I was not surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and at first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and have seen…

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Politics The Biden Coverup Comes Back to Bite the Dems There are no good options.  Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images I was not surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and at first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and have seen the endless string of viral clips of Biden falling down the main stairs of Air Force One (and being reassigned to the shorter crew stairs in response). I’ve seen the memes and loops of his many gaffes, and the awkwardly long pauses where Joe just drifts off when he is no longer in the spotlight or next to Jill. So the debate held little surprise for me. But for those whose media diet is slim, and whose images of Biden were relegated to highly edited mainstream clips, they saw Biden in-the-real for the first time and it shocked the hell out of them. It was clear what so many have said before to little belief: The Emperor has no clothes on. Some 85 percent of voters thought Biden was too frail to be president. That massive number of Americans must include almost everyone who has cared for an aging relative and knows the signs: mixed up words, forgotten details, the long, empty stares where conversation used to be. His debate performance and other stumbles were symbols of a deteriorating man, not signs of a bad night. Biden’s boast that he faces a cognitive test every day is ironically borne out by the results: an endless war in the Ukraine where there is no path to victory, an endless war in Gaza where the Israel mocks Biden’s red lines, and then the domestic issues of immigration and the economy, particularly intransigent inflation eating away at paychecks. If the presidency has been a test, Biden fails. Never mind bad optics; Biden failed at the real meat of the job, which is not being discussed. His own stubbornness and the games played around him weakened America at home and left it exposed and vulnerable to forces abroad. Which brings us to Biden Problem Two—actually a Kamala problem, the fact that the White House, Democratic Party and Joe himself have been, abetted by the mainstream media, lying to us for years about the condition of first Candidate Biden and then President Biden.  We now can surmise that the 2020 basement campaign, supposedly compelled by Covid, was actually a subterfuge, a way to spoon-feed good images and sound bites of Biden to the public and hide his ongoing condition. Clever propaganda, like Franklin Roosevelt appearing to “stand” at public events when in fact in private he was wheelchair-bound due to polio. The Wall Street Journal reports congressional leaders were worried about Biden’s mental state back in 2021. Democrats covered it up. That’s whom Kamala is beholden to, leaving the Democratic base to consist of Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries. Kamala’s problem is not with the undecided voters; it is with Democratic voters. How can they believe her after such malarkey? Indeed, it was only a week before the debate the White House was claiming video of Biden wandering off and/or falling down was the result of nefarious editing and visual trickery (that line of argument dissipated quickly post-debate.) Then it became a dead solid accepted fact that Biden was senile, and Democrats were paralyzed. No one listened to anything except questions about Biden’s ability. No one seemed to ask but likely thought about why this was hidden from the public. Kamala begins her campaign shouting into the wind, “Believe me!” Why should anyone? Did she not see Biden’s deterioration and keep silent about it? Meanwhile, the Democratic party, which has accused Trump of being anti-democracy, is running a candidate who never won a primary, removing the loser via some backroom process as transparent as chocolate pudding. Remember all the moaning about the many political and Constitutional crises Trump was to unleash? Here’s a real one. You’ll hear no mea culpa from the media about remaining quiet over what they knew from their own close contact with the President, as they remained silent after lying about Russiagate and Hunter’s not-Russian laptop. They saw the real Joe Biden and, instead of informing the American people, acted as agents of the Democratic Party to help cover things up. In an era where everything about Trump is fair game and then some (if there’s no lead story today, make one up!) the media was silent about Joe. This is the same media that for four years of Trump bleated emptily about the 25th amendment and how Trump was unstable, unqualified, and mentally ill. To make things worse, the media pivoted twice in a two week span, jumping on Biden to quit the race like school cafeteria bullies (Bill Maher called them “mean girls who smelled blood in the water”) and then spewing out funereal dirges about Biden the statesman when he did drop out. It was almost as if someone was directing the whole affairs from afar. Maybe it was  the MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, who admonished the home-team corporate media to ramp up its negative coverage of Trump while not “ginning up” reasons to criticize the vice president. Kirschner, on YouTube, urged the media to prioritize critical coverage of Trump while treating Harris better than it treated Biden following the June debate. The so-called defenders of democracy abetted a cover-up and a coup in plain sight. Credibility? Why should anyone believe them about anything Kamala-related going forward? The post The Biden Coverup Comes Back to Bite the Dems appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Where Was ‘Bioethics’ During Covid? A new book on medical whistleblowers lauds their moral integrity but skips over the most glaring test of medical ethics in recent history. The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott, W.W. Norton, 368 pages If I told you that doctors had injected live cancer cells into elderly Jewish patients, including Holocaust survivors, without their consent for experimental purposes, you would be appalled. That was certainly the public’s reaction when the scandal at Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital was uncovered in 1964. But digging deeper into the facts reveals that the experiment was far more benign than it sounds. Quite a few medical “scandals” are like that. The injections, believe it or not, were harmless. There was no chance of getting cancer from them. It had long been medically established that the foreign cancer cells from such an injection would be rejected painlessly by a patient’s body, with a lump forming and then healing over the course of weeks. The point of the experiment was to evaluate the sick patients’ immune responses, to see if it took longer than usual for these sick patients to reject the foreign cells. Oral consent was obtained from each individual. The word “cancer” was not used, but the patients were told, accurately, that “an injection of a cell suspension was planned as a skin test for immunity.” Medical whistleblowers are the subject of a new book by medical ethics professor Carl Elliott, The Occasional Human Sacrifice. The impression left by the book is that most whistleblowers, far from being heroic, are troublemaking narcissists with their own private motives. In the case of the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, the whistleblowing doctor was known to have “a personal animus” against one of his colleagues whom he wanted to get fired. He also fabricated details, such as that patients were too senile to give consent or suffered intense pain from the experiment, allegations that other witnesses claimed were totally false. Elliott got interested in medical whistleblowers when he became one in 2008. A mentally ill man named Dan Markingson committed suicide in St. Paul, MN, in 2003 while enrolled in a study of a new antipsychotic drug at the University of Minnesota, where Elliott teaches. The man’s mother, Mary Weiss, was overwhelmed with grief and took the story to the newspapers after trying unsuccessfully to sue the university. Elliott took up her cause, fixating on the fact that Markingson was in the throes of a psychotic episode in a locked psychiatric ward when he came to the researchers’ attention. (Where else would they have looked for subjects?)  Weiss says she discouraged her son from enrolling in the study, but, when he signed the consent forms, Markingson was out of the locked ward and a judge had ruled that he did not need involuntary commitment, so it was his decision to make. Weiss also claims she tried to persuade doctors to drop her son from the study after she grew concerned with his erratic behavior on the drug. With all compassion for Weiss, this is the sort of second-guessing that always torments bereaved survivors of suicides. Did I know at some level that something was wrong? Should I have done more? Perhaps her worries about the study loom larger in retrospect, for perfectly understandable psychological reasons. There is no way for Elliott, or the reader, to know. Looking back, Elliott can hardly believe some of the things he did in pursuit of justice for Mary Weiss: “Did I actually build a black coffin for a group of students in white coats to carry into a meeting of the Board of Regents? Did I really imagine it would help the cause to tweet out a photograph of my 12-year-old daughter holding a guinea pig while wearing a rubber pig mask and a University of Minnesota lab coat with money spilling out of the pockets?” One friend tells him gently, “You should probably get some therapy.”  Elliott sought out other medical whistleblowers to see if, bluntly, they are all as crazy as he is. They are. Most of the whistleblowers he interviews were bumptious malcontents long before any medical scandal crossed their path. One is a great-nephew of Leon Trotsky who tells Elliott, “I really embrace the need for a socialist revolution.” Another co-founded a radical group of health-care workers in the 1970s called the Fanon Collective: “We were, like, with the Red Book, and Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh and Huey Newton and Malcolm X on big posters on the wall of our house. It was pretty easy to figure out where we stood.” The first whistleblower Elliott meets is Peter Buxtun, the man who in 1972 exposed the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which the U.S. Public Health Service had been conducting in Alabama since 1932. Buxtun, the son of a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, had no medical background. He took a side job as a venereal disease tracker in San Francisco in the 1960s while enrolled as a graduate student in history. His job was to take lists of sexual contacts from VD patients, track down the names on the list, and persuade them to seek treatment. He heard about the Tuskegee experiment from one of his colleagues. He started collecting documents related to it and then passed those documents to a reporter. It is amazing that new information remains to be discovered about Tuskegee after so many decades, but Elliott uncovers a shocking fact that, as far as I know, has never been disclosed before. The Tuskegee study involved approximately 600 black sharecroppers in Macon County, 400 with syphilis and 200 without. The men were offered free medical care in exchange for periodic examinations by government doctors. When the study began, there was no cure for syphilis. The few treatments available were painful, expensive, ineffective, and sometimes fatal. A 1930 experiment in the same county that offered free treatment to patients with syphilis had resulted in four deaths.    In the passage below, Buxtun is telling Elliott about his reaction when he received the envelope of records he requested from the Centers for Disease Control in 1965:  What Buxtun read about the Tuskegee study in that envelope contradicted everything that he’d been advising doctors to do with a syphilis patient. “You treat him. You don’t let him get back out in society and infect someone else,” Buxtun says. The shocking fact is this: Buxtun apparently does not know that all the men in the Tuskegee study had been infected at least five years prior to the start of the study and thus, because their syphilis was in its latent stage, could not sexually transmit the disease to anyone else. There was no danger of the men infecting their partners.  Admittedly, Buxtun was not a doctor, and he was accustomed to dealing with syphilis patients in the initial, contagious stage of the infection. Nevertheless, it is staggering that the man whose personal crusade turned “Tuskegee” into a byword for medical malpractice is ignorant of such basic facts. If someone does not understand how syphilis progresses through its primary, secondary, and tertiary stages, then he cannot possibly grasp what the Tuskegee study was trying to achieve. Syphilis is known as “the great imitator” because, in its latent stage, which can last for decades, its symptoms resemble many other diseases: weakened heart, degraded nervous system, blindness, liver tumors, or any combination of the above. The purpose of the Tuskegee study was to learn more about how syphilis manifests in this difficult-to-spot latent stage. Far from being “a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone,” as one TV reporter called it, the study was intended to improve the diagnosis of elusive cases. Buxtun’s most serious accusation is that the Tuskegee experimenters withheld treatment from the men after the discovery of penicillin in the 1940s. According to the definitive study of Tuskegee, Bad Blood, by historian James H. Jones, Buxtun raised this question with the director of the U.S. Public Health Service, Dr. William Brown, in a letter in 1968. Brown “informed Buxtun that a committee of highly competent professionals drawn from outside the government had reviewed all aspects of the experiment and had decided against treating the men, a decision Dr. Brown insisted was ‘a matter of medical judgment since the benefits of such therapy must be offset against the risks to the individual.’”  Patients with weakened circulatory systems can suffer painful and even fatal complications when treated with penicillin. The blue-ribbon committee that Brown mentioned explicitly discussed whether the remaining Tuskegee patients should receive penicillin. It concluded that they should not, due to the “danger of late Herxheimer’s reaction which would worsen or possibly kill those syphilitic patients suffering from cardiovascular or neurological conditions.” The doctors also doubted that penicillin would cure the men at such an advanced stage of the disease.  Maybe Buxtun has a rebuttal to this argument. Jones, for instance, argues in Bad Blood that the decision of whether to offer treatment should have been made for each individual, weighing the risks and rewards on a case-by-case basis, and not for the Tuskegee subjects as a class. That’s a fair position. Buxtun never gets into such details. He simply repeats that the men were denied penicillin. Elliott obsesses over the use of mild inducements to attract participants in medical studies. In the Tuskegee case, he fumes that participants were “lured” with free meals on examination days and an offer for the government to pay their funeral expenses. If the men would not have enrolled without the “suasion” of burial insurance, then they were illegitimately coerced, according to Elliott. In another case, exposed by one of his whistleblowers in the 1970s, parents were coerced into volunteering their disabled children for a hepatitis study by telling them that there were no spaces open at Willowbrook State School, a residential hospital for children in New York, but that beds were open in a different wing of the hospital for children enrolled in the hepatitis study.  Every time I read Elliott getting on his high horse about immoral inducements, I wanted to ask him one question: What did you think of the Covid vaccine mandates, Dr. Elliott? Defenders of vaccine mandates, such as the federal one that President Joe Biden announced in September 2021, always insisted that no one was being forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will. You are free to reject the vaccine, they avowed. You will just be subject to penalties, including the loss of your livelihood, if you refuse. The choice is up to you.  It is astonishing in retrospect that the discipline of bioethics was so completely absent from the debate over pandemic measures. These are the people who over decades have hemmed in researchers with reams of red tape and stringent procedures like Institutional Review Boards, which govern even humanities researchers who just want to conduct interviews or pass out surveys, both of which qualify as “human subjects research” according to IRB protocol. Yet during the pandemic, when medical interventions were forced on patients indiscriminately with no regard for individual autonomy or informed consent, bioethicists were nowhere to be found. The pandemic was raging as Elliott researched and wrote his book. Unsurprisingly, almost every one of his whistleblowers is a Covid hawk. One has the two of them mask up for a walk outdoors. Another sits six feet away in deference to social distancing. Elliott tries to paint his whistleblowers as courageous loners who did the right thing even when no one else at their institution was willing to support them. How ironic, then, that when unjustifiable medical coercion was going on all around them, not just in one hospital or one lab but across the entire country, his brave truth-tellers were models of meek conformity. The post Where Was ‘Bioethics’ During Covid? appeared first on The American Conservative.

OMG SHE IS SOOOOO DUMB. No one can tell me she was out there out of her own 'talent'!!!! She is just a pawn of the NWO that's all!!!!

? Cancer story time......WAKE THE F$&@ UP PEOPLE!!!!

Go little old lady!!

It was inevitable that, when President Biden’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention transferred their allegiance to Vice President Kamala Harris, the corporate media would begin bowdlerizing her biography. Their shameless revision of her long history of hard left positions on virtually every issue should have surprised no one. Far less predictable, however, will be the voter response to the makeover. Will they accept the new Kamala Harris “unburdened by what has been”? Or will they remember that she was the point person for Biden’s disastrous immigration policy and a fervent cheerleader for his other failures, including the wild spending that caused inflation. Even if Harris is able to shed all that baggage, she is seen by many voters as culpable for the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline. The New York Post reports that, according to a YouGov poll conducted last week, “More than 9 in 10 voters who believe Biden’s health was covered up blame Kamala Harris.” This is hardly surprising. She had to have known he was unfit to fulfill his duties. Moreover, as Vice President, Harris is the only official who possesses the constitutional authority to set the 25th Amendment in motion. Yet her cynicism and personal ambition obviously outweighed any concern that Biden’s cognitive decline presents a clear and present danger to the country as long as he remains in office. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement released on the day Biden dropped out of the presidential race, “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President.” This is obviously true but Biden clearly plans to remain in office until January 20, 2025. Nor will Harris expend valuable time and political capital in a hopeless attempt to force him out. To do so would doom her chances of defeating former President Trump in November. The odds are already against her. Thus, the corporate media have attempted to purge awkward facts from the public memory, particularly if they involve the highest profile task Biden ever gave Harris. As AP reported on March 24, 2021: President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem … For Harris, the assignment gives her the first big opportunity to step to the front of the stage on a matter of enormous consequence for the administration. As the first Black woman elected vice president, Harris arrived on the job as a trailblazer. It has remained opaque how Biden would utilize her. Unfortunately for Harris — and the country as a whole — her feckless approach to this assignment resulted in the worst border crisis in U.S. history. Countless millions of illegal aliens flooded across the southern border bringing with them chaos, crime and unsustainable costs to the nation’s education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice systems. The corporate media has attempted to absolve Harris of responsibility by attacking a straw man. Despite repeatedly referring to her as the “border czar,” dozens of news outlets now insist that she never actually held that title. Time, for example, ran an article last week titled, “Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s ‘Border Czar.’” This clearly misses the point. Perhaps the worst defense of her negligence of the border crisis was provided by Harris herself during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. When he pointed out that she had never bothered to visit the border she responded, “And I haven’t been to Europe.” This flippant answer was punctuated by her trademark cackle and this comment: “I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” We don’t have enough space to discuss all that Harris doesn’t understand. But we know she supports the decriminalization of illegal immigration. In 2015, Harris told an interviewer with CBSLA (Los Angeles), “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” CNN reports that this fits her overall perspective on law enforcement: Part of what we have to do here is also look at the militarization of police departments and, and the kind of money that is going to that … In many cities in America, over one third of their city budget goes to police. So, we have to have this conversation. What are we doing? What about the money going to social services? What about the money going to helping people with job training? What about helping with the mental health issues that communities are being plagued with for which we’re putting no resources? If it isn’t obvious, Harris is talking about defunding the police. She also wants to reexamine Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): “There’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role, and the way that it is being administered, and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” She is also a gun grabber: “I support a mandatory buyback program that will get weapons of war off our streets, with civil penalties imposed for noncompliance.” By “weapons of war,” she means semi automatic rifles like the one that Thomas Matthew Crooks used in his attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. Presumably, she thinks that the rifle shot Trump in the ear rather than Crooks. The above is just a brief sample of our Vice President’s far left positions. She is obviously an extremist who can never be elected President unless the corporate media can prevent the voters from discovering her genuine views about everything from abortion to Zuck Bucks. Harris is no mere puppet of the left as Biden was. She is the genuine article. Can the corporate media keep this hidden from the voters for the next 100 days? It seems unlikely. Her well-documented history of hard left positions will be highlighted on X and long form journalism sites. And there is still the sticker shock that the ordinary American experiences when she goes to the grocery store. We will find out when the autumn leaves start to fall. The post Will the Media Makeover of Harris Work? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

When Josh Shapiro ran for governor of Pennsylvania against a weak Republican candidate in 2022, he postured as a moderate Democrat willing to embrace school choice and mollify critics of energy tax schemes. If he is elevated to the national stage, the Trump team could have field day exposing how beholden the Pennsylvania governor is to far left special interests. But because he is bought and paid for by government unions and progressive environmental activists, Shapiro has cut a left-leaning path since taking office that leaves school children and trade unions in the lurch. Although a broad cross section of Pennsylvania residents favor scholarships for students stuck in failing schools, and regulatory relief for companies that deliver affordable energy, Shapiro clearly takes his stage direction from well-endowed benefactors who operate against the public interest. His duplicity on policy may yet pay off so long as voters remain focused on what their governor says and not what he does. Polls show Shapiro remains reasonably popular in the state despite his lack of any tangible legislative accomplishments. That alone could suffice for Vice President Kamala Harris to select Shapiro as her running mate. With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is arguably the most critical swing state and one that at least until recently leaned toward Democrats in presidential races. Donald Trump appears to have made inroads with blue collar workers and union members that eluded previous Republican contenders. Before President Biden dropped out of the race, he consistently trailed Trump in Pennsylvania. If anything, Harris performs worse in a head-to-head matchup against the Republican presidential nominee, according to fresh figures. In a revealing survey of “likely Pennsylvania voters” conducted July 20-23, Steve Cortes with the League of American Workers found Trump leading Harris by 47 to 45 percent. Not exactly a big lead, but the favorable press coverage Harris received in the past few days may have inflated her numbers. Shapiro would presumably give Harris a much-needed boost in a state that could decide the election. Recall that Trump was the first Republican since President Reagan to win Pennsylvania back in 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton. He narrowly lost the state to Biden in 2020 but improved his margins in certain areas. So, would Shapiro be able to cancel out Trump’s advantage? The short answer is: only if Republicans let him. Does He Have the Courage of His Convictions? The more comprehensive answer delving into who Josh Shapiro is, what he believes, and what likely voter should know segues into public policy questions that have become more prominent not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. This is where Shapiro could run into the buzzsaw of public opinion. Proponents of school choice, for instance, were initially encouraged when Shapiro expressed support for scholarships that would enable students in the worst performing schools to cover the cost of private schools. But when his leadership was most needed, Shapiro bowed and yielded to the demands of his benefactors in the teachers’ unions. The governor’s flip flop first appeared in August 2023 when he vetoed legislation that would provide students in the worst performing schools with “Lifeline Scholarships.” The proposal, which Shapiro repeatedly endorsed on the campaign trail, would enable parents to receive a portion of their tax dollars back in the form of “Education Opportunity Accounts” to cover private school tuition, and other school related fees. Shapiro had another bite at the apple during state budget negotiations a few weeks ago, but capitulated once again to the opponents of educational freedom. Even as he continues to feign support for school choice in his public statements, the hard reality is that Shapiro’s 2024 budget proposal omits the funding needed for the scholarships. The sly technique at work is reminiscent of what President Richard Nixon’s attorney general once told the press: “Watch What We Do, Not What We Say.” John Mitchell has nothing on Josh Shapiro. But the Nixonian tap dance around the cause of education reform is ripe for exposure on the presidential campaign trail. Recent polling from the Commonwealth Foundation, a free market think tank based in Harrisburg, shows that 64 percent of Pennsylvania voters support scholarships benefiting the poorest families victimized by failing schools. At the national level, polls show that public support for additional options in K-12 education has continued to expand since the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest data from Real Clear Opinion Research shows that more than 70 percent of registered voters across party lines support school choice while a survey of parents this past January found that 72 percent “considered new schools for their children” in 2023, a figure which represents a 35 percentincrease from 2022. By walking back his campaign pledge, Shapiro is running against strong currents of public opinion. If he is elevated to the national stage, the Trump team could have field day exposing how beholden the Pennsylvania governor is to far left special interests. During the 2021-2022 election cycle, Shapiro was the number one recipient of government union money in the whole country —receiving more than $4.5 million, according to campaign finance records. The National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) were the top contributors. Each of the unions has a long history of supporting progressive causes that run counter to the values of American voters in critical swing states like Pennsylvania. The NEA, for instance, has been a persistent opponent of initiatives that empower parents with the ability to select from a range of private and public educational options, according to Influence Watch. NEA also makes substantial contributions to progressive organizations through its grant program and its political action committees. Union operatives clearly view Shapiro as an ideal conduit for advancing a radical agenda. Campaign finance records show that some of the largest and more recent donations from the NEA’s PACs to Shapiro include $250,000 and $150,000 in 2022. The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state affiliate of the NEA, also rang the bell that same year, making contributions through its political action committees in the amount of $350,000, $125,000, and $100,000. The American Federation of Teachers contributed $500,000 in 2023, and its affiliate group the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers contributed $250,000 that same year. AFSCME made two contributions in the amount of $500,000 in 2022 and one in the amount of $250,000. So, it’s not just the teachers’ unions, but government unions as whole that are driving Shapiro further away from his campaign rhetoric. The incestuous relationship may yet trip him up politically. As it turns out, the PSEA may have engaged in what litigants describe as a “money laundering” operation to camouflage the actual amounts the union funneled into Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign. Just a few days ago, the Freedom Foundation, a free market “action tank” that challenges the political power of public employee unions, filed complaints with federal and state officials that allege the PSEA, in collaboration with the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), engaged in illegal funding techniques to obscure the actual amounts they were donating to Shapiro. A press release from the foundation describes how the two groups orchestrated an “illegal scheme” during the 2022 Pennsylvania general election “to surreptitiously use nearly $1.5 million in teachers’ union dues to back then-candidate Josh Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign.” The state’s campaign finance and collective bargaining laws prohibit unions from using their general treasury funds to make contributions to political candidates. Yet, the PSEA “made two six-figure contributions from its general treasury to the Fund for Student Success (FSS), a little-known political fund operated the union, which then contributed the funds to the DGA in May 2022, which in turn, contributed heavily to Shapiro’s successful campaign for governor,” according to the release. These revelations come at an inopportune moment for Democrats looking to Shapiro as their salvation against Trump in Pennsylvania Regardless of what the fallout might be from the Freedom Foundation’s allegations, there’s a compelling argument to be made that Shapiro is merely an appendage of the teachers’ unions unwilling to extend a lifeline to K-12 students in failing schools. The fact that he would veto his own campaign pledge just a few months after taking office suggests he has been auditioning for the Oval Office for some time. Union officials would never countenance allowing someone on the Democratic Party ticket who supported school choice no matter how modest the proposal. But the perfidy does not end here. Trade unions that have made generous contributions to Shapiro stand to lose out under energy tax initiatives the governor has embraced. As an alternative to making Pennsylvania an active player in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate climate agreement widely known as RGGI, Shapiro has floated his own version of an energy tax plan. Officially dubbed the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act or PACER, Shapiro’s plan would produce a massive new tax further exacerbating costs for Pennsylvania businesses and households already beset with high inflation. Like RGGI, Shapiro’s PACER plan is built around “cap and trade”regulations that would limit greenhouse gas emissions in the name of climate change. Union workers attached to fossil fuel companies in Pennsylvania are especially vulnerable to new climate regulations that could shut down their energy companies. By contributing to Shapiro, the unions have effectively financed the demise of the jobs their members depend upon in the energy sector. Campaign finance records show that since 2021 several trade unions donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Shapiro. Local 0690, Plumbers Union Political Action Fund donated $110,000; Western Pennsylvania Laborers PAC, $290,000; Teamsters Local 0115, $200,000; Local 0449, Steamfitters Union PAC, $321,000; Local 5, IBEW PAC, $455,000; Local 19, Sheet Metal Workers Union League for Political Education, $459,500; Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 520 PAC, $107,500; Local Union 712, IBEW COPE, $26,000; Greater PA Carpenters PAC, $1,014,073; and Local 0524, United Association Steamfitters, $3,500. The unions did a receive a bit of good news last fall when the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled in their favor against having the state become part of RGGI. Unions, along with industry groups and lawmakers, successfully argued in court that executive agencies did not have the authority to join the agreement since RGGI would result in new taxes on energy production that only the Pennsylvania General Assembly can approve. But Shapiro, supposedly a friend of organized labor, decided to appeal the ruling to the state supreme court. Whose Side Is Shapiro On? One reason the unions may not be receiving any return on the investment they made into Shapiro is because the Democratic Party has become beholden to left-leaning environmental activists that support RGGI. These include the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania, which have all contributed to Shapiro. The split between trade unions and green activists among Democrats provides Trump with yet another opportunity to capitalize on the gains he has made with blue collar workers. By running against energy taxes, the Trump ticket could easily put Shapiro on defense. A new poll from the Commonwealth Foundation shows that rising household energy bills are a major concern of voters. But there’s additional intrigue. House Republicans have opened an investigation into an entity that calls itself the Energy Foundation China, a former affiliate of the Energy Foundation, a left-leaning grant operation. Although both organizations list San Francisco as their headquarters, a Fox News investigation concluded that the “majority” of the operations for the Energy Foundation China take place in China and that the foundation’s staff is closely tied in with the Communist Party of China (CCP). For its part, the Energy Foundation has pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to groups in Pennsylvania that actively oppose oil and gas production throughout the United States. Big Green Inc., a project of the Institute for Energy Research, a free market group in Washington, D.C., carefully tracks these grants. The NRDC is among the top recipients of Energy Foundation grants. Although the group has denied receiving money from China, NRDC has maintained close relationships with Chinese officials and the CCP, according to Influence Watch. Since Pennsylvania is No. 2 only to Texas in terms of natural gas production, there are geopolitical implications attached to Shapiro’s anti-energy plans. By working to impose costly new regulations on Pennsylvania, Shapiro — Trump could argue — is doing the bidding of Beijing either knowingly or unknowingly. Shapiro, a Georgetown law graduate, first entered the political fray in 2004 when he won a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives representing the 153rd district. He was reelected in 2006, 2008, and 2010. From there he continued to move up. Shapiro was elected as the state’s attorney general in 2016 and re-elected in 2020. Given his long, successful political history in Pennsylvania, he would seem a compelling choice for Harris. That fact that he won the 2022 governor’s race by a wide margin is another point in his favor. But he also ran against a candidate who didn’t bother doing any campaigning or fundraising. That’s not going to be the case with Trump. If Shapiro is tapped, voters could quickly discover that the money trail flowing into his campaign does not lead back to parents and children who benefit from school choice or to union workers concerned about their jobs. Then there are the average citizens who favor what Trump might call an “America First” energy policy who are also left out. There’s a lot to expose if the Republicans are game. The post Who Is Josh Shapiro? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.