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CDC had a warning ready that could have saved kids— and killed it on purpose; Bolton admits guilt; 4 Republicans block voter ID; Dems who once swore “believe all women” suddenly can’t hear; more.
JUN 5READ IN APP
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes: Senator Ron Johnson’s blockbuster hearing, where a University of London oncologist testified that all six of his melanoma patients relapsed within months of getting jabbed, and where a Senate report revealed the CDC had a myocarditis warning signed off and ready to publish in May 2021 — until a single FDA appointee personally killed it; John Bolton’s abrupt decision to plead guilty to retaining classified documents after a year of loudly insisting he was innocent; the SAVE America Act’s 48–50 defeat, with four Republican senators crossing the aisle to block voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements; and the New York Times’ “unsettling” new exposé of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, the Nazi-tattooed oyster farmer whose ex-girlfriends keep stepping forward to describe a candidate his own party somehow still considers their best shot.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Yesterday, ABC National News Desk reported, “Exclusive: Sen. Ron Johnson discusses alleged COVID cover-up, suppression of research.” Sometimes, “exclusive” means you broke the story before everybody else. Other times, like now, it means you were the only one who covered it while the rest of the corporate media ran Pfizer drug ads instead. Good for ABC.
Wednesday’s hearing, chaired by Senator Johnson (R-Wi.), was titled ‘Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research.’ Several compelling witnesses testified, many of whom are well known to anyone following the covid jab issues. For instance, the morning session featured well-known University of London oncology professor Dr. Angus Dalgleish, who informed lawmakers that all six of his melanoma patients, who had been serenely cruising in remission for years, were dragged back into the oncology wood-chipper shortly after getting jabbed.
To set your expectations, this won’t result in any arrests. Senator Johnson is playing a long game. That alone is a refreshing novelty in a capital where most politicians’ long-term planning extends only as far as their next libation with a pharmaceutical lobbyist.
The senator properly framed Wednesday’s hearing as part of a multi‑year transparency project, to slowly and steadily expose what he correctly called “the biggest government scandal of my lifetime:” public health agencies that knew about serious vaccine safety signals, cherry-picked statistical tricks to bury those signals, and diagnosed dissenting researchers with a sudden, acute case of career termination.
A grateful nation can thank Senator Johnson, who has dogged this issue since the pandemic. He’s using his Senatorial platform to hammer as much evidence of covid malfeasance into the permanent Congressional record as he can. “I can’t prosecute, I can’t convict, but I can expose,” Senator Johnson said. “That’s the first line of accountability. I’m trying to do this because America deserves a COVID reckoning,” he added.
Bring it, Senator Johnson.
💉 At the hearing, staff circulated an interim report issued within the last two weeks, titled, “Failure to Warn: How Federal Health Agencies Downplayed the Risk of Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Following COVID-19 Vaccination.” The report carefully details how CDC/FDA officials knew about the myocarditis signal in young men as early as February, 2021 —a month into the public launch— but did not make Pfizer and Moderna disclose it until June.
June. Long after hundreds of thousands of young people had gotten the shots to comply with their high school sports and college enrollment requirements.
The investigative committee subpoenaed thousands of pages of records from the agencies, drugmakers, and the White House. That effort uncovered an abusive pattern of minimizing the myocarditis signal while also leaning into ways to explain it away, like suddenly deciding that the adverse event tracking system they designed, VAERS, was unreliable. All of these monkeyshines were muddled in discussions about avoiding “vaccine hesitancy” and in polished talking points about how safe and effective the shots were.
Here’s one example of the games the committee uncovered. In May, 2021, some honest CDC officials prepared a “HAN” (“Health Alert Network”) advisory that would have delicately warned doctors and cautioned young people about the myocarditis signal and would have urged restrictions on “rigorous athletic activity” for at least 3 months for myocarditis cases. Restrictions intended to save their lives. It wasn’t a guess. Confidential internal CDC notes from May 24, 2021, explicitly answered one researcher’s question, “Is VAERS signaling for myopericarditis now?” with “For the age groups 16–17 years and 18–24 years, yes.”
By May 23, 2021, then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had signed off on the substance of the HAN, writing, “I’m fine with how this reads … grateful.” Absent a major surprise, it should have been published.
Surprise! Even that artfully hedged, tenatively phrased, barely committed HAN was too much. We must avoid hesitation!Triple-masking FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock gave the HAN a fatal injection. She directly emailed CDC Director Walensky, insisting that “FDA does not concur with the issuance of the myocarditis HAN as written.” So CDC ultimately published no HAN, quietly transforming the draft into a short, low‑visibility “clinical considerations” web page posted on May 28, 2021, which did not mention the recommended athletic restrictions, and which was not reported in the corporate media.
In other words, CDC staff had a fully baked alert ready to go, with an internal written acknowledgment of a real VAERS signal in the 16-24 age group, but a conscious political choice in the form of pushback from the FDA’s politically appointed director downgraded that lifesaving alert to a nearly invisible website note. We’ll never know how many kids and young adults could have been saved from lifelong injuries or even died as a result.
This is the same FDA which, I feel compelled to add, gets at least 65% of its human drug regulatory budget directly from pharma ‘user fees’— i.e., from the same companies it’s supposed to be policing. But never mind.
All while this sordid timeline of deceit was unfolding, other CDC officials “provided up‑to‑date information on the status of the HAN to Pfizer and Moderna representatives,” even as doctors and the public got no real‑time warning. In other words, while some CDC employees were doing their job and preparing a belated but critically important HAN, other employees were tattling on them to Pfizer and Moderna.
One has little difficulty imagining Pfizer and Moderna, having gotten the heads-up, complaining about the HAN to Janet Woodcock or even Biden (assuming he was awake).
Soon, and suddenly, political appointee and chronic germaphobe Woodcock shut it all down.
💉 There’s lots more. Read the whole report for more detail than you ever wanted about how things really work inside the public health agencies. Back at the hearing, and far beyond the myocarditis signal, Johnson’s witnesses explained into the Congressional record a dizzying number of ways that the covid shots could conceivably cause cancer.
In particular, Dr. Wafik El-Diery, MD, PhD, FACP testified about how the covid jabs interfere with the body’s normal tumor-suppression defenses against cancer. He also described how his carefully worded papers about how spike protein mightreduce the body’s ability to suppress cancer were savaged, both publicly and sneakily behind the scenes.
Dr. El-Diery testified that he’d reviewed over 70 peer-reviewed papers from 27 countries reporting over 300 cancer cases arising shortly after someone got the shots— many of which appeared near the injection site. In several cases, spike protein —which should be absent from tumor tissue— was found in biopsied tumor samples.
None of this, of course, says anything about later cancers that might develop one to three years after the shots, at a time when the delay makes it devilishly hard to claim any link, and when nobody’s testing tumors for spike.
Mass arrests and prosecutions are still far away, barely visible specks on the distant horizon. But we have seen many firings. And some involved scientists are being arrested, albeit for current misconduct. (We’ll take it, of course.) The market for covid jabs and for mRNA drugs in general has undergone a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. Moderna, whose stock ticker is literally “MRNA,” has acquired a terminal financial infection.
Meanwhile, Senator Johnson continues to beat the war drums and build a record. I wish they could give these courageous witnesses Congressional Medals of Honor. And Ron Johnson has earned our undying gratitude. Please keep it going, Senator.
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Yesterday broke even more encouraging Reckoning™ news. CBS reported, “Former Trump adviser John Bolton to plead guilty to retaining national security information” Boom.
John Bolton, a notorious neocon and one of the key architects of the Russiagate hoax that derailed Trump 1.0 —which led to two impeachments followed by four years of furious lawfare against the President— has agreed to plead guilty to basic DOJ charges that he illegally kept classified materials from his time in office.
After what President Trump went through, the irony of nailing Bolton on a classified documents conviction is so thick you could cut it into slices and serve it with Joe Biden’s favorite mint chocolate-chip ice cream.
It is also worth noting that, ever since Mr. Bolton was charged last year and his homes and office were raided, he has steadfastly insisted he was innocent, and the whole thing was weaponized selective prosecution. I guess he lied. From the Washington Post’s Editorial Board op-ed, in October:
Whoopsies! I guess he’s rethought all that. He no longer wants his day in court. And he’s no longer insisting on his innocence. Under the proposed plea agreement, Bolton, 77, will plead guilty —to one of 18 counts from the indictment— pay a $2.25 million fine, become a convicted felon who can never again hold security credentials, and will allow the judge to sentence him up to five years in prison.
If, like me, you would have preferred that Bolton be tried fairly by a jury of his peers and then launched into the Sun, you might be feeling less than fully excited about the proposed deal. But it is logical from the DOJ’s perspective.
In exchange for giving up a chance at a life sentence, the DOJ gets security. It has not, to date, had much luck with DC juries and judges. This way, it gets a conviction and takes Bolton off the political chessboard forever. Bolton gets a chance at having a few good years left as a free man.
The deal still must be approved by the Judge at a June 26th hearing.
And it leaves open the possibility of future charges related, say, to the ongoing Russiagate investigation. So there’s still hope for sending Bolton on his one-way mission to the star.
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It just became a little harder to blame Senate Majority Leader John Thune for failing to pass the SAVE America Act. Yesterday, Fox News reported, “Four Senate Republicans again unite with Dems to block Trump’s SAVE America Act.”
Yesterday, the Senate actually voted on an amendment to add the SAVE America Act to a pending budget reconciliation bill. Alert readers will recall that the proposed Act would require all voters to present ID and proof of citizenship in federal elections.
It only needed 50 votes. It failed 48—50. Four Republicans defected and joined Democrats opposing the amendment, including Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 84, Thom Tillis (R-NC), 65, Susan Collins (R-ME), 73, and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), 69.
The failed vote suggests that Majority Leader Thune may have had good reasons for delaying it— in that he probably knew it couldn’t pass. Of course, this doesn’t completely clear him. He could apply pressure and party discipline, such as by stripping the disloyal senators of their committee positions, as Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-La.) encouraged yesterday.
More conspiracy-minded commenters darkly suspect that Thune only let it come up for a vote because he knew it wouldn’t pass. I have no opinion on that one; it is a matter of mind-reading and imputed motives. I prefer to see the glass half-full— that there are now 48 Republican Senators on record as supporting the Act.
Maybe the Act will enjoy improved odds in January with a new Senate. Till then, there are other opportune irons heating up in the electoral fire. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for more on that.
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Speaking of Susan Collins: behold the latest exciting polycrisis chapter, set in Maine. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long-format article masquerading as a hit job against the Democrats’ nominee against Senator Collins— the Nazi-tattooed oyster hustler and true colorful character Graham Platner. In reality, the Times’ story was more of a limited hangout. It raised new allegations of sexual abuse, but made them sound like hysterical whining from Republican ex-girlfriends. The Times reported, “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.”
Unsettling behavior! Imagine the choice of vocabulary they’d have selected instead, if Platner were a Republican endorsed by President Trump.
The funniest thing about this whole story is that Platner is a walking, talking, cartoon caricature of what Democrats think knuckle-dragging conservatives are like. Despite that, and despite the fact he attended the Hotchkiss School, one of the most exclusive and expensive private boarding schools in the country, he’s still somehow the Democrats’ great white hope.
Adding the parts we already know to the new allegations in this story, here’s what the balance sheet shows so far:
- Platner is a bearded, flannel-wearing stereotype of high-testosterone, “blue-collar,” salt-of-the-earth toxic masculinity that Democrats both fear and romanticize.
- He never shuts up about his Marine service, saying he “signed up for the U.S. Marines to kill.” (Now he says he’s “incredibly non-violent.” It’s incredible, all right.)
- Democrat supporters brag about how he could “beat up anyone in Congress.”
- His Reddit posts stress his “passion for firearms” and “steadfast support for the Second Amendment.”
- In his archived social media posts, he constantly uses “gay” and “retard” as slurs, uses rude nicknames for black people and women (“slits”), and calls rural whites “racist and stupid.” (He now says he was in a “dark place” when he wrote those things.)
- His now infamous Nazi death-camp guard tattoo, which he called “my Totenkopf” (he now claims that for nearly 20 years he thought it was just a non-binary, friendly-pirate emoji).
- He has a recurring populist line steeped in contempt for the institutions: he calls U.S. wars “a lie” and says the system is rigged by oligarchs. His populism is almost MAGA-adjacent.
- He told one of his girlfriends that if he ever caught an intruder in his house, he would rape them— “not in a gay way,” but in a dominance way. (The campaign did not deny it.) This was a very sophisticated, progressive, hands-ontheory of home defense, which I’m certain will be warmly received by Maine’s suburban women voters.
- He admits sending sexy chats to women, not his wife, within a year of getting married.
- He and his wife are in current treatment with at least four mental health professionals and probably an exorcist.
- He has PTSD. Nobody is saying he could snap and shoot up the Senate.
- Three ex-girlfriends described him as a volatile, sometimes physically intimidating partner, with excessive drinking, flagrant infidelity, and the kind of sneering contempt toward women that usually gets you featured on a true-crime podcast.
His “transformation” into a liberal happened very recently in 2021, right around the time he realized that Maine’s progressive donor community has much deeper pockets than an oyster bed. Instead of having any kind of communiarian epiphany or even a thoughtful progressive platform, Platner manufactured his progressive bona fides by claiming to have voted for Bernie twice and being a “vegetable‑growing, psychedelics‑takingsocialist,” which Jacobin and NBC repeat as a kind of charming, anti‑establishment tagline rather than an instant disqualifier for public office.
Naturally, we are expected to believe Platner’s transition from bloodthirsty rifleman to peaceful, vegetable-growing, LSD-imbibing, tie-dyed socialist is completely genuine, and not at all a calculated rebranding designed by a focus group. Perish the thought.
And … well … I’m no expert, but I feel compelled to add that I would not be shocked if a reckless, PTSD-afflicted barfly with this train of wreckage already in his biography actually still had a whole conga line of skeletons poised to shimmy out of the closet any minute.
🔥 Back in 2018, NBC published what would become one of the most widely cited polls in recent political history. The article was headlined, “Poll: 56 percent of Republicans would consider voting for a candidate accused of harassment.” For contrast, the subheadline added, “Poll finds 81 percent of Democrats would definitely not support a candidate accused of sexual harassment by multiple people.”
That poll was dragged up again and again during me too episodes like Trump’s Stormy Daniels case and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, as proof that Democrats are more principled than Republicans, and would never ever support a candidate with sex pest strings attached. Believe all women!
So you would think it would be more explosive that the Times’ new Platner exposé included troubling allegations far sketchier than those leveled against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, which forced that unlucky politician to step down. But no. You’ve got to see how the liberal Times readers reacted in the comments. Behold, three examples of hyper-flexible mental gymnastics that could headline an old-time circus sideshow.
🔥 Democrats are taking a much broaderview of Platner’s flaws than NBC’s poll might suggest. First (2,600 likes):
And (1,500 likes):
And (1,300 likes):
There you have it. In a single election cycle, Democrats went from “81% say they would definitely not support a candidate accused of sexual harassment by multiple people” to “who cares; we just want healthcare and a higher minimum wage.”
(I also find it profoundly weird that Little Joe thinks his party “fights for the working class” when they just forced the working class to take experimental drugs or get fired, which by my calculations results in a minimum wage of zero. Maybe I’m missing the nuances. Never mind.)
🔥 The woman most heavily quoted in the Times’ new story was Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield, who this morning posted her response to the article. Lyndsey admitted that she was the one who first quietly unmasked the Totenkopf-tattoo story (trying to stay under the radar because she was afraid of Platner). Unsurprisingly, Lyndsey said the Times did not report the full extent of her history with Platner, did not use any of her text messages or screenshots, and spent six paragraphs proving she is a Republican, even though she readily admits as much.
My reaction to this developing story is mostly one of bemusement. For some reason, Democrats see Graham Platner as their best chance to pick up a Senate seat. But even without all this baggage, Platner was always a long shot against “moderate” Republican Susan Collins, who has never lost. Even though Times readers are willing to live with Platner’s knuckle-dragging, neanderthal temperament because he claims to drop acid and grow kale, the steady stream of misogyny can’t possibly help.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say Platner somehow wins. The last time the Democrats rolled the dice on a tattooed bro-candidate with psychological turbulence, they got John Fetterman. And Fetterman has been a spectacular success for progressives, assuming their primary goal was to elect a senator who spends his time trolling his own base, voting with Republicans, and bleeding staff like a punctured IV bag.
I’m not sure Democrats have fully thought this Platner thing through. I say: let them run him. If the Democrats want to replace Susan Collins with a man who threatened to rape home intruders and has to consult four mental health professionals to decide what to have for breakfast, we shall not stand in their way.
Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return tomorrow morning with an all-new roundup of essential news, caffeinated commentary, and oyster shucking. (Rhetorically.)
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Rose Rambles... 