The fallout from the “laptop from hell” scandal continues to spread.
Joe Biden is now entangled in this mess.
And that’s because Joe Biden told a huge lie about Hunter Biden that just came back to bite him.
During the final Presidential debate, Donald Trump blasted Joe Biden over reports that his son Hunter raked in millions from companies in Communist China.
Joe Biden claimed that was false.
“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China,” Biden stated.
This was the same debate where Joe Biden lied to the American people and falsely claimed the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop – which formed the basis for the New York Post’s reporting on alleged Biden family corruption – was the product of Russian disinformation.
NBC’ Kristen Welker asked White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield about reports in the Washington Post that a Communist Chinese-linked energy company CEFC China Energy paid a business run by Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s brother, James, nearly $5 million.
Unbelievably, Bedingfield stood by the lie.
“We absolutely stand by the President’s comment,” Bedingfield answered.
The Washington Post reported:
While many aspects of Hunter Biden’s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.
Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden.
The damn broke on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In addition to the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and CBS all reported that Hunter Biden faced an intensifying and expanding federal investigation.
CNN even reported there was a good chance Hunter Biden may face criminal charges.
The lie Joe Biden’s campaign told about Hunter Biden’s laptop being “Russian disinformation” looks more ridiculous by the day.
And it also appears that there are forces within the Democrat Party and the government who now leak details about the investigation into Hunter Biden to the press to embarrass Joe Biden.
Biden’s falling poll numbers leave many on the Left uncertain if Biden could win a General Election in 2024.
And Biden’s “allies” may be feeding the press stories about Hunter Biden as a means of forcing Joe to withdraw from the 2024 race.
Kakistocracy: noun, government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.
The old saying goes that even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally. So you might think that during a 50-year political career, the odds would dictate that Joe Biden would, once in a blue moon, make a correct decision — just based on the odds. But you’d be mistaken. Biden has stumbled and bumbled from one disastrous decision to the next. Disastrous, that is, for America. Biden himself has prospered handsomely in spite of his glaring incompetence and corruption.
Biden’s long Senate career was based on being the credit card companies’ man in Washington. While crowing endlessly about the working class being “his people,” Biden sponsored bills allowing bank issuers to charge egregious interest rates and to make it harder for working men to escape the credit trap through bankruptcy.
When Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, he turned the confirmation of Clarence Thomas into a political smear campaign that descended into a degenerate three-ring circus. In his first campaign for president, he failed to garner a single percentage point before having to withdraw when confronted with his past lies and blatant plagiarism. He literally stole a speech detailing a British politician’s life story. He ran again in 2008 but again failed to reach even one percent of the vote.
When Barack Obama took him off the primary trash heap to make him vice president, Biden first made a hash out of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasting hundreds of billions on boondoggles and giveaways to Democrat cronies. Little of the recovery billions was spent on anything useful to America. Biden went on to manage our relations with China and Ukraine, pocketing untold millions for himself and his family by selling out America’s security interests.
By the time he ran for president again in 2020 he was a spent husk of his former corrupt and incompetent self, delivering asinine performances in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. When the Democrat establishment propped him up to once again stop Bernie Sanders, Biden was set up for the strangest presidential campaign in modern history. While Donald Trump barnstormed the nation with packed, enthusiastic rallies, Biden cowered in his basement, occasionally venturing out to speak with a few dozen voters sitting in circles drawn on the floor.
For his vice presidential pick, he chose — if you can believe it — an even more buffoonish candidate than himself.
Had it not been for Mark Zuckerberg buying and staffing government election offices in swing states, and the media and Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden family’s corruption, Biden would now be enjoying his dotage in Delaware, creeping on unsuspecting children with yarns of Corn Pop and South African arrests.
Instead, the man with one of the most astonishing records of abject failure in Washington was installed in the White House, and he has remained true to form. As one of a hundred senators and then as vice president, there was a limit to how much damage he could do. But as president, the shackles have been removed.
His first agenda item was to throttle our oil and gas sector, offshoring tens of thousands of good paying jobs to Russia and the Middle East — along with our energy independence. He threw open our southern border and encouraged virtually unlimited illegal immigration — during a global pandemic.
Biden’s “defund the police” rhetoric delivered us soaring violent crime in Democrat-run cities, while he sicced federal law enforcement on parents who object too strenuously to their children being indoctrinated with anti-White racism and LGBTQIA+ ideology.
It can truly be said that as president, Biden’s record of failure remains unblemished.
But now comes what may be the capstone on Biden’s long history of buffoonery and corruption. In Ukraine, we have an armed conflict that threatens to plunge the world into an economic depression and raises the specter of nuclear war. Not only did Biden set the stage for this calamity when, as vice president, he was in charge of Ukraine policy and led Kiev to believe that NATO membership was in Ukraine’s future, but on the eve of the Russian invasion, he refused to admit that it was not. Then Biden all but admitted to Vladimir Putin — on live TV, no less — that NATO would not defend Ukraine if Russia chose to invade.
In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, Biden and his administration have crafted sanctions that seem almost designed to boomerang on America’s and Europe’s fragile post-pandemic economies, while forcing Russia into a deeper alliance with China.
With the U.S. over $31 trillion in debt, Biden seems totally oblivious to the perilous position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the consequences should that privileged position end.
Economists predict that food and gasoline will cost the average U.S. household an additional $3,000 this year, and inflation threatens to push millions of lower-middle income-earners into abject poverty.
And bumbling, corrupt Joe Biden isn’t yet halfway through his first — and please God, last — term.
66% of self-defined “swing” voters in competitive districts believe that “Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response.”.
👆This is exactly why Democrats are suddenly lifting restrictions👆
White and Hispanic voters were in equal agreement.
80% of these same swing voters believe that “Democrats in Congress support defunding the police and taking more cops off of the street.”
78% of these swing voters believe that “Democrats in Congress have created a border crisis that allows illegal immigrants to enter the country without repercussions and grants them tax-payer funded benefits once here.”
61% of these swing district voters believe that “Democrats in Congress are spending money out of control,”
and
“Democrats are teaching kids as young as five Critical Race Theory, which teaches that America is a racist country and that white people are racist.”
👉The poll was conducted from mid-January to early February, had approximately 1,000 respondents and a 3.1% margin of error.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sign the American Rescue Plan Act after the House voted on the final revised legislation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan, at the U.S. Capitol on March 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C. OLIVIER DOULIERY, Contributor / AFP via Getty Images
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is concerned that Republican attacks on the Democrats’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic have “alarming credibility,” according to a slide deck obtained by SFGATE.
The DCCC, which is the main campaign arm for House Democrats and is currently chaired by New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, worked with outside consulting groups to conduct an online poll of voters in the 60 most competitive House districts for the upcoming 2022 midterms. The poll was conducted from mid-January to early February, had approximately 1,000 respondents and a 3.1% margin of error.
Findings from the poll were presented to DCCC officials Thursday morning. One slide in the presentation, which was shared with SFGATE by someone who attended the presentation and was granted anonymity in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy, states, “Many of the Republican attacks tested have alarming credibility,” including Republican attacks on COVID-19 policy. (The presentation does not clarify what it means by “credibility.”)
The poll found that that 57% of voters in competitive congressional districts agree with the statement, “Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response,” and 66% of self-defined “swing” voters in competitive districts agree with that statement. White and Hispanic voters in competitive districts were equally as likely to agree (59%), while Black voters (42%) and Asian voters (46%) disagreed with the statement. The poll also did not define what “taken things too far” means.
The DCCC found that critiques of COVID-19 restrictions were slightly less potent than other issues. In swing districts, 64% of voters agreed with the statement that “Democrats in Congress support defunding the police and taking more cops off of the street.” The internal poll found that 80% of self-defined swing voters in competitive districts agreed with the same statement. Politico previously reported on the DCCC warning about the effectiveness of what they refer to as conservative “culture war attacks.”
Sixty-two percent of voters in contested districts agreed with the statement, “Democrats in Congress have created a border crisis that allows illegal immigrants to enter the country without repercussions and grants them tax-payer funded benefits once here.” Seventy-eight percent of swing voters in those districts agreed.
Sixty-one percent of swing district voters agreed with the statements, “Democrats in Congress are spending money out of control,” and, “Democrats are teaching kids as young as five Critical Race Theory, which teaches that America is a racist country and that white people are racist.” And 59% agreed with the statement, “Democrats are too focused on pursuing an agenda that divides us and judging those who don’t see things their way.”
The slide deck provides a snapshot into some of Democrats’ strategies as their outlook for the 2022 midterms growsincreasinglygrim.
The DCCC presentation also contained a slide showing that the top two concerns of voters in competitive districts are inflation and health care, with the COVID-19 pandemic coming in third. Medicare/social security and climate change rounded out the top five. At the bottom of the list were voting rights, taxes and racial justice/equality.
Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, More Than 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Finds
Ailan Evans / @AilanHEvans / February 09, 2022
Twitter, Google, Google+, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are among the platforms arrayed on the screen of an Apple iPhone. Many of them have used their largely unregulated power to censor information they don’t approve of as “misinformation.” (Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images)
Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of more than 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to a new study from the Media Research Center.
The study focused on acts of censorship on major social media platforms and online services, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and TikTok.
dailycallerlogo
Instances of censorship included Facebook’s decision to flag the British Medical Journal with a “fact check” and “missing context” label, reducing the visibility of a post, for a study delving into data-integrity issues with a Pfizer vaccine clinical trial.
Facebook also deleted the page of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter led by dozens of medical professionals, including Dr. Jay Battacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advocated for less restrictive measures to address the dangers of COVID-19.
“Big Tech set up a system where you can’t disagree with ‘the science’ even though that’s the foundation of the scientific method,” Dan Gainor, MRC vice president of Free Speech America, told the Daily Caller National Foundation. “If doctors and academic journals can’t debate publicly, then it’s not science at all. It’s ‘religion.’”
Big Tech also scrubbed podcast host Joe Rogan’s interviews with scientists Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, the latter of whom was instrumental in pioneering mRNA technology. Twitter banned Malone from its platform permanently in late December over the virologist’s tweets questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We tallied 32 different doctors who were censored, including mRNA vaccine innovator Dr. Robert Malone,” Gainor said. “Censoring views of credentialed experts doesn’t ensure confidence in vaccines. It undermines faith in government COVID-19 strategies.“
In addition to medical doctors, the study examined instances in which members of Congress were censored by tech platforms.
These included an incident last August in which YouTube suspended Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for posting a video arguing that “cloth masks” are not effective against the coronavirus, a view later echoed by many prominent medical commentators. Twitter also flagged a tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., in which he wrote “studies show those with natural immunity from a prior infection are much less likely to contract and spread COVID than those who only have vaccine-induced immunity.”
The study also examined Big Tech censorship of prominent media personalities, such as Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Dan Bongino.
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Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win includes the story of how donations from Communist China to the University of Pennsylvania almost tripled after the university established a “Biden Center” in 2017 and gave former Vice President Joe Biden a professorship.
As the book lays out in detail, the Biden family has a very extensive business relationship with Chinese Communist Party elites, and those elites were not shy about celebrating Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as a golden opportunity to further develop their influence over American government agencies and institutions. (One Chinese conference in November 2020 was so ebullient on this subject that Beijing prudently decided to nuke its video off the Internet just as it began to go viral.)
Three years before Joe Biden was elected president, the University of Pennsylvania made him a professor and established the “Biden Center” to promote his vision of “global leadership” — a vision, Schweizer notes, that viewed Russia as the great looming threat to world peace, but had absolutely nothing negative to say about China.
This should be especially amusing to those who remember the Obama-Biden ticket flinging adolescent taunts at rival candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 because he was supposedly stuck in the 1980s and obsessed with our good friends in Moscow as a Cold War boogeyman. It is, however, consistent with Biden’s stubborn refusal to see Communist China as either a threat to Western security or a competitor for American business interests.null
The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania was more than just a website that railed against Russia’s dictator while praising China’s as a treasured partner in globalism. The Center hired people, including Antony Blinken, who went on to become Biden’s Secretary of State — a role in which he was famously ambushed and curb-stomped by Chinese diplomats during his first bilateral conference with them in March.
Blinken’s work for the Biden Center appears to have left him completely unprepared for China’s emissaries shutting him down with a furious lecture on America’s alleged human rights violations. This should come as no surprise, for as Red-Handed outlines, the financing of the Biden Center was murky, but a great deal of documented Chinese money began flowing to the University of Pennsylvania after it was opened.
“In the three years before the announcement, the university received around $15 million. In the three years after, the total was close to $40 million. The latter number is $60 million from China if you include contracts,” Schweizer writes.
Some of those donors were anonymous, but declared donors included the state-owned China Merchants Bank, and a company called Cathay Fortune owned by “a secretive Chinese billionaire who appears to have strong links with the Communist Party” named Yu Yong.
Cathay Fortune is especially interesting because it has a controlling interest in China Molybdenum, a mineral producer with Chinese military contracts that teamed up with Hunter Biden’s investment fund to invest in an African copper mine.
As Red-Handed explains in great detail, the Chinese regime and Communist Party billionaires have spent a great deal of money developing influence over American higher education. At the very least, the return on these investments was a Biden administration staffed with people who expected China to play softball — and were absolutely stunned when the first diplomatic pitches they lobbed to Beijing were returned with smoking line drives right into their faces.
Red-Handed, published by Harper-Collins, will be released on January 25. Schweizer is the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and a senior contributor to Breitbart News.
BOMBSHELL: Biden Family Scored $31 Million from Deals with Individuals with Direct Ties to the Highest Levels of Chinese Intelligence
The Biden family scored $31 million from five deals in China, all with individuals with direct ties to the Chinese spy apparatus, according to a bombshell new book.
Multiple financiers with direct ties to Chinese intelligence partnered with Hunter Biden during and after his father’s time as Vice President — including the former head of the Ministry of State Security and the head of foreign intelligence recruitment — and some of those relationships remain intact, according to Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, by Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer.
Schweizer explains that Beijing saw a financial relationship with the Bidens as an opening for “elite capture,” which allowed Hunter Biden to secure meetings and score major deals with people in the highest levels of Chinese financial institutions and the Chinese Communist Party — and in return they would be able to leverage the Bidens’ power for their interests.
One of the central early players in the Bidens’ Chinese deals is a tycoon by the name of Che Feng, or “The Super Chairman,” as Hunter and his partners referred to him.
Che, the son of a PLA soldier, has been described in Western media as “a shadowy and discreet investor,” whose father-in-law was the governor of the People’s Bank of China, and whose business partner was the Vice Minister of State Security, a man by the name of Ma Jian. Schweizer writes that Ma was reportedly the director of the ministry’s No. 8 Bureau, overseeing North American operations targeting foreigners with its counterintelligence apparatus.
“The hazard of a Chinese businessman with close ties to the top ranks of Beijing’s spy agency conducting financial transactions with the son of the U.S. vice president cannot be overstated. How this did not set off national security or ethics alarm bells in Washington is a wonder in itself,” Schweizer writes in Red-Handed.
The Super Chairman was meant to “fuse Chinese financial might to those with access to the highest levels of power in the Western world,” which led to the creation of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), “funded by China’s biggest government-backed financial institutions,” with the Biden scion and his American partners.
Another partner the Bidens were introduced to via “The Super Chairman” is Zhao Xuejun (aka Henry Zhao), who formed Harvest Fund Management. Zhao was the chairman and Chinese Communist Party general secretary at the firm.
Zhao had another company called “Harvest Global Investments,” which he co-founded with Jia Liqing, the daughter-in-law of a member of the Politburo Standing Committee at the time. Jia Chunwang, Liqing’s father, is the former minister of state security, “in charge of secret service, espionage, and domestic and overseas intelligence work.” That firm, Harvest Global Investments, wired $5 million to another Hunter Biden business called Burnham.
“There is no one more powerful in the world of Chinese intelligence,” Schweizer writes. “The seductive and lucrative deal that Hunter was now putting into place, creating BHR, involved two financiers with ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, a billion-dollar private equity deal that we first exposed in Secret Empires. What we now know are the roles played by the spy-connected ‘Super Chairman’ and Zhao.”
“According to Michael Lin, another Chinese partner, Hunter’s role in the venture was pretty straightforward: ‘Open as many doors as possible in the western world for this very famous Bohai professional team.’ There was also the expectation that Hunter and his partners would ‘join some of the meetings in HK and China they arrange’ when communicating with possible financial partners,” Schweizer adds.
The Super Chairman and Ma Jian were eventually arrested and charged with money laundering and bribery, taking them out of the deal with Biden, however, the connections Hunter had made through them were already established, and Zhao would serve as a conduit for more deals ahead.
Eventually, BHR began buying or investing in companies in China and the U.S. with strategic importance.
For instance, Schweizer reports that one of their early investments was in China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN), with Hunter’s firm as an “anchor investor.” The FBI ultimately busted CGN as a “conduit for nuclear espionage in the West,” with CGN and a CGN engineer being charged by the Obama DOJ with stealing nuclear secrets in 2016.
BHR also bought an American company called Henniges Automotive, which created anti-vibration technologies with military and civilian applications. BHR partnered with the Aviation Industry Corporation of China to close the deal — one of China’s largest military contractors and a major culprit in the theft of U.S. defense technology.
Between the BHR deal and the $5 million wired by Harvest, Hunter received some $25 million from Chinese businessmen tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, Schweizer writes.
Eventually, Hunter would be introduced to CEFC China Energy Chairman Ye Jiemaing (Jainming), with whom he would develop a close working relationship and would speak, according to Hunter, “on a regular basis.”
Hunter served as Ye’s “personal counsel,” and also worked with him to broaden CEFC as a global energy company with holdings in Oman, Romania, Colombia, and Luxembourg.
However, Ye also had close Chinese intelligence ties: “CEFC was housed in a complex in Shanghai’s French Concession section, an area ‘primarily controlled by China’s military.’ One of Ye’s early business partners was the granddaughter of ‘one of the founders of China’s military,’ Marshal Ye Jianying.”
“The corporate logo of the company Hunter Biden was now advising, and which would pay him millions, features a star. According to company records on its English website, it represents ‘civil rights.’ However, on the company’s Chinese-language site, the star signifies that ‘this organization will play a strong and powerful role for the interests of the Chinese state and nation,’” Schweizer writes.
CEFC was also a direct beneficiary to the Chinese military, as the company played a central role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and was an oil supplier to the People’s Liberation Army.
Hunter would set up two entities with Ye, Hudson West IV and SinoHawk, to allow the Chairman to invest in U.S. infrastructure. In total, the Biden family received some $6 million from Ye’s companies.
It was in a deal with CEFC that Hunter reportedly discussed holding 10 percent for the “big guy,” Joe Biden.
In working with Ye, Hunter Biden also built a relationship with the Chairman’s “emissary,” Gongwen Dong, with whom he had plans to share an office, along with Joe and Jill Biden following the then-VP’s departure from office.
But Dong was not only an “emissary” for the Chairman — at the time he was also the chief financial officer for Beijing-based Radiance Property Holdings, controlled by Lam Ting Keung, a businessman with deep connections to “united front” groups linked to Chinese intelligence and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a central component of the CCP’s united front efforts, which often serve as covers for Chinese intelligence operations.
“In sum, each deal the Bidens secured in China was via a businessman with deep ties at the highest levels of Chinese intelligence. And in each case there appears to be little discernible business or professional service that was rendered in return for the money,” Schweizer writes.
There is evidence previously reported by the New York Post that the Biden family business was footing bills for Joe Biden’s expenses — as Schweizer writes in the book, “Hunter Biden and Joe Biden blurred their funds.”
In the infamous “Laptop From Hell,” a 2019 text was recovered from Hunter Biden to his daughter Naomi, where he writes, “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years … It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
There is also an email to Hunter on the hard drive from 2010, subject line: JRB bills, where bills are detailed for contractors hired for upkeep on the senior Biden’s Wilmington house, for Hunter to pay.
“The bills that June included $2,600 to contractor Earle Downing for a ‘stone retaining wall’ at Joe’s Wilmington estate, $1,475 to painter Ronald Peacock to paint the ‘back wall and columns’ of the house, and $1,239 to builder Mike Christopher for repairs to the air conditioning at the cottage of Joe’s late mother, Jean ‘Mom-Mom’ Biden, which was on his property and which he would later rent to the Secret Service for $2,200 a month,” The Post reported.
Peter Schweizer also reveals in Red-Handed that Rosemont Seneca, another one of Hunter’s many entities, set up separate phone lines to reach then-VP Biden, and paid for that monthly bill — a move Schweizer calls “not legal.”
“Beijing should certainly be happy with the overall posture of the Biden administration. The talk is tougher, but the main tenets of the foreign policy that Beijing wants Washington to pursue are secure: no radical reduction in the transfer of technology or capital from America to Beijing, no fundamental challenges to the Chinese regime, and mild criticisms over human rights accompanied by excuses for their conduct,” Schweizer writes.
Red-Handed, published by Harper-Collins, will be released on January 25. Schweizer is the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and a senior contributor to Breitbart News.
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her at ejmorris@breitbart.com or follow her on Twitter.
This corgi was killed by health workers in China in the name of Covid prevention, sparking public outrage.
Hong Kong (CNN)A series of loud bangs startle the sleeping corgi, driving it out of its bed. The door opens and two people dressed in full hazmat suits enter the living room, one carrying a crowbar and another a yellow plastic bag. “Did the leader say we need to settle it right here on the spot?” one of them can be heard asking. “Yes,” the other replies, as he proceeds to move a table the corgi was hiding under, and strike the animal on the head with the crowbar. The dog whimpers and runs off camera to another room.The unsettling scene, captured by a security camera and shared online by the dog’s owner, shows the last moments before the pet was killed in its home by Covid prevention workersin the Chinese city of Shangrao, in southeastern Jiangxi province, on Friday, while the corgi’s owner was undergoing compulsory quarantine in a nearby hotel.
The killing of the dog, which triggered a massive outcry on Chinese social media over the weekend, is the latest example of the extreme measures taken by local authorities in China in pursuit of zero-Covid.
Local authorities in China are under tremendous pressure to curb infections, as a renewed Delta variant outbreak continues to spread across the country. So far, more than 1,300 cases have been reported in about two-thirds of provinces in the country. Amid the outpouring of shock and anger, the dog’s death has sparked heated debate about animal rights, as well as no shortage of reflection on just how far unchecked government power can be expanded during the pandemic at the expense of individual rights.The residential community where the dog lived is under lockdown due to a handful of confirmed Covid-19 cases. All residents were required to enter into government quarantine on Friday, and were not allowed to bring their pets with them, the owner said on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
Survillance footage shows the corgi hit by a health worker with a crowbar.The owner, whose surname is Fu and has so far tested negative for the virus, said community workers had repeatedly reassured her before she left for quarantine on Friday morning that they would not take away or kill the dog during the building’s disinfection. But by the afternoon, Covid prevention workers had barged into her apartment to hit the dog, according to the owner.”The dog tried to avoid the beating and fled into the bedroom, and therefore it wasn’t recorded by surveillance camera, but (I) could hear faint wails. A few minutes later, they said they’ve dealt with it and would take it away, holding a yellow plastic bag in their hands,” she wrote in a since-deleted post. “Even now I don’t know whether my dog is alive or dead, and where it has been taken,” she added. In a statement late on Saturday, the local government of Xinzhou district, where the complex is located, confirmed the dog was killed as part of the need to “thoroughly disinfect” homes in the community.But it admitted Covid prevention workers had “safely disposed” of the dog without communicating fully with the owner. The workers involved had been criticized and removed from their positions, it said, adding they had apologized to the owner and gained her understanding.On Weibo, however, the owner claimed she was pressured by local authorities and her employer to delete her posts. CNN has reached out to the owner, who was not named by the government, and the Jiangxi provincial government for comment.
It’s not the first time Chinese authorities have killed pets as part of their stringent Covid response. In September, three cats in the northeastern city of Harbin were killed after testing positive for the virus without consent from their owner, who was in hospital quarantine after contracting the virus.Not all local governments are as stringent when it comes to dealing with pets, however. In January, Shanghai authorities were widely praised for allowing residents to bring their pets into centralized quarantine with them. Animals in different countries have contracted Covid-19, including domestic pets, zoo animals and livestock, with humans the primary source of these infections.But although scientists say Covid-19 likely originated in animals before becoming widespread among humans, there is no evidence animals are playing a significant role in the spread of the virus to people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.And in the latest incident, the dog was killed before it was even tested for Covid, according to the owner.”When they hadn’t even confirmed whether the dog was negative or positive (for Covid), they barged into the owner’s home and beat the dog to death. Is this the management level of the government?” a top comment on Weibo said.In its statement, the district government said residents had been asked not to lock their doors before they left for quarantine, and Covid prevention workers opened the owner’s door by force under the witness of police officers.The move has sparked a fierce backlash from pet owners and sympathizers, while others see it as a necessary sacrifice for the “greater good” of society, arguing that human lives are more important than animals’.
But for some, there is another crucial question to be asked: just how much more power has the government amassed in the name of Covid prevention, at the cost of individual rights and liberties?”From the earlier killing of the three cats to today’s killing of the dog, it’s getting worse and worse. The so-called debate around ‘animal rights’ is merely a camouflage — the issue at heart here has always been the wanton infringement of individual (rights) by the endlessly expanding state power,” a comment on Chinese social media site Douban said
The Trailblazing Patriot 