Opinion
By Jeff Childers
06-12-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! This morning offers a tight but thought-provoking roundup of today’s essential news: corporate media beside itself comparing Hunter to Trump after jury convicts the drug-addled meth addict in three hours; climate change alarmists disappointed with June temperatures; 10th circuit authorizes involuntary medication in a troubling case posing tough questions; Wall Street Journal runs a surprising exposé on fake science; and terrific news from the presidential campaign.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 The BBC finally got to run the story it impatiently anticipated, as antsy as a ten-year-old boy waiting for his turn to the bathroom. Yesterday, it deployed with great relish its long-written headline, “Analysis: Hunter Biden conviction shatters Trump’s persecution narrative.”
Yesterday, the Delaware jury found Hunter Biden guilty on all three federal gun charges. When buying a small revolver, Hunter failed to check a box on the federal form stating he was addicted to drugs. The jury returned its verdict after less than three hours of deliberation. It marked another historic U.S. conviction, being the very first time any child of a sitting U.S. president has ever been convicted of a felony.
Of course, Hunter is also a historic kind of presidential child, in many different ways, but that’s another story.
The significance of Hunter’s conviction is debatable. Immediately following the verdict, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt argued, “This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine.”
It might be a legal distraction as well as a political one. Last August, a New Orleans federal court ruled the Constitution protects the Second Amendment rights of drug users. In that case, the Court explained, “our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage.”
To what then does it amount? Predictably, BBC’s ‘analysis’ compared the Hunter and Trump convictions. The government-funded broadcaster first lamely argued Hunter’s conviction proves that blue state juries can be fair:
BBC also blessed the DOJ, absolving it from accusations of political double standards:
Some people wonder why, since Hunter’s attorneys put on almost no defense at all, Hunter didn’t take a plea deal. Unaccountably, Hunter insisted he was innocent, and demanded a jury trial — but then didn’t offer evidence of his innocence. What, exactly, was his strategy?
Those kinds of pointed questions remain unanswered, and unquestioned by corporate media.
In case you were tempted to start wondering about it all, BBC’s analyst labeled all doubts about the Hunter Trial as “bizarre.” Bizarre, even though Joe Biden’s son was only charged with the least criminal conduct that the trial evidence proved, eliding right over the millions Hunter raked in from U.S. enemies. Bizarre, even though Trump was charged with the most criminal conduct prosecutors could dream up, using tortured, novel legal theories.
But the BBC can’t see any difference between the two trials:
What do you think? Is Hunter’s conviction conclusive evidence that “no one is above the law?” Or is Hunter a willing Scapegoat of the Empire, as Representative Greene suggested?
Yesterday, corporate media widely reported that Hunter’s sentencing could take months, because these things take time. But Trump will be sentenced in a few weeks, right before the GOP Convention. Trump’s trial dragged on for weeks; Hunter’s was rammed through in only a few days. Hunter’s charges were routine firearms violations; Trump’s charges were unprecedented creative lawfare based on political conduct in office.
The stark differences continue, through every material point of comparison. But never mind! The differences will fade away into the media’s fog machine of confusion.
Finally, it’s worth considering how Hunter’s prosecution helps slam open wider the Overton Window of political prosecution. Now, presidential family members are also fair game. It won’t be so historic next time when some local prosecutor charges Hunter with felony drug possession or human trafficking.
The debate is just heating up. This morning, commenters argued hotly that the Hunter-Trump Trial debate is a distraction. For example:
Team Biden’s strategy of justifying President Trump’s prosecution by convicting Hunter of a silly firearms form violation may eventually backfire spectacularly. We shall see.
🔥🔥 In case you were wondering, since the temperature hasn’t been getting much coverage this summer, overall June has been cooler than last year. The Telegraph ran a muted story yesterday headlined, “June temperatures at half the level of this time last year.” They were hoping for something much hotter.
The greenhouse effect from all that carbon dioxide, supposedly causing all the derechos, hailstorms, and hurricanes, keeps stubbornly failing to show up on the thermometer. So.
🔥 The Denver Post ran a troubling story raising some very difficult questions yesterday, headlined “Mentally ill man charged in Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting can be forcibly medicated.”
In November, 2015, Robert Dear, 66, stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. He first opened fire with a rifle, then charged into the building. The siege ended five hours later when Dear surrendered. He killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine.
Dear is mentally ill. His criminal trial — now going on its eighth year — got bogged down in state court by Dear’s obvious insanity. So prosecutors ironically re-charged him with the federal crime of blocking abortion clinic access, and moved the case to federal court. In 2022, Dear’s federal judge green-lighted forcing the crazed defendant to take medicine for his delusional disorder, and to allow him to stand trial.
Dear’s attorneys appealed.
Yesterday, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial judge’s order, clearing the way for prison doctors to forcibly medicate Mr. Dear, despite the risks of side effects raised by his defense attorneys. Presumably, Dear’s lawyers will appeal this new ruling to the Supreme Court, which may or may not take the case.
What should the Supreme Court do? Before the pandemic, I would have easily agreed with the two lower courts. Medicate the man. It’s good for him, and good for justice. Win-win. But now, I’m not so sure. Now, despite what he’s done, and despite the fact Dear might be the least sympathetic defendant imaginable, I feel I’m leaning more toward favoring his bodily autonomy, if only to set the bar that low for the government to order any of us to take drugs we don’t want.
It’s a tough call. Which way are you leaning?
🔥 What have I been telling you about $Science? Three weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive headlined, “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures.”
Publicly traded John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest and most well-regarded science publishers, has been polishing its sterling reputation for over 200 years. But over the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than eleven thousand papers that turned out to be faked, and last month Wiley announced it was closing nineteen journals “infected by large-scale research fraud.”
Trust the science!
The Wall Street Journal spotted the awful risk that morons like us will conclude the whole Science industry is just a big casino-like shell game where the house always wins:
Ha. I say, threatens what credibility? Maybe Big Science still has some pus-filled pockets of credibility remaining among credulous New York Times editors, liberal elitists, and petty bureaucrats. But as for the rest of us, we survivors of the iatrogenic pandemic, have had our fill, thank you.
This story should surprise no one.
Way back in 2009, Marcia Angell, the executive editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, dropped this truth bomb in an article she published in the New York Review of Books:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Ten years ago in 2015, Richard Horton, chief editor of top journal The Lancet, also raised the alarm, and he was even more pessimistic than Marcia:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
A turn toward darkness! And just in time for the pandemic. It’s too bad nobody listened. That dose of scientific skepticism might have been very helpful back when the pandemic modelers swamped us with fake studies exaggerating the risks of covid mortality by orders of magnitude.
But the Journal, and all the downstream articles also wringing their hands about the loss of trust in Science, overlooked the more meaningful problem. During the pandemic, when fake studies based on “models” filled the journals hyping massive covid mortality — which were then used to justify the draconian pandemic mitigation laws — journal editors were systematically canceling any submitted studies with different conclusions.
You can argue about “study mills” and “pharma capture” all you want, but the truth is the journal editors failed. They earn their salaries as gatekeepers with the duty to ensure fair peer review. They are expected to actually read the studies to make sure they make sense. They failed. Worse, they reason they failed to do their job was on purpose, because the editors decided their job was not to ensure good science, but to enforce the official narrative.
But the narrative was wrong.
Given the stakes and the dollars involved, and how the system markets “peer review” as some kind of false scientific gold standard, of course pharma will try to get its fake studies published. Fake studies mint billions. But, if “peer review” is to be used as the gold standard, then editors like Wiley must ensure their products are not just a shiny artifice.
They are selling us fool’s gold. The good news is the whole rotten frame is falling down on them. And what started it tipping over was how far they overreached during covid. It’s another unexpected covid blessing.
📈 Today’s final entry begins with Reuters’ refreshing story from late last week, headlined “Trump rakes in $12 million at tech fundraiser in liberal San Francisco.”
Reuters seemed shocked — shocked! — that Trump’s post-conviction fundraising dinner, with seats selling for $300,000 each, in liberal San Fransisco, was sold out. Trump’s campaign looked to raise $5 million, but easily overshot that goal by more than double, netting over $12 million in one dinner.
That unexpected success, on top of Trump’s recent, massive rally in the Bronx, despite his legal troubles, are causing some to re-think the political landscape. This morning, Fox ran a provocative op-ed headlined, “How Trump cracked the code to penetrate the blue wall. The author argued that Trump is poised to capture traditional blue-city democrat constituencies, all the way from high-tech workers down to inner-city minorities and democrat blue-collar types, who feel written off by both political parties.
If Trump could shift the big blue cities, it’s all over.
“How many untapped votes,” the author wondered, “are there in the deep blue cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and elsewhere?” He suggested, as I have long said, that blue city governments’ anti-cop, pro-crime policies are making this election much more personal than possibly any presidential election in our lifetimes:
If President Trump stands for anything, it is commonsense, pragmatic solutions, like building a border wall. Biden, on the other hand, only offers complicated, nonsensical “solutions” like repeatedly defying the Supreme Court to pay off student loans with taxpayers’ money.
Trump, who can fairly be described as a marketing genius, seems to clearly sense an opportunity to create a generational shift. The fact that he knows is reflected in several recent headlines. Like last week’s headline from Fox:
Or this headline, also from Fox, published early last month:
The headlines also suggest Trump’s strategy seems to be working. For example, yesterday’s headline from deep-blue PBS:
Finally, shattering long-standing preconceptions about class-based politics, Trump is suddenly winning surprising support all across the economic spectrum. Yesterday’s headline from Bloomberg, e.g.:
Even though Bloomberg tried waving away all this post-conviction support as merely being billionaires voting for tax breaks, it started its story by admitting “Donald Trump entered the 2024 presidential race as a pariah on Wall Street and among the monied Republican donor class.” Not anymore though.
On the other hand, it is painfully difficult to scrape up any positive headlines about Biden polling well, anywhere. Here’s an example from Politico last week:
Biden’s fundraising among normal people — voters — is failing. Here’s another highly suggestive headline from Politico, just two weeks ago:
Maybe all those Biden problems are related to appalling absurdities, like Joe’s imitation of a wax dummy at a Juneteenth celebration this week:
CLIP: What on Earth is wrong with Joe Biden (0:55)?
Obviously, this kind of thing doesn’t bother the hyper-partisan members of the Democrat base. But equally clearly, Joe Biden is in no condition to compete with Trump for normal, sane blue-city democrat voters. He can’t walk that far.
It’s almost like folks are starting to realize that, sooner or later, the Democrats are going to get us all killed with their gain of function science, shrinkflation, proxy warmongering, mandatory medicines, wide-open borders, no-bail policies, and defunding police. People are voting for self-interest issues far beyond their personal pocketbook problems. Read the whole Fox op-ed, it will surely encourage you.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Only a few more days till the Childers vacation wraps up, and we’ll return to a regular C&C schedule and content. Either way, I’ll meet you back here tomorrow for another steaming fresh to-go cup of Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
