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Conspiracy theorists made Tiffany Dover into an anti-vaccine icon. She’s finally ready to talk about it.

Tiffany Dover is alive. Sitting across from Tiffany at her kitchen table, this is obvious. She breathes in and out. She gestures with her hands. She laughs generously. Dimples carve into both cheeks when she smiles, which she does a lot. Her eyes are wide and bright and terribly blue.

“I didn’t die that day,” Tiffany tells me. “But the life I knew did.”

I’d been following Tiffany since that day, Dec. 17, 2020. Like thousands of others, I first saw her on a livestream during the national rollout of Covid vaccines to front-line workers, where Tiffany became one of the first people in the U.S. to get a shot. I was also watching when she fainted immediately after, launching a wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories that would eventually unravel her life. 

The modern anti-vaccine movement was powered by unverified stories of the dead and damaged. Tiffany wasn’t the first person to be swallowed up in an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign, and she wouldn’t be the last. 

The unsettling thing about it — to me and the more well-meaning conspiracy theorists who took up an interest in Tiffany’s case — was that she seemed to just disappear. 

I called and sent emails, but Tiffany never got back to me. Her employer declined media interviews on her behalf, and she stopped posting on her own social media accounts. I made several visits to her Alabama home and to CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga. But I never spoke to her. 

So all I could do was watch, as Tiffany became the worst kind of internet celebrity, as she trended on every social media platform, as fact-checkers around the world worked to dispel reports of her death, and as the theories about her evolved, spun up by a phenomenon researchers call participatory misinformation. On Instagram, users flooded posts of her children with demands that she speak. People hounded her husband on Facebook and branched out to the social media pages of extended family members, colleagues and acquaintances, urging them to come clean about what had happened to Tiffany and the cover-up afterward. They made websites. They led Facebook groups. They recorded songs. They came to her house. Everyone wanted to know what happened to Tiffany. 

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San Francisco University to host seminar on ‘racist’ math

San Francisco University, in association with the Simon Fraser Public Interest Group, will host a seminar on Tuesday asking the question, “How can math be racist?” and will answer it by “unpacking oppressive structures and bias in math and science.”

Those set to speak at the seminar are Hannah Ghaderi, Co-Directory of Research & Education of the interest group, and Chantelle Spicer, currently the Director of Engagement. Neither of these individuals appear to have any professional background in math. Mathematician James Lindsay told Human Events that it is likely better that these two DEI professionals did not have a math background.

Lindsay said: “They don’t need mathematics backgrounds. They have critical consciousness, which means they know how racism and transphobia are hidden in everything, even things they don’t know anything about.”

“In fact, people with mathematics backgrounds would be less suited to this work than they would because they would believe that having been socialized into mathematics culture makes these so-called problematics seem normal, which makes them invisible,” he said.

Lindsay has recently been at the forefront of speaking out against diversity, equity and inclusion infiltrating mathematics, as woke leftist professors and activists have continued to insist that it’s racist to say at 2+2 = 4, and claim instead that the sum of the equation is 5.

The fundamental thesis of those who suggest that 2+2=5 is not that it must equal 5, but that it can equal five. The idea behind this assertion has to do with deconstructing conventionally accepted notions in exchange for subjectivity and unstable conclusions. This cultural stratagem finds its culmination in postmodernism, where objective fact is often seen as draconian and authoritarian.

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Here’s FBI Glossary for Flagging ‘Violent Extremism’

The FBI uses a “glossary of terms” to look for online that could indicate someone is involved with “violent extremism,” according to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. 

The flagged terms include “redpilled,” first popularized by the 1999 film “The Matrix,” “based,” “looksmaxxing,” and the names “Chad” and “Stacey.”

The FBI also flags phrases that include “it’s over” and “just be first.” 

The documents were obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through a Freedom of Information Act request. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Such words and phrases have come to be code for certain extremists who communicate online with others like them, according to the FBI’s glossary of words indicating “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” and a list of “key terms” about “involuntary celibate violent extremism.”

According to the FBI document, the word “cell” is short for incel, which in turn is short for “involuntary celibate,” or an online community of men who  think they can’t attract women even though they want to be in a relationship. 

“Docs we obtained show how @FBI equates protected online speech to violence,” the Oversight Project says in a tweet. “According to @FBI using the terms ‘based’ or ‘red pilled’ are signs of ‘Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.’”

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US Is Spying On Zelensky: Here’s What’s Known So Far From The Leaked Intelligence Files

The highly classified Pentagon documents which were leaked online in recent weeks, but which began being confirmed and reported as authentic by The New York Times and others only in the past few days, contain some embarrassing revelations. This has sent DOJ and US intelligence officials scrambling to discover the source of the leaks.

CNN is confirming Monday based on one of the documents which appeared online that the US has been spying on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky – a disclosure which has caused officials in Kiev to be “deeply frustrated”.

“One document reveals that the US has been spying on Zelensky,” CNN reports. “That is unsurprising, said the source close to Zelensky, but Ukrainian officials are deeply frustrated about the leak.”

The US intelligence document suggests that American officials have been worried about possible Zelensky decision-making to strike deep into Russian territory, which would escalate the war and potentially bring Russian and NATO into direct clashes:

The US intelligence report, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February “suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast” using unmanned aerial vehicles, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

An additional possibility is that the US intelligence community might be monitoring the Ukrainian presidency’s office as part of efforts to oversee and account for how the tens of billions in aid sent to Kiev is being utilized. 

The Washington Post details that “many of the documents seem to have been prepared over the winter for Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military officials, but they were available to other U.S. personnel and contract employees with the requisite security clearances.”

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Sen. Lindsey Graham Says He Would Support Sending American Troops To Taiwan

The United States should aggressively train Taiwanese forces “so they can fight like Ukrainians,” send F-16 jets to the island, install nuclear-tipped missiles in its submarines, and dispatch American troops to defend the nation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News Sunday on April 9.

Graham said that Congress needs to ask itself, “‘Should we have a defense agreement with the island of Taiwan?’ We don’t,” he said. “But yes, I’d be very much open to using U.S. forces to defend Taiwan because it’s in our national security interest to do so.”

Graham said he believes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing is “setting the stage possibly for a blockade of Taiwan.”

“The Communist Chinese party is going to test us dramatically this year and next year before the election,” he said. “In 1961, the Russians tried to isolate West Berlin. So I’m fearful that the Chinese may be setting conditions to blockade Taiwan in the coming months or weeks, and we need to respond forcefully if they do that.”

Graham cited Taiwan’s role in producing microchips and the risk of the CCP—which is militarizing at a rapid rate—gaining “a monopoly on the digital economy” as a reason for defending the island.

Taiwan makes more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90 percent of the most advanced versions.

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Leaked Document Appears to Show NATO Special Operations Forces are in Ukraine

A Pentagon document that has appeared on the internet as part of a trove of leaks shows the number of NATO special operations forces that are inside Ukraine, according to The Guardian.

The Guardian report reads: “One slide suggested that a small contingent of less than a hundred special operations personnel from NATO members France, America, Britain, and Latvia were already active in Ukraine.”

According to a copy of the document circulating on Twitter, the authenticity of which has not been verified, there are 97 NATO special operations soldiers inside Ukraine, including 14 Americans.

The French government denied on Saturday that its forces were inside Ukraine. “There are no French forces engaged in operation in Ukraine. The documents cited do not come from the French armies. We do not comment on documents whose source is uncertain,” a spokesman for the minister of France’s armed forces said.

The New York Times first reported on Thursday on the leaked documents that appeared online. The documents show US planning for a Ukrainian counteroffensive and appear to be authentic as the Biden administration is scrambling and the Justice Department launched an investigation into the leak.

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FBI documents associate internet slang like ‘based’ and ‘red pill’ with ‘extremism’

New documents released Monday warned that common internet lingo is being associated with “Violent Extremism” by the FBI.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project said it used a Freedom of Information Act request to expose FBI documents that include glossaries showing that common internet slang has been flagged as an indication of “Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism” or “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.”

Part of the document refers specifically to “incels,” or those “involuntary celibate,” whom the “threat overview” describes as possibly seeking to “commit violence in support of their beliefs that society unjustly denies them sexual or romantic attention, to which they believe they are entitled.”

The assessment notes, “While most incels do not engage in violence,” some have been involved in “at least five lethal attacks in the United States and Canada.”

Many of the terms mentioned in the FBI’s list of incel terminology are either widely used across the internet or innocuous in nature.

The one term in the glossary is “Red Pill,” which comes from the 1999 film “The Matrix” and has been used a metaphor for seeing hidden or politically incorrect truths about the modern world, particularly when it comes to politics or dating.

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BRITAIN ‘IMMEDIATELY’ SUPPORTED U.S. OVER SHOOTING DOWN OF IRANIAN AIRLINER

The attack occurred during the Iran-Iraq war, which had begun in 1980 with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. The US government backed Saddam, and sent warships to the Persian Gulf to support the Iraqi war effort. 

One of those warships was the USS Vincennes which, on 3 July 1988, fired two missiles at Iran Air Flight 655 while it was making a routine trip to Dubai.

Washington claimed the US Navy had acted in self-defence, but this wasn’t true. The plane had not, as the Pentagon claimed, moved “outside the prescribed commercial air route”, nor had it been “descending” towards USS Vincennes at “high speed”. 

The US thus shot down a civilian airliner, and haphazardly tried to cover it up. Some 66 children were among the 290 civilians killed. 

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Dalai Lama speaks out after bizarre video showed him asking to kiss boy’s tongue

The Dalai Lama has apologized following outcry over him kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue.

The spiritual leader’s office released a statement on Monday after footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, went viral on social media.

The statement said he “wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused,” according to CNN.

“His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement read, also saying he “regrets” the interaction.

The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.

In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”

The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.

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GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl

A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.

Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run, said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.

But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.

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