Barr Is Right On!

WSJ Columnist: Here's What the Press Left Out When AG Barr Said No Criminal Probe Will Be Opened Against Biden

Matt Vespa

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 @mvespa1

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Posted: May 22, 2020 4:10 PM

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Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been exposed. He was in on the unmasking of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. What did he know and when did he know it? Flynn has been exposed as a victim of an FBI run amok, with new documents showing a plot to entrap the former Trump official based on a phone call he had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. This call, coupled with the debunked Democrat-funded opposition research project called the Trump dossier, provided the basis for the FBI to target Flynn in their counterintelligence probe. There was no evidence for them to do so. We know this. Former FBI Director James Comey sure knew it but went ahead anyway, which led to the general pleading guilty to bogus “lying to the FBI” charges; the agents who interviewed Flynn felt he didn’t lie, by the way. It was a witch hunt propped up by a hoax.

So, with Attorney General Barr announcing that neither former Vice President Biden or former President Barack Obama would face criminal charges for their role in this fiasco, even though both men were in a meeting where the latter issued a marching order to protect the FBI probe from the incoming Trump administration virtually at all costs, the press seemed to miss the second part of the statement. It’s not shocking. This is the same press that believed the Trump-Russia collusion myth for over two years. The same press that couldn’t really parse what the DOJ IG really said about bias within the FBI/DOJ in his report about FISA abuses. And the same press that is just insufferably stupid when it comes to covering the Trump administration.

Did Obama know? Well, based on this January 5, 2017, meeting, he sure did. Why didn’t Obama rein it in? Well, as Kimberley Strassel at The Wall Street Journal noted, it’s because he supports “politicized justice.” And that’s where she says Trump should politicize to the fullest for the 2020 campaign season. Remind voters that Obama’s DOJ ran amok, violated the rights of American citizens, and was totally unapologetic about it—and how Biden was there cheerleading it all on for years. This is what will be resurrected with a Biden presidency. In all, Biden will face his reckoning with the American voter (via WSJ):

“Based on the information I have today,” he [Barr] said, “I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.” But the press largely ignored the fuller context of Mr. Barr’s remarks. He reminded Americans that our system provides for two methods of accountability—political and criminal—and it’s dangerous to mix the two.

The attorney general noted that for decades “there have been increasing attempts to use the criminal-justice system as a political weapon.” He specifically cited the “grave injustice” of a “law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus” that advanced “a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president.” That narrative was provided to the FBI by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign, making the FBI’s Trump investigation the purest expression of politicized justice.

[...]

While their actions may not rise to a “crime,” both men [Obama-Biden] may be guilty of an outrageous abuse of power. Such abuses require political accountability, through elections.

It’s a powerful point, one largely missing in the Russia-collusion scandal. The Justice Department’s inspector general excoriated the behavior of former FBI leaders like James Comey and Andrew McCabe. But whatever happened to Mr. Obama’s brag that “the buck stops with me”? Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Comey, despite many warnings (including on these pages) that he had a record of prosecutorial excess and bad judgment. Another Obama appointee, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, failed in her responsibility to keep Mr. Comey in line.

The former president didn’t clean up this mess because the Obama-Biden administration—and Democrats in general—are fine with politicized justice. Ms. Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, proudly declared himself an “activist” attorney general and pursued ideological campaigns against churches, corporations and state voter-identification laws. Politics permeated every Obama agency, from the Internal Revenue Service, which terrorized conservative nonprofits, to the Environmental Protection Agency, which bullied developers.

Mr. Biden’s support of this approach, and his own rah-rahing of the FBI and intelligence abuses, deserves center stage in the campaign.

[…]

Mr. Biden has been mum on the inspector general’s report outlining the FBI’s outrageous manipulation of the court—which happened on the Obama-Biden watch.

In Mr. Barr’s comments is some subtle advice for Mr. Trump. The president’s constant pressure on the Justice Department to pursue the prior administration only undercuts the Durham probe. Mr. Trump would do far better to make the politicization of the Obama-Biden Justice Department a main campaign point—and to warn Americans that a President Biden would again unleash prosecutors to pursue political targets, while covering up any further revelations about the 2016 abuses and killing any chance at reform.

Flynn was railroaded. It has become clear as the Special Counsel’s Office leaked a fake story to the media in order to shred attorney-client privilege in the Paul Manafort investigation. It’s a long, disturbing tale of how Democrats will shred constitutional norms to satisfy their agenda, to make their assumptions feel more grounded in reality. In this case, they assumed the Kremlin colluded with the Trump campaign to win the 2016 election when, in fact, it was Hillary Clinton who just lost because she was a terrible candidate.

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A lot of liberal media folks, Democrats, and left-wing judges obfuscated or helped the former administration pivot from horrible scandals. They whine when Trump tweets about their shoddy coverage. Barack Obama seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters and tried to say that former Fox News reporter James Rosen was pretty much a spy for reporting on a story about North Korea that was leaked. Trump just verbally abuses the press, which is deserved. Obama actually weaponized the state to go after such people. It’s time to take that trip down memory lane, and Joe Biden was right there whether he remembers or not.

The Truth!!

Cuomo Is A Fool

And Now The Rest Of The Story. Totally Expected By Everyone Expect The Governing Elite

THE COLLAPSE WILL BE VISIBLE: “FOR LEASE” AND “SPACE AVAILABLE” SIGNS ARE STARTING TO GO UP ALL OVER AMERICA

It is going to be a very dark chapter for our nation

Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse - MAY 21, 2020 55 Comments 

IMAGE CREDITS: GETTY IMAGES / FEIFEI CUI-PAOLUZZO.

Initially, we were told that the coronavirus lockdowns would just “temporarily” disrupt the U.S. economy, but now it is becoming clear that a lot of the damage will be permanent. 

We are starting to see businesses go belly up all over the country, and this includes some of the most iconic names in the retail world.  When J.C. Penney announced that it would be declaring bankruptcy and closing hundreds of stores, I warned that would just be the tip of the iceberg, and that has definitely turned out to be the case.

David Knight speaks with Delaware Pastor Andy Stevens about how the government is desperately trying to crush religious freedom and using the Coronavirus as an excuse.

In fact, on Wednesday many analysts were absolutely shocked when news broke that Victoria’s Secret has decided to shut down about 250 stores…

Victoria’s Secret plans to permanently close approximately 250 stores in the U.S. and Canada in 2020, its parent company L Brands announced Wednesday.

L Brands also plans to permanently close 50 Bath & Body Works stores in the U.S. and one in Canada, according to information the company posted online as part of its quarterly earnings.

If this pandemic had passed quickly, perhaps those stores wouldn’t have needed to be shut down.  But at this point it has become obvious that this virus is going to be with us for a long time to come.  In fact, the WHO just announced that on a global basis we just witnessed the largest number of newly confirmed cases on a single day so far.

Another major retailer that is closing down stores is Pier 1 Imports.  In fact, it is being reported that not a single one of their locations will survive…

Pier 1 Imports, which previously said it would close half of its fleet of stores, now plans to close all of its locations.

The retailer, based in Fort Worth, Texas, announced in a news release Tuesday that it was seeking bankruptcy court approval to begin an “orderly wind-down” when stores are able to reopen “following the government-mandated closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

I was never a huge fan of Pier 1 Imports, but my wife liked to visit and see what they had, but now we will never be able to do that again.

Something about that really saddens me.

Of course it isn’t just retailers that are collapsing.  Car rental giant Hertz “is on the verge of bankrutpcy”, and things are not looking good at all…

Hertz is on the verge of bankruptcy. At the end of April, it disclosed it had missed a large amount of lease payments on its rental cars. Since then, it has entered into forbearance and waiver agreements with these lenders that give it until May 22 to come up with the money and a plan. Its cars, now parked at various parking lots around the country, are collateral for this debt.

Some of you old timers might remember the old Hertz commercials featuring O.J. Simpson.  Those were much simpler times, and to be honest I really miss them.

Unfortunately, times have really changed, and I seriously doubt that Hertz will be able to survive much longer in this very harsh economic environment.

Needless to say, a lot of businesses are going to die in the weeks and months ahead of us.  As I discussed the other day, it is now being projected that approximately one out of every four restaurants in the United States will be closing down permanently.

Can you imagine what this is going to look like?

We are going to have abandoned buildings all over the place, and this will especially be true in our more impoverished communities.

The only chance we have of pulling out of this economic death spiral is if there is a full scale return to normal economic activity all across America, but that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Fear of COVID-19 is going to paralyze small and big businesses alike for the foreseeable future, and every new outbreak is going to spark more overreactions.

For instance, Ford just shut down two major production facilities just a few days after “reopening” them…

Just days after reopening its American assembly plants, Ford temporarily shut down two separate factories because employees tested positive for Covid-19.

One plant in Chicago that builds the Ford Explorer, the Lincoln Aviator and the Ford Interceptor police car stopped operations Tuesday afternoon after two employees tested positive for Covid-19. Then, Ford’s plant in Dearborn Michigan that makes its bestselling F-150 pickup, shut down Wednesday.

If we keep shutting things down every time someone gets sick, our economic problems are just going to get worse and worse.

Look, the truth is that lots more people are going to get sick and lots more people are going to die.  In fact, one new study has concluded that the U.S. death toll will more than triple by the end of 2020 “even if current social distancing habits continue for months on end”…

A new study suggests the number of Americans who will die after contracting the novel coronavirus is likely to more than triple by the end of the year, even if current social distancing habits continue for months on end.

The study, conducted by the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy and Economics Institute at the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy, found that 1.3 percent of those who show symptoms of COVID-19 die, an infection fatality rate that is 13 times higher than a bad influenza season.

Of course it certainly doesn’t help that we continue to allow people from other countries where COVID-19 is raging to fly into the U.S. without any special screening whatsoever…

A glamorous Russian blogger says she has proved that the US is open for foreign tourism again, despite the pandemic, according to video obtained by DailyMail.com.

Sofia Semyonova, 33, a fitness model, told how she traveled on a crammed Aeroflot flight with 500-plus passengers with ‘no social distancing’ from Moscow to New York City.

She used her B2 tourist visa to enter America from Russia’s coronavirus epicentre ‘in 30 seconds without any extra questions’.

I don’t know how this could possibly be happening, but apparently it is.

Eventually, COVID-19 will literally be just about everywhere, and almost everyone in the entire country will be exposed to it.

And fear of this virus will paralyze our economy for the foreseeable future.

So the truth is that the “for lease” and “space available” signs that you are now seeing are just the start.

A lot more are coming, and it is going to be a very dark chapter for our nation.

Its Time To Stop Buying From China

Yesterday we were offerred hand sanitizer from a friend. We looked at the bottle and it was made in the PRC--Peoples Republic of China.  We thanked our friend and said "no thanks."

We all need to stop buying anything made in China, assembled in China or has anything to do with China. We need to pull back all our medical equipment, vaccines made there. We need to make sure our government does not buy anything from China. In other words, we need to divorce ourselves from the mainland China totally.

We need to stop buying steel from China. Can you imagine being in a military conflict with them and needing to get steel to build tanks?

This does not mean Taiwan as they are a separate country. 

We are talking about the PRC, Peoples Republic of China.  We need to send a strong an unambigious message. Your cheap stuff is not welcome here anymore.

Anyone who disagrees has not seen what they did when other countries needed medical supplies, or when China went around the world scavaging masks and PPE before they announced that they had a problem. They are not our friends, they are our enemy and the clearer we make that statement the better.

Who agrees? Apparently many Americans as the following story is illustrative.

Conservative Tom

HUGE PERCENTAGE OF AMERICANS WON’T BUY PRODUCTS FROM CHINA

“It’s not quite a new Cold War yet”

Zero Hedge - MAY 19, 2020 23 Comments 

IMAGE CREDITS: MICHAEL LOCCISANO / STAFF / GETTY.

The ever-worsening and sinking US-China relationship has been a front-and-center headline for months, even prior to the onslaught of the Wuhan virus, as the trade war gave way to increasingly tense naval provocations in the South China Sea, and now the ongoing diplomatic blame game back-and-forth between Beijing and Washington.

The end result of all this, as Bloomberg puts it, is as follows: “It’s not quite a new Cold War yet. Just the cold shoulder.”

We explained earlier that in a nation that seems impossibly divided on most issues and is ideologically polarized more than ever in history, China is the one thing that more than two-thirds of Americans can agree on, and they agree that they simply do not like China. And the numbers absolutely bear that out: “Some 40% of Americans said they won’t buy products from China, according to a survey of 1,012 adults conducted May 12-14 by Washington-based FTI Consulting, a business advisory firm.”

Among the other results as summarized by Bloomberg, the poll found:

• 55% don’t think China can be trusted to follow through on its trade-deal commitments signed in January to buy more U.S. products
• 78% percent said they’d be willing to pay more for products if the company that made them moved manufacturing out of China
• 66% said they favor raising import restrictions over the pursuit of free-trade deals as a better way to boost the U.S. economy

This could play big for President Trump just six months out from the November election, something he seems very cognizant of, given he provocatively told FOX last week that ties with Beijing could ultimately be severed altogether.

“There are many things we could do — we could cut off the whole relationship,” Trump said in the interview when asked about the new retaliatory visa measures targeting Chinese nationals, such as state media personnel and students.

Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out to Bloomberg that “Foreigners are an all too easy political target in normal times. But once they become unpopular, politics can turn dangerous, as they turn into policy.”

For the upcoming presidential election this translates to the following scenario:

“As candidates compete over who can adopt a more extreme stance toward China between now and November, their post-election policies toward Beijing are increasingly being set in stone,” Bown said.

And it’s worth remembering that multiple months before anyone had heard the name coronavirus, Trump tweeted “we don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them” last August during the height of the trade war.

From a March Pew Research Center poll.

Of course Americans divorcing themselves from cheap Chinese manufactured goods remains much easier said than done.

“For a majority of U.S. companies that do business in China, uprooting themselves from world’s second-largest economy isn’t really feasible,” Bloomberg writes. “But according to a March survey of members of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 44% of respondents said it’s not possible for the two economies to decouple, down from 66% polled in October. A fifth said decoupling will accelerate.”

So perhaps, where there’s a collective will there’s a way. And a China-originated deadly global pandemic looks to be accelerating what was once thought near impossible.

The Truth About The Coronavirus

Check out this video and spread it far and wide. This is the a contrary opinion and one to which we agree.

Conservative Tom

https://www.infowars.com/banned-by-youtube-perspectives-on-the-pandemic-professor-knut-wittkowski/

Barr Proves He Is A Real Attorney General

Barr Pours Cold Water on Criminal Charges for Obama and Biden, But Leaves Room for Others

Katie Pavlich

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 @KatiePavlich

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Posted: May 18, 2020 1:30 PM

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Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Speaking from the Department of Justice Monday morning, Attorney General Bill Barr poured cold water on the idea of a criminal investigation into former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. 

"As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement based on the information I have today, I don't expect Mr. Durham's work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others," Barr said. "The Durham investigation is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And it will determine whether there were any federal laws broken and if there were, those who broke the law will be held to account. But this cannot be and it will not be a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result. The only way to stop this vicious cycle, the only way to break away from a dual system of justice, is to make sure that we scrupulously apply the single and proper standard of justice for everybody."

It has been revealed in recent weeks that President Obama knew about the FBI's surveillance of General Michael Flynn and asked during a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting whether he should be treated "any differently." Further, Vice President Biden unmasked Flynn on January 12, 2017.

But while a criminal investigation into Obama or Biden is highly unlikely, Barr left the door open on other Obama officials. 

"I have a general idea of how Mr. Durham's investigation is going. And as I have indicated some aspects of the matter are being examined as potential crimes. But we have to bear in mind with the Supreme Court recently reminded us of in the 'Bridgegate' case. The court said there's a difference between an abuse of power and a federal crime. Not every abuse of power no matter how outrageous is necessarily a federal crime," Barr said. "Under the longstanding standards of the department criminal charges are appropriate only, when we have enough evidence to prove each element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the standard we're applying."

Further, Barr stressed the need for the criminal justice system to stop being used as a political weapon and committed to keeping that type of interference out of the 2020 presidential election.

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"What happened to the president in the 2016 election and throughout the first two years of his administration was abhorrent. It was a grave injustice and it was unprecedented in American history," Barr said. "The law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president. The proper investigative and prosecutorial standards of the Department of Justice were abused in my view in order to reach a particular result. We saw two different standards of justice emerge, one that applied to President Trump and his associates, and the other that applied to everybody else. We can't allow this ever to happen again."

The Facts On Coronavirus Lockdown--Not What Your Politicans Are Saying!

Horowitz: We have been lied to: 6 facts that change everything we know about SARS-CoV-2

Every day we learn new information demonstrating the lies driving lockdown.

ArtistGNDphotography/Getty Images

 DANIEL HOROWITZ

  

James Madison once said, "A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." The coronavirus fascists have succeeded in cementing their illogical, immoral, and illegal policies through the prism of false information about the timing of the virus, the specific nature and severity of the overall fatality rate, the number of actual deaths, and the utility (or perhaps harm) of lockdown policies in actually mitigating deaths – all the while obfuscating the much higher collateral deaths and damage caused by the lockdown itself.

Ditch the fake news ==> Click here to get news you can trust sent right to your inbox. It's free!

Every day we learn new information demonstrating the lies driving lockdown. Here are some of the most important ones from over the weekend.
1) The shocking inflation of COVID-19 death numbers: From day one, we were warned that states are ascribing every single death of anyone who happens to test positive for the coronavirus — even if they are asymptomatic — to the virus rather than the clear cause of death. Now, thanks to a lawsuit in Colorado, the state was forced to revise its death count down by 23 % over the weekend — from 1,150 to 878. The state is now publishing numbers of deaths "with" COVID-19 separate from deaths "from" COVID-19. As I reported on Thursday, county officials started accusing the state's department of health of reclassifying deaths of those who tested positive for the virus but died of things like alcohol poisoning as COVID-19 deaths just to insidiously inflate the numbers. This revision in Colorado is a bombshell story that, of course, will remain unknown to most Americans. Every state needs to do this, and if they did, we would find an across-the-board drop in numbers by at least 25%, the same %age by which Dr. Birx reportedly believes the count is being inflated, according to the Washington Post. For example, in Minnesota, state officials are now admitting that every single person who dies in a nursing home after testing positive is now deemed to have died from the virus, never mind the fact that 25% of all natural deaths in a given week occur in nursing homes and that most cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic, which means more often than not, they died exclusively of other causes.

2) States with longer lockdowns had worse results: Kyle Lamb posted a solid analysis on Twitter, grouping states by how long they implemented a lockdown and averaging out the deaths per 100,000 people by each grouping. The results are stounding, as there is a perfectly inverse relationship between how long a state implemented a lockdown and how successful it was in keeping the deaths down. I independently cross-checked these numbers, and they appear to be accurate.

While this doesn't necessarily prove that lockdowns cause more COVID-19 deaths (although they definitely cause other deaths), it's nearly impossible to assert the other way around – that lockdowns prevent deaths – if we see zero correlation in the data. This is especially true given that Florida is the third most populous state and has the highest concentration of seniors, yet deaths and hospitalizations are way down since the state reopened on May 4. Florida is more densely populated than Michigan and Pennsylvania, yet has one-sixth and one-fourth of the deaths per capita, respectively. The same holds true for Georgia, which is a fairly densely populated state. Infections are down over 40% and deaths are down 31% since reopening. As Secretary of Health Alex Azar said yesterday, "We are seeing that in places that are opening, we're not seeing this spike in cases. We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed."
3) Outside nursing homes, the fatality rate never warranted such action, even if it would work: Every day we find more hard data showing that the overwhelming majority of cases are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, and outside nursing homes, the chance of dying is very low and very limited to a population we can more efficiently shield. For those who are younger and healthier, deaths are almost nonexistent. Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries and has a higher overall fatality rate than others, yet its age-stratified fatality rates mirror what we have seen in the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and elsewhere. One Twitter commentator has broken down the age-based fatality rates of the comprehensive Spanish antibody study, and the results are similar to what we've seen elsewhere:

He used public information to calculate the case data and the population age data, and I have spot-checked some data points and they all seem on target. It's identical to what the Netherlands found.

Remember, Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries, but even there, 57% of all deaths and the overwhelming majority of deaths of those above age 80 were in senior care facilities. When you take them out of the equation, the death rates are shockingly low. Yet the same politicians who focused on locking up an entire country failed to care for those in nursing homes. This demographic COVID-19 death chart from Massachusetts speaks volumes about the targeted scope of the danger.

It's essentially the same story in every state.
4) Outside New York, this is barely worse than bad flu seasons: While Europe is opening its schools, almost every U.S. state continues to keep schools shut. Yet according to the CDC's latest weekly report, "For children (0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates at comparable time points during recent influenza seasons." Even the World Health Organization's top scientist just admitted that children "seem less capable of spreading the virus." As for everyone else, if you look at the bump in overall deaths for most states (outside the tristate area), they are either at, slightly below, or slight above the 2018 flu season. But at this point, everything is way below a typical flu season in the winter, yet you wouldn't know it from listening to the media. According to the CDC, hospitalizations and deaths have been declining in all 10 designated regions for the past 3-7 weeks. Still, we are now being more fascist that even Italy in violating civil rights.

5) Excess deaths are from the lockdowns, not the virus: While there is zero evidence that lockdowns saved any lives of coronavirus patients, there is clear evidence they cost other lives. It has been observed in a number of states that there are excess deaths being detected, primarily from people dying at home. The CDC is predicting 21,462-40,097 excess deaths NOT due to COVID-19, likely from those too scared to come to the ER because of the exaggerated risk being associated with COVID-19. Also, a recent analysis of excess deaths in England shows that they are seeing thousands of people dying at home from other symptoms because of the lockdown.
6) Social distancing was invented by a high-school kid and politicians, not scientists: Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic research reports that the origin of this cult of "social distancing" being used for totalitarian lockdowns was the brainchild of a high schooler's sociology paper in 2006, promoted by the Bush administration during the avian flu. It was widely mocked by the epidemiological community, including by Johns Hopkins, for "causing the potential for a 'serious adverse outcome,'" thereby ensuring that "a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe."
How have we allowed such an illogical approach to crush our liberties, economy, hospitals, education, and criminal justice? How have we lost our freedoms?
The answer is that the public is not getting the right information. This is why the political class is doing everything in its power to censor anyone who dares question the idolatry of this lockdown cult. YouTube has censored the videos of Knut Wittkowski, who was a top epidemiologist in Germany and then served as the head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University. One would think we'd want to hear his opinion, but there is only one view that is allowed to gain traction. Why is it that only one side is scared of the information of the other side?
As James Madison warned, "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."