Christian flag and American flag flying together | GettyImages/ sdgamez
Is Christian nationalism dangerous? That all depends on what you mean by the term. On the one hand, there is no shortage of warnings today from the left about the alleged danger of Christian nationalism.
As expressed by conservative author Jason Mattera:
“Over the last few years, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of ‘alarming’ stories in left-stream media outlets about the rise of this scary, menacing boogeyman. Christian Nationalism, as the hyperventilating goes, poses a danger to the well-being of the United States and is a betrayal of genuine Christianity.”
In stark contrast, John Zmirak, a conservative Catholic scholar and cultural commentator, views the term as positive, referring it “to American civic religion circa 1960, where broadly Christian ideas about human nature, marriage, and life prevailed.” In his view, the more the left reviles the term “Christian nationalism,” the more we should embrace it.
What about the perception of the general public? How do most Americans view the concept of Christian nationalism?
I’m not aware of any scientific polls that have asked that question, but I did my own, totally unscientific, quite limited poll on my Twitter account, asking,
“How do you define ‘Christian nationalism,’ and in your view, is this a positive or negative term? (You can answer the first part of the question in the comments and the second part in the poll.)”
Bear in mind that most of my Twitter followers are fellow conservatives and fellow believers, and a strong majority of them voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Still, of the 1,085 respondents to the poll, 66.3% viewed the term as negative, 18.9% as positive, 11.1% were not sure, and just 3.8% had not heard of the term.
That poll reflects my sentiments as well: I do not like the term or see it as positive or helpful since, for many, it reflects the unhealthy marriage of the Gospel and politics, blurring the distinction between the kingdom of God and patriotism. As one Twitter user put it (quoting from another source), “Christian nationalism can be reasonably understood as a movement that seeks to preserve or promote a Christian national identity.”
This definition also suggests that America has a special covenant with God, and so being a Christian nationalist means helping America fulfill its God-appointed, covenantal destiny. Consequently, it is no problem to wrap the gospel in the American flag, since America is a Christian nation with a Christian calling.
In that same spirit, I have seen preachers standing behind pulpits with the American flag draped over their shoulders as they called for Christians to rise up in force and “stop the steal” (referring to the 2020 elections). The kingdom of God and the nation of America were now merged together as one.
Again, there are solid Christians for whom “Christian nationalism” simply means, “I love Jesus, I love my country, and I honor our Christian foundations.” That is hardly a dangerous position, and there is nothing ominous about it.
As I wrote in December 2020 in response to a controversial Beth Moore tweet,
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you love and appreciate America? No.
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you are patriotic and serve in the military? No.
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe Trump was better for America than Biden? No.
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe there was electoral fraud and are doing your best to fight for a free and fair election? No.
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe that America must protect our religious liberties? No.
Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe that God raised up America for special purposes in order to bless and help the world? No.
But you are a Christian nationalist if you confuse loyalty to your country with loyalty to the kingdom of God.
You are a Christian nationalist if you wrap the gospel in an American flag.
You are a Christian nationalist if you “merge Christian and American identities.”
That’s why recent comments by GAB CEO Andrew Torba have raised eyebrows and confirmed the worst suspicions about Christian nationalism, being quoted by outlets such as the Jerusalem Post and further fueling the fires of far-left websites such as Right Wing Watch. As Torba said with reference to a Republican candidate he backed,
“We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates, at the state, local and federal levels and we’re going to take this country back for the glory of God.”
And, what exactly, will this look like? What will it mean to “take the country back for the glory of God,” a sentiment that, in itself, can sound very positive to many Christians?
Torba explained,
“We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish. We don’t want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country. We’re not saying we’re going to deport all these people or whatever. You’re free to stay here. You’re not going to be forced to convert or anything like this because that’s not biblical whatsoever. But you’re going to enjoy the fruits of living in a Christian society under Christian laws and under a Christian culture and you can thank us later.”
“You degenerate pagans and atheists and non-believers went way too far with the COVID nonsense, with shutting down our churches and forcing our kids to be masked, and forcing us to get vaccinated with some mystery goop in order to keep our jobs and provide for our families. You pushed us too far, and now we’re going to take dominion of this country, of our culture, of news, of entertainment, of technology, of education, of everything for the glory of Jesus Christ, our king. It’s just that simple.”
In short, “Me loving my neighbor is wanting my neighbor to be ruled by wise biblical Christian men. Look at the fruits of what happens when we allow pagans, Jews, non-believers, atheists to run our country.”
Note carefully those words “take dominion” and “rule.” Christian nationalists will literally take over.
In Torba’s view, this will happen by winning elections and then making Christian values the law of the land. This, in turn, will benefit the whole society, as if Christians could change society by coercion rather than by sacrificial love and service and example.
Some even take this one step further, telling Christians to prepare for battle by getting their guns and ammunition ready, in the name of Jesus at that. Get ready for holy war!
This is irresponsible as it is dangerous, especially in today’s highly volatile, hyper-politicized, powder keg climate.
I believe those of you who are interested in delving deeper into the relationship between Church and State and who want to understand the Church’s calling to change the world will find The Political Seduction of the Church helpful. In fact, I wrote it for you.
For the moment, though, let me say this plainly: Jesus alone deserves our total loyalty and absolute, undivided devotion. Whether it be our careers, reputations, or our patriotism, anything or anyone that seeks to share the throne of our hearts and lives with Him, is an idol that must be smashed.
As a former homeschooled student and now a homeschool dad, I know first-hand the importance of sound education and the delicate balance of approaching difficult topics with my children.
First things first, families need to be grounded in what the Declaration of Independence calls the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, meaning God’s law is true, supreme, and immutable. In today’s society, children are taught that it is acceptable, and often encouraged, to redefine nature’s law. To “create your own truth” and go against the foundational truths that this country was built upon. Being rooted in the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God is the starting point, the catapult, for addressing difficult topics that our kids are facing on a daily basis.
The Rise of Gender Fluidity
Gone are the days when our God-given body parts were the determining factor of our sexual identity. Leftist agendas are now pushing that your sex is determined at birth, but your gender is not determined until you are old enough to start showing either feminine or masculine tendencies. Parents are being told to keep their children’s biological sex secret until their child is old enough to decide their own identity. This blatantly goes against the laws of nature.
When teaching our kids about their sexuality, we can ask, what does nature’s law tell us about sexuality? It is as simple as returning to God’s original design and purpose for humanity. We can explain this to our children by highlighting the responsibilities of males and females and their benefits to society. We can also educate our children about their bodies and the benefits of their sex. Yes, there are biological differences that match the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Our job as parents is to continually affirm to children who they are and how they were made and to teach them to know the truth about themselves, and that it isn’t something you can just change. When our minds don’t match the physical world, it is our minds that need to be healed, not our bodies. Just as physical laws are immutable, so too are natural laws.
Discussing Current Events with Your Children
It is no secret that we are consumed daily with news. Whether you watch the news with your kids or not, they are constantly being exposed. The rising generation has access to more information than ever before, which is why it is crucial that you are laying foundational truths at an early age with your children. Don’t be afraid to have difficult conversations with your kids.
The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade is a perfect example of ensuring your children are rooted in the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Our children need to know that the fetus is a stage in human development, much like we have identified being a toddler or a teenager as a stage in human development. The Law of Nature’s God states that every person may lawfully enjoy those rights which God has given. Key words being every person.
Life begins at conception, and the unborn are still lawfully entitled to the right to life. We need to be clear and speak truth to our children when this topic gets brought up in our households. To address the “your body, your choice” argument, let them know that choices have consequences and that having physical relationships outside of a committed marriage could lead to having a baby. Yes, you have a choice, but it is earlier in the decision-making process than when others claim it should occur. Your choice can’t end the life of another human. As parents, it is our responsibility to educate our children to see all life as valuable and to communicate Nature’s Law.
Parents, Your Children Need You!
Overall, this idea of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God can and should be the starting point for these types of conversations with your children. These truths ultimately overcome the false ideals the left is attempting to spread. The ultimate takeaway for your children is that just as physical laws are unchanging, so too are natural laws. Not preparing our children adequately can lead to significant problems for the next and rising generations. Parents need to educate themselves so they can teach their children to recognize truth over propaganda. Introducing children to the truth and having these difficult conversations with your kids early on and in an age-appropriate manner will better prepare and equip them for the future.
Robert Bortins is chief executive officer of Classical Conversations, the world’s largest classical homeschooling organization.
In a recently published blog post, Twitter announced its plans to “protect” political discourse ahead of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections by reaffirming its commitment to its “Civic Integrity Policy.” Given Silicon Valley’s tendency to suppress conservative speech while emboldening leftist causes, it is all but certain this policy will be used exclusively for right-wing censorship. And considering the impracticality of introducing regulations prior to the 2022 midterms, the Republican Party must make regulating Big Tech a top priority in order to ensure the integrity of the 2024 presidential election.
According to Twitter, its Civic Integrity Policy “covers the most common types of harmful misleading information about elections and civic events” by flagging “misleading content” and, in some cases, outright suppressing content that contains “false or misleading claim[s].” But, with recent history as a guide, we can see that Twitter does not enforce this policy honestly.
In 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, Twitter suppressed discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The company went so far as to prevent users from sharing the New York Post story exposing the scandal with one another, claiming that its circulation violated the company’s policy on spreading information obtained via hacking. Coincidentally, Twitter did nothing to stop the circulation of leaked copies of Donald Trump’s tax filings.
Why does this matter?
Twitter justified its suppression of speech that favored a Republican incumbent by falsely designating it as ill-begotten misinformation while simultaneously doing nothing to crack down on the likely illegally obtained information that damaged the same incumbent’s reputation among the electorate.
It just so happens that by suppressing negative stories about Joe Biden, Big Tech may have handed him the election as 82 percent of Biden voters in seven swing states were unaware of all of the scandals attached to him. Seventeen percent of these voters said that knowledge of these scandals before voting would have caused them to change their vote.
The company’s integrity policy was applied in ways that specifically targeted speech favorable to the Republican Party. By censoring this speech, Twitter played a direct role in Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency.
Social media’s utility is largely the provision of a digital town square where people can share information with other people. So, ethically, ought companies that monetize user data obtained from speech-centric platforms not protect speech?
But more importantly, considering how often Big Tech platforms such as Twitter act on behalf of the federal government, they must be held accountable for violating the First Amendment rights of American users. Corporations that function as extensions of the government must be compelled to uphold the constitutional protections of American citizens.
In a July 2021 briefing, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explicitly stated that the Biden administration intended to collaborate with Big Tech to “monitor misinformation more closely” and “proactively address the public’s questions without inadvertently giving a platform to health misinformation that can harm their audiences.” She also acknowledged that the White House intended to reign in counter-regime narratives by “bringing individuals and organizations together to address misinformation.” The White House was so effective at persuading Big Tech to crack down on narratives in opposition to its own that social media companies deplatformed journalists who were too effective at asking questions about Biden’s Covid strategy and Covid vaccine efficacy.
Agents of the government must be subject to the U.S. Constitution and prevented from infringing on the rights of American citizens. And despite what tech executives will say when testifying before Congress, these companies are politically motivated and serve the interests of the political left. Is there any question as to whether Big Tech plans to mobilize in favor of Democrats again in 2024?
It is far too late — and politically impossible — for congressional Republicans to introduce regulatory legislation that would reign in social media platforms like Twitter before the 2022 midterm elections. So, upon reclaiming control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the GOP must act to secure digital free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
But while the FBI and DOJ have busied themselves with targeting Trump and his aides, colluding with the National School Boards Association to silence concerned parents, concocting entrapment schemes masquerading as plots to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and chasing down election integrity supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, plenty of real criminals and security threats have gotten away scot-free. That’s no accident.
Here is everyone who Democrats and their bureaucrat buddies have deemed “above the law” and unworthy of proper investigation and prosecution.
The president’s son isn’t just a walking liability for the Biden family name, he’s a glaring national security threat with a long, infamous history of using illicit drugs, engaging in possibly criminal sexual escapades with foreign women, and selling access to his dad under the guise of doing business with foreign oligarchs.
Hillary Clinton and her staff mishandled highly classified information, which resulted in at least 91 security violations. The FBI, of course, never raided Clinton’s house over her rogue server despite the crimes committed to cover it up. Instead, as Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, the FBI “inexplicably agreed to destroy [Clinton staffers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson’s] laptops knowing that the contents were the subject of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters.”
4. Everyone Involved in Benghazi
Speaking of Clinton, why wasn’t she or any other Obama-era bureaucrat who was responsible for abandoning four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, where they were murdered by terrorists, punished for trying to cover up the fatal scandal?
5. Illegal Border Crossers
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has apprehended roughly 3.5 million illegal border crossers since Biden assumed office, but those migrants are rarely punished for violating the law.
Instead of addressing how the compromised border is fostering an environment ripe for trafficking and other crimes, the Biden administration along with the FBI and DOJ have brushed off concerns about illegal immigration. Apparently, it is more important to go after American citizens than prosecute potentially dangerous foreign ones.
6. Gavin Newsom and Every Other Dem Who Partied While Americans Suffered Lockdowns
Dozens of Democrats including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pelosi, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were caught violating their own Covid-19 lockdown rules. If Democrats cared about rule of law so much, why did these politicians escape accountability?
7. Summer of Rage Rioters
During the summer of 2020, rioters looted, burned, and destroyed more than $2 billion worth of private and federal property. Some of those who were caught were bailed out by Kamala Harris and her allies and let off the hook by the federal government. The rioters who weren’t caught can live comfortably knowing that the DOJ is too busy trying to track down potential J6 offenders to prosecute them.
It took 44 days after attacks on dozens of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations began for the FBI to tell The Federalist that it would investigate the firebombings. Two months after the agency reportedly started its search into the criminal activity, neither the FBI nor DOJ has announced charges against the vandals, including a mysterious anarchist-connected group called Jane’s Revenge, which took responsibility for some of the destruction.
10. Everyone Else Who Threatened SCOTUS over Dobbs
Shortly after a leak revealed that the Supreme Court planned to strike down Roe v. Wade, leftists called for violence against the Republican-nominated justices. While the Biden administration and DOJ stood idly by, some even said the court should burn to the ground. It took until a man was caught attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of Garland’s former colleagues, for the DOJ to respond to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s questions about whether the agency planned to prosecute anyone touting the “ongoing, coordinated campaign of intimidation against the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court.” Even then, nothing came of the DOJ’s words.
11. The Pelosi Family
Suspected insider trading deserves at least a second glance by federal investigators, but it looks like, so far, Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have gotten away with conveniently timing their stock purchases and sales to massively grow their wealth.
12. Almost Everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s Client List
Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were both convicted of trafficking children for sex, but the list of their clients is still reportedly harbored by the DOJ, something lamented by many including Elon Musk. Of those names that have surfaced from Epstein’s “little black book,” few have been prosecuted and convicted for their involvement in the sex-trafficking ring.
13. Marc Elias and Election Law-Breakers
Marc Elias has repeatedly tried to undermine U.S. elections, something the FBI loves to spy on Americans for. Elias has such a reputation for meddling and manipulating elections that even a federal judge reprimanded him for it. Unlike Douglass Mackey, who was charged by the DOJ for posting a meme encouraging Hillary voters to “text” their votes, however, Elias has not faced any charges or unannounced raids.
14. Mark Milley
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, undermined Trump by having secret conversations with known U.S. enemy communist China. In those covert calls, Milley promised to warn China if the U.S. ever decided to attack. Talk about a national security threat that deserves some attention from federal law enforcement.
15. Eric Swalwell
Speaking of communist China, Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell canoodling with a known spy for the nation’s No. 1 enemy seems like a pretty serious offense. Instead of a member of the House Intelligence Committee facing consequences for giving foreign spies access to key U.S. government offices and information, Swalwell is still comfortably rage-tweeting about Trump and MAGA supporters and appearing as a guest on corrupt corporate media programs.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder misled Congress during its investigation of the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal, which used taxpayer dollars to put guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords. Holder was held in contempt, but that’s pretty much the only punishment he received for intentionally dodging subpoenas and hiding documents from congressional oversight.
18. Susan Rice
President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked members of the Trump transition team and then lied about it. Unmasking may be a legitimate and legal process for those with the authority, but covering up an attempt to target the political enemies of the regime is an abuse of power that deserves examination.
Instead, it was yet another action U.S. intelligence agencies exploited to justify spying on American citizens.
19. All the Russia Hoaxers
There were plenty of people in the DOJ and FBI who broke the law when they lied on official documents and to other officials to advance the Russia-collusion hoax. Yet, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early August that so far, none of the FBI agents involved in the SpyGate scandal against Trump have faced serious consequences.
Similarly, despite lying about why he was supplying information about a supposed link between Trump and the Russia-based Alfa Bank to the FBI, former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted and let go without consequence.
20. Themselves
The same people who control the enforcement of the law, who love lording “no one is above the law” over Americans, are the ones who think they are above any semblance of oversight or law or constitutionality.
That’s why the FBI has skirted any of Congress’s attempts at oversight even though it has a long history of botched and politicized investigations, sometimes authorized on falsified information.
Instead of investigating and prosecuting real crimes, the FBI and DOJ have chosen to shame Americans who have called out the corruption and politicization that clearly drives their agencies’ actions. That’s a deliberate decision, but also a disastrous one.
Rule of law is one thing that sets the United States apart as a bastion of freedom, but when the government fails to uphold it properly, as the list details, the nation is in crisis and on the verge of falling apart.
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 and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Pastor Christiana Ford (L) mourns her late son, Lamar Ford, 39 (R). | Screenshot/4WWL
Christiana Ford, a New Orleans pastor and founder of the Silence The Violence Foundation, is calling for an end to gun violence in her community just days after losing a second son to gun violence just outside her home and steps away from her church. Ford lost her 39-year-old son Lamar Ford in a shooting earlier this month. Lamar Ford was fatally shot in the head on Aug. 5, 4WWL reported. Police say the shooting happened about 11:30 a.m. on the 1300 block of Elysian Fields Avenue. The location of the deadly shooting was near the House of Faith Non-Denominational Ministries, a congregation led by his mother.
Lamar Ford had served time in prison for manslaughter, according to nola.com, but was released two years ago. According to his mother, he was turning his life around and helping with outreach programs at her church.
In addition to his mother, Lamar Ford left behind a 9-year-old son and other siblings.
“This man got out of the car and stood over him and shot him two times in the head,” Christiana Ford told 4WWL. “It’s not right; it’s not right. It’s nothing like losing a child.”
The grieving pastor, who previously lost another son to gun violence in Texas, spoke out against gun violence in New Orleans amid a sharp increase in homicides in the city. Data from the Metropolitan Crime Commission found that since New Year’s Day, 180 murders have been reported, a 42% increase compared to the same period last year.
“To see our kids getting killed daily on the streets. It’s multiplying. It’s crippling. It’s out of control. We need help here in New Orleans,” Ford said.
“Every day, all day, somebody is being killed. That tells me it’s easy to kill and it’s easy to get away with it. … It’s my child now. Whose child is it going to be next?”
“We must come together and let these criminals know they’re not taking over the streets.”
At his trial in 2017, prosecutors said Lamar Ford shot a man named Tyrone Daniels in a vacant alleyway in a dispute over a $40 drug debt on April 22, 2013, according to nola.com. Prosecutors alleged that Lamar Ford lured Daniels into the alleyway by claiming his bike was there and then shot him. They cited circumstantial evidence against him.
Lamar Ford’s brother Lynn Ford, who had given Daniels a haircut shortly before he was shot, reportedly told investigators that he thought Lamar Ford had murdered Daniels but recanted his testimony upon taking the stand.
In May 2017, Lamar Ford pleaded guilty to manslaughter two days after his trial started, with Daniels’ mother accepting the deal made with prosecutors but insisting he was a murderer.
“I know you killed my son, but I’m going to take it,” Shirley Daniels said, as reported by nola.com at the time. “I can’t do it no more.”
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum listed the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as “another example” why the Convention of States Project (COS) is “so important,” because it will let states propose and vote on their own constitutional amendments that limit the powers of the federal government and their agencies, in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
COS calls for states to propose amendments they claim will give people greater say over their own rights than the federal government.
Santorum said the raid will “become the norm if we don’t do something to take power out of Washington and place the checks and balances that we need to restore federalism and freedom in our country.”
Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum called the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago “another example” of why America needs a convention of states to propose constitutional amendments that limit federal power in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Only 15 more states are needed to demand a convention that will allow all states to propose and vote on their own amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Santorum, a senior advisor of the Convention of States Project (COS), told the DCNF the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago is one reason why COS is “so important” so states can limit the powers of the federal government and “restore freedom back to the American public.” (RELATED: ‘No Real Legal Argument’: Here’s What The Liberal Justices’ Abortion Opinion Means For The Future Of The Constitution)
The FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home as part of an investigation into classified White House documents he allegedly took when he transferred out of office.
“What (the raid) indicates is the fact that the left is so focused on accumulating power and dictating to the American pubic how we should live our lives under their woke philosophy,” Santorum said. “This is going to become the norm if we don’t do something to take power out of Washington and place the checks and balances that we need to restore federalism and freedom in our country.”
PALM BEACH, FL – AUGUST 08: Palm Beach police officers keep watch near the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago on August 8, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida. The FBI raided the home to retrieve classified White House documents. (Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Santorum’s solution is a convention of states, which he calls an “emergency provision of the constitution that if Washington got out of control, those outside of power in Washington could restore freedom back to the American public.”
“Article V is something that our Founding Fathers realized could keep the federal government within the bounds of the Constitution, which is a restraining document on the federal government,” Lt. Col. Allen West, a COS advocate, told the DCNF.
Under Article V, the Constitution can be amended either by Congress or by state legislatures. Either two-thirds of both houses of Congress or, two-thirds of the state legislatures, 34 out of the 50 states, must vote to demand a convention. With the help of COS, 19 states have voted to demand one so far, making them more than halfway to the first convention of states to occur in American history. All other amendments have been proposed by Congress.
“This is how the States are supposed to act,” former Sen. Jim DeMint, senior advisor of COS, told the DCNF.
COS calls for states to propose amendments they claim will give people greater say over their own rights than the federal government. Their goals include balancing the federal budget every year, imposing term limits on elected officials and “career bureaucrats” and removing federal power over education, energy and health care, according to their background statement obtained by DCNF.
Insider framed these goals as “gutting federal environmental standards, nixing nationwide education requirements, and creating an incredibly high threshold for Washington, DC, or a territory to earn statehood.” They claimed the COS attracts “acolytes of Trumpism savoring the means to MAGA-fy the Constitution, and therefore, the nation.”
Their piece on COS also accuses some of its supporters of wanting to make it harder, “if not impossible, for someone — National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, for example — to work for decades within the federal government.”
“They see it as a legitimate threat to their power grab,” Santorum responded. He called COS “the great disruptor.”
“The tyranny we see accumulating in Washington is not just a tyranny of philosophy, but a tyranny that will use power to crush anybody in its path,” he said. “And it’s not just Donald Trump. If I were a liberal, in the truest sense of the word, which is someone who believes in a liberal democracy, I would be as upset as the biggest MAGA voter in the country.”
COS acknowledged the “attempted hit pieces” in a blog post and noted they are being published right before the midterm elections, when states could win over enough representatives supporting COS to reach their mark.
“Why the attacks? Because our movement threatens to take control away from people who have acquired an enormous amount of power and wealth,” they wrote.
“The Democrats, the left, the media and big corporations always want central power,” DeMint told the DCNF. “They don’t believe in states having authority.”
“Part of the socialist mindset is the superiority of the institution of government,” West added. “They want to see everything be dictated from the federal government on down, and not allow the states to be any way possibly involved in the United States of America.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to DCNF’s request for comment.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Starbucks recently asked the National Labor Relations Board to suspend all pending and ongoing votes to unionize at its U.S. stores due to concerns stemming from mail-in ballots. The franchise’s objections once again raise questions about the credibility of election systems that rely on mail-in ballots.
As with coffee companies, how much more with the American electoral process? With hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign material and increasing numbers of ballots in the mail, postal efficiency and honesty are becoming increasingly vital to free and fair elections.
Ostensibly to address some of these concerns, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced on July 28 that it was creating the Election and Government Mail Services division. Adrienne E. Marshall, a USPS veteran, was named as the division’s first director, with Marc Elias, the Democrat’s foremost lawfare professional and longtime proponent of elections by mail, tweeting out his approval.
The rationale for this new division is that the growing use of mail-in ballots requires extra attention to ensure the greater volume of mailed ballots can be handled by an increasingly overburdened USPS. The USPS reported it delivered more than 135 million ballots in 2020, with 40 million delivered so far this year during the primaries.
Elections conducted by mail have been a longtime goal of Elias and others since long before public health fears over in-person voting during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is instructive to note that most European nations found mail-in ballots to be susceptible to fraud and limited their use.
Among other problems, mail-in ballots can be cast by someone other than the voter, voter ID measures are harder to ensure absent in-person voting with a government-issued ID, and the secret ballot is more easily compromised by professional ballot traffickers who “help” the voter fill in their ballot. Thus, mail-in ballots will be an increasingly important part of the Democratic election playbook.
In related news, President Joe Biden nominated three people to fill vacancies on the nine-member USPS Board of Governors. The board determines the postmaster general, who remains, for now, Louis DeBoy. Biden’s nominees include the former chief counsel for the American Postal Workers Union and the head of the National Vote at Home Institute, a non-profit that pushes for nationwide mail-in voting. Some 80 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Biden urging action on the board of governor nominees to speed DeJoy’s ouster.
Should the voting public be concerned about the USPS paying closer attention to mail-in ballots? It depends on the trust you place in federal institutions and their employees.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is the oldest federal law enforcement branch. Regarding election-related mail, both campaign material and ballots, the Postal Inspection Service says they monitor “political and election mail as it moves through the postal network to prevent, identify and resolve any issues that might interfere with its secure and timely delivery.” All of which sounds great in theory, but what happens if the mail doesn’t get through? Or if it doesn’t get through selectively? Investigating after the fact won’t change election results.
By its own metrics, the USPS claimed it delivered 99.89 percent of mail-in ballots within seven days during the 2020 election. But what if the leadership of the USPS’s heavily unionized workforce decided to put their thumbs on the scale? The National Association of Letter Carriers is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO and endorsed Biden in 2020. It represents 277,000 workers.
The American Postal Workers Union also endorsed Biden. It represents another 330,000 workers and is also under the AFL-CIO umbrella. If there was a concerted effort to hinder election mail, the Postal Inspection Service likely wouldn’t notice it in time to stop it and prevent selective delivery of the mail from tipping an election.
In the case of mail-in ballots, USPS union interference might take the form of an effort to target delays in Republican-heavy areas of both mail-in ballot applications and the ballots themselves. But there are other ways to tip the scales through the mailbox: interfere with mailed campaign materials.
A lot of campaign work involves the organization of presorted mail and delivering it to the appropriate post office loading dock. These mailings feature prominent “election mail” tags that are supposed to guarantee that campaign bulk rate mail was treated as first class. It isn’t impossible that unionized postal workers might seek opportunities to “misplace” the mailings of conservative campaigns.
Two years ago, the USPS conducted an audit of election mail and found that some 68,000 pieces of election materials for the Baltimore mayor primary sat undelivered for five days before the June 2 election. This resulted in much of the campaign mail not being delivered until after most Marylanders had already cast their ballots by mail.
Incumbent Democratic Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young placed fifth in the primary. Young was seen as moderate and pro-business. Young raised the most money, but he was beaten by a progressive candidate who enjoyed substantial union support, Brandon Scott. Of the late mail, Young speculated, “That might the reason why I didn’t get a lot of votes.”
In what might have been a case of projection, two months later, Maryland Democrats accused the USPS under President Trump of deliberately slowing mail delivery to sabotage the November election. Notably, the president of Baltimore’s American Postal Workers Union promised, “Your mail will be delivered … you will get your vote counted.”
In May 2022, there was abundant evidence suggesting there was a concerted effort by postal workers to swing runoff elections in Texas. The Texas State House of Representatives District 73 is the 32nd most Republican district of the state’s 150. According to an analysis by “The Texan,” the district has a 71 percent Republican partisan lean — meaning that the real contest is in the Republican primary, as there is little chance of a competitive general election. After a three-way primary, the runoff came down to Barron Casteel and Carrie Isaac. The Casteel campaign received financial support from the largest government workers union in the nation, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), fire and police unions, and the Association of Texas Professional Educators. Given the hard Republican tilt in this district, Casteel would be the best Republican the unions could hope for.
And, as happened in Baltimore in the 2020 primary, delayed campaign mail played a role in this election — though Isaac ended up prevailing by 271 votes out of the 22,207 cast and won by a margin of 1.2 percent.
Interestingly, Republican voters in Hays County reported late mail from the Isaac campaign. In Comal County, Casteel’s home turf, the mail arrived on time. Hays County is served by a sorting center in northeast Austin. Comal County is served out of San Antonio. Isaac’s late pieces featured clear conservative messaging — an endorsement by Sen. Ted Cruz and calls to finish the border wall and to cut property taxes.
Campaign mail today is scanned and tracked. This allowed Isaac’s campaign consultant, Jordan Berry, to know with certainty that six mailers totaling 11,426 pieces targeted at high-propensity Republican households in Hays County were delivered after the election. The six mailers were each dropped on separate days and cost the campaign around $10,000. As might be expected, the late mail had an effect on the election. Isaac, whose husband Jason represented Hays County for eight years, from 2011 to 2019, was expected to win Hays County as it was her home turf. Instead, she narrowly lost to Casteel by 308 votes. In Comal County, where Casteel served as mayor of New Braunfels, Isaac won by 579 votes.
Of the late mail, Berry noted, “Of course, it had a negative effect. The campaign went dark to thousands of voters in the crucial homestretch. And over 15 years of political campaigns, this has never happened to one of our clients. That said, I’ve never seen so much union activity in a Republican primary. This was one of a handful of Republican runoff races where there was a significant difference between the candidates on key issues such as parent empowerment, government unions, and small business policies.”
Labor unions came within a few hundred votes of altering the composition of the Republican caucus in the Texas State House of Representatives, not by campaigning or by deploying manpower but by interfering with the mail. One wonders where else in America this might have happened in the past few years.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.
Alan Moore, author and social critic, asserts in “V for Vendetta” that “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” When a young director in Karachi, Pakistan, adapted “Vendetta” for a live theatrical performance 10 years ago, he repeated the line during the play’s curtain call to raucous applause from the audience. Moore’s simple words reflect poignantly the human desire to be free from government tyranny.
Moore’s statement is widely embraced in the United States, where “the people” are constitutionally vested with power over government. It is doubtful, however, that today’s permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., would concur.
This philosophical divide between the American people and their government is an important one. Should the American people be afraid of the U.S. government? Of course not. Yet a new army of IRS agents that will be used to audit middle-class Americans and a partisan DOJ and FBI that routinely ignore leftist violence while throwing the book at MAGA voters strongly suggest otherwise.
Does the federal government still work for American citizens, or have American citizens become nothing more than subjects expected to obey Washington’s bureaucratic regime? For many Americans, the answer to that question is glaringly obvious.
After Chris Wray’s FBI launched an unprecedented raid of President Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, the director’s immediate concern was not his agency’s appearance of impropriety but the denouncement of his lackeys’ behavior by the American public.
“I’m always concerned about threats to law enforcement,” Wray declared while saying nothing of threats to Americans from federal law enforcement. Who is more of a threat to American liberty: citizens using their constitutionally protected free speech to criticize the FBI or wayward FBI agents acting under the color of law?
Clearly, those with great power represent the greatest threat to freedom. For those such as Wray, who believe the FBI is the real victim, it is the citizen expressing himself who must be held accountable.
Wray’s decision to shield his agents from criticism while obliquely intimidating citizens is hardly a departure from the federal government’s standard operating procedure. Before the Democrats’ recent addition of 87,000 new prying IRS agents to hound American taxpayers, including the hiring of agents who will “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force,” Barack Obama’s IRS was already targeting and harassing conservative organizations.
Why should Americans expect a greatly expanded and well-armed IRS to behave any differently this time?
A similar abuse of power during Obama’s presidency occurred when his Environmental Protection Agency released “sensitive, private, and personal materials on more than 100,000 farmers and ranchers” to outside environmental groups in what was seen as an intentional effort to promote “eco-activist tyranny.” It was not enough for the EPA to harass America’s farmers with endless agricultural, livestock, and water regulations; the agency decided to permit outside “help” to further its interests in enforcing “green” regulations.
Now that congressional Democrats have succeeded in finding a path for greatly expanding the Green New Deal “climate change” agenda, it is likely that the EPA’s harassment of farmers will continue in the future.
The FBI, the IRS, and the EPA are but three agencies with tremendous powers that can be used to intimidate or imperil Americans. There are more than 400 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies within the federal government, and “no one knows definitively how many agencies, components, and commissions exist.”
Each of these authorities is constantly issuing rules, regulations, and guidelines that affect Americans’ rights and liberties without their knowledge. Each of those bodies exercises jurisdiction over the American people in ways that most don’t even realize. Does this sound like a government afraid of its citizens or tyranny?
J.B. Shurk is a freedom-minded, anti-establishment, sometimes unorthodox, committed generalist and a proud American from Daniel Boone country.
The New York Times asked TikTok, a social media app with known connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to censor American users sharing election integrity concerns on its platform.
In a recent article titled, “On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms,” Times writer Tiffany Hsu details how “TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information” ahead of the 2022 midterms, with the issue of voter fraud being a prominent topic shared across the platform. Buried within the article, however, Hsu tacitly reveals that as a result of the Times reaching out to the CCP-connected company, TikTok began censoring users from using a popular hashtag associated with fears about election interference.
“Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month,” the article reads. “Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times.”
Hsu goes on to note the platform’s failure to address the spread of “misinformation” in foreign elections, citing those in France and Australia as examples.
“The app [also] struggled to tamp down on disinformation ahead of last week’s presidential election in Kenya,” Hsu wrote, referencing a report by Odanga Madung, a researcher for the Mozilla Foundation. “Mr. Madung cited a post on TikTok that included an altered image of one candidate holding a knife to his neck and wearing a blood-streaked shirt, with a caption that described him as a murderer. The post garnered more than half a million views before it was removed.”
As reported by Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh, TikTok “is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet company” and “collects an enormous amount of data on its users, including IP addresses, browsing history, and biometric information.” While ByteDance argues that American user data “is safe because it is stored on U.S. soil,” China’s national intelligence law mandates that “all Chinese tech companies must turn over any data they collect if the government demands it.”
“[A] recent BuzzFeed News report, based on leaked internal TikTok meetings, shows that ByteDance’s Chinese employees have repeatedly accessed nonpublic U.S. user data,” Raleigh said. “One employee of TikTok’s trust and safety department said in a September 2021 meeting that ‘Everything is seen in China.’”
The actions by the Times to push TikTok into censoring Americans isn’t the first time the news outlet has played footsy with the CCP. Late last year, the Times faced public backlash after purportedly downplaying the role Chinese leader Xi Jinping played in the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.
“For unknown reasons, the New York Times appears to have intentionally withheld documents that directly linked top Chinese Communist Party officials, including General Secretary Xi Jinping, to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” wrote Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio in a letter to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. “In those now-released ‘Top Secret’ transcripts — documents that the New York Times has allegedly had in its possession since at least 2019 — Xi explicitly authorized changing local counterterrorism laws, rounding up and sentencing Uyghurs, the use of forced sterilization, and the use of slave labor in Xinjiang.”
The paper has since denied such accusations, with Assistant Managing Editor for International Michael Slackman claiming Rubio was “simply wrong on the facts.” But a pattern seems to be emerging.
Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at 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
As reported earlier today, Atlantic contributor Daniel Panneton has published an op-ed in which he claimed that the rosary is now a symbol of extremism. The rosary, of course, is a string of beads or knots that are used by Catholics as they do a series of prayers.
In the article titled, “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” Panneton claimed that “just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics.”
Panneton claimed that “on this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.”
The writer claimed that the “the rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy.”
This is just the latest shameless attack on Christianity and Catholicism by the radical left.
On Monday night FOX News host Rachel Campos-Duffy took on Panneton and the left. Campos-Duffy knows this is open communism.
Rachel Campos-Duffy: There is a long history of this. So the first thing that the Marxists, communists do is they attack religion they have to get rid of it. And by extension they want to get rid of family bond. It’s all because the family and religion are threats to the authoritarian state… Bishop Sheen said if you make it – outlaw believing in God then we should all stand up as criminals.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Concern is growing over Chinese interests purchasing large swaths of land, particularly farmland, in the United States – including one sensitive parcel in North Dakota in the proximity of a military installation.
Investigative reporter Sara Carter told Fox News on Monday that the USDA estimated the CCP government owned about 192,000 acres of U.S. land in 2019, which she added has been augmented since March 2021 with a collective $6.1 billion in land.
“Most of the land is very close to sensitive US military installations,” she told Fox News. “For example, in 2021, 130,000 acres of land was purchased right here in Del Rio, Texas, along the US-Mexico border by a former Chinese military official. That land is very close to Laughlin Air Base. It actually surrounds that sensitive airbase.”
Not only is Laughlin a security concern given Chinese proximity, but the open, uncontrolled U.S.-Mexican border presents another complication, given the amount of Chinese-linked fentanyl is being smuggled in from Mexico, she added.
Xi Jinping (Bikash Dware/The Rising Nepal via AP))
Carter also noted what North Dakota officials are becoming wary about – a Chinese company’s purchase of 370 acres in the vicinity of Grand Forks Air Force Base. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., recently told Fox News the facility houses sensitive drone technology used for space and satellite operations.
Joe Biden meets with China’s President Xi Jinping during a virtual summit from the Roosevelt Room. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Carter told Fox News’ Sean Hannity the most important purchase transacted in Montana near a U.S. nuclear site.
“Right now, the federal government is actually conducting an investigation to see whether those Huawei cell towers were intercepting and could block our communications within our nuclear silos and systems,” she said.
(Fox News)
“This is very concerning. I spoke with U.S. intelligence as well as foreign intelligence officials about this. And they say they’ve been sounding the alarms for quite some time and they’re very concerned that it already might be too late.”
Carter noted much of what would be considered the Chinese private sector are mostly linked to the Chinese Communist Party government anyway, meaning most any purchase of land in the United States is cause for concern toward Beijing.
“[These] massive land grabs by the Chinese government [come via] Chinese firms: Chinese firms connected to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Fox News’ Joshua Nelson contributed to this report.
Charles Creitz is a reporter for Fox News Digital.
Three eyewitnesses claim that five-time NFL Pro Bowler Aqib Talib instigated the Pee Wee football brawl that led to the on-field shooting death of coach Mike Hickmon in Texas.
Early Saturday evening, near the conclusion of a 9-and-under football scrimmage in Lancaster, Hickmon scuffled with opposing coaches representing the North Dallas United Bobcats, a team organized and financed by Talib and his older brother Yaqub Talib. During the melee, witnesses say Hickmon struck Aqib Talib with a yard marker. The fracas ended when a man wearing a black hoodie fired five shots at Hickmon, killing the 43-year-old assistant coach. Lancaster police identified Yaqub Talib as the shooter. Yaqub turned himself in to law enforcement Monday afternoon. Coaches for the Dragon Elite Academy, the team Hickmon served as an assistant coach, blame Aqib Talib for sparking the tragedy.
“Aqib incited the whole uproar,” Dragon Elite coach Kerry Lewis said during a phone interview Monday night. “The game would’ve never been stopped had Aqib not come over to our sideline to yell at the refs.”
Dragon Elite defensive coordinator Marty Barnett added: “Aqib started this. He was the first person to throw a punch. Out of all of the people, he was the one person who could have de-escalated the situation. He was the one person we all would’ve listened to. He could’ve stopped it all.”
Aqib Talib’s attorney, Frank Perez, strongly disputed the accusation that his client sparked the brawl.
“That story is inaccurate,” Perez said Tuesday afternoon. “You need to talk with all of the witnesses, not just the opposing coaches. I will be more than happy to make a statement at the end of the week, when we’ve conducted a full investigation.”
On Monday, TMZ reported that Talib’s lawyer acknowledged Aqib’s presence at the skirmish: “Aqib was present when this unfortunate incident occurred and is very distraught and devastated over this terrible loss of life. … He would like to convey his condolences to the family of the victim and to everyone who witnessed this unfortunate tragedy.”
Here’s how Lewis, Barnett, and a third assistant, Heith Mayes, described the events that led to the fatal shooting.
With approximately six minutes left in the scrimmage, the referees flagged a North Dallas United defensive player for a late hit, giving Dragon Elite a first down. One play later, Dragon Elite scored a go-ahead touchdown.
“Aqib got irate at that point,” Heith Mayes said.
According to Barnett, Lewis, and Mayes, Aqib walked across the football field to confront a referee. Lewis said Aqib threatened the ref. “I oughta sock your bitch ass now,” the assistants remember Aqib barking.
“That’s what was so weird. All of the tension was between them and the refs,” Barnett said. “There was no problem between the coaches. We all know each other. Kerry Lewis and Yaqub have coached together. I followed Aqib’s whole career, starting at Kansas. The other thing is that it was their event. They were the hosts. They hired and paid the refs. The refs weren’t cheating for us.”
According to Barnett, Lewis, and Mayes, the refs called the game with six minutes to play because the North Dallas coaches persisted with verbal threats and profanity. Dragon Elite coaches gathered their players at midfield for the postgame handshake line. Hickmon’s son is the quarterback for the Dragons. His son’s personal football was near the goal line, where it had been placed in anticipation of a 2-point conversion try. Hickmon, who was working the yard marker, went to retrieve his son’s football.
According to Mayes, as Hickmon attempted to pick up the football, a man working the first-down chains kicked the football into an area where the North Dallas coaches were gathered. Hickmon walked to the area with the yard marker in tow. The North Dallas coaches and Hickmon exchanged harsh words. As Hickmon bent over to pick up the ball, according to Mayes, Aqib Talib swung at Hickmon. Hickmon retaliated, striking Talib with the yard marker.
Isolated and surrounded by angry opposing coaches, Hickmon retreated. Video footage shows Hickmon fending off a half-dozen people, including a woman who appears to be Aqib’s wife, with the yard marker. The mob knocked him to the ground. He dropped the pole. As he climbed to his feet, with nothing in his hand, a gunman unloaded five shots.
“There’s no justification for having a weapon at a kids’ football game,” Lewis said. “It’s 90 degrees outside and you’re wearing a black hoodie. None of it makes sense. Our babies were all there. Yaqub’s kids were there. Mike’s kids. Football fields are supposed to be a safe haven for these kids. This is where they go to get away from the street life. They come here to feel safe. It’s not like that any more.”
Aqib Talib was no stranger to trouble during his decorated 12-year NFL career.
In 2008, he engaged in a brawl at the NFL rookie symposium. In 2009, he was arrested after an altercation with a taxi driver. In 2011, Aqib and his mother were suspected of firing a gun at his sister’s boyfriend. In 2016, Talib attacked Tennessee Titans receiver Harry Douglas on the sideline. After the game, Talib told reporters that he would “beat Douglas’ ass” the next time he saw him at their agent’s office. In 2017, Aqib and Raiders receiver Michael Crabtree had an ugly on-field skirmish. Aqib snatched a gold chain from Crabtree’s neck.
In 2014, Dallas police mistakenly announced that they arrested Aqib for public intoxication and throwing bottles inside a nightclub. Police had to retract the announcement when they realized they’d arrested his brother, Yaqub.
One final note: Mike Hickmon’s sister, Jennifer Hickmon, was murdered in July 2020. Yesterday, I reported she had been murdered in July 2021.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The FBI search warrant authorizing a government raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence sought an exhaustive list of any White House records the president ever came in contact with, according to the document obtained by The Federalist.
Outlining the “property to be seized” by the more than 30 agents who rummaged through the former president’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, the warrant demanded confiscation of any document Trump ever saw, read, or created for the entirety of his four years as commander-in-chief.
“All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation” of federal statutes governing records possession, the warrant reads, were to be seized. Records extended to “Any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.”
In other words, had Trump written something down on a napkin, federal officials were authorized to raid the former president’s home and capture it.
The affidavit allegedly asserting probable cause has not been made available to the public by the DOJ or the federal court that sealed it. The search warrant was signed on Aug. 5 and gave authorities two weeks to conduct the unprecedented raid. The federal magistrate who signed the warrant previously donated thousands to former President Barack Obama. Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination was invalidated after Donald Trump became president in 2017, acknowledged that he personally signed off on the raid in a Thursday press conference. Garland also claimed the search was conducted with a narrow scope.
“First, I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said. “Second, the department does not take such a decision lightly. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”
On Monday, three days after the warrant was signed, FBI officials conducted the hours-long raid of the 128-room estate which reportedly included an intrusive search of former First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe. While ostensibly executed under the pretext of violations of the Presidential Records Act, a law that rarely results in prosecutions, the raid has become the latest episode of Democrats weaponizing the Justice Department to go after political opponents, with Trump at the top as public enemy No. 1.
According to Fox News, law enforcement officials say they confiscated classified documents. Trump, however, says documents were declassified.
“Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” the former president said on TruthSocial. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request… They could have had it anytime they wanted–and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans.
She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation.
She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which she’s been prosecuted and investigated now for three years and will be in court again this November. Her case could affect international law and is a foreboding example of where identity politics policies are quickly heading across the world.
“If we break the gender system and if we break the natural marriage system between one man and one woman, then we have dangerous consequences, especially to children,” Paivi told The Federalist in person this summer in Chicago.
This woman of science also firmly believes in supernatural revelation. In her pamphlet on Christian marriage that Finland’s top prosecutor is seeking to ban as “hate speech,” Paivi writes that “Jesus’s death and resurrection is the core of the entire Christian faith. On this the Bible stands or falls. If one does not believe it, there is nothing left of Christianity. And … if I believe this, it follows logically that I must believe everything else Christ teaches in the Bible through the Apostles and Prophets.”
Paivi speaking to a sold-out audience of Christians in Chicago, Illinois, this summer. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
Persecution Spreads the Gospel
As it has often in history, persecution has created global opportunities for Paivi to spread Christian theology: about sex, its design for lasting human happiness, and Christianity’s warm welcome to those struggling with every kind of sin from the God “who hates nothing He has made.” The 2004 booklet “Male and Female He Created Them,” which prosecutors want to ban entirely and fine Paivi for writing, has gone from a few copies in a few conservative Lutheran churches to translated into half a dozen languages and read all over the world.
Rasanen’s 2004 booklet, printed from the online PDF and in its new second edition distributed worldwide.
Paivi and her husband Niilo (nee-loh) spoke this June in Budapest alongside megastar Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his wife. Paivi said she’s seen especially strong support from Eastern European countries because many there still remember the Communists interrogating people about the Bible, as Finnish police did to Paivi three times for a total of 13 hours.
The Rasanens flew to Chicago right after Budapest so Paivi could speak at the sold-out Christian “Issues, Etc.” conference on June 25. In pearls, a flowered dress, and silvered golden hair, the petite 62-year-old asked the American crowd to pray that her case would “allow for more chances to preach the gospel in public.”
Rasanen’s case is on appeal in Finland and may end up in the European Court of Human Rights, developing precedents that could affect the world. If she loses in court, Paivi told a Christian outlet last year, “It will also affect religious freedom in other Western countries. LGBT groups have a very good network across national borders. They will try to achieve the same in other countries in Europe.”
In Q&A after her talk, Paivi said Finnish Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen is expected to push the case as far as possible because Toiviainen has said identity politics is her top priority. Paivi’s legal help from Alliance Defending Freedom International has told The Federalist they are also prepared to appeal her case as far as possible should she lose.
Image courtesy Issues, Etc.
Persecution Amplifies Word of God’s Mercy for Sinners
Toiviainen claims agreeing with the Bible that sodomy is a sin is a criminal expression of hatred toward homosexuals. Paivi and her legal team have pointed out that if the court interprets the law this way, it will effectively outlaw Christianity and free speech in Finland.
Rather than rejecting homosexuals, as she’s been accused in court, Paivi glows with happiness when relating that gay people have disclosed her “Bible trial” has brought them to faith. In speeches and court testimony, Paivi has emphasized she not only bears no animosity toward homosexuals or transsexuals, she earnestly desires them to join her Christian family by receiving the eternal life that Jesus Christ offers freely to every person.
Paivi has been dragged into European courts and smeared in the press for years as a spewer of “hate speech.” Yet while battling severe jet lag that her husband said often gives her migraines, Paivi expressed not even a flicker of animosity toward her persecutors in Chicago.
Instead, when The Federalist asked if her three-year-and-counting prosecution might be orchestrated by political enemies, she seemed stumped. She conferred with her husband and finally suggested she was simply an easy target as a well-known figure in Finland.
“In all my career I have been known as a Christian and as a biblical Christian who doesn’t accept abortion and homosexual acts and so on,” Paivi told The Federalist. “And that’s why I think that perhaps it is the reason why the prosecutor has targeted just me.”
Family Unites to Fight for Other Families
Acknowledging the Biblical directive that only men serve as pastors has never tied Paivi to the kitchen — although perhaps she’d like to retire there given the suffering her political career has inflicted. Niilo prodded Paivi into running for office nearly three decades ago to try to stop Finland from forcing doctors like her to perform abortions, they told The Federalist.
Niilo Rasanen is a pastor and theology professor at a Lutheran Bible college. Niilo’s widowed mother lived with the couple while their children were young, and Paivi’s parents moved nearby and “helped a lot,” Paivi said. That, with Niilo’s flexibility while earning his doctorate, allowed Paivi to enter public service without sacrificing their children’s needs, they said.
During the five years when Niilo was writing his dissertation, “he was always at home when the children came home” from school, Paivi noted. Paivi and Niilo occasionally pulled out their phones to translate Finnish words into English or check they were using the right words, but Finns learn at least two foreign languages in school, Swedish and English.
Niilo and Paivi Rasanen in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2022. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
In response to a question from the Chicago audience, Paivi revealed threats against her family. When she campaigned against child pornography, she said, a convicted pedophile entered their front yard and threatened their children: “It was quite a difficult time because we had to keep safe our children and they were a little bit afraid many years after that.” The most violent of the recent threats include a rape threat against her son, she said.
These external threats may have helped strengthen family bonds. Paivi and Niilo’s faces light up when they talk about their now-grown children, whom the Rasanens say are a great joy and regularly text their parents Bible verses and prayers.
“The task is communal, we do it together,” Niilo said of their marriage and family. “It has been so busy and hard time in this politic area — very, very busy, very long days. If you are not doing it together, it will not work.”
“I think what has been a great power in our life is that we have felt that these callings and tasks that we have, that they are common,” Paivi added.
From Church Only at Christmas to Global Witness
Born in 1959, Paivi grew up in a remote area near Finland’s border with Sweden, in the village of Konnunsuo. Her father was the agricultural director for a prison there. He oversaw the prisoners raising vegetables and animals to feed and support themselves. Paivi remembers as a girl watching piglets being born.
Her parents went to church only at Christmas, she said, but she learned the Bible from Sunday School and at prison church services. Her family also hosted missionaries to the prison, and they explained Christianity to Paivi and her two younger siblings.
A skilled student, especially in mathematics, young Paivi read all the books in her tiny village library that was open only two hours per week, she said. An adult biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish scientist Marie Curie particularly inspired Paivi: “I admired her. I thought that I would like to be like her, to do something great.”
At the University of Helsinki, she studied both mathematics and medicine for a half year, but it was too much. So Paivi decided to focus on medicine because “I wanted to work with people.”
Organizing up to 70 Christian students for five years of weekly door-to-door evangelism in university deepened her faith, Paivi told The Federalist: “It was a very important time for me because there were students from different faculties and I had to defend my views, and I had to know [the] Bible because they asked difficult questions.”
She met Niilo doing summer missionary work among immigrants in London, and they married in February 1985, a year after Paivi started working as a doctor. They welcomed their children in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996.
Because Paivi kept organizing debates and speakers about abortion among fellow medical students and doctors, the Christian Democrat political party asked her to run for office. The Christian Democrats are a small party that focuses on faith and family. From 2011 to 2015, Paivi served as Finland’s Minister of the Interior as part of a coalition government.
She Fights Like a Woman
Paivi has fought steadfastly not by disposition, but by compunction. She and Niilo chuckled quietly when noting that in university, she flatly refused all public speaking offers and leadership positions.
In person, the two Finns are true to type and their “Minnesota nice” American cousins: polite, soft-spoken, and deferential. In Chicago, Paivi and Niilo attempted for some 15 minutes to get the Uber app to work on their Finnish cell phones before they could be prevailed upon by this journalist to accept a ride.
She would have walked the mile to the conference, Paivi assured, as they had the day before, but that morning’s rain would bedraggle her hair and dress right before her speech. After a bit of emotional discomfort at allegedly imposing, followed by a quick, rain-unaffected arrival, Paivi laughed softly, expressed thanks, and commented that this would be a good anecdote for The Federalist profile.
Paivi Rasanen during audience Q&A in Chicago. Because English is a second language for Paivi, she was given the written questions in advance.
Although she’s a public figure who regularly appears on TV, including a variety show that dressed her in a bear costume to sing to her grandchildren (she showed photographic evidence), Paivi habitually asks for others’ thoughts rather than discussing her own. It’s yet another contradiction to women’s mag-celebrated attributes: expressing her femininity not only doesn’t abrade Paivi’s character, it complements it.
Paivi doesn’t assert herself as a “girl boss” who assumes masculine prosthetics, despite years of public leadership that could have taught her to do so. Her apparent emotional security in being the woman God made her bestows its own authority and charm.
Only Men and Women Fit Perfectly Together
That acceptance of one’s sex as a gift from God is also a foundation of the theological booklet that helped land Paivi in court indefinitely. Cultural Marxism foments a war between the sexes, but the Bible teaches that love means total self-giving: Husbands sacrifice everything to love their wives, and wives submit to their husbands as they do to God. The true war is not between the sexes, but against them, and in war clear chains of command are necessary to protect everyone.
The 1960s feminist war fomented between the sexes has now expanded into a war on sex itself. Now even recognizing the differences between men and women and the exclusive fertility of natural marriage is heading toward being criminalized across the West, and with it the Christianity that protects and celebrates these natural realities.
When she wrote the booklet, Paivi was already well-known as a Christian member of Parliament representing Hame, a rural Finnish province about an hour north of Helsinki. Pastor Juhana Pohjola, elected bishop of Finland’s non-state Lutheran church in 2021, had asked Rasanen to respond to proposals for government licensing of homosexual relationships. Here was a government endorsement of severing natural biological bonds between parents and children that raised both political and theological concerns.
Rasanen’s resulting 24-page booklet is a succinct summary of Christian sexual ethics. “People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms,” Rasanen writes in the English translation.
“No choice of policies is ethically neutral,” she notes. “…In actuality, the acceptance of homosexual partnerships meant a more profound change in values than was willingly acknowledged at the time.” For example, she notes, in Finland, those proposing a homosexual partnerships act promised it would affect adults only. Yet immediately after the act passed, the proponents moved to make taxpayers pay for lesbians to be artificially inseminated and for homosexual couples to adopt children who could never know either a father or mother.
The act’s proponents also promised that Finland’s state church could maintain Christianity’s historic teachings if state recognition of homosexual couples passed. Paivi’s trial today, under a law passed seven years after the booklet was published, directly refutes that claim. It also highlights how impossible it is to reconcile the hard-won natural law framework that protects everyone equally with the identity politics that provides special rights to only government-favored groups.
Seeking an Internet Interdiction
Writing the booklet is one of three charges Toiviainen has filed against Paivi. It forms the sole count against Pohjola, the pastor who published the booklet. The two other counts against Paivi relate to her tweet of a Bible verse at the nominally Lutheran state church for sponsoring a homosexual pride parade and comments in a public radio debate she participated in years ago.
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?” #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?" #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier https://t.co/0GEJ5tZEb6
In 2019, several Finns lodged complaints against Paivi’s tweet. Police investigated, interrogating Paivi about her beliefs three times. Although the police ultimately recommended against prosecuting Paivi, prosecutors sifted through her three-decade public record. They dug up the three alleged hate crimes and charged her.
The charges against Paivi fall under the legal category of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The prosecutors have asked for Paivi’s writings and audio clips to be completely banned from the internet and for her, Pohjola, and his church to be fined up to a third of their annual incomes, but courts could put Paivi in prison for up to six years if she’s found guilty. Pohjola could be imprisoned for up to two years.
During Paivi and Pohjola’s trial in early 2022, thousands of Finnish supporters gathered in Helsinki outside the court. Free speech supporters in other countries rallied at Finnish embassies. The American Family Research Council sent Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey detained for two years for preaching Christianity, to give Paivi a pledge of prayers from Christians around the world. U.S. members of Congress, international human rights groups, and coalitions of religious believers have also petitioned the Finnish government to stop prosecuting Rasanen and Pohjola’s human rights to free speech and religious exercise.
“It is important that we have the freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Paivi told The Federalist in Chicago. “Freedom of speech because it is important for everyone. It is important for every minority and majority. For Christians, it is crucial because we have the commandments of Jesus to tell the good gospel to all people…”
“Also I think that it is important to respect in society also everyone’s right to speak and argue and oppose you,” she continued. “So this is [a] fundamental issue.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Atlantic contributor Daniel Panneton has published an op-ed in which he claimed that the rosary is now a symbol of extremism.
The rosary, of course, is a string of beads or knots that are used by Catholics as they do a series of prayers. In the article titled, “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” Panneton claimed that “just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics.”
Panneton claimed that “on this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.”
The writer claimed that the “the rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy.”
Panneton noted that the rosary, a weapon against evil, is often shown in memes and merchandise alongside guns and imagery celebrating a warrior mentality.
“The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength,” Panneton wrote. “This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled ‘Into the Breach,’ which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series promoting Olmsted’s ideas.”
The article went on to attack people who wish to defend their church and family.
“But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders,” he noted.
The op-ed was widely mocked online, particularly in a Catholic subreddit.
“It would be even more hilarious if people started praying the rosary outside his house in Toronto (so he can see them praying) for the salvation of his soul,” one user wrote.
Another replied, “Calling the police, ‘there are armed extremists outside my home!!’”
Cassandra Fairbanks is a former leftist who came out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. She has been published in the International Business Times, RT, Sputnik, The Independent and countless other publications.
Multiple conservative organizations penned an open letter Friday, sharply criticizing Department of Justice (DOJ) Attorney General Merrick Garland and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray for politicizing both agencies. The letter, exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller, was signed by individuals representing organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Media Research Center, and the Leadership Institute. The contents of the letter called for the release of all documents related to the raid on President Trump’s home in Florida as well as the confiscation of Congressman Scott Perry’s cellphone, stating both actions “undermined the rule of law in America.”
“In overseeing these actions, you and FBI Director Christopher Wray have grossly failed in your mission to oversee an impartial and equal application of the law,” the letter reads.
WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 12: FBI director nominee Christopher Wray testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 12, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
The letter stipulated several other examples of what the organizations claimed pointed to a “politicized” DOJ and FBI, including labeling parents at school board meetings domestic terrorists, perpetuating the Russia collusion narrative about Trump and turning a blind eye to the crimes of Hunter Biden.
“Under your leadership and that of Mr. Wray, the DOJ and FBI have breached the public trust. This blatant politicization of the federal justice system is a dangerous escalation without precedent, and incompatible with the United States Constitution,” the letter said.
“Accordingly, we, the undersigned hereby demand that you immediately make public all underlying information relied upon or referenced in both the warrants executed against former President Trump and Congressman Perry this week,” the letter concluded.
The FBI raided Trump’s home in Florida last week, in an apparent effort to retrieve classified documents the former president had allegedly taken with him when he left the White House. The FBI obtained 11 sets of classified documents from Trump’s house, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller Friday.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
LGBT rainbow flags fly outside of Mr. Misster, a gay bar in Dallas, Texas. | The Christian Post
The Texas comptroller said the state has opened an investigation into a Dallas bar that held a drag show for children earlier this summer.
In a statement released Friday, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar identified himself as one of many Texas parents who found themselves “disturbed by the recent images showing children participating in a drag show in the Dallas area, including one of a child placing money in a performer’s undergarment.”
The drag show in question, which was dubbed as a “family-friendly pride experience” called “Drag the Kids to Pride,” took place at Mr. Misster bar in Dallas on June 4.
“I know this is a concerning issue for many Texans, and the images circulating are certainly inconsistent with our Texas values,” he added. “Though my office does not typically comment on ongoing investigations, the recent public discussion surrounding this specific entity demands a response.”
Hegar assured concerned Texans that “my office had already begun the process of investigating this specific event, as well as working to determine if the establishment is liable for the Sexually Oriented Business Fee (SOBF) under Chapter 102 of the Business Code.”
Hegar’s announcement came one day after Republican state Rep. Bryan Slaton called on Hegar to treat Mr. Misster as a “sexually-oriented business.” As Slaton explained, “Sexually-oriented businesses are required to pay $5 per attendee present and they must also prevent children and sex offenders from attending or participating.”
Drag shows are no place for a child.
Today I’m calling in @Glenn_Hegar to do what he can to enforce existing law and protect Texas kids while I work with my colleagues in the Texas Legislature.
Slaton emerged as an outspoken opponent of the idea of drag shows for kids when news of the “Drag the Kids to Pride” event at Mr. Misster first broke in early June. At the time, Slaton vowed to introduce legislation that would ban drag shows for minors as soon as the next session of the Texas legislature began. Two months later, the state lawmaker has described any action by Hegar as a temporary measure to “enforce existing law and protect Texas kids while I work with my colleagues in the Texas Legislature.”
Drag shows are no place for a child.
I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Video footage from the event shows a performer dressed in red leather drag taking tips from small children as he suggestively danced under a sign that read, “It’s not going to lick itself.” A description of the June 4 drag show on Eventbrite promoted the availability of “Mr. Misster Mocktails” for guests under the age of 21 while highlighting “FIVE limited spots for young performers to take the stage solo, or with a queen of their choosing.”
Following Hegar’s public statement indicating his intention to investigate the drag show for kids, Slaton praised the state comptroller for his “strong leadership on this important issue.” The state lawmaker asserted that “when it comes to protecting children from grotesque content, Texans deserve lawmakers who will stand up for our children’s innocence.”
“Any business that allows kids to attend an event of a sexual nature should be held accountable, and I am proud of Glenn Hegar for taking steps in that direction,” he remarked. “Like many Texans, I am eagerly awaiting the results of his investigation. I will continue working toward passing legislation to ensure children are never again subjected to these events.”
In an earlier statement to The Christian Post, a spokesperson for Mr. Misster lamented that the attention the establishment received due to the outcry over the “Drag the Kids to Pride” event led to hundreds of “threatening emails, messages and phone calls” as well as protesters “yelling in kids’ faces, calling them a variety of homophobic slurs, throwing trash at them and trying to get in fights with parents.”
“We are sad to see that an event that was [supposed] to be a moment of pride for these LGBTQ+ families and their children is being interpreted as anything other than it was, a family-friendly event. … We are thankful that [the Dallas Police Department] stepped in to control the unruly protestors and we are saddened by the unjust actions that these protestors displayed.”
CP reached out to Mr. Misster for comment on Texas state officials’ attempts to probe whether or not to impose a “sexually-oriented business fee” on their establishment. A response was not received by press time.
The controversy surrounding the Drag Your Children to Pride Event comes as the prevalence of Drag Queen Story Hours targeted toward young children at some public libraries has raised concern among parents throughout the U.S. At the same time, public schools’ embrace of LGBT ideology, including many public schools’ participation in “Jazz & Friends” Reading Day, has also raised alarm among parental rights activists.
As part of the Jazz & Friends National Day of School and Community Readings earlier this year, schools across the U.S. partnered with the LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign to read books about trans-identified children to students. In addition to I am Jazz, a semi-autobiographical tale about trans-identified activist Jazz Jennings, recommended reading for the day included CALVIN: Time to Be Me!
“Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl. He knows who he is in his heart and in his mind, but he hasn’t yet told his family. Finally, he can wait no longer,” a description for the book reads. A lesson plan for the day advises teachers to tell students that “gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and that we all express ourselves in many different ways along that spectrum.”
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Democrats’ new reconciliation bill isn’t just going to be the largest-ever expansion of a government agency, it’s going to be the largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history. Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already collects $4.1 trillion every year—or $12,300 for every citizen—needs 80 new battalions of new IRS cops.
The average American has less reason to be concerned about cops with guns—though the IRS is looking for special agents who can “Carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary”— than they do bureaucrats armed with pens who are authorized to sift through their lives. If you pay your taxes you have nothing to worry, Democrats claim. But most law-abiding citizen know they have something to fear from a state agency that doesn’t concern itself with your due process, has no regard for your privacy, and is empowered to target anyone it wants without any genuine oversight.
And, please, spare us this nonsense about the IRS expansion focusing exclusively on “high earners.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised that the IRS wouldn’t engage in new audits of anyone making under $400,000—a claim she has no authority to make and could not possibly predict even if she did. Connecticut’s Chris Murphy also said that the bill was passed to stop an “epidemic of tax cheating amongst the millionaires and billionaires” and promised that “audit rates won’t increase for anyone making under $400K.”
This is a lie. Nothing in the bill that Democrats passed through the Senate limits audits. Murphy, along with every other Democrat in the Senate, voted against a Republican amendment that would have prevented new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less than $400,000 of taxable income. Not long ago, Democrats passed the “American Rescue Plan Act”—which had as much to do with rescuing as the “Inflation Reduction Act” has to do with reducing inflation—and changed tax code so that mobile payment apps like Venmo and Cash App were now required to report transactions totaling $600 or more per year to the IRS. Does that sound like a party aiming fire exclusively at high-earning Americans?
Indeed, poor and middle-class Americans are far more likely to do their own taxes, and thus more prone to making mistakes. In 2021, those making $25,000 or less (often the young and elderly) were audited at a rate five times higher than everyone else. The wealthier you are the more likely it is that you can hire lawyers and accountants to work within the system. There aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires in the world to keep a potential new 87,000 new IRS employees busy.
There are other overlooked aspects of the Democrats’ IRS expansion. The bill, for instance, strengthens the federal public-sector union monopoly that funds Democrats’ political aspirations. IRS and Treasury Department employees spent 353,820 hours engaged in union activism—their PAC gives every cent to the Democrats—in 2019. One can imagine what another 87,000 employees would do for that effort. In the real world, laundering taxpayer funds through unions and using them on political campaigns is called racketeering.
None of this is to say that everyone who works for IRS is corrupt or power-hungry or an ideologue. The unassailable rules of giant bureaucracies, however, are that they always experience mission creep, they always do enough to justify their funding, and sooner or later, their leaders become political operatives.
With that said, it’s worth remembering that the IRS doesn’t simply collect taxes, it enforces speech codes. This is what empowered Lois Lerner to target conservatives groups – “crazies and “a—holes” — who used words like “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their names. But, even at the time, leftists at The New York Times editorial board praised the IRS for going after conservative groups because they did not “primarily” engage in “social welfare,” and so did not deserve an exemption under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Has anything in the evolution of the Democratic Party given you confidence that such power would not be abused or that an engorged IRS would be immune from political pressure?
Wrestling with a insanely complex tax code — nearly 8 million words — costs Americans billions every year. Rather than flattening and simplifying this astonishingly convoluted code, which not only would have saved citizens but the government money, Democrats decided we needed up to another 87,000 people to enforce it.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post, and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Democrats just doubled the size of a major Democratic war chest. Yes, remember those 87,000 new IRS agents that will be added to the federal payroll thanks to the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (a misnomer if there ever was one)? The vast majority of those agents will likely join and pay dues to the IRS’ public sector union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).
Per Americans for Tax Reform, the union gave 100% of its Political Action Committee (PAC) funding to Democrats for the 2022 cycle, including $30,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $30,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $30,000 to the DNC Services Corporation, a group dedicated to “coordinating party organizational activities.”
It also gave 98.79% of its federal candidate spending for the 2021-2022 cycle to Democrats, most notably House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The NTEU specifically prioritized donating to key Democratic battleground races, such as donating $5,000 to Raphael Warnock’s Georgia Senate race and $10,000 to Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).
And that’s not all. In 2019, it was reported that IRS employees spent 353,820 hours of taxpayer-funded union time (TFUT) on the job. That means during a normal workday, instead of assisting taxpayers with filing their taxes, IRS agents spent hours working for an entity that spends 100% of its PAC funding on Democrats. This is an organization where if you call them, you have a 1-in-50 chance of reaching an actual human being. Those 353,820 hours could have been used to help taxpayers instead of strengthening a public sector union.
As Aaron Withe, CEO of Freedom Foundation, put it, taxpayer dollars are being used to “double the size of an agency that has already weaponized itself against those taxpayers it deems its political opponents.”
By doubling the size of the IRS, Democrats are doubling the number of dues the NTEU receives, dues that will be funneled to bankroll Democratic political campaigns. NTEU dues range from $16 to $23 per pay period. If all 87,000 new IRS agents were forced to unionize, the number of dues collected would amount to at least $33,351,168 per year — all ripe for the taking by Democrats. How clever.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
If you want to know what the establishment’s all-seeing eye is maniacally fixated on, the amount of energy the corporate media orcs spend bludgeoning “Christian nationalists” provides a clue. Over the past 48 months, there have been dozens of hit jobs on the terror of “Christian nationalism”; there have been about a score of these smear pieces just this past month alone.
Their Pavlovian function is to condition Americans to associate the term with a bunch of extremists and racists who pose a Hitleresque threat to this country’s democratic institutions so that they will dutifully freak out. These articles rely on the same tactics: straw man arguments that misrepresent both Christianity and nationalism, and phony attempts to depict the movement as white.
“Christian Nationalism is an un-Christian concept,”opines the New York Times. The Christian right “is beginning to part with democratic norms,”laments NPR. “Christian nationalism has a long dark history … of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi party,”warns MSNBC. “The movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America,”explains CNN.
The trusted media sources who sold you Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation hoax, and “transitory” inflation, are at least this time right about one thing: Christian nationalism is real, and it’s gaining traction. It’s biblical, it’s America First, but it’s not “white.” It’s not about a white supremacist “Christian Taliban” installing a theocracy, idolizing the nation, or in any way rewriting this country’s great Republican constitutional model.
In fact, Christian nationalism is entirely consistent with that model. The Declaration of Independence vests the sovereign power with the people, on loan to the government, and entrusts the state with the responsibility of safeguarding the individual’s Creator-endowed rights. In asserting that “the United Colonies are and ought to be Free and Independent States,” the signers appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions” and committed themselves to “the protection of Divine Providence.” If nationalists believe that government should prioritize the interests of the country and the people, Christian nationalists believe, as did the Founders, they should do so under the banner of God.
The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.
It also envisages, from Genesis to Isaiah, from the Gospels to the Book of Revelation, the conversion of whole nations or peoples, and warns of the inevitable harm of instead embracing a culture of idolatry, depravity, and deceit. Hence, we read in Proverbs that “a nation without God’s guidance is a nation without order.”
The biblical message of rightly ordered praise, an objective standard of morality, and free will is a steadying hand, tempering the self-interest of nationalism and the reactionary tendencies of its close cousin populism. When, on the other hand, generic nationalism is shaped by the coercive and unobstructed power of a godless, behemoth administrative state, grave problems arise.
This was the story of early 20th-century Germany. Hitler was not a Christian nationalist but an illiberal, anti-capitalist, anti-religious national socialist. Hitler’s New Order was the culmination of a decades-long counter-Renaissance revolution in Germany. The enemy — one they shared with communists — was the essence of Western civilization: liberal democracy, the individual man qua man, and the majesty of God.
In his 1944 book “Road to Serfdom,” the Viennese Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich von Hayek warned not to repeat Germany’s fate by implementing the same policies of big government, central planning, collectivism, social engineering, and the subjugation of the individual to the will of the omnipotent state. Hayek’s concern was not Hitler’s nationalism per se, but his socialism.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippman similarly warned about the “cult of the Providential state.” He wrote that a generation no longer looking confidently to God for the regulation of human affairs is now realizing what happens “when men retreat from freedom to a coercive organization of their affairs.”
Today, Americans are reaching the same conclusion, with evidence indicating a collapse in support for the Democrats’ socialist, America-last agenda. Economically, Americans recognize that the manipulation of the energy sector in the name of the bogus Green New Deal is driving up gas prices. They’re also blaming Biden’s economic mismanagement for record high inflation, a crisis the administration is now exploiting to expand the IRS by more than six times its current annual budget. Voters are losing interest in spending billions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty when the U.S.’s own southern border is being overrun by human and drug traffickers, sex offenders, and violent criminals.
Socially, Americans are trending toward family policies that reflect a conservative, Judeo-Christianworldview: honoring the nuclear family and parental rights, ensuring medical freedom, and fiercely protecting the innocence of children.
As much as the left fetishizes skin color, none of this is about race, although different racial groups are feeling the pain in various ways. The Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels is affecting both the Native Americans whose resource-rich tribal lands bring wealth and employment to Native communities, and the predominately white Americans employed in mining, oil, and gas extraction.
Hispanics, more than any other ethnic or racial group, want the southern border closed and are registering their disapproval by flipping former Democrat strongholds on the southern border red. And with an exponential increase in business ownership to approximately 12 percent of the 27.6 million total U.S. businesses, they’re understandably not impressed by Biden’s economic performance, an assessment 60 percent of black voters agree with. Parents across all racial groups overwhelmingly favor initiatives such as school vouchers and education savings accounts.
Not surprisingly then, elections in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Arizona, and Michigan, reveal a gravitation toward populist candidates united not by their race or gender but by their Christian, America First principles. The message is one of decency, not degeneracy, prosperity, not pauperdom, and self-determination, not serfdom.
It’s this love of God, country, and freedom trifecta that has the enemy screeching like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s a winning formula, and the establishment fears it, which is why its hordes in the press keep militantly pounding away at those racist white supremacists every chance they get.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
Indiana Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz blasted the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home this week, calling the move “KGB-style tactics.” Spartz was not just saying that either, she grew up in the former Soviet Union before emigrating to the United States. Her comments ring true because that’s just the way it came off to millions of Americans. It looked like something that happens in other countries, not America.
‘KGB-style tactics’: Congresswoman born in USSR blasts FBI raid
Following the FBI’s Monday morning raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago, Indiana GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, who grew up in the Soviet Union, likened the Bureau’s operation to those of the KGB, the USSR’s notorious secret police and intelligence force.
“As a U.S. Congresswoman who grew up in the USSR, the FBI raid of President Trump’s home is alarming. It is reminiscent of KGB-style tactics,” Spartz told the Epoch Times. Spartz was born in Nosivka, in the Chernihiv region of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now in independent Ukraine.
FBI agents from the Washington Field Office raided the former president’s home on Monday reportedly in search of classified documents he may have removed from the White House. Trump himself said the FBI’s actions signaled the country was declining into the political instability commonly associated with developing nations…
Spartz made an appeal for Americans to look beyond partisanship and recognize the threat that political persecution poses to the political system, saying “[r]egardless of people’s feelings about President Trump, this should not be acceptable in a democratic society.”
Spartz also mentioned this on Twitter:
I had never met President Trump while he was in office but noticed as a state senator his stamina to challenge the status quo which I liked
What I see now as a US Congresswoman who grew up in USSR is not just troublesome but alarming – KGB style politicshttps://t.co/lAFNetx49d
A senior Justice Department official condemned the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as a “spectacular backfire” for triggering a tsunami of backlash against the Justice Department. Two senior DOJ officials spoke with Newsweek and disclosed new details about what led up to the raid. According to one official, the FBI specifically planned to conduct the raid when former President Donald Trump was not present at Mar-a-Lago. Trump was in New York at the time of the raid, Fox News reported.
“What a spectacular backfire,” the senior DOJ official said of the FBI’s attempt to keep the raid “low-key.”
“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official explained. “They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”
The second DOJ official told Newsweek the FBI “were seeking to avoid any media circus” but “they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”
The officials explained the FBI had been planning the raid for weeks after receiving information from a confidential source about allegedly classified documents being stored at Mar-a-Lago. Newsweek reported the informant both identified the documents and told investigators where they were located. Importantly, the sources told Newsweek that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not have advance knowledge about the specifics of the raid. Instead, FBI Director Christopher Wray approved the raid.
“I know it’s hard for people to believe,” one of the DOJ officials said, “but this was a matter for the U.S. attorney and the FBI.”
Despite claims that Garland was not involved in the planning of the raid, Republican lawmakers are demanding that Garland and Wray face repercussions for the unprecedented raid.
“I’ve never been a fan of overusing impeachment, but I think there has to be an investigation. And if it warrants it, there’s going to have to be a look at whether or not the attorney general has misused his office for political purposes. Have they gone after a political opponent? I mean, this is beyond the pale,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on Fox News.
“At a minimum, Garland must resign or be impeached. The search warrant must be published. Christoper Wray must be removed. And the FBI reformed top to bottom,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.
A Florida sheriff has reassured parents that children will be kept safe in the upcoming school year, announcing that deputies in Brevard County will be equipped with rifles and tactical gear to make schools “hard targets” for would-be shooters. In a Facebook video posted Monday, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey detailed school safety measures local police stations have taken after the deadly mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“Folks, let me be very clear. You are not coming in to my schools and killing our children. I firmly believe that if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed,” Ivey said. “My goal is to avoid ever having to face a threat on one of our campuses by being better prepared, better armed, and better trained than anyone else, and especially someone thinking about harming our children or our teachers.”
Ivey announced that school resource deputies with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office will be given new uniforms with a “tactical appearance that clearly signifies we mean business when it comes to protecting our children.” Officers will also be permitted to carry rifles on campus, changing a policy that Ivey said previously required his deputies to keep their long guns locked in a gun safe within their parked patrol cars.
“This new style uniform and tactical preparedness gives our team members the advantage and ability to instantly address the threat with the level of force necessary to eliminate the shooter and save the lives of innocent children and teachers,” he explained.
“While there will be those that perhaps don’t understand this new tactical approach to keeping our kids safe, it is my prayer that this new level of preparedness and immediate ability to address the threat will prevent an active shooter from ever walking onto one of our campuses and trying to harm a child,” Ivey said.
A North Carolina school district recently adopted similar school safety measures. Madison County Schools, near Asheville, North Carolina, announced Friday that AR-15 rifles would be kept on campus locked in safes for school resource officers to access if there’s ever a shooting event.
“Having a deputy just armed with a handgun isn’t enough to stop these animals,” Sheriff Buddy Harwood said, according to WLOS-TV. “That’s why I’ve decided to arm all of my school resource officers with AR-15 rifles.”
Though the local superintendent and county board support the sheriff’s new policy, it is opposed by UNC Chapel Hill education professor Dr. Dorothy Espelage. She said she’s conducted decades of research on school safety and determined that “hardening” schools could lead to accidents and increased juvenile arrests.
“What’s going to happen is we’re going to have accidents with these guns,” Espelage told WLOS. “Just the presence of an SRO increases violence in the schools. There’re more arrests of kids. Why is it that they have to have these AR-15s? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Harwood said the AR-15s would be locked in an undisclosed location within safes paid for by the county.
Oklahoma parents demanded that sexually explicit books be removed from the public school libraries in their district, but others argued to keep them. The parents made their objections known at the monthly meeting of the Stillwater Board of Education on Monday.
Stillwater resident Karen Flack cited the book, “The Truth About Alice,” which is a book about a hypocritical woman protesting against abortion clinics while her daughter has an abortion.
“I just feel there is no need for this in our libraries,” Flack said. “This is just not appropriate. To me, it’s like if you had a section of video pornography for kids to check out. Wish you would find out more about how these books are getting into the school and get back to teaching our children.”
The book’s author, Jennifer Mathieu said specifically that the book was an attempt to persuade people to defend abortion rights.
Another parent referenced “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” which has explicit accounts of oral sex.
“I hesitate to read it,” said Riley Flack to the board. “I don’t feel comfortable reading it to adults.”
He said another book on their list had 79 instances of the F-word.
Not all parents agreed.
“We’re not limiting their time on the internet,” said parent Danielle Keig to KOCO-TV.
“I’m sure these parents also let their kids use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, social media apps, those things have way more sexualization in them than these books do,” she added.
She also argued that wanting the sexually explicit books out of the public library was somehow against the Constitution.
“The Library Bill of Rights, rooted in the First Amendment, has been repeatedly held up in court cases and it guarantees that parents can choose for their own child what they can and cannot read,” Fuxa said, “however, it holds that other parents do not have the right to restrict access for my children as that right lies with me and my family.”
The objecting parents said they would making formal complaints about the books in order to initiate a formal investigation about their controversial inclusion in a public school library. Stillwater Public Schools said in a statement to KOCO that no parent had thus far made a formal complaint about the books.
Here’s a local news report about the incident:
Angry parents in Stillwater want some books banned from middle school librarieswww.youtube.com
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Let’s hope Merrick Garland’s search of Mar-a-Lago is based on more evidence than his indictment of the Louisville, Kentucky, police officers involved in the raid on Breonna Taylor’s house.
That passive construction I just used — “involved in the raid on,” instead of “who raided” — is not sloppy writing: It’s the facts. The officers who actually shot Taylor have not been charged, apparently on the flimsy grounds that they were being shot at when they fired.
Instead, our lunatic attorney general has indicted officers who prepared the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor’s home. In the words of the indictment, the affidavit “contained information that was false, misleading and out-of-date … and the officers lacked probable cause for the search.”
Further, the indictment also alleges that the officers knew they were providing false information.
Breonna Taylor, you will recall, was the moll for drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, one of Louisville’s biggest suppliers of cocaine and fentanyl, and therefore by definition a murderer. On March 13, 2020, the police executed simultaneous search warrants on two of his “trap houses” as well as the home of his bagwoman, Breonna.
At Taylor’s house, police announced themselves and got no response. They announced themselves again; no response. They announced themselves again; no response. Finally, they used a battering ram to enter. Almost immediately, an officer was shot.
The man with Taylor, Kenneth Walker, claims he shot at the officers because he thought the guys pounding on the front door and yelling “POLICE!” were home invaders. Skeptics will say that’s implausible, but it is now treated as hard fact in such solid, reliable news sources as The New York Times.
The officers returned fire and hit Taylor, who had the misfortune to be standing next to her boyfriend as he was shooting at the police. Riots ensued. Taylor’s family got $12 million.
Kentucky’s criminal prosecution of the one officer charged ended in an acquittal. With last week’s suit, the federal government is now bringing its own criminal charges against the police — in a sane world, this would be double jeopardy — alleging that the affidavit for a search warrant was based on information that was knowingly “false, misleading and out-of-date.”
Specifically, the feds say the following claims were false:
1. Glover and Taylor had an “ongoing connection”;
2. Glover used Taylor’s address as his residence;
3. Glover received packages at Taylor’s address.
While it can be murky determining the precise relationship status and residence of a drug dealer, especially when he works out of three trap houses and has multiple girlfriends, those three claims are not false. They are “true.”
The cops didn’t lie; the indictment does.
1. Did Glover and Taylor have an “ongoing connection”?
Their relationship dates back to at least 2016, when Taylor loaned Glover her rental car, only to have the police show up at her door to ask about the dead body in the trunk. The dead man turned out to be the brother of one of Glover’s criminal confederates.
But that was four years before the raid! Surely, Breonna wised up after the body-in-the-trunk incident and dumped Jamarcus like a hot potato. Right?
Nope! Taylor continued bonding Glover out of jail through his many arrests from 2016 to 2020. He called Taylor from jail at least 26 times during those four years — that can be proven — including on Jan. 3, 2020, three months before the raids. During that call from January 2020, the two talk about sleeping together and exchange “I love you’s.”
On Jan. 2, 2020, police installed a pole camera to observe one of the crack houses in response to numerous violent assaults in the area. The very day the camera went up, Taylor’s car was seen pulling up to the house, dropping off Glover. On Feb. 13, 2020, Taylor drove him there again, and while waiting for him, got out of her car, in full view of the camera.
GPS tracking showed his car driving to Taylor’s house six times in January 2020 alone.
But this is a dry recitation of police evidence. Glover’s baby mama (not Breonna) is more colorful. In a recorded jailhouse phone call the day after the shooting, she told him: “This b*tch (Breonna) where she’s been with you, since you ain’t been over at my house … the same day you post a picture I guess she post a video, you knew it because she said what’s up she was in the bed with you, you kissing all over her.”
Glover repeatedly assures the irate baby mama that Breonna just kept his money for him — and that thousands of dollars were still at her house.
Now, where in the world would the police get the idea that Glover and Taylor had some sort of “ongoing connection”? It’s a puzzlement.
2. Did Glover use Taylor’s address as his “residence”?
Again, what constituted Glover’s “residence” is a bit of a philosophical question because, in the words of his baby mama, “You bounce back and forth between these btches.”
But he had to give the bank an address. He gave them Taylor’s — as confirmed by the police with subpoenaed bank records they obtained on Feb. 24, 2020, mere weeks before the raids. He also had to give police a phone number when he filed a complaint in February about his car being towed. He gave them Breonna’s number.
To the extent that a major coke dealer with a string of ladies has any fixed address, Glover’s address was Taylor’s house.
3. Did Glover receive packages at Taylor’s residence?
This one’s the easiest to answer. The police had photos of Glover carrying a USPS package from her house on Jan. 16, 2020. His car pulls up, he walks into her house empty-handed, then emerges carrying the USPS package. (Whereupon, he drove directly to a trap house.)
The hilarious part of this charge is that according to the indictment, it is based on the word of U.S. Postal Inspector Tony Gooden, who has been giving interviews all over, saying that in January 2020, his office investigated whether any “potentially suspicious packages” were being sent to Taylor’s house. But after a thorough investigation, he reported, nope, no suspicious packages!
That search must have been exhaustive!
Even the lawyer representing Taylor’s family wasn’t stupid enough to deny the packages. Amid a blizzard of fanciful claims about Taylor and Glover’s relationship — They’d broken up years ago! They barely stayed in touch! — the lawyer admitted that Taylor “accepted packages” for Glover.
Yeah, we know. There are pictures. The only people who don’t know are the Louisville postal inspector and the attorney general of the United States.
This fall, the Democrats will try to convince you that they support the police. Why, look at how well we treated the cop who shot Ashli Babbitt! Never forget that this is the party that spent 2 1/2 years — and counting! — trying to destroy Louisville police officers for risking their lives to take down a major drug ring.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
At the beginning of the school year in 2019, Jennifer received an email from her daughter’s 5th-grade teacher. The teacher, a male, was using a different name for her then-10-year-old daughter. Jennifer thought it was a mistake. The teacher must have accidentally emailed the wrong parent. But then, Jennifer went to her daughter’s room and found a yellow Post-It note stuck to her dresser with that same name, along with the pronouns “they/them.”
“Do you have a new nickname?” Jennifer asked.
Her daughter responded yes.
Jennifer didn’t think much of it beyond harmless identity exploration. But a couple of months later, Jennifer received a more concerning call from a school counselor informing her that her daughter had used the words “suicide” and “cutting” with a friend. The counselor recommended her daughter start seeing a therapist who was contracted with the school. That therapist was free to use, accessible during school hours, and qualified to handle her daughter’s mental health problems, Jennifer was told. Worried about her daughter, Jennifer said yes. But because her daughter was only 10 at the time, Jennifer would have to go into the school and give written permission.
Jennifer lives in a suburb of Washington state, where children as young as 13 years old can access their own medical and mental health services without parental knowledge or consent. Parents in these cases are billed by insurance companies with no explanation of benefits, meaning they’re stuck with the tab but have no ability to know what services or treatments their child received.
When consenting for her daughter to see the school therapist, Jennifer made sure to tell the therapist that her daughter had been talking about her sexuality and gender identity. She shared that while she and her husband believed their daughter was too young to be exploring these ideas, they’d “love her no matter where she ends up.” The therapist made no mention of her own views on the subject or her affirmation-based treatment model where, if a child declares he or she is transgender or non-binary, the therapist would affirm the child’s stated identity.
So, for two and a half months, Jennifer’s daughter was meeting with a school therapist once a week who was treating her as a boy, using male pronouns and a made-up name. When Jennifer would ask how the sessions were going, the therapist acted as though nothing big had come up.
‘Coming Out’
Then in February 2020, right before COVID-19 hit, Jennifer received a phone call from the school therapist with a two-fold purpose: to request that she and her husband come to the school in three days for a meeting where the therapist would assist their daughter in officially coming out to them as a boy, and to obtain parental permission to allow her daughter to stay overnight in the boy’s cabin for an upcoming school trip.
Sensing the meeting wouldn’t go well — and worse, would set them up in an adversarial position with the daughter they loved — Jennifer and her husband called it off.
“We were never going to let her do that, I don’t care who she thinks she is,” Jennifer said. “There are so many reasons not to put a girl in a cabin with a bunch of boys and a male adult teacher. So many safeguarding fails.”
At that point, Jennifer and her husband decided to take more drastic measures. They were skeptical that their 11-year-old daughter was transgender and believed the school and the therapist were actually leading her to identify as a boy. So, they revoked their consent for their daughter to see the school therapist, took away her access to online devices, and soon, unenrolled her from public school altogether.
“I already knew I couldn’t trust the school with my daughter when she was in fifth grade,” Jennifer said. “And going onto the middle school, she would be turning 13. And then I wouldn’t even know. They wouldn’t have to tell me what was going on.”
Identifying as a Boy
Jennifer’s daughter first identified as transgender when she was 10 years old and enrolled in an online drawing program. Prior to that, Jennifer and her husband had restricted their daughter’s access to online devices. But since their daughter was an artist, they agreed to what they thought was a harmless online art program.
Yet, a year and a half later, Jennifer learned it was through that group of online art friends that her daughter was introduced to ideas of sexuality and gender.
“She talked about being asexual at 10 years old,” Jennifer said. “Which of course she’s asexual at 10 years old. But that’s an identity.” She then talked about being demi sexual, gay, non-binary, and finally landed on transgender.
The transgender identity was heightened when her daughter began conversing with a group of girls at school who, at ages 10 and 11 years old, also identified as some form of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The friends appeared to compete over who could have the edgiest, most unique identity.
“She was trying to fit in. She was trying to have friends,” Jennifer said.
Once her daughter was out of school and no longer communicating online with peers who valued queer identities, her transgender identity lost its importance. Slowly, Jennifer said, her daughter started to let it go.
‘Wasn’t Making Her Happy’
“Her mood changed drastically,” Jennifer said. Identifying as transgender “wasn’t making her happy.”
Since giving up on being transgender, Jennifer has talked with her daughter about everything that happened over the year and a half she spent exploring identifying as a boy. After repeated unanswered requests, Jennifer also obtained notes from the school therapist, which confirmed her suspicion that the therapist was encouraging her daughter’s transition behind her back.
“I was so upset because [the school therapist] was using male pronouns for my daughter from the first moment, from the first notes,” Jennifer said. “He, him. And it seemed like all that she was doing with my daughter was helping her advocate for herself whenever somebody ‘misgendered’ her.”
This included Jennifer’s older two sons, who didn’t even know their sister was identifying as a boy. It also included a boy at the school who Jennifer said got in trouble for “misgendering” her daughter.
“At the school, they’re not just affirming and encouraging my daughter in this delusion,” Jennifer said. “It’s deluding other kids too. They are teaching kids to deny their own sense perceptions.”
More recently, Jennifer felt enough time had passed that she could ask about the idea of staying in the boy’s overnight cabin for three nights without feeling embarrassed or self-conscious.
Jennifer’s daughter told her, “That wasn’t my idea. That was the school’s idea. My teacher asked me.”
“Kids want to please adults,” Jennifer said. “My daughter felt she had to answer yes.”
After that incident, Jennifer said her daughter, who is now 13, decided she didn’t want to go on the 5th-grade overnight trip. Though it wasn’t then, it’s now clear to her why.
‘Going to War Together’
Jennifer feels betrayed by educators, therapists, doctors, and liberal politicians whom she spent a lifetime supporting. That list includes President Joe Biden, who told parents in March that affirming their child’s transgender identity is “one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.”
“A lot of people think that using the pronouns and affirming a child who says they’re the opposite sex, that that is about kindness,” she said, explaining:
Everybody’s very confused about this. Because the T has purposefully been attached to LGB, which is a completely separate issue. We know the LGB community was mistreated, and so people don’t want to do that again with trans-identified people, so everybody’s being super careful, and they want to be kind. But it’s a different situation. With LGB people, they’re saying, ‘Just let us be who we are.’ And there’s no medical consequences.
But with transgender-identified people or people who identify as the opposite sex, it’s very much a medical situation and it’s about the harm medicalization causes. Children are cutting off their healthy breasts and testicles and doing things to their bodies that they can’t undo. So that is completely different. Of course parents are concerned when their children identify this way because it carries a heavy medical burden which they will have for the rest of their life. They become sewn to the medical industrial complex. They will have to take drugs. They will probably have to have other surgeries. We don’t even know all the health consequences at this point. It’s an experiment happening right now on children.
In the past, most parents followed the watchful waiting approach. Children were not medically or socially transitioned, and the vast majority became comfortable with their sex when they went through puberty. Today, parents are being told that affirmation is the only acceptable response to a transgender declaration. Jennifer’s story is just one example of how there is another possible outcome if a child is not affirmed.
“They might desist,” she said. “Isn’t that preferable to a lifetime of harmful medical procedures?”
For more from IWF’s Identity Crisis series, click here.
Editor’s note: Last names have not been used to protect a minor’s privacy.
Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.
Arrests and convictions over contempt of Congress. Police enforcement of bureaucratic and relatively obscure archivist laws. FBI raids on former presidents (and future political opponents?). In their rage, the Democratic Congress and administration have written a vicious battle plan — one that conservatives will do well to follow when they return to power if they’re at all serious about restoring any semblance of respect for law in our country. In weeks past, there’s little reason to believe conservatives are; but Monday night’s raid might finally have changed that.
Just over one year after President Joe Biden’s election to the White House, his Department of Justice arrested Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former political director. Bannon was arrested for contempt of Congress, or, refusing to answer a congressional subpoena. After he was convicted last month, Bannon became the first American to face a prison sentence for contempt since the House Un-American Activities Committee sent 10 uncooperative, suspected Hollywood communists to prison in 1948. In the more than 70 years between the Hollywood Ten’s sentencings and Bannon’s conviction, contempt of Congress had devolved into more of a political tool used to investigate the other party, but rarely brought to its legal conclusion.
While Democrats tried to prosecute contempt of Congress twice during the Reagan years, the administration only let one prosecution come to pass (in which the defendant was ultimately found innocent of contempt). Decades later, when Republicans tried to bring a similar case against President Barack Obama’s obstinate attorney general, Eric Holder declined to prosecute himself, citing executive privilege. Two years later, when Republicans sought answers from the IRS’s Lois Lerner over her targeting of political opponents, Holder also declined to prosecute. Later, when Democrats tried to bring criminal contempt charges against Trump’s secretary of commerce and attorney general, Bill Barr similarly declined to prosecute himself.
Criminal enforcement is extremely rare because the reality is Congress can refer who they like, but the administration prosecutes whomever the administration chooses to prosecute.
The Biden administration has made clear they’ll prosecute their political opponents every chance they get. That means that despite Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s threat to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland accountable in the next Congress, he will only be empowered to hold Garland accountable under a Republican administration (unless he complies with Republican congressional oversight, which he won’t).
True: Arresting an administration official after he’s left office is a dangerous precedent, but it’s one Democrats gleefully set this past year. And contempt of Congress is far from the only weapon the administration has wielded against their out-of-power opponents: Tuesday’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s home, for example, reportedly centered on his handling of classified information (and the Watergate-era Presidential Records Act).
While politicians such as Hillary Clinton have been accused of similar crimes, prosecution is extremely rare — and focuses on the most egregious cases. For example, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was prosecuted in 2004 for stealing and destroying classified documents on the Clinton administration’s handling of terrorism prior to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Gen. David Petraeus was similarly charged for sharing classified documents with his mistress. Neither Berger nor Petraeus was charged with so much as a felony, instead pleading guilty to misdemeanors. Neither Berger nor Petraeus’s homes were ever raided, either, and, neither man ever served a day in prison. Most importantly, neither was a former president of the opposing party — nor a potential political opponent in the next general election.
That’s what makes the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home so shocking — so disconcerting that voices from former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the liberal Bloomberg editorial board to D.C.-groupthink mouthpiece Playbook have all voiced their unease.
These liberals’ unease stands in contrast with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who ignored a reporter’s Tuesday afternoon question on the subject and didn’t issue so much as a peep of concern for the first 23 hours after the raid was publicized. He was joined in his silence by Senate Republican Whip John Thune (who issued a statement at the same time, Tuesday night), Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman Roy Blunt (who remained silent as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday), and the Senate’s premier “thoughtful conservative” cosplayer, Ben Sasse. Why the silence? While after five years of increasingly unrealistic (and unproven) conspiracies and accusations against the former president, some Republicans still somehow trust the FBI. The reality is that others, such as McConnell, are pleased by the raid. But regardless of their private thoughts and motivations, their impotent silence in the face of the Biden administration’s charges, arrests, and raids on its political opponents exposes their inability to handle the crisis the American state finds itself in.
While over the coming years, still other Republicans will cite this dead norm or that gutted precedent as they hesitate to use the Democrats’ own battle plans back on them, one-sided disarmament is no strategy at all. The only way to fight back is to make the kinds of people who’ve weaponized and undermined the American state suffer for their actions. They’ve arrested their enemies, revived obscure rules as pretexts for partisan attacks, and raided their opponents’ homes, and they won’t be sorry until they’ve felt the same pain.
They aren’t sorry at all — yet.
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, a founding partner of RightForge, vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at The Daily Caller News Foundation and National Journalism Center, and the author of “The Art of the Donald.” His work has been featured in The American Mind, National Review, the New York Post and the Daily Caller, where he led the Daily Caller News Foundation and spent eight years. A frequent guest on Fox News and Fox Business, he was raised in Massachusetts and lives across the river from D.C. Follow him on Twitter.
The criminal indictment and imprisonment of former heads of state by ruling regimes in other countries is more common than most Americans probably realize. Today, former presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, and Costa Rica are all imprisoned — and that’s just in Central and South America.
The world is replete with corrupt leaders who criminalize the opposition and politicize domestic law enforcement. That’s why, for example, Daniel Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007. When you jail your political opponents and potential rivals, as Ortega did with gusto ahead of Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, it’s easy to stay in office. One of the salient features of these so-called “developing countries” is that they have not developed a way to transfer power peacefully. Brute force, not free and fair elections, is how rulers of the Third World seize and retain power.
Soon, the United States might join their ranks. On Monday evening, dozens of FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. The absurd pretext for the raid was a dispute over documents with the National Archives — a circumstance by no means unique to the Trump administration and one that no serious person believes could ever justify such a raid. (As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and her staff committed numerous felonies by using a private email server to send classified and even top-secret information and then destroyed all evidence related to the illegal server. Yet there was never an FBI raid or even a single charge filed against anyone. Just the opposite, in fact: Clinton’s staff was given immunity.)
Everyone in America knows the real reason for the FBI raid: to tarnish Trump as unfit for office and to intimidate and dissuade him from running again in 2024. Nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was exactly right to compare the FBI raid to the kind of thing you see in Ortega’s Nicaragua. It’s what ruling regimes do to rob the people of their voice and avoid the consequences of elections.
Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent
Because one day what goes around is going to come around
As bad as the raid was, though, it’s only the most recent incident in a larger pattern of corruption, not only in the Justice Department but across the federal government, designed to keep Trump out of office and away from the levers of power.
On Monday, before news broke of the FBI raid, The New Yorker published a remarkable piece about Gen. Mark Milley and other top Pentagon officials during Trump’s presidency. The article, an excerpt of a forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser titled “The Divider,” is meant to show what a hero Milley was to stand up to Trump, especially after the 2020 election (no doubt thanks to Milley obviously being the unnamed source for the conversations the article recounts). But what it unintentionally reveals is a U.S. military establishment that simply refused to follow the orders of a duly elected commander-in-chief and worked behind the scenes to thwart Trump’s entire foreign policy agenda, and, in Milley, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who came within a stone’s throw of staging a military coup in Washington. Milley and other top-ranking generals undermined Trump not because he asked them to do anything illegal but because he asked them to do things they opposed, like withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan and take a hard line on Iran.
Withdrawing U.S. troops from these places and pushing back against Iran is, of course, one of the things Trump campaigned on in 2016. Many of Trump’s voters, disillusioned with unending and seemingly pointless foreign conflicts, were ready for a radical shift in U.S. foreign policy. But Milley, whom zero Americans voted for, disagreed. He thought he knew better. Thus, we are told about how in December 2020, Milley met privately with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to personally urge him to back off with Trump” and not strike Iran’s ballistic missile sites, which Trump wanted to do in response to Tehran’s breakout nuclear capabilities. This was around the same time Milley was making phone calls to a Chinese general to reassure Beijing that Trump wasn’t about to start a war — and that if Trump did plan to attack, Milley would personally warn his Chinese counterparts ahead of time.
The left and the Never Trump crowd think that doesn’t count as treason because they think Trump was never a legitimate president. They think we needed people like Milley to undermine him until he was out of office and the “adults” were in charge again. Under the circumstances, almost anything was justified, goes the thinking.
The same twisted logic is at work in this FBI raid against Trump. In addition to corrupt Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias admitting on Twitter that the real purpose of the raid is to rig the 2024 election by disqualifying Trump from running, you have Never Trumpers like David French peddling the laughably naive line that “no president is above the law” and that no one should assume the FBI is abusing its power. Even South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Americans should not jump to conclusions but let the DOJ investigation “play out.”
But of course the FBI is abusing its power, as is Attorney General Merrick Garland. The idea that the FBI and Garland’s DOJ deserve the presumption of integrity and impartiality is only possible if you have been blissfully unaware of the events of the past six years in American politics.
The FBI fabricated evidence and then repeatedly submitted it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain an illegal warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. The FBI’s top officials then illegally leaked to the press and later lied about it. They used this illegal surveillance as a pretext for the years-long Mueller investigation. All of it was designed to remove Trump from office or, failing that, fatally weaken his administration. None of it had anything to do with the rule of law.
Nor did the FBI’s decision to quash an investigation into Hunter Biden’s criminal activities and overseas business dealings ahead of the 2020 election, even though much of the information driving the investigation was verified or easily verifiable. And neither does this FBI raid. This is about one thing and one thing only: holding onto power by any means necessary. There is nothing particularly subtle or nuanced about it. If you want to know where it leads, check out Nicaragua.
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.
Law enforcement sources and an attorney for former President Donald Trump are making eyebrow-raising accusations as more details about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago are sifted through the media. The New York Post reported Tuesday the purpose of the raid was to retrieve “presidential records and evidence of classified information being stored there.”
Sources further alleged that FBI agents barred Trump’s attorneys — who arrived at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the raid began — from witnessing the search, which is unusual. Once a judge approves a search warrant, authorities have the ability to execute the warrant without consent from the person whose property is being searched, thus attorneys or the person being searched are typically allowed to witness the search. Shockingly, sources even alleged FBI agents demanded surveillance cameras be switched off, but Trump’s employees did not comply with the request.
After searching Trump’s property for nearly 10 hours, the FBI removed boxes of documents and personal mementos that Trump collected during his presidency. It is not clear what other items the FBI confiscated, the Post reported. However, sources told the Post that FBI agents searched every room — including Melania Trump’s wardrobe — and repeatedly boasted to Trump’s lawyers, “We have full access to everything. We can go everywhere.”
Secret Services agents who are stationed at Mar-a-Lago reportedly granted the FBI access to the property after likely receiving instructions from U.S. Secret Service attorneys.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that a Trump lawyer confirmed the FBI confiscated about 12 boxes of documents from a basement room. The documents were reportedly taken from the same room that FBI investigators, according to CNN, had already inspected in June.
Trump attorney Christina Bobb — one of the attorneys who responded to Mar-a-Lago after the FBI arrived — confirmed that agents were looking for documents in compliance with the Presidential Records Act and allegedly classified documents. She also described the warrant as “thin” and explained that she does not yet know the probable cause for the warrant because the affidavit remains sealed.
asked on Real America's Voice what the search warrant said, Trump attorney Christina Bobb hems and haws but ultimately says it had to do with the Presidential Records Act and classified documents pic.twitter.com/MIe7eNQJYD
In another interview, Bobb suggested the search is related to other matters and the DOJ’s purported attempts to prosecute Trump.
“I think this is clearly a situation where they’re looking for a way that they can easily prosecute President Trump,” Bobb claimed. “They want to do it under a national security-type guise because they can hide things from the public and they can say, ‘Oh, we can’t tell you. We can’t give you the details because it’s confidential information, subject to national security concerns, so we can’t tell you, but we’re just going to prosecute [Trump].
“They’re trying to shield what they’re doing,” she charged.
Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired under the Trump administration, agrees the aggressive nature of the raid suggests it was about something more than documents.
“This is such a bold, such a disruptive, such an aggressive move,” McCabe said on CNN. “The idea they would do this simply because they weren’t getting the sort of compliance they were looking for out of securing the room with the documents, things like that, seems really unimaginable to me. It seems like they must have — I hope they have more than just that.”
A well-known scientist who criticized Republican efforts to investigate a potential lab leak of COVID-19 and gain-of-function (GoF) research himself took part in such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and did not disclose it to a commission he served on. Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, funded a scientific study authored by Dr. Shi Zhengli, also known as WIV’s “bat lady,” describing their work creating a recombinant virus from two SARS-like coronaviruses, according to U.S. Right To Know (USRTK),
The scientist was also awarded an NIH grant between 2012 and 2017 for the purpose of researching a vaccine against SARS “due to possible zoonotic reintroduction into humans, accidental release from a laboratory or deliberate spreading of the virus through bioterrorism,” USRTK reported.
Peter Hotez said a congressional investigation into gain-of-function research was a “a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America”
Hotez also serves on The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, an investigative group formed by the scientific journal seeking to find the origin of COVID-19. Jeffrey Sachs, the former chairman of the commission before resigning due to conflicts of interest compromising several members, said Hotez routinely rejected any notion that a lab leak was possible.
Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert David Relman told USRTK that Hotez’s work with the WIV should probably have been subject to the NIH’s GoF research funding pause, which was active between 2014 and 2017.
“Whenever I discussed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a laboratory release, Hotez strongly rejected that possibility, but never explained to me or to the Lancet Commission that he actually had a grant that was based on that very kind of risk,” Sachs told USRTK. “He should certainly have been clear on that.”
Paul led a Senate hearing on GoF research last week, in which an expert panel testified that the work is too dangerous to continue without increased oversight from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and that a lab leak may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Hotez further accused Paul of playing politics and elevating fringe beliefs.
2/3 but it’s even worse than that. The far elements of the Senate and House have already shown their cards. If they gain power because of the midterm elections, they have a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America 🇺🇸 https://t.co/qcASp2VP41
“America is a nation built on science and technology and our great research universities and institutions. If we allow the extremists to undermine us, it’s a threat to the whole nation. Remember the scientists are the real patriots, not the chuckleheads,” Hotez tweeted in part.:
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Merrick Garland should have recused himself from anything pertaining to former President Donald Trump. Period, full stop.
Think about it.
President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the United States Supreme Court in 2016. With the presidential election looming that coming November, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell halted the nomination and refused to allow it to even go to the Judiciary Committee, let alone to the floor of the Senate for a confirmation vote.
This immediately made Garland a major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Donald Trump vowed to personally remove his name as a nominee for the high court should he win the election, and that became part of the reason for his historic and unlikely victory.
Trump won. Garland’s name was withdrawn, and his hopes of landing the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and a place in American history were dashed forever.
Fast-forward to last year when Joe Biden became the accidental place-holder president for the Establishment and the Deep State. He made Garland Attorney General partially as a consolation prize and partially as a symbolic message to Trump and Republicans.
In the intervening months since taking his position, he’s dutifully done the bidding of the Biden White House, including the outrageous decision to set up a special FBI task force to investigate parents who protest at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.
Whatever Biden, the Democrats, and their special interest overlords demanded, he was quick to comply.
You want parents investigated? You got it!
You want extra investigations into new voting laws in Republican states? We’ll double our investigative staff!
You want hundreds of Trump supporters arrested for “illegal parading” on January 6th to languish in jail for over a year before they get a court date? Done!
You want midnight raids on advisors to the president to intimidate them into testifying to the January 6th kangaroo committee? You don’t even need to ask!
You want Bannon arrested and convicted? No problem!
Any chance this petty, little, vindictive man had to use his department as a political tool to punish the enemies of the American left, he took it.
And it all led to yesterday’s Banana Republic cosplay in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Under the guise of the Presidential Records Act (seriously?), 30 FBI agents stormed into the home of the former president and conducted an authoritarian fishing expedition seizing whatever documents they wanted without even perusing them to see if they matched the criteria of their sham search warrant, broadcasting their third-world larping around the planet to send the message that the FBI was treating Donald Trump like a mafia boss and common criminal.
And Merrick Garland oversaw the entire pathetic scene.
This angry, bitter Napolean should never have had anything to do with the chain of command regarding any issue pertaining to Donald Trump.
As detailed above, he has a very personal reason to despise the former president. Trump single-handedly kept Garland off the Supreme Court. And now, he’s in the position as chief law enforcement officer in America to release the full weight and power of the FBI on the man who thwarted his career and ambition.
That’s not just a conflict of interest, that’s a murder plot in a John Grisham thriller.
In fact, it goes well beyond the obvious conflict of interest stemming from the “Revenge factor” over the events of 2016. Garland has a vested interest in stopping Donald Trump so as to advance his future political and financial fortunes.
You see, Donald Trump is not just a former president, he is also a future presidential candidate. He will likely run against Garland’s current boss. If Trump wins, he would once again end Garland’s current run as attorney general, and he would, once again, end any future prospects of Garland getting another Supreme Court nomination.
If Trump wins the next election, Garland’s career is pretty much over.
So, Garland uses his power to help make sure that doesn’t happen.
This is what the professionals who care about these things refer to as the appearance of impropriety and a direct conflict of interest.
Jeff Sessions recused himself as attorney general for anything pertaining to the Russian Collusion hoax because he had a bowl of borscht at a Trump Tower restaurant or something stupid like that. And Garland doesn’t feel any pressure to recuse over his obvious, direct, past, present, and future conflict with Donald Trump?
You make sense of it… I’ve lost the energy to even try.
No raid on Hillary for her private server with classified files or Hunter Biden and his Quid Pro Quo with Ukraine and China but let’s get Trump. 2-tier justice?
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Just hours after Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was raided by the FBI, the former president posted his eerie new ad on his social media platform late Monday night warning America is in decline and “a failing nation.” Despite the unprecedented tyranny that’s taken hold of the U.S. over the past two years, the legitimate president assures, “The best is yet to come.”
A harrowing clap of thunder is heard as Trump mournfully details the litany of dangers Americans face as tyranny takes hold in the somber ad, which opens in black and white.
“We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation,” Trump cautions:
We are a nation that has the highest inflation in over 40 years; where the stock market just finished the worst first half of a year in more than five decades. We are a nation that has the highest energy cost in its history and we are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, which we were just two short years ago. We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil.
“We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world. We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people and it will only get worse.
We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party, like never before — we’ve never seen anything like this.
We are a nation that no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.
We are a nation where free speech is no longer allowed; where crime is rampant like never before; where the economy has been collapsing; where more people died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020.
We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars that’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own, that over the past two years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. And we are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith. We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming and whose education system is ranked at the bottom of every list.
We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke.
The adversity may seem insurmountable, “But soon we will have greatness again,” Trump continues, as color is restored in the video.
“It was hard working Patriots like you who built this country and it is hardworking patriots like you who are willing to save our country,” Trump affirms. “There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield, ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up. We will never, ever back down. We will never let you down as long as we are confident and united, the tyrants we are fighting do not stand even a little chance because we are Americans and Americans yield to God and God alone and it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
WATCH:
Hours before the ad was published, Lara Trump argued the FBI’s raid of the former president’s home is an attempt to derail his 2024 bid for the presidency which “he’s going to announce any day.”
“This is about weaponizing the justice system, as it has been so many times in the past against somebody who you politically do not like,” she admonished in an appearance on the Fox News Channel. “They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side, but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them, because he doesn’t play their game. They are terrified. He’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump as though they haven’t already done enough.
“Think about this. If this is what they’re able to do to the former president of the United States, think about what they could do to you, to anybody in America. The bottom line here is that these documents that have been in question have been, everybody’s been cooperating,” she continued. “Everybody from my father-in-law’s team has been cooperating with the FBI with any authority that asks for anything up until now and there was no need to make such a big scene, to do something this insane, quite frankly, to a former president. But I think everybody clearly knows, Will, what is going on here. This is about weaponizing the justice system, as it has been so many times in the past against somebody who you politically do not like.”
WATCH:
Trump trounced potential 2024 contenders in CPAC’s presidential nomination straw poll presidential nomination straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference three-day gathering in Texas last week, capturing 69 percent of ballots cast in the anonymous survey.
“The support for the former president, who remains the most popular and influential politician in the Republican Party and continues to play a kingmaker’s role in GOP primaries, is up from his 59% showing in the anonymous online straw poll at the CPAC gathering in Orlando, Florida in February,” Fox News reports. “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came in second on the 2024 presidential nomination question, at 24%, down from his 28% showing at CPAC in Orlando five months ago.”
Alicia is an investigative journalist and multimedia reporter. Alicia’s work is featured on numerous outlets including the Gateway Pundit, Project Veritas, World Net Daily, Townhall and Media Research Center, where she exposes fraud and abuse in government, media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma and public corruption. She has a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She served in the Correspondence Department of the George W. Bush administration and as a War Room analyst for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee. Alicia is originally from New York City and currently resides in Washington D.C.
Biden’s Deputy White House Press Secretary shared a meme on Twitter yesterday, portraying Joe Biden as exactly what he is: An evil dictator.
Surprisingly, after years of labeling President Trump as a neo-Nazi and a dictator who would start World War 3, the left loves the image of Warmonger Joe Biden standing over a crumbling city with a Reich Eagle in the sky above him.
The Nazi’s Reich Eagle is also printed behind a caption: “The Dark Brandon Rises.”
The mainstream media remains completely silent on the Regime’s use of this symbol.
What started as propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party has turned into an attempt by the Biden Regime to take back the infamous “Let’s Go Brandon” phrase.
Donald Trump Jr. pointed out the leftwing media’s hypocrisy on Twitter.
So Biden's Deputy White House Press Secretary, @Andrewjbates46, is posting literal Nazi memes on Twitter and our corrupt media is completely silent about it.
I'm sure that if this was a Trump WH staffer, the media would treat it the exact same way and totally ignore it 🙄🙄🙄 https://t.co/FlgrWlVzNC
Given today’s events at Mar a Lago it seems clear the White House intentionally included the Nazi/CCP theming on the Dark Brandon memes as foreshadowing. https://t.co/CKOW88XdXK
But there’s more to this story than the White House using theReichsadler orParteiadler in its memes.
THE REICH EAGLE SUPERIMPOSED BEHIND BIDEN IN HIS WHITE HOUSE STAFFER’S MEME.
The first thing to note is that this “Dark Brandon” stuff is actually being promoted by corporate media outlets. Check out Slate’stake, which concludes: “If he can muster a smidge of momentum from the al-Zawahiri assassination by pulling up the cowl of Dark Brandon, then that is surely better than whatever he’s got going right now. After all, Joe Biden’s approval rating is already cresting back toward 40 percent. Dark Brandon strikes again!”
But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.
“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego,toldPOLITICO.
That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.
Yes, the pro-Biden memes being disseminated from the hallowed halls of the White House are both Third Reich in nature, and hail from the Chinese Communist Party’s fellow travelers.
"Dark Brandon" started as Chinese propaganda and then the White House co-opted it using Nazi Eagle imagery…
The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago was reportedly part of an investigation into former President Donald Trump removing classified documents from the White House and storing them in his south Florida resort. FBI agents began the raid early Monday morning around 9 a.m. and searched the property until 6:30 p.m., according to News Nation reporter Brian Entin, who cited his sources. The agents arrived in plain clothes — thus appearing to be Secret Service agents — and only notified the Secret Service about the raid right before it began. “That is why it didn’t leak earlier,” Entin explained.
Three of Trump’s lawyers arrived at Mar-a-Lago after the raid began, and the FBI agents did, as Trump claimed, open a safe in his office.
2/3 FBI did not notify secret service about raid until right before. 3 Trump lawyers showed up during the raid. Safe referred to in Trump statement was in his office which is the old bridal suite above the ballroom. It is a hotel style safe. FBI broke it open.
The purpose of the raid was to retrieve classified documents that Trump allegedly removed from the White House, the New York Times confirmed.
From the Times:
Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year.
Eric Trump confirmed about 30 FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago, that nothing was found in Trump’s safe, and the purpose of the raid was to retrieve documents.
The raid does not confirm that Trump has committed a crime. It does, however, signal that investigators convinced a federal judge they had sufficient probable cause that a crime had been committed and that raiding Mar-a-Lago was necessary to retrieve evidence. Legal experts believe the raid must have been approved by the most senior levels of the Justice Department, perhaps even by Attorney General Merrick Garland, because Trump is a former president and raiding his residence would require approval at the highest levels of government.
The White House allegedly did not know about the raid beforehand.
But Republicans say the raid is more evidence the Justice Department has become politicized under President Joe Biden. After the raid, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy promised an investigation into the DOJ should Republicans retake control of the House after the 2022 midterm elections.
“I’ve seen enough,” McCarthy said in a statement. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
“Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he added.
Republican politicians and conservative commentators sounded off on Monday after former President Donald Trump released a statement saying that the FBI had raided Mar-A-Lago.
“The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared in a tweet.
The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.
“This is the act of a dictator of a Banana Republic. Republicans NEVER did this to Clinton, although perhaps we should have. With Joe & Hunter Biden paying zero consequence for his actions. This is shameful and MUST STOP. We don’t do this in America. Way over the line,” Glenn Beck tweeted.
This is the act of a dictator of a Banana Republic. Republicans NEVER did this to Clinton, although perhaps we should have. With Joe & Hunter Biden paying zero consequence for his actions. This is shameful and MUST STOP. We don’t do this in America. Way over the line. https://t.co/IrypwN0dRE
“In third world countries and banana republics they prosecute the former presidents/leaders and their staff. Right now, we look beneath them. We are in a race to the bottom,” GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted.
“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “But never before in America.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that when Republicans regain the majority in the chamber, they will carry out “immediate oversight” of the Justice Department. “Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” McCarthy said in the statement.
Trump, who is widely expected to run for president again, issued a statement on Monday in which he said that, “my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024 … and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the incoming Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
BlazeTV host Mark Levin unloaded on the FBI Monday night, calling the raid on Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, “outrageous” and the “worst attack on this republic in modern history.”
Levin, a former chief of staff to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, called in to “Hannity” on Fox News Monday to give his reaction to the then-breaking news that FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Federal agents were reportedly searching for evidence that Trump violated federal records-keeping law by allegedly taking classified documents from the White House with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
“First of all, I’m a former chief of staff to a United States attorney general. We would never ever have done this. Ever,” Levin told Sean Hannity. “Number two, it’s 90 days before midterm election. That’s outrageous.”
“Number three,” he continued, “everybody pretty much knows that Donald Trump is going to run in the Republican primary for president of the United States. And so you have a sitting president who wants to run against him and his attorney general acting like this.”
Levin said Graves’ office likely coordinated with the U.S. attorney’s office in Florida and that FBI agents in South Florida would have been the ones who conducted the raid, “if they are playing it by the book.”
“[The U.S. attorney] wouldn’t have done anything without the sign-off of the attorney general of the United States. Period,” Levin emphasized. He also explained that the precision of the FBI raid suggests it had been planned for some period of time, possibly weeks.
For months, watchdog groups have accused former President Trump of violating the Presidential Records Act by improperly handling classified documents. The National Archives has said Trump tore up some documents he was supposed to preserve while in office and took other materials with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.
Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of presidential records from Trump’s residence in Florida, which allegedly included “classified national security information.” Trump said the records were given to the Archives upon request in accordance with federal law. But the agency referred the matter to the Justice Department.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has written a forthcoming book that accuses Trump of attempting to flush some records down the toilet, an act that would potentially be illegal.
Levin said the accusations in Haberman’s book and other reports of Trump’s alleged misconduct served as a “pretext” for the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
“There is no justification for sending 30 freaking FBI agents to the former president’s compound in Mar-a-Lago in early morning and conducting themselves this way or in any other cases in which they’ve done exactly the same thing,” Levin said.
“The FBI is corrupt. This guy [Attorney General Merrick Garland] goes after parents. He goes after Republican state legislatures, he goes after states he disagrees with their abortion positions, he doesn’t do a damn thing to protect the border, which is compelled by the Constitution. Nothing.”
“This is the worst attack on this republic in modern history. Period,” Levin continued. “And it’s not just an attack on Donald Trump. It’s an attack on everybody who supports him, it’s an attack on anybody who dares to raise serious questions about Washington, D.C., and the establishment in both parties.”
THE GREAT ONE GOES OFF: ‘The Worst Attack on This Republic in Modern History, Period.’
posted by Hannity Staff – 8.09.22
0:11 / 4:20
Fox News host Mark Levin went off on the FBI and the DOJ for the raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence; Levin says it’s “the worst attack on this republic in modern history, period.”
Watch the clip above. Excerpts from the interview below.
LEVIN: Everybody pretty much knows that Donald Trump is going to run in the Republican primary for president of the United States. And so you have a sitting president who wants to run against him and his attorney general acting like this.
Now, here’s how this worked. Everybody’s guessing. I’ll tell you what happened. This is in the jurisdiction of the US attorney in District of Columbia, who’s also overseeing the January 6 prosecution. Why? Because that’s where the National Archives is, in the District of Columbia. They didn’t send FBI agents from the Washington office down there. They would have used FBI agents in South Florida and they would have coordinated with the U.S. attorney’s office down there if the plaintiff had a book.
This was well orchestrated, so this has been going on for weeks. Now, you keep asking your guests, what’s the justification? There is no justification. What’s he going to say tomorrow? The attorney general. Here’s my guest. We’ve been negotiating with Trump and his lawyers since February when we found out they had this information, we were getting nowhere. And then we know or we heard that some documents were being destroyed. Maggie Haberman, The New York Slimes was on CNN. They’ve been running pictures of hers that she’s going to have in the book of documents being flushed down a toilet. That doesn’t mean a damn thing. It could be anything.
There is no justification for sending 30 friggin’ FBI agents to the former president’s compound in Mar-a-Lago in early morning and conducting themselves this way or in any other cases in which they’ve done exactly the same thing.
The FBI is corrupt. This guy, Garland, goes after parents. He goes after Republican state legislatures. He goes after states because he disagrees with her abortion positions. He doesn’t do a damn thing to protect the border, which is compelled by the Constitution. Nothing.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at The Rosen Shingle Creek on February 24, 2022, in Orlando, Florida. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
If you did a case study of our political and cultural polarization and how radically different the Democratic and Republican parties are, look no further than each party’s poster boy — California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
Earlier this week, GOP darling DeSantis held a press conference where he boldly stated the dangers of transgender medicine — particularly on children. “They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate these young boys. That’s wrong,” DeSantis said, “both from the health and children well-being perspective, you don’t disfigure 10, 12, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria.”
Thursday, DeSantis showed the world that he meant business when he suspended Florida State Attorney for refusing to enforce state law regarding the protection of minors from gender transition treatment.
Meanwhile, in Newsom’s California, a radical bill just passed out of committee Wednesday in the state assembly that would give California courts the right to take “temporary emergency” custody of out-of-state children whose parents won’t affirm their gender identity or are stopping their children from receiving gender transition treatment. If this bill passed, California courts would even turn a blind eye if a child from another state was kidnapped from their parents or legal guardians and taken to California for the purpose of gender transitioning.
While the bill still needs to be voted on by the General Assembly and the State Senate before making its way to the governor’s desk, it’s likely to pass and be signed into law by Newsom who, last fall, celebrated signing bills that would hide abortions and gender transition treatment for California minors from their parents.
Now, rather than just submitting children who are California citizens to this dangerous medical experimentation, Newsom and the California Left are ready to export their radical gender ideology nationwide and become a top travel destination for minors looking for hormonal or surgical gender transition treatment.
While California attempts to become a “sanctuary state” for young people who identify as transgender, states across the country and even the FDA are starting to wake up to the risks of gender transition treatment for minors. In July, the Food and Drug Administration slapped a warning label on puberty blockers after six girls between the ages of five and 12 suffered from severe side effects, including tumor-like brain masses and eye paralysis.
Despite this implicit admission of the weakness and dangers of “gender-affirming care,” the radical transgender ideology train isn’t slowing down in California any time soon. In Wednesday’s committee hearing, 17-year-old Chloe Cole, who medically transitioned to become a male from the ages of 13 to 16 before transitioning back to being a female, testified against the bill. In her statement, Cole referred to her gender transition experience as “irreversible and painful” and that she “really didn’t understand all the ramifications of any of the medical decisions [she] was making.” She also expressed that her doctor “brushed off [her] parents’ concerns about the efficacy of hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries” and “were pressured to continue [her] so-called gender journey.” Despite hearing this heartbreaking testimony, the committee passed the bill 11-4.
On the East Coast, DeSantis is ready to go to the mat to protect children like Chloe from experiencing the same sorrow and regret, while the Left in California are all too eager to help children ignore the care and concern of their parents for the sake of protecting their radical gender ideology.
As major figureheads for their respective political parties, Newsom and DeSantis offer the American electorate a snapshot of two very different paths the country can take. With California and Florida as the examples, Americans will have to choose, come November, if the United States is going to be a nation that protects children or one that experiments on them.
On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.
“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.
Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.
That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.
Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States
It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.
In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.
The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.
This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.
Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had foiled an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.
But now, in 2022, the story is VERY different. What happened, who authorized this operation, and is this typical of the DOJ's domestic terrorism unit?
Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.
This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.
This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.
The @FBI is too busy hunting down every grandma and goofball who trespassed and took selfies on January 6th.
And too busy harassing Loudoun County parents who dared to speak up at public school board meetings.
Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.
Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.
We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.
As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.
If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.
We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.
Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.
We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The Senate passed the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday afternoon after an all-night session lasted more than 15 hours. The package, negotiated by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Chuck Schumer of New York, passed along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the upper chamber’s 50-50 tie. The bill includes nearly $370 billion in green energy subsidies and tax credits, nearly $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service and a drug price setting mechanism for Medicare. It also establishes a 15% tax on corporations with market caps higher than $1 billion.
Although Democrats have repeatedly argued that the bill will reduce inflation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model has “low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” In addition, the bill will likely raise taxes for Americans in every bracket, despite President Joe Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. The Inflation Reduction Act will pay down the federal deficit by more than $300 billion, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found.
Senators voted down 35 amendments and passed two, with the 48 Democrats and Independent Angus King of Maine agreeing that they would oppose all amendments offered during vote-a-rama to offer the legislation its best chance of passing. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders objected to the agreement, offering amendments that would restructure the child tax credit, but his proposal failed 97-1.
“They’re great amendments. I’m very happy and I think it says something that every Democrat and Republican voted against them. It says I’m doing something right,” Sanders complained, according to Politico. “I’m fighting for you. I think that should be the message — not to come up with a convoluted reason you can’t vote for it.”
“Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” he said in a statement.
Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
The House of Representatives will take up the legislation when it gets back from recess on Aug. 12, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced. The bill is expected to pass the lower chamber along party lines.
A video clip has gone viral of U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine calling for laws to “support and empower” youths by not limiting their “participation in activities or sports” or “their ability to get gender affirmation treatment” in their state.
Biden Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine: We need to “empower” KIDS to go on puberty blockers and get sex reassignment surgery. pic.twitter.com/CRPRaFYtzK
Levine was speaking in opposition to states such as Florida that have taken steps to limit “transgender care” for children. Early treatments for children include puberty blockers and hormones, some of which were flagged by the FDA last month because of a “plausible” link to a serious brain disorder called “pseudotumor cerebri.”
Reactions on Twitter were so irate that we can’t share the vast majority of them here, so here’s a sample of the more mild responses:
On “Pat Gray Unleashed,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray discussed Levine’s dangerous argument for gender reassignment treatments for children, Texas oil exports, Vice President Kamala Harris sharing “unbelievable campfire stories,” and more.
Watch the full episode below. Can’t watch? Download the podcast here.
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