The Shocking Rewrite of COVID History; Trump to Appeal New York Verdict; Tucker to Host Show on Twitter
A Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump liable for defamation and battery in a civil case filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll. Both are civil charges that do not result in jail time. Joseph Tacopina, Trump’s attorney, told The Epoch Times that the former president is planning to appeal the verdict.
Also, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has just announced his future plans. He’s going to start a new show on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has come to an end. The federal vaccine mandates are over. The public health emergency was brought to a stop. The world is returning to normal, yet for many people, things aren’t over just yet. The next step may be to hold everyone accountable who violated the basic rights of people using COVID policy.
Yet, key players behind lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and censorship are now claiming it wasn’t them. They say the public attacks are based on misleading information. Others are writing off the blame altogether.
So what’s really happening? We explore this issue in this episode of Crossroads.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Today, a Manhattan jury found former president Donald Trump liable for defamation and battery in a civil case filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll. Both are civil charges that do not result in jail time.
The jury found that Trump should pay about $5 million in damages to Carroll, that includes about $3 million for the defamation charge and about $2 million for the civil battery charge.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee who oversaw the trial, announced the verdict, concluding a week-long civil trial in the Southern District Court of New York. Carroll claims Trump raped her in a dressing room of a department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996—committing a battery offense—and, because Trump denies the incident—he’s accused of libel, which is a type of defamation in written words.
Joseph Tacopina, attorney of former President Donald Trump, told The Epoch Times that the former president is planning to appeal the verdict.
Trump has repeated denied all of Carroll’s allegations and immediately following the verdict, here’s what Trump wrote on Truth Social:
“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
Carroll’s attorney alleged that Trump’s denial of the incident hurt Carroll’s career prospects as a journalist and writer.
Carroll said during the trial that she did not report the alleged incident to authorities for fear of backlash from Trump and his supporters.
But Trump’s lawyer said in his closing arguments that she did not report it to police at the time the allegation because it “would never make it through a police investigation in a million years.”
Additionally, a Trump Campaign spokesperson sent this statement to The Epoch Times immediately following the verdict:
“The Democratic Party’s never-ending witch-hunt of President Trump hit a new low today. In jurisdictions wholly controlled by the Democratic Party our nation’s justice system is now compromised by extremist left-wing politics. We have allowed false and totally made-up claims from troubled individuals to interfere with our elections, doing great damage. Make no mistake, this entire bogus case is a political endeavor targeting President Trump because he is now an overwhelming front-runner to be once again elected President of the United States…”
The case against trump was only made possible because in 2022, the New York state legislature passed the Adult Survivor Act, which amended state law to give victims of certain sexual offenses a one-year window to file a civil lawsuit against alleged offenders. Carroll filed a second lawsuit last November, under this Act, which went to trial and resulted in Tuesday’s verdict.
We’ll see how this story develops.
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Meanwhile, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has just announced his future plans. He’s going to start a new show on Twitter. Watch:
As of Tuesday afternoon, Musk has not issued a public response to Carlson’s video.
Nor did the former Fox News host did not say anything about his former network, coming two weeks after the company released a statement saying they had parted ways.
Since Carlson’s exit, Fox News’ primetime ratings have dropped significantly. The replacement show, “Fox News Tonight,” which has a rotating cast of hosts, has seen a decline in ratings.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has come to an end. The federal vaccine mandates are over. The public health emergency was brought to a stop. The world is returning to normal, yet for many people things aren’t over just yet. The next step may be to hold everyone accountable who violated the basic rights of people using COVID policy.
Yet, key players behind lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and censorship are now claiming it wasn’t them. They say the public attacks are based on misleading information. Others are writing off the blame altogether.
So what’s really happening? We explore this issue, in this episode of Crossroads.
The United States was shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This started under the Trump administration, with guidelines in March 2020. They declared that in order to “slow the spread” that the nation would have to self quarantine for 15 days. Do you remember this?
Then we were told, 15 days? That’s not enough to “flatten the curve.” We need to quarantine longer.
The economy began to fail. Trillions were given in coronavirus bailouts, and the American people were given crumbs from this. Teachers refused to return to school, and children were forced to learn from home. Any business declared as non essential was closed, and this was extended even to the forced closure of churches. Others lost their livelihoods, while big corporations deemed “essential” saw their sales boom. Even prisons in some states were emptied, under the narrative that the jails could become “super spreader sites.”
As this happened, politicians were seen eating at restaurants with their families, elite parties were held where only the servers wore face masks, and while the country was on lockdown mass BLM protests were allowed to sweep the country with waves of destruction, under the narrative that the fight for “racial justice” was more important than the fight for public health safety.
When things gradually began returning to normal, it was still far from normal. Children were forced to wear face masks throughout the school days. Vaccine mandates were rolled out. Many Americans were forced to get injected with experimental shots with shoddy health data, against their will. This was rolled out alongside campaigns of election reform, mass censorship, and heavy handed public criticism of anyone who stepped out of line.
Three years later, things are finally going back to normal. The vaccine mandates are ending. The public health emergency officially ended. The Atlantic even called for a “pandemic amnesty,” where we all just forgive the people who violated our rights, and simply move on. Of course, the public doesn’t want to just move on. Instead there are now calls for justice, to ensure this never happens again.
And as the public calls for justice, something new is happening. Key people who were responsible for these public abuses are trying to flip the script. They’re attempting to rewrite history, to shift the blame, and it seems they’re hoping the public simply forgets what actually took place.
Former White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a focal point of this criticism, and the accompanying calls for justice.
Back in December, Elon Musk declared “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” and with 1.2 million likes on the post, he added “Truth resonates…”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had this to say about Fauci:
“You have people like Fauci saying that his lockdowns didn’t cause any permanent damage to any young kids. I got news for you. It did. And we are gonna reap those rewards across the whole country for years and years and years, because they treated kids so poorly. And I’m just sick of seeing him. I know he says he’s gonna retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
Fauci responded to the growing criticism in a recent puff piece from New York Times Magazine. He said that with pandemic policy, “Nothing was done perfectly.” And he washed the hands of the institutions mainly calling the shots, by stating “the emphasis strictly on the science and public health — that is what public-health people should do. I’m not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.”
He added, “when people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”
So Fauci didn’t shut down the economy? Well, technically he didn’t flip a switch somewhere that just locked down businesses across the nation. He didn’t personally close down a school, or personally put up a sign closing down a factory. But yes, as he notes, he gave the recommendation. The CDC echoed that recommendation. And policy that shut down the country was based on his recommendation, given from his position in power.
It’s like a President starting a war, then declaring he didn’t “go to war” because he never physically set foot on the battlefield. There’s a difference between physically carrying out an order, and being the one who pushed for the order in the first place. And when it comes to the lockdowns, Fauci by his own public admissions, was the one who gave the recommendation for that order.
Let me show you, this is Fauci, on CNN just thirteen days ago on April 26, 2023:
“It was a personification of me as a person who essentially closed everything down. Those were public health recommendations that came from the CDC, and I have always been very supportive of the CDC.”
But this was what Fauci said on October 6, 2020 during a live forum:
“And when it became clear that when we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread, this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the Northeast in the corridor, driven by New York City metropolitan area, I recommended to the President that we shut the country down.”
You get that? He took credit for giving the recommendation to “shut the country down.”
Of course, it’s not just Fauci. Many people were involved in the lockdowns and the abuses. And some of the biggest victims of these policies were America’s children.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, recently testified before Congress on some of the decisions for schools. She recently claimed that the teacher union had actually pushed early on to have schools reopened. Watch:
“I’m sorry, Congressman Raskin, I’m just, we spent every day from February on, trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools, but we also knew that people have to be safe. But maybe it’s because I live in New York City, I live near a hospital. Every other minute there was an ambulance. There was terror. Our members were terrified. Others were terrified. And what we were simply looking for was clear scientific guidance. And when we couldn’t get it, we did it ourselves, and we worked with doctors and we worked with others, and we just tried to get it out there.”
So, the teacher union played a heavy role in keeping schools closed. Weingarten claims they really wanted to get them open, as they knew the situation wasn’t good for kids. But apparently it wasn’t their fault for closing schools, since the physical decision to close things down was based on scientific guidance, you know, like from the officials who were giving the public recommendations for people like her to follow. They were acting on the available information.
So who’s to blame? The people who carried out the action? The people who recommended the action be carried out? Was the real problem a lack of information? Then maybe we should blame groups like the World Health Organization or Big Tech that were restricting and censoring information and news reports that didn’t follow the official narratives? So then, maybe the blame falls on the groups that created the official narratives? Well, the censorship policies followed recommendations from the CDC, which was also being fed recommendations from Fauci. Seems we’ve gone full circle.
In other words, the accusations are turning into a big mess of different people all pointing fingers at each other. Who do you hold responsible? None of them? Or maybe all of them?
But for Weingarten, like Fauci, people were also quick to point out that her statements didn’t seem to be genuine.
Back in July 2020, Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, released plans to reopen America’s schools. And despite the top level recommendation, Weingarten was one of the biggest voices trying to stop schools from reopening.
This is what Weingarten said to The Guardian when this was happening: “It’s as if Trump and DeVos want to create chaos and want to jeopardize reopening.There’s no other reason why they would be this reckless, this callous, this cruel.” And she added, “Their recklessness scared people so much that now I fear a brain drain of people basically opting out of teaching, because they don’t want to jeopardize their own families.”
The teacher union Weingarten represents was also a key force in keeping schools closed. Education Week reported in December 2020 that “Several statewide teachers’ unions, including in Illinois, Maryland, and Wisconsin, have put pressure on their governors to shut down schools across the state or set clear benchmarks that dictate when districts will have to close their doors.” Weingarten told the publication that before schools could open, the unions wanted requirements for things like facemasks and other COVID mandates.
It’s not just an American issue either. This is a global issue. And global leaders are likewise shifting the narrative, and altering history.
Take Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example. Canada had some of the strictest mandatory vaccination policies around. In a recent speech, he claimed claimed he never forced anyone to get vaccinated.
“And all of the scientists, and the medical experts, and the researchers, not just in Canada, but around the world, understood that vaccination was going to be the way through this. And therefore, while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all the incentives and protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated, and that’s exactly what they did. We got vaccinated to a higher level than just about any other of our peer countries. And that’s why we had a less deadly pandemic than most other countries.”
Did he really not force anyone to get vaccinated? Well, you be the judge. This is Trudeau in August 2021:
“We have made the decision that federal public servants need to be fully vaccinated. That is something we are also applying to everyone who gets on a plane or a train in the coming months in Canada.”
Here’s Trudeau again that same month in 2021:
“You deserve better. You deserve a government that is gonna continue to say, get vaccinated. And you know what? If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your choice. But don’t think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people, and put them at risk.”
“I need you to talk to your neighbors and talk to your friends. Talk to those folks who are still wondering whether they should get vaccinated, and tell them yes. They need to get vaccinated so we can protect ourselves, protect our communities, and protect our kids who can’t yet get vaccinated. That’s what we need to do. I need you to get out there.”
I see. He didn’t technically force anyone to get vaccinated. You just couldn’t use public transportation, and you risked getting fired from your federal job if you refused. And then the government told your neighbors and other people to seek you out, to try to force you to get vaccinated.
Oh yeah, and when truck drivers held protests calling for an end to the vaccine mandates, Trudeau also invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act to crush the protests.
But back to his recent statements, was it really the case that “all” the scientists, and medical experts, and the researchers, were all onboard with the vaccines? All of them? Maybe that was partly because scientists, medical experts, and researchers faced punishment, and could even lose their jobs, if they said otherwise. Remember the narratives on how “COVID misinformation” was dangerous? Well, that’s one way to get all the “experts” onboard.
We also learned later through the release of the Twitter Files that US federal agencies were colluding with Twitter to suppress information on COVID-19 and vaccines. This included censoring information on COVID and the vaccines that was later shown to be true. It turned out that the FBI even colluded with the FBI to make a blacklist of experts who went against the official narratives.
As things stand, it looks like many of those responsible for the lockdowns, the mandates, and other abusive policies no longer want to admit their roles in it. And speaking of which, the vaccine companies themselves may not get off the hook either. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he’s investigating Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna over deceptive practices, with allegations that they misrepresented the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The public is calling for accountability. The people who may be accountable are trying to dodge the blame, while pointing their fingers at someone else. But at the end of the day, accountability will be necessary to ensure that what we endured under COVID policy never happens again.
That’s all for tonight, folks. Thanks for joining us for this new version of Crossroads on weeknights at 7PM eastern on EpochTV.com. Also join me for a replay and a live Q&A weekday mornings at 9:45AM eastern. In the next couple of weeks, we will be adding interviews and more segments to the show, so stay tuned for that. And then starting May 15th, we will be broadcasting simultaneously on both EpochTV.com and NTD cable. For updates, follow us on social media @crossroads_josh. And as always, Stay informed, and stay free.
