A new paper taking a look at the Fermi Paradox using the Drake Equations has suggested an uncomfortable solution: maybe we are alone in the galaxy.If you haven't heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: given the vastness of the universe and the probability that implies of life evolving elsewhere, how come no alien civilization has ever gotten in touch? We have found many exoplanets in the brief time we've been looking. Surely there must be someone else out there who, like us, desperately wants to find others?Since it was posed in 1950 by Enrico Fermi, there have been a range of answers, from the benign to the absolutely terrifying. One is that there simply hasn't been enough time yet. Alien civilizations may prioritize, as we do, searching for techno signatures, which we simply haven't been broadcasting for long enough. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be that the tendency throughout the universe is for civilizations to destroy themselves before they reach sufficient advancement to make contact.                              After the Fermi paradox came the Drake Equation, which attempts to quantify the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, or the universe. In it, we can place knowns or best guesses as to the number of stars that contain (for instance) planets in habitable zones, or best guesses as to how many of those will be able to sustain intelligent life. Using these equations, scientists attempt to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, and depending on their input, have come up with answers ranging from 30 to 100,000. Drake himself estimated a figure between 1000 and 100,000,000 in our galaxy alone.As we get more information on exoplanets, and how life began here on Earth, we can at least refine our estimates, which is what a new paper attempts to do. These high estimates do not fit with what we see – i.e. no active, communicative civilizations (ACCs) – the researchers point out, and so perhaps we are missing some important variables. The team attempted to address this by looking at how life evolved on Earth. Like many others, they suggest that plate tectonics is crucial for complex animals to evolve. Plate tectonics, the team explained, likely accelerated biological evolution in several key ways. This includes delivering crucial elements for life like phosphorus to the surface."Tectonic processes exposing fresh rocks on the surface are crucial for enhancing delivery of [phosphorus] and other inorganic nutrients, because shielding of fresh rock surfaces by soil reduces nutrient fluxes due to chemical weathering," the team explains in their paper, adding that evidence for this is found in Earth's ancient history, where the emergence of plate tectonics created a more life-hospitable environment. "The addition of [phosphorus], [iron] and other nutrients from erosion and weathering of Ediacaran collisional mountains broke the Mesoproterozoic nutrient drought, stimulating life and evolution."The transition to plate tectonics may have been crucial in other areas too, including increasing oxygen levels in the atmosphere and ocean, moderating the climate (e.g. through subduction of carbon), and creating complex landscapes and climates that can stimulate diversity of life. "We further suggest that both continents and oceans are required for ACCs because early evolution of simple life must happen in water but late evolution of advanced life capable of creating technology must happen on land."It's possible that plate tectonics – as well as sufficient oxygen for a planet to have fire – is necessary for intelligent, communicative life to appear. Thus, we should look for planets with continents and plate tectonics that can be sustained over long enough time periods for life to evolve.The team then attempted to place restrictions on the amount of water that would need to be present on exoplanets in order to have surface water and continents, before attempting to use the Drake Equation to estimate how many planets in the galaxy contain these conditions (and others), making them potentially suitable to evolve ACCs. They came up with a figure ranging from less than 0.006 to less than 100,000. But this is not the only limiting factor to ACCs, with other potential "great filters" coming later for life, such as potential extinction events or societal collapse. Factoring this in, they put the figure between less than 0.0004 and less than 20,000. The team stresses that we should probably look at the lower end of this range, given that potential catastrophes could limit the amount of time alien civilizations are communicative for."It may be that primitive life is quite common in the galaxy," the team concluded. "However, due to the extreme rareness of long-term (several hundred of million years) coexistence of continents, oceans and plate tectonics on planets with life, ACCs may be very rare."There are, of course, a whole host of uncertainties within the Drake Equation that can be updated as we learn new information. Large planets are much easier to detect than Earth-sized terrestrial planets, due to the increased amount of dimming and wobble they produce on their host stars. Perhaps there is an abundance of Earth-like planets which we will find as detection improves, or other planets capable of hosting life. Or we could find that initial life is more likely than we thought, making it more likely that life could get through these great filters somewhere in the cosmos. Though plate tectonics may play a huge role in our own evolution, let's not lose hope that there are others out there with intelligence just yet.The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Astrology has received a well-deserved beating in a new study that’s shown zodiac signs have no link to a person’s well-being; whatever “star sign” you happen to be, it doesn’t impact your happiness, affirming the view that the movement of planets has no direct influence on human affairs.In a new study, a psychologist at Keimyung University in South Korea looked at data on 12,791 people and measured their well-being based on eight components: general unhappiness, depressive symptoms, psychological distress, work dissatisfaction, financial dissatisfaction, perceived dullness of one's life, self-rated health, and unhappiness with marriage.The researcher then looked at their birth dates to see whether their ascribed “star sign” had any impact on their well-being. Lo and behold, there was scarcely any link at all.“The effect sizes were nearly zero across all the well-being outcomes examined, indicating that knowing someone's zodiac sign would not provide meaningful information for predicting their well-being levels. These results align with past empirical research which has generally failed to find evidence supporting astrological claims about personality traits or marriage outcomes,” the study concluded.“The results contradict astrological claims that zodiac signs shape an individual's tendencies, destiny, and susceptibility to feeling happy or successful,” it adds.Around 29 percent of Americans believe in astrology, according to a 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center. There’s even evidence that it’s on the rise, especially among young people. Among the many astrological beliefs held by people, it’s often felt that “star signs” or “sun signs” have an influence on one's personality, life outcomes, and well-being. It’s a nice idea – but it’s total bullshit. Science has tested these claims innumerable times and has not found a shred of evidence to affirm the theory that celestial bodies influence people’s lives in any mystical sense.The latest study concludes by saying the research highlights the need to show people that astrology is pure pseudoscience with little grounding in reality. “These findings underscore the urgent need to increase public awareness of the lack of scientific evidence supporting astrological beliefs through robust public education initiatives,” the researcher writes. “Such initiatives can play a pivotal role in promoting scientific literacy and critical thinking skills, equipping individuals with the rational tools to make informed decisions and challenge pseudoscientific beliefs that lack empirical support,” the study author concludes. The study is published in the journal Kyklos.

Driving down a busy motorway, a young man spotted an unusual sight that instantly caught his attention—a dog wandering alone along the side of the road. Excitement and urgency both filled his heart, and he had to help. He knew he had to act fast to ensure the safety of this vulnerable animal amidst the... The post Man sees scared little pup running down busy highway and immediately jumps into action appeared first on Animal Channel.

Christiane “Be Truthful, Not Neutral” Amanpour lied by omission on Wednesday's edition of Amanpour and Company, which airs globally on CNN and domestically on PBS. She reported that American munitions were used recently in an Israeli strike that “killed more than 45 people,” but omitted that the warhead on the bomb was not big enough to create the massive fire that caused all those deaths by itself. Amanpour kicked off the show by attacking President Joe Biden from the left, “Israel's assault on Rafah is intensifying, but the U.S. president, Joe Biden, is not changing tack. The White House asserts it hasn't yet seen a major ground operation there. But that's done nothing to temper global outrage after an Israeli airstrike killed more than 45 people in a displacement camp in Southern Gaza on Sunday.”     She then added, “A CNN analysis has found that U.S.-made munitions were used in that attack.” Here’s what the CNN report says in greater detail: “In video shared on social media, which CNN geolocated to the same scene by matching details including the camp’s entrance sign and the tiles on the ground, the tail of a US-made GBU-39 small diameter bomb (SDB) is visible, according to four explosive weapons experts who reviewed the video for CNN.” CNN reported that its conclusion matches Israel’s: [IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel] Hagari told reporters the strike – which he said targeted senior Hamas commanders – used two munitions with small warheads containing 17 kilos of explosives, adding these bombs were ‘the smallest munitions that our jets could use.’ The traditional GBU-39 warhead has an explosive payload of 17 kilos. Hagari said the deadly fire which occurred following the strike was not caused solely by weapons used by the Israeli military. Biden’s previous halt on weapons shipments to Israel was over 500-2,000 pound bombs. Israel listened to his concerns about larger munitions in Rafah and used a much smaller bomb with a 37 pound warhead, but Amanpour omitted all that. Instead, she welcomed Sen. Chris Van Hollen and asked him, “Does the United States have leverage? I mean, it does, but is it prepared to use it? It appears – I mean, again, this is, you know, the impression we get that all the admonitions and recommendations from Israel's biggest backer, i.e., the United States, the president of the United States, don't seem to have affected action on the ground, and we keep seeing civilian casualties. Prime Minister himself, Netanyahu, called it a tragic mistake the other day that would be investigated. Are you confident that the United States is able to use its leverage or should be using more leverage?” Van Hollen replied: Oh, Christiane, I think we should and can be using more leverage in order to pursue our interests, which I believe are also in the best interests of Israel, both in terms of the Rafah operation, but also what's next. I mean, after all, Benny Gantz said he's going to leave the war cabinet shortly if he doesn't see a post-war plan for governing Gaza. So, you would think that the United States could take the position that, you know, we're not going to continue to provide a blank check until we see a post-war plan that meets our concerns and meets the interests that the president has announced. Instead, we see Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly and repeatedly rebuffing the president of the United States, whether it's on having the P.A. having a governance role in Gaza, whether it's for a two-state solution, to provide some light at the end of the tunnel as part of the normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia and others. Time and again, we see Prime Minister Netanyahu rebuffing the position and requests of the United States. And so, yes, we should be doing more to exercise our influence. Amanpour, the self-appointed champion of truthfulness over neutrality, couldn’t be bothered to mention that Gantz, Van Hollen’s great hope, wanted to attack Rafah earlier and also opposes the creation of a Palestinian state.

Jury deliberations have finally begun in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump. Regardless of the verdict, however, Trump’s Democratic opponents have already received a massive media bonus from the flimsy legal case. Unlike the jury in the courtroom, millions of citizens have seen the evidence only as depicted by the liberal news networks — an often skewed version that seemed more designed to embarrass and antagonize the Republican presidential candidate than to scrutinize the merits of the case against him. In just six weeks, ABC, CBS, and NBC have doled out more than ten hours (640 minutes) on the case across their flagship morning, evening, and Sunday political talk shows to interfere in the 2024 election. ABC has delivered the most coverage, an exhaustive 257 minutes that accounts for 40 percent of the overall tally. NBC’s news shows have supplied 222 minutes of trial coverage, while CBS churned out 161 minutes. While the networks have pushed the Trump trial to the top of the news, that’s not the case with an ongoing case of Democratic corruption. Since our report last week, there’s been zero additional broadcast coverage of liberal Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ)’s bribery trial; the tally remains stuck at a piddling seven minutes and 56 seconds. A deep dive into the networks’ nightly coverage — which accounts for 244 minutes of the broadcast total — can be used to extrapolate how biased journalists leveraged the left-wing Democratic D.A.’s pursuit of a weak legal case to tarnish the former President and 2024 frontrunner with weeks of negative, tabloid headlines. Our analysts reviewed all 110 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories that discussed Trump’s New York trial from April 14 (the day before it began) through the start of deliberations on May 29. Key findings:   ■ A Nonpartisan Prosecution? Out of 110 evening news stories, only three hinted that D.A. Alvin Bragg was a partisan Democrat. The CBS Evening News never permitted this point to be made during the trial, while ABC let it slip just once, in the form of a soundbite from Trump on the May 12 World News Tonight, when the former President was heard calling Bragg a “radical Democrat District Attorney.” On the NBC Nightly News, there were exactly two references to Bragg as a Democrat. “Mr. Trump lambastes the case as a Democratic conspiracy to hurt his re-election chances,” reporter Laura Jarrett summarized on April 15. A week later (April 22), anchor Lester Holt teed up reporter Hallie Jackson: “Hallie, this is a partisan prosecution in the opinion of Mr. Trump?” Jackson replied, “Yeah, that’s what his campaign has been saying.” There were three stories (one on NBC, two on ABC) that directly referenced lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, but none explained he had left a high-ranking job at Joe Biden’s Justice Department to join Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. Similarly, there were six stories which identified prosecutor Joshua Steinglass and two others that named Susan Hoffinger, but no explanation that the duo were veteran Trump antagonists, having helped Bragg previously prosecute the former President’s businesses in another case. Instead, the networks presented the case as a strictly law enforcement exercise, referring almost always to “the prosecutors/the prosecution” (216 times) or “the state” (7 times). On May 6, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell introduced the case as “the People of the State of New York vs. Donald J. Trump,” thoroughly disguising the reality that this was not “the people” at work, but rather partisan Democrats. ■ Guilty until proven innocent? On April 15, ABC’s Aaron Katersky branded Trump “the first President in U.S. history to stand trial as a criminal defendant.” The same night, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell touted “the first criminal prosecution of a former President of the United States.” Of course that’s true, but only because of the partisan Bragg’s decision to indict Trump last year. Nevertheless, the networks enthusiastically hammered the point night after night. From April 14 through May 29, viewers heard the word “criminal” used 111 times in relation to the presumptive GOP nominee, slightly more than once per story; the term “felony” was heard an additional 18 times. Separately, NBC Nightly News used the more accurate phrase “low-level felony” nine times to describe the “Class E” (lowest level) charges against Trump, a distinction that the other broadcast networks never made. And, our analysts found, the phrase “hush money” — a tabloid term to describe a legal non-disclosure agreement — was used 113 times in these six weeks. In any other legal context, such repeated use of loaded language — “criminal,” “felony,” “hush money” — would be seen as creating a presumption of guilt around a defendant whom the legal system would consider innocent until proven guilty. NBC was the only network to provide any airtime to key points that would have given viewers important context, including how the previous Democratic District Attorney in Manhattan (Cy Vance), as well as federal prosecutors had looked at the same material and declined to press charges. NBC’s Laura Jarrett stated this fact twice on Nightly News, once on April 15 and again on April 22. Jarrett also undermined the prosecution's claim during opening statements that Trump’s conduct was “election fraud, pure and simple.” But, the NBC reporter countered: “Mr. Trump is not facing conspiracy or campaign finance violations, something the defense sought to highlight today.” While all of the networks quoted the arguments of Trump and his lawyers, Jarrett was the only correspondent who herself challenged elements of the prosecution’s case in advance of deliberations — and then for only 44 seconds (out of 244 total minutes of trial coverage). ■ Burying Michael Cohen’s perjury conviction: As would be expected, the networks’ coverage spent a significant portion of their airtime discussing former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s role in the case. From April 14 through May 29, the networks spent 75 minutes on Cohen, out of 244 total minutes, or roughly 30% of the evening news coverage. Yet despite Cohen’s central role in both the case and the coverage, network reporters barely mentioned his previous conviction for perjury. This inconvenient fact received just 94 seconds on the CBS Evening News, 80 seconds on the NBC Nightly News, and a pathetic 10 seconds on ABC’s World News Tonight. “One major challenge for prosecutors is getting the jury to believe Michael Cohen,” CBS’s Robert Costa admitted on May 13. “He’s a convicted felon who spent time in prison and admitted lying to Congress.” It was a “major challenge,” yet 96 percent of TV’s Cohen coverage during the past six weeks omitted this crucial fact. If the chief accuser of a Democratic politician had been a previously convicted liar, it’s not far-fetched to assume that such information would rate much more coverage than was the case with Cohen’s accusations against Trump. ■ Hiding Judge Merchan’s conflicts: None of the network evening newscasts informed viewers of any of the several conflicts raised against Judge Juan Merchan, including one donation to Joe Biden and another to the group “Stop Republicans,” both in 2020. “While the amounts here are minimal, it’s surprising that a sitting judge would make political donations of any size to a partisan candidate or cause,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig commented last year. The closest any viewers came to learning about the questions surrounding Merchan’s bias came when Trump was shown speaking outside the courtroom, as on the April 18 CBS Evening News: “You’ve got a D.A. that’s out of control. You have a judge that’s highly conflicted.” Yet throughout the trial, reporters never explained the conflicts that Trump referred to. The last time any network newscasts did was weeks earlier on April 2, when NBC Nightly News reporter Gabe Gutierrez provided one sentence of context explaining why Merchan’s gag order had been expanded to include “relatives of court staff.” Why? Because, Gutierrez noted, “Mr. Trump on social media attacked the judge’s adult daughter, who is a political consultant for Democrats.” That’s the last time any evening news viewer actually heard about the younger Merchan’s work as President of Authentic Campaigns, with clients such as California Democratic Senate candidate Adam Schiff, a longtime Trump nemesis, and even current Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Instead of focusing on these conflicts, the networks presented Merchan as an unbiased voice of authority. Most of the time (57% of stories), Merchan wasn’t even referred to by name, merely as “the judge,” cloaking him in the institutional respect that the role presumes ■ Heavy on the sleaze: Instead of scrutinizing the case against Trump, the networks (especially ABC and CBS) reveled in the tawdry, tabloid testimony against him — even though they had been previously reported years earlier, and had little to do with the question of business records at the heart of the case. On 91 occasions (sometimes more than once per story), evening news viewers heard allegations that Trump engaged in extramarital sex. Most, but not all, of these references were accompanied by a perfunctory, one-sentence reminder that Trump had denied all such charges. The word “porn” was used 47 times, compared with 35 instances when the slightly-less vulgar “adult film” modifier was used to describe Stormy Daniels’ profession. Fourteen times, viewers heard that another accuser, Karen McDougal, was a “Playboy” model. The networks regurgitated old and negative claims against Trump, even if they were not permitted in court. In advance of the trial, Judge Merchan forbade playing clips of the infamous Access Hollywood tape — first shown eight years ago — in order, the judge wrote, “to avoid undue prejudice.” Yet ABC’s World News Tonight ran such prejudicial clips six times during the trial, while the CBS Evening News aired such material twice. “I just start kissing them,” those tuning in to CBS on April 25 heard Trump allegedly telling Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” ABC viewers heard Trump boast all six times the Access Hollywood tape was mentioned on World News Tonight. “They let you do anything.” NBC Nightly News was once again the most restrained, running the video just once with sound (April 21), and then only an innocuous clip of Trump saying “nice to see you” to a woman outside the trailer. Four times, the CBS Evening News dug up clips from their network’s six-year-old 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels, including a segment in which Daniels alleged she had “unprotected sex” with Trump and how she supposedly directed the future President to “turn around and take off his pants,” and “gave him a couple of swats.” In that same May 7 newscast, CBS News legal expert Rikki Klieman explained it was all irrelevant: “There is no legal significance to the salacious details” in Daniels’ testimony — and none, presumably, in the inflammatory quotes resurrected by CBS for the trial. ■ A six-week long negative ad: This wave of tawdry allegations, plus a prosecution presented as nonpartisan, added up to heavily negative coverage of the former President. Between April 14 and May 29, our analysts tallied 230 negative statements about Trump related to the trial, vs. just seven positive statements (mostly soundbites from pro-Trump rallygoers who rejected the idea that the case might shake their support). This translates to 97% negative coverage (methodological details below), which would be  historic negativity if it wasn’t nearly identical to these networks previous coverage of Trump in other contexts. Don’t think this steady drumbeat of negative anti-Trump news doesn’t matter: An April poll by NBC News found that while Trump had a narrow (46% to 44%) national lead, voters who say they primarily get their information from “national network news like NBC, ABC or CBS” said they preferred Biden in a landslide (55% to 35%). And, according to NBC’s poll, nearly one-third of voters (32%) say they depend on the “national network news” for their information. For the last six weeks, those voters have been treated to a festival of Trump-bashing, as the networks amplify the worst allegations against the former President. So even if the trial doesn’t give liberals the Trump conviction they’ve yearned for, it’s still been an election-year bonanza for Democrats, who’ve enjoyed watching their nemesis getting pilloried by the press. +++++ METHODOLOGY:  We calculated the spin of Trump’s trial coverage by tallying all clearly positive and negative statements from non-partisan or unaffiliated sources — in other words, reporters, anchors, voters. We excluded evaluative comments from Trump himself, his staff and identified surrogates, as well as all identified Democrats. It also excludes “horse race assessments” about the candidates’ prospects for winning or losing.

Now, more than ever, the world is showing us that our future is hard to predict, with natural disasters occurring all over the globe and the economy slowly declining, reminiscent of 2008. The post Why you should pack for more than 72 hours appeared first on Survivopedia.

Does the name Jonathan Keeperman ring a bell? What about Lomez, the pseudonym Keeperman has used over the past few years while amassing 75,000 followers on X and building a successful publishing company? 'We investigated and reported out the identity of a leading far-right commentator who publishes and platforms prominent racists. ... That isn’t doxxing — it’s straightforward coverage of the most influential political movement in America today.' Keeperman's online presence is a bit too small-scale to qualify him as an "influencer," and the readership served by Passage Publishing, while growing, is still rather niche. The former high school basketball star lives a quiet life centered on work and family — hardly the profile of someone courting fame. So there's a decent chance you don't know him. But at least one journalist-activist thinks you should.G'day, anon! Earlier this month, a Portland, Oregon-based Australian writer named Jason Wilson published an article in the Guardian under the breathless headline "Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house." Although somewhat grandiosely billed as an "investigation," Wilson's piece confines itself to one simple question: Who is the anonymous writer and publisher known as "Lomez"? The intrepid muckraker expends 3,000 words to provide the answer, which would seem to be of little interest to anyone outside a certain segment of the very online: Lomez is Jonathan Keeperman, a 41-year-old native Californian with an MFA from UC Irvine, which subsequently employed him as a lecturer in the English department. Wilson pads his expose by rehashing Keeperman's rise to prominence under this name, noting that his "far-right" X account had managed to amass a modest but respectable 55,000 followers in recent years. Nor does Wilson fail to mention the growing success of the company Keeperman founded in 2021, Passage Publishing. But all of this was already common knowledge to both Keeperman's supporters and detractors. The bulk of Wilson's reporting consists of clicking his way through public statements that are not in themselves especially incriminating: the X post in support of Kyle Rittenhouse, the articles for the American Mind and IM-1776, the popularization of "longhouse" as a metaphor for feminist overreach. At times Wilson's penchant to disseminate the obvious leads him to serve as a kind of guerrilla marketer. He dutifully he rattles off a number of the authors whose works are available for purchase on the Passage Publishing site, some of which he notes appear in "lavishly produced" deluxe editions. Wilson betrays his desperation to make something of this perfectly unremarkable commercial activity when he asks one A. James McAdams, a political scientist who researches "far-right thinkers," to weigh in on what possible motive Keeperman could have had to start a business. “This is a source of money,” comes the expert response. “The general public does not know about Ernst Jünger, but you can sell his books to the far right, and you can make money.” Far more rigorous is Wilson's careful assembly of evidence tracing the Lomez identity back to Keeperman. The reporter tracks his quarry down a twisting trail of Whois lookups, LegalZoom LLC filings, and burner Twitter accounts. Cross-checking biographical details mentioned by the Lomez persona with public information about Keeperman reveals extensive parallels. Both Lomez and Keeperman are third-born children who excelled at high school basketball; both have a father who died in autumn 2022. Wilson's "Deep Throat" is a former UCI colleague who listens to Lomez podcast appearances and identifies the voice as Keeperman's. Master of the doxx-posé Eventually, the reader wearies of all this journalism. He realizes that these meticulously sourced facts won't add up to anything bigger. There's no crime or grand conspiracy at the bottom of this rabbit hole. For Wilson, stripping Keeperman of his anonymity is its own end. Which makes his article a perfect example of a relatively new nonfiction form, as revolutionary in its way as "New Journalism" was in the '60s. Let's call it the doxx-posé. The practice of doxxing originated with hackers, who would self-police their community of digital outlaws by broadcasting the identity of anyone who stepped out of line. It later came to mean the publishing of a public figure's personal information (a policeman's or judge's home address, for example) with the implied threat that others would use that information to do the figure harm. Like its antecedents, the doxx-posé is essentially malicious in intent; what makes it particularly weaselly is the way it disguises that intent as a high-minded act of journalism. The doxx-posé writer pretends to uncover a newsworthy truth without ever explaining why that truth is important. After all, what's wrong with publishing under an assumed name? There's a long tradition of using pseudonyms and a variety of perfectly respectable reasons for doing so. In 1996, then-Newsweek editor Joe Klein released his Clinton campaign roman à clef "Primary Colors" under the nom de plume "Anonymous." Doing so, Klein recalled a few years ago, gave his novel "a mystical power I hadn’t imagined." I’d held back my name partly as a goof, an homage to pseudonymous 19th-century serial novels. Benjamin Disraeli and Henry Adams, among others, had employed the conceit; "Sense and Sensibility'" was written by "A Lady.'" To my amazement, members of Clinton’s team began accusing one another of having written it. The intrigue surrounding it helped the gossipy "Primary Colors" sell millions of copies. The doxx-posé writer has no time for such genial parlor games. He writes under the assumption that anonymity is no longer a laughing matter. The Lomez mask conceals not a mischievous wag but a kind of terrorist, who uses language to harm the body politic. And so the mask must be removed. We know this not because Wilson bothers to explain why Keeperman is a threat but because he describes Keepernan with the same vague, meaningless labels with which the left identifies all its ideological enemies: "proto-fascist," "far-right," "anti-LGBTQ+." The article's sole accomplishment is to attach these shorthand accusations to a real name. And what are we supposed to do with this information? Wilson insinuates that Keeperman's position as a "university lecturer" (he left the job in 2022) was somehow incompatible with his online activities, without explaining why. If there were a conflict of interest, its up to the reader to imagine it. More creepy is the message Wilson sends by digging into Keeperman's personal life: calling his home, linking to his wedding pictures, looking up property he owns. Ostensibly this is in the service of verifying Keeperman's identity, but the subtext is clear. Pretty nice life you got here, Mr. Keeperman. It would be a shame if you said anything to ruin it. When a doxx-posé does upend its target's life, the damage it inflicts retroactively legitimizes the the doxx-posé writer. The punishment proves the guilt. They fired him? I guess he was doing something wrong. Who doxxes the doxxers? Align contacted Wilson via email to ask why Keeperman's identity was newsworthy enough to justify a 3,000-word article in a major newspaper. Rejecting the characterization of his article as "doxxing," Wilson replied: "We investigated and reported out the identity of a leading far-right commentator who publishes and platforms prominent racists, and used anonymity to make threats online and direct unfriendly attention at events in his own community. That isn’t doxxing — it’s straightforward coverage of the most influential political movement in America today." Wilson's response is disappointingly — yet typically — circular. As in his article, the epithet "racist" is meant to be self-evident, requiring no further proof or explanation. Then there's the nefarious use to which Keeperman allegedly put his anonymity. Lomez's raison de posting seems to be no different from that of countless other, often more prominent anons: making "offensive" jokes and expressing unpopular beliefs. As an example of Keeperman's online "threats," Wilson's email to Align links to an archived post responding to pundit Max Boot's call for a reinvigorated GOP: Wilson links to the same post in his article, quoting the first entry in the list and soberly describing it as "an apparent call for summary lynchings of members of the media." He fails to quote any subsequent entries, however, leaving the reader to wonder if he regards proposals to "beaverize the watershed" and "arm the moderate alt-right Latinx nationalists" as little more than idle japes. As an example of Keeperman "direct[ing] unfriendly attention at events in his own community," Wilson links to a post in which the sometime Montana resident offers critical commentary on an upcoming "family friendly drag show:" — (@) While this post failed to make the final cut of Wilson's article, it clearly catches Keeperman in the act of inciting his followers. He openly urges them to question just when drag's raunchy, hypersexualized parodies of femininity supplanted balloon-twisting party clowns as optimal children's entertainment. Physiognomy check In Wilson's defense, his article does fail to meet the criteria for doxxing in one crucial respect: Keeperman seems to have suffered few if any negative consequences as a result of his big unmasking. If anything, Wilson's well-wrought doxx-posé seems to have improved Keeperman's fortunes, prompting multiple displays of solidarity from friends and acquaintances and gaining him more than 20,000 new followers on X. In post after post, Keeperman supporters marveled at how Wilson inadvertently pulled off a strange kind of reverse character assassination. Revealed: Lomez is tall and handsome. He can dunk a basketball. His UC Irvine students loved him. His wife is beautiful. Less kind posters couldn't resist the opportunity to compare Keeperman's chiseled, square-jawed visage to the headshot accompanying Wilson's Guardian bio. Coming out as Keeperman was also a boon for business. Passage Publishing was quick to capitalize on the publicity by offering free shipping for Steve Sailer's "Noticing" with the cheeky promo code "Wilson." Said anthology soon climbed the Amazon Kindle charts, becoming the number-one new release in "golf" and "statistics" and reaching number two in "social policy." — (@) Align originally reached out to Keeperman on May 13, the day before the Guardian article appeared. Our intention was to profile him as a rising entrepreneur. Neither of us had any way of knowing that fate — in the form of a Media and Communications PhD turned streetwise, immigrant cybersleuth — was about to add a shocking new chapter to Lomez lore. The following interview was conducted via shared Google doc over the period from May 14 through 23. ALIGN: Is “Lomez” a "Seinfeld" reference? I’ve always wondered. JONATHAN KEEPERMAN: It is a "Seinfeld" reference. Decades ago, when I started posting on the internet, pre-Twitter, I needed a handle. I must have recently watched a "Seinfeld" episode where Lomez, one of Kramer’s off-screen friends, was mentioned. It was a unique name and, I thought, suitable for an anon. ALIGN: Jason Wilson's "Guardian" article about you cites one A. James McAdams on your possible motivations for starting Passage Press: “This is a source of money. The general public does not know about Ernst Jünger, but you can sell his books to the far right, and you can make money.” Selling books to make money? How accurate a description is this of the Passage Press business model? JK: What an incisive observation. I don’t know how Dr. McAdams was able to pull back the curtain on our nefarious scheme. No wonder he’s a tenured professor at a prestigious university! Our original business plan was to give our books away for free, and when the communist revolution comes we will be prepared to do our part, but alas, for now, in the pre-dawn of our coming utopia, we have to pay our bills. McAdams’ comments in the article really are the smoking gun for how utterly corrupt American intellectual life has become. The fact that he calls Ernst Jünger a “far-right” figure, as if to dismiss such a great man’s work with this meaningless phrase, demonstrates these people's utter lack of seriousness. They are either illiterate, willfully ignorant, or brazen liars. I don’t know which of those is worse, and I suspect it’s a combination of all three. Jünger is one of the most brilliant and complex writers of the 20th century. "Storm of Steel" is perhaps the most profound firsthand account of the experience of war that has ever been written. Jünger’s writing on art, religion, philosophy, and the totalizing tendencies of modernity transcend the petty ideological games these people demand we play. No wonder they hate him. Anybody with a soul will take great comfort in Jünger’s writing and be elevated by him. Truthfully, it breaks my heart that people who presume to be our intellectual betters have failed so spectacularly and stooped to such bottom-feeding invective. They are unworthy of uttering Jünger’s name. ALIGN: But seriously: What are the economics of publishing like these days? On the one hand, I assume printing on demand saves money; on the other hand, nobody reads books. On the other other hand, you can more easily target the audience who is interested in your book without big, wasteful marketing campaigns. JK: Publishing is a difficult business that really only works at volume. That’s why it’s such a hard industry to break into. You capture small margins and have to sell a lot of books before you can break even. That is the old logic, anyway. We’ve found a new model for selling books that captures both the luxury consumer who values nice physical objects made with care and the price-sensitive consumer who just wants to read a regular old paperback. So this means on the one hand selling small-batch, hand-crafted books with very fine materials at a premium (our Patrician Editions), and then selling a paperback version once those are accounted for. Just how much this model can scale is anyone’s guess, but so far we’ve sold out of everything we’ve printed, so we will continue down this path until the market tells us otherwise. ALIGN: Could you describe — in as much detail as you can bear — the origin of Passage Publishing? Did it start with the more or less spontaneous announcement of the Passage Prize in response to a Twitter exchange? JK: “The more or less spontaneous announcement of the Passage Prize” is correct. I did not set out to start a publishing company. As recent reports confirm, I had a comfortable job as an academic and wasn’t trying (at least not consciously) to find an escape hatch. Around mid-2020 or so, just as COVID hysteria was peaking, I began to observe that culture was stuck. Not stuck accidentally, but as a result of systematically excluding certain types of art and stories from certain types of people. This was not a novel observation. I think just about everyone, from every corner of the culture, was feeling and even saying the same things. So I thought, "Why not try to do something about this, however modest?" My idea was to take $10,000 of my own money and put it up as a prize for an art and literature contest. I wanted to see what kinds of talent I might be able to dredge up from the online ferment. The project then took on a life of its own. Long story short: I ended up receiving over 2,000 submissions and raising another $10,000 in prize money. I had some great judges helping me along the way; they deserve as much credit as anyone for the project's success. We turned the winning submissions into a book and sold out the entire print run, which created enough revenue to fund the second prize. It was obvious at that point that we were on to something. But I hadn’t yet taken a cent from the project; in fact, I'd lost a not insignificant amount of money along the way. I knew that if I wanted to sustain this work, I’d have to start thinking a little bigger. That’s when I formulated the idea for a proper publishing company, and the rest, as they say, is history. ALIGN: Was Michael Anton’s article “The Tom Wolfe Model” an influence on Passage Publishing? JK: It was. I had the idea for something like the Passage Prize for awhile, and there are some old threads of mine on Twitter where I’m speculating about what new patronage networks for art and culture might look like, but Anton’s essay really catalyzed my thinking and helped validate my hunch that I was not alone in these thoughts. ALIGN: How do you pay authors? Publishing, like music, is one of those industries people often speak of as “broken” — especially when it comes to artists making a decent living. Do you see what you’re doing as offering any kind of replicable, long-term solution? JK: We are experimenting with royalty structure and have a current model that breaks slightly from the Big Five. Paying our authors is of course important, but what the industry needs to figure out is what value a publisher actually adds for writers, many of whom have large enough social media followings to serve as their own marketing apparatus. One thing we do is make really high-quality physical books that writers can’t make themselves. We’ve also had a lot of success with events and readings that get authors in front of a paid audience. We are building a community around our writers and readers that is different from anything mainstream publishers are doing (or frankly capable of doing). ALIGN: What kind of marketing does Passage Publishing do? Does having a relatively large follower count on X allow you to rely mostly on “word of mouth”? JK: So far, word of mouth on Twitter has been our best and really only form of marketing. At the scale we are at, this works, and our audience has continued to grow. Big social media flash points like Steve Sailer’s ongoing dispute with Will Stancil, or my recent micro-moment in the spotlight, help get us in front of even more eyes. We believe in our work. And we believe that readers, wherever they may be, who find our stuff will be impressed enough to stick around to buy the next thing. Brick by brick. Organic growth. Keep publishing great books. That’s the formula. That’s the tweet. ALIGN: Do you deal with any kind of censorship? I was able to find "Noticing" on Amazon; then again, it’s “not available” for whatever reason. JK: So far we have not dealt with any institutional censorship. Amazon, with a few notable exceptions, has been pretty good in the past about allowing all sorts of books on their platform. I don’t foresee that changing, though it’s possible I’m being naive. We know we will be under fire — see the Guardian’s hysterical reporting as an example — but we are agile. We control most of our own production and distribution. If bottlenecks around censorship show up, we will pivot and find solutions. ALIGN: How important is Amazon to independent publishing? Self-published writers have told me it’s essential, like it or not. Is it different for you? JK: We only started selling books on Amazon a couple of weeks ago. Our direct sales model from our website has sustained us so far. But yes, Amazon is a behemoth. I don’t know that a book business can thrive without them. But again, if Amazon decides to take radical action and start censoring Ernst Jünger, I suppose we will adapt to that too. ALIGN: What kind of administrative etc. overhead do you have? I assume you can just use ready-made ecommerce tools (I could be wrong)? What about editing and design? Marketing? Printing? JK: There are ready-made services that can do some of this stuff, and AI may help with some design and editing efficiencies, but there is nothing like the human touch. We have a lean staff, but we do have a staff. We also work with a handful of designers and editors on contract. Normal startup environment, I suppose. ALIGN: I particularly like the design of the three Peter Kemp covers. And for different reasons, the cover of “Noticing” — something about that featureless silhouette evokes the '70s educational TV programming of my youth. JK: Yes, our designers are really incredible artists, two of whom I found through the Passage Prize. Book design in general, like the rest of the industry, is mostly pretty dull. These book covers all more or less look the same and speak to a bygone era of information design. Like with everything else we do, we want to shake up the visual landscape. We want books that really stick out on your shelf. Our design for Nick Land’s "Xenosystems" is a great example of this. But then, not all authors should be treated with this approach. Steve Sailer is not Nick Land, and his style of quiet, reasonable punditry needs a visual language to match. ALIGN: Is it possible (or advisable) to have handshake (or very simple) legal agreements with writers — or do lawyers need to get involved? JK: I value a firm handshake as much as the next guy, but just as good fences make good neighbors, good contracts make good business partners. That’s been my experience, anyway. ALIGN: Many of the works you publish are public domain. All curatorial taste and market savvy aside, is publishing authors like Conrad, Jünger, and Kemp as easy as choosing what’s out there, “cutting and pasting” and then repackaging? JK: It could be that easy, but again we want to offer value to our readers they can’t get elsewhere. Anything we publish will come with something that has a Passage signature. In our new collection of stories from H.P. Lovecraft, for example, we commissioned the great comic artist Alex Wisner to create original drawings for each story. In our forthcoming three-volume set of Robert E. Howard books, we commissioned a scholar on his work to craft new introductions and contextualize Howard’s work. ALIGN: I assume the company takes its name from Jünger’s “The Forest Passage.” Could you describe what that book means to you — and how it speaks to Passage Publishing’s mission? JK: That’s correct. I think Jünger’s "Forest Passage" is one of the most important pieces of writing of the last century and is perhaps more relevant now than ever. The book asks what it means to stand apart from and outside a totalizing cultural and political leviathan, one that wants to reduce us to meek, unrelenting surrender. Jünger describes this state as omnipresent and all-seeing. Even worse, it's impossible to locate — it surrounds you like a miasmatic fog. To me, that image is quite powerful. As is the place Jünger proposes as an alternative: the wild, undomesticated forest where men — “forest rebels” in Jünger's parlance — can gather the imaginative and moral courage to find their way to something new. This is the whole concept of Passage in a nutshell. ALIGN: Most of the works you republish seem to have developed a certain following on the “dissident right” (or what have you). To what extent are you reacting to what the “scene” is talking about, and to what extent are you introducing books and writers to them? JK: We are not reacting. There are a certain number of writers that have gained meme status on the right — Evola and Spengler come to mind — and there is certainly nothing at all wrong with reading those guys or publishing them, but we have our own vision, our own canon of forgotten or what I call “obscured” writers that we are trying to reintroduce to the public. We are starting from the premise that people’s mental models for the world are broken or at least woefully incomplete. Their understanding of history has been purposefully constrained and intended to nudge people toward very particular conclusions about how we are supposed to think and act in the current year. People are carrying around these narratives without even realizing it. We want to disrupt that. We want to jar those closed-off spaces open and allow for a fuller picture of the world to come through. ALIGN: One thing I’ve noticed about many of my “normie” friends — regardless of their politics — is this untroubled assumption that all of the old cultural gatekeeping institutions are both still relevant and still functional. Even conservatives who know enough to bash CNN and “fake news” don’t know or care who Steve Sailer is, for example. If he had something important to say, he’d have a TV show or write Ann Coulter-level best-sellers. JK: Yes, it’s a curious thing. I’ve written about epistemic authority quite a bit and how officialdom gets cemented in the collective consciousness. Who produces truth? Conservatives laugh at the left when they ask this question, as if it’s just some postmodern gobbledygook — the truth is the truth, after all. But it's highly salient. When we look at any event — be it January 6, the pandemic, George Floyd’s death, etc. — we are inevitably dealing in matters of interpretation. Even the driest, most just-the-facts-ma’am summary of these events has normative implications based on what facts are included and what aren’t. And in every instance, the official narrative about "what happened" gets constructed by a web of self-reinforcing institutions that all share a very narrow ideological framework. [Passage Publishing author] Curtis Yarvin famously calls this web of institutions the cathedral. We need to jam these networks up and offer an alternative web of self-verifying channels of information. ALIGN: The lack of curiosity seems even more pronounced when it comes to literature. I know I used to write off the idea that anything artistically worthwhile was happening online. Wondering what your experience was in realizing its potential— especially as someone who explored the more traditionally credentialing MFA route. JK: There’s a temptation to think you are slumming it by writing and growing an audience online, that there is something lesser about this ecosystem than what is on offer in normie publishing. I reject this totally. The normie lit world (with certain exceptions, among them friends of mine who have succeeded there) is just mind-numbingly boring. There is no risk-taking. No wildness. It is a sewing circle. So the online world has been a blessing. There is tremendous raw talent and a readership that actually cares about ideas. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. ALIGN: While I’m on the topic, did you go through an analogous red-pill conversion at some point? JK: No real red-pilling for me. My path is somewhat unusual in that I’ve more or less always been on this side of the fence. I was reading Sailer when I was 20 years old. While I was no fan of Bush in high school, I would side with Pat Buchanan when I’d watch "The McLaughlin Group" with my dad (much to his dismay), and I always cited Richard Nixon as my favorite modern president. Granted, the latter was something of a troll ... at any rate, I'm not sure what formed my political inclinations. I think I was just born this way. ALIGN: I follow a lot of marketing guru accounts on X, and one consistent theme is the counterintuitive popularity of “high-ticket offers” — people want to pay a lot of money for something you tell them is worth it. Is that your experience with the Sailer “Patrician Edition”? JK: I don’t have strong intuitions about marketing or consumer behavior. Truth be told, these Patrician Editions were my business partner’s idea, and I personally feel a bit weird asking people to spend that kind of money on a book. But his instincts are correct and mine aren’t on this. So when he tells me to jump, I jump. ALIGN: Speaking of Sailer, I may be slow, but I only recently got the "Gone Golfing" reference on those hats you sell. Brilliant! Just copped one in navy. JK: Maybe we'll do Sailer-themed driver covers next. ALIGN: Could you describe any mistakes you made or lessons you learned in the course of building up this company? JK: Most of the things you do running a business, in my experience, anyway, is a mistake in the sense that there was some alternative thing you could’ve done that would’ve been slightly more optimal. It’s a constant process of iterating on your mistakes. So no, there really isn’t anything I can point to where I’d say “We really screwed that up.” The things that keep me up at night are the little things. I know of about a dozen typos and formatting errors throughout our books that I failed to catch during editing. This drives me crazy. But I’ve come to learn that the vast majority of consumers don’t see these things and trust that when we do make mistakes, we’ll fix them for the next time (and we will). ALIGN: Any big breakthroughs in the business? Landing a writer or reaching a certain sales milestone? JK: So far we’ve been very lucky to get exactly the writers we wanted in order to kick off this project. I have to give a special thanks to Curtis Yarvin, who agreed to let me put "Unqualified Reservations" into physical print before I really had a business at all. That book, which attempted to take Yarvin’s influential blog and convert it to printed media, really was a proof of concept. I didn’t know what I was doing and went through quite a bit of editorial experimentation to figure it out. The process is not as straightforward as you might think. How do you take a text that is native to the internet — each page containing dozens of hyperlinks (a device central to the writer’s style) and make that accessible to a reader holding the text in his hands as a book? I encourage you to buy "Unqualified Reservations" to figure out how we pulled it off, but some of the innovations we developed we were later able to apply to the writing of Steve Sailer and Nick Land, both of whom were also gracious enough to give me their business. ALIGN: To me it’s evident that you have good taste and that anything with the Passage imprimatur is worth checking out. JK: I agree. ALIGN: That said, how would you pitch some of your wares to someone going in completely cold? "Noticing," or the Kemp trilogy, or Jünger. JK: It’s a good question. Where do you start with any of this stuff? I will say that I think it’s all of a piece. Nothing we are publishing is chosen haphazardly. All of this work helps fill out a mental map that, broadly speaking, encompasses what some might call the new right (though I confess I don’t like that term and have my reasons for rejecting it). In any case, these ideas don’t need to be discovered linearly. One book doesn’t necessarily lead to the next. There is probably a good bit of wisdom in starting with the oldest stuff first, but if I had to offer a suggestion, I’d just say, “Go with your gut.” ALIGN: What are your plans for the future? JK: My plans are simple: Keep publishing good, important work that appeals to a broad readership. Disseminate books that can help rebalance our narrative and intellectual foundations so that we can make better decisions both politically and in our own private lives. ALIGN: What about your own writing? JK: Unfortunately, my own writing has been put on hold. Maybe one day I will get back to writing fiction, but for now my time and creative energies are best spent servicing the work of others. ALIGN: Is there a useful name for this “scene” of people building alternative institutions and infrastructure? I never know what to call it when “pitching” to people who aren’t very online. Some shorthand would be useful. JK: I don’t like labels. To the extent there is a scene, I don’t see it as my job to identify it, lest it becomes too rigid and therefore uninteresting. What this “thing” is, at bottom, is simply a cluster on a social graph, with many overlapping adjacent clusters. Political language like “right,” “dissident right,” “new right,” or whatever doesn’t really belong to us. It’s the language of the people who want to ghettoize what we’re doing, and while I am sympathetic to Conquest’s Law, I would rather not play according to the rules of my enemy’s rhetorical games. ALIGN: Roughly speaking, I don’t think it’s about an ideology check as much as it is the conscious and public commitment to trusting your own senses and conclusions and any wisdom older than Obama’s second term. People of various political beliefs united by the willingness to realign themselves to proper, true incentives: family, faith, community prosperity, order — human flourishing, basically. As opposed to all the fake incentives DEI etc has installed. JK: Yes, correct. I’ve described this attitude as “pre-political.” I’m not sure that is a sticky phrase, or even a good one, but I think we should be thinking about our cultural projects outside the frame of politics. They have a political dimension, no doubt, and I’m not trying to suggest that politics don’t matter, or politics are fake or cringe or something, but rather that the creative enterprise, the artistic gesture is derived from more fundamental impulses, more personal impulses, biological and spiritual impulses.

Beginning in March 2020, governments, academics, social media companies, mainstream media, power-hungry bureaucrats, and globalists colluded to drive the narrative of the COVID-19 epidemic. Anyone, whether a concerned citizen, a democratically elected politician, or even a distinguished epidemiologist, going against that narrative needed to be silenced and discredited as quickly as possible. That same cabal, led by people such as former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, has spent years lying, obfuscating, and avoiding consequences for its actions. The members can hide no more. 'That’s the one thing shadowy bureaucratic schemers like Anthony Fauci cannot withstand — exposure to sunlight.' Armed with the facts, BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe and his team at Free the People have spent months investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus and the extreme lengths to which the government, the media, academics, and public health bureaucrats went to prevent anyone from so much as questioning the official narrative. On Thursday, May 30, Blaze Media released the first episode in a new docuseries, “The Coverup,” hosted by Kibbe and produced by Free the People. Part political thriller, part true crime investigation, “The Coverup” sheds light on the dissident voices that the corporate media, at the behest of government, tried to silence. Kibbe told Blaze Media, “Free the People produced ‘The Coverup’ to shine light on the shadowy government figures who caused so much pain and suffering with their tyrannical overreach during the pandemic. They would rather we not uncover what really happened. They want us to just move on.” He added, “Unfortunately for them, I’m not going to let that happen.” Kibbe continued, “As someone who has been fighting big government for most of my career, this fight is the most crucial one. I want to expose their unethical motives and wildly dangerous actions and figure out who really pulls the strings behind the curtain of the pandemic industrial complex. Because they’re not going to stop. The power is too intoxicating.” “They will stop at nothing to demonize and destroy anyone brave enough to ask the right questions. This investigative series from Blaze Media and Free the People will arm alarmed citizens with the truth, and that’s the one thing shadowy bureaucratic schemers like Anthony Fauci cannot withstand — exposure to sunlight,” Kibbe concluded. The series features insights from infectious disease experts who authored the Great Barrington Declaration, pushing back against the wisdom and efficacy of lockdowns. You’ll hear stories from inside the White House Coronavirus Task Force about why the president’s advisers were so committed to the natural origin explanation of the virus. Journalists will explain why they were silenced on social media for attempting to do their jobs, asking questions instead of marching in lockstep with the administration’s talking points. And the lone senator who has dared to demand accountability and transparency from his colleagues, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, will describe the steps he’s taking to get to the bottom of the COVID cover-up and to hold those responsible accountable. On Monday, Anthony Fauci will appear once again before a congressional committee and try to deflect, deny, and delay any accountability he should face for his actions during the pandemic. On May 30, you can begin to arm yourself with the facts to fight back against his false narrative. The first episode of “The Coverup” will premiere on Thursday, May 30, on BlazeTV and features Stanford University medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the man Anthony Fauci and his sidekick Francis Collins dismissed as a “fringe epidemiologist.” “The Coverup” is available exclusively on BlazeTV. If you aren’t a BlazeTV+ subscriber, visit FauciCoverup.com and use code FauciLied for $30 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

A courtroom video shows the unbelievable moment when a defendant on trial for driving with a suspended license joined a Zoom hearing on the matter — while driving a car.Judge Cedric Simpson was presiding over the hearing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, WJBK-TV reported, adding that defendant Corey Harris joined the May 15 video hearing from behind the wheel of a car.'Okay, so maybe I don’t understand something,' the judge began. 'This is a driving while license suspended [hearing], and he was just driving, and he didn’t have a license.'"Mr Harris, are you driving?" Simpson asked Harris."Actually, I’m pulling into my doctor’s office," Harris replied. "Just give me one second, I'm parking right now."Simpson was incredulous, dropping his pen and resting his head on his hand, WJBK said."All right," the judge interjected. "What are we doing?" Image source: WJBK-TV video screenshotHarris' public defender asked Simpson to adjourn the hearing, but the judge wasn't about to let this one go."Okay, so maybe I don’t understand something," the judge began. "This is a driving while license suspended [hearing], and he was just driving, and he didn’t have a license.""Uh," Harris muttered."Those were the charges, your honor, yes," the public defender replied."No, I'm looking at his record; he doesn't have a license," Simpson shot back. "He's suspended, and he's just driving.""That is correct, your honor," the public defender acknowledged."Uh," Harris muttered again before adding a "hello?" amid a long silence from the court.Finally, the judge noted, "I don’t even know why he would do that." Image source: WJBK-TV video screenshotSimpson soon announced that Harris' bond was revoked, and he ordered the defendant to turn himself in at the Washtenaw County jail by 6 p.m. that same day or else he'd be held without bond, WJBK noted.With that, Harris leaned his head back and sighed, "Oh, my God." Image source: WJBK-TV video screenshotHere's the video of the entire exchange:WJBK spoke to Harris' attorney who said she "strives to live in a world where people are not jailed for non-violent offenses," but the station said she refused to comment further.A number of everyday people had hilarious reactions to what went down in the courtroom.One woman told WJBK she advises Harris to "just walk, from here out" instead of getting behind a steering wheel anytime soon. A man added to the station that next time Harris ought to dress in a suit and tie and sign into the Zoom video hearing from inside his house.Speaking of, Harris' next court date is set for June 5, WJBK said.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

In 2020, the Trump administration helped broker the Abraham Accords to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states.