2025? No, 2017. There was no comparable response to Trump’s inauguration today. Al Sharpton spoke at a rally in Washington, DC. A few hundred protested in San Francisco. And there were only tiny protests in London, Switzerland, and Panama.

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In truth, the book shows that Joe Biden has been involved in shady influence-peddling his entire career. While intense focus has rightly been paid to the Biden family’s influence peddling with America’s foreign adversaries, the evidence assembled by Schreckinger suggests that Biden owes his political career to election interference by the mafia.

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In truth, says Schweizer in a new interview with Public, Biden was a pioneer in “offshoring his corruption.” As soon as he became Vice President, Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James “started doing deals, not in Tokyo, not in London, but in Ukraine, Russia and China.

Haven’t other political leaders made money by having family members sell access to them? Sure, say Schweizer. The difference with Biden was both the scale of the influence peddling, and that it happened with so many enemies of the United States.

“The Biden family has taken in tens of millions of dollars. The people who send him millions of dollars with nothing discernible being given in return are directly tied to the spy apparatus of China. All the people involved had ties to Chinese intelligence. And there's no discernible evidence that Hunter Biden brought anything of value to the table other than his name and his connections to his father and his father's political power.”

And the millions from China appear to have changed Biden’s behavior.

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But LA firefighters themselves disagree. They say the reason they arrived too late to stop the fires from becoming catastrophic was because of severe budget cuts. The Fire Department did not pre-deploy fire engines to strategic locations, and helicopters arrived half an hour too late to put out the Palisades.

“That [Santa Ynez] reservoir being closed did not allow helicopters to drop and suck water up from five minutes away,” a new firefighter whistleblower, the third who has come forward, told me. “Instead, they had to fly 10 to 15 minutes away to go get water somewhere else.”

The problem is that the LA Fire Department is one of the most severely understaffed of America’s 10 largest cities. It has less than a single firefighter per 1,000 residents compared to Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, which have twice as many.

“ In 1960, our city population was 2.5 million, and we had 112 fire stations. In 2020, our city population was 3.9 million, and we had 106 stations,” a representative of LA’s firefighters ’ union testified last month. “That's 1.4 million more people and six fewer fire stations.”

This undermines the Department’s ability to respond to emergencies. “In 2020, the average emergency response time was seven minutes and 53 seconds, nearly double the NFPA recommendation.”

Part of the problem is that the number of homeless fires in LA doubled between 2020 and 2023 to an astonishing 38 per day. They start dangerous fires in many ways, including by breaking through the sidewalk into the city’s electrical system, which can result in explosions and death.

Still, many say, it is wrong to blame homelessness for LA’s fires. They are victims of trauma and poverty.

But the research is unequivocal. Over half of all fires that the LA Fire Department responds to are set by a homeless person. "There were two huge explosions, and when I looked out my apartment window, I saw plumes of black smoke," a resident told NBC-Los Angeles. "People are literally dying in the streets, in tents burning down around them.”

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And now a video released yesterday by NewsNation, which was shot by a former employee of Kamala Harris, shows that it took the LA Fire Department 45 minutes to respond to the Pacific Palisades fire. “It could have been confined,” said attorney Michael Valentine. “It wouldn’t have touched any of the homes.”

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But as fires continue to rage out of control, it’s increasingly clear that the response to the fires by California’s leaders was inadequate. The LA Department of Water and Power had drained the city’s second-largest reservoir of water, which was right near the Palisades fire, and failed to notify the County or City Fire Department. The National Weather Service (NWS) warned of “extreme fire risk” on January 2, the NWS - Los Angeles held a briefing on January 3, and yet Mayor Bass flew to Ghana anyway. Newsom did not call out the National Guard until Friday and did not mobilize national and international help until the last few days.

An aide to a former California governor told me, “Knowing the mayor’s office couldn’t adequately manage the situation, Newsom should have immediately traveled to LA to backstop the mayor’s office.”

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But there are good reasons to believe that it would have made a very significant difference. The Santa Ynez Reservoir is just a few thousand feet away from where the massive Pacific Palisades fire started and is the second largest of L.A.’s “ten major active reservoirs.”

It’s too early to say precisely how much of a difference it would have made, and there’s no question that LA’s fire system is antiquated. It was never created to battle so many different fires at once. What’s more, the use of so many hydrants and the destruction of so many service lines to private residences resulted in a major loss of water and, thus, of water pressure.

But the Santa Ynez reservoir was uphill from the Pacific Palisades fire and the firefighters doing battle with it would likely have had first access to its 117 million gallons of water before other firefighters below them. And that would likely have kept water pressure high.

While the media downplayed the significance of the Santa Ynez, a senior water utility executive has come forward to tell Public that “117 million gallons is a huge amount of treated water storage to have available for firefighting. Massive. Maybe one of the biggest treated water storage reservoirs on the whole West Coast.”

The person I spoke with has worked as a senior professional in a California water utility for two decades. The person told Public that the LADWP should never have drained the Santa Ynez reservoir of water. Instead, it should have kept it full for emergency use, and only drained it to repair a torn cover after the fire risk was far lower and after LADWP had a contractor under contract and ready to perform necessary repairs.

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They’re all lies.

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The consequences of this self-hating Woke ideology can be seen today in catastrophic fires, mass evacuations, and burned rubble of Los Angeles. So-called progressives finally achieved what they supposedly warned of but in truth wished for: the eviction of the affluent descendants of colonizers, the incineration of their homes, and the destruction of a city that, more than any other, represents our bloody history of white supremacy and conquest.

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Those will be lies. They could have prevented them.

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Two people are dead, and 80,000 have been forced to evacuate neighborhoods in Los Angeles thanks to fires raging out of control. According to the media and some scientists, climate change is causing the fires. “Researchers believe that a warming world is increasing the conditions that are conducive to wildland fire, including low relative humidity,” reported the BBC.

But one of the country’s top fire experts disagrees. “I don't think these fires are the result of climate change,” Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist, told Public. “You certainly could get these events without climate change.”

Keeley has researched the topic for 40 years. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”

Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state,” said Keeley, “and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”

What about scientists who claim that the dry conditions are unusual? “If you look at the past 100 years of climates in Southern California,” said Keeley, “you will find there have been Januaries that have been very dry. And there's been autumns that have been very dry. There have been Santa Ana winds in January. So these sorts of conditions are what contribute to a fire being particularly destructive at this time of the year. But it's not the result of climate change.”

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The decision by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to crowdsource fact-checking, move content moderation from California to Texas, and advocate for free speech around the world will result in a flood of real-world violence, dangerous disinformation, and conspiracy theories, say experts and the media. Zuckerberg is “giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives,” said the President of GLAAD. “Fact-checking and hate speech policies protect free speech.”

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But there is no evidence that Musk has illegally interfered in foreign elections. In every case, what foreign leaders and the media are referring to are posts that Musk has made on X, formerly Twitter, and an op-ed Musk authored for a German newspaper. And that op-ed and those posts are legal, not only in the United States but also in Germany, France, Norway, and the rest of Europe.

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Post-traumatic stress disorder from Afghanistan war trauma and resulting unresolved depression appear to have driven a 37-year-old Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger to kill himself in a Tesla CyberTruck in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. “In 2020, he was having paranoia and nightmares. He was exhausted and depressed,” said Livelsberger’s ex-girlfriend. “He was gaining weight, and he couldn’t think.” Said the FBI special agent in charge, “Although this incident is more public and sensational than usual, it ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who is struggling with PTSD and other issues.” Law enforcement says there is evidence he changed his psychiatric medication.

Livelsberger’s actions appear to be part of a larger pattern among US military personnel. The number of former service members who commit extremist crimes has significantly increased in recent years. According to a report obtained by the Intercept, seven individuals with US military backgrounds committed extremist crimes between 1990 and 2010. Since 2011, this figure has risen to nearly 45 per year.

The Las Vegas police on Friday released a manifesto by Livelsberger lamenting America’s cultural decline and urging people to “rally around Trump, Musk, and Kennedy.” In an email to a former Army intelligence officer on December 31, which law enforcement sources say appears authentic, Livelsberger claimed it was the Chinese who were flying drones over the East Coast, and that they used “gravitic propulsion” technology that only the US had previously.

And yet several elements of his case appear to be strange and unresolved. Livelsberger never released the manifesto he allegedly wrote; police and the FBI released it, saying they found it on his phone. The manifesto reads as though it were written by a different person than the email allegedly sent to the Army intelligence officer. “They don't look like the same writer at all,” said former FBI agent turned whistleblower, Kyle Seraphin. “The sentence structure is different, the lexicon, the type of words being used, the formation of thoughts and ideas, the length, the topics — completely different.” The email is focused on blowing the whistle on the military coverup of Chinese drones and war crimes in Afghanistan, while the manifesto is focused on civilizational decline and Ukraine.

And for a guy who claimed to love Musk and Trump so much, blowing up the former’s truck in front of the latter’s hotel seems like an odd way to show it. This is particularly odd given the claim by FBI that Livelsberger shot himself in the head with a powerful Desert Eagle .50 handgun before the CyberTruck detonated. Matt Tardio noted on X that the video of the explosion showed Livelsberger sitting upright and no blood on the window. “Desert Eagle .50 would have been highly destructive and blown out the window,” George Hill, a former FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst (SIA) told Public.

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A 42-year-old former Army IT specialist named Shamsud-Din Jabbar committed an act of terrorism by killing 15 in his truck in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, says the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). And there appears to be abundant evidence, including testimony from his close relatives and videos he posted to Facebook, that radical Islamic ideology motivated Jabbar.

Jabbar’s motivations may come as a surprise to millions of Americans. After all, for the last four years, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), President Joe Biden, and other United States agencies that constitute the Intelligence Community (IC) have emphasized that the greatest threat of terrorism comes from white supremacists, not radicalized Islamists.

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For decades, many progressives, Democrats, and others on the Left have argued that Republicans were racist for criticizing the mass migration of unskilled, non-college-educated workers from foreign countries. Around 2016, Democratic leaders, who had recognized the need for border control a few years earlier, increasingly denounced Republicans and Trump supporters as white supremacists.

But the vast majority of those people weren’t racists at all, and they were rightly concerned about the downward pressure of mass migration on the wages of non-college-educated people, the high economic costs of mass migration, and the societal divisions it creates.

Over the past week, many conservatives, Republicans, and others on the Right have similarly argued that critics of mass migration by skilled, college-educated workers from foreign countries are racists. President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, including those who have criticized mass low-skilled migration for the last decade, defended the expansive use of H-1B visas for skilled, college-educated workers. Some Trump allies demonized Republican critics of high-skilled migration as white supremacists.

Although some online commentators have expressed racist views, the vast majority of the H-1B program’s critics have consistently made economic, not race-based, arguments against the program. Like critics of mass low-skilled migration they are rightly concerned about the downward pressure of the H-1B system on wages, in this case of college-educated Americans in tech, as well as the societal costs of H-1B visa abuse and misuse.

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The idea that intelligence and security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others have been involved in the surveillance and censorship of the American people is a conspiracy theory, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was not a victim of government censorship, says NBC News. There was simply no “Censorship Industrial Complex” or government-coordinated activity that targeted American citizens’ speech and violated the First Amendment, mainstream journalists and commentators agree.

But there was and is a Censorship Industrial Complex. The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of DHS expanded its mandate in January 2017, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, to cover election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. This would eventually entail protecting “cognitive security” by combating mis- and disinformation. DHS asked four government-funded think tanks to flag “misinformation,” which was often simply political speech that Democrats didn’t like, and together with DHS urge social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to delete, suppress, or censor it in some other way. In 2020 and 2021, the four government contractors worked hand-in-glove with DHS and other government agencies to pressure social media platforms to engage in political censorship.

Defenders of those efforts say they weren’t engaged in censorship and that the Supreme Court agrees with them. Representatives from these Big Four counter-misinformation NGOs say they did not censor anyone, nor could they, since they didn’t operate the social media platforms. They simply did what anyone could do which was to flag misinformation to the social media companies. No government agency ever threatened to harm a social media platform that refused the offers of help from NGOs engaged in counter-misinformation. And the Supreme Court ruled that government officials have long been free to try to persuade the publishers, reporters, and editors at newspapers and thus were and are free to do the same with social media platforms. “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship,” a Senior Advisor for Public Affairs told Public. “Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

In truth, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire,” said Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Senior Facebook executives worried that the Biden administration would not help Facebook deal with its problems complying with European regulations if it didn’t censor vaccine hesitancy.

And CISA did not refute any of Public’s allegations; it simply dismissed them. That may be because there is no dispute over the basic facts of the situation. DHS and the censorship NGOs persuaded the social media giants to give them unique and special status for flagging disfavored election and Covid content in 2020 and 2021 through a special ticketing (Jira) system. Ordinary members of the public not only did not have access to this system, nobody outside the small government-organized censorship clique knew it existed.

The head of the Stanford censorship program said its function was to “fill in the gap of things the government couldn’t do.” And there was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford’s flagging and censorship operation. CISA’s Director and the Director of one of the Big Four censorship groups texted each other “with some regularity,” according to a staffer. A CISA official named Brian Scully was in a Signal messaging group with at least one Stanford intern and Twitter’s content team.

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.

“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

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But drones have been violating the airspaces of US military bases for years, according to military observers, and Biden said the investigation into the drones had not been completed, which undermines his assurances that there is no threat. “They’re checking it all out,” said Biden. And a few hours after Mayorkas made his remarks on Friday, drone sightings in the airspace over Wright Patterson Air Base in Ohio prompted the base leaders to shut down the airspace.

“Most of the New Jersey drone sightings were misidentified,” noted the War Zone, which broke the story, “so it is notable that the ones spotted over Wright-Patterson, as with the other U.S. military installations, were seen by trained observers that are equipped with high-end gear to maintain security and to discriminate between friend and foe.”

As military journalist and Debrief publisher Tim McMillan noted last week, “A HUGE problem with the White House’s recent stance that the recent ‘mystery drone’ craze is effectively mass hysteria is that officials from Picatinny Arsenal” had told his Debrief colleague Micah Hanks “there had been nearly a dozen confirmed sightings of drones operating near the base going back to mid-November. This was before the reports of drones over bases in the U.K. and the viral news of incursions in New Jersey.”

On Monday, Kirby admitted, “There have been some drone sightings, I think, as you know, over some military bases,” without explaining why he had said the opposite days earlier.

On a private Monday conference call with New Jersey mayors obtained by Public, representatives from the FBI, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Aviation Administration all said that nothing unusual was going on. “These sightings include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones as well, as well as other aircraft, helicopters, and other images including lights mistakenly reported as drones,” Jennifer Daskal of DHS told the mayors.

But President-elect Donald Trump disagreed, saying, “The government knows what is happening… and they'd be better off saying what it is. Our military knows. Our president knows. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy because if it were the enemy, even if they were late, they'd blast it.”

Trump did not answer a reporter who asked if he was getting a national security briefing, but a current or former military intelligence officer told Public he was getting them, which others have also reported.

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