Tag: hoax

Comic Hasan Minhaj Admits He Makes Up Stories About Experiencing Racism — and Doesn’t Regret Smearing Real-Life Acquaintances

Comedian Hasan Minhaj has admitted to inventing several first-person tales of facing discrimination — including a racist attack on his daughter — that undergird his standup comedy act and his politically-themed TV shows.

Minhaj, born in 1985 in the United States to Muslim Indian immigrants, made a name for himself on The Daily Show and his own Netflix comedy series, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. He won a Peabody Award in 2018 for the short-lived (2018-2020) Netflix series.

The comedian has become a favorite among left-wingers for skewering America as a hateful and inherently racist country, often with personal stories of discrimination against him and his family.

Minhaj — who joined Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Steward in 2014 — made headlines as host of the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (WHCD), where he ripped President Donald Trump, calling him the “liar-in-chief” and “the orange man behind the Muslim ban.”

His comedy was even panned by Saudi Arabian officials, who forced Netflix to remove one of his 2019 episodes of Patriot Act that criticized the Kingdom over the Jamal Khashoggi incident.

Minhaj relays several stories during his show. To name a few, he has claimed that a white girl refused to go to a high school homecoming dance with him, tells the tale of a “brother Eric” who infiltrated a mosque for the FBI, and even told the harrowing tale of an envelope with “white powder” in it spilling all over his daughter.

He also tells the story of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner arrogantly sitting in a chair reserved for a formerly imprisoned Saudi activist at a Time 100 gala in 2019. He now admits that never happened.

At long last, Minhaj has admitted that none of these stories of discrimination ever happened, though he tells them on stage and on TV as if they are real.

Keep reading

The ‘Climate Emergency’ Is A Hoax

More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have signed a declaration saying that “There is no climate emergency.”

The declaration is unlikely to get any attention from the mainstream media, unfortunately, but it is important for people to know about: the mass climate hysteria and the destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change need to stop.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” states the declaration signed by the 1,609 scientists, including Nobel laureates John F. Clauser from the US and Ivar Giaever from Norway/US.

The statement adds:

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures…

“The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

“Warming is far slower than predicted…

“The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

“Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial…

“Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2 mitigation measures are as damag­ing as they are costly.

“Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.”

Professor Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration, current professor at New York University, and fellow at the Hoover Institution, authored the 2021 bestseller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. In it, he states that what the largely unreadable (for laymen) and complicated science reports say on climate change is completely distorted by the time their contents are filtered through a long line of summary reports of the research by the media and the politicians.

Keep reading

A Cop Jailed Her for 2 Years on Fake Charges. Will She Ever Get Justice?

A Minnesota woman has resuscitated her effort to sue a police officer who jailed her as a teenager for two years on false charges associated with a sham sex trafficking investigation that the FBI once billed as its largest human trafficking crackdown. The case is another example of the legal labyrinth victims are required to navigate when attempting to get recourse after the government infringes on their rights and once again raises the question: How inoculated should those government officials be from civil suits for violating the Constitution?

Hamdi Mohamud’s odyssey began over a decade ago when St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker had her arrested on witness tampering charges concerning a woman named Muna Abdulkadir, who allegedly attacked Mohamud and her friends at knifepoint. Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s sex-trafficking case, which, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conceded, was “plagued with problems from the start.” Some of those problems included Weyker lying under oath, coercing witnesses, editing police reports, and making up evidence.

The groundless charges against Mohamud were ultimately dropped, but not until she spent about two years in federal prison, where those accused of federal crimes are typically held pretrial.

When Mohamud sued, Weyker was denied qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue state and local government actors unless their alleged misconduct was “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. Yet the 8th Circuit in 2020 overturned that decision, citing Weyker’s position on a federal task force. Government employees at the federal level receive an even more muscular immunity.

“Qualified immunity makes it very, very difficult to sue government officials,” Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), told me in 2021. “This makes it impossible.” The U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened that protection in June 2022.

Keep reading

No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada

After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains.

Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.

Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.

The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found.

He also referred to the effort as the “initial excavation,” leading some who were skeptical of the original claims to think even more are planned.

“I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post Wednesday.

Keep reading

Marijuana laced with fentanyl? Claims unfounded, doctor says

Police departments across the country have recently warned of finding marijuana laced with fentanyl, but one doctor is cautioning not to put too much stock in the warnings.

Concerns over fentanyl have grown as more drugs are being laced with the deadly narcotic. Authorities in states including Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana and New York all claimed to have begun finding fentanyl-laced marijuana.

In one of the most recent cases, the district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, said Friday that police discovered THC gummies that contained fentanyl and claimed the supposedly tainted product was responsible for two overdoses.

But the office walked that back Monday, saying testing conducted over the weekend found that the products “did not alert to any illegal drugs at the lab’s threshold level of detection.”

One doctor who argues the reports should be taken with a grain of salt is Dr. Ryan Marino, a toxicologist who has conducted extensive research on fentanyl exposure.

Keep reading

Two Princeton, MIT Scientists Say EPA Climate Regulations Based on a ‘Hoax’

Two prominent climate scientists have taken on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new rules to cut CO2 emissions in electricity generation, arguing in testimony that the regulations “will be disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

Citing extensive data (pdf) to support their case, William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued that the claims used by the EPA to justify the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently proven to be wrong. 

“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen stated. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”

“All of the models that predict catastrophic global warming fail the key test of the scientific method: they grossly overpredict the warming versus actual data,” they stated. “The scientific method proves there is no risk that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.”

Keep reading

‘Aliens’ Terrorizing Peruvian Village Revealed to be Mischievous Miners

Peruvian authorities have identified the alleged aliens that have been terrorizing a village for the past month and revealed that the ‘extraterrestrials’ were actually a group of miners with a scheme straight out of the classic cartoon Scooby-Doo. The wild case, which made headlines earlier this week, began last month when the Ikitu indigenous people living in the district of Alto Nanay reported nightly visits from fantastic beings, believed to be aliens or supernatural entities, that seemingly possessed the power to levitate. Following an attack on a teenage girl by one of the eerie interlopers, Peruvian authorities descended on the scene to investigate and managed to quickly unmask the nefarious ‘ETs.’

In detailing the findings of their investigation, an official reportedly indicated that the ‘visitors’ were actually a group of individuals who were illegally mining for gold in the nearby jungle. Amazingly, lest one think that the accounts of levitating aliens were a case of mass hysteria or simply made up out of whole cloth, he explained that the gang actually used jet packs to make it appear as if the ‘beings’ were not bound by the laws of gravity. The purpose of the elaborate production was to convince the villagers that aliens or supernatural beings had overtaken the jungle so that they fearfully avoided the area while the illegal mining operation was underway.

Keep reading

Inside the very sinister world of Lil Tay: Influencer and rapper faced fury over vulgar N-word videos at age NINE – before mysteriously VANISHING amid claims she’d been ABUSED by her dad and ‘exploited’ by brother Jason Tian

14-year-old influencer Lil Tay was involved in a bizarre fake death scandal this week – which marked a wild twist to an already tragic story that was filled with rumors of exploitation and allegations of abuse.

Lil Tay, whose real name is Tay Tian, was skyrocketed into the spotlight when she was just nine years old, after she began posting a series of vulgar videos online, which showed her using the N-word and getting into fights with strangers. 

She was hailed as one of the internet’s biggest rising stars in 2017, and quickly racked up millions of followers – but her bizarre clips left some people on the web concerned for her wellbeing. 

Soon, rumors began to swirl that she was being forced to partake in the videos by her family, which were only fueled when footage that seemingly showed her then-16-year-old brother, Jason Tian, coaching her on what to say made its way around the web. 

Lil Tay sparked more concern in July 2018, when she shared a chilling message asking for help to her Instagram Stories, only to suddenly erase all of her videos hours later.

Four months later, an anonymous person started sharing harrowing posts to her account in which they claimed that her ‘abusive’ dad, Chris Hope, was trying to take her away from her mother. 

Chris denied the allegations, claiming that he was actually protecting her. He insisted that he was trying to ‘stop things that he felt were dangerous to her physical and mental health and to her future’ and separate her from people who were motivated by ‘the possibility of making money off of her.’

Then, three years later, her brother issued a desperate plea for help through a GoFundMe page, in which he claimed that Lil Tay was ‘fighting for her life, future and freedom’ after being ‘physically and mentally’ abused by her ‘absentee’ father, who wanted to ‘gain control’ of her and her earnings.

He alleged that Chris had stolen millions of dollars from his sister, took control of her career, forced her into silence, and was now trying to gain full custody over her.

Then, on Wednesday, someone shared a post to Lil Tay’s Instagram claiming that both she and Jason had passed away, explaining that the ‘circumstances surrounding’ their deaths are ‘still under investigation.’

Hours later, however, Lil Tay told TMZ that she was still alive and that her account had been ‘hacked.’ 

As the young star is shrouded in controversy once again, FEMAIL went ahead and rounded up everything we know about her – from her scandalous rise to fame and why she suddenly disappeared from the spotlight five years ago to what she said about her father and what we know about her recent fake death.

Keep reading

Claims that ‘Global Boiling’ Led to “Shocking” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet are Nonsense – the Ice Sheet is Currently Bigger Than Normal

The new era of ‘global boiling’ has brought a return of the much loved climate scare story featuring the imminent demise of the Greenland ice sheet. The Daily Mail recently ran a headline noting the ‘Impact of Global Boiling‘, saying it has “shocking” photos showing how much the ice sheet has melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth”. Snow melt is said to be higher than the 1981-2010 average.

But, alas, those who strive for accuracy in these matters are likely to quibble. The Earth is not “boiling” – that is the unhinged raving of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – the claim about July comes from a computer model, while “ever” refers to data of varying quality going back barely 150 years. Furthermore, the surface balance of ice on the Greenland ice sheet is higher than the 1981-2010 average, and could improve on last’s year performance, when there was little or no loss of the surface mass after the brief summer melting season.

If the Mail is “shocked” by how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year, it probably didn’t consult the polar portal site run by Danish meteorologists, which updates an accurate record on a daily basis. Both graphs above show the effect of a cold June where the ice loss was considerably lower than the previous year. Warmer weather arrived from the south in late June in time for the peak summer melt season.

As the second graph shows, the accumulation of surface ice on Greenland is more than the 1981-2010 average, and a big improvement on a decade ago. But as the Daily Sceptic noted recently, the current improvement can be seen in an even better light. A number of scientific institutions still use a decadal 1981-2010 average for comparison purposes, despite data to 2020 being available. The cynical might note that the ice sheet lost just 51 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s, compared to an annual loss of 244 gts in the 2010s. Updating the average figure would greatly amplify the recent, and continuing, recovery in the surface ice mass.

Keep reading

Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, “MM,” in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own.”

“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter,” states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, “and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s
daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn’t be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don’t appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It’s happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was “a different ethnicity” from her.

This situation isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It comes amidst a decades-long moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns (“if you see something, say something”) to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the “signs” these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on “children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone” and people who seem “nervous.” Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family “should” look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to “stop sex trafficking” via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

Keep reading