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Monday, February 28, 2022
The Suicide of a January 6 Defendant: ‘They Broke Him’
Matthew Perna was failed by the country he loved.
Matthew Perna did nothing wrong on January 6, 2021.
The Pennsylvania man walked through an open door on the Senate side of the building shortly before 3 p.m. that afternoon. Capitol police, shown in surveillance video, stood by as hundreds of Americans entered the Capitol. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, Perna, 37, left after about 20 minutes.
Less than two weeks later, Perna was ensnared in what the former top U.S. prosecutor called a “shock and awe” campaign to round up Trump supporters and deter them from demonstrating at Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. After he discovered his image on the FBI’s most wanted list for January 6, Perna immediately contacted his local FBI office and voluntarily submitted to questioning; on January 18, six FBI agents arrested Perna at his home.
His life from that point turned into a nightmare. Perna was indicted by a grand jury in February 2021 on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors. Despite his nonviolent participation in the events of that day—he did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property—Biden’s Justice Department and local news media nonetheless made his life pure hell.
Whenever his hometown paper, the Sharon Herald, published an article on its social media account about Perna, the majority of replies were “horrible and brutal,” his aunt, Geri Perna, told me on the phone Sunday. After more than a year of legal and public torture, Perna saw no way out.
On Friday night, Matthew Perna hung himself in his garage.
“They broke him, they mentally broke him,” Geri said through racking sobs as she explained why her loved one ended his life. “He had run out of hope. I know he couldn’t take it any more.”
In December, at the behest of his defense attorney, Perna agreed to plead guilty to all four counts. With no criminal record and no violent conduct on January 6, Perna and his family expected a prison sentence of less than a year; Perna’s sentencing hearing was scheduled for March 3, the seven-year anniversary of his mother’s death.
But Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling every January 6 prosecution, intervened and asked the court to delay Perna’s sentencing so his office could make sure Capitol defendants are punished equally. “While every case and every defendant are different, the Government is attempting to ensure that similarly situated January 6 defendants are treated in the same manner,” Graves wrote in a motion on February 11. “The Government is attempting to do that in this case and that requires additional time for the Government’s internal review process to be completed.”
This was very bad news for Perna. Graves’ office has sought lengthy prison terms for defendants who plead guilty to the obstruction felony. In the case of Jacob Chansley, who, like Perna, committed no violent act on January 6 and was allowed into the building by police, Biden’s Justice Department sought 51 months in jail and three years probation. (Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced him to 41 months.)
In sentencing recommendations on obstruction pleas, prosecutors have compared defendants to domestic terrorists and asked judges to act accordingly. “The need to deter others is especially strong in cases involving domestic terrorism, which the breach of the Capitol certainly was,” one of Graves’ prosecutors wrote in Chansley’s sentencing memo. “The sentence of this Court must drive home this fact for this defendant, and any others who may wish to emulate him: crimes committed against this country and democracy will be prosecuted and punished in accordance with the law.”
That appears to be what Graves would have demanded in Perna’s case as well.
When Perna learned his sentencing hearing was again delayed, he called his aunt. “‘I am guilty, I am guilty!” he told her. “He said that he deserved whatever punishment they were going to give him. That was the last straw. The constant harassment was...
Joe Rogan mocks so-called ‘health expert’ Bill Gates over his war on beef: ‘You look like sh*t’
Joe Rogan is calling out Bill Gates in no uncertain terms for setting a very poor example when it comes to personal health even though the billionaire Microsoft co-founder possesses vast resources to get into optimum physical condition.
“When you’ve got man-boobs, and a gut, and you’re walking around, and you have like these toothpick arms — ‘hey buddy, you’re not healthy,'” the influential Spotify podcaster said on a recent episode about globalist Gates, who is said to be the world’s fourth richest man, with a estimated net worth of $126 billion.
Gates, a vaccine and lockdown advocate and someone who Fox News host Tucker Carlson has ridiculed as a “creepy beta-dork” in the context of the so-called war on beef, has invested in companies that develop synthetic or lab-based meat.
The Gates Foundation charity reportedly invested as much as $1.75 billion “into combating COVID-19 through vaccine development and distribution,” ABC News reported in December 2020.
However, on a personal basis, Gates is not doing much to stop the spread, as it were, Rogan implied.
In a 2015 blog post, Gates called upon industrialized nations to cut back by about half their real meat consumption because of climate change.
“Want to help save the planet? Stop eating beef. At least, that’s what Bill Gates says. In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review, Gates said, ‘all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef’ in an effort to cut down pollution,” Forbes reported in May 2021.
Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing...
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing
You gotta have something if you want to be with me
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing
You gotta have something if you want to be with me
I'm not trying to be your hero
Cause that zero is too cold for me, brrr
I'm not trying to be your highness
Cause that minus is too low to see, yeah
Trump Vindicated: Germany to FINALLY Pay NATO Spending Requirements
After years of delinquency to meet its NATO obligations, Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe has finally committed to spending at least 2 per cent of its GDP on defence spending.
Speaking before the Bundestag on Saturday, Chancellor Olof Scholz said: “From now on, more than 2 per cent of our GDP will be invested in our defence,” announcing that the German government will commit an additional €100 billion in this year’s budget towards the German military, the Bundeswehr.
While Germany has increased its defence spending over recent years, it has consistently failed to reach the NATO threshold, spending just 1.53 per cent on defence last year, according to NATO figures.
The state of the German armed forces was lambasted last week by the chief of the army, Alfons Mais who wrote that “the army that I am allowed to lead, is more or less bare.”
“The policy options we can offer in support of the Alliance are extremely limited. We all saw it coming and were unable to get our arguments through to draw and implement the conclusions of the Crimean annexation. That doesn’t feel good! I’m [disturbed]!” the army chief continued.
Germany has long been criticised for its failure to meet its NATO obligations while at the same time shipping billions to Russia in exchange for natural gas.
In July of 2018, President Trump said: “It is very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where we’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes and pays out billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia. We’re protecting Germany, we’re protecting France, we’re protecting all of these countries.”
“We’re paying a lot of money to protect, this has been going on for decades… it’s very unfair to our country, it’s very unfair to our taxpayers… these countries need to step it up, not over a ten year period, but immediately.”
The President also commented that because of a reliance on Russian gas, Germany had become “captive” to Putin’s regime. After years of controversy, the German government finally decided to block the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last week.
In an exclusive 2018 interview with Breitbart London, then-American Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell described Germany’s commitment to NATO as “woeful”, saying: “Germany is the largest economy in Europe. They made a commitment to NATO, and they should be serious about that commitment; it is a multilateral institution that guarantees the allies, guaranteeing freedom.”
On top of Germany belatedly meeting its defence requirements, Germany also reversed its long-standing prohibition on sending or selling weapons to conflict zones. Chancellor Scholz said that Germany would be shipping 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 surface-to-air missiles in the coming days.
The German government has also lifted the ban on Estonia and the Netherlands from shipping German-made munitions to Ukraine, after previously blocking the shipments.
Last week, Germany was ridiculed over the much-maligned package of 5,000 helmets, which only arrived two days after Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of...
In the End, Sweden Did It Right
The one country that mostly rejected lockdowns.
What if two years ago, when COVID-19 first hit these shores, our politicians hadn't panicked?
What if the government did what it has done every time we were confronted with a deadly virus, such as the Spanish flu or polio? Instead of locking down our schools, churches and businesses, the government could have simply informed citizens of the risks of getting sick and urged people to be extra careful about hygiene, stay out of crowded places and protect the vulnerable.
It turns out there was one country that mostly rejected lockdowns and let life go on as normal as possible under dire circumstances. That country was Sweden.
There were some restrictions and temporary lockdowns, but they were minimal.
The hero of this story is Anders Tegnell, Sweden's chief epidemiologist. He was Sweden's Anthony Fauci, but unlike the now-widely discredited Fauci, Tegnell eschewed lockdowns. The international media pilloried him for not following "the science." At first, it seemed the Swedish live-and-let-live strategy was a miserable failure. Death rates soared higher than in other European nations.
But to their credit, the Swedes ignored the "mad modelers" such as Britain's Imperial College team, which predicted multiple times that the number of deaths around the world would be more than actually occurred.
Sweden made some mistakes at the beginning. Like many states in the United States, the Swedes failed to protect elderly nursing home residents adequately, which was a significant reason that deaths in Sweden were higher than in neighboring Norway or Denmark. But Tegnell argued that the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do on a societywide basis. He was proven right.
Two years later, Sweden's COVID-19 death rate is 1,614 per million people — much lower than Britain (2,335) or the U.S. (2,836), which both had much more stringent lockdowns.
Sweden appears to have achieved herd immunity much more swiftly and thoroughly than other nations. Deaths were higher at the start of the pandemic but fell much lower than other lockdown nations in succeeding months.
What is clear today is that the Swedes saved their economy. This year, it's projected to be 5% larger than before the pandemic, compared to a 2% gain for Germany and a 1% gain for Britain. Moreover, the extra debt Sweden has had to take on is a fraction of that of lockdown countries. So it will not have to spend decades paying for the costs of lockdowns.
Swedish schools stayed open with no face masks. Test scores are up, and there is no talk in Sweden about "lost" years of education.
What is sadly ironic about the Sweden story is this should have been the...
How Biden’s Fed Nominee Could Transform Central Banking To Fit the Left’s Climate Agenda
Joe Biden’s nominee for the nation’s top banking regulator could dramatically change the Federal Reserve’s responsibilities to include harshly punishing any financial institution or company that does business with fossil fuel companies.
Sarah Bloom Raskin, the wife of outspoken climate change hawk Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), is up for the role of vice chair for supervision at the Fed, a position created in the aftermath of the Great Recession as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. Raskin’s past work indicates she believes fighting climate change should be in the purview of the Fed. Her confirmation would potentially provide opportunities for the Fed to circumvent Congress and force financial institutions to implement sweeping climate change-related reforms.
For years, the left has increasingly focused on central banks as a tool to implement policies they believe will avert doomsday scenarios brought on by climate change. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), for example, voted against Jerome Powell’s renomination to lead the central bank after labeling him "dangerous" and criticizing his unwillingness to put more regulations on banks that do business with polluters.
Raskin expressed support for using the financial regulation agency as a tool to fight climate change in a 2020 report she co-authored for the environmentalist think tank Ceres. The report, titled "Addressing Climate as a Systemic Risk: A call to action for U.S. financial regulators," provides more than "50 recommendations for key financial regulators to adopt."
"If we want to create a sustainable climate, we need to transition to a net-zero carbon economy. This transition is not going to happen without guidance," Raskin wrote in the report’s forward. "Financial markets, themselves, are not going to be the first responders to keep us from the threats posed by a climate emergency."
Some Political Analysts interpreted Raskin's nomination as a way to appease members of the Democratic Party's far-left after Biden's decision to renominate Powell. Warren, for example, has called combating climate change an "obligation of the Fed."
"Raskin troubles me the most of all [Biden’s] picks," said Allison Schrager, an economist and expert on monetary policy. "It’s a big leap to go from financial stability to regulating climate change."
Policies recommended in the Ceres report authored by Raskin include rewarding financial institutions that divest from fossil fuels, and punishing companies deemed to be heavy polluters. Members of the European Central Bank, for example, have called for "reassessing the benchmark allocation of our private asset purchase programmes."
That could mean, according to economist John Cochrane, simply telling "banks to stop lending to the evil fossil fuel companies, and print money and hand it out to worthy green projects." The idea has gained currency among left-wing green energy advocates in the United States, such as proponents of the "Green New Deal."
The Ceres report calls for the Fed to account for "climate exposure" when engaging in asset purchases and criticizes the central bank’s decision to provide loans to oil companies as part of its Main Street Lending Program. In the future, the report argues, emergency support for companies "should be underpinned by conditions relating to improved...
The CDC — which is withholding information — has a hidden agenda
The CDC has admitted it is withholding large portions of COVID-19 data -- including on vaccine boosters -- from the public because it fears the information could be misinterpreted.
People say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a messaging problem. But the CDC’s problem is not messaging — it’s issuing flawed guidance while covering up the data.
Case in point: pushing boosters for young people.
After the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably bypassed its expert advisory committee to authorize boosters for all young people, the CDC director overruled her own experts’ downvote of the boosters-for-all proposal. That’s the magic of a call from the White House. Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine-center head, quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.
But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.
What have they been hiding? As a proxy, let’s take a look at what the CDC just published on people 50 to 65: For the fully vaccinated, the booster reduces the risk of COVID death from four per million to one per million. Who are those three helped by a booster? They’re not healthy people. One study of breakthrough hospitalizations found 75% had at least four comorbidities.
So the three people age 50 to 65 per million saved by a booster are almost certainly immunosuppressed individuals, a subgroup for whom boosters have long been recommended. Of course, the CDC doesn’t disclose what medical conditions those few who died had — it only has 21,000 employees to collect that information.
Case in point: pushing boosters for young people.
After the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably bypassed its expert advisory committee to authorize boosters for all young people, the CDC director overruled her own experts’ downvote of the boosters-for-all proposal. That’s the magic of a call from the White House. Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine-center head, quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.
But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.
What have they been hiding? As a proxy, let’s take a look at what the CDC just published on people 50 to 65: For the fully vaccinated, the booster reduces the risk of COVID death from four per million to one per million. Who are those three helped by a booster? They’re not healthy people. One study of breakthrough hospitalizations found 75% had at least four comorbidities.
So the three people age 50 to 65 per million saved by a booster are almost certainly immunosuppressed individuals, a subgroup for whom boosters have long been recommended. Of course, the CDC doesn’t disclose what medical conditions those few who died had — it only has 21,000 employees to collect that information.
The CDC said the reason for the slow release of data is because there is always a chance it is not completely accurate.REUTERS
We once again have to look overseas for reliable data. An Israeli population study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared boosted vs. nonboosted people with the primary vaccine series. The risk of COVID death among nonboosted people under age 30 was zero — the same as it was among boosted.
A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.
The CDC claims it didn’t release booster data because it feared the information would be misinterpreted. No, it’s because the stats don’t support its agenda. Yet public-health officials continue to beclown themselves by demanding all Americans over age 12 get boosted.
We once again have to look overseas for reliable data. An Israeli population study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared boosted vs. nonboosted people with the primary vaccine series. The risk of COVID death among nonboosted people under age 30 was zero — the same as it was among boosted.
A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.
The CDC claims it didn’t release booster data because it feared the information would be misinterpreted. No, it’s because the stats don’t support its agenda. Yet public-health officials continue to beclown themselves by demanding all Americans over age 12 get boosted.
A study found that boosters for young people did not do much to prevent against COVID-19.Christopher Sadowski
On the bandwagon
Most of the media have fallen for it. Throughout the pandemic, The New York Times and other outlets have only sourced doctors on the establishment groupthink bandwagon, dangled fear to young people and blindly amplified every edict government doctors fed without asking questions, just as the press did with weapons of...
On the bandwagon
Most of the media have fallen for it. Throughout the pandemic, The New York Times and other outlets have only sourced doctors on the establishment groupthink bandwagon, dangled fear to young people and blindly amplified every edict government doctors fed without asking questions, just as the press did with weapons of...
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