Read it.

It would appear that at least some of them are.

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The ‘family farm’ is a doomed as the ‘family manufacturing company’ was when I was a child.

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foreign meddling in U.S. elections, congressional Republicans say.

Amid the ongoing crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border, the lawmakers decried flyers posted at the migrant services center near Brownsville, Texas, that tell illegal aliens: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States.”

“Joe Biden has sacrificed our nation’s safety and security in his pursuit to get as many people here as possible. Why? Because he believes these are future Democrat voters,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told The Daily Signal.

Read it.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said he is willing to vote with Democrats to dismiss impeachment articles against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

Read it.

A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute revealed that 28% of likely voters would be willing to engage in illegal voting activity if it would help their preferred candidate win the 2024 presidential election.

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A Democrat-controlled city announced $45 million in funding for programs to help deal with the skyrocketing number of migrant arrivals it is facing, resulting in over $8 million in budget cuts for the police department.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced last week a package of $45.9 million to fully fund programs for “newcomers” for 2024 and avoid worst-case scenarios projected by the city. That’s in addition to $44 million in spending already secured for the program through previous budget moves.

Spending on migrants in the city skyrocketed last year from $2 million a month in August to $15 million in December. In January, migrant numbers peaked at around 5,000 in shelters but have since dropped to around 1,000, according to official figures.

Read it.

Police across the United States arrested dozens of “Free Palestine” protesters Monday as part of a “multi-city economic blockade” targeting major airports, highways, and bridges. Those defendants are set to receive free bail money and legal assistance thanks to an online fundraiser hosted by ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s primary fundraising platform that earns a cut off of each contribution.

The “bail and legal defense fund,” organized by A15 Action and Community Justice Exchange, remains live on ActBlue’s website roughly 24 hours after the protests caused chaos in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. The fundraising platform—which is used by President Joe Biden and every major Democratic congressional campaign—earns a 3.95 percent transaction fee each time a donor contributes to the fund, according to its policies.

ActBlue’s website states that its fundraising platform is exclusively available to groups whose “work is not at odds with values including, but not limited to, social equality; women’s rights; LGBTQIA2S+ rights; racial justice; diversity; freedom of speech; disability rights; and respect for scientific inquiry, discovery, and data.”

The link between ActBlue raising funds for activists that deliberately “coordinate[d] to disrupt and blockade economic logistical hubs and the flow of capital” in solidarity with “Palestine” highlights the blurred boundary between the Democratic Party’s anti-Israel faction and its mainstream establishment.

ActBlue did not respond to a request for comment.

Read it.

The Biden administration’s top criminal prosecutor served on the board of directors of a “social justice law firm” that during her tenure called to defund police departments and free cop killers from prison, records show.

Nicole M. Argentieri, the acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, served on the board of the Legal Aid Society of New York from January 2019 to May 2022, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings. During her tenure on the board, the Legal Aid Society of New York endorsed “the movement to #DefundNYPD” and promoted a “March to Defund the NYPD” rally.

The Legal Aid Society also represented some of New York City’s most notorious cop killers when Argentieri served on the board. In 2019 and 2020, lawyers for the nonprofit represented Black Liberation Army members Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim in their parole cases. The pair were convicted of assassinating two New York City police officers in May 1971 and murdered a San Francisco police officer inside a patrol station in August 1971. They were granted parole over the objections of their victims’ families and then-New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Foundry.

A California public school district that attempted to hide pro-Hamas course material from parents now faces legal action.

The Deborah Project, which describes itself as “a public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of Jews in education,” filed suit April 8 against the Berkeley Unified School District, accusing it of “intentionally trying to prevent parents from knowing what their kids are learning.”

The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, also accuses the school system of “teaching kids mendacious and malicious lies about [Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel] that are grossly inaccurate and, on the basis of this false information, fomenting hatred against the Jewish State.”

Steve Sailer.

New York City doesn’t have a relatively high crime rate since the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton era, but it needs a really low crime rate because its density and mixture of classes and races (the subway system makes it easy for anybody from public housing projects to hang out in even the richest neighborhoods) makes NYC peculiarly psychologically stressful. Not surprisingly, the BLM era of locking up fewer dangerous men because most of them are black and encouraging racist anti-white hate is taking its toll on New Yorkers, especially when many have trained themselves to try not to notice what is actually going.

Read it.

An advocacy group based in Northeastern Mexico that lobbies U.S. lawmakers has distributed and posted flyers encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

Translated from Spanish, the Oversight Project notes, the flyers posted by the organization Resource Center Matamoros say: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.

Read it.

Scores of “Free Palestine” protesters across the United States took to the streets Monday to block major airports, highways, and bridges. Those who are arrested will receive bail money and legal support from a left-wing dark money behemoth funded by George Soros, an online fundraising page shows.

Read it.

A former senior employee at TikTok said he was ordered to send American user data to Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, contradicting TikTok’s public claims of operating independently from China, according to a Fortune report published Monday.

Evan Turner, a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September in 2022, told Fortune that every two weeks TikTok had him email spreadsheets containing millions of American users’ data to ByteDance employees in Beijing, including the users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, and demographics.

Turner said he “literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China” even though TikTok had launched Project Texas in March 2022, promising U.S. officials that it would stop sharing American user data with its Chinese parent company and keep the data in U.S.-based data centers. “There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this,” Turner said.

ZMan mixes it up.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

…

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Steve Sailer.

What Austin does have is a lot of smart white people. I got about a 50% higher turnout in fairly small Austin than in huge Los Angeles.

Read it,

‘Kaka’ is apparently a European football star.

You can’t make this shit up.

BBC.

Squatters have taken over a pub owned by Gordon Ramsay in central London, which is currently up for sale with a guide price of £13m.
The group of at least six people have boarded up windows and put up a “legal warning” defending their occupation of the Grade II-listed York & Albany hotel and gastropub near Regent’s Park.
The BBC understands they want to use the space as a community art cafe.

The Spectator.

One hundred and twenty minutes. That’s how much time more than 40 percent of American children spent on TikTok every day last year. The app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, worms its way into the minds of young people to an extraordinary degree, dwarfing their use of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X and Snapchat. And when word went out that the House of Representatives was seriously considering forcing a sale to peel the app away from the power of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok fired back by weaponizing the same children against Congress — driving a deluge of confused phone calls to Capitol Hill, including some where teens threatened to commit suicide if the vote went forward.

The chief virtue of TikTok appears to be encouraging people whose opinions nobody in their right mind cares about to broadcast those opinions to the world.

Read it.

Carl Menger is widely recognized as one of the economists leading the so-called marginalist revolution along with William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras. There are two other contributions by Menger that are relatively underappreciated and are vital for making sense of the socioeconomic order, including why mankind remains so lost in economic ignorance and tribalistic warmongering.

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The best gun-control measure would be to forbid young black males from buying or carrying guns.

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Coming from Russia-allied Belarus, hundreds of “very aggressive” migrants carrying ladders and wielding rocks and tree branches stormed the border of Poland on Wednesday, but were repelled by security forces. Belarus has long been accused of “weaponizing” migrants by encouraging them to travel to Belarus only so they can be pushed into Poland and Lithuania.

According to a statement issued by the Polish Border Guard and reporting by Babel, the onslaught took place around 10 am in a marshy area in the dense Bia?owie?a forest, which is a popular but difficult avenue for attempted crossings by migrants from around the world.

Astral Codex Ten.

Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t.

One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense – it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it – but in the end we don’t know. According to a Washington Post article, students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework – maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught.

But this is the least of our problems. This methodology assumes that time spent on homework is a safe proxy for amount of homework. It isn’t. Students may spend less time on homework because they’re smart, find it easy, and can finish it very quickly. Or they might spend more time on homework because they love learning and care about the subject matter a lot. Or they might spend more time because they’re second-generation Asian immigrants with taskmaster parents who insist on it being perfect. Or they might spend less time because they’re in some kind of horrible living environment not conducive to sitting at a desk quietly. All of these make “time spent doing homework” a poor proxy for “amount of homework that teacher assigned” in a way that directly confounds a homework-test scores correlation.

Read it.

Here is a paradox: a generation whose members get more psychological therapy than any generation before them is more stressed, more anxious, and more depressed than any age group since records began. How can this be? Abigail Shrier, an author and Wall Street Journal columnist, has a suggestion: perhaps there is no paradox. Perhaps it is all this therapy that is the problem.

Nothing will screw up your head like ‘therapy’.

Read it.

Eventually the only people playing women’s sports will be men pretending to be women.

The New Neo.

The situation has the unintended effect of allowing terrorists to win wars by their tactic of putting civilians in harms’ way. The Palestinians’ entire war strategy rests on this, and most of the West cooperates. Thus, the unrealistic expectations held by so many modern Westerners about war end up enabling evil to flourish.

ZMan is fed up.

If you have paid any attention to British politics, you will note that what passes for the political right in Britain is more feckless and ridiculous than what passes for the political right in the United States. It is one of those things that should be impossible, but once you look at the recent string of Prime Ministers, you have to accept it is reality, which means things will inevitably get worse in America. No matter how much you hate the Republicans, you will have reason to hate them more.

The Tories are facing what many predict could be a party ending election this year, as current polling has them winning just a handful of seats. The Tories currently have a 35% approval number, an all-time low. As a result, there is a movement afoot to wipe out the party entirely. The “zero seats” campaign started as a joke but as is often the case, this joke could turn out to be reality. Italy’s Five Star movement started as a gag and eventually overturned the political establishment.

The New Yorker.

BLUF:

• They were spending too much time on their phones and, like children, didn’t have the willpower to cut it down or cut it out.
• They couldn’t get what they considered to be an adequate amount of information on ‘dumb phones’.
• They decided to start a side hustle supplying ‘dumb phones’ and information to people similarly situated.

You can read the whole article if you like–The New Yorker has good writing if it has nothing else–but the whole situation is merely further confirmation of the mental neoteny that pervades modern American society.

On the other hand, their pivot to entrepreneurship is encouraging. Apparently the American spirit is not dead, merely deeply hidden; it will arise when conditions warrant.

Read it.

You would be forgiven for thinking that “Civil War” was a movie about the bloodiest U.S. conflict dating back to the late 19th century. Instead, it’s a prescient look at a fictional, fractured, near-future America.

Directed by Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”) and produced by independent entertainment company A24, the film opens with an unnamed president (Nick Offerman) practicing a self-assured speech about the strength and unity of the United States juxtaposed against scenes of chaos, violence and destruction erupting across the country.

Meanwhile, veteran Reuters journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) sits in a New York City hotel room as an explosion erupts outside her window. Her team, which consists of alcoholic thrill-seeker Joel (Wagner Moura), her elderly mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a stowaway newcomer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), plans to make the treacherous drive from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., to try to confront the president, who has held three terms in office but nary a press conference.

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A meme has taken hold in the online right ahead of this year’s UK general election: Zero Seats. It is both a wish and a promise: to repay the Conservative party for 14 years of betraying the British public. Although the Tories look to retain some true-blue constituencies, they are forecast to suffer their worst election in a century. But Zero Seats is more than a call to desolate the Conservative party electorally, as they have Britain culturally, economically, and demographically. Refusing to vote for the Conservative party in its current form is an ambition to lift the post-war paradigm that lies like a dead hand upon national politics.

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Celebrities look on their kids like some sort of hominid pets, so they never hesitate to experiment on them.

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Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard arguments between the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board and the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Advocacy Coalition (OKPLAC).

On one side, the school board defended its decision to include St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in their network and fund it like any other public charter school. As a charter, the school operates independently of public school systems and is funded based on its enrollment. Lawyers defending St. Isidore claim it’s simply an option for families who desire that kind of education: “They’re a Catholic school, but they welcome everyone. Nobody is required to go to St. Isidore. That’s very important. It’s an option among many.”

On the other side, the lawyers for OKPLAC argued that this was mixing church and state and could result in “discriminatory practices, such as students being treated differently for their religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability—as well as not providing adequate services for students with disabilities.” Essentially, by funding St. Isidore, the state was funding Catholic bigotry.

Read it.

It was the summer of sixty-nine….

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The Amazon Labor Union burst onto the scene in 2021 with support from leading progressives and an endorsement from President Joe Biden. But the group could soon lose that prime placement as it grapples with financial troubles and controversy surrounding its founder.

The union had just $28,354 cash on hand at the end of last year, down from $95,437 in 2022, according to its latest filing with the Department of Labor. The union began 2023 with $118,463 in net assets, but ended up deeply in debt, with negative $48,006 in net assets. It has $43,581 in bills more than three months past due, including $12,098 owed to its landlord.

The financial hemorrhaging comes as union founder Christian Smalls faces blowback for his pro-Hamas rhetoric and criticism from union workers who sued Smalls last year over his alleged “scheme to suppress democratic dissent” by blocking votes for union leadership.

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In one of the more dizzying episodes of controversy surrounding Jewish cultural events since the Israel-Hamas war, a court ordered a Philadelphia-area movie theater Tuesday to move forward with screening an Israeli film less than a day after the theater’s Jewish director tried to call it off.

The injunction issued by Montgomery County Court instructed the Bryn Mawr Film Institute to move forward with its planned screening of “The Child Within Me,” a documentary about the Israeli musician Yehuda Poliker. The Israeli Film Festival of Philadelphia had reportedly filed a last-minute lawsuit against the theater, alleging breach of contract after it announced Monday night that it was no longer planning on screening the film owing to what its director called the “current climate.”

Local Jewish groups, enraged by the cancellation, had planned to stage a protest against the nonprofit theater Tuesday evening. The protest was still moving forward, organizers told Haaretz, in a show of support for the festival.

Steve Sailer.

From a Pioneer Works issue that tells you more than everything you could possibly want to know about the impact of Adderall on 21st Century writers.

So Trump Derangement Syndrome may have a chemical basis.

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The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.

But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.

During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.

Read it.

In November 2022, Los Angeles voters approved a so-called ‘mansion tax,’ which slaps a 4% sales tax on properties sold for over $5 million, and 5.5% for those over $10 million.

The scheme (Measure ULA), put forward by Democrats, was projected to raise roughly $672 million in its first year, to be used for affordable housing.

Not only did the plan fall short by hundreds of millions of dollars (raising just $215 million), the measure caused residential building construction to plummet, raising housing prices even further, the Washington Examiner writes, noting that the tax doesn’t just apply to large homes in Bel Air, “but also gas stations, commercial real estate, condominiums, and apartment complexes.”

Politico.

Each day in San Francisco, vendors line busy city streets with a plethora of fully packaged items: shampoo, mouth wash, multi-vitamins, deodorant and laundry detergent.

Mayor London Breed calls it “Walgreens on the sidewalk” — a confluence of the city’s struggles with unchecked shoplifting, its fentanyl addiction crisis and a state law that has made it extremely difficult to get the vendors off the streets, even if they are selling stolen goods.

Breed is now pushing to change that law as widespread frustration with retail theft and the blatant sale of stolen merchandise threatens her reelection bid.

The Antiplanner.

Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Read it.

Two shootings at fast food restaurants in Democrat-run cities went viral last week, after enraged customers went off on employees during arguments.

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Today, states across the country are beginning to actively embrace pro-sound-money legislation, inviting a critical examination of how America abandoned the gold standard of money and racked up $34.5 trillion in debt. To understand how we got here, it’s important to understand the policy that initiated our monetary decline.

The four horsemen of the American apocalypse: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon.

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Specifically, Democrat leaders.

From President Biden to the mayors of small cities, Democrats have been trailed by demonstrators who are complicating the party’s ability to campaign in an election year.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

In Detroit, a congressman’s holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.
In Fort Collins, Colo., the mayor abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.
And in places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

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As in other European countries, mass migration to Switzerland has resulted in “housing shortages and rising rents, traffic jams on the roads, crowded trains and buses, falling standards of schools, increasing violence and crime, electricity shortages, income stagnating per capita, ever-higher health insurance premiums, indebted social services, and increased pressure on the beauty of the landscape and the preservation of nature,” according to the party.

The UDC previously warned that the country was being subsumed by mass migration, with new arrivals from Africa having welfare rates of 34 per cent.

Around two-thirds of prison inmates in Switzerland are foreign nationals, with Algerians representing the highest proportion.

Read it.

On April 1st, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed a bill into law that ended her state’s more than three-year-long experiment with legalization of so-called hard drugs. The choice of day notwithstanding, her decision to sign the bill that reintroduced criminal penalties for the use of those drugs was no joke. It was a badly needed end to a reckless experiment in childish libertarianism with humans as guinea pigs.

Fox News referred to Governor Kotek’s decision as a “U-turn on a short-lived liberal policy,” which is a fair description insofar as the policy move is concerned. However, the big losers here are the libertarians who wanted legalization in the first place. As far as they are concerned, the Oregon reversal raises an existential question for their very ideology.

As we will see in a moment, libertarians who celebrated the Beaver State’s legalization when it was implemented are now strikingly silent. To the extent that they do offer comments, they only reinforce the impression that the Oregon reversal has the potential to become the death knell of American libertarianism.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy for solipsists. They use the term ‘statist’ where proglodytes use the term ‘racist’ but the mindset is much the same.

Read it.

Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report created “precrime,” the clairvoyant foreknowledge of criminal activity as forecast by mutant “precogs.” The book was a dystopian nightmare, but a 2015 Fox television series transforms the story into one in which a precog works with a cop and shows that data is actually effective at predicting future crime.

Canada is trying to enact a precrime law along the lines of the 2015 show, but it is being panned about as much as the television series. Ottawa’s online harms bill includes a provision to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future.

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The “trans” industry’s assault on America’s youth includes persuading kids that they “really” are a boy rather than a girl, or vice versa. Sex change operations don’t come immediately; rather, the preferred sequence begins with puberty-blocking drugs. The rationale is that the effects of these drugs are reversible, so they merely buy time to allow the kid to sort out his or her “gender.”

But are the effects of puberty-blocking drugs actually reversible? Will the boy or girl be magically restored to his or her original self, after a few years in sexual limbo? Many have seen this as a dubious claim, and a number of countries have now banned the administration of puberty blockers along with banning sex change operations on minors. The U.S. is an outlier in our apparent enthusiasm for the “trans” regime.

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personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.

‘Thot’ is an acronym for ‘that hoe over there’. It usually refers to women who trade sex for money, not officially as a ‘working girl’ but unofficially as a species of gold-digger.

Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he’s since repented, naturally — may have been onto something. While his original article unfairly characterized the specific women he offered as examples, all of whom turned out to be genuinely committed to the values they espoused, what he described ended up reflecting a real phenomenon.

In the years that followed, the “tradthot” — the Traditional Woman who created content seemingly for everyone except other women — became a thriving and lucrative genre of internet personality.

Go to YouTube and search for ‘Steven Crowder’ to watch a tradthot in action.

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A Pfizer-funded, peer-reviewed paper authored by Pfizer scientists reveals that the company’s antiviral COVID medication Paxlovid completely sucks, confirming what everyone’s known since it came out.