Today's News: September 11, 2020

Mile Markers of Tyranny: Losing Our Freedoms on the Road from 9/11 to COVID-19

The Rutherford Institute – “No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”—George Orwell
You can map the nearly 20-year journey from the 9/11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic by the freedoms we’ve lost along the way.
The road we have been traveling has been littered with the wreckage of our once-vaunted liberties, especially those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
The assaults on our freedoms that began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act laid the groundwork for the eradication of every vital constitutional safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The COVID-19 pandemic with its lockdowns, mask mandates, surveillance, snitch lines for Americans to report their fellow citizens for engaging in risky behavior, and veiled threats of forced vaccinations has merely provided the architects of the American police state with an opportunity to flex their muscles.
These have become mile markers on the road to tyranny.

NEVER FORGET: In 2020, a 4-year Study Found that “Fire Did Not Cause Building 7’s Collapse on 9/11”

Activist Post – As the media frenzy around 9/11 reminds us today to “never forget” there is some crucial information that the establishment absolutely wants all Americans to forget — the overwhelming abundance of evidence that pokes serious holes in the official narrative of what happened that fateful day.
On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 p.m., World Trade Center Building 7 suddenly collapsed into its own footprint, falling at free fall speed for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second complete destruction. WTC 7 was not hit by a plane. After it collapsed, Americans were told that office fires caused a unique — never before seen — complete architectural failure leading to the building collapsing into its own footprint at the rate of gravity.
Despite calls for the evidence to be preserved, New York City officials had the building’s debris removed and destroyed in the ensuing weeks and months, preventing a proper forensic investigation from ever taking place. Seven years later, federal investigators concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.
Naturally, skeptics have been questioning the official story for some time and after moving from the realm of conspiracy theory into the realm of science, this extensive university study has found that the official story of fire causing the collapse is simply not true.
As TFTP reported in April, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth announced the completed partnership with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in their final report of an in depth four-year study on what they say actually brought down WTC 7. According to the press release, contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team finds that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not caused by fires but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused the observed collapse,” said Professor Leroy Hulsey, the study’s principal investigator. “The only way it could have fallen in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column.”
The extensive four-year study was was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization representing more than 3,000 architects and engineers who have signed the organization’s petition calling for new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11.
“We are proud to have supported the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Professor Leroy Hulsey in conducting a genuinely scientific study into the reasons for this building’s collapse,” said Richard Gage, president and founder of AE911Truth. “It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.”
According to the study’s authors:
The UAF research team utilized three approaches for examining the structural response of WTC 7 to the conditions that may have occurred on September 11, 2001.
First, we simulated the local structural response to fire loading that may have occurred below Floor 13, where most of the fires in WTC 7 are reported to have occurred.
Second, we supplemented our own simulation by examining the collapse initiation hypothesis developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
After conducting comprehensive modeling and studying countless scenarios, the study’s authors, J. Leroy Hulsey, Ph.D., P.E., S.E., UAF, Zhili Quan, Ph.D., Bridge Engineer South Carolina Department of Transportation, and Feng Xiao, Ph.D., Associate Professor Nanjing University of Science and Technology Department of Civil Engineering, concluded the following:
Fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
The results of this study cannot be dismissed. It completely destroys the narrative that has been shoved down the throats of Americans for nearly two decades. What’s more, this study backs up thousands of other researchers, scientists, and engineers who have been pointing this out for years.

Since 9/11, the Government’s Answer to Every Problem Has Been More Government

10th Amendment Center – Have you noticed that the government’s answer to every problem is more government – at taxpayer expense – and less individual liberty?
The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.
Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn.
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
To the police state, this COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge boon, like winning the biggest jackpot in the lottery. Certainly, it will prove to be a windfall for those who profit from government expenditures and expansions.
Given the rate at which the government has been devising new ways to spend our money and establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems, this current crisis will most likely end up ushering in the largest expansion of government power since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This is how the emergency state operates, after all.
From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.
As chief correspondent Dan Balz asks for The Washington Post, “Government is everywhere now. Where does it go next?”
When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control.
This expansion of government power is also increasing our federal debt in unprecedented leaps and bounds. Yet the government isn’t just borrowing outrageous amounts of money to keep the country afloat. It’s also borrowing indecent sums to pay for programs it can’t afford.
The government’s primary response to this COVID-19 pandemic—flooding the market with borrowed money in the amount of trillions of dollars for stimulus payments, unemployment insurance expansions, and loans to prop up small businesses and to keep big companies afloat—has pushed the country even deeper in debt.
By “the country,” I really mean the taxpayers. And by “the taxpayers,” it’s really future generations who will be shackled to debt loads they may never be able to pay back.
This is how you impoverish the future.
Democrats and Republicans alike have done this.
Without fail, every president within the last 50 years has expanded the nation’s debt. When President Trump took office on January 20, 2017, the national debt—the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back—was a whopping $19.9 trillion. Despite Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp and eliminate the debt, the federal debt is now approaching $27 trillion and is on track to surpass $78 trillion by 2028.

Video: The Moral Challenge of Slavery and Confederate Emancipation by Don Livingston

Dr. Donald Livingston discusses “The Moral Challenge of Slavery and Confederate Emancipation” at the 2015 Abbeville Institute Summer School.

The Evidence Keeps Piling up: Lockdowns Don’t Work

Mises – The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process. And then, of course, there is the economic toll on employment, which will feed negative impacts into the longer term. The economic burden has fallen the most on the young and on working-class families, whose earners are least able to work from home.
These measures also have made a mockery of basic human rights while essentially expropriating private property. Mom-and-pop business owners were told to shut their doors indefinitely or face arrest. The unemployed were told it was now illegal to work for a living if their careers were deemed “nonessential.” Police officers have beaten citizens for not “social distancing” while mothers have been manhandled by cops for attempting to use playground equipment.
This was all done because some politicians and bureaucrats—who were in no danger of losing their large paychecks—decided it was a great idea to carry out a bizarre and risky experiment: forcing large swaths of the population to stay at home in the name of preventing the spread of disease.
An Experiment Concocted by Governments
Indeed, politicians have long dreamed of forcing people into isolation en masse. But this was most recently revived during the George W. Bush administration. As the New York Times reported in April,
Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.
Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing…that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.
How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.
The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.
Lockdowns Don’t Work
And why was it considered impractical and unnecessary? There is more than one reason, but one major reason is that lockdowns have never been shown to be particularly effective. And this lack of success in containment must also be weighed with the very real costs of forced isolation. This was explained in a 2006 paper in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism called “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza” by Thomas V. Inglesby, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Tara O’Toole, and D.A. Henderson. The authors conclude:
There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that “forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.” Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.
The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.
Not surprisingly, then, it’s now becoming apparent that lockdowns don’t work when actually tried. Earlier this month, for example, Donald Luskin noted in the Wall Street Journal:
Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.

CHINESE GOVERNMENT COMBINES ‘TRACK AND TRACE’ CORONA SYSTEM WITH SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE

Infowars – The Communist government of China has combined its coronavirus ‘track and trace’ system with the country’s notorious social credit score.
As the Epoch Times’ Joshua Philipp explains, fears that the new COVID surveillance system would be used for “totalitarian social monitoring” are being realized in China.
“The local government of China’s Jiangsu province has launched a new social control system that combines the CCP’s health code program with the regime’s social credit system to create what they’re calling a civilization code,” Philipp reported.
The new system ranks each citizen via a “civilization score” and then places them in a category which determines whether they get priority access to services or are punished and restricted.
The new system represents an expansion of the social credit score and is being initially rolled out in the city of Suzhou and will apply to everyone over the age of 18.
Last year, we also highlighted how Chinese citizens would need to pass a facial recognition test to access the Internet in another expansion of the social credit score system.
In August 2019, the Communist state bragged about how it had prevented 2.5 million “discredited entities” from purchasing plane tickets and 90,000 people from buying high speed train tickets in the month of July alone.
As we document in the video below, the onerous social credit score system is literally designed to punish and socially ostracize dissidents who express controversial opinions.
In the age of social media deplatforming, an identical system is gradually being introduced in the west, where people who have been banned by social media networks for ‘offensive’ views are then also deplatformed by companies and banks.

NFL fans appear to boo Chiefs, Texans players during moment of unity before coin toss

Fox – NFL fans who were able to attend the opening game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans to start the 2020 season on Thursday appeared to boo the teams’ moment of unity at midfield prior to the coin toss.
Both teams lined up in the middle of the field after the national anthem and locked arms briefly before shaking hands to get ready for the coin toss. Fans on social media noticed that the limited number of fans who were in attendance appeared to let their own voices be heard during the moment.
Those watching through the prism of social media were apparently bewildered by the reaction.
Chiefs players were on the field for the playing of the national anthem and the rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Texans players were not on the field for either song.
Most Chiefs players stood, locking arms on the sideline for the national anthem. At least one Chiefs player knelt and raised a fist. Players locked arm-and-arm across the goal line for the Black national anthem.
Texans players were not on the field for either “The Star-Spangled Banner” or the Black national anthem.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” will be played before each game during the first week of the season as part of the NFL’s efforts on social justice issues Chiefs players locked arm-in-arm in the end zone as the song played. The team went into the locker room after the rendition was over.

Chinese Regime Infiltrated US K–12 Education Through Deep Collaboration With College Board: Report

The College Board has partnered closely with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for over a decade, allowing Beijing to influence Chinese language and culture teaching in K–12 classrooms across the United States, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
The report released on Sept. 6 found that the College Board, a New York-based nonprofit best known for administering the SAT and AP standardized exams for college admissions, worked with the CCP to develop an AP (Advanced Placement) Chinese language and culture course for high schools, helped China gain control over training for Chinese-language teaching in the country, and strongly promoted Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms.
Billed as Chinese language and culture programs, Confucius Institutes and Classrooms have drawn heavy criticism over its role in spreading Chinese propaganda and suppressing free speech on college campuses and K–12 classrooms.
“China has managed to build out an entire educational system before the public caught on to what has happened,” report author and NAS senior research fellow Rachelle Peterson said at the report’s online launch hosted by The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.
“It co-opted a prestigious respected name, the College Board, gaining an access it could never have earned outright by working from within organizations that Americans knew and trusted,” Peterson added.
The findings come amid heightened scrutiny over the CCP’s efforts to influence American universities, as well as its aggressive campaign to steal U.S. research and technology.
According to the report, in 2003, the College Board worked with Beijing to formulate the AP Chinese-language course, with the Chinese government covering half of the $1.37 million development costs. In exchange, the regime was able to influence what was taught in the high school course, and push for instruction in simplified Chinese characters, Peterson said. After the CCP took power in China, it imposed simplified Chinese in the 1950s as part of an attempt to eradicate traditional culture embodied in traditional Chinese script. Traditional Chinese script is still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
“As a result, American students of Chinese would be unable to read the older, more traditional literature that [Party chairman] Mao [Zedong] had sought to supplant,” Peterson said.
The College Board also helped the CCP train American instructors who taught Chinese by partnering with it to host the National Chinese Language Conference, the largest annual gathering of Chinese-language educators in the country. The chief sponsor of the conference, organized by the College Board, is Hanban, an office with China’s ministry of education that oversees Confucius Institutes around the world.

ATHLETIC APPAREL COMPANY LULULEMON SPONSORS “DECOLONIZING GENDER,” “RESIST CAPITALISM” WORKSHOP

Infowars – Multibillion dollar Canadian athletic apparel company Lululemon promoted an upcoming social justice workshop which aims to “decolonize gender” and “resist capitalism.”
In a recent post, the company urged its 3.3 million Instagram followers to participate in a virtual lecture titled, “Decolonizing Gender: unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism,” hosted by Lululemon ambassador and yoga instructor Rebby Kern.
The description of the event is extremely confusing due to the progressive language used throughout:
Decolonizing Gender: unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism
So wait, you mean to say we’ve been learning inaccurate histories of gender?
Because capitalism wins under a colonized binary system of gender?
YEP! So now what?
Hang with Rebby to get the download on how gender constructs across the world have informed culture and the ways violent colonialism has erased these histories to enforce consumerism, gender stereotypes and misunderstanding of gender diverse communities.
While the event aims to bash “capitalism,” it’s asking attendees to pay $20–$60 to participate in the event.
The company’s virtue signal stunt follows a string of corporations bending to extreme far left ideologies, as noted by Washington Free Beacon:
Many institutions have created or promoted diversity training after a summer of social justice protests. Seattle’s city government created a whites-only anti-bias training for employees earlier this summer, Duke University said it would implement anti-racism training in its curriculum, and Google said it would launch a series of anti-racism training seminars in 2021.

Portland Oregon Bans Facial Recognition

Activist Post – Yesterday, the Portland City Council passed an ordinance banning government use of facial recognition technology. The growing movement to prohibit the use of facial recognition at the state and local levels could hinder the operation of a growing national facial recognition network.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty introduced the ordinance. The new law bans the use of facial recognition technology by all City of Portland bureaus. Under the ordinance, city agencies, including the police department, “shall not acquire, evaluate or use Face Recognition Technologies.” The law also prohibits city agencies from directing non-city entities to acquire or use the technology on their behalf.
The council passed the ordinance by a unanimous vote.
The Portland City Council also passed a second ordinance barring the use of facial recognition technology by private entities ” in places of public accommodation.” Information from private facial recognition systems often ends up in government databases so limiting the private use of the technology makes sense on one level. But the ban raises significant private property rights issues. A better approach would be to prohibit data-sharing between private facial recognition systems and government entities.
The Portland facial recognition ban makes up part of a broader nationwide movement to limit this invasive surveillance technology at the local and state level. San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California prohibited government use of facial recognition technology. Several cities in Massachusetts have also instituted bans, including Easthampton, Somerville, Northampton, Brookline, Cambridge, Springfield, and Boston. Last year, the California governor signed a bill that imposes a 3-year ban on the use of the tech in conjunction with police body-worn cameras, leading to the shutdown of one of the biggest facial recognition programs in the country. And New York is considering a bill to ban facial recognition in schools and on police body cameras.

Research: Smartphone Blue Light Linked to Colon Cancer and Depression. Ditto with Smartphone RF Radiation

Activist Post – There IS research that has already determined that exposure from cell phones and other sources of wireless (WiFi) radiation is harmful. It has been linked to cancer, mental health issues, and much more.
In fact, there are currently cancer survivors awaiting the outcome of a smartphone class action lawsuit that was filed last year.
There is also research that has already determined that Blue Light exposure from screens and other sources affects human health in a variety of undesirable ways.
Thanks to Environmental Health Trust for posting the results of a 2020 study on Blue Light.
Smartphone Blue Light is Linked to Colon Cancer and Depression
Smartphones emit several types of electromagnetic fields that can harm our health. In addition to harmful radio-frequency radiation, they also emit blue light. While humans have always been exposed to natural blue light frequencies in nature, our use of smartphones and screens has resulted in unprecedented exponentially increased exposures at all hours of the day and night.
A 2020 study on colorectal cancre and blue light at night with over 2000 subjects found outdoor blue light at night is linked to colon cancer.
(See video from scientist HERE.)
Artificial blue light can damage the eyes, contribute to aging of the skin and harm our sleep. It is linked to depression and mental health problems.
“To understand why shining the blue light at the mice led to depression, the researchers studied their brains—most specifically, the neural pathways that lead from the eyes to the brain. They found a specific kind of light receptor in the mouse retina that led to brain areas associated with mood: the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal perihabenular nucleus. When the researchers disconnected them, the mice did not become depressive due to exposure to blue light at night. The researchers also found that the pathways became much more active when processing blue light at night versus daytime—which, they suggest, explains why blue light during the day does not lead to depression.” -Medical Express “Exposing Mice to Blue light Leads to Depressive Symptoms”

Coronavirus kills off BRAIN cells as it hijacks some to make copies of itself and starves others of oxygen, study finds

Daily Mail – Verifying reports of delusions and brain fogs, new research reveals just how coronavirus attacks and kills brain cells to churn out more copies of itself.
Collaborating scientists around the globe have shown that the virus burglarizes brain cells, using their machinery to replicate, in a study posted online this week, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal.
And in the process, the infection seems to suck up the oxygen from other brain cells near the ones it has invaded, eventually killing them.
So far, coronavirus’s effects on the brain don’t seem to be what is killing COVID-19 patients, but researchers say that an unchecked infection in cerebral cells could be deadly.
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People deficient in vitamin D have a higher risk of COVID-19, reports new study

NaturalNews – A person’s vitamin D status may determine his susceptibility to COVID-19, the disease caused by the Wuhan coronavirus. In a new study published September 4, researchers at the University of Chicago found that, compared to people with normal vitamin D levels, those who were deficient in the vitamin have a greater risk of testing positive for COVID-19.
In line with this, previous studies suggest that vitamin D supplementation can decrease the incidence of viral respiratory tract infections, especially in patients with vitamin D deficiency.
“These findings appear to support a role of vitamin D status in COVID-19 risk,” the researchers wrote in their study, which appeared in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Vitamin D can regulate immune responses to viral infections
Vitamin D interacts with various components of the immune system. Immune cells, for instance, have a protein called vitamin D receptor (VDR), which, upon binding with vitamin D, helps control the rate of expression of certain genes. Immune cells also produce an enzyme called 1a-hydroxylase, which helps convert vitamin D into its active form, calcitriol. The discovery of VDR and 1a-hydroxylase in immune cells is what led scientists to investigate the role of vitamin D in human immunology.
Low vitamin D status can heighten risk of COVID-19 infection
To determine if vitamin D status has any effect on a person’s susceptibility to the coronavirus, the researchers conducted a retrospective study of 489 patients whose vitamin D levels were measured a year before they were tested for COVID-19. Those with calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) levels lower than 20 ng/mL or calcitriol levels less than 18 pg/mL were considered vitamin D deficient.
The researchers also considered changes in vitamin D type and dose — defined as treatment changes — between the patients’ last vitamin D testing and the date of COVID-19 testing to determine whether the patients were “likely deficient” or “likely sufficient” when they were tested. The researchers then performed multivariate analysis to look for associations between vitamin D status and a positive COVID-19 result, controlling for both demographic and factors related to other conditions.
Of the 489 patients, 124 were considered likely deficient, while 287 were found to be likely sufficient and 78 were uncertain. Overall, 71 patients (15 percent) tested positive for COVID-19, and the results of multivariate analysis suggested that this specific outcome was associated with increasing age (50 years and older) and a “likely deficient” vitamin D status. The researchers also found that the relative risk of testing positive for COVID-19 was 1.77 times greater for those who were likely deficient in vitamin D compared with those who were likely sufficient.
“Vitamin D is important to the function of the immune system and vitamin D supplements have previously been shown to lower the risk of viral respiratory tract infections,” said Dr. David Meltzer, chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. “Our statistical analysis suggests this may be true for the COVID-19 infection.” (Related: Vitamin D deficiency increases risk of coronavirus infection.)
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Adam Schiff’s Latest Russia ‘Whistleblower’ Investigated By House Intel, Inspector General, & Was Fired From DHS For Surveilling Press

ZeroHedge – On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has unveiled a new whistleblower – former DHS intelligence official Brian Murphy, who claims that Trump administration officials at the White House and Department of Homeland Security suppressed intelligence reports that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election, and ‘altered intelligence’ related to comments made by President Trump.
“We’ve received a whistleblower complaint alleging DHS suppressed intel reports on Russian election interference, altered intel to match false Trump claims and made false statements to Congress,” Schiff tweeted, adding “We will investigate.”
Except, Schiff did investigate – his whistleblower – for allegedly ‘providing incomplete and potentially misleading information to Committee staff,’ according to the New York Times.
Not only that, Murphy was fired from his job as the head of DHS’s intelligence branch and reassigned after he compiled reports about protesters and journalists reporting on the Trump administration’s response to the riots in Portland, Oregon in July.
Brian Murphy, the acting under secretary for intelligence and analysis, was reassigned to a new position in the department after his office disseminated to the law enforcement community “open-source intelligence reports” containing Twitter posts of journalists, noting they had published leaked unclassified documents, according to an administration official familiar with the matter. It was not clear what Mr. Murphy’s new position would be. –New York Times
As a result of Murphy’s actions, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf asked the Inspector General to investigate.

LA health director accused of ‘playing politics’ after saying schools won’t reopen ‘until after the election’ in leaked audio

RT – LA County’s public health chief has come under fire after saying that local schools would not reopen until after the 2020 presidential election, prompting criticism that officials are putting politics ahead of science.
The county’s health director, Barbara Ferrer, recently told local educators that schools would remain shuttered until the beginning of November, repeatedly referring to the upcoming election, according to leaked audio obtained by LA radio station KFI AM 60.
“We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November,” Ferrer said on the conference call.
When we just look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we are done with the election.
The LA County Department of Public Health later elaborated on Ferrer’s remarks in a statement, saying she was referring only to the timeframe for “expanded school reopenings,” though it did not specify a date when classes would resume.
Despite the attempted clarification, some have taken the leaked recording as an admission that reopening decisions were being based on political considerations, rather than health or science.
“It’s been about the election the entire time. Anybody who’s been paying attention could see this would be stretched into November solely for that purpose,” one netizen tweeted.
Others offered pushback, however, arguing that Ferrer’s reference to the election was merely another way of saying ‘early November’ and implied no political motivation, while some pointed out that the brief leaked audio clip lacked context.
A number of detractors remained unconvinced, with some calling for Ferrer’s firing, accusing her of “playing politics.” Others went further, demanding the health director be charged as a “criminal.”
Home to the country’s second-largest school district, LA County schools remain shuttered under an order issued by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, which requires counties meet a number of benchmarks before resuming in-person classes. LA currently does not meet those criteria.
To date, the county has tallied more than 236,000 coronavirus infections and over 5,700 deaths, making up a sizable proportion of California’s nearly 751,000 cases and 14,000 fatalities.