(from: The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening by Tom Wolfe )

The trainer said, “Take your finger off the repress button.” Everybody was supposed to let go, let all the vile stuff come up and gush out. They even provided vomit bags, like the ones on a 747, in case you literally let it gush out! Then the trainer told everybody to think of “the one thing you would most like to eliminate from your life.” And so what does our girl blurt over the microphone?

“Hemorrhoids!”

Just so!

That was how she ended up in her present state … stretched out on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with her eyes closed and her face pressed into the stubble of the carpet, which is a thick commercial weave and feels like clothes-brush bristles against her face and smells a bit high from cleaning solvent. That was how she ended up lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids.

Eyes shut! deep in her own space! her hemorrhoids! the grisly peanut—

Many others are stretched out on the carpet all around her; some 249 other souls, in fact. They’re all strewn across the floor of the banquet hall with their eyes closed, just as she is. But Christ, the others are concentrating on things that sound serious and deep when you talk about them. And how they had talked about them! They had all marched right up to the microphone and “shared,” as the trainer called it. What did they want to eliminate from their lives? Why, they took their fingers right off the old repress button and told the whole room. My husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destructiveness, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and then it had been her turn, and she had said, “Hemorrhoids.”

You can imagine what that sounded like. That broke the place up. The trainer looked like a cocky little bastard up there on the podium with his deep tan, white tennis shirt, and peach-colored sweater, a dynamite color combination, all very casual and spontaneous—after about two hours of trying on different outfits in front of a mirror, that kind of casual and spontaneous, if her guess was right. And yet she found him attractive. Commanding was the word. He probably wondered if she were playing the wiseacre, with her “hemorrhoids,” but he rolled with it. Maybe she was being playful. Just looking at him made her feel mischievous. In any event, hemorrhoids was what had bubbled up into her brain.

Then the trainer had told them to stack their folding chairs in the back of the banquet hall and lie down on the floor and close their eyes and get deep into their own spaces and concentrate on that one item they wanted to get rid of the most—and really feel it and let the feeling gush out.

So now she’s lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids. The strange thing is … it’s no joke after all! She begins to feel her hemorrhoids in all their morbid presence. She can actually feel them. The sieges always began with her having the sensation that a peanut was caught in her anal sphincter. That meant a section of swollen varicose vein had pushed its way out of her intestines and was actually coming out of her bottom. It was as hard as a peanut and felt bigger and grislier than a peanut. Well—for God’s sake!—in her daily life, even at work, especially at work, and she works for a movie distributor, her whole picture of herself was of her … seductive physical presence. She was not the most successful businesswoman in Los Angeles, but she was certainly successful enough, and quite in addition to that, she was … the main sexual presence in the office. When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her out. She knew that. She could feel her sexual presence go through the place like an invisible chemical, like a hormone, a scent, a universal solvent.

The most beautiful moments came when she would be in her office or in a conference room or at Mr. Chow’s taking a meeting—nobody “had” meetings anymore, they “took” them—with two or three men, men she had never met before or barely knew. The overt subject was, inevitably, eternally, “the deal.” She always said there should be only one credit line up on the screen for any movie: “Deal by… .” But the meeting would also have a subplot. The overt plot would be “The Deal.” The subplot would be “The Men Get Turned On by Me.” Pretty soon, even though the conversation had not strayed overtly from “The Deal,” the men would be swaying in unison like dune grass at the beach. And she was the wind, of course. And then one of the men would say something and smile and at the same time reach over and touch her … on top of the hand or on the side of the arm … as if it meant nothing … as if it were just a gesture for emphasis … but in fact a man is usually deathly afraid of reaching out and touching a woman he doesn’t know … and she knew it meant she had hypnotized him sexually… .

Well—for God’s sake!—at just that sublime moment, likely as not, the goddam peanut would be popping out of her tail! As she smiled sublimely at her conquest, she also had to sit in her chair lopsided, with one cheek of her buttocks higher than the other, as if she were about to crepitate, because it hurt to sit squarely on the peanut. If for any reason she had to stand up at that point and walk, she would have to walk as if her hip joints were rusted out, as if she were 65 years old, because a normal stride pressed the peanut, and the pain would start up, and the bleeding, too, very likely. Or if she couldn’t get up and had to sit there for a while and keep her smile and her hot hormonal squinted eyes pinned on the men before her, the peanut would start itching or burning, and she would start double-tracking, as if her mind were a tape deck with two channels going at once. In one she’s the sexual princess, the Circe, taking a meeting and clouding men’s minds … and in the other she’s a poor bitch who wants nothing more in this world than to go down the corridor to the ladies’ room and get some Kleenex and some Vaseline and push the peanut back up into her intestines with her finger.

And even if she’s able to get away and do that, she will spend the rest of that day and the next, and the next, with a deep worry in the back of her brain, the sort of worry that always stays on the edge of your consciousness, no matter how hard you think of something else. She will be wondering at all times what the next bowel movement will be like, how solid and compact the bolus will be, trying to think back and remember if she’s had any milk, cream, chocolate, or any other binding substance in the last 24 hours, or any nuts or fibrous vegetables like broccoli. Is she really in for it this time—

The Sexual Princess! On the outside she has on her fireproof grin and her Fiorio scarf as if to say she lives in a world of Sevilles and 450SL’s and dinner last night at Dominick’s, a movie-business restaurant on Beverly Boulevard that’s so exclusive, Dominick keeps his neon sign (DOMINICK’S) turned off to make the wimps think it’s closed, but she (Hi, Dominick!) can get a table—but inside her it’s all the battle between the bolus and the peanut—

—and is it too late to leave the office and go get some mineral oil and let some of that vile glop roll down her gullet or get a refill on the softener tablets or eat some prunes or drink some coffee or do something else to avoid one of those horrible hard-clay boluses that will come grinding out of her, crushing the peanut and starting not only the bleeding but … the pain! … a horrible humiliating pain that feels like she’s getting a paper cut in her anus, like the pain you feel when the edge of a piece of bond paper slices your finger, plus a horrible hellish purple bloody varicose pressure, but lasting not for an instant, like a paper cut, but for an eternity, prolonged until the tears are rolling down her face as she sits in the cubicle, and she wants to cry out, to scream until it’s over, to make the screams of fear, fury, and humiliation obliterate the pain. But someone would hear! No doubt they’d come bursting right into the ladies’ room to save her! and feed their morbid curiosities! And what could she possibly say? And so she had simply held that feeling in all these years, with her eyes on fire and her entire pelvic saddle a great purple tub of pain. She had repressed the whole squalid horror of it—the searing peanut—

—until now. The trainer had said, “Take your finger off the repress button!” Let it gush up and pour out!

And now, as she lies here on the floor of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel with 249 other souls, she knows exactly what he meant. She can feel it all, all of the pain, and on top of the pain all the humiliation, and for the first time in her life she has permission from the Management, from herself, and from everyone around her to let the feeling gush forth. So she starts moaning.

“Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

And when she starts moaning, the most incredible and exhilarating thing begins to happen. A wave of moans spreads through the people lying around her, as if her energy were radiating out like a radar pulse.

“Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

So she lets her moan rise into a keening sound.

“Oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

And when she begins to keen, the souls near her begin keening, even while the moans are still spreading to the prostrate folks farther from her, on the edges of the room.

“Eeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhheeeeeooooooooh!”

So she lets her keening sound rise up into a real scream.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!”

And this rolls out in a wave, too, first through those near her, and then toward the far edges.

“Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeaiaiai!”

And so she turns it all the way up, into a scream such as she has never allowed herself in her entire life.

“AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

And her full scream spreads from soul to soul, over top of the keens and fading moans . . .

“AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeooooohhheeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!”

…until at last the entire room is consumed in her scream, as if there are no longer 250 separate souls but one noosphere of souls united in some incorporeal way by her scream. . .

“AAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

“… A scream such as she has never allowed herself in all her life: ‘AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!’…”

Which is not simply her scream any longer … but the world’s! Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item … my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last—a whole world of anguish set free by . . .

My hemorrhoids.

“Me and My Hemorrhoids Star at the Ambassador” … during a three-day Erhard Seminars Training (est) course in the hotel banquet hall. The truly odd part, however, is yet to come. In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970s, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade.

“Me” (read more)

• Why would Biden declare a federal vaccine mandate for every American even though two previous Supreme Court decisions says his federal vaccine mandate is unconstitutional...? Because he is evil.

• Why would Biden declare that all Americans must be vaccinated but illegal immigrants crossing our border illegally do not have to be vaccinated...? Because he is evil.

• Why would the Biden administration demand that all Americans be vaccinated, regardless of whether they have already acquired natural immunity since they have already had COVID...? Because they are evil.

• Why would the Biden administration declare a national vaccine mandate for all Americans, but exempt all of Congress, all the congressional aides, the postal service, the federal justice system, and the Supreme Court...? Because they are evil.

• Why would Biden and the militarily happily leave $85 billion worth of military weapon armaments to the terrorist Taliban, but at the same time try to disarm peaceful law-abiding American citizens of their 2A rights...? Because they are evil.

• Why would the Biden administration allow for open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, when they know that drug cartels and child traffickers use these openings to push the illegal drugs and the child trafficking into America...? Because they are evil.

• Why would the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, and the NSA violate their own laws, laws within the Constitution, and their own standards of practice for five years against candidate Trump, president-elect Trump, and President Trump...? Because they are evil.  
  

• Why would the Biden administration fight so hard against Texas and its pro-life law that protects babies inside the womb whose heart is already beating, but at the same time they federally protect the embryos and eggs of lizards, alligators, and snakes...? because they are evil.

• Why would the Justice Department keep the "mostly peaceful protesters" of January 6 locked up in solitary confinement as political prisoners when they actually committed no violent act...? Because they are evil.

• Why would the Deep State cabal "place" someone in the White House who obviously has diminished intellectual capacity, most likely suffering cognitively from old age, and appears from all accounts to be suffering from deteriorating mind-functioning skills, (he was hidden in the basement for most of the last six months of the controversial election)...? Because they are evil.

• Why is Nancy Pelosi putting the fences and barricades back up around the Capitol dome, the people's building, keeping the people out...? Because she is evil.

• Why would Nancy Pelosi put on a "Stalinist Show Trial" concerning the events of January 6, when she ignored the violent and deadly riots all summer long in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles...? Because she is evil.

• Why did Attorney General Merrick Garland say that the Justice Department is looking at putting people in jail for civil rights violations if they continue to have state forensic auditing of the controversial 2020 presidential election...? Because he is evil.

• Why does Fauci continue to demand vaccinations for all, even including all K-12 students, when he knows the individuals that have had COVID are better naturally immunized than if they "take the jab"...? Because he is evil.

• Why would General Mark Milley evacuate all the soldiers first from Afghanistan and leave Bagram Air Base unattended, before he got out all the American citizens and all the Afghani interpreters...? Because he is evil.

• Why would Biden, the CDC, Fauci, and the Deep State be more angry at American citizens who refuse to take the experimental vaccine rather than focus their anger and retribution on China; the country that actually gave us COVID...? Because they are evil.

• Why would Biden and the Deep State be more critical of and use more hateful words towards those Americans who believe in putting America First, rather than be critical of the globalist elite who hurt American interests both domestic and international...? Because they are evil.

• Why is General Milley driving many patriot soldiers (conservatives/Christians/constitutionalists) out of the military...?  Because he is evil.

• Why is Biden and the Justice Department declaring that the unvaccinated have no constitutional right to travel from state-to-state...? Because they are evil.
  

• Why does the ACLU stay silent when books are burned, people are fired, citizens are threatened with bodily harm, academic freedom is squashed, and lives and employment are cancelled simply because of a political difference or a different political point of view...? Because they are evil.

• Why would the federal government and CDC close down schools and churches, but leave open alcohol and hemp stores...? Because they are evil.

From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before. For two separate studies published in May, doctors in California read through several hundred charts of pediatric patients, one by one, to figure out why, exactly, each COVID-positive child had been admitted to the hospital. Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group.

The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past. (read more)

Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration.  Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective.  Mature reflections may be permitted.  But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.

The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoists.  For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its schoolboy incoherence.  It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, [a war against groups trained and funded by U.S. intelligence,] a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock.  As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed [by the two largest state sponsors of terror].  In this hothouse fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade.  Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.  “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”

War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight.  The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities.  David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.”  Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area.  Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.”  And so rests the case for the prosecution.

In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts.  Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.

Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office.  Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

The security propagandists have not done much better.  With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial.  “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”

A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention.  Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments.  Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”.  He prefers focusing on scale.  “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.”  Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading.  “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11?  Absolutely.  Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11?  Absolutely.   To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.”  Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”

The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever.  “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month.  “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.”  Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition.  Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe”.  The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating. (read more)

They promised no vaccine mandate. They lied. pic.twitter.com/14CXCt1c9D

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 9, 2021

In his latest fascist move, however, the president announced on Thursday that his administration will force private-sector employers with 100 or more employees to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine or demand a negative test weekly.

This decision is based on a lie, which Biden proudly proclaimed during his justification for the new Labor Department rule.

“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday. Later, he tweeted that “people are dying and will die from COVID-19 who don’t have to.”

“If you haven’t gotten vaccinated, do it now. It could save your life and the lives of those you love,” he wrote.

These aren’t the first lies Biden has told about the Wuhan virus. Shortly before the COVID-19 shot was made available in December 2020, Biden publicly declared that he didn’t think the vaccine should be mandatory.

"No, I don’t think [vaccines] should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory…”
Biden on December 4, 2020

He lied. pic.twitter.com/seEgMcqgsO

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) September 10, 2021

In March, Psaki said that one of the “key principles” used by the administration to address COVID was that there would be “no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”

On March 29, Jen Psaki said there will be "no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential." pic.twitter.com/De6tWr3zzR

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 10, 2021

Psaki repeated this lie through her other press briefings and noted that the government wanted to ensure “these systems are not used against people unfairly.”

“That’s not the role of the federal government,” she said in July. “That’s the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others, may take.”

FLASHBACK: Jen Psaki said Biden would not support vaccine passports OR coercive vaccine mandates.

“Americans privacy and rights should be protected” pic.twitter.com/G3jLahGCZV

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 10, 2021

Fauci and CDC officials also peddled this narrative, agreeing that there would be “no nationwide mandate.”

None of these previous objections, however, were addressed by the president in his most recent speech.

By now, Americans shouldn’t be surprised that the federal government was lying to them. Since assuming office, Biden and his team have flip-flopped on nearly every COVID-19 mitigation strategy under the sun.

In December, Biden called for 100 days of masking to stop the spread of the virus. Now, nine months into his tenure in the White House, Americans are still subject to a federal mask mandate when they travel.

His administration also flip-flopped on its school reopening goals based on the whims and wishes of leftist teachers unions. The same thing happened with the CDC’s ever-changing mask guidelines.

Shouldn’t Biden have said something about why he’s breaking all of his earlier promises? (i.e., no vaccine mandates, no vaccine passports, "100 days of masking,” CDC dropping its mask guidance for the vaccinated; trying to unite the country …)

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 9, 2021

Biden spent much of his time on the campaign trail calling for unity and promising to beat the virus. Now it’s more apparent than ever that his administration is really just using lies and deception to force their agenda on the American public without regard for the law or Constitution. (read more)