FBI Director Christopher Wray will allow congressional investigators to view a document related to alleged criminal activity involving President Joe Biden.
Last month, the House Oversight Committee demanded that Wray turn over a copy of an FBI document that allegedly shows evidence that Biden, as vice president, was engaged in a “criminal bribery scheme” that involves “an exchange of money for policy decisions.”
According to Fox News, the FBI will bring the document in question to Capitol Hill on Monday. Only House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member on the committee, will be allowed to view the document. The document will be kept in a SCIF, a secured environment for viewing sensitive — most often, highly classified — information.
News of the planned document viewing comes after Wray offered to bring the document to Capitol Hill in a phone call with Comer on Wednesday. The FBI had previously refused to give Congress any access to the document. Bureau officials said the decision was necessary to protect confidential human sources. Still, it’s not clear whether Wray is complying with the subpoena, technically speaking.
We have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena. If the FBI fails to hand over the FD-1023 form as required by the subpoena, the House Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings.
A spokesman for the Republican lawmaker reaffirmed that sentiment on Thursday, suggesting the current plan may not spring Wray from contempt proceedings.
“Chairman Comer has been clear that anything short of producing the FD-1023 form to the House Oversight Committee is not compliance with his subpoena,” the spokesperson said. “This unclassified record contains pages of details that need to be investigated further by the House Oversight Committee.”
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Border Patrol agents caught 16 people on the FBI’s terror watch list trying to illegally cross the U.S. southwest land border between entry ports in April, bringing this fiscal year’s suspected terrorist arrest total up to nearly 100.
Not only is 16 higher than the recorded combined arrest totals from fiscal years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 but it’s the same as the total number of suspected terrorists apprehended at the southern border in FY 2021. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection also suggests that the number of suspected terrorists arrested in April alone was five times the three watch list apprehensions listed for all of FY 2019 and FY 2020.
There are still five months left in the 2023 fiscal year, which means that 2022’s arrest total of 98 people on the watch list, an all-time record for the U.S., will be easily surpassed in the coming months. Already, CBP data says 98 noncitizen watch list members were arrested at American borders in 2023, all but two of whom were caught at the southern border. Reports of more potentially dangerous foreign nationals trying to infiltrate the U.S. in May have also surfaced.
Ever since Biden took office in January 2021, border arrests have skyrocketed. The number of suspected terrorists captured by border agents may be small compared to the 1,734,686 and 2,378,944 illegal border crossers apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in FY 2021 and FY 2022, respectively, but it is important.
Despite the Biden administration and corporate media’s attempts to downplay the ongoing border crisis, internal alarm over the escalating number of terror watch list members caught entering the U.S. prompted CBP in April of 2022 to create an “Enforcement Statistics” page detailing all of its agents’ “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters.” At that time, roughly 42 people listed on the terror watchlist had been arrested attempting to enter the U.S. since Biden became president.
As the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center webpage notes, everyone listed on the watchlist is “reasonably suspected to be involved in terrorism (or related activities)” and most “are not Americans.” Because these people “have no known connection to the U.S.,” their increased presence at the southwest and northern borders of the nation, where overwhelmed border agents struggle to keep up with the years-long influx of migrants, is suspect.
Just as millions of arrests and hundreds of thousands of gotaways continue to increase, so does the number of national security threats seeping into the country. As Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Texas-based senior national security fellow, writes, “remember that not all terrorism-linked ‘special interest aliens’ coming from nations of national security concern get as far as nomination and approval for the FBI terrorism watch list, which involves a lengthy, multi-tiered process.”
“Some 3,000 to 4,000 special interest aliens are caught between ports of entry every year from the same countries as those who do make the FBI terrorism watch list. Terror links may not come out until much later, after the individual is in the country,” he warned.
Republicans on the House Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray in late May demanding information about suspected terrorists, specifically an Afghan national and a Pakistani national, who were caught trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in May.
“These reported arrests raise serious questions about the security of our Southwest border and the potential for terrorists to take advantage of the glaring vulnerabilities due to the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies,” the Republicans wrote.
That demand was preceded by a letter from Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green pressuring Mayorkas to explain how DHS “is handling the elevated national security risk presented by an increasing number of aliens with terrorist ties illegally crossing the southwest border into the United States.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Several leading Republican election officials are sounding the alarm about the federal government’s persistent interference in U.S. elections.
Jay Ashcroft and Mac Warner, the secretaries of state of Missouri and West Virginia, respectively, recently told The Federalist they are increasingly worried about the mounting evidence documenting federal agencies’ interference in prior elections to the benefit of the Democrat Party.
Ashcroft pointed to the long-awaited report from U.S. Attorney John Durham that confirmed what The Federalist has been reporting for years: The FBI possessed no real evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russian government officials when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign leading up to the 2016 election. The political investigation — which was “based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” — would continue throughout the 2016 election and well into Trump’s presidency.
This type of behavior from government agencies “is what you expect out of a banana republic,” Ashcroft said. “It is a direct attack on a foundational aspect of our country, that being fair, free elections.” As it turns out, he noted, “the largest purveyor of misinformation and disinformation with regard to elections [over the course of] the last several years has been the federal government.”
Warner echoed similar sentiments, calling the report’s findings “extraordinary” and adding that he can’t recall an instance in U.S. history where “our own federal agencies have gotten involved in an election to the point of lying to the American people to sway the outcome … for one candidate and one party.”
The 2016 election wasn’t the only one in which U.S. intel agencies decided to intervene to boost Democrats’ electoral prospects. Last month, a report released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government indicated the CIA “both solicited signatures for and eventually approved the infamous 2020 letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian disinformation plot.” The letter — which was signed by more than 50 former intel officials — was used as a pretext by Big Tech companies and legacy media to censor and ignore the New York Post’s reporting on the Bidens’ shady business dealings ahead of the 2020 election.
During his Oct. 2020 debate with Trump, Biden even cited the letter to dismiss Trump’s mention of the Post report, accusing the then-Republican president of partaking in a “Russian plan.” It’s also worth noting that during an August interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook algorithmically suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election after being primed to do so by the FBI. According to Zuckerberg, the FBI warned Facebook about forthcoming “Russian propaganda” just before reports of the laptop dropped.
Polls taken since the 2020 election have shown that the coordinated efforts between U.S. intelligence agencies, America’s regime media, and social media companies to censor and ignore the Post’s reporting may have tipped the election to Biden. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis reported, a 2022 poll by TIPP Insights “found that 47 percent of those polled, including 45 percent of independents, said knowing the laptop contents were real and not Russian disinformation likely would have changed their votes in the 2020 election.”
In his remarks to The Federalist, Warner took specific aim at then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who, according to testimony from ex-CIA official Michael Morell, played a role in the creation of the debunked letter. During his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Morell said Blinken reached out to him to discuss the laptop story several days after it dropped and that the call “absolutely” pushed him to write the infamous letter. Morell additionally confirmed one of the main reasons he released the letter was because he “wanted [Biden] to win the election.”
“Using the word treason is not out of context. It’s treasonous when you betray your own, and this [was] a betrayal by our own people,” Warner said. “These agencies are supposed to protect us, and [yet] they are the ones who are perpetrating this fraud on the American people. You just can’t get any more insidious or dangerous than that.”
While discussing the integrity of future elections, Ashcroft and Warner both emphasized that failure to hold America’s intel agencies accountable for their previous shenanigans will only result in continued interference in future elections.
“Unless there is real punishment for the people involved, it will continue in future elections,” Ashcroft said. “They are violating federal law by being involved in elections in a political way that they are not allowed to be and they are using that to change the outcome. They are using … not just their office, but their clearance and their job titles, and using that to change the outcome of our elections. I don’t know what’s more severe than that.”
It’s worth mentioning that Missouri and West Virginia have implemented several election integrity reforms in recent years. Last year, Missouri passedlegislation requiring voters to “provide a form of personal photo identification that is consistent” with state law in order to vote. Meanwhile, West Virginia, according to Warner, has successfully removed more than 400,000 ineligible voters from its voter registration lists since 2016. Both states were also among those to withdraw from ERIC — a leftist-controlled voter-roll management group — earlier this year.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
EXCLUSIVE: The individual behind the information that then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national is a “highly credible” FBI confidential human source who has been used by the bureau in multiple investigative matters dating back to the Obama administration, Fox News Digital has learned.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley were approached by a whistleblower alleging that the FBI was in possession of a document—an FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020—which explicitly detailed information provided by a confidential human source alleging Biden, while serving as vice president, was involved in a $5 million criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national in exchange for influence over policy decisions.
A source familiar told Fox News Digital on Friday that the confidential human source who provided the Biden information to the FBI was a “pre-existing” FBI source who has been used in multiple investigative matters separate from the Biden information.
President Joe Biden speaks at the University of Tampa on Feb. 9, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The source told Fox News Digital that the confidential human source was used by the FBI for “at least several years” before the generation of the June 2020 FD-1023 form detailing the Biden allegations.
The source also told Fox News Digital that the confidential human source has been “consistently reviewed by the FBI” and has been “found to be highly credible.”
The source said the individual participated in investigative matters during the Obama administration. The FBI did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Comer, R-Ky., subpoenaed the FBI’s FD-1023 document last month, but the bureau did not comply because it said it was trying to protect sources and methods. Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress if the bureau did not turn over the physical document to the committee.
FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a news conference on Aug. 10, 2022, in Omaha, Nebraska. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
The information in the FD-1023 form, according to the whistleblower, reveals “a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose” and details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
An FD-1023 form is used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources. The form is used to document information as told to an FBI agent, but recording that information does not validate or weigh it against other information known by the FBI.
The FBI offered to allow Comer and Grassley to review the document at FBI headquarters and later agreed to bring the physical document to Capitol Hill Monday for lawmakers to review in a secure SCIF. The FBI is also expected to deliver a briefing to the lawmakers in that same setting on the Biden document and allegations on Monday.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IO). (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The White House has maintained that President Biden is not involved in any foreign business dealings and said that he has never spoken to his son, Hunter Biden, about them. Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018 for his “tax affairs” linked to suspicious foreign transactions.
Biden administration officials maintain the president has never discussed investigations into members of his family with the Justice Department.
When asked for comment, the White House pointed Fox News Digital to a previous statement made last month, saying “Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the President and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests.”
“That’s because they prefer floating anonymous innuendo, amplified by the megaphone of their allies in rightwing media, to get attention and try to distract and deflect from their own unpopular ideas and lack of solutions to the issues the American people actually care about,” White House spokesman Ian Sams said in May. “When it comes to President Biden’s personal finances, anybody can take a look: he has offered an unprecedented level of transparency, releasing a total of 25 years of tax returns to the American public.”
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sounded the alarm Friday about the Department of Justice’s credibility in investigating the Mar-a-Lago files. In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Ohio Republican said special counsel John Durham’s report on the “failings” of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has called the current DOJ probe into question. The department is investigating a trove of classified documents and sensitive correspondence discovered at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
“The special counsel’s report serves as a stark reminder of the need for more accountability and reforms within the FBI,” Jordan insisted, noting the agency’s “documented political bias” against conservatives.
“Accordingly, as Congress conducts oversight to inform these legislative reforms, we write to ensure the Justice Department acts to preserve the integrity and impartiality of ongoing investigations from the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy,” he added.
Jordan then asked Garland to reveal whether special counsel John L. Smith, who is overseeing the Mar-a-Lago investigation, “relies on any information or material gathered exclusively by the FBI prior to the special counsel’s appointment.”
The chairman expects an explanation about those matters by June 15.
He is also seeking to arrange a briefing with the committee about issues related to Durham’s report, including any new measures “implemented to address the misconduct described” by the special counsel.
It comes as President Joe Biden also undergoes a separate DOJ investigation into classified files found at his home outside Wilmington, Delaware, and his previous office at the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
The White House was not happy that a reporter dared to ask on Wednesday about a recent poll showing that a majority of Americans think President Joe Biden is “corrupt.”
At the daily press briefing, New York Post reporter Steven Nelson confronted John Kirby with information dripping from congressional investigations into the Biden family.
“There is one committee trying to get an FBI file alleging that President Biden took bribes. There’s another IRS whistleblower who’s alleging there’s a cover-up in the investigation,” he explained. “There’s, of course, evidence that the president interacted with his relative’s associates from China, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Nelson asked, “So what do you say to the majority of Americans who believe that the president is himself corrupt?”
The reporter cited a Harvard/Harris poll, which earlier this month found that 53% of Americans — a slim majority, but a majority still — believe Biden was involved in “an illegal influence peddling scheme” with his son, Hunter Biden.
Kirby was left awestruck that Nelson asked the question, while press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to stop Kirby from answering it.
“Wow,” Kirby responded.
“No, we got to wrap this up,” Jean-Pierre interjected after muttering “Jesus” under her breath upon hearing the question.
Kirby, however, did provide an answer — without addressing the substance of the question — despite Jean-Pierre’s attempts to interfere.
“The president has spoken to this, and there’s nothing to these claims,” Kirby claimed without providing any evidence to disprove the allegations.
05/31/23: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby www.youtube.com
While the White House’s spokespeople don’t want to broach the subject, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said Wednesday the FBI has confirmed the existence of a document alleging that Biden was involved in a “criminal bribery scheme” as vice president.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, however, has so far refused to give that document to congressional investigators despite a subpoena. Comer has repeatedly threatened to hold Wray in contempt of Congress for not cooperating. But he has not made good on those threats.
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Chick-fil-A, the leading fast-food chain that has shuttered its stores each Sunday to allow employees “to rest and worship if they choose” since 1946 and became a household name because of it, is now coming under fire over the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion agenda and Erick McReynolds, the black company executive driving it.
“Our founder, Truett Cathy, believed that ‘a great company is a caring company,’ and since the beginning, care has been at the center of everything we do. We understand that the path toward Better at Together looks different for every business,” states Chick-fil-A on a page on its corporate website dedicated to the DEI campaign.
LGBT gear at Kohl’s: ‘Little kids’ T-shirt with transgender flag, ‘proud’ rainbow baby bib
Retail store partners with group supporting drag queens at libraries
“Why is Kohl’s selling pride clothing for babies?”
That’s the question being asked by some conservative activists on social media as the chain has become the latest retail outlet to face scrutiny over its LGBT merchandise for young children.
The Kohl’s website has a dedicated pride page with rainbow iconography with the heading “Love is our favorite color: Celebrate Pride Month” and a statement reading, “We are committed to amplifying and affirming the voices of the [LGBT] community, celebrating the joy that comes from living authentically and unapologetically not just this month, but all year long.”
A screenshot of the Kohl’s website showing a “little kids” pride T-shirt. | Screenshot/Kohls.com
The website features a number of pride-themed clothing for kids and toddlers, including a “little kids” T-shirt featuring the transgender pride flag and a pride “baby bib” emblazoned with a rainbow and the words “PROUD OF MY FAMILY.”
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ appalling decision to honor an anti-Christian hate group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during their “Pride Night” on June 16 has been met mostly with a deafening silence from the vast majority of Major League Baseball players. Even Catholics, whose faith is particularly singled out for mockery by this LGBT hate group, have been largely mute.
As of this writing, only four players in the entire league have said anything about it, and one of those four has already caved to the rainbow mob. The only Catholic player to come forward has been Trevor Williams, a starting pitcher for the Washington Nationals. Williams denounced the Dodgers and called on his fellow Catholics “to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur.”
The only Dodgers player to come forward so far has been relief pitcher Blake Treinen, who also released a clear statement Tuesday criticizing the Dodgers organization for honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, rightly saying the group “promotes hate of Christians and people of faith.”
The statements from Williams and Treinen were infinitely better than the cowardly response of Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who contented himself with a nonresponse. Instead of addressing the issue head-on, he weakly announced the return of “Christian Faith and Family Day” at Dodger Stadium after a hiatus. “For us, we felt like the best thing to do in response was, instead of maybe making a statement condemning or anything like that, would be just to instead try to show what we do support, as opposed to maybe what we don’t,” Kershaw told the Los Angeles Times recently.
For Kershaw, it seems, the Dodgers should get a pass for awarding a group that openly mocks Christians as long as the Christians get an appreciation night of their own later in the season. What nonsense. It’s like having Christian appreciation night at the Temple of Artemis right before marching the Christians off to the Colosseum. Far from being “the best thing to do,” it would have been better had Kershaw said nothing.
His cowardice was overshadowed, though, by the Toronto Blue Jays’ Anthony Bass, who performed his very own Maoist struggle session over the weekend, giving a scripted apology for the crime of posting something mildly supportive of the Bud Light and Target boycotts.
“I recognize yesterday that I made a post that was hurtful to the Pride community, which includes friends of mine and close family members of mine, and I am truly sorry for that,” Bass said, promising to educate himself and make better decisions moving forward.
Not good enough, Blue Jays manager John Schneider told reporters. “We’re not going to pretend like this never happened,” said Schneider. “We’re not going to pretend like it’s the end and move on. There are definitely more steps that are going to follow.”
The double standard here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s meant to demonstrate hierarchy. The Dodgers can insult every Christian in the country, and only two guys will speak up. But a single post obliquely critical of transgenderism means Bass gets flogged in public by the Blue Jays. As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out, no one was hurt by Bass’s tepid support for boycotts of multibillion-dollar corporations; the real point of all this is “to chill speech and transform relatively common positions about faith and irrefutable biological truths into blasphemous utterances, whether done in private or not.”
And it looks like the Dodgers, the Blue Jays, and the entire MLB are going to get away with it — unless the players themselves make a stand.
As welcome as the statements by Williams and Treinen were, they weren’t enough. Faced with what amounts to open hostility to the Christian faith, MLB players need to do more than issue statements. As Mollie Hemingway suggested the other day on Twitter, players who support religious tolerance should refuse to take the field on June 16 in protest. If the Dodgers want to insult Christians by honoring a group that blasphemes their faith, then players should simply decline to participate that day. It would send a clear message that the MLB pursues aggressive LGBT activism at its peril.
Players could take inspiration from the great Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, who refused to play in the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. “From what I’ve been told, there are no dispensations for this particular day,” Koufax told reporters. The decision to prioritize his faith over baseball is one he had made years earlier, and in fact, Koufax missed a number of games throughout his career when they fell on major Jewish holidays. At one point, he told a reporter that a “man is entitled to his belief and I believe I should not work on Yom Kippur. It’s as simple as all that and I have never had any trouble on that account since I’ve been in baseball.” Saner times, those.
It might be, though, that the courage of Williams and Treinen is becoming contagious. On Wednesday, Robby Starbuck said a large group of MLB players “will refuse to wear pride or trans flags of any kind this year if asked to by their teams. This includes star players.” That would be great if it actually happens. Players should no more be asked to wear pride or trans flags than they should be asked to wear Christian crosses or any other religious symbol — which is exactly what pride and trans flag have become.
But it would be better if a large group of players, including star players, pushed back in a more forceful way and stood up for religious tolerance by sitting out on June 16. They would become instant heroes in a country where most people think it’s wrong to honor hate groups that mock other people’s religious faith. But more important than becoming heroes, they would simply be doing the right thing, which is its own reward.
I’ve argued recently that we’re not really fighting a “culture war” in the sense we have previously understood it, but a religious war in which everyone must choose a side. The controversy now engulfing the MLB is part of that religious war, and every player in the league is involved in it whether they want to be or not. They, too, must choose a side.
Choosing sides will mean different things for different people, but for those who choose the side of the Tao — of objective moral truth, of resistance to the fascism of the left — it’s going to mean some sacrifice. For example, MLB players who refuse to play might face financial penalties. They will certainly be denounced by the media as bigots. Their careers might suffer in the long term.
So be it. Everything is at stake in this fight, and the fate of the country at this point depends more on MLB players refusing to take the field, or suburban moms refusing to shop at Target, or dudes refusing to buy Bud Light, than on who we elect as our next president, or how the debt limit debate shakes out.
This isn’t a fight any of us can escape. Corporate America has decided to wage a religious war on everyone, to force trans ideology and LGBT propaganda on the whole of society, so now everyone must decide what they’re going to do about it. Baseball players have a clear decision before them, one that could galvanize support for them and give courage to the rest of us. Here’s hoping — and praying — they make the right choice.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
While I made it clear this week that I do not support the debt ceiling deal, I believe Speaker Kevin McCarthy and our House Republican negotiators gave it their best against a president who does not care about how the inflation he created, retirement concerns and medical bills are causing havoc on families all across this country.
It’s OK to acknowledge that the deal being voted on this week may be the best that could be done with this president who refused to negotiate or even discuss this issue for months. But that acknowledgment must come with a second part: This legislation will only bury us deeper in debt and won’t actually deal with the raging inflation that is hurting every American family.
Now conservatives in Congress have a choice. We can either do business with the devil knowing this debt ceiling bill will not slay inflation, reduce retirement concerns or medical bills. Or, we can say now is the time to live within our means and stop inflation in its tracks.
If the time to say no is not today, when is it? Is it when we hit $40 trillion in debt, mortgage rates climb north of ten percent and credit card interest rates go over 30%? I say no, that would be far too late.
So ask yourself this question: is a yes vote this week simply kicking the can down the road and telling American families we don’t care about how inflation is impacting their ability to make ends meet. Of course, the answer is yes.
When a family has a spendthrift child, all they want is for that child to learn to be independent and live within their means. We all love our kids and we don’t want them to fail, but seeing your child be independent and responsible is one of the greatest joys of parenthood. Standing up on your own feels good whether you’re a parent, running a company or leading a state. Only in Washington do people have a hard time accepting this basic and universal truth.
I am a businessman who has negotiated a lot of deals. In every deal, you have to say no at some point. Maybe this is the time all Republicans need to say no.
Frankly, I’m sick and tired of watching people live in D.C.’s fantasy land where debt doesn’t matter, while America burns in the background.
I am a businessman who has negotiated a lot of deals. In every deal, you have to say no at some point. Maybe this is the time all Republicans need to say no. Not to be an obstructionist, but to tell every American family we hear them and we care about them.
When we say no to more debt, we are telling all American families we know inflation is too high and is caused by a federal government that cannot live within its means. By saying no to more debt, we are telling American families we know medical bills are too expensive, along with gas, groceries, college and rent. By saying no, we can force elected leaders to make choices like all American families do.
Biden will not acknowledge what his reckless spending is doing to the American family. Inflation is causing American families to make tough choices. Inflation and mortgage rates are making housing unaffordable. Interest expense is eating up the federal budget, crowding out military spending when Communist China is building a military to defeat us.
Let me give you some outrageous numbers. President Biden’s proposed budget for this year was $6.8 TRILLION – a 55% increase since 2019. Meanwhile, the U.S. population has grown less than 2% in that same time. This is the kind of reckless spending that gets embraced in Washington and it’s ruining our country.
The only way out of this mess is to balance the budget, pay down federal debt, reduce the size of government, reduce regulations, make permitting easier and have government only do the must haves. That’s what I did as governor of Florida and the result was more and better paying jobs, less taxes, less debt, better schools and a lower crime rate.
I supported what House Republicans originally passed in the Limit, Save, Grow Act. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it started the process to a balanced budget, get able-bodied Americans back to work, reduced the regulatory footprint which is killing American jobs and worked to grow the American economy not the Washington, D.C. economy.
So, if our only two options are to make the tough choices to balance our budget or pass this bad bill, the decision is easy.
Let’s do the hard work and make the tough choices so American families can realize the dream that has made our great nation the greatest place for opportunity on Earth.
Above all, we must understand this – there will never come a day when the permanent political class in either party in Washington will stand up in favor of curtailing runaway spending and debt. But we must all hope that there will come a day when enough responsible adults are sent to Washington to stop this madness.
A Republican measure overturning President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plan passed the Senate on Thursday and now awaits an expected veto. The vote was 52-46, with support from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana as well as Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent. The resolution was approved last week by the GOP-controlled House by a 218-203 vote.
Biden has pledged to keep in place his commitment to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans for 43 million people. The legislation adds to Republican criticism of the plan, which was halted in November in response to lawsuits from conservative opponents. The Supreme Court heard arguments in February in a challenge to Biden’s move, with the conservative majority seemingly ready to sink the plan. A decision is expected in the coming weeks.
“The president’s student loan schemes do not ‘forgive’ debt, they just shift the burden from those who chose to take out loans onto those who never went to college or already fulfilled their commitment to pay off their loans,” said Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, lead sponsor of the Senate push.
The legislation aims to revoke Biden’s cancellation plan and curtail the Education Department’s ability to cancel student loans in the future. It would rescind Biden’s latest extension of a payment pause that began early in the pandemic. It would retroactively add several months of student loan interest that was waived by Biden’s extension.
The GOP challenge invoked the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to undo recently enacted executive branch regulations. Passing a resolution requires a simple majority in both chambers, but overriding a presidential veto requires two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate, and Republicans aren’t expected to have enough support to do that.
“If Republicans were to get their way and pass this bill into law, people across the country would have relief they are counting on snatched away from them,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
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How did I miss the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death? Were the media caught sleeping? Three years ago, Floyd was given funerals in three states, carried in a gold casket and driven to his final resting place in a horse-drawn carriage. It was like the funeral for a pharaoh.
From Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, to the end of the year, The New York Times alone ran more than 4,000 articles about him. But exactly three years later, Floyd’s name made it into only three Times items — fleetingly and barely.
Are the media (and Democrats, and Hollywood, and corporate America, and the universities and grade schools, and hospitals and military and President Biden) hoping we’ll forget about their weird campaign to make black Americans even angrier?
Since May 25, 2020, the single-minded message delivered to black people, without interruption or contradiction, has been that they live in a country steeped in white supremacy, anything bad that happens to them is proof of racism, and oh by the way, the police are trying to kill them.
The You Are a Victim! message is unlikely to produce stellar behavior in anyone. Directed at a group that already had a pretty high rate of criminal offending, it nearly destroyed our country.
By the end of 2020, the national homicide rate had shot up an unprecedented 30% and has continued to climb since then.
“New homicide records were set in 2021 in Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Portland, and elsewhere. The violence continued into 2022. January 2022 was Baltimore’s deadliest month in nearly 50 years, with 36 people killed, compared to 35 in 1973, when the city’s population was much larger.”
With the black community itself bearing the brunt of the violence, by now, the ruling class’s fawning embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten tens of thousands of black people killed.
If I’d done that, I’d want everyone to forget about the “racial reckoning,” too.
Although the hourly “racism updates” have ended, BLM’s lies have calcified into received wisdom. It is still a matter of doctrine that black people are victims of systemically racist police.
In fact, as Mac Donald has been documenting for years, police are 400 times as likely to be killed by a black person as unarmed blacks are to be killed by cops.
Using the latest figures, in 2021, a grand total of eight unarmed blacks were killed by cops. That same year, an estimated 29 police officers were killed by black suspects. Of course, there are a lot more black people (47 million) than police officers (700,000). Thus, the apples-to-apples comparison works out to: For every 100,000 blacks, 1/100th of one unarmed black is killed by a cop; for every 100,000 cops, four are killed by black men.
Maybe it’s the moms of black cops who ought to be giving their sons “The Talk.” Son, do everything you can to avoid being assigned to a black neighborhood. Be alert at all times, even when sitting in your squad car. If at all possible, do not arrest a black suspect. If you absolutely have to, make sure you have backup.
One person too full of her own self-righteousness to notice that the rest of her party had decided to keep mum about the “racial reckoning” was Rep. Ilhan Omar. She marked the occasion by regurgitating the exact same boilerplate about racist cops and “black bodies.”
“Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies,” she told The Guardian, “it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher.”
(What I admire most about third-world immigrants is their realization that their ancestors were people utterly incapable of building a functioning society, and therefore, if they happened to find themselves in a successful country, like the U.S., they should shut up, listen and learn.)
“State-sanctioned violence” against “black bodies”? The fact is all police shootings of blacks combined (justified, unjustified, armed and unarmed) is a smaller percentage of the black homicide rate (2%) than police shootings are of the white and Hispanic homicide rates (9%).
But the 98% of black people who are killed by other black people are of zero interest to the media or the Democratic Party. It’s that crucial .01% of blacks killed by cops that get the headlines.
Neighbor: YOUR 9-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS JUST GUNNED DOWN BY GANG MEMBERS IN A SACRAMENTO PARK!
Black mother: Please God, tell me the shooters weren’t white!
After listing pages and pages of black children killed in black neighborhoods by black criminals, Mac Donald writes: “Since the black children’s assailants are overwhelmingly black themselves, the country changes the subject, lest it be accused of a taboo attention to black crime.”
So black bodies continue to pile up, and the only people who give a damn are conservatives — and the police.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
The Elon Musk-founded Neuralink, the medical device company developing implantable brain-computer interface microchips, has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to start human clinical trials as early as this summer.
The company announced what it calls “an important first step” last Thursday and expects to share more information on recruitment for the clinical trial in the near future.
“We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!” the company tweeted. “This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people. Recruitment is not yet open for our clinical trial. We’ll announce more information on this soon!”
While details are still scant, the trial is expected to focus on Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI), a Class III medical device that connects the brain to an external computer using a Bluetooth signal.
With this connection, the device — a coin-sized chip called the “Link” — allows for continuous communication and is designed to not only “read” neural activity but “write” signals into the brain.
Musk has said Neuralink could potentially restore eyesight and motor function for disabled patients and offer the ability to control electronic devices mentally.
Neuralink does not currently have any clinical trials available for enrollment but has created a patient registry for those interested in participating in future trials.
To be eligible for the registry, one must live in the United States, be at least 18 years of age and of consenting age in their state, and suffer from any of a number of medical conditions, including quadriplegia, paraplegia, or vision or hearing loss.
As with any new technology, there are considerable health concerns associated with the Link. Reuters reported in March that the FDA rejected a 2022 application from Neuralink to commence human trials, citing “concern” over the device’s lithium battery, a risk of some of the Link’s wiring to “migrate to other areas of the brain,” and safety questions about the removal of the device without damaging brain tissue.
In animal trials conducted between 2017 and 2020, the device has seen mixed results, with some monkey test subjects using their brain to move computer cursors. But more than half reportedly died from brain hemorrhages or other causes.
While some Christian neurologists have raised ethical questions about implanting devices into human brains, Musk has said his inspiration behind the company in the first place was to be a “risk mitigation for digital super-intelligence.”
“The reason I created Neuralink long-term as a risk mitigation for digital super-intelligence, in that if we are able to effectively achieve symbiosis with digital intelligence, then … the collective human will is better able to steer things in the direction that we’d like, or even with benign AI, at least go along for the ride,” he told The Babylon Bee in a 2021 interview.
“We’re already at this point partially a cyborg … in that our phones and computers and applications are a digital extension of ourselves at this point.”
Among other goals, Musk said he’s confident Neuralink will ultimately allow paraplegic or even tetraplegic to operate a phone “faster than someone who has … working hands.”
Dr. Travis Losey, the vice-chair of the department of neurology and co-director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Loma Linda University in southern California, said in a 2021 interview with The Christian Post that when it comes to the use of brain interface technology, the purpose should be to heal something that was harmed by disease or a disorder.
“The core ethical issue with the brain-computer interface is similar to issues with medication,” he offered. “I think it’s only ethical to use medications when they are being used to restore function that has been lost or affected by a disease. The same principles would apply to brain-computer interfaces.”
The doctor said there is no higher calling for a Christian than to help people affected by disease. He said believers should enter the field to ensure these technologies are used appropriately.
“There’s no such thing as a small god. Once somebody starts playing God, sooner or later, things will get out of hand.” -Elif Shafak
Most of us are familiar with the term “playing God.” Those few instances we do recall were often from movies or television shows where a physician has pushed the boundaries of “do no harm” to “I can- so I should. One of the best examples of this was 1931’s Frankenstein.
In the film version of the famous book, young scientist Henry Frankenstein has become obsessed with the possibility of bringing the dead back to life. He is under the erroneous impression that deceased tissue only lacks the ability to work, needing only the right conditions to revive it; and that he can do it. With this plan in mind, he gathers various body parts, and employs a dwarf named Fritz to break into a laboratory and procure the one missing component- a brain.
Frightened with the nearby belltower’s gong, Fritz drops the bottle containing the brain marked normal, and unbeknownst to him, grabs the nearest one, marked abnormal. Later that evening, Fritz and Henry are prepared to begin. After harnessing thousands of volts from the storm into his patchwork creation, it comes to life- with disastrous and deadly results. Needless to say, things “got out of hand.”
Though fictional, the ultimate end result is the same: playing God comes with a price. However, even Frankenstein had his limits. It has now been nearly 95 years since America watched the dangers wrought from the “God-complex” brought to fruition before our eyes.
In 2023, “I can-so I should” is still the only lesson we have learned.
This from the National Post’s Sharon Kirkey:
“Forty-five years after the world’s first “test-tube baby” was born, surgeons are preparing for another historical first: transplanting a womb inside the body of someone born male.’
Several teams are “actively working” to make uterus transplants for transgender women a reality, according to an article published in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility, with the first such procedure likely to happen “within the next few years, if not sooner.”
A team at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, the first in North America to transplant a uterus from a deceased donor into a woman born without one, authored the paper. If the anatomical challenges in transgender women can be overcome — and surgeons have said none seem insurmountable — uterus transplants would make it possible for trans women to gestate and give birth to a child.
The baby would be delivered by caesarean section. The issue is sensitive and controversial. Some have called uterus transplants for trans women a “dystopian biological experiment.” Others have argued that the procedures would allow trans women to attain “body-completeness through having a key female reproductive organ.”
Nearly 100 womb transplants have been performed in over 10 countries (excluding Canada) worldwide since the first baby was born following a uterine transplant in Sweden in 2014. More than 35 healthy babies have been delivered. But from a philosophical, and feminist, perspective, she finds uterus transplants in general “really troubling.”
Ya think?
From this author’s perspective, transplantation, while troubling, is not the biggest concern. That we are so complacent about actual medical professionals putting wombs into men is much more disturbing. The ability for doctors and scientists to change lives is not a blank check; there must be a system of checks and balances to provide accountability.
Once this standard is removed, the door to do literally anything “in the name of science” is non-existent. This is what happens when those that make the rules aren’t governed by them.
Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcom understood this all too well, as he addressed his issues with the casual demeanor concerning “genetically created” dinosaurs:
“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it!”
These ‘Frankenstein-like” experiments aren’t 20 to 30 years from being completed; this is currently being done as we speak- with measurable success. These “gods” in operating rooms that are slicing and dicing with impunity have been gaining ground for years.
How do we know?
More than two years ago, an article concerning the Cleveland clinic announced that the impossible had become possible.
“A baby girl born last month at Cleveland Clinic has made history. She was the first baby in North America delivered by a mother who received a uterus transplant from a deceased donor.
The mother, who is in her mid-30s, is part of a groundbreaking research trial involving 10 women with uterine factor infertility. Women who have UFI don’t have a uterus, or had their uterus removed, so they aren’t able to get pregnant.
The study is testing whether receiving a uterus transplant from a deceased donor could allow these women to become pregnant (via in-vitro fertilization) and carry and deliver a baby.
Since the trial began, the team has completed five uterus transplants, three of which were successful (including this one, which resulted in a live birth). Currently, two women are waiting to have embryo transfers, and several more candidates are waiting for a transplant.”
One Step Ahead or Two Steps Behind?
To be honest, we have by-and-large been always two steps behind. By the time we get up to speed, those seeking to undermine all that we stand for have moved on to the next target. Why? Because we don’t consider this a threat as much as they consider it a win.
Where they march-we merely gather. Where they are loud-we are silent, and while we merely talk about how we can change the world-they are already doing it. What does it mean when our efforts to protect women and girls are overshadowed by their efforts to eradicate them?
A baby girl born last month at Cleveland Clinic has made history. She was the first baby in North America delivered by a mother who received a uterus transplant from a deceased donor.
You’re probably familiar with the idea of a kidney, liver or heart transplant, but uterine transplant is a rapidly evolving field, says maternal-fetal medicine specialist Uma Perni, MD, who was part of the mother’s care team.
“It’s important to remember that this is still research, but it’s exciting to see what the options may be for women in the future,” she says.
The mother, who is in her mid-30s, is part of a groundbreaking research trial involving 10 women with uterine factor infertility. Women who have UFI don’t have a uterus, or had their uterus removed, so they aren’t able to get pregnant. The study is testing whether receiving a uterus transplant from a deceased donor could allow these women to become pregnant (via in-vitro fertilization) and carry and deliver a baby.
This clinical trial reflects the Cleveland Clinic tradition of innovation in clinical medicine. Unlike some other uterus transplant programs, Cleveland Clinic’s trial uses only uteruses from donors who have recently died. This eliminates the risk of potentially harming a living donor, who would need to have major abdominal surgery to have her uterus removed.
“The transplantation of a uterus into a woman is a complex procedure that requires suppression of her immune system response,” says transplant surgeon Andreas Tzakis, MD. “Through this research, we aim to make these extraordinary events ordinary for the women who choose this option. We are grateful to the donor. Their generosity allowed our patient’s dream to come true and a new baby to be born.”
Since the trial began, the team has completed five uterus transplants, three of which were successful (including this one, which resulted in a live birth). Currently, two women are waiting to have embryo transfers, and several more candidates are waiting for a transplant.
Bureaucrats in President Joe Biden’s Department of Education just put their thumb on the scale of a book dispute in Georgia by not only smearing parents’ concerns about sexually explicit books in schools but also leveraging their federal power to intimidate districts that have successfully purged porn from campuses. In the Biden administration’s latest attempt to weaponize an arm of the federal government against parents, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) wrote a letter to Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Jeff Bearden on May 19 outlining everything it deemed wrong with the district’s decision to pull several inappropriate books from school bookshelves.
Not only did the federal agency demand that the district offer “supportive measures to students who may have been impacted by the book removal process,” but the OCR also ordered the Georgia school district to administer a “climate survey” to middle and high school students so bureaucrats can “assess whether additional steps need to be taken.”
The OCR predicated its probe into Forsyth schools on allegations from an unnamed complainant that the administration, at the bidding of parents, “created a hostile environment for students”based on race, color, or national origin. Using the Supreme Court’s expanded definition of “sex” as determined in the 5-4 Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, the OCR also claimed it was investigating whether Forsyth County schools “created a hostile environment for students” based on sexual orientation and identity.
The Bostock ruling specifically pertained to sex differences in employment, not education. Still, after reviewing district documents, emails from parents to school staff, and school board meetings as well as interviewing several district staff, the Biden administration attempted to justify its involvement in this local education dispute by claiming it is a top enforcer of the 1972 Title IX and the 1964 Title VI laws.
“In my opinion, this is not about books,” Cindy Martin, an FCS mother, told The Federalist. “This is about the federal government using bully tactics against our school system to indoctrinate our children into their LGBTQ ideology.”
District and Parents Agree: Porn Shouldn’t Be in Schools
Clamor over inappropriate content in Forsyth schools first surfaced in 2021 when parents discovered several titles including sexually explicit material were made available by schools to their children. One parent told The Federalist that despite several attempts to contact the district, she never heard back until January 2022. After months of ignoring parents’ calls for change, the district called a District Media Committee meeting to independently discuss how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom. By Jan. 21, 2022, FCS Superintendent Dr. Jeff Bearden asked the chief technology and information officer (CTIO) to “pull from school libraries books that were obviously sexually explicit or pornographic.”
“…how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom”? Simple really. If you are uncomfortable reading the material Sunday Morning in Church Service, then should our children be READING IT?
“For us, it’s not about censorship because, obviously, students and parents have the right to choose to read whatever they want outside of the school,” FCS Chief Communications Officer Jennifer Caracciolo told one local media outlet at the time of the decision. “They can purchase it or they can go to the public library. But we have a responsibility whenever it comes to sexually explicit content in the walls of our buildings.”
Following a review, the CTIO asked Forsyth County Principals to indefinitely pull nine books from “all school libraries” and restrict another six books to high schools only.
“The content in them was what we would consider pervasively vulgar, and it’s not about whether or not a parent or guardian liked or disliked the ideas contained in the book or liked or disliked the author or the author’s identity, we focused on content that was pervasively vulgar,” Caracciolo clarified.
For a while, it seemed like the schools and the parents were beginning to get on the same page. But the fight wasn’t over yet.
“The conservative parents in our community were grateful that the school chose to stop providing children with this harmful, low-quality material. It fantasizes sex and leads to negative consequences such as sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, disease, and poverty,” Martin said. “However, we had done intense research and knew that eight books did not even come close to the amount of sexual explicit books that needed to be removed. This is how and why the Mama Bears of Forsyth County formed. We expected the school to make the libraries a safe place for all children. A school system should never provide sexual reading material to children.”
Twisted Tales
During its investigation, the OCR was quick to overlook the role parents and taxpayers have the right to play in the education of children, instead complaining that “the District did not make an announcement to, or have other communication with, students about the removal of the books.”
The OCR admitted in its findings letter that the school administration made it clear that the books in question “had not been reviewed for LGBTQI+ content or moral dilemma issues, just sexual explicitness.” Yet, OCR accused FCS parents of making what it characterized as “negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory.”
“Many parents called for the removal of additional books, with most of their comments focused on sexually explicit content; however, some comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation,” the letter stated.
The OCR additionally accused the district of giving the “impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment.”
Several local media outlets also expressed outrage at the district’s decision and spread the lie that FCS leadership was “banning” books at the bidding of parents. The OCR, in turn, cited the media’s rage as proof that parents and the district somehow overstepped their bounds by protecting minors from sexually explicit content.
One Atlanta Journal-Constitution article lamented that “Juliet Takes a Breath,” a book known for, as Common Sense Media put it, “detailed scenes of kissing and lovemaking between two women, sexual fantasies, masturbation, and periods, as well as extensive discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity,” would no longer be available to students. Another book called “Monday’s Not Coming,” one reviewer noted, is filled with “homosexuality, promiscuity, intercourse, and prostitution” as well as child abuse. That book was sent “to local media center review committees for further analysis” by the school district.
Similar coverage dominated corporate media pages after the OCR’s letter was published in May.
Shortly after the school district pulled the handful of explicit books, parents gathered at a Feb. 15, 2022 Forsyth County Board of Education meeting to express their concern that children were being exposed to even more explicit books via the school system.
One attendee, Alison Hair, only got a few words into reading an excerpt from one of the other explicit library books that still sat on FCS shelves before she was cut off by the board for allegedly violating meeting rules.
“If you continue with your statement just please, we have other people that are younger in this [room],” one board member told Hair.
“If it is inappropriate to read in this building, then it is inappropriate, inappropriate to be in a library,” Hair said. “How dare you say ‘Oh, well, there’s minors in here.’ Wait, what is it? My son’s a minor and this book that you all have copies is in my son’s middle school.”
Hair’s frustrations were echoed by more than a dozen other parents.
“I have an 11-year-old and this is not allowed in our house nor would I allow him to pick this book up at Barnes and Noble or your school library that you provide for my children,” Ann Christopher, a mother to a Forsyth County middle schooler, said. “Also, you say respect the rules. You’re telling Alison to respect the rules. Excuse me. This is in my child’s face if he chose to check it out. What rules are you respecting for my child who can’t speak for [himself]? I’m the one here to protect my child, nobody else is. That’s why we parents are here.”
In a complaint filed in July 2022, Mama Bears of Forsyth members Hair, who was barred from school board meetings after attempting to read from another explicit passage in March, and Martin alleged that the Forsyth County Board of Education violated their First Amendment rights as parents to speak up about what kind of reading materials their children are exposed to.
“This lawsuit does not try to resolve the question of which books should be available in school libraries, but instead addresses unlawful attempts to sanitize how parents speak about those books in the presence of elected officials and other adults,” the lawsuit states.
In February 2023, a judge ruled that the FCS board violated Hair and Martin’s constitutional rights and must pay $100,000 in legal fees.
Despite these particular books’ inappropriate content, parents’ ongoing pleas for the taxpayer-funded district to stop supplying pornographic material to children, and the district’s expensive legal defeat, multiple problematic books were eventually approved to return to school shelves, along with more than half a dozen other titles for high schools, after review by a committee.
The Biden administration’s OCR investigation and demand for a mea culpa from FCS over its decision to pull bad books is likely only going to deter the district from taking any further drastic action when it comes to porn and inappropriate content in schools.
FCS parents, Martin reassured The Federalist, are not deterred.
“Wake up parents,” Martin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
After a confidential human source claimed then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, FBI agents used what’s called an FD-1023 form to record the allegation. Now FBI Director Christopher Wray is defying a May 3 congressional subpoena to provide this form. On Tuesday, in response to Wray’s refusal to hand over the documents, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer announced the House will move to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.
It isn’t that announcement — or even the other explosive ones released over the past year by Comer’s Senate colleague, Chuck Grassley — that prove the most telling, however. Rather, it is the combination of all the details, big and small, that suggests the scandal set to unfold over the coming weeks will be bigger than anyone imagined.
The Dirt Is in the Details
Take recent big news from whistleblower disclosures revealing that the Justice Department and the FBI have the unclassified FD-1023 form spelling out Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. Then combine that with other known information to discover the bigger picture.
For instance, in response to Wray’s failure to comply with the subpoena, Grassley, who had previously noted the FD-1023 form was five or six pages long, indicated that the confidential human source (CHS) was “an apparent trusted FBI source.” This is huge because Grassley wouldn’t make that claim unless the whistleblower had. That means the source is not some random guy walking in off the street, but rather an existing “trusted” CHS, which is why the FBI used the FD-1023 form.
In response to Wray’s stonewalling, Comer likewise revealed some significant details, clarifying late last week that the CHS reporting document was dated June 30, 2020, and referenced“the amount of money the foreign national allegedly paid to receive the desired policy outcome” as “five million.” These details could only have come from a whistleblower with deep knowledge of the investigation, meaning the whistleblower’s characterization of the CHS as “trusted” carries more weight. Likewise, the whistleblower’s claim that the FD-1023 “includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” is more credible given the whistleblower’s knowledge of other details.
Comer’s reference to “five million” is also intriguing. In a letter to Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley had previously revealed a promise by a Chinese communist government-connected enterprise to funnel $5 million to “Hunter and James Biden to compensate them for work done while Joe Biden was vice president.” Records released by Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., also confirmed a $5 million payment to James and Hunter Biden from another Chinese-connected business.
The date of the FD-1023 form, June 30, 2020, also proves significant when read in conjunction with Grassley’s letter to Wray in July 2022. In that letter, Grassley said the whistleblower had claimed that “the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but “that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (‘FBI HQ’) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
The whistleblower further alleged that in September 2020, the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.
Several points merit mention here: First, Auten is the same agent responsible for some of the shenanigans in Crossfire Hurricane. Second, Grassley’s letter indicates Auten did not open the “assessment” on Hunter Biden or other members of the Biden family. The senator’s correspondence actually suggests the assessment may have been opened on the CHS.
Here’s the relevant language:
The basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but in more than one instance the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden.
The whistleblower also reportedly told Grassley that FBI HQ later closed sources after branding their info as disinformation. Given the timing of the assessment (August 2020) and the date of the CHS report (June 2020), it seems likely the FBI used the CHS report as part of the “assessment” and that the “assessment” was of the CHS.
This leads to the next significant point: According to the whistleblower, Auten’s assessment led to the “improper discrediting” of the verified and verifiable derogatory information about Hunter Biden. Worse, based on several hints dropped by Grassley over the last year, FBI headquarters conducted little to no investigation on the CHS and other derogatory info before labeling it “disinformation.”
The timing of the CHS report in June 2020 also proves conveniently coincidental to the decision by Democrat Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Adam Schiff to send a letter just two weeks later, on July 13, 2020, to the FBI claiming Congress was being subjected to a foreign disinformation campaign. On July 16, 2020, the then-ranking members of two congressional committees asked the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the same one that handled the “assessment” that branded the Hunter Biden intel as disinformation — to give the committees a defensive briefing. News of that “Russian disinformation” briefing soon leaked to the press.
What About a Recording?
Grassley’s correspondence and statements over the last year hint at one more possibility: The FBI had at least one recording that implicated members of the Biden family in a criminal enterprise and buried that evidence. Specifically, in one letter to the bureau, Grassley said other FBI records “shed light on Hunter Biden’s business and financial relationship with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky,” and those “documents include specific details about conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden.” Grassley had previously requested interview summary forms that referenced Zlochevsky, and in seeking FBI records, the senator’s letter made clear that “records” included “recorded or graphic material,” including “recordings of verbal communications.” This possibility fits with the whistleblower’s description of “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” that FBI HQ shut down in October 2020 “in furtherance of Mr. Auten’s assessment,” even though, according to the whistleblower, the intel could have been verified by use of search warrants.
A follow-up question Grassley asked Wray further suggests the possibility of recorded conversations implicating the Bidens: “Does the Justice Department have a specific policy regarding the use of materials and information related to U.S. citizens who reside in the United States provided by foreign governments, including the fruits of surveillance carried out by a foreign state’s intelligence service?”
Whether these possibilities pan out remains to be seen, but what should be clear to all now is that the whistleblower knows where the evidence is buried — and Grassley and Comer have brought their shovels.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The U.S. government has given Chinese and Russian entities at least $1.3 billion for various research programs over the past five years, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and watchdog group Open the Books.
The analysis revealed that millions of taxpayer dollars have been given to, among others, a Chinese software developer for military tech support, a Russian health insurance provider that has since been sanctioned and Chinese agriculture companies. And it showed the federal government gave $2 million, more than previously reported, to the Chinese state-run Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.
“Washington’s continued spending is so out of hand, it is losing track of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars, but I am creating accountability for every penny,” Ernst said in a statement after releasing the report.
“It is gravely concerning that no one in Washington can actually account for millions sent to Russia and China for pointless projects,” the Iowa Republican continued. “But I have the receipts. I’m shining a light on this reckless spending, so bureaucrats can no longer cover up their tracks and taxpayers can know exactly what their hard-earned dollars are funding.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said she released the report Wednesday “so bureaucrats can no longer cover up their tracks.” (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
In addition to releasing the analysis, Ernst introduced the Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) Act that would require all federal funding for organizations in China and Russia to be tracked and disclosed. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., who chairs the China Select Committee, introduced companion legislation in the House.
Overall, using data obtained from the Congressional Research Service, Ernst and Open the Books tracked $490 million in U.S. grants and contracts paid to Chinese entities and another $870 million paid to Russian entities. The Government Accountability Office previously estimated the U.S. funneled just $48 million to Chinese entities over the five-year period ending in 2021.
According to Ernst’s analysis, one program, a $58.7 million State Department grant, included giving a Chinese organization, Beijing-based Crossroads Cultural Communication, $96,875 for “gender equality” through the exhibition of New Yorker magazine cartoons.” To increase awareness on gender equality and women empowerment through an exhibition of works by women cartoonists of the New Yorker Magazine in China,” the 2021 grant description states.
President Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Indonesia on Nov. 14, 2022. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
Another, a $51.6 million grant from the Department of Defense, resulted in $6 million in funding for Chinese tech firm Beijing Juehua Trading Co. to provide “deployment and distribution command” software for the U.S. military. And Chinese food producers were awarded $1.6 million under the Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program, which was designed to assist domestic producers.
The $2 million in research funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Chinese lab some experts have blamed for leaking coronavirus, sparking the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — included $1.1 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development and $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health. The funding was indirectly transferred through EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. non-governmental organization.
In addition, a $4.2 million Health and Human Services program granted $770,466 to the Pavlov Institute, a state-run lab located in St. Petersburg, Russia, to experiment on cats running on treadmills. The Biden administration ultimately cut off funding for the program after criticism from groups like White Coat Waste and Republican lawmakers.
Ernst’s analysis also showed that the federal government wired $4.7 million to Russian company PAO Rosgosstrakh for health insurance. That same company was sanctioned by the Treasury Department amid the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
Also, $1.45 million was granted to entities in Russia for COVID-19 pandemic virus tracking.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
One female athlete is suing her home state of Connecticut for its unfair transgender policies, arguing that forcing girls to compete alongside biological men with a “huge” physical advantage is “not fair.”
“All four years of my high school experience, I raced against these two biological males who ended up taking four state championships, two honorary awards, and countless other opportunities for myself to advance. And it’s not fair to force people to participate against biological males, and so that’s why I’m suing,” Chelsea Mitchell argued during an appearance on “Varney & Co.”
Chelsea Mitchell is a college sophomore and track athlete. | Fox News
“It’s not fair that these biological males took these titles from myself and other girls, and so the record should reflect that. But also, we want the policy reversed so that no other female in Connecticut has to go through the same thing that I went through,” she told substitute host Lauren Simonetti on Wednesday.
Selina Soule, a fellow frustrated track and field athlete, is joining the legal battle against the state of Connecticut, and is pleading with other women to take a stand in defense of women’s sports.
“Everybody who has encountered this issue needs to speak up and ask for fairness,” Soule said last week on “America Reports.” “I was one of the very first to start speaking on this issue, and it’s taken a while, but we are finally starting to get somewhere… we need to protect every single girl in this country.”
Soule urged “everybody out there… to start speaking on this issue and ask for fairness to be restored to women’s sports.”
Attorney Christiana Kiefer joined both of her clients, Mitchell and Soule, separately during their TV interviews, detailing the several ways the athletic community can come together and “win” their case.
“It’s so important that our laws and policies, not just in Connecticut but across the United States as well, reflect biological reality. And that’s the whole reason Title IX was passed nearly 50 years ago, was to ensure that girls like Chelsea and like the young woman who are now protected in the state of Alabama, can compete on a fair and level playing field and not be forced to race against males who have inherent physical advantages over them,” Kiefer explained Wednesday.
“It’s been really encouraging to see more than 21 states now protecting women’s sports across our country. And we just want to see that momentum continue.”
As the fight against transgender policy continues to heat up, women nationwide are joining the conversation.
When she initially launched her lawsuit, Mitchell noted that there was “a lot of silence” and “whispered support” for her cause. In the past year, there has been a surge of support for female athletes, making it “much easier” for women to stand up for themselves on a legislative stage. Mitchell continued, spotlighting the ground-breaking impact trans athletes have had, and will continue to have on female sports if changes are not made.
“In competitive sports, we need these sex-separated categories so that women still have the opportunity to win. You know, I mean, I worked for years to get to that state championship, to be on the line, to win that race; and to have that kind of taken from you is really just frustrating and disheartening, especially because you know the person next to you has a huge physical advantage,” she concluded.
Since its CEO hailed DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives and a backlash for targeting kids with LGBTQ Pride messaging, Target’s stock price hit its lowest level since the 2020 pandemic lockdowns.
Shares hit a low of $133.42 on Wednesday in early trading and has dropped for eight consecutive sessions, its longest losing streak since November 2018, the New York Post reported.
Its market capitalization has seen about a $12.7 billion drop to $61.6 billion Wednesday since CEO Brian Cornell hailed DEI as having been a boon to business.
“When we think about purpose at Target, it’s really about helping all the families, and that ‘all’ word is really important,” Cornell told Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast this month. “Most of America shops at Target, so we want to do the right thing to support families across the country.’
“I think those are just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand.”
Cornell hailed DEI initiatives has being a moneymaker.
“The things we’ve done from a DE&I standpoint, it’s adding value,” he said. “It’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests, and those are just the right things for our business today.”
But now it has led to backlash, boiling before June’s Pride Month for the LGBTQIA+ community. Calls for Target boycotts on Twitter have been going on since mid-March, condemning pride messaging and LGBTQ clothing for children, and even babies, TheStreet reported.
Target closed at $160.96 on March 17 (topping at $162.43 at 11 a.m. ET that day) since Cornell’s remarks and has only closed lower since, including $133.80 on Tuesday.
Notably, Target’s Twitter account activity has been virtually nonexistent since October, just days after CEO Elon Musk took over — a sign it might be engaging in its own political boycott. The Target boycott has also rejected “tuck-friendly” clothing and merchandise from a vendor who sells items with satanic messaging, The Washington Post reported.
Also, new song called “Boycott Target” by Forgiato Blow and Jimmy Levy surged Monday to the No. 1 spot in the iTunes hip hop chart, increasing the surge against Target in a campaign similar to the one waged against Bud Light.
“Attention all shoppers, there’s a clean up on every aisle,” Blow raps in the opening line. “Target is targeting your kids.”
Bud Light infamously used Dylan Mulvaney, a pro-President Joe Biden transgender social media influencer, to help sell its beer in April, leading to a backlash that has seen a campaign rise against the brewer. Anheuser-Busch’s share price has fallen around $13.63 since it closed at $66.57 on March 31, just a day before Mulvaney appeared on Twitter to brag about the personalized Bud Light cans and partnership. The share price dipped to $52.94 on Wednesday, or more than 20% loss of market capitalization to $91.7 billion.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, R-Ky., held a call with FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday on a refusal to hand over an FBI whistleblower document to Congress, potentially setting the stage for a historic contempt of Congress charge.
“On my call with FBI Director Wray, the FBI finally confirmed the existence of the FD-1023 form alleging then-VP Joe Biden engaged in a criminal bribery scheme,” Comer tweeted Wednesday after the call. “Anything short of producing these documents to @GOPoversight is not in compliance with my subpoena.”
Comer’s statement detailed the call with Wray, including the first time confirmation of FD-1023 form alleging Biden’s “criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national.”
“However, Director Wray did not commit to producing the documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee,” Comer’s statement continued. “While Director Wray – after a month of refusing to even acknowledge that the form existed – has offered to allow us to see the documents in person at FBI headquarters, we have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena.
“If the FBI fails to hand over the FD-1023 form as required by the subpoena, the House Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings.”
A source told Newsmax congressional correspondent Kilmeny Duchardt on Newsmax‘s “American Agenda,” the call did not go well and will ultimately force Comer and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to call for a vote on holding Wray in contempt of Congress.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime whistleblower advocate working with Comer, condemned the FBI for treating Congress like “second-class citizens” while leaking other information to the media.
“While the FBI has apparently leaked classified information to the news media in recent weeks, jeopardizing its own human sources, it continues to treat Congress like second-class citizens by refusing to provide a specific unclassified record,” Grassley wrote in a statement. “Director Wray confirmed what my whistleblowers have told me pursuant to legally protected disclosures: the FBI-generated document is real, but the bureau has yet to provide it to Congress in defiance of a legitimate congressional subpoena. This failure comes with consequences.”
Comer said Tuesday he was moving forward with holding Wray in contempt of Congress because the FBI missed the deadline to turn over the FBI record on Biden and his family’s foreign business dealings.
“The FBI’s decision to stiff-arm Congress and hide this information from the American people is obstructionist and unacceptable,” Comer wrote in a statement.
In response, the FBI said in a Tuesday statement it remained committed to cooperating with lawmakers in “good faith,” and “any discussion of escalation under these circumstances is unnecessary.” The FBI said it offered to give the Oversight committee “access to information responsive to the committee’s subpoena in a format and setting that maintains confidentiality and protects important security interests and the integrity of FBI investigations.”
The bureau called that offer “an extraordinary accommodation.”
The offer was reportedly repeated to Comer on Wednesday, but House GOP members believe it has oversight authority that should force the FBI to turn that document over the Congress without a secure viewing alternative.
Calls to move forward with contempt were elevated by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier Tuesday, who said he had personally called Wray to urge the release of the document to Congress.
“If he does not act, he’s not above the law,” McCarthy said. “He’s not above Congress. And we will hold him in contempt. Now I want to be very clear about that.”
Comer subpoenaed Wray earlier this month seeking a specific FBI form from June 2020 that is a report of conversations or interactions with a confidential source. These reports are routine, contain uncorroborated and unvetted information and do not on their own establish any wrongdoing.
In a May 3 letter to Wray with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Comer said that “it has come to our attention” that the bureau has such a document that “describes an alleged criminal scheme” involving Biden and a foreign national “relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” when Biden was vice president and includes “a precise description” about it.
Comer and Grassley said those “disclosures” demand further investigation, and they want to know whether the FBI investigated and, if so, what agents found. The subpoena seeks all so-called FD-1023 forms and accompanying attachments and documents.
Democrats on the Oversight committee called Comer’s narrative of the FBI obstructing “a radical distortion of the situation.” And they accused the chairman of stonewalling them from the call with Wray on Wednesday.
“This subpoenaed document, by definition, reveals nothing more than an unverified and unsubstantiated tip made to Donald Trump’s Justice Department, which presumably led to no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement late Tuesday.
The lawmakers used the word “alleged” three times in the opening paragraph of the letter and offered no evidence of the veracity of the accusations or any details about what they contend are “highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures.”
The White House has called the subpoena effort further evidence of how congressional Republicans long “have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically motivated attacks” against the Biden family “without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests.”
A contempt of Congress charge would require a full committee vote before going to the House floor. If the House were to approve a contempt resolution against Wray, the decision about whether to prosecute him would fall to prosecutors in the Justice Department, where Wray works.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Meg Oliphant / Contributor, Frederick M. Brown / Stringer, Icon Sportswire / Contributor | Getty Images
A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to biological males competing in women’s sports. That time has come for us in relation to male athletes avoiding the topic of biological males competing in women’s sports.
I’m obviously stealing from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-Vietnam War speech. It applies to transgenderism. It applies to America’s assault on common sense.
We live in a time in which the prevailing sentiment is that everything is for everybody. It’s not true. You can’t have it all. You shouldn’t desire to have it all. The mindset is testament to greed’s power to overtake a culture and man’s willingness to submit to cowardice in pursuit of financial gain.
On Saturday, USA Today published a column attacking ESPN broadcaster Samantha Ponder for a tweet that supported University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines. Gaines has earned popularity speaking out against the trend of gender-dysphoric biological males competing in girls’ sports. She swam against William “Lia” Thomas in the NCAAs. Last week, via Twitter, Gaines shared a handful of messages she received from California parents and young girls upset that biological boys were competing against girls in the state’s high school track meet.
“I barely said anything publicly about this issue and I’ve had so many people message me, stop me in the street to say thank you and tell me stories about girls who are afraid to speak up for fear of lost employment/being called hateful. It is not hateful to demand fairness in sports for girls.”
This tweet sparked a nasty rebuke from Nancy Armour, a USA Today columnist: “Don’t be fooled by the people who screech about ‘fairness’ to cloak their bigotry toward transgender girls and women, the transgender girls and women who have the audacity to want to play sports, in particular. This is, and always was, about hate, fear, and ignorance.”
According to Armour, Sam Ponder is a bigot now because she believes biological boys and girls should compete in separate sports. Armour berates Ponder for agreeing with a Megyn Kelly tweet that ridiculed a transgender “woman” going to see a gynecologist. Armour complained that Ponder’s likes are a “cesspool of transphobic tweets.” In April, Ponder tweeted that she regrets not speaking out sooner in support of Riley Gaines.
Where are the men at ESPN and throughout the sports world speaking out in support of Samantha Ponder and Sage Steele, another ESPN employee who has been vocal on the trans sports issue? Why are jocks, sports pundits, and men betraying Ponder, Steele, and Gaines?
If Mina Kimes gets a mean tweet about her lack of qualifications to be considered an “NFL insider,” the white and black knights of ESPN rush to Twitter to protect their Asian queen.
There’s no rush to publicly rally around Ponder or Steele because there’s no money or social media clout to be gained. You can’t elevate your Corporate Equity Index pointing out the absurdity of men competing against women.
Every male ex-jock at ESPN knows it’s unfair for biological boys to compete against girls. They’re experts on the topic. They know far more about competing in athletics than they do about law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and American history. They can’t wait to hop on television to second-guess law enforcement. They can’t wait to offer bold opinions about subjects they know very little about. But boys competing against girls?
Silence.
It’s as fundamental a topic as there is in sports. It’s the equivalent of debating Jordan vs. LeBron or the NFL careers of Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick. Why is ESPN avoiding the subject?
Because the executives running the network are petrified of the Alphabet Mafia and the on-air talent fear social media backlash. It’s collective cowardice. Two women at ESPN – Ponder and Steele – have more courage than Mike Greenberg, Stephen A. Smith, Ryan Clark, Dan Orlovsky, Jalen Rose, Max Kellerman, and all the other men combined. It’s embarrassing. This is what happens when everyone is chasing “the bag.” It empowers social media to eliminate common sense.
I have sympathy for men and women who believe they were born the wrong gender. But common sense makes it clear that not everything is for everybody. A boy who thinks he’s a girl doesn’t get to compete in girls’ sports. That’s life. No different from how I’ve long thought I would look great in size 32 skinny jeans. They’re not for me. They don’t fit.
The solution to dysphoria is not pandering to other people’s delusion. It’s helping them come to grips with reality. And the reality is the silence of men on the issue of trans athletes speaks to our betrayal of women and God.
The most uneducated but wildly popular critique of Christianity in America — especially on social media — is that Christianity has been a bastion of oppression and intolerance. So much so that the advancements made in liberty and equality over the centuries have come only when America and American leaders have rejected Christianity. In his new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, historian Mark David Hall offers a concise corrective to this inaccurate and often ignorant hot-take and popular narrative.
Hatred of Christianity is one of the pillars of the current anti-American ideology that permeates universities and the governing spirit of our ruling elite. Mockery of Christians, especially evangelicals, is also one of the core tenets of progressive culture. This hostility and mockery are unwarranted. Far from being agents of oppression and anti-intellectualism, Hall highlights how Christians have been the bedrock of social activism advancing liberty and equality, as well as promoting education reform, increasing literacy, and publishing newspapers and magazines.
We are all familiar with the asinine proclamations of America as a secular country, that progress, liberty, and equality are atheist ideals, and that committed Christians are the greatest threat to America’s future. Yet, as Hall forcefully rebuts, “it is simply false to claim that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America’s leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether.”
Looking at the Puritans, the American Revolution, evangelical social reform prior to the Civil War, and contemporary debates over religious liberty, Hall reveals what used to be well-known: Christianity has been the heart of true social progress and explosive advancements in human liberty, equality, and democratic government.
Puritans and Foundations of Liberty
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, one of the most important senators the United States ever had, lauded the Pilgrims and Puritans as champions of the liberty that our “civil and religious liberty” grew from. Today, however, it is common to imagine Puritans as petty tyrants, intolerant theocrats, and bah humbug killjoys.
When I was a student at Yale taking classes on American Puritanism, our professor went to great lengths to de-indoctrinate us of the popular stereotypes of the Puritans. The Puritans were among the most educated people at the time, established our most venerable institutions of higher education, promoted the advancement and discoveries of Enlightenment science, vigorously advocated for public literacy, and enjoyed a good laugh, beer, and sex.
The real history of the Puritans that I learned at Yale is covered again by Hall in his opening chapter deconstructing the lies of secularists and anti-Christian writers and hacktivists portraying the Puritans in a dark and inaccurate light. The Puritans, our author reminds us, “valued natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and limited government; they were convinced that citizens have a right, and perhaps even a duty, to resist tyrannical government.” When traveling through the lands the Puritans helped to build in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”
As historians and scholars of Puritanism have long asserted, the democratic ethos of congregationalist church politics helped develop the local customs of self-government in New England that would form the basis for “Democracy in America,” as Tocqueville famously put it. But what about the banishment of certain Baptist dissenters and the Salem witch trials, the critic asks? These events did happen, but they are drastically overblown by contemporary critics.
The banishment of a handful of religious dissenters in Massachusetts was only after these rabble-rousing individuals repeatedly, and deliberately, returned to cause trouble and disturb the peace. Also, Hall reminds us, when compared to Europe, where more than 100,000 men and women were prosecuted as witches and half sentenced to death, only 272 individuals in America were ever charged with witchcraft. The Salem witch trials, which happened in 1692, marked the last execution of a witch in North America. In Europe, witches were still executed as late as 1782.
Completing his overview of the Puritans, Hall writes that the Puritans “created political institutions that were more democratic than any the world had ever seen, and they strictly limited civil leaders by law.”
Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God
Another one of the popular putdowns of Christianity by its critics (and even some Christians) is that Christianity doesn’t permit rebellion to tyrannical government but supports tyrannical government. In a gross and deeply literalist reading of the Apostle Paul in Romans (somewhat ironic all things considered), these critics assert that because a single passage in the New Testament supposedly teaches obedience to government, which is ordained by God, the American revolutionary patriots rejected Christian teachings and had to utilize secular and Enlightenment arguments to advance the cause of liberty during the American Revolution.
Again, this is patently false, as any decently educated person knows. Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer recently published a superb book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, addressing this myth in detail. Hall, too, quickly covers the problems of this critique. Highlighting Calvinist theological history (something that these critics have no knowledge of, despite their claims of educated intelligence), covering important names known to students of theology, such as John Ponet, John Knox, George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, and even John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather), Hall shows that Christian theological history had come to see rebellion to tyrants as obedience to God and Scripture.
Moreover, most of the popular and patriotic arguments for revolution were not conversant with theorists such as John Locke but with Scripture. The Old Testament, especially, was appealed to by the patriotic clergy in favor of revolution. Christians, far from submitting to tyranny, offered complex theological arguments against tyranny and, therefore, helped formulate a political theology of liberty and equality in the process.
Evangelicals Against Oppression
Perhaps the most common trope that our contemporary anti-Christian elite culture pushes is the tyrannical and ignorant evangelical Christian. This, too, is a stereotype with little basis in history. In fact, many of our best institutions of higher learning were founded by evangelical Christians even if they have since departed from that faith that gave birth to them (Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin, to name a few). The first opponents of slavery and proponents of abolition were the heirs of the Puritans, such as the Rev. Samuel Sewall, who published the first anti-slavery writing in 1700.
Motivated by a vigorous religious faith, the Second Great Awakening was the fire that fueled anti-slavery and abolitionist politics in antebellum America. Men and women of Methodist, Baptist, and congregationalist (Puritan) backgrounds were oftentimes the leading champions of liberty and equality for African-Americans and indigenous Americans. As Hall writes, it was American evangelicals, and especially evangelical women, who most actively “oppos[ed] the evils of slavery and Indian removal.”
During the antebellum years, American evangelicals sought to “work together to help end social evils” and established “thousands of organizations aimed at alleviating suffering and reforming society.” Evangelicals were on the front lines of creating new educational institutions, promoting education reforms to advance public literacy, and establishing newspapers as a means of confronting social evils. Furthermore, Evangelicalism, originally a religious minority grouping, was deeply indebted to religious liberty as the means for its social growth and prominence.
This spirit of religious social reform for liberty led to the contemporary defense of religious liberty as the bedrock on which all liberty and equality before the law stands: “Christian legal organizations have been among the best advocates for religious liberty for all, including citizens who embrace non-Christian faiths,” Hall writes.
Why Christianity Matters to America
In Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, Hall gives us yet another triumphant and important book to correct the polemical, inaccurate, and deeply misleading public presentation of the relationship between Christianity and American politics. Far from the evil bogeyman and religion of oppression that ungrateful critics claim, Christianity has been a positive force for good and the growth of liberty and equality. In fact, America has been best when it has reached into the heart of Christianity for its social reforms and advancement of liberty and equality rather than rejecting Christianity.
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of “Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics” (Academica Press, 2023), “The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books” (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and contributed to “The College Lecture Today” (Lexington, 2019) and “Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters” (Routledge, 2022).
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” It warns that social isolation is a major public health problem. The 81-page document presents six government-directed “pillars” of action to address the health hazards of social isolation.
On the surface, these six directives may look innocuous, but they present a clear and present danger to the autonomy of our private lives and relationships. The project is potentially so massive in scope that it’s not an overstatement to say it threatens to regulate our freedom of association in ways we never could have imagined.
Let’s look in greater depth at those pillars and the risks they pose.
‘Building a Social Infrastructure’
The first stated goal is to “strengthen social infrastructure in local communities.” It defines “social infrastructure” as the regular events and institutions that make up community life, and says the federal government should both fund local organizations and direct how they’re structured, including their locations. This can only mean that all local communities must answer to the federal bureaucracy in the quest to strengthen social connections among people.
Social infrastructure, the report says, includes physical parts of a community, such as housing, libraries, parks and recreation spaces, transport systems, and so forth. The report expresses concern that some people have better access to such locations than other people, and recommends federal interventions.
Those are likely to be used to promote densified housing along the lines of the “15-minute city” (more accurately termed 15-minute ghettoes), as well as the eventual dismantling of single-family housing. The goal of replacing private vehicles with public transportation fits easily into this scheme too.
I don’t presume that this plan will, by itself, drive wholesale changes in our physical infrastructure. But it would certainly provide authority and justification for changes supported by radical environmentalists, all of which diminish our freedoms.
The advisory warns that participation is mandatory if the plan is to work: “It will take all of us — individuals, families, schools, and workplaces, health care and public health systems, technology companies, governments, faith organizations, and communities — working together…”
The report’s proposed infrastructure to solve the problem of social isolation seems designed to lock everybody into compliance with and dependence upon federal mandates. Local control is then lost.
We end up with a massive federal infrastructure that can monitor the levels of social connection and disconnection in every nook and cranny of society. As described in the report, this would mean every institution, every governmental department, every volunteer association, every locality, every church, every faith community, every organization, every club, every service club, every sports league, and so on, would likely be assessed and “strengthened” to promote social connection.
‘Enact Pro-Connection Public Policies Everywhere’
According to the second pillar, “Government has a responsibility to use its authority to monitor and mitigate the public health harm caused by policies, products, and services that drive social disconnection.” How will these be tracked and mitigated? It “requires establishing cross-departmental leadership to develop and oversee an overarching social connection strategy. Diversity, equity, inclusion, [DEI] and accessibility are critical components of any such strategy.”
In other words, some people are more socially connected than others, and that’s not fair. They enjoy benefits — as in “unearned privileges” — that put others at a disadvantage. So, the government needs to intervene for the sake of equity to “spread the wealth” of social connections.
DEI is a creature of identity politics, which serves to erase human individuality and replace it with demographic identity markers that label people as either oppressors or victims, thus cultivating more resentments and hostilities in society. By injecting the codes of DEI into all social relationships, we’re bound to become even more divided, alienated, and lonely. And the federal government is bound to become even more authoritarian and meddlesome in our personal relationships and social interactions.
‘Mobilize the Health Sector’
Another threat to the private sphere of life comes under the directive to “mobilize the health sector” by expanding “public health surveillance and interventions.” This sounds very much like tracking your social connections and intervening when the bureaucracy deems it necessary. Big Brother sitting in on your doctor visits and therapy sessions?
The report indicates that health care workers will be trained to track cases of what the government views as social connection and disconnection. As they obediently report to the federal bureaucracy, most individual and local control will be lost. Medicine is bound to become more federalized and less private than ever when answering to these mandates.
Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness.
“Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness. “
Of course, to the promoters of DEI, all white people are inherently racially biased, simply because of their skin color. This brings to mind the disturbing practice in the Soviet Union of consigning political dissenters to psychiatric treatment. The official line was that you must be mentally ill if you disagree with communism.
‘Reform Digital Environments’
The advisory recognizes that overuse of the internet and social media can drive people deeper into social isolation. But it also promotes centralized government control over technology development, especially in human interactions: “We must learn more by requiring data transparency from technology companies,” it says. So, government would decide how to design and use such technologies. It would very likely compel technology companies to provide data to the government on Americans’ social connections.
The advisory also backs the “development of pro-connection technologies” with the goal of creating “safe” environments and “safeguarding the well-being of users.” Such phrasing has been used in recent years to justify censorship under the guise of protecting certain demographics.
In light of the importance of DEI to the overall strategy, this sounds ominously like a call for further “protection,” i.e., government control of the private sphere. Again, the primary director of all these remedies is the federal bureaucracy, not a trusted family member, friend, pastor, or neighbor.
‘Deepening Our Knowledge’
The fifth pillar of the advisory pushes a “research agenda” that enlists all “stakeholders” — that means every level of government, every organization, every corporation, every school, every family, every individual — to deepen their knowledge about social connection and disconnection. Of course, the advisory has already predetermined the outcome of much of this research, and we can be reasonably confident this research will reflect the outlook offered by the advisory. After all, that’s how researchers get grants and research contracts.
I imagine institutions will publicize their “studies” through a media monopoly that promotes the preferred narrative on what kinds of relationships we should have, what we can and can’t talk about. Essentially, we’ll get a flood of government propaganda about their preferences for human relationships.
In the context of today’s censorship regime, this means promoting a single narrative that will drown any competing views offered by critics and the public with the favored views of government and corporate interests, parroted endlessly by Big Media.
‘Cultivate a Culture of Social Connection’
Finally, the advisory advocates for cultivating “a culture of connection,” one based on “kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another.” This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, our government’s relentless push for woke policies tells us that we cannot expect to understand those terms as traditional virtues.
Rather, such terms will likely be used in woke Orwellian fashion, to direct our social interactions and behaviors. For example, not dating a transgender person is now labeled unkind and “transphobic.” “Gender affirming care” — i.e., castration and mutilation of children — is the only “respectful” way of treating gender dysphoria. Your “responsibility” is to comply without question.
The advisory also calls for the media and the arts to promote stories that encourage “connection,” most likely in the Orwellian sense that wokeness demands. Further, the report cautions that certain kinds of social connection are harmful for individuals and society. It warns that too much like-mindedness can lead to extremism and violence.
The Historical Pattern of Big Government Is Atomization, Not Social Connection
Ironies abound in this advisory. The pretext for government injecting itself into our personal lives is to rescue us from the misery of our loneliness epidemic. Never mind that government policies are largely to blame for family breakdown, welfare dependency, urban blight, attacks on free speech, attacks on privacy, and countless other developments that result in an acute sense of isolation and polarization.
Never mind that the proven prescription for loneliness is the opposite: a private sphere of life where intact families raise their children with a sense of virtue; where institutions of faith give people a sense of order and purpose in life; and where friends can confide in one another without meddlers eavesdropping on their conversations. This sphere of life — the private sphere — is the fount of freedom, love, and trust that nurtures social connections. It can only thrive in privacy.
But this private sphere seems to be in the crosshairs of Murthy’s massive government project to “fix” the social connections of all Americans. The government will doubtless enlist a media monopoly and Big Tech for support in monitoring those connections.
Given the current direction of this administration’s policies, it will also deploy heavy-handed political censorship — of which Murthy already proved a huge fan during Covid — to enforce compliance and punish dissent. Such censorship heightens the fear of speaking openly, which only builds more walls between people. Ironically, we would end up more atomized than ever.
The Tentacles of Bureaucracy
This may sound over the top to a general reader who may find the advisory benign and even welcoming, and perhaps just a narrowly focused plan to address a recognized health issue.
I am very skeptical about that for two reasons. The first is the natural inclinations of bureaucracies populated by “experts.” Bureaucracies never shrink. They continuously bloat. That’s the nature of the beast. Their protectors keep pushing their relevance on some issue or problem. Their experts — who will always “know better” than anyone else — will present solutions to be deployed by the bureaucracy. Compliance will then be demanded. And the bureaucracy will continue to bloat until its tentacles strangle every area of life.
The second reason for skepticism is history, which is filled with examples of governments invading the private sphere of life, specifically the institutions of family, faith, and community. That private sphere is still the most decentralized area of life, the one in which individuals are most able to think and speak freely, unless the government invades. Communist China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are prime examples in the 20th century of government invading the private sphere.
Eminent sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote about the deep-seated tendency of governments to hijack the functions of the mediating institutions of family, faith, and community. When the government takes over those functions, we lose those institutions as buffer zones between the isolated individual and the all-powerful state. We become powerless in the resulting isolation.
Nisbet posed this rhetorical question: “What remains then, but to rescue the masses from their loneliness, their hopelessness, and despair, by leading them into the promised land of the absolute, redemptive State?”
I believe the surgeon general’s advisory vindicates Nisbet’s point. Indeed, the state creates the malady and then offers its authority as the only cure as it rushes into the vacuum. The strategy for doing so seems evident in the report’s “six pillars.”
Where Does It All End?
No one can say for sure where this “Ministry of Loneliness” proposal will end up. History — particularly recent history — has warned us about such projects. The goals of this advisory may seem unobjectionable, but the concern is about who decides how we connect socially.
When the “who” is the federal government, we should remember that the pattern of the mass state is always to induce loyalty to the mass state. That pattern always comes with a push to surrender our loyalty to one another as individual human beings capable of real kindness and real love. That amounts to something I call the weaponization of loneliness.
We must insist on making our own decisions to live as free individuals. That means pushing back in any way possible against potential intrusions in the private sphere of life. It means rejecting the pseudo-intimacy and pseudo-connection that our federal government seems intent on foisting upon us in exchange for control of our private lives and relationships. Otherwise, we end up in much worse isolation that renders us powerless and unfree.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.
By now, most Americans have heard of Daniel Penny, the Marine Corps veteran being charged by Manhattan’s Democrat district attorney for defending his fellow citizens from an erratic Jordan Neely on the New York City subway. There’s also a good chance they’ve heard of Daniel Perry, the Army sergeant recently convicted in Austin, Texas, for protecting himself from an armed Black Lives Matter demonstrator.
On their own merits, both cases represent a seemingly growing trend of Democrat prosecutors allowing violent criminals to walk free while punishing law-abiding Americans for defending themselves from horrendous acts of violence. Case in point: Kevin Mackie, an Acton, Massachusetts, resident charged for allegedly protecting himself from a violent, anti-Republican attacker.
What Happened
On July 8, 2022, Mackie was among several individuals to participate in a demonstration outside of Acton’s Discovery Museum. The purported purpose of the gathering was to protest the facility’s role in giving Covid shots to children.
In a March 2022 “update,” Museum CEO Neil Gordon announced the organization had partnered with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services to “host six days of public COVID-19 vaccination clinics for kids ages 5 to 11.” According to Gordon, “[m]ore than 650 vaccine doses were administered,” with each jabbed child receiving “two free Museum admission passes as a sweetener.” Notably, the museum requires individuals seeking employment with the organization to show “proof of full COVID-19 vaccination.”
“We think that it’s just wrong for a museum to exchange services for vaccinations,” protestor Michelle Efendi told The Federalist. In addition to founding the Neighborhood Admins Resilience Network — a coalition of Facebook Groups supporting community preparedness and response — Efendi is a community organizer with experience in emergency management. It’s worth mentioning that Efendi does not describe herself as a Republican and has previously campaigned for Democrat presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Upon arriving at the Discovery Museum, Efendi, Mackie, and their fellow demonstrators were confronted by several individuals — at least one of whom was a Discovery Museum faculty member — who wanted them to leave the area. Shortly after arriving, the protestors were confronted by local resident Frederick Smith, who, as documented in footage obtained by The Federalist, appears to assault Mackie and rip apart his protest sign. Mackie allegedly hit Smith with his megaphone “four times” in response.
Following this initial contact, videos reviewed by The Federalist show Smith pushing Mackie toward the ground into some nearby shrubs. After regaining his balance, Smith is documented grabbing the sign strapped over the front of Efendi’s shoulders, at which point Mackie discharged pepper spray into Smith’s face. Mackie sprayed Smith in the face again after the latter latched on to Efendi’s wrist and refused to let go.
Upon releasing Efendi, Smith proceeded towards Mackie’s broken sign, pulled out the sign’s four-foot-long PVC pipe, and used it to hit Mackie. Smith also swung at Efendi — barely missing her face — and another protestor before finally walking away. In pain from the pepper spray, Smith called 911 and was taken into police custody.
“I’ve never seen … or experienced anything like [that],” Efendi said. “It was actually really scary what he did.”
A deeper dive into Smith’s background reveals a history of animosity towards people with conservative viewpoints. Hours after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, for example, Smith claimed on Facebook there “are no good [R]epublicans” and that “[w]e should not attempt to ‘bridge’ any division [because Republicans] are a virus that this country needs to expel.”
“We will never convince [Republicans] that they are better served by progressive policies — they are wholly irredeemable,” Smith wrote. Several days later, on Jan. 10, Smith equated the GOP to “Nazis” while celebrating Amazon Web Services’ decision to remove Parler —a free speech social media platform predominately used by conservatives — from its web hosting service.
Other posts by Smith suggest he was a strict adherent of the federal government’s Covid-era policies and recommendations.
The Charges and Ongoing Litigation
After reviewing the available evidence and conducting interviews with various witnesses, the Acton Police Department requested Mackie be charged with trespassing, assault and battery, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The department additionally recommended Efendi and two other protestors be charged with trespassing.
A complaint was also sought against Smith on numerous counts, including assault and battery, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and disorderly conduct.
While the trespassing charges considered for Efendi and the two other demonstrators were ultimately not pursued, Mackie is still facing prosecution from the office of Marian Ryan, the Democratic district attorney of Middlesex County. If convicted on the assault and battery charge alone, Mackie could face up to 10 years in state prison. Meanwhile, Smith cut a deal with Marian’s office to have all his charges dropped in exchange for several months of pretrial probation and participation in anger management classes. The judge presiding over the case approved the deal last February.
“When it comes to dissent or any kind of protesting that’s not for leftist causes, they will arrest you, and they will prosecute you no matter what,” Mackie’s lawyer, Ilya Feoktistov, told The Federalist. “There is a major … double standard of criminal justice when it comes to protesting in Massachusetts. If you protest for the wrong cause … there will be a case manufactured against you.”
While Feoktistov criticized all the charges against Mackie, he specifically noted how the trespassing charge falls flat, given that the location of the protest was on public grounds.
“There’s an easement that was signed in 2016 by the museum in [Acton] that allows the town to use the sidewalk outside their building,” Feoktistov said. A copy of the easement provided to The Federalist indicates that this is true.
Legal Shenanigans
In their attempt to prosecute Mackie, Ryan’s prosecutorial team has purportedly engaged in several legal shenanigans. Feoktistov claims Ryan’s office violated the pretrial conference report, which includes, for example, a list of witnesses both parties agree to ahead of trial. This is done to allow both parties time to prepare for cross-examination. Ryan’s office allegedly violated the pretrial agreement by “calling an additional witness to testify” after “consistently represent[ing] to the Court and Mr. Mackie that the Commonwealth’s only evidence at trial would be testimony from the cross-complaint defendant, who would be exercising his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.”
“The Commonwealth did not serve any witness list on Mr. Mackie. On January 23, 2023, however, the Commonwealth informed Mr. Mackie’s attorney that an eyewitness who had originally declined to testify for the Commonwealth will be testifying after all,” an emergency motion to continue trial filed by Mackie’s attorneys reads. “As a result, Attorney Feoktistov has not had sufficient time to investigate and prepare Mr. Mackie’s case to go forward on January 26, 2023.”
In a memo filed in opposition to Feoktistov’s motion to dismiss the charges against Mackie, Ryan’s office attempted to make it appear as if Mackie was the aggressor in the situation and not Smith. In their memo, the prosecutors claim Mackie was the one who “escalated the altercation by discharging his pepper spray directly into Mr. Smith’s face” and that the “level of aggression between [the] two parties differs drastically, which renders the claim that they are similarly situated Defendants invalid.”
Feoktistov’s motion to dismiss was denied seemingly without reason by the Concord District Court last month.
Ryan’s History of Prosecutorial Misconduct
Mackie’s case is hardly the only one where Ryan’s legal team has seemingly engaged in unethical behavior. In fact, the Middlesex DA’s office has a documented history of withholding exculpatory evidence in several notable cases.
The first of such instances involved Aisling Brady McCarthy, a nanny accused in 2013 of murdering the 1-year-old for whom she provided care. According to The Boston Globe, McCarthy was charged by Ryan’s office after Alice Newton, a prosecution medical expert, “concluded … the 1-year-old had suffered injuries, including severe bleeding in the back of the eyes, which indicated abusive head trauma, also known as shaken baby syndrome.” This resulted in McCarthy being placed in jail without bail.
In August 2013, Ryan’s office consulted with eye specialist Dr. Alex Levin on whether injuries to the baby’s eyes indicated some form of abuse. According to the Globe, Levin was “hesitant” to conclude the baby was abused, telling prosecutors he “found less severe retinal hemorrhaging, and repeatedly raised the possibility that the baby’s injuries might have been caused by something other than abuse.” Despite prosecutors’ obligation to share such information with McCarthy’s legal team, Ryan’s office sat on it for over a year, even after defense attorneys, “who learned of Levin’s work by happenstance, asked for it repeatedly.”
It wasn’t until the judge presiding over the case ordered Ryan’s office in January 2015 to turn over notes taken during their conversations with Levin was the information then disclosed to the defense. McCarthy, who had been in jail for over two years, had her sentence reduced and was released in May that same year. Charges were ultimately dropped on August 31, 2015.
A similar instance occurred in the case of Geoffrey Wilson, a father charged by Ryan’s office with shaking his infant son to death. While initially ruled a homicide, the case’s medical examiner reportedly told prosecutor Katharine Folger in a September 2013 email that he “wanted to change his homicide finding.” While the examiner would not officially do so until August 2014, he claimed Ryan’s office “attempted to pressure him into sticking with his original homicide finding.” The charges were eventually dropped after it was disclosed the baby died from natural causes.
It’s worth mentioning that Ryan’s office has been criticized by the U.S. Supreme Court for its reckless prosecutions, specifically by Justice Samuel Alito in the court’s 2016 Caetano v. Massachusetts decision.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is taking steps to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress after the Bureau notified the panel it will not comply with its subpoena related to a possible criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Comer, R-Ky., has subpoenaed the FBI for a document that allegedly describes a criminal scheme involving Biden and a foreign national and relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. The document is an FBI-generated FD-1023 form.
FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a news conference on Aug. 10, 2022, in Omaha, Nebraska. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
Comer first subpoenaed the document earlier this month. The FBI did not turn it over and instead explained that it needed to protect the Bureau’s confidential human source program.
Comer set another deadline last week, giving Wray until Tuesday, May 30 to turn over the document. After the deadline was set, Wray set up a call with Comer for Wednesday, May 31. However, the FBI notified the panel it would not provide the document to the committee by the Tuesday afternoon deadline.
“Today, the FBI informed the Committee that it will not provide the unclassified documents subpoenaed by the Committee,” Comer said Tuesday. “The FBI’s decision to stiff-arm Congress and hide this information from the American people is obstructionist and unacceptable.”
President Joe Biden speaks at the LSU Tigers Championship Celebration event at the White House in Washington D.C., United States on May 26, 2023. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“While I have a call scheduled with FBI Director Wray tomorrow to discuss his response further, the Committee has been clear in its intent to protect Congressional oversight authorities and will now be taking steps to hold the FBI Director in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena,” Comer said.
He added: “Americans deserve the truth, and the Oversight Committee will continue to demand transparency from this nation’s chief law enforcement agency.”
Representative James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky and chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. (Photographer: Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The document is being sought after a whistleblower approached Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, alleging that the FBI and the Justice Department were in possession of it, and that it would reveal “a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose.”
Comer attempted to “narrow the breadth of the subpoena” in response to FBI staff criticisms, the committee determined “additional terms based on unclassified legally protected whistleblower disclosures that may be referenced in the FD-1023 form.” The terms included “June 30, 2020” and “five million.”
The back-and-forth came after Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley notified Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland this month about the “legally protected and highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures.”
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IO). (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Comer and Grassley said that based on “the alleged specificity within the document, it would appear that the DOJ and the FBI have enough information to determine the truth and accuracy of the information contained within it.”
“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people. Releasing confidential source information could potentially jeopardize investigations and put lives at risk,” the FBI said in a statement. “The FBI remains committed to cooperating with Congress’s oversight requests on this matter and others as we always have.”
The White House has maintained that the president never spoke to his son about his business dealings and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. Officials also say the president has never discussed investigations into members of his family with the Justice Department.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
The House could pass the debt-ceiling deal agreed to by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden, but it might ultimately cost McCarthy his job if he has to have Democrat votes to do it, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., warned Tuesday on Newsmax.
“The operative question there is whether or not the speaker can get to a majority of the majority,” Gaetz told Tuesday’s “The Chris Salcedo Show.” “If a majority of Republicans are against a piece of legislation, and you use Democrats to pass it, that would immediately be a black letter violation of the deal we had with McCarthy to allow his ascent to the speakership, and it would likely trigger an immediate motion to vacate.
“I think Speaker McCarthy knows that. That’s why he’s working hard to make sure that he gets 120, 150, 160 votes.”
Republicans control the House with a 222-213 majority, so, as Gaetz pointed out to host Chris Salcedo, McCarthy needs to whip up at least 112 Republican votes for the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.
“That’s a key number because according to the concessions that Speaker McCarthy made in January, he can only bring legislation to the floor if a majority of the majority is going to support it,” Gaetz told Salcedo. “Right now, that may be in question. The first test for Speaker McCarthy is the Rules Committee. That’s a committee where we’ve got folks who are very dead-set against this bill like Chip Roy and Ralph Norman.
“So, will Democrats on the Rules Committee crossover and give Speaker McCarthy what he needs to get the bill to the floor? And then will 112 Republicans indicate that they’re going to vote for it?
“We cannot pass bills with a majority of the Republicans in opposition, so if folks are against this, they should reach out to their member of Congress and have their voice heard.”
Gaetz is a hard no, but he was also a hard no on the previously GOP-passed House deal to raise the debt ceiling.
“I am not going to vote for this bill,” Gaetz said. “I think that it doesn’t put sufficient downward pressure on spending. I announced that on Newsmax the other night and what’s interesting to me, Chris, is that an increasing number of members who are very close to Speaker McCarthy are now announcing their opposition; people like: Kat Cammack, Corey Mills, Michael Waltz, Russell Frye, Wesley Hunt.
“These are very much team McCarthy people, but they have announced that this isn’t something that they can support.
“I didn’t even vote for the first increase in the debt limit because gaslighting $49 trillion in debt over the next 10 years does a great deal of harm to the American economy, and it cuts against our principal mandate with the voters, which is to fight inflation.”
Also, Gaetz concluded, a number of the features of the deal McCarthy agreed to with Biden can too easily be unwound by the president.
“Those of us who are not supportive of the bill are trying to point out that many of the changes are cosmetic in nature and Joe Biden’s administration is going to be able to waive certain requirements and certain conditions that sound like great talking points, but they don’t save the country from the ruin that the Biden administration is bringing us to,” Gaetz lamented.
It requires just one “motion to vacate” McCarthy as speaker, spiraling the House back into a search for speaker that ultimately required 15 rounds of voting to pick McCarthy in January.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Since the boycott of Bud Light seems to have been a rousing success, many people are shifting focus to retail giant Target and its years of supporting radical LGBT groups — one of which even advocates to “transition” children without parental consent. It is so outrageous that even Elon Musk felt compelled to begin asking some questions about it.
Musk, who is considered center-left in most things political was shocked by a recent Fox News article that reported that Target has been supporting the radical gay group GLSEN for years, even though the group “calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math,” and spends its donations to get American schools to comply with that policy.
In its tweet, Fox News also noted that GLSEN “encourages secret gender changes among children in schools.”
TARGET TAKES AIM: The retail giant provides annual donations to GLSEN, which calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. https://t.co/f7g9yLDvuOpic.twitter.com/vCK6fqXepa
In its May 26 report, Fox News noted that Target is “partnering with a K-12 education group for which focuses on getting districts to adopt policies that will keep parents in the dark on their child’s in-school gender transition, providing sexually explicit books to schools for free, and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools.”
Indeed, Fox even obtained a direct quote from Target saying how much they support the organization with their annual donations of tens of thousands.
“GLSEN leads the movement in creating affirming… and anti-racist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students. We are proud of 10+ years of collaboration with GLSEN and continue to support their mission,” the retailer told Fox.
Fox goes on to explain what GLSEN does: “GLSEN calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. It provides educators instructions on how they can make math ‘more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities’ by including ‘they/them’ pronouns in word problems.”
“We advise on, advocate for, and research comprehensive policies designed to protect LGBTQ students as well as students of marginalized identities,” the group itself describes on its own site.
This group that Target has supported urges schools to add “intersex,” “transgender,” “non-binary” and other such left-wing “choices” of sexual identity into all class work from math to science, per Fox.
GLSEN tells schools to keep confidential any information about students “transitioning” or self-identifying as the opposite or some fantasy gender, and to make sure parents are not told of any such information unless explicitly approved by the child.
The group pushes a policy that maintains that schools and faculty “shall ensure that all personally identifiable and medical information relating to transgender and nonbinary students is kept confidential… Staff or educators shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardian… This disclosure must be discussed with the student, prior to any action.”
In a Saturday news release condemning “right-wing extremists,” GLSEN attempted to spin that little nugget of information as such: “Supportive educators are a lifeline to students who do not have the freedom to be exactly who they are safely, and GLSEN will always fight back against policies that force educators to jeopardize student safety.”
The group also seeks to force schools to allow boys who claim to be transgender girls to play in school sports with the girls.
“To date,” Fox added, “the retail giant has donated at least $2.1 million to GLSEN.”
Fox’s shocking report spurred Twitter chief Elon Musk to ask, “Is this true, @Target?”
A Twitter “community note” also appeared on the tweet, noting that, “Target has donated to GLSEN for more than a decade: ‘Target annually supports GLSEN and its mission to create…spaces for LGBTQIA+ students.’” The note also presented links to the radical policies for which GLSEN advocates.
One Twitter user blasted Musk for asking the question, carping, “Oh come on, this is Fox News. You question CNN, MSNBC, but not Fox News? Don’t you think that this is hypocritical?”
But Musk pointed out that he literally was questioning the claims, and tweeted back, “Maybe it’s not true, hence the question.”
So far, Target has not made any statement past its quote to Fox that it supports GLSEN.
This newest wrinkle in Target’s big-dollar support of the radical LGBT lobby comes on the heels of a boycott effort over its “pride” merchandise and for partnering with a company that embraces satanism along with its LGBT advocacy. Target is now hemorrhaging money, as is Anheuser-Busch, following Bud Light’s decision to partner with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
The bad news continues to mount for Target and Bud Light both, and conservatives must keep the pressure on these woke corporations. Examples must be made if we hope to reverse the wide trend in corporate America of donating billions to these organizations whose main goal is to groom our children for their disgusting sexual agenda.:
Warner Todd Huston has been writing editorials and news since 2001 but started his writing career penning articles about U.S. history back in the early 1990s. Huston has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and several local Chicago news programs to discuss the issues of the day. Additionally, he is a regular guest on radio programs from coast to coast. Huston has also been a Breitbart News contributor since 2009. Warner works out of the Chicago area, a place he calls a “target-rich environment” for political news.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images); “The Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization” (Image Source: University of Dayton YouTube video screenshot)
A college program that received taxpayer funds from the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security equated conservatives and Christians to militant neo-Nazis, according to watchdog group MRC Free Speech America.
Documents obtained by the conservative media watchdog revealed that the DHS’ Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention doled out $352,109 in fiscal year 2022 to a University of Dayton program that aimed to “develop and implement modules on the risks of and protective factors for radicalization to violence related to media literacy and online critical thinking for students,” the New York Post reported.
The DHS awarded 80 grants totaling nearly $40 million under its Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program to establish “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives.” In an internal memo obtained by MRC, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas referred to the grant program as a “high priority.”
According to the watchdog organization, the University of Dayton’s PREVENTS-OH was “among the most radical grantees.” The program vowed to fight “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.”
“For example, a chart used by DHS and its grantee in a training program equates mainstream groups with militant neo-Nazis, including: The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, the National Rifle Association (NRA), Breitbart News, PragerU, Turning Point USA, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), the American Conservative Union Foundation (ACUF) and the Republican National Committee, among others,” MRC stated.
“The Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization” (Image Source: University of Dayton YouTube video screenshot)
The chart, labeled “The Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization,” sorted various Christian, conservative, and known neo-Nazi groups into a pyramid. It placed “smaller” organizations with an “increased level of extremism” closer to the top.
During the university’s seminar, the presenter explained that groups listed at the bottom of the pyramid are considered “mainstream conservatism,” including the Republican Party, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, and the Christian Broadcasting Network.
The second level of the graphic was labeled “alt-lite” and included Breitbart News Network, PragerU, Turning Point USA, Infowars, and “Make America Great Again.”
The final top two tiers, labeled “alt-right” and “accelerationist terrorism,” listed known radical hate groups.
“The seminar also compared former President Donald Trump to Pol Pot and suggested Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might wish to start a second Holocaust,” the watchdog group stated.
A DHS spokesperson told the Post, “This seminar was not funded, organized, or hosted by the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Similarly, the presented chart was not developed, presented, or endorsed by the Department of Homeland Security, and was not part of any successful grant application to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS does not profile, target, or discriminate against any individual for exercising their constitutional rights protected by the First Amendment,” the spokesperson added.
However, a DHS employee participated in the university’s seminar to discuss the department’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnership. Additionally, Dayton researchers noted that the seminar was part of the DHS grant program.
MRC’s vice president Dan Schneider accused the agency of “lying through its teeth once again.”
“DHS did indeed fund the PREVENTS-OH program a year after a graph and documents were presented that equated Nazis to conservatives, Christians, and Republicans,” Schneider stated.
“Laughably, the DHS Ohio grantee quickly scrubbed its website following this report, something innocent groups don’t do. But it is too late; we have already copied it. We also have proof that ‘PREVENTS-OH’ actually hosted the conference and that DHS was an active participant, including featuring a senior DHS official at the conference,” he continued.
Schneider called on Mayorkas to “step down immediately” and urged Congress to launch a criminal investigation into the DHS.
A spokesperson for the University of Dayton told Fox News that the seminar “had no affiliation with and predates PREVENTS-OH.”
Extremism, Rhetoric, and Democratic Precarity youtu.be
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“The Wise of Heart” by Hans G. Schantz (Image Source: Hans Schantz YouTube video screenshot)
Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter recently suspended an illustrated novel project about “defying transgenderism” after the campaign was fully funded.
The author of the project, Hans G. Schantz, stated that his comic was canceled by Kickstarter after initially being reviewed and approved by the company. It was not until after the illustrated novel reached its $3,000 crowdfunding goal that the project was booted from the website.
Schantz said that he increased the novel’s goal to $6,000 before the project reached its May 31 deadline, but Kickstarter shut down the campaign, claiming that it had violated the site’s community rules.
The illustrated novel, “The Wise Heart,” follows the story of a biology teacher who is “thrown in jail for defying transgenderism” and subsequently “faces a show trial amid a media circus.”
Kickstarter Trust and Safety sent Schantz a “generic note” alerting him that his project would no longer be promoted. Backers of the campaign will no longer be charged for their pledges.
“A thorough review of your project uncovered one or more of the following violations: Inappropriate content, including but not limited to explicit or pornographic material [or] Hateful or offensive content that fails to meet Kickstarter’s spirit of inclusivity by promoting discrimination, bigotry or intolerance towards marginalized groups,” Kickstarter told Schantz.
The platform cannot comment on suspension “beyond what is stated in this message,” according to the company’s Trust and Safety.
The author accused the crowdfunding site of failing to live up to its own “inclusivity” standards.
“It’s sad that Kickstarter lacks a sufficient spirit of diversity and inclusion to be willing to tolerate an objective look at the scientific and political issues surrounding transgenderism as presented in the context of a courtroom drama,” Schantz wrote on Substack.
“I infer they received a complaint, the substance of which I was not privy to and took unilateral action without allowing me any input,” he continued. “No due process, no ability to face my accusers or even to be informed of the nature of the accusation. The fact that Kickstarter waited until after the project was already fully funded and nearing a close is a more disturbing trend. Creators would be wise to to [sic] deal with platforms more worthy of their trust.”
“The conduct of Kickstarter in particular and big tech companies in general raise broader issues of how the rule of law has devolved in an online context to sanction injustices that would not be tolerated in a more conventional setting. A contract that allows one party to unilaterally withdraw from the deal already agreed to after the other party has detrimentally relied upon their assurances would not typically be enforceable,” Schantz added.
Since being removed from Kickstarter, Schantz moved his campaign to an alternative crowdfunding platform, Fund My Comic, to assist with funding his project.
Kickstarter did not respond to a request for comment, Fox News Digital reported.
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In ‘The Wise Of Heart,’ A Man Faces Unthinkable Consequences For Stating An Unspeakable Truth
How much trouble can one get into for stating a simple and obvious truth? Quite a lot. And a man learns that in a way he couldn’t have foreseen in The Wise of Heart, a satire by Hans Schantz. Schantz gave Bounding Into Comics the inside scoop on his tale, which twists an old story in a perfect way for modern times.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023) character sheet, Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
The Wise of Heart is crowdfunding on Kickstarter right now. With just a week to go, the 80,000-word illustrated novel is about $225 shy of its $3,000 goal. It needs just a little bit more help, and it’ll be well worth it if readers can push it across the line. This isn’t Schantz’s first rodeo, either. In addition to his previously published works, he’s scheduled to be involved in an interesting event later this year. Keep reading until the end to find out what that is. First, though, there’s the new book.
“The Wise of Heart reworks the story of the hundred-year-old Scopes Monkey Trial amid today’s transgender mania,” Schantz told BIC. “A high school biology teacher, Mike Andrews, agrees to participate in a court challenge to a law forbidding the teaching of biological science. [However], the law isn’t forbidding evolution—as in the original Scopes Trial—but rather the teaching of the biology of sex determination in defiance of a state mandate for gender affirmation.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
“The result is a deft and devastating satire that flips the script on the original Scopes Trial as depicted in movies like Inherit the Wind,” he continued. “Instead of the enlightened advocates of progressive evolutionary biology exposing the supposed ignorance of the superstitious religious town folk, The Wise of Heart is all about how today’s progressive advocates of gender affirmation defy the truths of biological science.”
Schantz provided more details on the plot. “The story opens in a small-town diner as the school superintendent, ringleader of the local cabal, persuades the mayor and the local university president to support his plan to challenge the ‘Gender Awareness in Academia’ or GAIA Act. The university president recruits an out-of-town ringer to lead the prosecution, her former student, Senator Roxy Castillo, leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
“Not to be outdone, the superintendent secures the services of Castillo’s archrival, Senator Chad Travis from Texas, to head up the defense,” Schantz added. “The resulting trial becomes a media circus with a Greek chorus of reporters and commentators popping up between court sessions to casually lie and spin the narrative in their desired direction.”
It’s not all about the subject matter, though. “One of the most interesting characters is Mike’s girlfriend, Acey, whose mother is the university president, and who faces the challenge of trying to find some middle ground,” he explained. “The courtroom drama is a fight to the finish on the science and politics, but serves as a catalyst for a number of great character arcs and conflict-driven personal growth.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
Interested readers who back this will not only be the first in line for a copy of the book, but they’ll also help Schantz fund the bold line drawings by artist Elin Chancey that help bring the story to life. Additionally, an extensive sample, including a couple dozen episodes, is already available both on Substack and Arktoons. There’s also an extended trailer that further explains the story and showcases the art.
Again, Schantz isn’t a new author. His sci-fi techno-thriller series, The Hidden Truth, has proven to be popular. And he writes non-fiction as well. Beyond that, he takes the time and effort to run book sales for indie authors on a regular basis. And they highlight some fantastic works that BIC readers will undoubtedly enjoy.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
And that interesting event he’s scheduled to be involved in later this year? That would be BasedCon, which “is a gathering for authors and fans of science fiction and fantasy.” It’s currently planned for September somewhere in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Where exactly? You have to register for the event to find out that info.
The event has already gained attention because it’s a con for those who are “tired of woke propaganda.” Is that a good thing or bad thing? Who knows, at this point? Right now, though, it looks like it’s going to have a significant lineup of guests. Those interested in sci-fi and fantasy will definitely want to check out the website for additional info.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
But first things first. And that’s Schantz’s The Wise of Heart. It’s received an incredible amount of backing already. All it needs is a final few supporters to hit that $3,000 goal. Any amount that people can provide helps, and so does spreading word about the book on social media.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
Paul Hair is an author who writes fiction and nonfiction under his own name and as a ghostwriter. Follow him on Gab (PaulHair). His fascinating books are available at his Amazon Author Page. Help support him by purchasing one or more of his titles. https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Hair/e/B0034OTU50/
Americans often wonder why they should care or what the consequences would be if China replaced the United States as the world’s most powerful nation. Surprisingly, a clear answer to this question can be found in the ongoing saga of comedian Nigel Ng Kin-ju.
Ng, more popularly known as Uncle Roger, is a British-Malaysian comedian and internet personality who has become wildly popular over the last couple of years, thanks to his hilarious critiques of Westerners’ attempts at cooking Asian food. Even if you are not familiar with his name, chances are you have stumbled upon one of his videos while scrolling through YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, where he has a combined 20.8 million followers.
Overall, things were working out quite nicely for Uncle Roger until he committed the gravest of modern-day sins: criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping and Communist China.
In a recent upload clipped from one of his stand-up comedy shows, Uncle Roger asked an audience member if he was from Boston. When then the gentleman responded that he was in fact from Guangzhou, China, Uncle Roger immediately feigned a look of exaggerated concern and retorted, “China, good country, good country. … We have to say that now, correct?” The entire audience, including the gentleman from Guangzhou, burst into laughter.
— Nigel Ng (Uncle Roger) (@MrNigelNg) May 14, 2023
Uncle Roger continued taking shots at China, noting that the man’s Huawei phone was listening to everything he was saying and repeating, “Long live President Xi.”
The comedian then really went for it, asking who in the audience was from Taiwan. Responding to the cheers of a few Taiwanese audience members, Uncle Roger brazenly quipped, “Not a real country, not a real country,” and, “I hope one day you rejoin the motherland. One China!”
He ended by soliciting the audience to write the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and state that Uncle Roger is a “good comrade.”
The clip immediately went viral and caught the eyes of some of Twitter’s more well-known critics of China, including Melissa Chan, Lele Farley, and former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, who retweeted the video along with the caption, “This guy gets what it’ll look like.” The clip’s virality, however, was not limited to American audiences, and it swiftly caught the eyes of the censorship brigade in Beijing.
On Saturday, Taiwanese news outlet New Liberty Times reported that China suspended Uncle Roger’s Weibo and Bilibili social media accounts. Between both platforms, the comedian lost access to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Weibo said the channel was muted due to “violations of relevant laws and regulations.”
Uncle Roger’s social media blacklisting came just days after Chinese comedian Li Haoshi was arrested for making jokes about the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. Li’s management company was also hit with a $2 million fine.
“We will never allow any company or individual to wantonly slander the glorious image of the army on any stage in the capital city … or to make fun of serious subject matters,” regulators in Beijing said.
You might ask yourself why censorship within China’s borders should matter to Americans, especially as the United States has serious internal issues. America has her share of problems, not the least of which are those dealing with First Amendment rights. And the rules Beijing regulators decide to enforce have no effect on the average American’s life — for now.
Imagine for a moment, however, a hypothetical world where China has invaded and conquered Taiwan. It might not be readily apparent, but this world would look drastically different than the one you know today. In this world, American credibility in Asia will have been destroyed due to its inability or unwillingness to deter China. Realizing American power is on the way out, nations like Japan, South Korea, and Australia will hedge their bets and move away from Washington and closer to Beijing.
China is now the hegemon, or dominant nation, in Asia. And that means China directly or indirectly controls about half of the world’s economy. If you want to do business in Asia, ship your goods through Pacific waters, or source any of your supply chain on the continent, you will not be able to do so without China’s consent.
And if you think American autarky might be the answer, you may want to reconsider. As Colby noted in a piece for Time Magazine:
America will be at best roughly 20% of global GDP, a far smaller base for competition, making it likely our economy would be outclassed and left behind by China’s much larger area over time. Even more, though, China will very likely seek to diminish the U.S. This is just basic power politics.
At this point, all Americans directly or indirectly work for Chinese companies that are themselves controlled by the CCP, and if you want to keep your income stream flowing, you will have no choice but to bend to the party’s will. If you do not want to play along, well, look no further than what is happening right now with Uncle Roger. He made a simple joke at the expense of the party, and his ability to do business in China vanished.
A China that has gained hegemonic status in Asia now has that same power and authority over all facets of the global economy, including right here in the United States. What suggests that China would not gladly wield such a weapon at its discretion?
This is not the first time Uncle Roger has offended the CCP. In 2021, he angered Chinese social media users after he uploaded a video featuring outspoken China critic Mike Chen. Uncle Roger swiftly deleted the video and apologized to his Chinese audience, no doubt hoping to preserve his market share. As the latest developments show, however, appeasement only lasts until you inevitably upset the party line again, for which you will promptly be punished. Hopefully, Uncle Roger can learn from his past, and Americans can learn from him.
A future discourse dictated by Chinese power is not one that aligns with the preservation of American values or prosperity, and that is just the future Xi is hoping for.
Lane Kendall is a graduate of Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication and holds a Master’s of International Studies in Korean and East Asian Studies from Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. His research and writing focus on East Asia’s geopolitics and America’s power competition with China, Russia, and Iran.
IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley will appear before the House Ways and Means Committee later Friday morning to submit to questioning from both Democrats and Republicans.
Missing, however, will be any members of the Senate Finance Committee, which refused to conduct a joint interview with the House oversight committee. While Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, held the power to authorize Senate representatives to attend the transcribed interview of the whistleblower.
Smith inexplicablyignored Shapley’s statement that he “would welcome” the participation of designated Senate staffers in the House hearing. Thus, the House hearing will proceed, but not on a bicameral basis.
According to a person familiar with the proceedings, the House Ways and Means Committee will convene at 9:30 a.m., with Shapley appearing for questioning with his two lawyers, Mark Lytle from Nixon Peabody and Tristan Leavitt of Empower Oversight. The closed-door questioning is expected to last all day.
While the Ways and Means Committee will question Shapley in a closed session, the public can guess the content of much of his testimony given the high-profile nature of the case against Hunter Biden. In fact, neither Shapley nor his attorneys have ever publicly confirmed that Hunter Biden is the target of the Internal Revenue Service investigation, yet it is uniformly agreed that the whistleblower’s testimony concerns the handling of the tax probe into the president’s son.
Shapley, a 14-year veteran at the IRS, provided some insight into his likely testimony when he sat for an exclusive interview with CBS News on Wednesday. During that interview, Shapley explained that he was first assigned to the investigation in January 2020. “When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process,” Shapley told CBS News. “It was way outside the norm of what I’ve experienced in the past,” the whistleblower stressed.
Shapley further claimed during the interview that “there were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice.” That statement coincides with the information contained in an earlier letter sent by the whistleblower’s lawyers to the oversight committees. That letter maintained that the whistleblower has detailed “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
“People directly familiar with the case” provided more particulars to Shapley’s claims, asserting that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” The unnamed sources also stressed that the improper politicization of the case came from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters.
When read together, these details raise a huge red flag because they mean the interference from the DOJ and FBI headquarters began under the Trump administration. So, who in the Trump administration was responsible for slow-walking the Hunter Biden investigation? What investigative steps were not taken?
In a letter from Shapley’s legal team to the congressional oversight committees, he spoke of irregularities beginning in the summer of 2020 in both the DOJ Tax Division and an unnamed U.S. attorney’s office, which CNN would later report is the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018.
Another detail from Shapley’s CBS News interview that foreshadows the content of his Friday testimony concerns his explanation of the “red line” meeting that convinced the IRS supervisory special agent his oath of office required him to come forward. According to Shapley, while he had been noticing deviations in the investigative process for a couple of years, he just couldn’t “fathom that DOJ might be acting unethically.” Then came an October 2022 meeting he had with federal prosecutors, after which Shapley told CBS News, “It just got to that point where that switch was turned on, and I just couldn’t silence my conscience anymore.”
While the CBS News interview did not air further details about the meeting, a letter from Shapley’s legal team described a “charged meetings on October 7, 2022,” during which the U.S. attorney — reportedly Weiss — “became aware that both the IRS and the FBI had longstanding concerns about the handling of the case” and that those concerns had been communicated up the chain of command. Then, after an Oct. 17, 2022, meeting at which Shapley continued to raise concerns, he and his investigative team were excluded from future meetings on the case.
Shapley seems poised to name names on Friday, and his attorney has told Just the News that “he’ll be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors.” Shapley summarized those meetings and distributed his notes to the IRS and other agents, his lawyer explained, and along with his emails, these documents will corroborate his story.
The whistleblower can also identify other IRS agents who participated in the meetings and can confirm his testimony. The DOJ’s decision earlier this month to remove Shapley’s entire investigative team from the Hunter Biden investigation may backfire, serving as a catalyst to loosen the other agents’ lips.
But in the meantime, it will be Shapley doing the talking. And while Americans won’t know at once what the IRS supervisory special agent has to say, the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to submit the information obtained from Sharpley to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, thereby making the testimony public.
Democrats used that statutory carveout to release Trump’s tax information publicly, and Republicans should follow their lead — and soon.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Bud Light enlists a trans ladyface minstrel to sell beer. Target hires a trans Satanist to design LGBT clothes for kids and starts selling “binding” and “tucking” swimwear. North Face launches a marketing campaign featuring a creepy drag performer hocking LGBT gear to children ages 2 to 7. The Los Angeles Dodgers gives an award to a demonic hate group whose sole purpose is to blaspheme and profane the Catholic faith.
All this, and June “pride month” hasn’t even begun.
What’s happening? Why did so many major corporate brands decide to go all-in on promoting an aggressive, radical LGBT agenda that just a few years ago would have been considered totally unacceptable in civil society? Is this a psy-op? Is it real? What happens next?
The short answer to these questions is that we’ve entered a new phase of the culture war, and in some ways have transcended “the culture war” completely. What we’re in now is better described as a religious war — one that’s been launched by corporate America against all of us, and therefore demands we all choose sides.
Choosing sides in a religious war means you have to choose your religion. And in this particular religious war, there are only two sides. On one side is what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, which was his ecumenical shorthand for objective moral truth. “The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value,” Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man. “It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.”
In America and in the West generally, the side of the Tao is the side of faithful Christians and Jews, as well as those atheists who, for practical reasons, cling to Judeo-Christian morality as the survivors of a shipwreck might cling to a lifeboat. It is the side that sees Target’s transing of kids as an intolerable moral evil, affirms the givenness of our nature and the created order, and recognizes not only that man isn’t God, but that man’s destiny is communion with God in a redeemed creation.
On the other side is what the writer Paul Kingsnorth, among others, has called the Machine, which at its root is a Nietzschean rebellion against God that turns out also to be “a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself.” Like the Tao, the religion of the Machine, of progress and technology and will to power, has a very long pedigree. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, where the serpent assured Eve, “You will not surely die,” that if she ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she would become like God.
That was the first rebellion; we have been reenacting it ever since. It is perhaps easier to see in our own time how every rebellion against God, from the Garden to now, is also an attempt to overthrow Him, to become like God. Indeed, the desire to play God is the dark heart of both transgenderism and its close cousin, transhumanism. Like other evils of our age — abortion and euthanasia, to name the obvious ones — these are, at their roots, extremely candid manifestations of pride, the source of all sin.
The Machine is a religion that makes a claim over and against reality and the created order, which are denied and disfigured in man’s attempt to arrogate the power to recreate himself according to his own desires. In our day, he seeks to do so using new technologies, but that he would desire to do so is merely the latest iteration of the rebellion that began in the Garden. This is what J.R.R. Tolkien meant when he said, “all stories are ultimately about the fall.” Tolkien also referred to the Machine at times when discussing his legendarium, often describing it as the urge to amass power and dominate, “bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills” — a tyranny exercised over creation with the object of overcoming mortality.
This is just what we see in the twin trans movements: a desire to overcome sex and a desire to overcome death. The transhumanists are as explicit about their desire to cheat death and attain godlike immortality as transgenders are about their desire to become the opposite sex. The latter appear to believe, like rebellious pagans of past ages, that children have an important role to play in the achievement of this desire. The Machine devoured children by fire on the altars of Moloch and Baal; it devours them now in the black mirrors of the internet and social media.
The temptation here is to dismiss this reading of our situation as hyperbole. Surely it isn’t as bad as all that, we want to say. But it really is. What’s happening now isn’t about corporate brands embracing “pride month,” as The New York Times recently framed it, or even about promoting tolerance in a diverse society. If Target were just selling T-shirts that said “fabulous” in rainbow letters no one would care. This is about transing kids. Everyone knows it, but no one wants to say so out loud. Corporations are the tip of the spear, pushing this stuff out and then letting the media turn around and accuse the right of being violent bigots for objecting.
We err, too, in thinking of all this as just a really bad case of “the culture war” that breaks along the familiar lines of left and right, blue and red. It’s partly that, but at its deepest level it’s a religious war, a spiritual struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, the Tao and the Machine.
All of which is to say that as this war develops, we should try not to get too caught up in how much Target stocks plummet or how low the price of Bud Light gets ($0, as of this writing). “Go woke, go broke” is — pardon the rhyme — a cope. That’s not to say we shouldn’t boycott these companies, even if it means financial hardship or inconvenience. Boycotting them is part of what we have to do in this religious war, but it’s not sufficient.
Corporate America is not going to stop, even if some corporations do go broke. What will be required of those who resist them is a deep religious commitment, a radical new way of living in the modern, digital age. If you’re a Jew, be deeply serious about your Judaism. If you’re a Christian, make the practice of your faith the central organizing fact of your life, not just something you do on Sundays. If you’re an atheist, pray that God gives you faith.
For adherents of the Tao, fighting this religious war is going to mean not just boycotting corporate brands but reorganizing your personal and professional life. It might mean quitting your job, or moving, or giving up certain things. It will require sacrifice. Perhaps great sacrifice.
And rest assured that every person in America is going to have to pick a side. If you don’t pick a side then your side will by default be that of the Machine, which dominates the heights of our post-Christian culture and economy. Whatever your opinion of transgenderism or identity politics, the Machine will suck you in and ensnare you unless you make a conscious choice to stand against it. So choose, and choose wisely. Your country — and, more importantly, your soul — depends on it.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The “Godfather of A.I.,” Geoffrey Hinton, quit Google out of fear that his former employer intends to deploy artificial intelligence in ways that will harm human beings. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton recently told The New York Times.
But stomping out the door does nothing to atone for his own actions, and it certainly does nothing to protect conservatives – who are the primary target of A.I. programmers – from being canceled.
Here are five things to know as the battle over A.I. turns hot:
Elon Musk recently revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page and other Silicon Valley leaders want AI to establish a “digital god” that “would understand everything in the world. … [A]nd give you back the exact ‘right’ thing instantly.” It is hard to imagine anything more dangerous to a pluralistic, democratic Republic than a single dispenser of “truth.”
The Biden administration has seen the potential of AI to push its political message. (JOSEP LAGO/AFP via Getty Images)
That nobody has a monopoly on truth is the prerequisite for pluralism. But pluralism is what authoritarians abhor and what AI tech executives cannot tolerate. Conservatives have already seen how Big Tech censors and cancels us based on our beliefs and political viewpoints. AI is being turbocharged to do this in limitless ways.
2. Brainwashing is no longer science fiction
Americans are just beginning to understand that the dangers of AI go far beyond economic disruption. They also go beyond silencing speech. The newest gadgets being powered by AI now permit tech companies to capture our most intimate thoughts and our most sensitive data. They have already begun to map our minds, so they can manipulate our thoughts.
Duke Law professor Nita Farahany (a biologist, philosopher and human rights attorney) has been sounding the alarm, explaining how the Chinese government is using AI to analyze facial expressions and brain waves to punish those who are not faithful communists.
Using similar technology, U.S. tech companies may be able to hack into the minds of users to steal PIN codes, according to Farahany. They are also tracking brain waves via sensors embedded in watches and headphones which can determine which political messages are most persuasive to a user.
AI will soon empower lying politicians to deceive more voters than ever before. When Farahany tried to explain these dangers at the World Economic Forum, the snobs of Davos applauded enthusiastically. They see AI’s dangers as an asset.
3. The GOP is truly the Grand OLD Party
Republicans in Congress who are even talking about AI are focusing on how many nurses and truck drivers might lose their jobs, not about the serious threat AI poses to the very essence of who we are as humans. Economic disruption is most assuredly going to happen, but Republicans are missing the profound implications to liberty.
In the first AI hearing held by the House Innovation Subcommittee this year, Big Tech lobbyists admitted that self-driving car manufacturers would gobble up every imaginable bit of data “for our own safety” but assured the committee that they would endeavor not to share this data with other companies. Shockingly, nobody asked the obvious: what assurances do we have that these companies will not use this data against their own customers?
You’d think that the lessons of Big Tech censorship would draw every Republican into the AI fight. That has not happened yet.
Americans are just beginning to understand that the dangers of AI go far beyond economic disruption. They also go beyond silencing speech.
4. Democrats have us where they want us
Democrats in the Biden administration and in Congress have a much better understanding that AI is the greatest tool they’ve ever had to socialize America. Many are pretending to call for a pause to AI development while stomping on the accelerator to develop it as fast as possible.
Here’s reality: the Biden administration has already pledged to spend $140 million to establish seven AI research institutes, and it just created the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee to chart “a path for responsible and inclusive AI.” Even more telling, the Biden White House has indicated to it will direct federal agencies to “use AI tools” in their work. Nary a pause in the Dems’ use of AI can be found.
5. But failure is not an option
Communist China just released regulations mandating that AI be programmed to reflect “socialist core values” and avoid information that could undermine “state power.” The Chinese government and other authoritarians seek to harness this new technological power for control of information and the masses. They will use it extensively in warfare, too.
The trick is to lead the development of AI globally while enforcing appropriate guardrails to prevent the left from attacking our freedoms. The window to achieve both is small and shrinking.
Dan Schneider is vice president of MRC Free Speech America
Republican debt limit negotiator Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, left, walks out of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office Friday. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Democrat and Republican negotiators struggled Friday to reach a deal to raise the U.S. government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, with a key Republican citing disagreements over work requirements for some benefit programs for low-income Americans. Time is running short for Democrat President Joe Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to reach an accord to raise the federal government’s self-imposed borrowing limit and avert a potentially disastrous default.
Negotiators appeared to be nearing a deal to lift the limit for two years and cap spending, with agreement on funding for the Internal Revenue Service and the military, years while capping spending on many government programs, according to a U.S. official. But an administration official briefed on the talks said they could easily slip into the weekend. The two sides remained at loggerheads over a Republican push for new work requirements for some anti-poverty programs.
“We have made progress,” lead Republican negotiator Garret Graves told reporters. “I said two days ago, we had some progress that was made on some key issues, but I want to be clear, we continue to have major issues that we have not bridged the gap on chief among them work requirements.”
A failure by Congress to raise its self-imposed debt ceiling in the coming week could trigger a default that would shake financial markets and send the United States into a deep recession.
“We know it’s crunch time,” McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol on Friday. “We’re not just trying to get an agreement, we’re trying to get something that’s worthy of the American people, that changes the trajectory.”
Wall Street’s main indexes rose on Friday as investors hoped for progress in the negotiations. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was set to snap a five-day losing streak, while the Nasdaq touched its highest level since mid-August earlier in the session.
Even if they succeed in reaching a deal, leaders from both parties will likely have to work hard to round up enough votes for approval in Congress. Right-wing Republicans have insisted that any deal must include steep spending cuts, while Democrats have resisted the new work requirements for benefit programs. The deal under consideration would increase funding for military and veterans care while essentially holding non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, said the official, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal discussions.
A two-year extension would mean Congress would not need to address the limit again until after the 2024 presidential election. The deal might also scale back funding for the IRS, the official said.
Biden paid for his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, in part by committing $80 billion in new funding for the IRS to target wealthy Americans and generate $200 billion in new tax revenue. The money was designated mandatory spending, which, like social security, protects it from the annual appropriations process. The deal being considered would shift that money to discretionary funding, making it subject to the annual appropriations process and placing its future in jeopardy, according to a U.S. official. The White House is working on a way to preserve the effort to target wealthy taxpayers, even if the money is moved, the official said.
The deal would boost military and veterans spending to levels proposed by Biden earlier this year, a second U.S. official said.
BIPARTISAN DEAL
Each side will have to persuade enough members of their party in the narrowly divided Congress to vote for any eventual deal.
“The only way to move forward is with a bipartisan agreement. And I believe we will come to an agreement that allows us to move forward and that protects the hardworking Americans of this country,” Biden said on Thursday.
The Treasury Department has warned that it could be unable to cover all its obligations as soon as June 1, but also has made plans to sell $119 billion worth of debt that will come due on that date, suggesting to some market watchers that it was not an iron-clad deadline.
The standoff has unnerved investors, pushing the government’s borrowing costs up by $80 million so far, according to Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo.
Several credit-rating agencies have said they have put the United States on review for a possible downgrade, which would push up borrowing costs and undercut the United States’ standing as the backbone of the global financial system. A similar 2011 standoff led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its rating on U.S. debt.
Most lawmakers have left Washington for the Memorial Day holiday, but their leaders have warned them to be ready to return for votes when a deal is struck. House leaders have said lawmakers will get three days to ponder the deal before a vote, and any single lawmaker in the Senate has the power to tie up action for days. At least one, Republican Mike Lee, has threatened to do so.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Michael Jameson, who changed his name to Lauren Jeska, attempted to murder Ralph Knibbs at Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium in March 2016.
According to the Guardian, at the time of the attack, Jeska’s status as a female athlete was under review, as there were concerns he had a significant advantage over the real women with whom he was competing. The murderous transvestite had, after all, bested women in the 2010, 2011, and 2012 English Fell Running Champion and as well as in the British Championship in 2012.
Jeska, who did not “transition” or have his testicles removed until he was 26 years old, reportedly refused to provide relevant samples of his testosterone levels and other documentation to the governing body, prompting officials to void his race results in September 2015.
After questions were raised about his eligibility, Jeska packed up two large kitchen knives and traveled nearly two hours from his house in Wales to the offices of UK Athletics in Birmingham. In Birmingham, he savagely stabbed Knibbs in the head and neck, leaving a hole about an inch wide. A witness said it looked as though the transvestic eunuch was “trying to skewer meat.”
The premeditated murder attempt, which the judge presiding over Jeska’s case indicated was executed with “chilling precision,” left Knibbs with limited vision in both eyes. The BBC reported that in the “cool, calculated attack,” Jeska also grievously injured two other UK Athletics employees, Kevan Taylor and Tim Begley, who had tried to intervene during the attack.
Police indicated that “Jeska carried out a violent and unprovoked attack on a man whose sole objective was to enable [him] to compete. [He] will now have plenty of time behind bars to contemplate the devastating consequences of [his] actions.”
Jeska was ultimately given an 18-year sentence.
Mara Yamauchi, former Olympian and British elite marathon runner, was among the first to highlight the abuse of the Parkrun’s gender self-identification policy by opportunistic men, reported the Daily Mail. Yamauchi indicated earlier this week that a Parkrun female group course record had been “smashed to smithereens by a trans-identifying male” and possible put “out of female hands forever.”
The Olympian and other feminists noted that Jeska still holds the top two women’s records for the Aberystwyth Parkrun, a weekly competition held in Wales. According to the Parkrun’s official records, Jeska has a time of 17:38 in the Aberystwyth run and is also ranked first in the Bryn Bach Parkrun and third in the Heaton Parkrun, both in the women’s category.
Heather Binning, founder of the Women’s Rights Network, told the Telegraph, “I am lost for words that a male is stealing what should be women’s records first of all, and setting these records that will not be broken — these records are frozen, women won’t beat them.”
Binning added that it was “gobsmacking,” not just that the violent eunuch in jail for stabbing innocents over the question of his eligibility would still hold the title, but that he was “in a women’s prison despite politicians’ mealy-mouthed words that violent male offenders should not be in the female estate.”
“Politicians are turning their backs and sports associations are frightened and are being hung out to dry,” continued Binning. “More people take part in Parkrun than the Olympics — it does matter. The grassroots is where the elite athletes come from — girls and women will not in these circumstances want to participate.”
It appears that the actual top female in the Aberystwyth parkrun is Charlotte Morgan, who had a time of 17:55 on June 24, 2017. Jeska is eligible for parole in 2029. It is unclear whether Parkrun will permit him to resume competing against women.
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A school district in Fargo, North Dakota, will conceal the gender identities of students from parents in spite of a state law prohibiting the policy.
“We will not openly out any student because of one law if we know that that’s going to cause harm to that child,”said Fargo Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Rupak Gandhi, who is backed in the decision by the school board.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed the bill earlier in May that banned schools from withholding or concealing “information about a student’s transgender status from the student’s parent or legal guardian.”
Some parents expressed outrage at a school board meeting about the decision.
“The way I see it, the way I heard it is that you want to protect kids from their parents,” said one father. “Instead of encouraging everyone to talk more, you are suppressing talk.”
Another parent accused them of trying to take away authority from parents.
“I really urge you all to pay attention to what we’re setting as a precedent,” said the mother. “Whose kids are these? Do they belong to you as a school board? Do they belong to Fargo Public Schools? Or is each child’s parent ultimately the decision-maker in their family over what is allowed and what is safe for that child?”
Critics of the law said that revealing a student’s gender identity to the parents might lead to dangerous confrontations. Gandhi cited suicide statistics put out by an LGBTQ advocacy group to argue that hiding the gender identities from parents was protecting the students.
“You teach your kids that nobody who asks you to keep a secret is safe,” said another mother at the meeting. “Now, this is going the other way. This is an adult saying that they’ll keep a child’s secret.”
Here’s more about gender laws in North Dakota:
Governor of North Dakota Bans Transgender Pronouns in Government & Schools | EWTN News Nightly www.youtube.com
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During a House subcommittee hearing on “American Confidence in Elections,” Republicans demolished Democrats’ phony narratives regarding nonexistent “voter suppression.”
“Our hearing today will highlight how voters across the country are demanding reforms to ensure that every eligible American voter can be confident that they will have access to the ballot box and that their ballot will be counted according to established law,” said Chair and Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla.
For the past several years, Democrats have routinely slandered anyone with legitimate questions about the conduction of the 2020 election. Concerns raised about the influence of hundreds of millions of ‘Zuckbucks,’ interference by federal intel agencies, and censorship by Big Techplatforms have been met with leftist accusations of subverting “democracy” and advancing “conspiracy theories.” Legacy media have additionally used the term “election denier” to smear and silence their political opponents over such concerns.
During Wednesday’s hearing, however, Scot Turner, a former Republican state representative from Georgia, turned the tables, exposing Democrats as the party that has a history of pushing real conspiracy theories regarding the outcome of elections.
“Faith in the results of elections is vitally key for the health of our republic. But more and more, that faith is shaken by false allegations,” Turner said. “In 2016, the presidential election was marred by allegations of Russian hacking. And while evidence showed that the hacking was of email servers, by December of 2016, half of Democrat voters believed that Russians had changed vote tallies in favor of Donald Trump. That number would skyrocket to 67 percent … after a media barrage and many prominent leaders call[ed] the presidency of Donald Trump ‘illegitimate.’”
A November 2018 Economist/YouGov poll found this to be the case, showing that 67 percent of Democrats believed it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected.” Meanwhile, only 17 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Independents believed such a statement to have any semblance of accuracy, according to the survey.
During his testimony, Turner also highlighted former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ repeated insistence that her 2018 election against now-Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was illegitimate due to nonexistent voter suppression. Shortly after the 2018 contest, for instance, Abrams told a crowd of supporters that “concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper” and that “as a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.” Abrams repeated similar remarks during an August 2019 interview with CBS News.
Abrams’ bogus contention ultimately went down in flames last year when an Obama-appointed judge struck down her lawsuit challenging the election. In his opinion, Judge Steve Jones wrote that the voting practices challenged by Abrams’ team “violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act of 1965].”
“Abrams’ refusal [to concede] in 2018 is when it became apparent to me as a state representative just how damaging misinformation and disinformation are to our country,” Turner said.
Turner additionally referenced Democrats’ slanderous attacks on Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law, saying that dishonest opposition to such measures “are a form of voter suppression in their own right.” Signed by Kemp in March 2021, SB 202 included provisions mandating voter ID for absentee voting and safeguards on giving voters gifts or money within 150 feet of a polling place. Early voting was also expanded under the law, with counties now required to “offer two Saturdays of early voting instead of just one.”
Immediately after the law’s passage, Democrats and their legacy media allies began smearing the law as a Republican-led effort to “suppress” nonwhite voters. President Joe Biden grossly referred to SB 202 as “Jim Crow on steroids” and called on Major League Baseball to relocate its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in protest. The MLB ultimately acquiesced, condemning the law and moving the game to Colorado. The decision ultimately cost Georgia an estimated $100 million in revenue. Coca-Cola and Delta were also among those to condemn SB 202.
Contrary to Democrats’ claims that the Republican-backed law would suppress Georgians’ ability to vote, the results from the 2022 midterms say otherwise. In addition to record early voter turnout ahead of the Nov. 8 general election, the state also experienced record turnout for in-person, early voting for its Dec. 6 Senate runoff.
A poll conducted after the midterms further revealed that 0 percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting in the 2022 contest. In fact, as noted by Breitbart, “73 percent said they had an ‘excellent’ overall experience voting, 23 percent said they had a ‘good’ experience, [and] three percent said they had a ‘fair’ experience.”
“At each step of the way and with every improvement to the voting process, the Georgia General Assembly has had critics screaming at them that what they’re doing is wrong, racist, and will hurt communities of various types,” Turner said. “And just like the claims that Russia hacked the election and changed votes, or that Abrams lost because of ‘voter suppression,’ or that the election was stolen, the data and evidence don’t back up those claims.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood.
A spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., falsely claimed the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower had “backed out” of an agreement to meet with the Senate Finance Committee next week, the whistleblower’s attorneys told The Federalist.
“It’s disappointing Senator Wyden’s staff is playing partisan games by releasing inaccurate information,” said the legal team representing the whistleblower, who was identified as Gary Shapley during a CBS interview Wednesday. “As emails show, our client didn’t ‘back out’ of anything because there was never anything to back out of.”
On Wednesday, CNN reported the Senate Finance Committee’s claims, quoting Wyden’s spokesman, Ryan Carey, saying, “Committee staff on both sides agreed with counsel to meet directly with the whistleblower next week, however the whistleblower has since backed out of that agreement and declined an attempt to reschedule.” Carey added that “Chairman Wyden’s staff stand ready to arrange a meeting on terms that comply with laws protecting taxpayer data and ensure a fair and rigorous investigation.”
CNN later updated the article to include a detailed denial of the staffer’s claim by Shapley’s legal team.
Emails obtained by The Federalist between Shapley’s lawyers and Wyden’s staff confirm the whistleblower’s version of events.
On Friday, May 19, 2023, Mark Lytle, Shapley’s Nixon Peabody lawyer, arranged for a conference call between the whistleblower’s legal team and Wyden’s office to discuss logistics for their client to sit for a transcribed deposition. The next email in the thread came from a Wyden staffer the day after Lytle and his co-counsel Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, had dispatched their May 22 letter to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, as well as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office.
In their May 22 letter, the whistleblower’s legal team summarized their version of what had transpired. They also noted that they had informed the Senate Finance Committee’s staff that Shapley would testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, May 26, and reiterated their preference for a single joint interview or, at minimum, an interview the previous day, May 25.
“Unfortunately, the Finance Committee would not commit to a date consecutive to the House interview as an accommodation to our client’s concerns, as the staff had previously offered,” the letter stressed. Wyden’s staffers also refused to commit to an interview the Tuesday after the long Memorial Day weekend. The Senate Finance Committee’s political game-playing prompted the whistleblower’s attorneys to move forward with the House interview.
It was only then that Wyden’s office attempted to commit to an interview with the whistleblower before the Senate Finance Committee. In doing so, the staffer sent an email that both ignored Shapley’s letter and misrepresented the prior communications, the whistleblower’s legal team confirmed. The email communications back up those claims, with the whistleblower’s legal team writing that during their Friday call, Wyden’s office “would not commit to *either* Thursday or the following Tuesday after the holiday.”
“We asked you to reconsider Thursday and you offered to check on logistics for Tuesday, expressing doubt that you could get a court reporter,” the email continued. “We did not hear from you over the weekend or Monday, and thus sent the letter articulating our position and the reasons for it.”
In response, Wyden’s staffer did not dispute that sequence of events, but instead wrote that since Tuesday was represented as a “‘distant third’ option, it was an option”: “In line with that agreement, Tuesday the 30th is the date the Committee is available to meet. Please let us know how you’d like to proceed by the end of the day.”
That final email confirms there was no agreement between the Senate Finance Committee and the whistleblower, as Wyden’s spokesman had told CNN, but only continued efforts to reach an agreement.
The Federalist requested clarification from Daniel Goshorn, the Wyden staffer on the email exchanges, asking whether the senator’s spokesman had misspoken when he said there was an “agreement” for Shapley to testify. The Federalist also asked whether Wyden’s office on Friday had been unwilling to commit to either a Thursday or a Tuesday interview. Finally, The Federalist queried Wyden’s office on why they won’t agree to a joint interview.
Goshorn did not respond with a comment by press time.
However, no matter the reason Wyden and the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee have for refusing to conduct a joint interview with the House, that may be their only option at this point. The whistleblower is poised to appear on Friday before the Ways and Means Committee and indicated an unwillingness to testify again later before the Senate.
Rep. Jason Smith, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, shouldn’t leave the decision up to Wyden, though, because the Senate Democrat has proven himself to be putting politics above the public interest. Smith should sidestep the political posturing and, as I explained on Tuesday, use Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code to open the House Ways and Means’ interview of the whistleblower to the relevant Democrat and Republican members from both the House and Senate.
If Smith refuses to do so, that will be as inexplicable as Wyden refusing to participate in a joint hearing — leaving one to wonder if the House Republican is playing politics as well.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
President Joe Biden and top congressional Republican Kevin McCarthy on Thursday appeared to be nearing a deal to cut spending and raise the government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, with little time to spare to head off the risk of default. The deal would specify the total amount the government could spend on discretionary programs like housing and education, according to a person familiar with the talks, but not break that down into individual categories. The two sides are just $70 billion apart on a total figure that would be well over $1 trillion, according to another source.
Biden said the two sides still disagreed where the cuts should fall.
“I don’t believe the whole burden should fall back to middle class and working class Americans,” he told reporters.
The Treasury Department has warned that the federal government could run short of money to cover all its obligations as soon as June 1 – a week away – but on Thursday it announced plans to sell $119 billion worth of debt that will settle on June 1, suggesting to some market watchers that date was not an iron-clad deadline. Any agreement will have to pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Democrat-controlled Senate. That could be tricky, as some right-wing Republicans and many liberal Democrats said they were upset by the prospect of compromise.
“I don’t think everybody’s going to be happy at the end of the day. That’s now how the system works,” said McCarthy, who serves as House speaker.
His office did not respond to a request for comment about the possible agreement with the president. The deal would only set broad spending outlines, leaving lawmakers to fill in the blanks in the weeks and months to come. It would specify the total amount of military spending, which would a key sticking point in the talks, one of the sources said.
Biden has resisted Republican proposals to stiffen work requirements for anti-poverty programs and loosen oil and gas drilling rules, according to Democrat Rep. Mark Takano.
Rep. Kevin Hern, who leads the powerful Republican Study Committee, told Reuters a deal was likely by Friday afternoon.
Even as Republicans tout progress, McCarthy is preparing to possibly let lawmakers leave Washington on Thursday for a week-long holiday recess, with the proviso that they need to be ready to return for a vote. The Senate is currently out but on similar orders to be ready to return.
A U.S. default could upend global financial markets and push the United States into recession.
POSSIBLE DOWNGRADE
Credit rating agency DBRS Morningstar put the United States on review for a possible downgrade on Thursday, echoing similar warnings by Fitch, Moody’s and Scope Ratings. Another agency, S&P Global, downgraded U.S. debt following a similar debt-ceiling standoff in 2011. The months-long standoff has spooked Wall Street, weighing on U.S. stocks and pushing the nation’s cost of borrowing higher. The yield on U.S. Treasury bills maturing in early June climbed in early Thursday trading, in a sign of investor unease.
Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said concerns about the debt ceiling had pushed up the government’s interest costs by $80 million so far. Lawmakers regularly need to raise the self-imposed debt limit to cover the cost of spending and tax cuts they have already approved.
House lawmakers will get three days to read any debt-ceiling bill before they have to vote on it. In the Senate, Republican Mike Lee said he would block a quick vote if he did not like the deal, which could delay action for days. McCarthy has insisted that any deal must cut discretionary spending next year and cap spending growth in the years to come, to slow the growth of the U.S. debt, now equal to the annual output of the economy.
He also said he had briefly spoken about the negotiations with former President Donald Trump, who has publicly urged Republicans to allow a default if they fall short of their goals. Biden has offered to freeze spending at current levels next year and proposed several tax increases to help curb the debt.
Lawmakers on the parties’ right and left flanks are growing frustrated by signs of compromise. Republican Representative Chip Roy, a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, has insisted that any deal must include the sharp spending cuts they passed last month.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, say Biden has not been vocal enough about the downsides to Republicans’ proposed spending cuts, in contrast to McCarthy who has been briefing reporters multiple times per day.
“I would urge the president to use the power of the bully pulpit of the presidency,” said Democrat Representative Steven Horsford.
Special counsel John Durham will speak with members of the House Judiciary Committee in coming weeks, and members will hear “exactly how the FBI lied to the American people” with its investigative actions during former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, speaking at a time when Americans need to know “just how deep the rot in our intelligence agencies has gone,” Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., said Thursday.
“He’s going to be able to tell us exactly how the FBI lied to the American people, how they used the Steele dossier when they knew it was false and based on false premises, and how it was pushed to use the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrants to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016,” Cline said on Newsmax’s“Wake Up America.”
The deceptions continued, Cline said, with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2018, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020, and the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.
“We would just like to have an election season without interference from our intelligence agencies,” said Cline. “Is that so much to ask?”
Meanwhile, there are several ways the House can prevent the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray from continuing such behavior, said Cline.
“We have several options ot our disposal in Congress,” he said. “We have the power of the purse, and right now the appropriations bills for the FBI. They want a new office building, a giant new office building [to be] built. These kinds of things are being looked at very skeptically by appropriators.”
Cline said there also is legislation that can be brought into play, including reauthorizing the FISA process, which expires at the end of this year.
“If they want that tool, we might have to take that tool away,” he said.
Another legislative tool was put in place when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took office and agreed to restore line-item revisions of individual bureaucrats’ salaries in appropriations bills “so we can go in and line item, whether it’s Anthony Fauci or Christopher Wray, those will be subject to debate and vote in the House of Representatives.”
Cline also on Thursday discussed the impasse between House Republicans and President Joe Biden’s administration on debt ceiling talks, saying it was Biden “from the very beginning” who has been the problem.
“It was the president from the very beginning, stomping [his] feet and crossing [his] arms and saying, My way or the highway, pass a clean debt ceiling with no reforms,” said Cline. “That’s not acceptable, and that’s what he was doing for several months while the speaker was saying, ‘Come to the table, let’s start negotiating. Let’s talk.'”
The House passed its debt ceiling bill with a GOP majority vote, Cline added.
“We’re the only body to have passed legislation that actually raised the debt ceiling with a number of conditions that are popular among 80% of the people, with work requirements for welfare, energy independence,” Cline said. “The president should be at the table negotiating and should agree to cut spending.”
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New GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said on Thursday that if he’s elected, he will “be aggressive” in using presidential pardons to free people charged or convicted through the weaponization of the Department of Justice, and that includes his main rival for the party’s nomination, former President Donald Trump.
“What I’m going to do is … on day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” the Florida governor told podcasters, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis.
DeSantis added that the DOJ and FBI have been weaponized in many ways under President Joe Biden, and he acknowledged that in some of the cases where people are charged with crimes, “people may have a technical violation of the law.”
“But if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice, and so we’re going to find ways where that did not happen,” said DeSantis. “And then we will use the pardon power — and I will do that at the front end.”
He said many presidents wait until the end of their administration, but he promised that his administration will “find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate.”
However, DeSantis also explained that the pardons will be considered “case by case,” meaning that a blanket pardon wouldn’t be given to Trump, who is facing several criminal probes.
“That could be from a grandma who got arrested and prosecuted too much all the way up to, potentially, Trump himself,” Travis said. He then asked the governor, “Is that fair to say when you analyze what the charges might have been brought on a federal level?”
“I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big,” DeSantis responded.
Now that we know Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running for president (along with several others whose names I can’t remember), I have a helpful primer on what NOT to do as president.
I base this advice on the conduct of the most inconsequential president in U.S. history, Donald Trump. With the exception of the judiciary — something neither he nor Jared saw a way of monetizing, thank God — Trump’s entire presidency can be summarized as: obnoxious tweets, followed by immediate and complete capitulation.
The problem with the Trump diehards is that they’d read the bad-ass tweets, pump their fists, but then wander off, never bothering to find out what happened next. Here’s what happened: Trump surrendered. Over and over and over again.
There were so many surrenders that The New York Times had to keep coming up with new synonyms for “loser”: “Trump Gives Ground,” “Trump Backs Off,” “Trump Drops,” “Trump Accommodates Democrats,” “Trump Seethes,” “Trump Signals Defeat,” “Trump’s Surprise Retreat,” “Trump Confronted by a Loss,” “The Biggest Surrender of His Presidency,” and so on.
In his first two years in office, Trump had a Republican House and a Republican Senate — he could have done anything! Let’s see how he fulfilled his signature promise to build a wall, as told in tweets and headlines.
FIRST SPENDING FIGHT:
“… (if) the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be! #BuildTheWall” — Trump tweet, April 24, 2017
“Don’t let the fake media tell you that I have changed my position on the WALL. It will get built and help stop drugs, human trafficking etc.” — Trump tweet, April 25, 2017
New York Times Headline, April 26, 2017: “Wall ‘Will Get Built,’ Trump Insists, as He Drops Funding Demand”
SECOND SPENDING FIGHT:
“If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall … One way or the other, we’re going to get that wall.” — Trump at Phoenix rally, Aug. 22, 2017
“I think everybody knows this president isn’t somebody who backs down.” — White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, Aug. 23, 2017
Months of negotiations and studly tweets (Jan. 4, 2018: “We must BUILD THE WALL, stop illegal immigration,” etc. etc.) led to this:
New York Times headline, March 22, 2018: “Spending Plan Passed by Congress Is a Rebuke to Trump.”
“Rebuke” is putting it mildly: The bill expressly prohibited Trump from building a wall and, for good measure, also blocked the hiring of thousands of new Border Patrol agents.
But Trump bounced back with more masterful tweeting!
“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill (because) … the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.” — Trump tweet, March 23, 2018
Then, the very next day …
New York Times headline, March 24, 2018: “Trump Seethes, but Signs Bipartisan Spending Plan”
True, Trump had given away the store, but look at what he said while signing the Don’t Even Think About Building a Wall bill:
“I looked very seriously at the veto. I was thinking about doing the veto.”
Not only that, but he vowed, “I will never sign another bill like this again — I’m not going to do it again.”
You’ll never guess what he did again.
THIRD SPENDING FIGHT:
“I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!” — Trump tweet, Sept. 20, 2018
Months of negotiations finally ended with …
“Trump Signs Bill Reopening Government for 3 Weeks in Surprise Retreat From Wall” — The New York Times, Jan. 25, 2019
Surprise! By then, 41 newly-elected House Democrats had been sworn in and there was no hope of getting a wall or anything else through Congress.
How does a Republican president get buffaloed like this by a Republican Congress? Reagan enacted his entire radical agenda (and won the Cold War) without ever, not once, having a Republican House and Senate.
It wasn’t only Trump’s wall that followed the obnoxious tweet/face plant trajectory. It was everything. Tweeting “LAW & ORDER!” as the country went up in flames; retweeting #FireFauci while never daring to remove King Anthony from his throne; spending months tweeting about “Rocket Man,” then staging a theatrical meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — to accomplish what exactly?
I’ll need another column to even begin to capture the horror of this wasted presidency.
Gov. DeSantis, I’m pretty sure I don’t need to tell you this, but please don’t do any of that.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Democrats are communicating loud and clear that they support law enforcement so long as it abuses police power to serve their political goals. They want to defund police who enforce the law and expand police forces that use law as a political weapon on Democrats’ behalf.
One proof is that in last week’s hearing on FBI weaponization, support for the FBI was split exactly by political party. Democrats uniformly supported the FBI in face of evidence of gross and systemic abuse of power, while Republicans uniformly criticized it. This is a clear tell that Democrats consider the FBI to be working for them — a shocking and dangerous situation.
“Every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee is committed to fundamental change in how that [FBI secret warrant] process works,” Rep. Jim Jordan told Maria Bartiromo Sunday in a post-hearing interview. “…the FISA and the appropriations process is how you rein in this agency that targeted good men, like Garret O’Boyle, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, who had the courage to come forward and testify this week and tell the American people what’s going on with their tax dollars in the Justice Department.”
The last week has surfaced numerous new facts about serious ongoing and systemic FBI abuses of law enforcement powers. Special Counsel John Durham’s report showed that the FBI acted in a clearly partisan manner in multiple situations, including protecting the Hillary Clinton campaign while placing informants and electronic wiretaps on the Trump campaign based on fabricated evidence their agents didn’t check.
In Thursday’s hearing, the three whistleblowers detailed the FBI’s cruel retaliation against themselves and their families when they filed legally protected ethics complaints about: the FBI surveilling parents who complained about Democrats’ education policies at school board meetings; the FBI pursuing a SWAT-style raid against a cooperative man who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally; and the FBI inflating “domestic terrorism” cases to bolster Democrats’ false and horrifying claim that their political opponents are terrorists.
Allen told the committee it appears the FBI is conducting a “purge” of conservatives. Michael Shellenberger and Madeleine Rowley reported, “No mainstream media journalist interviewed the FBI whistleblowers before demonizing them.”
During that hearing, it was also revealed that the Bank of America gave the FBI private banking information about any American who used BOA credit cards near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, without any warrant, and regardless of whether those people committed any crimes or even were on the Capitol grounds that day.
“FBI leadership pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country,” says a congressional staff report released May 18.
Saturday reporting on a secret court filing showed the FBI broke the law by spying on Americans 278,000 times, without any warrants, in 2021 alone. “For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans,” reported the New York Post on Sunday. The whistleblowers noted that the FBI rewards agents for opening more warrantless surveillance and searches of Americans’ communications.
Then on Sunday a poll came out showing the majority of Americans believe the FBI covers up Democrats’ crimes — specifically those of the Biden family. It also showed that 70 percent of Americans are concerned the FBI and other intelligence agencies interfere with elections, and believe the agencies need “wide-ranging reform.”
Don’t forget, either, that the only former president’s home the FBI has ever raided was a Republican’s, while FBI officials bent over backward to avoid touching even convincing evidence of criminal behavior related to Clinton, according to Durham’s documentation. The FBI’s recent record is clearly partisan, and that’s why its support is also now partisan.
This partisanship is not just typical politics. It’s over fundamental issues, not differing ways to get to the same goal. It’s also very dangerous to our country.
When federal law enforcement becomes the shock troops of only one political party, you don’t have the rule of law anymore. Law is only legitimate if it is equally applied to all. When members of one party or set of political beliefs are above the law and use the law not for justice but as a weapon against their political enemies, that’s what we call a police state.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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