Photo by: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images (left); Photographer: Leigh Vogel/Polaris/Bloomberg via Getty Images (right) Far-left actress Debra Messing — who doubles as a card-carrying enemy of President Donald Trump — is setting her sights on one of Trump’s closest confidants: White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Well, at least news networks that hire McEnany or put her on screen as a panelist: If I ever see @kayleighmcenany on a panel on a news show or hired by a network, I am immediately ceasing to support… https://t.co/nK84s5QvD2 — Debra Messing✍� (@Debra Messing✍�) 1610981452.0 “If I ever see @kayleighmcenany on a panel on a news show or hired by a network, I am immediately ceasing to support every single advertiser on that network,” Messing tweeted Monday, asking her 684,000 followers to retweet if they agree. She added a ‘Deplatform Hate’ hashtag to boot.
Indeed, cancel culture has been in overdrive following U.S. Capitol rioting earlier this month, with left-wing politicians, journalists, and CEOs of social media sites and Internet empires circling the wagons around conservatives and threatening to obliterate them into oblivion unless they speak the right way. How did folks react to Messing’s latest Twitter barrage?
Of course, Messing has fans who couldn’t agree more with her threat against news networks, but others called out the former “Will & Grace” star for her own hatred: “Debra now acting like the Nazi Party…incredible,” one commenter noted .
“So much for wanting unity and tolerance, right Deb?” another user quipped .
“Like really, because you’re ‘Hollywood’ you think you’re special or superior. You’re a second rate actress and sad you don’t yet realize America is done with Hollywood and ‘stars’ thinking they are so much smarter than them,” another user wrote . “You’re going to jail with the rest.”
This is something I’ve highlighted for years. Radicals, extremists, and terrorists have always been able to roam Facebook and Twitter freely. A few years ago, they finally started working to remove ISIS accounts. However, death threats against conservatives or hunters are often allowed to stay up. I’ve highlighted personal experiences with this many times over the years.
If Apple and Google want to take Parler down because of what happened at the Capital, they have to take Facebook and Twitter down too. Both failed to remove Capital organizers for weeks. Both failed to remove thousands of violent threats. Both failed to remove racist posts. Far more violations happen on Facebook and Twitter, and for much longer periods of time, than on Parler. Therefore, they must be taken down if the attack on Parler was actually about what they claimed.
First, they came for Gab. Now they come for everyone else. Gab has a large and vibrant left-wing community. They aren’t ‘alt-right’ or a ‘right-wing’ platform in the least.
From WaPo:
In the days leading up to last week’s march on the Capitol, supporters of President Trump promoted it extensively on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram and used the services to organize bus trips to Washington. More than 100,000 users posted hashtags affiliated with the movement prompted by baseless claims of election fraud, including #StopTheSteal and #FightForTrump.
The details, emerging from researchers who have combed the service in recent days, shed new light on how Facebook services were used to bring attention to and boost attendance at the rally, which turned violent when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol while Congress was in session. The attack resulted in the death of a Capitol Police officer and four other people.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.
“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” Sandberg said in an interview Monday that was live-streamed by Reuters.
Riiiiight.
The far bigger platform with far more users who was used far more than Parler and Gab SHOULDN’T be held to the same standards as Parler and Gab because they do remove posts sometimes. Well, so do the other platforms. Posting illegal activity is a violation of everyone’s terms of services and aren’t permitted or allowed in any capacity. Actually, Sandberg’s deflection of blame is really an indictment of Facebook.
When she says Parler and Gab a ‘smaller’ and ‘don’t have our abilities to stop hate’ she’s admitting that Facebook failed even though they are far more capable than the other two. If Facebook can’t possibly prevent this content, how are Parler and Gab expected to given their small size and lack of abilities to stop it?
The legacy press, such as the New York Times, and activist groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, each also blamed two challenger sites – Gab and Parler – rather than the big sites like Twitter and Facebook where rioters actually planned their activities.
The reality of app store bans is and always has been that Big Tech moderation policies are selectively applied. Big Tech responds not to reality but to the demands of far-left activists who clog the proverbial phone lines of Apple and Google every time a handful of offensive or illegal posts appears on our sites, while ignoring when hundreds of thousands of illegal or offensive posts appears on theirs.
We are documenting millions of illegal posts in our Liberal Hate Machine project which shows just how much hatred and bile is spewed on Twitter, one of our most major competitors. We have been collecting and analyzing over 100 million tweets in the replies section of President Trump’s Twitter account for about a year. We applied sentiment analysis to detect violent and hateful replies. Wait until you see what we found.
Twitter and Facebookboth have huge contracts with Amazon. Facebook has a data deal with Amazon that they kept secret. Twitter uses the same AWS services that Parler used. Yet Amazon hasn’t taken Twitter off the internet for far more violations over a longer period of time than Parler. Why? Probably money. A bigger customer of Amazon asks them to remove the competition and stop the bleeding from the mass exodus away from Twitter and Facebook. Amazon complies with its bigger customer’s requests.
It’s a tale as old as time and may give more teeth to the government’s anti-trust case.
Holcomb was so committed to getting his message across Wednesday that even when Indiana Department of Transportation Commissioner Joe McGinnis delivered a report that focused on roadways with no discussion of facial coverings, Holcomb responded with this line: “You did say masks are working. I just want to get that in there for the third time.”
Welcome new people.
The two articles and corresponding charts above already prove my point. Those results are duplicated globally.
Let me put a couple of things to bed right away since I already know how some of you will react.
I’m not anti-mask. I’m pro-science.
I wear my mask all the time to put people at ease, not because it’s effective.
COVID is real and no one is actually denying its existence beyond a few online. This is a childish red herring argument used when you are desperate.
My goal has always been to inform my audience of the actual clinical facts so they can protect themselves. There is no other motivation.
I started regular coverage of the virus in December 2019.
I started daily coverage on January 14, 2020. This is long before anyone in US media I’m aware of (for daily coverage), and far sooner than almost any politician considered COVID a threat.
I promoted the masks early on before we knew the virus was airborne while reminding everyone to only use their mask once.
I’ve been reminding everyone about the single-use of the mask from the very beginning. Reusing a contaminated mask defeats the purpose and can spread infection.
My opinions about masks or mask fines don’t come from my politics or my ideology. They come from peer-reviewed clinical research, not preliminary lab results with problematic methodology, which have never been considered scientifically valid in any scientific field. As well as real-world data.
Everything I said in this interview is backed up with scientific research and real-world data. None of it is baseless opinion. None of it is taken from unsubstantiated posts from social media, or some conspiracy website yapping about Bill Gates.
While many of you may be new here, I’ve already addressed the issues you’ll likely post … many, many times. I simply don’t have time to go over 12 months of work I’ve done on this in a single interview or post.
The reality … officials are in a tough spot. They don’t have any answers. They can’t stop the virus. It’s career suicide to say that out loud so they must come up with, what I call, ‘busy work’ to make it seem like they are trying. Often, as is the case with fines, this busy work pushes the blame on an innocent population in order to pass the buck and buy time.
The experts went from correctly telling you a mask was your last hail mary to prevent infection but wasn’t all that effective. Every other step is more important in prevention but the mask is the least effective tool in your tool chest. Now, they’ve all but abandoned those other steps in favor of indoctrinating people into the Cult of Mask with a form of religious dogma that masks are the most important and effective tool you have. Cases continue to spike and they keep neglecting to tell people to only use their mask once.
Consider this … everywhere mask mandates have been in effect, where COVID is an issue, has now been hit by a new spike in cases. This includes places with universal compliance like Japan. If masks worked the way the dogma currently dictates, the spike would be impossible.
Everywhere that installed mask mandate fines on businesses and/or individuals hasn’t reduced their number of cases. The policy is ineffective and causes unnecessary tension, strife, and hardship with zero tangible results. It’s just throwing matches on a powder keg.
We had lockdowns because the Imperial College released a study showing hundreds of millions might die. Oxford proved their study wrong and the IC retracted it, but lockdowns remained.
We have mask mandates because we thought the virus was spread through droplets alone and asymptomatic people were superspreaders. We now know it’s airborne and all of the research shows asymptomatic spread, while possible, is not a major source of infections.
I’ve included just a few links to get you started on your journey if you really want to dive in.
Prior to the pandemic, there was a mountain of research showing masks of all kinds don’t prevent aerosol viral spread. This research has now been completely abandoned and ignored in favor of preliminary lab results that are never considered scientifically acceptable to draw conclusions from. I can’t include all of the links to those studies but some are mixed in below.
Dr. Brosseau is a national expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases and professor (retired), University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Sietsema is also an expert on respiratory protection and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“The evidence from…laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19.”
We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility (Figure 2). However, as with hand hygiene, face masks might be able to reduce the transmission of other infections and therefore have value in an influenza pandemic when healthcare resources are stretched.
Tom Jefferson is a senior associate tutor and honorary research fellow, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford. Disclosure statement is here
Carl Heneghan is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor in Chief of BMJ EBM
In 2010, at the end of the last influenza pandemic, there were six published randomised controlled trials with 4,147 participants focusing on the benefits of different types of masks. 2 Two were done in healthcare workers and four in family or student clusters. The face mask trials for influenza-like illness (ILI) reported poor compliance, rarely reported harms and revealed the pressing need for future trials.
Despite the clear requirement to carry out further large, pragmatic trials a decade later, only six had been published: five in healthcare workers and one in pilgrims. 3 This recent crop of trials added 9,112 participants to the total randomised denominator of 13,259 and showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.
A study conducted by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center sought to test lockdowns along with testing and isolation.
What were the results? The virus still spread, though 90% of those who tested positive were without symptoms. Incredibly, 2% of the CHARM recruits still contracted the virus, even if all but one remained asymptomatic. “Our study showed that in a group of predominantly young male military recruits, approximately 2% became positive for SARS-CoV-2, as determined by qPCR assay, during a 2-week, strictly enforced quarantine.”
The study actually suggests the quarantine may increase the spread of the virus.
Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon. Yet, the findings were inconclusive and cannot definitively exclude a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection of mask wearers in such a setting.
The use of masks only makes sense in confined places, where it is not possible to have certainty and guarantee necessary physical distancing or outdoors when physical distancing is not possible. I tried to look for scientific evidence on the use of open air mask and potential benefits of virus transmission, but I couldn’t find any.
Making the mask mandatory across Italy outdoors without any distinction between the higher and lower endemic circulation areas is wrong.
Conclusions: This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs (Health Care Workers), particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
Jacobs, J. L. et al. (2009) “Use of surgical face masks to reduce the incidence of the common cold among health care workers in Japan: A randomized controlled trial,” American Journal of Infection Control, Volume 37, Issue 5, 417 – 419. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216002
N95-masked health-care workers (HCW) were significantly more likely to experience headaches. Face mask use in HCW was not demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds.
“There were 17 eligible studies. … None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”
Smith, J.D. et al. (2016) “Effectiveness of N95 respirators versus surgical masks in protecting health care workers from acute respiratory infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” CMAJ Mar 2016 https://www.cmaj.ca/content/188/8/567
“We identified six clinical studies … . In the meta-analysis of the clinical studies, we found no significant difference between N95 respirators and surgical masks in associated risk of (a) laboratory-confirmed respiratory infection, (b) influenza-like illness, or (c) reported work-place absenteeism.”
Contrary to popular opinion on social media, in our tribalist political arena, news media, or local officials … Americans actually wear masks and comply with mask mandates much higher than much of the world. Over 80% wear their mask now. The latest spike in the U.S. started September 14 when 77% of Americans were adhering to the mask mandates. That number is exactly the same as July 31 when U.S. COVID cases began to decline drastically and before the AP and Gov. Holcomb credited masks for the decline in cases.
In other words … the same percentage of Americans who wore masks during the big decline in COVID cases over the summer were also wearing masks at the beginning of the latest surge in cases. There was no change, no fluctuation at all in the number of Americans wearing masks during a decline and a surge in COVID cases. The number of people wearing masks had no effect on the number of cases of the virus.
I said the same thing three times, three different ways so everyone understands the actual data on mask-wearing. Sorry about being redundant.
I know you all just came here to listen to the interview with Mayor Roberson. You weren’t expecting all this to be thrown at you. However, it’s important that you know what I said during that interview is factually correct. While I can appreciate the Mayor is just taking the advice of his advisors, those advisors have no actual data backing up their policies. I do.
The mandates we are being given by public officials are unscientific and, dare I say, emotional.
Lockdowns didn’t work and the preponderance of research says they are ineffective and actually worse for people long-term.
Mask mandates simply don’t work.
Blaming innocent people for those two failed policies with fines simply because you’ve run out of ideas and are trying to hold on until the vaccine/herd immunity happens is not a legitimate way to govern. It’s tyrannical. While Mayor Roberson may not be seeking to be tyrannical, the end product is just that.
There’s been a lot of speculation about voter fraud in Pennsylvania. President Trump’s team has filed lawsuits to investigate those allegations.
Rudy Giuliani says that 650,000 votes were illegally counted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There may be 900,000 invalid ballots total. Less than 54,000 votes separate Joe Biden and President Trump.
“I think we have enough to change Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania election was a disaster,” Giuliani said. “We have people that observed people being pushed out of the polling place. We have people who were suggested to vote the other way and shown how to do it. I’m giving you the big picture.”
For the record, we don’t know if that is accurate but there’s certainly enough evidence to warrant an investigation.
It’s not just the voting irregularities, removal of poll watchers, or the unlawful election law changes that have people speculating fraud. It’s the voter turnout itself. This is the case in multiple states but we are only focused on Pennsylvania here.
As of the writing of this article, the Pennsylvania government website says 6,802,581 people have voted so far. The count isn’t done yet. In 2016, the total vote was 6,115,402. That’s an increase of 687,179 votes, and they aren’t done with 2020 counting yet. Before 2016, the highest number of votes was in 2008 for Obama with 6,010,519 votes.
These numbers are dramatic, to say the least. Skeptics might say that doesn’t really matter. This was a major election and people were motivated to vote.
There’s some logic to that, but I’d have to ask if they would really be more motivated to vote now than in the elections with Hillary or Obama. I’m not so sure.
Here’s where things get more interesting …
Since 2016, Pennsylvania has only added 279,023 registered voters. So we have an increase of 279,023 registered voters but an increase of 687,179 votes?
Furthermore, voter turnout is 75.57% for 2020. It was 70.11%. There’s been a nearly 5.5% increase in voter turnout? This would be the highest voter turnout since 1992. Prior to 1992, voter turnout above 75% was the norm but it’s not happened one time since then. It’s usually in the high 60s.
Do these numbers specifically indicate fraud? No. They are, however, very irregular in, not only their patterns but their scope of change.
If Rudy Giuliani is right about those 650,000 ballots, and I’m not saying he is, it would make Pennsylvania’s voter turnout 68.35%. That is in the historically accurate range since 1992 for the state while still increasing total votes by 37,179 over 2016 … a new record in total votes for the state.
Given the large numbers we see here and the other issues surrounding Pennsylvania, you can see why people are skeptical of the results.
