Judge Weighs Whether To Block Vaccines Changes From CDC, RFK Jr.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge weighing whether to block changes to U.S. vaccine guidance and an advisory panel did not immediately rule Feb. 13 after hearing from attorneys representing medical groups and the government.

Lawyers for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and other groups told U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy during a hearing at the federal courthouse in Boston that recent changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine schedule and the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel violate federal law and will reduce vaccination rates.

“This is a clear and present danger to public health,” said James Oh, a lawyer for the groups.

Oh said the schedule update, which removed the broad recommendation for six childhood vaccines for diseases including rotavirus, influenza and hepatitis A, “set off alarms” in the medical community and occurred without any rational explanation from the agency.

The CDC on Jan. 5, with backing from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., narrowed the number of vaccines routinely recommended by the childhood schedule.

Government officials said in filings that the the reasoning behind the change was in part due to an assessment carried out by senior health officials that analyzed the U.S. childhood schedule against schedules from other countries.

“The U.S. is a global outlier among peer nations in the number of target diseases included in its childhood vaccination schedule and in the total number of recommended vaccine doses,” the officials, Drs. Tracy Beth Hoeg and Martin Kulldorff, concluded.

The plaintiffs, which also include several women who say changes under Kennedy have prevented them from receiving vaccines, are challenging a series of actions. They focused on arguments for and against imposing an injunction blocking that update and the health secretary’s remaking of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.

Oh said that the committee is not fairly balanced because it is dominated by people who oppose vaccines, in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and urged Murphy to block the committee’s upcoming Feb. 26–27 meeting.

Government lawyers said in a recent brief that the advisory committee members have a variety of employment histories and that the accusation they are anti-vaccine “does not accurately represent the members’ complex and nuanced perspectives and their committee voting records.”

Murphy asked during the hearing whether he could consider the “broader public health impacts” of the changes in vaccine recommendations while weighing the case.

Department of Justice lawyer Isaac Belfer told him health officials were not pursuing an anti-vaccine agenda and welcomed “spirited debate about vaccine policy.”

But he said the Department of Health and Human Services had broad authority to change policy to address a decline in public trust in vaccines following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The court cannot substitute its judgment in place of the agency,” Belfer said.

Murphy did not immediately rule.

With the meeting upcoming, he said he “must make a decision in this case on an uncomfortably tight timeline.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 02/14/2026 - 17:30
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Judge Weighs Whether To Block Vaccines Changes From CDC, RFK Jr.

Vast Majority Of Americans Want Voter ID And Democrats Don't Care

Are voter ID requirements considered a controversial idea in the eyes of US citizens?  If you watch the establishment media or follow leaders in the Democratic Party then you might think bills like the SAVE Act are the end of freedom as we know it.  However, outside the echo chambers of DNC propaganda, the vast majority of Americans have no problem whatsoever with people proving their US citizenship before they vote in local and federal elections. 

The widespread support for voter ID is undeniable.  Surveys from the past year including those from Pew and Gallup show that, regardless of party or ethnicity, Americans citizens want elections to be protected from manipulation through mass illegal immigration.  

A Pew Research Center survey from August 2025 found that 83% of Americans favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes:

95% of Republicans

71% of Democrats

Only 16% of people oppose it.

A Gallup poll from 2024 shows 84% support for requiring photo ID to vote, with 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 67% of Democrats in approval.

A recent CNN segment featuring number cruncher Harry Enten confirms that the backing for the SAVE Act is also dominant regardless of ethnicity:  85% of white voter, 82% of Latino voters and 76% of black voters all want voter ID.  It's difficult to find many issues which the American public universally supports at this level. 

Democrat leaders, however, don't care that the majority of their own base wants voter ID laws.  Party officials and the left-wing media have engaged in a shameless propaganda campaign designed to frighten the public into opposing the SAVE Act, despite their previous platforms defending majority rule.  They consistently compare the new laws to "Jim Crow" era restrictions, claiming that minorities (and rural Americans) are too dumb to figure out how to get access to state IDs and birth certificates.  

In truth, every state that already has some form of election ID laws has seen a spike in voter participation, not a decline.  Only 8 states have laws demanding proof of citizenship before voting (half of the states are in legal battles to implement them); the other 42 only require that you check a box that says you are a citizen.

When Democrats are asked why they are ignoring their majority of their constituents when it comes to the SAVE Act, they launch into tirades about racism and fascism, but never seem to be able to answer the question.

This SAVE AMERICA ACT debate has revealed a truth about the Left: they think black voters, married women, and rural voters are too stupid to figure out how to vote. What a wild, condescending argument. pic.twitter.com/RWQgdnxYXw

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) February 12, 2026

It's difficult to reconcile the rhetoric of Democrats from 2024 when they wailed and screamed about conservatives being a "threat to democracy" compared to their rhetoric today.  At bottom, the political left only supports majority public decisions when those decisions work in the favor of leftist elites.  

The majority of Americans continue to support the Trump Administration's deportations of all illegal migrants (not just migrants with violent criminal records), but Dem leaders and their NGO partners continue trying to thwart the will of the people.  By extension, voter ID makes it far more difficult for non-citizens to vote and makes it easier for voting records to be checked for discrepancies. 

It's clear that ID requirements and tighter controls on mail-in ballots will work heavily against Democrats and, if passed, they are likely to see a sharp decline in votes across the board.  They are fighting against the SAVE Act because they want oligarchy, not "democracy."  They want minority elitist control over government policy.   

Voter ID is perhaps the most important legal question of our era; it will determine the course of elections for many years to come.  Most western countries have laws in place to prevent illegal migrant voting and foreign manipulation of elections.  The US is the only country in which this type of law is treated as "racist".  

Tyler Durden Sat, 02/14/2026 - 15:45
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Vast Majority Of Americans Want Voter ID And Democrats Don't Care

Midterm Palpitations

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races.

Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress.

Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating.

So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself.

But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on the economy, the border, crime, or foreign policy.

Instead, the new Democrat-Socialist Party views the Biden disaster of 2021-2024 not as a result of his puppeteers’ toxic policies of open borders, 21 percent aggregate inflation, dead-end green energy subsidies, DEI mandates, trans fixations, and an appeasing foreign policy that led to wars abroad and emboldened China.

Instead, they now blame those catastrophic years on Biden’s own enfeebled state—as if he were merely a hapless, debilitated messenger for their otherwise superb radical message.

So absent a positive agenda, Democrats will simply run all their state and federal campaigns as if Trump, their Satanic monster, is on every ballot.

Their Trump obsessions result in three now well-worn strategies.

The first, of course, is still more chaos.

The left believes that the unending 2020 riots cost Trump the election.

Ever since, they have sought to concoct a nihilist replay—whether the Tesla hysterias, the perpetual threats of government shutdowns, tough-guy talk of open insurrection against the federal government, or the current, performative-art, anti-ICE violence in Minneapolis.

They concede most Americans still support Trump’s closed borders and legal-only immigration, but hope they want a return to “normalcy” even more.

The more violence, Nazi-invective, and sheer craziness the left can instill—storming church services, ramming ICE vehicles, taking over the streets, or boasting of armed resistance—the more they believe that voters will blame not them, the instigators, but Trump, the target of their insurrectionary madness.

In Democrats’ blinkered reckoning, voters supposedly would prefer 10,000 illegal aliens methodically and daily swarming the border instead of seeing Minneapolis in utter neo-Confederate revolt.

Second, Democrats seize on every Trump art-of-the-deal excess or coarse putdown.

They scream that narcissistic Trump’s new ballroom has wrecked the White House. Or madman Trump was on the verge of fighting our NATO brethren in Greenland. Or cruel Trump wrecked our relationship with the lovable and blameless Canadians.

Democrats grant that voters sincerely like Trump’s secure border, the new trade agreements that correct past asymmetries, a rearming NATO, a defanged Iran, and the end to Maduro’s communist thugocracy—but not Trump’s messy art-of-the-deal means to achieve those desirable ends.

They scream that Trump talked crazily of making Canada a 51st state, not that it was finally shocked into promising to pay what it owed back in NATO contributions, securing its side of the border, and addressing its massive trade surpluses with the US.

So, Trump needs to avoid the very melodramas the left wants to exploit, which detract from his own undeniable accomplishments and the Democrats’ previous disastrous record.

Third, Democrats still rely on their ossified partnerships with the media, academia, and popular culture to mouth the old talking points.

So we are told ad nauseam that Trump caused the “affordability” crisis.

Or Trump is still Putin’s puppet.

Or Trump was an Epstein groupie.

Or Trump’s trade war crashed the economy.

Behind this stale Democrat boilerplate lies a deep fear that the Nietzschean Trump, just as he beat all their lawfare ambushes, will also do the impossible and avoid losing the Congress in November.

And they should fear.

Trump’s catalysts for a booming 2026 economy are already in place.

No one can now stop massive deregulation, new tax cuts and incentives, recalibrated tariffs, unprecedented foreign investment, record energy development, and the new emerging technologies.

All that is needed before the midterms is not controversial new initiatives, but more focus on the current boom in GDP, lower inflation, and increased purchasing power—all in contrast to Biden’s inflation disaster.

Voters still support closed borders and deportations of criminals and the millions who swarmed in under Biden.

But the best way to remind them of a secure border is to concentrate on partnering with red and purple state and local law enforcement for the next few months.

Each week, the thousands of systematically deported criminals in these jurisdictions will contrast with the thousands of violent offenders who are sanctuaried and protected in failed blue states.

And without the smokescreen of the ICE psychodramas, there are a lot of Democrat fears—like the vast Somali fraud in Minnesota, the even greater welfare scandals emerging in California, and the antics and verbiage of the hard left, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the herky-jerky Gavin Newsom, who turned California’s natural paradise into a manmade purgatory.

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Midterm Palpitations

"An Astonishing Sign Of Cultural Decay..."

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Sure, Take That Time-Out

“Crisis is when brittleness meets shock. “

- Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost on X

By shutting down the government for a minimum of ten days supposedly over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Wile E. Coyote Democratic Party is about to blow up another Acme bomb in its mangy muzzle.

I will tell you why.

First, this DHS business is just a stupid prank to bamboozle the public.

It will not shut down ICE operations, as Chuck Schumer pretends. ICE was already funded with $75-billion in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill. The shutdown will only defund the Coast Guard and airport security. (Does that sound smart?)

Second, senators will be leaving the DC swamp and going home to their states where, it turns out, polls show that voters of both parties combined overwhelmingly favor election reform by 84-percent.

The House has passed the SAVE Act onto the Senate for action, up or down. For at least ten days of the shutdown, the senators will have to explain why proving that you are a citizen to vote is a bad idea — or conversely, why allowing non-citizens to vote is a good idea. So, thanks, Democrats, for sending the senators home to face their voters.

Eventually, senators will have to return to the US Capitol and take up the SAVE Act.

The act will require proof of citizenship to register, photo ID to vote in person and for requesting an absentee ballot. The bill would prohibit universal mail-in voting, require absentee ballots be received by election day, impose a five-year prison sentence for helping anyone to register without correct documents, and provisions to clean up the states’ voter rolls.

Additional legislation still in the House, introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), would provide for Election Day only in-person voting by paper ballots, and yet other bills awaiting action would eliminate electronic vote-tallying machines. All the provisions above are common in most other civilized nations (and even a few that are not, such as Afghanistan). The Democratic Party is against all of it because they can only win national elections by deceit and chicanery.

When Senators return to DC, they will have to overcome the filibuster in its current mode, which is the silent or so-called “zombie” filibuster. You see, in the old days, before 1972, if senators wanted to filibuster, they had to actually hold the Senate floor and keep talking — bringing all Senate business to a complete halt until either they gave up or the majority could gather enough votes for cloture (ending debate). It was physically very hard on the senators, an ordeal, and to get through the hours of mindless blather, they would read the phone book, or the World Almanac, or a Sunday newspaper from page one to the obituaries, which subjected them to ridicule.

After 1972, the Senate introduced what they called “the two-track” system, which allowed the body to move on to other business under a filibuster, without requiring a member to stand and speak. All that was needed was for a senator to inform the leadership that he intended to block a vote, with the backing of 40 other senators. This led to a dramatic increase in the use of filibusters — transforming them from a rare, physically demanding gambit into a routine procedural threat.

Now, the catch is that this change in procedure was never formally voted on. Going from “talking” filibusters to “silent” filibusters didn’t happen through a deliberate decision by the full Senate to change the rules — it emerged in 1972 from a procedural workaround that then Majority Leader Mike Mansfield introduced.

It’s just a custom masquerading as a rule, and one that now Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) could declare null and void.

Doing so would bring back the old talking filibuster. Opponents of a given bill, such as the SAVE Act, would have to step into the well of Senate and offer arguments against election reform, or they could read through the Chicago phone book.

In either case, they’d expose themselves to ridicule. Perhaps those ten days at home during the present government shutdown will lead to an attitude change.

If that doesn’t do it, consider that sometime in the weeks and months ahead, you will be seeing some results from the seizure of the Fulton County, GA, 2020 voting records that took place in January. Since the FBI went in there on a warrant — meaning a judge saw probable cause of voter fraud — the country will likely be exposed to real evidence, for the first time, that one crucial swing state ran a corrupt election operation, and it will no longer be possible for the Democrats to yell that such claims are “baseless” or “debunked.”

It’s an astonishing sign of cultural decay that we are even arguing over election reform at this point.

The measures introduced during the dastardly COVID-19 trip - unlimited mail-in balloting, organized “ballot harvesting,” counting ballots for weeks after Election Day, doing so with Dominion / Smartmatic machines connectable to the Internet, and ignoring chain-of-custody requirements - were patently and obviously dishonest.

That’s what got you four years of “Joe Biden,” a walking-talking lie.

Is there anything that the Democratic Party doesn’t lie about? I’ll wait for your answer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 02/13/2026 - 16:20
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"An Astonishing Sign Of Cultural Decay..."

We Have Now Reached "Gunperson"-Level Absurdity

Authored by Jenna McCarthy via 'Jenna's Side Rocks' substack,

By now you’ve surely heard about Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Tumbler Ridge—a tiny, remote Canadian town where the biggest excitement is probably a moose spotting on Nextdoor—that left nine people dead and more than two dozen injured. Monstrous would be an insult to monsters everywhere.

It’s the deadliest mass shooting Canada has seen in more than thirty years. The details are unimaginable, the community is destroyed, survivors are traumatized for life, and none of it is even remotely funny. The news coverage, however, could easily be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Comedy Writing category.

Within minutes of the rampage, alerts went out describing the suspect as a “female in a dress.”

The minute I saw that, I knew.

I mean, have you ever—even once—seen an alleged perpetrator described as a “male in pants” or a “female wearing shoes?” Of course not! It’s “armed female” or “adult male” or, if the subject is still on the loose, maybe “a white male in a neon green hoodie and purple parachute pants.” But never-not-ever is it “a human in human clothing.” They only threw the dress part in there to avoid stating a politically inconvenient fact, upsetting advertisers, or toppling their own carefully constructed narrative.

By the time officials reached the podium to deliver a press briefing, the description had morphed into “a gunperson.” A gunperson. As if the word “shooter” was insufficiently inclusive or somehow accidentally implied gender? The press spent more time agonizing over culturally sanitized euphemisms than reporting the actual details of the crime.

By early afternoon, every major outlet was doing verbal Pilates to avoid saying the one thing the adults in the room had already figured out: the “female in a dress” was a biological male transvestite.

Reporters tiptoed around the truth like it was a sleeping dragon. A lot of “quotes” were used.

You could practically hear the gears grinding: “If we get the pronouns wrong, we’ll be accused of hate; if we get the biology right, we’ll be called bigots. So let’s say nothing and hope nobody screenshots this.”

NOTE: I will not be mentioning the shooter’s name, showing his face, or referring to him as her or them. Linguistic autonomy. My stack, my choice.

Social media, as always, was on it. Online sleuths quickly dug up the shooter’s past, online posts, behavioral history, and hobbies—some dark, some disturbing, some tragically predictable for a young person spiraling into violence. They discovered that he was into guns, liked to wear lipstick, and described himself online as MtF, trans slang for someone making the switch from male to female. (I could probably stop there.) They found old Facebook posts written by his mother—who was allegedly one of the victims, along with one of her three other children—asking a private parenting group for advice on dealing with a child who “is angry, mean, and territorial,” “hurts his siblings” and “covers things up and lies.” They unearthed evidence that the mom was also seeking help for his ADHD diagnosis and that the killer was in fact, taking psychiatric drugs. They pointed out, time and again, that Canada has some of the strictest gun laws on the planet, a detail that somehow didn’t stop a deranged lunatic from getting his hands on a weapon and opening deadly fire. Go figure.

The actual press, it seemed, was too concerned with identity etiquette to touch any of those piddling particulars. And even long after the gunperson had been positively identified as someone who was born with XY chromosomes, they still couldn’t do it. They couldn’t bring themselves to have the journalistic decency to make it clear that the suspect was a mentally ill male who at the very, most generous best could be considered a transgender woman.

Nope, it was just woman.

What makes me mental is the media’s absolute allergy to stating the obvious. They refuse to report basic facts because those specifics implicate the very experiment they’ve helped unleash on America’s kids: destabilizing their identities, medicating their emotions, indulging their self-delusion, and then ignoring any possible connection when the result is deadly violence.

🚨"He is a MAN. He is a boy. It is a MALE crime. But you wouldn't know that from watching the BBC, ITV or Sky News."

Julia Hartley-Brewer's scathing message to media outlets for telling the public "lies" about the sex of the suspect of the Canadian school shooter. @JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/uHzdzIaQ9O

— Talk (@TalkTV) February 11, 2026

The media has a line they will repeat until the sun burns out: “Trans people are far less likely than cis men to commit mass shootings.”

You’ll see it on every network, on every chyron, and in every sanctimonious “actually” thread on X.

And technically, it’s true—but only because they cheat.

The stats they cite routinely fold every gun catastrophe in America into one giant pile: gang shootings, drug-turf shootouts, domestic murders, felonies gone bad, suicides, robberies, drive-bys, and the occasional drunk uncle with a Glock. If you use the standard media definition of “mass shooting”—four or more people shot in a single incident—then yes, trans-identifying shooters make up a tiny slice. So do dentists, redheads, and people named Gary.

But that’s not the category anyone conjures when they hear the phrase mass shooter. 

We’re talking about public, ideological, spectacle violence—school shootings, mall massacres, club attacks, manifesto-fueled rampages, the “society broke me and now I’m returning the favor” genre. And when you look at those, the ones that shock the nation and lead to “serious national conversations,” a different pattern emerges—one the media pretends not to see.

Out of roughly 150–185 public mass shooters since the 1960s (depending on the database), at least five have been trans, “gender-nonconforming,” or nonbinary. That’s around 3%—and doesn’t include this week’s carnage—in a population where trans-identified people comprise about one percent. In other words: the trans community represents triple the baseline. And if you zoom in on the last decade, when the gender ideology movement hit full throttle, the number jumps to 7%.

It gets worse. If you narrow the subset further to school shooters only—using the standard definition to include non-gang, non-accidental, multiple targeted victims—and suddenly 10% of the perpetrators in the last decade (two out of twenty) have identified as transgender. And if you look at just the past five years, when five of ten shooters were trans—this time, I’m including this week’s horror—that number skyrockets to fifty percent. But nothing to see here, folks. Trust us.

Of course, this doesn’t prove causation. But what it absolutely disproves is the media’s favorite bedtime story: that it’s “baseless” or “bigoted” to notice a recurring theme. It isn’t. The pattern is real, documented, and growing. Yet the folks whose entire job it is to inform us will continue to chant their mantra that “trans people are far less violent than toxic cisgender men”—because they’d rather gargle broken glass than admit the monster under the bed is one they had a hand in feeding.

And I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: facts matter. Trends matter. Truth matters. Because institutions can’t solve a problem they refuse to see, and you can’t have a public reckoning when half the country is duct-taping their mouths shut to protect an ideological narrative.

Change my mind.

Tyler Durden Thu, 02/12/2026 - 16:20
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We Have Now Reached "Gunperson"-Level Absurdity