The American Mind.

The latest release into the American interior of an FBI terrorist suspect who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border—a twice-freed Afghan national man free to roam America for 11 months until his capture—demands that the federal government regard this patterned problem as a chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

The case of the 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, whom an overwhelmed Border Patrol freed into America on March 10, 2023 before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and whom a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February, is the seventh example of its kind that can establish, just from disparate public records, a mortally dangerous failure pattern.

More cases of accidental Border Patrol releases of illegally crossing terrorism suspects, who did not reach the public record, are highly likely if not certain.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a legal challenge to a Texas law that requires voters under the age of 65 to provide justification to vote by mail, meaning that the Democrat-aligned attempt to sharply expand “no-excuse” mail-in ballots in the Lone Star state has failed, with implications for other states.

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The Catholic Charities of San Antonio allegedly misused tax dollars to fund the travel of illegal migrants to a “destination of their choice.” “These tax dollars were not intended to be used to fly illegal immigrants all over the country,” Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Tex., said.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), appearing alongside President Joe Biden on Monday, praised the anti-Israel campus protests that have sprung up across the United States.

“It is especially important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country today, of all days, as we once again witness the leadership of those peaceful, student-led protests on campuses like Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and many others,” the New York Democrat said at an event in Virginia with Biden commemorating Earth Day.

After Ocasio-Cortez spoke, Biden urged the audience to “listen to that lady.”

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Senator Jon Tester’s new $14.5 million ad campaign features footage of the southern border wall and boasts that the Montana Democrat “worked with Republicans” to “target fentanyl traffickers and add hundreds of new border patrol agents.”

There’s just one problem: Tester lobbied against a border wall in 2017 and voted against amendments that funded anti-fentanyl programs.

Tester was a vocal critic of former president Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border, calling the idea “ineffective and wasteful.” Tester has since said he supports erecting barriers where it “does make sense,” but he has not put forward any legislation that would do so.

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While Congress failed to pass a border security bill over the weekend amid a flurry of billions in international aid to Ukraine and Israel, they did set aside $3.5 billion for “Migration and Refugee Assistance” for the State Department to “address humanitarian needs of vulnerable populations and communities.”

The Antiplanner.

Today is Earth Day, a day in which we are supposed to celebrate environmentally friendly ideas such as public transit, high-density development, and electric vehicles. My report published last week revealed that the transit lobby has hijacked affordable housing funds so that, in many cities, most of those funds are spent on expensive high-density transit-oriented developments rather than on more affordable low-rise housing.

The Antiplanner.

axpayers spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing so-called affordable housing, but much of that money is wasted, says a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute. Affordable housing being built today actually costs much more than market-rate housing, and most of the benefits from building such expensive housing are captured by the developers, not low-income families who need housing.

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The White House is weighing an unprecedented declaration of a national climate emergency to crack down on the oil industry and advance President Joe Biden’s climate policies, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Declaring a national climate emergency would allow the Biden administration to more easily reduce oil exports, offshore drilling, and greenhouse gas emissions, individuals familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity.

The administration, however, will likely not make a final decision anytime soon, with the president’s advisers still divided over whether such an unprecedented move to advance the green energy agenda is appropriate, especially as Biden looks to win over voters ahead of his rematch this fall with Republican nominee Donald Trump.

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Democratic officials are throwing billions at California high-speed rail projects that have yet to be built, funding thousands of jobs specifically for union members.

Despite funding initially being approved by a referendum in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail project currently has less than a quarter of its expected length under construction and was initially supposed to have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 48 local unions and more than 150,000 members in California, boasted of the creation of 13,000 unionized construction jobs due to continued funding of California’s high-speed rail project.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, in its community benefits agreement regarding the construction of the rail, lays out that it will exclusively bargain with union representatives for craft labor and that no employee will be required to join a union, but workers who are at the site for more than eight total days will be required to pay union dues.

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In the past, teachers’ unions concentrated on fighting to keep all teachers employed—competent or otherwise—laying off teachers by seniority when necessary and soaking taxpayers every chance they could. While those activities are still part of their mission, they have, over time, increasingly delved into the political/social realm, promoting Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, DEI, class warfare, gender-bending, etc. And their current level of engagement is staggering.

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For much of the past year, we had joked that behind the facade of western Democratic ideals, was a cold hard truth: the price of oil must not be allowed to go up in an election year. This was obvious in Biden’s “kid gloves” treatment of Iran’s regime, it was obvious when the US implemented “sanctions” on Russian oil that were breached within months with zero enforcement, it was also obvious when the US president became best friends with Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro last October when, in exchange for a few thousands barrels of Venezuela’s oil, the US lifted sanctions on the person that for years was one of western “democracies” biggest enemies.

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Two conservative Colorado counties—Douglas and El Paso—have sued the state of Colorado and its Democrat governor over laws that prevent local law enforcement from working with federal agents to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

Pretty sad.

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Perhaps because he’s in favor of it.

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If idealistic politicians succeed in removing U.S. LNG from the global market, it will lead to the double whammy of increased coal and dirtier natural gas from emissions-agnostic countries like Russia. Like nuclear, the LNG export sector is highly vulnerable to political disruptions.

Washington Free Beacon.

Michigan public schools used nearly half of their pandemic relief spending on employee compensation, according to a new report from a Michigan policy watchdog. Many of the state’s students, meanwhile, continue to perform below pre-pandemic testing benchmarks.

So far, Michigan public schools have spent 47 percent of their $1.2 billion in COVID relief expenditures on staff salaries and bonuses, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The watchdog group says state data show staffing levels did not increase significantly enough for new hires to explain away the heavy spending on teacher salaries and benefits.

“Overall, staffing levels did not increase drastically enough to suggest that the $1.2 billion of Covid aid slated for compensation was primarily devoted to mitigating learning losses incurred by prolonged school closures,” the report states. “Although a portion of the funds may have been used to hire new employees, these findings support the idea that school districts mostly used Covid relief funds to pad existing employees’ compensation levels.” Over half of Michigan’s pandemic relief funding for schools left must be spent by September.

As Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. Like it or not, public school teachers are government workers, and (as history has demonstrated time and time again), the objective of government workers (and of the Unions that now represent them) is to get as much money as possible for as little work as they can get away with.

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Plenty of room at Guantanamo Bay.

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Why bother? It’s not as if they intended to do anything about it.

The Beatles – Taxman (Remastered)

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In a scene reminiscent of the Chuck Norris film Invasion USA, a speedboat loaded with at least a dozen illegal immigrants ripped through the waters just off the coast of Carlsbad, California, nearly slamming into bathers and surfers as they landed and sprinted across the beach.

Some migrants raced to nearby waiting vehicles which sped away, the rest walked off in broad daylight to mix with the surrounding tourists. Locals who filmed the migrants claimed police were called but didn’t show up.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is distributing $300 million to sanctuary cities that provide services like shelter and food to illegal immigrants amid a massive increase in incursions across the southern border.

The $300 million in grants will be provided through the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), according to an April 12 press release. SSP offers funding to non-federal entities like NGOs and local governments that provide support to illegal immigrants released into the United States by the DHS. Out of the $300 million, $275 million will be distributed in the first allocation, with the remaining $25 million to be allocated later this year to meet operational requirements.

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The Biden administration is sending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to an anti-Israel professor to investigate how “viral memes” can “perpetuate gendered, anti-Muslim racism,” federal spending disclosures show.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded San Diego State University professor Amira Jarmakani $60,000 to research and write a project titled, “Weapons of Mass Dissemination: Apprehending Digital Anti-Muslim Racism,” which will address Islamophobic stereotypes in memes and images on the internet.

Jarmakani in the grant description argues such memes have the ability to perpetuate “gendered anti-Muslim racism” which leads to “domestic surveillance that can also lead to the capture and incarceration of innocent people, framed as terrorists or enemy combatants in the War on Terror.”

Explain to me how ‘Muslim’ is a race.

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U.S. employers’ obligation to accommodate workers’ pregnancies also extends to abortions and the use of contraception, the U.S. agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said Monday.

New York Post.

Customers packed Cory Gautereaux’s small gun store northeast of San Diego on a recent Friday afternoon.

Many of the people buying pistols at Firearms Unlimited California said they were concerned about the massive number of migrants being released onto the local streets after the area became a hub for the crisis at the border — which is just 25 miles from El Cajon, a Southern California suburb of 105,000 people.

“My wife and I have had home defense guns for many years. Recently, though, with all the stuff that’s happening south of the border and all the people coming over, my concerns have broadened,” said Keith Carnevale, one of the shop’s customers, who’s armed his entire family.

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The World Health Organization’s Dr. Hanna Nohynek testified in court that she advised her government that vaccine passports were not needed but was ignored, despite explaining that the COVID vaccines did not stop virus transmission and the passports gave a false sense of security. The stunning revelations came to light in a Helsinki courtroom where Finnish citizen Mika Vauhkala is suing after he was denied entry to a café for not having a vaccine passport.

CBS News.

an Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.”
About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned.
Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.”

Imagine my surprise.

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An Afghan man and illegal immigrant who’s on the FBI terror watchlist has been twice apprehended in the United States only to be released by a federal apparatus that continues to make a mockery of the very notion of “border security.”

Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was first arrested in Southern California in March 2023 after he’d illegally entered the United States from Mexico, according to NBC News, which was first to report the story. Border police suspected Kharwin was on the watchlist, because one unspecified attribute matched his entry on the list.

However, for lack of additional corroborating data, he was processed and released, just like hordes of other illegal migrants before and since. He was instructed to periodically call an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, but was free to apply for asylum and permission to work in the United States. He was also free to board domestic flights.

The American Mind.

The U.S. Navy recently released a photograph on social media showing a sailor firing his M-4 aboard a ship. No doubt some public relations officer thought the picture looked great—a fit and ready sailor shooting his rifle, with spent cartridges flying. A perfect picture for a recruitment catalog, except for one crucial detail: the rifle’s scope—which the sailor appears to be looking through—is mounted backwards, and its lens covers appear to be closed. A swift social media uproar arose over the bizarre and glaring error. Someone with actual military experience in the Navy evidently noticed what this photo said without words, because the picture was quickly deleted.

Too late, for this image of bastardized military training is already the allegory for the collapse of the military profession and America’s deployment of military force around the world. The glaring deficiencies in this photo go a long way towards understanding the U.S. military in 2024. Outkick has a hilariously tragic rundown of all that is wrong with the picture, but there is a lesson for those Americans concerned about the institutional integrity of a military on the precipice of war in different regions of the world.

Many veterans will recognize the notion and verbiage of a “box check exercise,” that being a colloquial phrase used to describe drills a military unit undergoes to fulfill a prescribed process. Box-check exercises are frequently unrelated to easier or more functional parts of a unit training calendar. From a veteran Army infantryman, one would think shooting rifles aboard a Navy destroyer epitomizes the notion of a “box-check exercise.”

The Foundry.

Today’s standard-issue body shields leave officers exposed to perpetrators’ increasingly lethal weapons. But groundbreaking innovations like liquid armor and ultra-high-strength composites could revolutionize police protection, creating lightweight, flexible equipment that lets cops operate more securely.

AI-powered sensors and real-time data analysis could enhance authorities’ situational awareness and decision-making. On the horizon: lighter and more comfortable “smart long johns” that officers could slip beneath their uniforms.

Breakthroughs in smart helmets also could prevent deaths. Advanced composites of Kevlar, carbon fiber, and thermoplastics could help craft headgear that are more nimble, easier to wear, and far tougher on hostile fire.

Sorry–all our money is going for ‘reparations’ and into the pockets of politicians and their cronies.

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on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.

Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.

The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”

A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.

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An Afghan migrant, who is on the terrorist watchlist, was taken into custody crossing the southern border and released by authorities last year, NBC News reported.

The network, attributing the information to U.S. officials, said Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was taken into custody again in February and released last month by an immigration judge, who was not informed of the security risk.

Kharwin had been ordered free on bond pending a 2025 immigration hearing in Texas. No restrictions were placed on his movements inside the U.S.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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Four years have passed since the onset of COVID-19 and the global mishandling of its spread. Now, the same governments and international organizations that lied about the last pandemic are negotiating a new pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) at the World Health Organization (WHO).

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Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend dedicated years of their lives to serving their country in the FBI. But when they began to question some of the decisions being made within the bureau, they were suspended.

After joining the FBI, O’Boyle says he “immediately saw that other agents [and] supervisors didn’t have a solid grasp of people’s civil rights.”

“Having sworn that oath to the Constitution multiple times—twice in the Army, once as a police officer, once as an FBI agent,” O’Boyle said, “it actually meant something to me—which, I think, it doesn’t to many, maybe even to most at this point. It’s just a job.”

The Foundry.

The Democrat-run city of Denver plans to defund its Police Department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Colorado’s capital, commonly referred to as a “sanctuary city,” announced Wednesday that it will spend $89.9 million on services for incoming illegal migrants, pulling some funding from roughly $45 million in public programs and services. The Denver Police Department will be hit with a reduction of $8.4 million— about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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North Carolina’s highest court could determine whether election officials retain special legal privileges that allow them to defame individual voters and set a precedent for how voter fraud claims are pursued.

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Cmdr. Cameron Yaste, the Commanding Officer of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), was recently photographed shooting a 5.56×45mm M4 carbine with the optics installed backward.

The now-deleted image and press release on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service website featured Yaste shooting the M4 with the Trijicon VCOG scope installed backward while pointed at a giant target balloon.

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This time, journalists Chris Rufo and the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak found that Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook appears to have plagiarized her academic work in violation of her former university’s policy.

Washington Free Beacon.

USAID gave more than $900,000 in taxpayer funds to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a humanitarian group based in the Gaza Strip that is said to be “in close cooperation with [the] Hamas regime,” according to a report by the Middle East Forum’s Focus on Western Islamism project. The United States awarded the most recent grant on Oct. 1, six days before Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel.

“Bayader is listed in federal spending data as a sub-grantee for USAID, with the government monies first routed through a sponsoring U.S. nonprofit, which are ostensibly required to vet their sub-grantees,” according to the report. In February 2023, Bayader reportedly organized an event in the Gaza Strip that included “senior Hamas officials,” such as Abdul Salam Haniyeh, the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

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Seven Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Joe Biden’s administration over a new student loan forgiveness plan rolled out this week.

Biden announced Monday that he was rolling out the plan, which would cancel a minimum of $5,000 for over 10 million Americans with student loans, despite the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s previous initiative in June 2023. Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri filed a lawsuit alongside Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma, arguing that the president’s plan was unconstitutional and “illegal.”

The debt isn’t ‘cancelled’, it’s merely assumed by the government and paid by the taxpayers.

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New York City Hall on Monday indicated it will use taxpayers’ money to pay for a celebrity lawyer to defend New York City mayor Eric Adams against a lawsuit containing allegations of sexual assault dating back to 1993.

Attorney Alex Spiro will serve as co-counsel for Adams, according to a court notice filed on Monday by the New York City Law Department. Spiro is a prominent lawyer who has represented high-profile figures, including Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Alec Baldwin.

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Two FBI agents who had their security clearances suspended after speaking to Congress about how law enforcement went after pro-lifers and concerned parents, now warn that the FBI has adopted a “Marxist culture” and called for its abolition.

“The type of recruiting events they have—they have adopted this Marxist culture to permanently change our institutions like the FBI,” Garret O’Boyle, an FBI agent whom House Republicans hailed as a whistleblower, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation. “Remember, the FBI are the people with the guns and badges who will come after you.”

O’Boyle was referring to the FBI’s decision to publicly champion identity politics celebrations such as Arab American Heritage Month and to use race as a factor in hiring.

Real Clear Politics.

President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes. It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.

But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.

The culprits here are the very companies that Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.

Politico.

As the Navy’s largest U.S. trade show gets underway on Monday, officers in charge of the service’s marquee shipbuilding programs won’t offer the usual briefings with reporters and analysts about them.

That break from the tradition of sharing program updates at the Navy’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition comes just days after the Navy announced that four of its most critical shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule.

The Navy’s top admiral and civilian secretary have still not responded to questions about a damning Navy report released Tuesday outlining the sweeping failure of the Navy and its industrial partners to make expected progress on two submarine programs, an aircraft carrier and a new class of frigates.

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n May 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, that severely restricted the number of immigrants by putting quotas on their country of origin, and completely excluded immigrants from Asia.

Among other things, the act brought to an end a historic migration of Jews to the United States, and set in place restrictions that would keep Jewish refugees out when the Nazis rose to power a decade later.

Power Line.

It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump, the documentary Scott recently posted, outs Deborah Birx as the villain in the Covid drama. The case is strong, but there’s a back story people should know.

In 1985, Birx began her career with the Department of Defense as a “military trained clinician in immunology, focusing on HIV/AIDS vaccine research.” That was the project of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology. In 1984, Fauci became head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the federal agency responsible for development of vaccines. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), went on record that Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was, controlling public health policy and spending on medical research, a huge concentration of power.

Fauci contended that AIDS was caused by HIV, a claim disputed by Mullis, Peter Duesberg, Charles A. Thomas, and other leading medical scientists in “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.” See Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course in virology plus an exposure of Fauci.