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Election Illegalities in Maricopa County’s 2022 Election, Reveals ‘Intentional Conduct to Sabotage the Election’

January 22, 2024

gettyimages-1206477691-612x612 — Empty envelopes of opened vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary are stacked on a table at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

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New Documentary ‘State of Denial’ Goes over Election Illegalities in Maricopa County’s 2022 Election, Reveals ‘Intentional Conduct to Sabotage the Election’

A new documentary released on Wednesday, reveals the full extent of the chaos on Election Day last fall in Maricopa County due to voters unable to feed their ballots into the machines for tabulation. Speropictures released “State of Denial” in a viewing hosted by We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) at Pollack Cinemas in Tempe, which is now available free online. The documentary interviewed the key people involved in figuring out how the problem arose, and why nothing happened in the courts to rectify it.

WPAA, which is working with the Kari Lake campaign, posted the documentary on X, along with the statement, “The movie of what the government knows, but will never admit. Kari faces defamation charges for telling the truth, while Scott Jarrett, Stephen Richer, and Bill Gates continue to gaslight and lie to the public.”

The documentary juxtaposed footage of Maricopa County officials reassuring everyone that very little went wrong on Election Day, while revealing how bad the voting anomalies were. At least 61 percent of vote centers encountered tabulation problems, the documentary revealed. One video clip showed Gates, who is a Maricopa County Supervisor, stating that “door 3,” where ballots were placed that were unable to be read by the tabulating machines, was “secure.” However, cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh said during the video that door 3 containers were not sealed.

WPAA conducted an investigation into the election to get to the bottom of the illegal activities. When the group attempted to review the county’s live cameras, Chris Handsel, WPAA’s data and technology director, said they discovered, “We have so many of the cameras that went down just before we started opening up these boxes and looking at the balance.”

Lake’s attorney Bryan Blehm discussed how Lake has been unable to find almost anyone to represent her challenging the election, since Democrats are coming after election attorneys who challenge the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections. “I was the only lawyer in the state of Arizona willing to take Kari Lake’s case because I know what happened in 2022, and I know what happened in 2020,” he said.

Lake frequently says she may end up representing herself in the future since the Arizona Bar is in the process of disciplining her attorneys.

Lake’s attorney Kurt Olsen addressed the courts dismissing the election lawsuits. “The court[s] they just say well, there’s no evidence to baseless allegations of fraud allegations,” he said. “That phrase, ‘baseless allegations of fraud,’ was repeated, regardless of the evidence that showed that there was actually illegal voting and evidence of fraud.”

Blehm said the courts sanctioned election attorneys who brought the lawsuits in order to deter others.

“I believe it was an intentional effort to get attorneys to self-censor, to avoid potential sanctions,” he said.

Blehm pointed out how progressives got the courts concerned about interference in elections, but that was back when it was likely to hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats. “They were convinced there was Russian interference in elections, so convinced courts to create misinformation boards,” he said. Blehm has been speaking out against the Arizona Supreme Court’s creation of a misinformation task force, resulting in the State Bar of Arizona coming after him for criticizing judges.

Olsen said there were four major problems in the election, which he sued over in his complaint representing Lake. They were tabulator rejections, chain of custody violations (which is a Class 2 misdemeanor), lack of signature verification, and First Amendment violations.

The documentary revealed that of 464,926 ballot scan attempts on Election Day, over 50 percent had misfeed issues. The federal Election Assistance Commission limits misfeeds to 1 in 500 ballots. There were 180,894 ballots rejected out of 248,070, with 16,724 ballots going to door 3.

This was juxtaposed with a video clip of Gates stating, “There was no one who came today with a valid ID who was turned away from the polls.”

Many voters revealed later that they were unable to vote because they ran out of time waiting in line; many had to return to work, were elderly or sick and unable to stand in line for hours, or had other reasons.

Olsen revealed problems found with the county testing the equipment.

“They didn’t test any of the tabulators that were used in the vote centers; they tested five spares [that were not ultimately used on Election Day],” he said.

The lawyer brought this out in the pleadings in Lake’s lawsuits, but so far the courts have done nothing about it.

The county was required to conduct Logic & Accuracy tests before the election, but WPAA reported that the county didn’t conduct the mandatory testing until after they had certified on October 11, 2022, that it had been done, and then illegally swapped out the memory cards without testing them afterwards. WPAA discovered this after obtaining the system log files, which revealed that the L&A testing was actually done on October 14, 17, and 18, a full week after publicly certifying that it had been completed.

Olsen said over those three days, the county cut the seals from 446 tabulators, which was against the law, then reprogrammed the memory cards, which were never tested. He said the seal was supposed to be on there during the election to show they had been tested. He added that the county didn’t remember they did that until seven months afterwards when they were caught, since warning signs showed up in the log files.

Parikh said the log errors meant the votes could have been tabulated for the wrong candidate, since the machines were forced to attempt to decipher the errors. He said there was no evidence the problem was ever fixed prior to the election.

Another problem WPAA found based on the log files was that the county duplicated over 8,000 ballot images in an attempt to fix the tabulator problem on Election Day. However, the county only admitted duplicating 1,300 ballots, Olsen said. He said he believed setting the printers to print 19-inch ballot images was “intentional conduct to sabotage the election.”

When WPAA requested video footage, the county sent them a limited amount, which revealed nothing since the cameras were located too far away from any activity. But WPAA had been recording their own video too, and figured out that the county could have sent them that video which revealed far more, but chose not to.

Similarly, when the Lake campaign asked to inspect the ballots, which the statutes authorize a candidate to request, the county refused to turn them over.

Parikh discussed how he figured out the tabulation problem. He asked the county to allow him to look at ballots from six of the vote centers. He asked for a ruler and could see that the margins on the ballots varied, leading him to discover that some of them had been printed with 19-inch images instead of 20-inch images. The incorrect 19-inch images were found in all six vote centers.

The documentary showed footage of Jarrett, the Maricopa County Elections Department co-elections director, testifying on the witness stand during Lake’s trial about the 19-inch ballot images. During the first day he testified about it, he denied four times that it could have occurred; said the size was never tested and never installed. However, the next day he testified that he discovered the “fit-to-print” problem a few days after the election. He was not disciplined for perjury, and Shelby Busch, co-founder of WPAA, observed that the judge called him “credible.”

Busch discussed the problems the group found with voter signature verification. “Some of the things we found were voter registrations that were put into the system that had no signature, or they had signatures that belonged to another voter,” she said. Handsel added that 21 percent failed the secretary of state’s standards for signature matching, and 9 percent were “egregious mismatches.”

Olsen pointed out that 9 percent was enough to alter any election outcome.

“Nine percent of 1.9 million would be 180,000,” he said. Additionally, he cited testimony from whistleblower employees who revealed that 15 to 40 percent of signatures didn’t match, but were approved anyway by second level managers.

Handsel said WPAA submitted public records requests to the county for its signature verification procedures, and determined that following them would take as long as 45 seconds per signature. However, many of the signature reviewers were “speed clicking” through the process, many with approval rates of 100 percent of all signatures. Olsen said the court determined that over 321,000 signatures were verified in less than three seconds, asserting that it did not violate the law.

WPAA was thwarted doing its investigation, because the county refused to turn over ballot affidavit envelopes containing the signatures from the 2022 election, only the screenshots of them.

In regards to the chain of custody problems, the documentary showed Maricopa County Elections Department Co-Elections Director Rey Valenzuela stating that when the county picks up mail-in ballots from the Post Office, the county does not count them before dropping them off at their third-party vendor Runbeck Election Services, which scans in images of the ballot envelopes.

Blehm pointed out this violated the law. “They gave Runbeck the authority to count their ballots and they have no legal authority to do so,” he said. Olsen said there were around 35,000 ballots which appeared at Runbeck lacking a chain of custody. Runbeck said it received 263,000 ballots on Election Day, but recorded that they scanned in 298,000 images. Olsen and Blehm are in the process of being disciplined by the Arizona Bar for bringing up this discrepancy in pleadings for Lake.

The documentary also showed footage of Richer, the Maricopa County Recorder, testifying during Lake’s trial that when ballots leave the voting centers in the bins, they are not counted so no one knows how many there are.

The documentary cited a poll from Rasmussen Reports earlier this month which found that one in five voters admit they committed voter fraud in the 2020 election, such as by filling out a ballot for someone else. It concluded with a message from Lake, who said the U.S. needs to return to conducting elections on one day only, in person, and hand counted. She cited France’s presidential elections, which are conducted that way.

Watch the trailer.

The full film can be seen on Rumble and YouTube.

– – –

Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to rachel.r.alexander@gmail.com.
Photo “State of Denial Arizona Movie” by StateofDenial.

Illegals are counted as residents for the Census helping Blue States Keep Congressmen despite citizens leaving

Steve Balich

January 21, 2024

#twill #opinion #thought #sbalich #idea #plan — Can be good or bad depending on ones opinion

Illinois Looks Under a Rock and Finds Another 46,000 People

We’ve cast serious doubts on the accuracy of the 2020 Census count in many blue states. The population numbers far exceed the annual Census population estimates, data on home sales, moving van destinations, IRS tax returns, and other measures of movements between states.

Illinois should have probably lost another congressional seat as should have New York. Just as the left used the COVID pandemic in 2020 to change long-established voting rules, they used the virus to change the way the Census was conducted. There is good reason to suspect that the counting errors cost the red states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona as many as three to four congressional seats.

So our jaws dropped open when we read this headline from the Chicago Tribune:

State officials claimed that there were far more people than originally counted who live in shelters, government-assisted housing, in prison, or are homeless.

You wouldn’t think a state would want to boast about these high numbers of indigents and criminals. But Governor J.B. Pritzker is celebrating that this recount will bring tens of millions more federal welfare dollars to his state.

None of this changes the sad reality of Illinois: the state is rapidly losing its most productive citizens – no matter what Census bean counters say.

Illegal Immigration is Big Business – Who’s Tracking the Crisis

The U.S. Government Facilitates Human Trafficking – Illegal Immigration is Big Business – Who’s Tracking the Crisis – First COVID, Now Migrant Disaster Proclamations

Migrant debris littering private property along the Rio Grande This week, I had the opportunity to visit the U.S. southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas. I was invited to join a small group of Illinois legislators, a Texas state representative, Congresswoman Mary Miller, and a couple of others. Jaco Booyens led the tour. Jaco is well-known for his work to prevent human trafficking. His organization is Jaco Booyens Ministries, and his team works on public policies related to detecting and preventing human trafficking.
Our one-day tour included a visit to the Eagle Pass Border Patrol Station, where we were not invited in to ask questions, Mission Border Hope migrant processing facility, Bridge 2 in Eagle Pass, and a farm that has been run over by illegals and is now a border crossing controlled by the federal government.
In addition, I was also fortunate to have dinner with Don McLaughlin, the former Mayor of Uvalde the night before our border tour. We spoke about both the border crisis and the school shooting. He will be on my Sunday radio show tonight, so tune in to hear more.
Seeing the border operation firsthand and hearing from people directly affected by the open border brought the situation into focus. More than one person who has been living by the border for years said the U.S. government is the biggest human trafficker in the world right now.
That’s a very strong statement, but not inaccurate.
Our government is doing nothing to stop the migrants from coming in. Instead, they are enticing, facilitating, and funding the massive movement of illegals in direct violation of our laws.
Here are pictures of the staging area for migrants at Bridge 2 in El Paso, Texas. The top photo was taken around mid-December 2023. The bottom picture is from January 4, 2024. Same place, just a different angle.

The reason the staging area is empty in January is because on January 3^rd a Republican Congressional delegation was there getting briefings and taking a tour. The government ensured migrants were not around – at least not en masse. They cleared them out to processing centers, held them back on the Mexican side, and some likely crossed further away from the Eagle Pass area. A border patrol officer we spoke with said they expect 10,000 to show up next week. They also cleaned up lots of trash. Sounds like a San Francisco-style clean-up ahead of the dog and pony show.
Here’s what is revealed – if they can stop the flow of migrants for a few days, then they can stop the flow of migrants completely.
That’s not what’s happening, though.Instead, our border patrol agents and other public safety officers are actively aiding the movement of illegals into our country.

Some of us walked past the staging area towards the line of containers to get a closer look at what was happening. While we were there, a couple of migrants actually scaled the container, crossed over the concertina wire, and then were helped down by law enforcement with the ladder, you see in the picture above. This is a screenshot from a video State Rep. Chris Miller took explaining what just happened. If you use Facebook, here is a link: (20+) Facebook
If you can cross the shallow river, lay down blankets and clothes to climb across the wire, get on top of the container, and then cross another set of wire – good job! We’ll let you climb down to freedom and lots of government assistance. That’s what’s happening!
The migrants were shown to prepositioned buses ready to take them to a processing center.
Side note – we heard it costs Texas $5,000 per passenger to send the migrants to Chicago or elsewhere. Someone is making LOTS of money off the crisis.
Another side note – Hotel costs at the border are outrageous. Holiday Inn Express is nearly $250/night. With other states sending public safety officers on temporary assignment to the border, this is another enormous cost to taxpayers.
We spent hours at Heavenly Farms, a pecan farm owned by Hugo and Magali Urbina. Their 400-acre farm has been a crossing point for migrants. They are used to seeing a couple of hundred migrants walk through their property daily.
They have encountered people defecating, puking, and walking naked on their land. In one week, they found 57 dead bodies on their property. They have seen 2 and 3-year-olds wandering around alone and encountered families in their barn.
They began to work with border patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety to control the situation. Fencing was put up and the border on their property is monitored by the New Jersey National Guard, Texas National Guard, Texas DPS, U.S. Marines, and border patrol.
Their strip of property is also where the infamous red buoys are located. That whole setup is a joke.
The buoys stretch for 200 yards only, and just past the ends, migrants find a way to cross instead. They said they have seen migrants standing atop the buoys, mocking them.

I really couldn’t believe it when I saw it. You don’t even have to turn your head to see from one end of the buoys to the other. They are not as large as I thought they look on TV (of course, doesn’t everything look bigger on TV?). The buoys weren’t even floating but mostly perched on a sand bar.
Unbelievably, Texas spent a million dollars on the buoys that don’t work, and the federal government is suing Texas to have them removed. If you saw it, you wouldn’t believe it.

The photo below is a screenshot from a video I took of State Reps. Dan Caulkins and Chris Miller shows the red buoys located on the border at Heavenly Farms in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Notice how the buoys just end – randomly.

The biggest joke of all, though, was where the fencing ends. Just one look at the setup makes you know they are not serious about securing the border. In fact, the Republicans should make every single Democrat go to this one point and then dare them not to impeach Mayorkas over his lies that the border is secure.The picture below is the end of the fence line. Both sides of the fence are still on the private property of Heavenly Farms.

On the left side of the photo is the bank that has been excavated and built up by the government, with fencing at the top and concertina wire at the river’s edge. The vehicles are inside the fence. In front of the fence, from where I took this picture, is open to the river on a gentler slope where migrants cross and discard clothes and personal items. In the upper right corner of the photo, the fencing is open and border patrol picks up the migrants and puts them on buses to then transport them to a processing station.
Now, do you understand what a joke this is? All they are doing is funneling migrants to one spot only to pick them then up and send them on their way. And this is happening on private property.
Our government is facilitating the entire illegal movement of people into the country.
Another cause for concern is the massive amount of money given to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to process migrants. We weren’t allowed to take a look inside an NGO affiliated with the United Methodist Church. However, they did let us into their parking area, which was otherwise hidden behind metal walls.
State Rep. Brad Halbrook is in front of an outside area where approximately 150 migrants stood lightly dressed in 45-degree weather. Children were there as well.

I find it strange that NGOs have so much authority in processing illegals, given its importance to national security and since it is a fundamental function of government to watch over people who have committed a crime.
There’s lots of money involved.
Catholic Charities is a massive player in the migrant crisis. This C r isis magazine article from October 2023 is something everyone should read in its entirety. The author, John Cassara, gives the facts and numbers surrounding illegal immigration. He mentions that it has cost $151 billion for US taxpayers. The cartels charge tens of thousands of dollars to cross the border. One radio show host said the going rate is $6,000 for someone from South America and $25,000-50,000 for someone from the Mideast or China. Many of these poor people end up as indentured servants. Illegals come here to get jobs and get supported by taxpayers. They then take their cash and send it back to their home country. This is big money for these small countries. For example, the author notes, “Approximately 25 percent of El Salvador’s GDP is due to remittances.”
On Catholic Charities, though, Cassara indicts them for facilitating illegality:

The cartels are expanding their physical presence and reach into the United States. They are increasingly involved in other lucrative crimes such as organized theft rings and stolen cars. The open border and illegal immigration also facilitate the entry of tens of thousands of military-age males from adversaries such as China and Venezuela into the United States. So far in 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol has stopped 146 individuals currently on the terrorist watch list. Those numbers do not count the ones we did not catch.
Big business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other “elites” also benefit from illegal immigration. They enjoy cheap labor and more consumers. Meanwhile, the American worker—particularly minorities—suffer from depressed wages, loss of buying power, and the dilution of government services caused by illegal immigrant competition. The Democratic Party benefits from its promotion of open border policies and illegal immigration. It is part of former President Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the United States. Without a national “conversation,” the Democratic Party is actively working to change the population dynamics.
Illegal immigrants are given (bribed with) taxpayer-funded welfare, food stamps, healthcare, education for their children, and other government handouts. Illegal immigrants voting by the millions, facilitated by questionable practices such as lack of genuine identification, ballot harvesting, and drop boxes, change the electorate at the federal, state, and local levels. Coming from Latin American socialist collectivism, the schemes must seem normal to the recent arrivals.
The Biden Administration has endorsed and incentivized the entry of more illegal immigrants than the populations of 32 states (counting the District of Columbia). Democrats know that if, for example, Texas turns blue, they will cement their hold on power. And power means the ability to control the money flow to their activists and special interests.
With the above as context, let’s examine the role of the American Catholic Church in facilitating the immigration crisis.
The corporal acts of mercy necessitate that we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, and clothe the naked. Our compassion dictates that we assist strangers to our homeland. But when it comes to illegal immigration, is our empathy misplaced? Is the Church enabling the above criminality and facilitating the oppression of the immigrants we are hoping to help? Are leftists and naïve do-gooders in the Church participating in the transformation of the United States that by far the overwhelming majority of all Americans, particularly Catholics, do not want?    Decades ago, the State Department began to resettle genuine refugees in the United States. They approached the Catholic Church for help. Today, that legitimate assistance has turned into an “illegal immigration complex” worth billions of dollars.

Church members and leaders need to have a broader discussion about exactly what type of behavior they are encouraging, considering who is benefiting from illegal immigration that they are supporting.
The solutions are not that hard.
Build the wall, and don’t let people in. Expel people who overstay VISAs.
Return people who are here illegally. We have comprehensive refugee and asylum programs. Talk to anyone involved in those legitimate programs, and one will quickly understand that the millions that have come over do not qualify for refugee or asylum status. Refugee vetting usually takes two years at a refugee camp before official status is granted. Migrants from Venezuela pass through seven other countries before reaching our border. At least a few of them are “safe” to seek asylum in and the rule is you seek asylum in the first country you get to. Venezuelans could also head to other South American countries to seek a new beginning. At least Argentina may get on the right track with their new conservative, capitalist leader in charge now.
Tax Remittances. https://www.vance.senate.gov/press-releases/senator-vance-rep-hern-introduce-bill-to-tax-international-money-transfers-by-cartels-and-illegal-immigrants/
End sanctuary status. Our laws are meaningless if we won’t enforce them.
In the meantime, the Illinois Freedom Caucus is calling on Governor Pritzker, who just announced his 18 ^th Disaster Declaration on the migrant crisis, to give specific regular reports on spending, housing, and public safety concerns related to the crisis.Where are the daily pressers and data tracking like Pritzker had during COVID?

Colorado Bans Trump From Running Over Concerns Usual Election Rigging System Could Fail

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Steve Balich

January 19, 2024

Colorado Bans Trump From Running Over Concerns Usual Election Rigging System Could Fail

POLITICS·Dec 28, 2023 · BabylonBee.com

DENVER, CO — Facing critics over their 4-3 decision to remove Trump from the presidential ballot in 2024, Colorado’s Supreme Court insisted it was a necessary step due to concerns the usual election rigging system could fail.

“I know we have all the normal rigging techniques available to us, but we’re worried that Trump’s lead could grow so much that those efforts will fail to protect our democracy as they did in 2020,” said Justice Richard Gabriel. “Rest assured, we will not rest until we save democracy by making it completely illegal to vote for Trump. You’re welcome, America!”

Pollsters confirmed that even with classic rigging measures like hackable voting machines, unmonitored drop-boxes, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, and universal mail-in voting, it may still not be enough to stop Trump from being reelected. Experts are urging unelected Judges to put additional measures in place.

At publishing time, Trump had responded by vowing to build a wall around Denver.

As the country slowly increases in racism and right-wing bigotry, it’s important to ensure you don’t get caught up in their evil MAGA ways.

New Year’s Message on Illinois Gun Ban

Steve Balich

January 18, 2024

New Year’s Message on Illinois’ Gun Ban (youtube.com)

New Year’s Message on Illinois Gun Ban

Today we celebrate the New Year, but also face a new era in Illinois Gun Control as today was the deadline for the forced registration of commonly owned firearms. The ISRA remains committed to fighting this unjust law, and we will need the help of every member, their families, friends, and fellow gun owners in Illinois to prevail.

Tempting Human Nature By M.E. Boyd Miss Constitution

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Steve Balich

January 18, 2024

The Will County News

Home Uncategorized Tempting Human Nature By M.E. Boyd Miss Constitution

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Tempting Human Nature By M.E. Boyd Miss Constitution

Steve Balich

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February 9, 2024

“[A]dd to your faith virtue, and to your virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity.” 2 Peter 5:7 King James Version

Since faith is one of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), “adding” virtue must mean virtue of a certain type, or virtue in sync with reason and experience. Both reason and experience tell us that tempting human nature can be very dangerous. And yet this is exactly the political policy of the current executive branch of the federal government – a stress test on brotherly kindness – a stress test on loving one’s neighbor as oneself. The political gamble is that human “deficient inclinations”, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines them, will prevail over patience and charity resulting in a cultural meltdown into chaos, violence, and baseness. Human nature, in other words, at its worst.

Miss Constitution thinks this is no accident. Having made the decision to end the nation-state of the United States of America by allowing an international invasion, the guess is that the normally rule-conscious and big-hearted American citizen will eventually break down into indiscriminate loathing that will then be labeled “racist” and “un-Christian” – the opposite of St. Peter’s admonition above. If deliberate, this is a clever and wicked plan. It is a plan only the clever and wicked could devise.

Add to your virtue, knowledge. . .

Our society is in the current fad of seeing all through the prism of race. Thousands of years ago Asians crossed a now non-existent land mass to come to North America and divided into distinct tribes. Some writers like to call these tribes First Peoples. One might call them aboriginal, like the forests some of them inhabited. With the invention of the compass, explorers began to take dangerous journeys by sea, and these tribes were discovered. The French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Swedes, the Danish, the British, and others were some of the first to emigrate from Europe to the west. Sometimes they were welcomed, sometimes they were not. Some of the peoples already here were “virtuous”, some were not. Some who emigrated here were “virtuous”, some were not.

And yet, the issue of immigration emphasizes the group, not the individual, and this distorts the discussion. American law on immigration has always been reactive of the times and that is why when one looks at the history of that law there are no real anchors or principles that undergird the statutes or the enforcement of those statutes. Other aspects of America’s Rule of Law are anchored in the timeless, in individual unalienable rights, in the existence of the soul, in man’s quest for liberty, in duty to God, country, and neighbor, in the very definition of citizen and republic.

Immigration, on the other hand, based on nationalities, religions, and races not persons, sways in the political wind of the “now.” When the British failed to re-conquer America in the War of 1812, Irish Catholics and Lutheran Germans came to America in droves. Catholicism in a Protestant country was seen by many as abhorrent. With the rise of industrialism after the Civil War, labor unions saw Chinese immigration as a threat to wages and the Chinese were excluded. Woodrow Wilson wanted to convince the nation that all Germans are blood-thirsty rapists so he could justify entering WWI.

And on and on it goes – immigration as a reaction to current events. The rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s created the perfect environment for national self-loathing and a change in immigration policy. From the concept that those who emigrate to America must learn our system and assimilate into a giant melting pot of stability to the concept of punishing “whiteness” by systematically eliminating the white majority was established by Congress in 1965 and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. Chain migration (anchoring one family member so all are allowed to come) and virtually eliminating British and other founding nationalities, sealed the deal. The white American majority will be gone by mid-century. Senator Ted Kennedy proclaimed the dramatic change “will not upset the ethnic mix in our society. It will not relax the standards of admission.” Really? The United Nations and other globalist organizations are piling on relentlessly with notions of the elimination of nation-states and free international immigration.

And to knowledge, patience and brotherly kindness. . .

What had been the practice of emphasizing the group as a reaction to the political winds of the day, but screening the individual in that group, has been deliberately abandoned. Instead of the individually virtuous from many ethnic groups, it is assumed that race itself is a marker of the good. Nothing could be further from the truth. No notion could be more damaging to any society. And so, America is experiencing a stress test in brotherly kindness. Groups have invaded without screening individuals in these groups and Americans are asked to be patient and to be kind – a tempting of human nature.

And to brotherly kindness, charity. . .

How, then, are Americans to react to this obvious dismantling of our society? The US Constitution specifically prohibits, in Article IV, section 4, this current national policy of open borders. The Constitution, unfortunately, is not in play. What is in play is the individual American citizen. Tempted or not, impatient or not, temperate or not, it is not antithetical to St. Peter’s reminder for the individual American to feel righteous anger. Righteous anger translated into a demand for personal scrutiny of every person who has bypassed examination and entered the United States illegally. This anger is not tied to race, it is tied to reason, experience, and necessity.

It is in this midst of faulty ideology, of gross incompetence, of clever and wicked plans, of the abandonment of ancient and trusted principles, that the individual response must remain firm but humane. It is how the inappropriate are removed that is the measure of brotherly love. Of whatever race wanting to emigrate to America, whether tired or poor, whether yearning to be free, the American people have a right to ask that each person be virtuous.

Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing. 1 Peter 3:9

In a Constitutional Republic we repay evil and wickedness through free and fair elections. For those elections to have meaning, a virtuous people must have knowledge. Miss Constitution, again, calls for vigorous Civics Education, K-12, philosophy, authentic American history, Western Civilization, theology, the ancient languages, and ethics. Knowledge is the shield against the worst in human nature, charity the goal – in the firm hope that America may again obtain God’s blessing.

No Liberty without VirtueAugust 29, 2016In “2016 Election”

Could America Survive without Religion?November 30, 2015Similar post

CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATIONSMay 12, 2021Similar post

THE YEAR THAT EXPERTISE COLLAPSED

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Steve Balich

January 17, 2024

THE YEAR THAT EXPERTISE COLLAPSED

The Year that Expertise Collapsed

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER DECEMBER 31, 2023 HISTORY, SOCIETY 10 MINUTE READ

https://play.ht/embed/?article_url=https://brownstone.org/?p=34602&voice=en-US-DavisNeural&appId=XCST8pha_y_&trans_id=-Nn-7VDQPxqYo-ZAYsNa

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Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

“She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this.

As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

TO STARVE OUR FEUDAL OVERLORDS OF ATTENTION

Steve Balich

January 16, 2024

TO STARVE OUR FEUDAL OVERLORDS OF ATTENTION

To Starve our Feudal Overlords of Attention

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY 7 MINUTE READ

If there is one subliminal message we are sent again and again in the course of our days, it is that almost everything we think or do is measurable, and that by carefully collating all the data relating to these measurements, wise “experts” will give back to us the means to streamline our various life processes, and in this way, bring us to ever greater levels of health and happiness.

This is, to take just one of many examples that could be adduced, the premise behind instruments like the Fitbit. You hand over all of your private bodily data to the experts and they will give you back the outlines of a “data-based” philosophy for living a more healthy and happy life.

Whatever else they do with that personal data—like for example selling it to companies interested in bombarding you with new fears and would-be desires, or conjoining it to other databases in ways that might eventually cause you to not be able to get a decent mortgage rate or affordable health insurance—well, I guess it’s best not to ask.

No, your job is to be a “good kid” who blocks all that out and optimistically fixates on how much healthier and happier that device will make your life.

But have you ever noticed that those same commercial entities are much less interested in talking about the many other types of data they undoubtedly have collected from and about us?

For example, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how much extra profit they gain—while effectively robbing us of the same number of hours that we could use to make money, think, or simply relax—by keeping us on hold for hours at a time in the hopes of having a simple query answered, or problem they caused rectified?

Or how many billions they earn by having a poor Filipino or Indian with nothing more than a smattering of English and a script to repeat over and again—as opposed to someone earning a living US wage who is actually trained to resolve problems through dialogue—on the other end of the line?

Or exactly how long they have to keep us on hold to get us fed up enough to end the call in frustration, something which, of course, effectively exonerates them from the need to redress the problems caused by their poor work or poor service?

Or how long it takes you to cease and desist in your desire for a resolution of your problem when wrestling with a stupid AI chatbot that mindlessly runs you through circle after stupid useless circle?

The big holding companies that now control the majority of the services we use and the retail outlets where we buy most of our consumer goods never talk about these things, and needless to say, do not allow the commercial media they effectively control to fixate on these subjects.

And why should they?

Over the last several decades, the BlackRocks and State Streets of the world have steadily lowered the bar in terms of the attention we can expect after turning our money over to them.

During the first years of what I’m sure they surely categorize as a wonderful revolution in efficiency, you could still find a telephone number or two that would lead you to a living breathing human being more or less capable of responding to your needs.

But since the so-called pandemic, even that’s gone.

And I don’t think I’m alone in believing that eliminating the last vestiges of the belief that a merchant has a moral responsibility to back up their products and services was one of the key goals of those who planned this contrived social emergency.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that the governments we sustain with our taxes have gone down the same path, treating the copious information they collect on us as their own private patrimony, erecting barrier after barrier to prevent us, the stupid louts we are, from seeing what they know about the actual results of their brilliant programs, or how they are otherwise spending our money.

Here again, sadly, but also understandably given the day-to-day difficulty of their lives, most people eventually desist in their efforts to get answers to these queries.

And if you are one of the stubborn few who continue to insist on getting reasoned responses, and begin to enlist fellow citizens to your cause, well, they have a solution for that too. They’ll use the media they control to slap a pejorative label on you (racist, populist, anti-vaxxer, it really doesn’t matter which), then send an algorithmically-directed lynch mob your way to execute your social death.

There is a name for a social order of this type. It’s called feudalism.

In the feudalism we learned about in school the lords lived behind thick manor walls that separated them from the serfs in the field. Sure, if a dangerous enemy came along they’d open the gates and let the serfs huddle there until the danger passed.

But in general, most of the traffic went in the other direction; that is, the lord would go out of the gates to take what he wanted from the serfs: their daughters for sex, their sons for soldiering, and of course the fruits of their labors for their well-cladded warehouses within the gates.

And what if the serfs didn’t like this and some of the braver ones got the idea of scaling the walls and taking justice into their own hands?

Well, that’s when the boiling oil and rocks would usually rain down on them from the ramparts.

Today, our lords ostensibly live among us. But it’s not really so.

Over the last three to four decades, and with a special intensity since September 11^th, 2001, they have built cyber-barriers that are every bit, if not more, impregnable than the walls that protected their medieval progenitors. And they have actively fomented the idea through their control of the media, that, as wrong as we might feel it to be, there is nothing we can do about it.

And maybe they’re right.

But then again, the first feudalism eventually did end.

How?

When growing numbers of the serfs realized that the threats “out there” that the lord claimed he was protecting them from with his occasional offers of refuge and safety within the walls, were not nearly as bad as he and his noble friends, and their in-house clerics said they were.

And with this realization they began to turn their eyes away from the thick walls that towered over their hovels and toward the horizon leading to the burghs, where one could live much more fully on the basis of his beliefs, skills, and convictions.

Our modern age, undergirded by the idea of linear time and linear progress, has an obvious bias toward doing; that is, toward resolving problems through purposeful, forward-looking actions.

This can obscure the fact that many improvements to our vital circumstance can also be achieved, not by doing more, but by simply ceasing to do many of the counterproductive things we have, out of laziness or unconsciousness, turned into key elements of our daily life.

Of all of these negative habits, perhaps none is more counterproductive than passively accepting the parameters of “reality” as articulated by supposedly wise and benevolent others. There are, of course today, as there were during medieval feudalism, a number of wonderfully wise and benevolent people out there. But in times of cultural disintegration such as our own they tend to be rather few and far between.

As Covid showed us, an unusually high number of those trotted out to us by our “noble” class as possessing inordinate wisdom are little more than self-interested charlatans.

But they retain much of their prominence because many people, having been told again and again that their own observational and reasoning skills are terminally inadequate, hand over those tasks to those presented to them as inordinately wise.

How about if we stop doing that?

If we do, we’ll strengthen ourselves and our fast-fading skills of discernment while depriving the self-interested charlatans of most, if not all, of their remaining aura of respectability.

Neanderthals and humans may belong to the same species, say scientists. It could rewrite the history of our evolution.

Steve Balich

January 15, 2024

Story by mguenot@businessinsider.com (Marianne Guenot)

An employee of the Natural History Museum in London looks at model of a Neanderthal male. Will Oliver/PA Images/Getty© Will Oliver/PA Images/Getty

Up until recently, the consensus was that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.
But most humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA, challenging the view that we are different.
Other studies suggest Neanderthals weren’t inferior to Homo sapiens and should be considered human.

Neanderthals have long been portrayed as dim-witted, brutish monsters who were genetically inferior to our direct ancestors, early modern humans.

These ape-like creatures spoke in grunts, were beset with illnesses, and died out 40,000 years ago after losing the evolutionary battle against Homo sapiens.

Or at least, that’s what we’ve been told. Recent discoveries, however, are upending that view and reigniting a debate among scientists about whether Neanderthals should be considered to be the same species as early modern humans.

If Neanderthals belonged to our species, it could reshape the history of human evolution and challenge how we define what makes us human.

Most of us have some Neanderthal DNA

The first fossils of Neanderthals were identified almost 200 years ago. By now, you would think scientists would have made up their minds about whether they should be defined as a separate species from Homo sapiens.

But it turns out this is a matter of fierce debate, Antoine Balzeau, a paleontologist from the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France, told Business Insider.

“When we were at first discussing the fossils in the 19th century, there was no real debate about specific species or not, simply because at the time, humans were seen as a species but by default,” he said.

The cast of a Neanderthal skull is displayed in the Chemnitz State Museum of Archaeology. Hendrik Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images© Hendrik Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images

As more fossils emerged, scientists started questioning the strict separation between the species.

Still, up to recently, the consensus was mostly that Neanderthals should be seen as separate. The hominins, who roamed Europe as early as 430,000 years ago, only briefly interacted with Homo sapiens emerging from Africa, who reached Europe about 50,000 years ago.

Related video: Study Suggests Early Risers May Have Neanderthal DNA (Money Talks News)

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The lineages separated about 500,000 years ago — relatively recently in the story of human evolution, but long enough ago that they looked significantly different. For many, that evidence was enough to close the debate: Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.

That view started to change in 2008 when Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo achieved something that was thought to be impossible: he sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal by extracting DNA from ancient bones.

Through his research, Pääbo was able to show that there’s a little Neanderthal in most of us. In fact, he showed most living humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA.

The evidence also suggests that human ancestors and Neanderthals likely had children together when they cohabitated about 50,000 years ago.

After all, according to the strict biological definition of species, animals from different species shouldn’t be able to produce fertile offspring.

“It definitely was a big game changer at that point,” Laura Buck, an evolutionary anthropologist studying hybridization between hominin species, told BI.

“I think it has sort of brought that discussion to the forefront again,” she said.

Were Neanderthals more than just our distant cousins?

The idea that species can’t reproduce is “intuitively attractive because it’s sort of clear cut,” Buck said, “but biology isn’t clear cut.”

She points to several examples of mammals that have been known to interbreed and have fertile offspring, like wolves and dogs, despite being clearly defined as separate species.

For her, a better definition of Neanderthals, the most scientifically tried and tested, is the first one: the characteristics of their bones separate them from modern humans and their direct ancestors.

Hyperrealistic face of a Neanderthal male is displayed in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina. REUTERS/Nikola Solic© REUTERS/Nikola Solic

“I know there are various different papers saying if you shaved a Neanderthal, put him in a suit, and put him on the tube or the subway in New York, no one would notice, I don’t think that’s true,” she said.

“I think we’d definitely think they looked a bit weird,” she said.

Balzeau agrees. “There may be some discussion between specialists about how we define the different groups but from a paleontological point of view, Homo neanderthalensis and almost Homo sapiens are very clear anatomical differences,” said Balzeau.

For others, however, the genomic information should be another argument to liberate the Neanderthal from its knuckle-dragging stereotype.

That’s the case for Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist who specializes in the Paleolythic at Durham University in the UK.

“It would be guesswork to use that evolutionary divergence to assume that there are different species,” he told BI.

Can culture define a species?

Over the past two decades, digs started emerging showing Neanderthals may have been much more sophisticated than had been previously thought.

Pettitt counts himself among those who, until recently, were skeptical that Neanderthals could have any sense of sophistication.

“Until say 20 years ago, Neanderthal behavior was looked on as fairly stupid, or at least fairly limited, and Homo sapiens were, by contrast, seen as quoting Shakespeare, as they dance across Europe,” he joked.

“Which is, of course, nonsense, but it’s a very entrenched view,” he said.

This is thought to have been Neanderthal jewelry created using eagle talons 130,000 years ago. AFP

After all, relative to their size, some studies suggest Neanderthals had a brain at least the same size, if not bigger, than our ancestors, indicating that they may have been very cerebral, Pettitt said

“You don’t buy a top-of-the-range computer simply to use it as an alarm clock. There’s got to be an evolutionary reason why Neanderthals had selected for this remarkably, metabolically expensive tissue,” he said.

Studies have suggested that Neanderthals were skilled hunters, and hide workers, created rudimentary jewelry, had a complex lythic industry, and even worked with pigment.

Some scientists even believe they may have had some form of spiritualism, and would bury their dead, revere lions, and may have even created cave paintings — though that evidence is still a matter of debate.

For Pettitt, this suggests that as Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other in Europe, there’s a good chance they shared a culture or learned from observing each other.

If they spoke, he said, “we can assume they probably spoke different languages. But that similarity suggests there was in fact a shared meaning, however simple.”

Could Neanderthals be called human?

There’s a bigger picture question at stake here: should Neanderthals be considered humans?

“What humanity is very much depends on which group of people you’re talking to,” Buck said.

“It’s something that is culturally defined, but it’s also something that has sort of value judgments. We talk about inhumanity. We talked about humanity. It’s not something that just refers to different types of organisms,” she said.

With the sheer number of people who are alive today, there is arguably more Neanderthal DNA on Earth than there ever was before.

Angela Saini, author of “Superior: the Return of Race Science,” argues that there is a real risk of getting this wrong. Those who are thought to have more Neanderthal DNA today could be wrongly thought of as inferior.

Early studies have linked these Neanderthal genes to modern health effects like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and some cancer— though how these genes exactly affect the health of the person who carries them is still mostly unclear. Neanderthal genes have also notably been associated with catching COVID-19.

Because East Asian populations have been found to carry slightly more Neanderthal DNA on average, there is a real danger that this information will be used for discrimination.

The flip side is that our interpretation of Neanderthal culture has changed dramatically in recent years. Saini notes that the Neanderthal image was rehabilitated just as people started to draw them closer to populations in Europe, and genetic information started suggesting they were fairer skinned with red hair.

“That’s what I find particularly galling. A hundred or so years ago, the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used as a justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity,” she told WNYC.

“Now, because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern-day Europeans, Neanderthals themselves an extinct species has been thrown into that circle of humanity.”

Rewriting our history

We are still in the process of understanding Neanderthals and our relationship to them. As we begin to unpick the history of human and Neanderthal evolution, new scrutiny is being placed on the decision of scholars to separate the two and depict one as superior.

When he revealed his research, Pääbo reflected on how humans living on the Earth today are rather exceptional — not necessarily because Homo sapiens are intrinsically better, but because there is very little time in the history of human evolution when Homo sapiens were the only hominin or human on the planet.

“Had Neanderthals and Denisovans survived, how would we deal with that today?” Pääbo said.

“Would we experience even worse racism against them than what we experience among us today — because they were in some respects really different — or could we think differently and say if we had them here today we would not just have one type of humans?” he added.

“I think both things are possible and it sort of reflects our view of humans and how we speculate about that.”

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