"Follow the Money”
A tiny grassroots' organization from Tennessee did the job of the mainstream press … and showed that massive Covid bribes … worked.
I’ve been researching several topics I think are worth quick re-cap stories.
The first story/subject is another great find from Transcriber B, who has made it her life’s mission to highlight significant interviews and public comments most people might have missed.
In this dispatch, Transcriber B runs excepts from a “discussion with A.J. DePriest focusing on Fraud involving Federal money being sent to States and to School systems, and federal mandates that follow the money that is forcing states, localities, and school systems to follow federal guidelines or lose BILLIONS of ESSER dollars that they have already accepted.”
Ms. DePriest and her group of 28 citizen researchers at the Tennessee Liberty Network simply “follow the money.”
“Following the money” revealed WHY every school system in America continued with mask mandates (and social distancing and pushing the vaccines) far longer than made any sense.
As Ms. DePriest shows, school districts and States received massive amounts of “Covid relief money” paid out in three tranches of ever-larger payments - with the stipulation/requirement that the school districts follow the public health guidelines.
Ms. DePriest’s bottom line is that all the parents who went to school board meetings and gave impassioned speeches pleading that their children not have to wear masks and participate in all the other ridiculous non-pharmaceutical interventions were simply wasting their time.
The reason they were wasting their time is that the school systems were never going to do away with those requirements - because they were making a killing in new money - as long as they did what they were told by the federal government.
Per Ms. DePriest’s conclusion, the vast majority of school board members were probably clueless about the real reason these mandates had to continue for so long.
One assumes school board members were simply told the mandates had to stay. School board members, as they’re now prone to do, simply went along with what they were told - by the local and/or state superintendents of education - public servants who did know how much money the school systems were making by following the Public Health guidelines.
“… I think the reason why we started digging into this is because something wasn't jiving in our minds,” Ms. DePriest told interviewer Dan Meredith. “We were going to school board meetings and we were watching them online and the way school boards were behaving when crying parents, begging to have their kids unmasked and they were dropping just reams of studies about how masks were inefficient and even detrimental to health and they just didn't seem to have any emotion or response. And we wanted to know why.”
(In an interview on the same topic with Del Bigtree, Ms. DePriest characterizes these school board members as “zombies” who couldn’t be influenced by reason or by a show of numbers or grassroots “democracy.”)
“… we started looking at why these things were happening and what we discovered was that these requirements in the interim final requirements were behind it all.”
In a Federalist or Republican form of government, each of America’s states are supposed to function as 50 laboratories of democracy. In theory at least, each independent state has hundreds of independent school districts.
This would mean, hypothetically, any school district in America could do away with the mask or social distance requirements.
However, few if any did this. Ms. DePriest tells us why. If individual school districts or states did this, they’d be giving up millions, or billions, in federal money.
Apparently this was a project worth a lot of money
to Pandemic Producers …
How much were school systems paid to keep the mask mandates in effect?
According to Ms. DePriest, nationwide, at least $200 billion was doled out to to complying school districts. This figure qualifies as the most money the federal government has ever given to schools “in the history of federal giving.”
For example, Ms. DePriest says the County School System in Memphis cleared three-quarters of a billion dollars. Nashville City Schools made $500 million in new “education” money under the banner of “Covid relief.” All school districts in Tennessee netted approximately $2.5 billion in new funding.
Del Bigtree opines …
In an interview on Del Bigtree’s “Highwire” show, Bigtree agrees that none of this makes sense … “it’s unnatural … There’s got to be a payoff here.”
Bigtree then volunteers that the federal government gave each state the “biggest carrot known to man.”
To me, this story reveals several disconcerting truisms about our democracy:
Local and state school systems are not autonomous or independent. Like every other captured organization in the world, these political organizations are looking for more money (and more control) … and that money increasingly comes from agencies of the federal government. “Local control” doesn’t exist anymore.
Essentially, federal agencies bribe local authorities to do their bidding.
“Covid money” could be used for anything and everything, including hiring new mental health counselors, building a new athletic field house or paying teacher and administrator salaries.
The money certainly had nothing to do with keeping children safe because this virus never threatened school children.
The money also didn’t have anything to do with improving the education of school children because all the mandates did great harm to student learning.
The teachers unions and state education bureaucracy realize they might have messed up …
In her interview with Mr. Meredith, Ms. DePriest identifies what she thinks is the real reason the teachers’ unions and education bureaucracies changed their tune and, after lobbying to keep students home and out of school, suddenly began to push for the return to in-school instruction (albeit with 10 different safety guidelines).
Said Ms. DePriest: “They wanted kids back in school because in 2020 when kids were at home learning, their parents were seeing what they were learning. And the federal government figured out …”
DAN MEREDITH (podcast interviewer): “They don't like that.”
A.J. DEPRIEST: “…no.”
Me: So, apparently, the “rest of the story” is that parents were increasingly learning how clueless or “woke” their teachers were. Maybe not in all school systems, but in many, parents were learning their children’s education resembled a progressive indoctrination program which bore no resemblance to the education the parents had once received.
Apparently, such knowledge might jeopardize continued support for public education in America so it was decided to get the kids back in school … where attentive parents could no longer monitor their child’s on-line or Zoom “education” lessons.
Part 2 of ‘following the money’ …
After Ms. DePriest’s organization “followed the money” and learned of the massive payouts to the K-12 Education Complex, a light bulb went off and group members figured the same type of payouts might have been given to hospitals and healthcare groups … as further incentives to follow the CDC guidelines.
In Ms. DePriest’s interview with Bigtree, viewers learn that hospitals were getting a lot more than just $39,000 for putting a Covid patient on a ventilator.
According to Ms. DePriest, in her state of Tennessee, hospitals received, on average, $166,000 for every Covid patient.
In Nebraska, she says the figure was $379,000 (!) per “Covid patient.”
This was the bounty for hospitals that followed the NIH, CDC and WHO “protocols.”
In addition to $39,000 for a patient put on a vent, hospitals received extra money for every Covid patient admitted (based on a positive PCR test). Hospitals also received a “20 percent bonus” for using remdesivir.
Once hospitals reached a certain threshold of “Covid admissions,” they received $50,000.
As Bigtree notes (paraphrasing): “That funding is paying for the things that are going to kill you.”
The lucrative reimbursement programs explain why many hospitals which saw their census of admitted patients plummet, ended up having their most profitable financial years ever.
The bottom line (literally) is that the response to Covid was extremely profitable to hospitals, testing companies, mask manufacturers … and to school systems.
More examples of democide ….
One of my recent articles was on “democide,” a theory that shows that governments actually have strong incentives to kill or harm their own citizens.
Or, if one wants to be less harsh, key players in the government-funding behemoth have strong disincentives to do things that will save lives or prevent unnecessary deaths.
Ms. DePriest’s research provides Substack readers an example of one tiny group that documented harmful fraud in two of the biggest government-managed sectors of the economy - education and healthcare.
One might say these were Mafia-like bribes except the Mafia doesn’t posses anywhere close to the capability to dole out bribes of a scale this gargantuan nor this wide-spread. Also, mobsters don’t have any incentive to kill anyone except rival mobsters.
As it turns out, government bribes in healthcare and education were funded by the taxpayers - who were the victims of the bribery. This means the public, in effect, was funding its own demise.
Lastly, I note that it took a small group of every-day citizens who aren’t earning a penny to actually “follow the money” and do the job an army of mainstream “watchdog” journalists are supposed to perform.
One can “follow the money” on captured news organizations as well.
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Trascriber B, Ms. DePriest and Bill Rice, Jr. don’t have much money to follow. What funds I have come from generous donations of paid subscriptions and Ko-Fi donations. These donations make articles like this possible and are greatly appreciated.
Bonus text from Transcriber B's excerpts from Ms. DePriest's interview with Mr. Meredith:
DePriest: The second bullet is probably the most important one, and that lays out that the
the requirement that the SEA, which is the State Education Agency, will comply with all ARP Act and all other ARP ESSER requirements. Now this is where things get dicey because if you go to look at the interim final requirements for the ARP Act it states very clearly that every state and district plan will show how they're going to universally mask, contact trace, social distance, isolate, quarantine, test, covid test, set up vaccination clinics to try get the entire school population vaccinated. These are all in the interim final requirements of the ARP Act.
... April 22nd was when the interim final requirements came out listing all of those CDC requirements. So they gave them a lot of money, more money, and even more money, and then they laid out the requirements. That is, that's simply fraud.
Mr. Meredith: "Yeah. You can't give schools all that money and then say, oh by the way, here's what you have to do to keep that money."
This story shows two industries that have been bought off by the State. I don't mention all the organizations that were bought off to go after the dissenters of the Covid guidelines. That's every organization in the now-massive Censorship Industrial Complex and all the mainstream media "news" organizations that survive on Big Pharma ads, Bill Gates' "excellence in journalism" grants and/or government-purchased ads to promote the Covid, flu, RSV, Shingles, pneumonia "vaccines."