patrick.net

Drug advertising also buys influence over news outlets, according to Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland. Holland said:

“Drug companies use advertising to do more than just sell more drugs. The billions Big Pharma spends on ads, especially for TV and legacy print media, guarantee that network news decision-makers will run only favorable news stories and veto any reporting that casts drugs or drugmakers in a negative light.

“We saw this clearly during the pandemic, when not a single major news outlet did any real critical reporting on COVID vaccines. Instead, they parroted pharma’s ‘safe and effective’ propaganda, while ignoring the waves of injuries and deaths that followed the rollout of the shots.”

Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year through Dec. 15, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Last year, Big Pharma spent more than $5 billion on TV ads alone. ...

New Zealand is the only other country that allows direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs.

In the U.S., the practice has been ongoing for decades, drawing criticism from advocates like Kennedy, researchers, the American Medical Association and other doctors’ associations, and even mainstream health news outlets, including STAT News.

In recent years, Pharma has thwarted efforts to regulate drug ads, claiming a ban would violate their First Amendment rights.

When the first Trump administration tried to require drugmakers to list drug prices in TV ads, the industry took it to court. A federal judge blocked the move, ruling that HHS lacked congressional authority to compel drug companies to disclose drug pricing.

The Wall Street Journal ran the story below the headline, “Supreme Court Allows States to Restrict Transgender Treatments for Minors.” ...

The paper might have announced the earth-shaking decision the same way the vast majority of sane adults will see it: as good news for the most vulnerable —kids— who can be persuaded to try almost anything...

But no. The Journal’s glass-half-empty sub-headline was a stinker: “By 6-3 vote, justices say Tennessee ban is constitutional, the latest setback to transgender rights.” They could have just as easily called it the latest victory for parental rights. They didn’t even shoot for balance.

The Journal found only bad news in the decision. ...

Yesterday, the top court held (6-3) that transgender identity is not, in fact, a suspect class under 14th Amendment Equal Protection. In other words, transgenderism is not like race, sex, or religious belief.

The implications of that decision ripple far beyond mere medical regulations. ...

That perennial debate —what is a woman?— forms the razor-sharp crux of the discord between the two sides. The majority started from the premise that biological women are women, and many laws often vary by sex without violating Equal Protection, like laws banning exhibitionist gals from going topless on public beaches. ...

like laws banning exhibitionist gals from going topless on public beaches. ...

Welp, in hindsight, it seems inevitable. The Washington Post ran a great story late yesterday headlined, “RFK Jr. wins his fight against a rare, safe flu-shot ingredient.” The new ACIP vaccine committee voted to recommend against vaccines with mercury in them, and WaPo had a surprising take.

In a migraine-inducing narrative whiplash, WaPo’s story reported that hardly any vaccines include thimerasol anyway, so the decision barely moves the needle. But you’ll recall media’s hysterical predictions of mass death just yesterday.

But today: meh, it’s nothing but a symbolic victory for anti-vaxxers.

“The vote to no longer recommend influenza vaccines that contain the preservative thimerosal,” WaPo explained, “is likely to have limited impact because the vast majority of flu shots are thimerosal-free.” Now they tell us.

The vote, merely a recommendation by the advisory committee, has no binding authority. It must be adopted by the CDC. But the CDC currently has no confirmed director, leaving the final decision up to Secretary Robert Kennedy, who in 2015 edited an anti-thimerosal book. So.

The only panel member to vote no, Cody Meissner, argued it would limit the availability of flu shots. Oh, no. Last year’s shots had a woeful 33% efficacy. Just saying.

This morning, CNN ran the latest terrific TAW story, headlined, “Paramount settles Trump’s dubious ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit with $16 million payout and no apology.” It might’ve been cheaper had they said they were sorry. Oh well. ...

CNN’s pathetic sneering started in the very first sentence, in which —in a supposedly straight news story, mind you— it sandwiched the scornful descriptor “legally dubious” between the words “settle a” and “lawsuit.” So much for objective reporting.

Despite CNN’s twitchy insistence that the lawsuit was “legally dubious,” the merits were anything but. Trump accused CBS of creatively editing Kamala Harris’s interview with Lester Holt to conjure a digitally improved description of Biden’s Gaza policy —during the heat of an election cycle— airing different clips on different shows, then refusing to release the full transcript. It wasn’t routine editing; it was message management.

A media that delights in spotting everyone else’s “cheap fakes” saw no problem at all with what amounted to an AI-grade rewrite of Kamala’s signature word salad. CBS’s video editors transformed a meandering diplomatic mush into something that almost sounded like coherent policy. The same outlets that cried foul over TikTok deepfakes couldn’t be bothered when 60 Minutes edited the Cackler like a Marvel trailer, snipping out the painful dead air and scads of “ums” until the final cut sparkled with keen insight.

But hey, as long as the manipulation flatters the right candidate, it’s not “disinformation”—it’s just editing for time.

When CBS finally coughed up the raw footage under FCC pressure, the evidence confirmed that, yes, key context was missing. Whoops. CNN’s witless morons called the claim “legally dubious,” but a Texas judge denied CBS’s motion to dismiss— meaning the court found the claim had merit. Period, full stop, as Justice Jackson would say. That didn’t stop CNN’s unidentified “legal experts,” who allegedly “maintained that Trump’s suit was frivolous and that CBS was on solid ground to fight and win the case in court.” ...

But, if the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss, by definition it isn’t frivolous. “Frivolous” is a legal term of art, not just a spicy insult tossed around on cable news. A frivolous case is one so lacking in legal merit that it cannot reasonably be argued under any existing law. Courts can sanction parties and even lawyers for filing them. Yet Trump’s lawsuit cleared the plausibility bar at the dismissal stage, went to court-ordered mediation, and ended with a $16 million check. That’s not frivolous; it’s expensive. ...

But even worse, and proving why the media is, in fact, the enemy of the people, the 60 Minutes edits were exactly the kind of selective curation that, if reversed, would’ve had the media shrieking about “election interference” louder than a CNN chyron during a Trump presser on the Gulf of America. They would have pounded the anchor room conference tables and demanded criminal sanctions. But election interference is only seditious when you can accuse your political enemies of doing it. Apparently. ...

Back in December, ABC/Disney quietly shelled out $15  million (plus $1  million in legal fees) to Trump’s future presidential library after libelously claiming he was “found liable for rape” in the E.  Jean Carroll case— a defamation lawsuit that ABC resolved with cash and a “statement of regret.” In January, Meta coughed up a cool $25  million ($22 million to the library) for suspending Trump’s Facebook account on January  6th, with Mark Zuckerberg personally negotiating the deal during a Mar‑a‑Lago sit-down. Today’s settlement with Paramount (CBS/60  Minutes) added $16  million more, rounding out a trifecta of $56 million so far recovered from corporate media morons.

Trump has more pending lawsuits in the pipeline, including one against the Des Moines Register and another against various pollsters and survey reporters for pushing fake polls right before the election.

We are rapidly approaching the point where one wonders whether Trump might ultimately claw back all the fines, judgments, and penalties extracted by progressive lawfare during the wilderness years of judicial persecution. As they say, two can play Cards Against Humanity, or the worm always makes a squiggly U-Turn, or words to that effect. I can’t remember.

According to Fox News, the settlement includes a $16 million upfront payout covering legal fees, case costs, and funding for future charitable or presidential library endeavors, at President Trump’s discretion.

In addition, sources close to the case say the network will allocate a mid-eight-figure sum toward “advertisements, PSAs, or similar transmissions” promoting conservative causes, a notable shift for one of the legacy media’s most liberal networks.

The New York Times pretends that all this is “a mystery” because to tell the truth would inculpate them in the ongoing criminal racketeering operation of their patron, the Democratic Party.

They all know what the truth is in this matter: that Robert Westman became insane, at least in his time of puberty, possibly earlier, and that his parents resorted to persuading their child that he was born in the wrong body — as the trendy theory goes — to remedy his psychological distress. He was thereafter influenced to play-act as a female. Possibly, he was induced to go through some stage of medical “treatment” to supposedly advance his transition to the opposite sex — for instance, a hormone regimen. This has not yet been reported. (Has it even been investigated by police or the news media?)

Of course, “gender-affirming medical care” is a vicious fraud, as is the preposterous idea of “sexual assignment at birth” (as if it is some kind of error-ridden clerical function). Males cannot be changed into females no matter how much their hormones are altered or how much surgery they endure. It is all just costuming and makeup, to an extreme degree, to enhance the game of pretend. It is also bound to be nightmarishly disappointing to the person undergoing such malign rigors. ...

Westman evinced stark rage and despair over the poor choice he was induced to make at a time in his life before the judgment region of his brain had fully developed. “I’m tired of being trans,” he wrote. “I wish I had never brainwashed myself.” It was hardly his own fault, though. He was pushed to do it by his own family and strongly supported by the culture that surrounded him in Tim Walz’s “trans refuge state” of Minnesota — the state that also gave us George Floyd, the fake martyr to black victimhood, whose death provoked a years’ long national race-hustle.

Diana (Somewhere in Maryland)

The media is of course ignoring the biggest bombshell from yesterday: Senator Ron Johnson holding up a VAERS report admitting 30k died worldwide right away or within two days of getting a Covid shot. Absolute crickets!!

The media is of course ignoring the biggest bombshell from yesterday: Senator Ron Johnson holding up a VAERS report admitting 30k died worldwide right away or within two days of getting a Covid shot. Absolute crickets!!

Westman evinced stark rage and despair over the poor choice he was induced to make at a time in his life before the judgment region of his brain had fully developed.