#nunyas news

[beardedmrbean]

A gunman who opened fire on the street with a submachine gun before fleeing in a Rolls Royce has been jailed for more than 15 years.

Mohammad Khan fired the lethal Skorpion gun in the direction of a man standing in a doorway, damaging a house and parked car on Melrose Place, Smethwick.

Khan, 29, was among a group of people who arrived at Melrose Place at 4am on 6 September 2023 following a dispute. Khan was handed the Skorpion gun - Eastern European weapons which can fire up to 800 rounds-per-minute - by an associate.

No one was injured in the shooting and the mob fled off in a hired Rolls Royce, before West Midlands Police tracked down the vehicle and were able to identify Khan following forensic investigations.

Khan was arrested soon after and charged with possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. After facing a trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court, Khan was sentenced this week to 15 years and six months in prison.

Skorpion guns are machine pistols which were first designed in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. They were later believed to have been used by members of Irish republican groups.

West Midlands Police said: “We’re continuing our work to take all guns off the streets and jail those who are prepared to use, supply or handle them. Over the last 12 months we’ve helped put many offenders behind bars and there is no hiding place, we’ll continue to do this.

“The success is part of Operation Target, which sees us take a defiant stand against a range of serious and organised crime offences.

“Officers use local intelligence, seize goods, carry out warrants and target offenders as part the ongoing crackdown.”

[beardedmrbean]

consequences of my own actions .jpg

[beardedmrbean]

South Carolina middle school bullies who pushed a 12-year-old girl to hang herself visited her later at the ICU and took photos of the victim to mock her on social media, according to a new lawsuit.

Kelaia Turner, now 14, suffered more than a year of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of five peers at the Dr. Phinnize J. Fisher Middle School in Greenville, her heartbroken family wrote in a lawsuit against the district and nine faculty members who were accused of negligence.

Seeing suicide as her only way out, Kelaia hanged herself in 2023 and was dead for 8 minutes before paramedics could revive her, with Kelaia suffering severe brain damage and remaining in a coma for weeks.

While Kelaia was in the coma, one of the bullies made their way inside the ICU and snapped photos of the intubated girl, posting the pictures on social media and spreading rumors about her injuries, the lawsuit says.

Ty Turner, Kelaia’s mother, said she wants justice and is targeting the district for allegedly failing her daughter and allowing the bullying to go unrestrained for a year and a half.

“They used to teach us, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me,’ “ the mom told WFY44. “Unfortunately, words do hurt.”

The lawsuit claims the bullying started in 2021 when Kelaia began wearing her natural hair to school, with students calling her “roach” and saying she looked “like a man.”

Kelaia’s teacher, Olivia Bennett, allegedly joined in on the mockery and would acknowledge the victim when the bullies would ask her, “Where’s the roach?”

Along with regularly insulting Kelaia and pushing her, one of the bullies verbally assaulted her when they found out her parents spoke to school officials about the torment and planned to move her to another class.

Things only escalated in 2022 when Kelaia got into a fight with one of the bullies, with school officials opting to suspend her but not her tormentor, according to the lawsuit.

On May 23, 2022, Kelaia’s parents said, students targeted their daughter by playing an offensive YouTube video called “The Black People Song,” which teacher John Teer allegedly allowed to be played aloud without reprimand over the video’s racist nature.

Later that year, the bullies went on to pour water on Kelaia’s clothes and then threw them in the trash, the lawsuit states.

Through all this, the stricken child’s parents allege that the district failed to take any meaningful action to stop the torment, with Kelaia opting to hang herself with a belt in her bedroom on March 17, 2023.

“She was cool to the touch, blood was coming out of her nose,” her mother recalled of her daughter’s limp body afterward. “She had fully committed to what it was that she was attempting to do, and she was gone for 8 whole minutes.”

Kelaia ended up suffering severe brain damage and has been left with no control over her body.

The lawsuit, which was filed in November, seeks damages from the district and faculty members to cover Kelaia’s medical bills, psychiatric expenses, special education, parents’ lost wages while taking care of her, life care expenses, disability care, injury to her psyche and emotional state and loss of enjoyment of life.

Greenville County Schools has denied the allegations and claims its staff takes the appropriate steps when dealing with bullying incidents.

“We disagree with these allegations and have conducted a thorough investigation and review of each allegation at the time they were made,” the district said in a statement.

“While we do not agree with the allegations, our hearts go out to Kelaia Tecora Turner, her mother, and their family,” officials added.

As of Tuesday morning, a GoFundMe to help support Kelaia raised more than $15,000.

[beardedmrbean]

boo hoo, shouldn't have fucked a student then

[beardedmrbean]

wonder how many more nuisance suits he's gonna have to fight off.

Link

[beardedmrbean]

I like the Florida Sheriff's that tell the citizens to just shoot them better than this.

[beardedmrbean]

Centrist Democrats are slamming their far-left colleagues following Election Day, arguing that their emphasis on "identity politics" and other issues handed huge victories to the GOP.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., argued that President-elect Trump has "no greater friend than the far left." Like-minded Democrats say racial politics, anti-police rhetoric and gender hysteria are alienating millions of voters.

"There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world," Torres wrote on X. "The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling."

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville put it more bluntly in a Sunday interview with the New York Times, calling "defund the police" the "three stupidest words in the English language."

"We could never wash off the stench of it," he said.

Torres is one of several Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who have called out his party's "nonsense." One centrist House Democrat complained to Axios on Monday that the "identity politics stuff is absolutely killing us."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., argued on Sunday that Democrats are "out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA."

"We don't listen enough; we tell people what's good for them. And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base," Murphy wrote.

Not all Democrats are ready to make a change, however. When Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., broke with his party to condemn biological males playing in women's sports last week, he faced an avalanche of hate.

"Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face," Moulton said in a New York Times report. "I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that."

The statement resulted in calls for Moulton to resign, and at least one of his staffers quit in protest.

Massachusetts state Rep. Manny Cruz suggested Moulton's stance was "a betrayal" in a post on X.

"Congressman Moulton, your commitment then was protecting the LGBTQ community, standing up for their rights, and compassion. Now, on a political whim, our Congressman has betrayed the words he signed onto just last year by scapegoating transgender youth in sports for the failures of the national Democratic Party and leaders to win the presidential election. You said you 'would stand with Nagly and with all our community … against all forms of bigotry, discrimination, bullying, and harassment,'" Cruz wrote. 

Salem city Councilor Kyle Davis, another Democrat, called for Moulton to resign. 

"I’m not looking for an apology from [Moulton], I’m looking for a resignation," Davis wrote in a post on X.

Moulton refused to apologize and instead doubled down in a statement late last week.

"I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them. Yet there are many who, shouting from the extreme left corners of social media, believe I have failed the unspoken Democratic Party purity test," he said.

"We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop. Let’s have these debates now, determine a new strategy for our party since our existing one failed, and then unite to oppose the Trump agenda wherever it imperils American values."

[beardedmrbean]

Why does this read like they want to pump these numbers up

[beardedmrbean]

Transgender advocates are pushing back on activists who resort to “unreasonable” tactics, with some admitting they “cannot vilify” critics — as support among Americans for their biggest issues plunges.

Transgender rights came in dead last in a Gallup poll that asked 2024 voters to rank the 22 issues that factored into their ballot decision, with 36% of survey respondents rating them “not important.”

Drilling down into polling on specific issues — such as transgender bathroom policy, trans athletes competing in female sports and laws allowing gender-questioning youth to procure medical sex change treatment — reveals support from many Americans is waning.

Some LGBTQ activists recently told the New York Times they believe the worrying dip in support is attributable to the zealotry of the movement, which emphasizes shame and forced compliance while discouraging any critical debate.

“We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, told the outlet.

“We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.”

Advocates cited tactics — such as stripping distinctions of “male” or “female” from abortion and childbirth topics, being fanatical about pronoun use and likening even unintentional misidentification of a trans person to an act of violence — has not helped grow their coalition of allies.

“No one wants to feel stupid or condescended to,” Heng-Lehtinen acknowledged.

Rethinking how the issue is advocated has also become a part of the Democrats’ ideological reckoning following their decisive loss in this year’s election.

The Trump campaign seized on Vice President Kamala Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners, and turned her pushing of LGBTQ issues into one of the most effective campaign ad slogans of the election: “Kamala is for they/them. I am for you.”

Even a small group of Democratic members of Congress have started testing the waters in defiance of the trans lobby.

“Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.).

His office was protested by trans activists after he suggested transgender athletes competing against biological females could have an advantage or even injure other competitors — which has happened and continues to happen.

Tufts University’s science department chair purportedly claimed that the school would be cut off internships with Moulton’s office over his concerns, but the Boston institution quickly clarified that was not the case.

Mara Keisling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality, pointed the finger at activists for devoting so much energy to debating losing issues.

Among them, she told the Times, were the demonization of “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling for her stance against the encroachment of biological males into female spaces, and pretending that any objections to transgender women in sports are invalid and rooted in discrimination.

The issue of sports, in particular, Keisling noted, was an instance where Americans moved away from sympathizing with trans activists.

“We looked unreasonable,” she told the outlet. “We should be talking about the 7-year-old who just wants to play soccer with her friends.”

[beardedmrbean]

Just one more election everyone I know we've been saying that for the last 50+ years but this time we really mean it, we just need you to set aside your integrity just one more time and then we won't try and guilt you into violating your conscience.

This is just the most important election ever so you gotta trust me on this, we can start making it better after this.

Submitted anonymously

Almost exactly how I'd have put it, I'd have dialed up the sarcasm more I think.

Threat to democracy is people using scare tactics to get you to vote for their guy instead of letting you be free to make your own choices and believing in the system of checks and balances that is in place.

Also if 85% or your reasons for voting for one person is that they're not the other person I'm not going to vote for you because I don't know what your position is and I'm not going to be bothered to find out.

[beardedmrbean]

I bet the last thing Bernie Sanders expected upon his arrival in Ireland and Britain was to be met by angry protesters—to find himself heckled and damned as a sellout by the kind of radicals who would have been shouting his praises just six months ago. And yet that is what happened: Some of Britain's Bernie Bros have morphed into Bernie bashers.

Why? Because he refuses to describe Israel's war on Hamas as a "genocide" and he doesn't approve of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.

Quick—cast him out. Unperson him. He has ventured outside the parameters of acceptable Left-wing thought and must be punished.

It all kicked off in Dublin. Senator Sanders, who is on these isles to promote his book, Why It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, was speaking at University College Dublin. A group of pro-Palestine protesters assembled at the entrance to the venue, all wearing the uniform of the virtuous: a keffiyeh. "It's OK to be angry about capitalism, what about Zionism?" they chanted.

It got heated inside, too. Sanders was interrupted by audience members. "Resistance is an obligation in the face of occupation!" one shouted. "Occupation is terrorism!" yelled another.

Sanders kept his cool with his reply: "Good slogan, but slogans are not solutions," he said.

It continued at Trinity College the next day. Sanders was in conversation with the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. Outside, a small but noisy gaggle of anti-Israel agitators displayed a banner that said: "Boycott Apartheid Israel."

"Free Palestine!" they chanted. (Deliciously, a woman who was queuing for the Sanders event bellowed "from Hamas!" every time they said it.)

Again, Sanders was heckled by hotheads. "Ceasefire now!" they shouted. At one point, in the words of Trinity News, Sanders "threw up his right arm in frustration and looked at O'Toole, as if to ask him what would be done."

It is little wonder he felt frustrated. Sanders was there to talk about capitalism, yet angry youths kept badgering him about Zionism. He is used to a fawning response from Socialist twentysomethings, and yet now some were effectively accusing him of being complicit in a "genocide." It's quite the downfall for one of the West's best-known leftists.

The turn on Bernie is underpinned by a belief that he is too soft on Israel. The radical Left will never forgive him for initially supporting Israel's war on Hamas. Even his more recent position—he now says there should be a ceasefire—is not good enough for these people, who seem to measure an individual's moral worth by how much he hates the Jewish State.

They want Bernie to say the G-word. They want him to damn Israel as uniquely barbarous. They want him to agree with them that it is right and proper to single Israel out for boycotts and sanctions.

In short, they want him to fall into line. They want him to bend the knee to their Israelophobic ideology.

These illiberal demands on Bernie to bow down to correct-think continued when he arrived in the U.K. A group of communists protested against him in Liverpool. Normally, Sanders would have been shown only love in a historically radical city like Liverpool, said the Liverpool Echo, but this time, "the atmosphere was different," for one simple reason: "his refusal to brand Israel's actions in Gaza as 'genocide'."

Sanders' resistance of the G-word haunted him in his media interviews, too. Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, a key outlet of Britain's bourgeois Left, asked him three times if he would call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide." He refused and it went viral. Armies of ersrtwhile Bernie fans damned him as a "genocide denier."

There is something quite nauseating in this spectacle of an elderly Jewish man being pressured to denounce the world's only Jewish State as genocidal. Millennial Gentiles who want to trend online might be happy to throw around the G-word. But Senator Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a deeper moral and historical understanding of what genocide is. And it seems he is not willing to sacrifice that understanding at the altar of retweets or an easy ride.

Good for him.

Sanders' father was born in Poland, where most of his family were exterminated by the Nazis. Sanders is a son of the Shoah, a descendant of survivors of the greatest crime in history. To subject him to the modern equivalent of a showtrial in which you demand that he scream "Genocide!" at Israel feels unconscionable. As does branding him a "genocide denier."

Why won't he call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide"? Maybe, says a writer for the Jewish Chronicle, it's because he lost so much of his family to Hitler's gas chambers and therefore he "knows what a genocide is, what a war crime is." He knows that while the war in Gaza, a war started by Hamas, is "horrible," to use his word, it cannot in any way be compared to the Nazis' conscious efforts to vaporize an entire ethnic group.

There has been a Inquisition vibe to some of the Bernie-bashing in Britain. At times it has felt cruel. The sight of fashionable, privileged Israel-bashers haranguing a man who will have heard stories from his own father about the genocidal mania of the Nazis has come across like Jew-taunting rather than political critique.

More broadly, this unseemly episode gives us a glimpse into the authoritarian impulses behind the Left's obsessive opposition to Israel. Israelophobia, it seems, is less a rational political stance than a borderline religious conviction. There are true believers, who dutifully repeat the G-word like a mantra, and sinful outliers, who refuse to treat Israel as uniquely "problematic."

One's moral fitness for radical society is increasingly judged by one's willingness to treat Israel as the most wicked nation in existence. The dangers of making hostility to the Jewish State a requirement of being a Good Leftist should be clear to everyone.

Sanders is wise to resist this tyrannical zeitgeist, and to say what he believes rather than what he believes will be popular.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

[beardedmrbean]

Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo committed “medical malpractice” and publicly undercounted the total number of COVID-related nursing home deaths in New York during the worst period of the killer pandemic, a damning final investigative report released by a key House panel found.

The report from the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released Monday, also concluded that Cuomo “likely gave false statements” about his role in pandemic decision-making.

That includes him actually being “directly involved” in the infamous March 2020 edict directing nursing homes to admit recovering COVID-19 patients — and downplaying pandemic-related deaths of residents in a July 2020 report, the House panel found.

In another finding, the report concluded that Cuomo “acted in a manner consistent with an attempt to inappropriately influence the testimony of a witness and obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation,” referring to his contacts with former adviser James Malatras.

The House had previously released documents laying out the allegations about Cuomo and his administration’s actions — but the more-than 500-page final report paints a devastating picture of the three-term Democratic governor’s decisions that the subcommittee claims undermined public health.

Cuomo — who is weighing a political comeback run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021 amid sexual misconduct accusations he denied — ripped the report as a partisan GOP witch hunt.

“This is the same weak gruel the MAGA Republicans on this committee have been peddling for months if not years,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi.

But Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican who chaired the panel, said in the opening letter of the report that there was bipartisan consensus on numerous topics including “that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo participated in medical malpractice and publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York.”

A more than 40-page section of the report focuses solely on Cuomo and the state government’s response to the pandemic. Cuomo’s name appears in the report 203 times.

Among the findings alleged in the report are that:

The Cuomo administration’s March 25, 2020 directive to admit or readmit recovering COVID-19 patients into nursing homes was “medical malpractice,” “antithetical to known science” and inconsistent with federal guidance — and the Executive Chamber “attempted to cover it up.”

Contrary to his denials during House testimony, Cuomo and his top aides and advisers were “directly Involved” in and approved the infamous directive, which was later rescinded following public outcry.

Cuomo administration officials testified that the governor ordered the controversial July 6, 2020 state Department of Health report — which was criticized for lowballing nursing home resident deaths from COVID — to combat criticism of the March 25 edict.

Cuomo was directly involved in editing the July report and directing people outside the government — such as Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling and Greater NY Hospital CEO Kenneth Raske to review it. In a memo shortly before the report’s release and obtained by the House panel, Dowling offered to help “rewrite” it.

Cuomo’s executive chamber decided to remove “out-of-facility” fatalities — such as nursing home residents who died from COVID after falling ill and being transferred to hospitals — from the July report, thus dramatically reducing the total death toll.

The panel also concluded that “Mr. Andrew Cuomo Likely Gave False Statements to the Select Subcommittee in Violation of 18 U.S.C” — a federal crime that if proven could result in a sentence of five years in prison.

The committee in October said it had referred Cuomo’s “criminally false statements” to the US Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Cuomo’s rep, Azzopardi, claimed the House was out to get “perceived political enemies.”

“From the very beginning this has been an abuse of power and a waste of taxpayer money aimed at punishing perceived political enemies – like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci [then Director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases], Governor Cuomo and ‘the deep state’ – that does nothing to make us more prepared for the next pandemic,” he said.

He claimed federal data showed that New York ranked 39th in terms of per capita nursing home deaths in 2020.

“The DOJ -three times – the Manhattan DA and others looked at the nursing home issue and found no wrongdoing, while the meritless civil lawsuit launched by the very same people who have been working arm and arm with this committee was tossed out of court,” Azzopardi added.

Families of loved ones who were nursing home residents and died from COVID said Cuomo was finally being held to account.

“Cuomo has been lying about following the Trump CDC guidelines for years,” said Peter Arbeeny, whose father, Norman, died from the virus after being released from a Brooklyn nursing home.

“If the Cuomo administration would have followed the Trump [administration] CDC guidelines and also used the the USS Comfort ship and Javits Center [for more patients], thousands of lives would have been saved.”

[beardedmrbean]

Alec Baldwin once fired a blank round at a crew member on the set of “Rust,” prosecutors alleged in new court papers, as they accused the actor of being reckless with firearms while filming.

Prosecutors in the New Mexico involuntary manslaughter case against the “30 Rock” star said they plan to bring evidence at his trial — slated to begin on July 9 — showing that Baldwin had a history of flouting safety protocols on set, which led to Halyna Hutchins’ tragic shooting death in 2021.

One such reckless moment came when Baldwin, 66, pointed his gun and fired “a blank round at a crew member” while he held the person target in his line of sight, prosecutors alleged in the Monday filing.

Other examples of Baldwin ignoring safety procedures between Oct. 12, 2021 up until the day of the shooting included him using his gun as a pointer; firing the weapon after filming was over in violation of safety rules; holding his finger on the trigger in scenes that didn’t require it; rushing armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed to reload his gun faster; and being on FaceTime with his family and making videos for them during firearms training, the court papers claimed.

And before filming even started Baldwin — one of the producers and the leading actor in the movie — “asked to be assigned the ‘biggest’ gun available,” the filing alleged.

Prosecutors said they have photos and videos of Baldwin that they plan to show a jury acting cavalierly toward on-set safety rules.

In one clip, he “can be seen engaging in horseplay with his gun and pulling his gun when the scene did not call for the pulling of his gun,” the papers claimed. “When he pulls his gun the muzzle of the gun is pointed directly at another actor.”

Prosecutors said many clips show an angry and aggressive Baldwin, who can also be seen halting filming to yell and swear at the crew.

“Mr. Baldwin can be seen screaming intermittently throughout the attempts at filming the scene,” the filing claimed. “He exercises complete control over the set by stopping the acting sequence, cursing loudly and rushing the other cast and crew.”

Taken altogether this “intrinsic evidence” of Baldwin’s “other acts” leading up to Hutchins’ death shows that the incident wasn’t an “accident or mistake” — as Baldwin has maintained all along, prosecutors said.

During a rehearsal on the set of the Western film, Baldwin aimed his revolver in the direction of cinematographer Hutchins when it fired, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza.

Baldwin pleaded not guilty and faces up to 1 and 1/2 years if convicted.

Armorer Gutierrez-Reed, 26, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars in April after her conviction on the same charge Baldwin now faces.

A video hearing has been scheduled for Baldwin on Friday to go over a slew of motions for the upcoming trial.

Baldwin’s lawyers didn’t immediately return a request for comment Wednesday morning.

[beardedmrbean]

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked  Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.” 

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

[beardedmrbean]

Jimmy Kimmel has admitted his own role in “dividing” America in a 19-minute, last-ditch plea to Republican voters ahead of next week’s presidential election.

The comedian abandoned his “usual roast” of Donald Trump and, while he still cracked jokes about the Republican candidate, struck a more serious tone by making an appeal to GOP supporters on Tuesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.

“We are very divided, and not just because of Donald Trump, because of people like – if I’m being honest – me,” Kimmel said.

“I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive.”

Kimmel urged viewers to share his monologue with people in their lives who are “either planning to vote for Trump or thinking about it” and urged them to watch the entire thing.

“I promise I won’t make you regret it because it’s not going to be our usual roast of Trump or some kind of liberal virtue signaling, none of that,” Kimmel said.

In his monologue, the late-night host asked Republican supporters to consider some of the statements Trump has made directly over the years, starting with healthcare.

Kimmel played a montage of clips of Trump promising to announce a healthcare plan, with the dates ranging from 2016 up until the 2024 debate with Kamala Harris on September 10, where he said he “had concepts” of a plan.

“Donald Trump was president for four years,” Kimmel said.

“You would think that at this point he would have some answers, some kind of plan, for simple questions about subjects like healthcare and childcare.”

He also slammed Trump for fearmongering with unfounded claims of forced sex change operations in schools. “I understand this is a tough subject, but this alarm he keeps sounding, about forced sex change operations, this is not happening. This is an imaginary problem,” Kimmel said.

In a lighter moment, Kimmel returned to more familiar ground when he joked that Trump is “the exact meeting point between Q-Anon and QVC.”

“You remember when Ronald Reagan was selling high tops in the 80s? No, you don’t because he wasn’t,” Kimmel said.

“Reagan didn’t sell sneakers, Clinton didn’t sell pork rinds, Bush didn’t sell baked beans, presidents don’t sell products – except for one who sells a lot of them.”

Towards the end of his monologue, the comedian turned to a wall full of photos of Republicans, including those from Trump’s first administration, who have backed Harris and abandoned their support for Trump this election.

“This has never happened before,” Kimmel said.

[beardedmrbean]

Hamas was heavily embedded inside a hospital in northern Gaza, using its offices and ambulances for their operations, according to an ambulance driver.

Speaking under interrogation by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the driver said Hamas military operatives were known to operate “at the gates of buildings [and] in the offices” of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia.

“They operate ambulances to transport their wounded military operatives and transport them for their missions. And this is instead of using ambulances for the benefit of civilians,” he said in a video released by the IDF.

The driver was arrested after Israeli special forces stormed the hospital over the weekend, during which 100 suspected Hamas fighters were captured.

Israel said it raided the hospital as part of its new offensive in northern Gaza in response to a “regrouping” of Hamas in and around Jabalia.

Gaza health officials have denied Israeli claims of any militant presence at the hospital.