone and some in the conservative news media have criticized the FBI operation as heavy-handed. Stone called it "Gestapo tactics." Former Republican governor and ABC News contributor Chris Christie characterized the handling of the arrest as "overkill," although other former law enforcement officials have called it standard procedure.
Trump told the Daily Caller on Wednesday he would "think about" asking the FBI to review its use of force and cited concerns over the number of agents and types of vehicles on the scene for an alleged white collar crime suspect.
"I thought it was very unusual," Trump said.
Other Republicans have demanded answers.
"I am concerned about the manner in which the arrest was effectuated, especially the number of agents involved, the tactics employed, the timing of the arrest, and whether the FBI released details of the arrest and the indictment to the press prior to providing this information to Mr. Stone's attorneys," Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a letter to Wray on Wednesday. Graham’s committee has oversight of the FBI.
Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote Wray on Wednesday as well, asking for information on the raid and suggesting that "such a show of force may also unnecessarily place agents’ lives at risk by potentially heightening the risk factor for everybody involved."
The FBI and special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Following his arrest and initial court appearance last week, Stone told reporters gathered outside a federal courthouse in Florida that agents had "terrorized" his wife and dogs.
"They could simply have contacted my attorneys and I would have gladly surrendered voluntarily," Stone said.
Prosecutors wrote in court documents that alerting Stone in advance of an imminent indictment would risk "the defendant fleeing and destroying (or tampering with) evidence."
"While I firmly support law enforcement taking into account threats to officer safety, flight risk, and the need to ensure evidence is preserved," Graham wrote, "I am leery that a subject of the Special Counsel’s investigation, who had retained counsel, had publicly stated that he believed that he would at some point be indicted, and was apparently willing to surrender voluntarily, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid at his home."
"Although I am sure these tactics would be standard procedure for the arrest of a violent offender, I have questions regarding their necessity in this case," Graham continued. "The American public has had enough of the media circus that surrounds the Special Counsel's investigation. Yet, the manner of this arrest appears to have only added to the spectacle. Accordingly, I write to seek justification for the tactics used and the timing of the arrest of Mr. Stone."
Stone’s indictment includes five counts of lying to Congress, one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, and one count of witness tampering. He faces up to 50 years in prison if found guilty, but Stone insists he’s innocent and has pledged to fight the charges.
Stone is scheduled to appear again in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Friday.
ABC News' Mariam Khan contributed to this report.
Editor’s Note: This story previously misidentified the statutory maximum for Roger Stone’s crimes as 20 years in prison. The actual maximum is 50 years in prison. We regret the error. [SOURCE]
Sunday, October 26, 2025
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