Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.
At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had “created more jobs in two years than any president created in four years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. But Biden’s contention was exceptionally misleading, considering he inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown. If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open.
On more than one occasion during the night, a mercurial Biden contended that Covid-19 had shut down the economy. No, states did. Politicians did. Biden was an aggressive proponent of those shutdowns. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the president regularly attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal health officials. Even in August of 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was still criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a new round of Covid authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way” of those trying to “do the right thing.”
Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Today, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of 3.4 percent. More than 30 million people lost their jobs to Covid lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The one big difference is that the labor participation rate still hasn’t recovered to pre-Covid numbers. It’s great that people are working again. But millions fewer are in the market for jobs.
Biden also boasted that Americans were seeing “near” historic unemployment lows for black and Hispanic workers. These historic lows were achieved before Covid lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit for this, doesn’t Trump? Of course, there is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment rate 0.1 percent lower than the previous administration. Washington wasted trillions of dollars propping up an economy that it previously shut down.
Speaking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which you might recall was initially called “Build Back Better,” had helped alleviate spiking prices. Only when inflation became non-transitory, and a politically problematic issue, did Biden begin arguing that more spending would mitigate inflation. And only then did Democrats rename their bill, which was crammed with the same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive wish-list items. “The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate change,” Biden said during his address, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are often unduly blamed or given credit for economic events beyond their control. But it is no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped hundreds of billions into a hot economy (in the case of the “infrastructure” bill, with the help of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable problems with policies that disincentivize work and undercut energy production. All this led to the biggest inflation spike since 1982. We are still at historic highs. A slew of products that consumers rely on still remain atypically expensive, and fears of additional price hikes have started to seriously corrode consumer confidence.
Biden lied that “25 percent” of the national federal debt was incurred by the previous administration when most of that debt was driven by entitlement programs passed, expanded, and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t enough.
Biden went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the rich don’t pay taxes — “[n]o billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter!” — and proposed higher rates on the wealthy and corporations. He also promised to micromanage the economy with a slew of new regulations that would interfere in voluntary contracts struck between employees and employers and consumers and businesses.
Biden implored Congress to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would empower the government to impose unions on businesses and workers who want no part of them. Biden hawked an entire menu of crude economic populism — including price controls and protectionist trade policies that would undermine growth, competition, job creation, and innovation while driving up the cost of virtually every construction project in the country.
There were numerous lies, half-truths, and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated economic ideas and sloganeering. But, surely, the president’s biggest lie of the night was to claim, “I’m a capitalist.”
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A new poll found that a record percentage of Americans say they are doing worse financially under President Joe Biden’s leadership. 41% of respondents to the ABC News/Washington Post poll said they were financially worse since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, the highest figure for the question in 37 years that it has been polled. Only 16% of respondents said that they were better off. By contrast, under the Trump administration the poll found that 25% of respondents said they were better off while only 13% said they were worse off.
The poll also found that former President Donald Trump would easily defeat Biden in a hypothetical matchup, with 48% of respondents saying they would vote for Trump and only 44% saying they would vote for Biden. When narrowed to registered voters, the margin only shrunk by one percentage point.
The poll is the latest data point in the debate roiling the Democratic Party whether to have Biden run for another term or to replace him as the party’s candidate for the 2024 election. Many are pointing to his advanced age as a problem that might dissuade many voters from supporting his reelection campaign.
Of respondents who said they were Democrats or independents who lean Democrat, only 44% supported Biden as the party’s nominee in 2023. Nearly half, 49%, said that the party should choose another nominee.
The president angrily lashed out at a reporter in July after he asked him to respond to polling showing many Democrats didn’t want him to run again.
“They want me to run,” he exclaimed and yelled at the reporter. “You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92% of Democrats if I ran would vote for me.”
Biden is likely to tout his economic policies during the State of the Union speech on Tuesday. While the unemployment rate remains low, wage growth has been minor and mostly undone by the plague of high inflation.
The poll also found that 53% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s job performance and only 42% approved of his performance.
Here’s more about the damaging Biden poll: Breaking down the recent ABC News/WaPo poll ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union l ABCNL www.youtube.com
The United Nations announced plans to release a report in June regarding “perceived contradictions” between “the right to freedom of religion or belief (FoRB)” and “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).” The report aims to push governments to “fully comply” with international human rights law to “protect and empower” the participation of LGBT+ people in religious communities, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Sounds like more “One World Government” push.
The U.N. requested calls for input from all interested governments, religious leaders, academics, activists, and human rights organizations regarding “perceived points of tension” between FoRB and SOGI. Respondents were requested to indicate any policies or laws protecting discriminatory religious practices.
One question asked, “What are the key trends or significant instances of discriminatory or abusive practices by individual providers of goods or services in the public sphere against LGBT+ and gender-diverse persons that rely on religious narratives?”
The report’s findings will be shared during the 53rd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in June. It will also include “recommendations to States and other relevant stakeholders to fully comply with their obligations under international human rights law to protect and empower LGBT+ persons to pursue happiness, exercise and enjoy all their human rights, and choose how to contribute to society on an equal footing with everyone, including through effective participation in religious, cultural, social, and public life.” In charge of the report is Victor Madrigal-Borloz, an independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, who has been a longtime LGBT+ advocate.
The U.N.’s announcement argued that religion has “historically been used to promote, enable, and condone institutional and personal violence and discrimination against individuals based on sexual orientation or gender identity (real or presumed); repress sexual and gender diversity; and promote cis-gendered and heteronormative norms of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
According to the U.N., such practices cannot be “justified” under human rights law. The upcoming report aims to “introduce voices from LGBT-inclusive belief systems” to “better recognize and protect LGBT+ persons’ access to faith and spirituality.”
Grace Melton, senior associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, told the DCNF that the report could result in the “politicization” of religious freedom.
“My biggest concern is the premise of the report which seems to suggest that freedom of religion and rights based on sexual orientation are the same,” stated Melton. “But certainly as a function of international law, they are not the same. Freedom of religion or belief, or freedom of conscience, is an internationally protected human right. It’s codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is a legally binding treaty.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, a fellow for the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that the U.N.’s report is a “bold attack” against religious freedom.
“Despite saying that we shouldn’t have these rights pitted against one another, but when you keep reading on you see that the author of the report really does see [rights and religion] as being in conflict,” Picciotti-Bayer said.
“This narrative is not only harmful because it could make people doubt the importance of religion in their own lives and their communities, but it’s also harmful because it will undermine really important social protection,” Picciotti-Bayer added. “Religion and religious freedom is a stabilizing presence, and for the cases where religion is being misused to oppress, the answer isn’t to shut down religion entirely.”
Neither the U.N. nor Madrigal-Borloz responded to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
Hollywood is in desperate need of new ideas. Take Sunday’s Grammy Awards, for example. If there were ever a spectacle that could simultaneously be described as demonic and trite, it would be Sam Smith’s performance of “Unholy,” which rang the final death knell for the satanic-ritual-as-art trope.
As Federalist contributor Isabelle Rosini wrote, it was as boring as it was unoriginal. Stiletto-clad devils? Latex pants? Whips? Women in cages? Bursts of flame to signify — in case it wasn’t clear enough — that Smith was singing from the pit of hell? “Been there, done that,” artists ranging from Lil Nas X to Lady Gaga would say.
And it all fell flat. Despite the media’s attempts at running interference — with all the typicalRepublicans–pounce framing — the awards show was decidedly uninteresting, and this points to a broader crisis within the arts world itself. There is nothing it can produce that will shock the American public, quasi-satanic orgies and all.
Modern American culture has become a willing collaborator to the arts world — from Hollywood to the Oval Office, from TikTok to the public school classroom — thanks to the ascendancy of leftist orthodoxy in cultural and political institutions. Art can no longer be subversive once the political and broader media establishments espouse its values, whether those be sexual perversion or anti-religious bigotry.
Thus art has ceased to be interesting or subversive. Instead, the arts world and the establishment have merged — First Lady Jill Biden presented at the award show after all — producing mediocre content according to its tastes. If art wants to become subversive again, it must reject the values most prized by our modern culture. It must discard the idols of the left, from sexual deviancy to bitter racism. It must trash wokeness. Until it comes up with a fresh message, expect a continued mass exodus.
Reactionaries who really want to buck establishment tastes are congregating not in an art museum or mosh pit — but, ironically, at church. As Julia Yost described last summer in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” pandemic-weary Manhattanites have rebelled against leftist orthodoxy by embracing traditional morality and the Catholic Church:
By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church — and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.
Comedian Tim Dillon has noticed the same phenomenon. “All the cool kids now are unwoke and some of them are going back to Christianity because it’s the only way to be rebellious — because everybody’s blue-haired, non-binary, talking about piss orgies,” Dillon said in a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
That to be “transgressive” in this day and age means attending church and rediscovering religious orthodoxy is quite the plot twist, but it’s encouraging for the West’s prospects. Let’s hope this trend continues, and that so-called artists like Sam Smith and his tired satanism shtick get the red, latex boot.
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.
Republicans convened the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday to evaluate the “front lines of the border crisis” but Democrats were less than cooperative in the GOP’s efforts to hear from two chief patrol agents.
“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history,” committee chairman Republican Rep. James Comer said in his opening remarks.
Comer and several other GOP members on the committee pointed to President Joe Biden as the reason millions of migrants, including suspected terrorists, illegally cross the border. Witnesses — CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin and Chief Patrol Agent of the Rio Grande Valley sector Gloria Chavez — confirmed this in their testimonies.
“In the Tucson sector, interviewing people post-arrest, what became the most common response [from migrants] was that they believed that when the administration changed that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border,” Modlin said.
The chiefs agreed that border security measures like the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which Biden eliminated with the stroke of a pen at the beginning of his term, were “effective” at combatting the staggering number of illegal migrants flooding the border.
And staggering those numbers are.
“We went from what I would describe as unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,” Modlin said.
Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability
House Democrats, who had two years to give Biden’s disastrous border the oversight it required but failed to do so, were less interested in asking the CBP officials questions and far more interested in criticizing Republicans for suggesting that Democrats’ lax border policies are responsible for the worst migrant influx in U.S. history.
Before the hearing, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security tried to obstruct oversight by Republicans by keeping CBP officials from testifying. Democrats joined in their attempts to taint the GOP’s investigation into the border crisis with smears that Republicans wanted “to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories instead of a comprehensive solution to protect our borders and strengthen our immigration system.”
The “QAnon caucus” and “anti-immigrant” name-calling continued in the hearing after ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin launched another round of politically motivated attacks in his opening remarks.
The same Democrats who bought into and promoted the border patrol whipping lie claimed that Republicans “demonize migrants” and refuse to fund the border through Democrats’ omnibus wish list. Washington D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton even went so far as to blame the GOP for the El Paso Walmart shooting.
Despite Democrats’ attempts to turn the hearing into a political circus painting the border crisis as a funding problem, instead of a policy problem, the witnesses confirmed that the U.S. southern border is comprised in a way it’s never been in the past.
Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’
A large part of the Republicans’ border inquiry centered on the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border against cartels, which Chavez said have become “more active” in trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. in “recent years.”
“Cartels are leveraging chaos at the border. They are using their human smuggling operations to overwhelm U.S. Border Patrol agents with large migrant groups, often placing migrants in peril,” Comer said. “They create these diversions at the expense of human life to traffic dangerous narcotics like fentanyl, across our southern border. These deadly drugs then make their way into communities across the United States and poison our neighbors and our children.”
“No one crosses the border in Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin confirmed in his testimony. Chavez testified the same about her district.
“[Migrants are] pretty much confined to whatever those cartels require to be able to see their family member again,” she said.
Democrats tried to claim that the problems at the border are a “humanitarian crisis, not a criminal one.” Yet, none of them mentioned the connection between cartels’ illegal activities and migrants, including the criminals’ lack of care for the men, women, and children who have to bribe them for passage to the U.S.
“What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are failing to recognize is in order to get here, [migrants] have to deal with a group of people that is not interested in human rights. They place no value on humanity. If they can make money on it, they will exploit it,” Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong said. “I think one of the mistakes we make quite often is we talk about [cartels] like they’re drug cartels. They’re in the business of making money and whatever the path of least resistance is, is how they make money.”
Cartels’ billion-dollar migrant smuggling business, Modlin and Chavez said, deliberately puts illegal border crossers in danger so Border Patrol agents will leave their posts to conduct rescue missions.
“There are a lot of migrants out there that are out there requiring rescue. So, a lot of times, our agents are out there rescuing people, being task-saturated in rescues, abetting frontline operations, so therefore cartels take advantage of that,” Chavez said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S. is a serious issue that needs addressing. What the representatives did not agree on is that it’s Biden’s policies that embolden the cartels to manufacture and smuggle fentanyl into the states.
Multiple Democrat representatives tried to blame the proliferation of fentanyl on U.S. citizens who are often selected to bring the drugs to the United States. Rep. Katie Porter even had the audacity to argue that because CBP is seizing more fentanyl now than it was before 2020, border security under Biden is a “success.”
“Regardless of who’s bringing it across the border, U.S. citizens, ports of entry, between ports of entry, not ports of entry, the drugs that are killing people in my communities are being made by the cartels,” Armstrong pointed out.
Modlin and Chavez both said their agents are overworked and overwhelmed by the crisis. Unless there’s a national policy shift on the border, the historic crisis is only going to get worse.
“What happens on the border affects the entirety of the country,” Modlin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Such a smash success has Joe Biden’s presidency been so far that even the Chinese are sending up balloons. That’s more or less what Biden will say, over and over, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The economy is humming. Inflation is cooling. Electric vehicle sales are raging. There has never been a more orderly southern border.
It will all sound very scary to viewers who will rightly begin to question their own sanity. Or perhaps it will make you feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you’re inexplicably falling behind.
Don’t panic. When confronted with these anxieties, there are steps you can take to re-ground yourself in reality. For instance, when Biden says something confusing — something like, “Folks! Energy costs are down, folks!” — remember to yourself that this is a lie. As of Monday, national gas prices averaged higher per gallon than a year before. It’s more than a dollar per gallon higher than it was in January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated.
Biden will likely also mention “steps” he has taken to control the unabated flow of hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In that stupefying moment, take a deep breath and refer to this chart maintained by Biden’s own administration, showing that December had the highest number of illegal aliens encountered by border agents — ever. That month, there were more than 250,000 migrants who unlawfully crossed into the U.S. The month before, almost 235,000. That’s nearly half a million migrants throwing themselves into the care of the American taxpayer in just two months’ time. They openly say they’re here because of Biden.
Democrat congressmen will leap to their feet and clap with ferocity when Biden says inflation is down. (Or even that higher prices are actually a great thing!) He might even say costs increased less than 6 percent from this time last year. If you feel a spinning sensation, close your eyes, count to 10, then look at this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The less-than-6 stat is if you exclude food and energy prices.
In other words, if you don’t account for the things you depend on to survive, inflation really isn’t that bad! By itself, food cost is actually up more than 10 percent. It’s probably close to 12 — and maybe much more. Energy is up more than 7 percent. Mind you, this has been a year of rising costs, where each month it’s been more expensive to simply live than it was the same time a year before.
Biden’s vertigo-inducing speech will surely go on for what feels like an eternity, earning applause for assertions that are the exact opposite of reality. But remember, this too shall pass.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday failed to slow down the House Republican push for new oil and gas leases on federal land, after GOP lawmakers shot down her attempt to require further study of the public health impacts of energy extraction.
The House National Resources Committee met Tuesday to adopt its work plan for the new Congress. Included in that plan is language that says the Biden administration has leased fewer federal acres for oil and gas development than “any presidential administration” since the end of World War II.
“The Committee will examine the lack of oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands in the western United States, including focusing on administrative actions that have created permitting delays and disincentivized production on federal lands,” the committee’s plan said.
Before adopting the plan, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., offered an amendment that would require the committee to collect “public health data and other impacts of new drilling on federal lands.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., failed to convince Republicans that new drilling on federal land should be linked to a study on public health. (Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“There is a failure to acknowledge the disproportionate impact that these changes have on communities of color and other frontline communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She added that there should be “no objection to gathering better data on the health impact of these policies.”
But Republicans pushed back and said her proposal ignores the health benefits that energy development has delivered to people for generations.
“How can you ignore the millions of people around the Earth that have had clean water, indoor plumbing, lights, electricity provided to them, making their lives better, extending, literally extending their life span, lifting them out of poverty by having access to electricity that’s been provided by coal, oil, gas, or other fossil fuels?” said Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.
“It simply can’t be ignored – their lives are better, their lives are longer as a direct result of that,” he said. “So to sit there and to say that we should be trying to eliminate these fuels is absolutely absurd, ridiculous.”
Rep. Thomas Tiffany, R-Wis., pressed that point by asking Ocasio-Cortez if her amendment would require a study of all health impacts, good and bad, or just the bad ones.
Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., was one of several Republicans who rejected Ocasio-Cortez’s push for a health study. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) ( (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images))
“I do not dispute the inclusion of any positive health impacts,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “But of course, there is a large degree of concerning information about potential health impacts, breathing impacts, cancer exposure, etc.”
Tiffany replied that her response made it clear she’s only interested in the negative health effects of drilling.
“I will not be able to support this amendment because there was a ‘but’ in there, in the answer,” he said. “It is not focusing on also the good things that have happened…”
Other Republicans similarly saw the amendment as an effort to block new leasing on federal lands. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., mocked the amendment as an attempt to force climate change theory into the GOP’s effort to ensure the U.S. controls its destiny and shores up its national security by ensuring ample energy supplies.
“I’m not here to deny climate change, I don’t think anyone here is,” Boebert said. “It happens four times every year, we’re very, very much aware of that.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., squared off in the hearing over new public drilling on federal land. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Ocasio-Cortez stressed that her amendment is not a proposal to “stop drilling.” She said her amendment language is neutral and that it could allow a study on both the positive and negative health impacts of drilling and said it’s critical to consider this factor for families.
“I have visited with families who say that they will be near an extraction site, and at different times of the day their lungs start burning,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I personally represent an area of the country that has some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the world.”
“People deserve to know if they’re being poisoned, people deserve to know if there is no health impact,” she added.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., closed the debate by saying his committee would be crossing into the jurisdiction of other committees if it accepted Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment.
“The gentlelady almost had me with this amendment,” Westerman said. “We all care about public health, we all care about safety. I think that’s our duties as members of Congress.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment failed to be adopted as part of the committee’s work plan in a party-line 15-21 vote.
Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.
Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males. Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.
Alexander informed The Epoch Times that St. Joseph’s Catholic High School told him that his attendance at the school would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students. Alexander said the school labeled his beliefs as “offensive” and “bullying” because there was a transgender student in his class. Alexander insists that he has no plans to be violent in defending his ideology, and doesn’t feel as though he is bullying anyone.
“Offense is obviously defined by the offended. I expressed my religious beliefs in class and it spiraled out of control,” Alexander explained. “Not everybody’s going to like that. That doesn’t make me a bully. It doesn’t mean I’m harassing anybody. They express their beliefs and I express mine. Mine obviously don’t fit the narrative.”
He said, “This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”
Alexander told The Post Millennial, “They’re using it as a technicality to say that they’re not disciplining me, and it’s just a form of exclusion to protect the other students.”
However, Alexander is already enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, which reportedly bars him from enrolling at any other education programs.
Alexander said, “I am unable to do any other form of education because as long as I’m enrolled in the Catholic board, I’m not allowed to take an alternative route of education. So I’m enrolled, but I’m not allowed to attend school. So right now I actually have no form of education.”
Alexander stated that he plans to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.
Alexander is appealing his suspension. However, his appeal is reportedly being held up because Alexander previously asked for parental independence so as not to drag his parents into this quandary.
Alexander’s lawyer James Kitchen said, “He does live with his parents and they have an excellent relationship. He seeks guidance from them and they gladly give it to him. But he runs his own life. And that’s actually by design, because that’s how his parents raised him to be.”
St. Joseph’s Catholic High School principal Derek Lennox and Mark Searson, the director of education for the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board, both said they could not comment on the situation.
Indian Catholic devotees offer the way of the cross prayers after an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Mary’s Basilica in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on March 5, 2014. | AFP via Getty Images/Noah Seelam
Christians faced harassment in more countries than any other religious group amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to a recent Pew Research study finding an increase in 45 countries where followers of Christ face social or government abuse or violence since 2012.
The data on restrictions to religion around the globe, released last November, was featured in a Jan. 27 report showing that Christians face harassment in over 155 countries in 2020, an increase from 110 in 2012. The organization’s definition of “harassment” can include a wide range of actions, including verbal abuse to physical violence and killings committed by governments, social groups or individuals. The study captured “cases where individuals or groups feel singled out or unable to express their religious belief or nonbelief.” The study rated 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion using the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.
Pew’s Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices, while its Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. Researchers sifted through over a dozen publicly available data sources for the report, including the U.S. Department of State’s annual peports on international religious freedom and annual reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Overall, physical harassment related to religion occurred in more than two-thirds of countries in 2020, the research shows. Muslims faced harassment in 145 countries, an increase from 109 in 2012. Jews, who make up 0.2% of the global population, face harassment in 94 countries, up from 71 in 2012.
The study found that Christian groups were “targeted by private individuals and organizations in nine countries” as Christians were often blamed for the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In Turkey, an Armenian Orthodox church’s door was set on fire, and news reports said the man told police that he acted because “they [Armenian Christians] brought the coronavirus” to Turkey,” the Nov. 27 Pew report states.
“In Egypt, conspiracy theories blamed the pandemic on the Coptic Orthodox Christian minority, which international Christian observers said exacerbated the discrimination the minority group already faced.”
In India, two Christians were beaten and killed while in police custody for violating COVID-19 curfews in Tamil Nadu, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual international religious freedom report.
The study also found a nine-fold increase in countries where non-religious people face harassment. Pew named the United States among 27 countries where “religiously unaffiliated people” were harassed in 2020.
“Restrictions on religion don’t just affect those who are religious. Religiously unaffiliated people also are harassed because of what they believe,” states the Jan. 27 report by research analysts Sarah Crawford and Virginia Villa, which focuses on harassment against the religious unaffiliated.
Pew study says religiously unaffiliated face harassment in the US | Screenshot/Pew Research
The report also found that the religiously unaffiliated faced harassment in 12 majority-Muslim nations and six majority-Christian countries.
Forms of government harassment for atheists, according to Pew, included atheist groups in Croatia — a majority-Catholic country — who alleged the presence of the cross and other Roman Catholic symbolism in public buildings like hospitals and courtrooms were unconstitutional.
And in countries like Pakistan, where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion, atheists are not given a “no religion” option for their identification cards, although the “government requires people to state their religious affiliation.”
Examples of social harassment cited by Pew included a political satirist in Lebanon who called atheism the “religion of donkeys” during a program on a TV channel backed by that nation’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement political party.
While the rise of the religious “nones” isn’t new, Pew predicts the trend could result in the number of Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to as low as 35% of all Americans by 2070.
The Pew findings come as the global persecution watchdog organization Open Doors reported last year that over 360 million Christians experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination across the globe.
But even as more people shy away from identifying with any religion, many of those who report no religious affiliation still partake in a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices and beliefs.
According to a 202 Baylor University study, many “nones” still attend religious services, pray, meditate, believe in God or a higher power, have religious experiences, and believe in Heaven, Hell and miracles.
Hollywood’s not-so-secret LGBT agenda was on full display at the Grammys last night. From the eyesore that was Harry Styles’ “clowncore” jumpsuit; to Beyonce dedicating her win to her uncle and the “queer community” (of which she is not a part); to Kim Petras narcissistically crowning himself the first transgender “woman” to win in the Best Pop Duo/Group category, the only way viewers could escape the gay was if they turned off their TVs.
For those who powered through the ceremony, they would have also been subjected to the unsightly and openly satanic performance of “Unholy” by Petras and Sam Smith, who calls himself “nonbinary.” While Petras danced around in a cage surrounded by she-devils (or they-devils?), a latex and high heel-clad Smith led a group of witchy women in a dance clearly intended to mimic devil worship. That Madonna — a woman who looks less human and more diabolic than ever thanks to some gnarly plastic surgery — introduced the performance is fitting.
In her introduction, Madonna smugly alluded to the “controversy” that would soon occur on stage. Though the performance was certainly as depraved, tasteless, and oversexed as the lyrics to the sinful “Unholy” might call for, my main complaint is not that Smith, a gay man, and Petras, a man who purports to be a woman, were flaunting Satanism and anti-family values on live television.
My main complaint is just how boring, unoriginal, and self-congratulatory the performance was.
These days, full-fledged embrace of Satanism and sado-masochism is nothing new or out of the ordinary for Hollywood. Anything that was going to come after Lil Nas X’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” music video, featuring a lap dance with the devil, and accompanying Satan shoes would be hard to top. Even so, Hollywood’s pop and hip-hop darlings continue to seize on satanic imagery for their lyrics, performances, and promotional materials as often as they adopt new gender identities or advocate to normalize transgenderism.
But is it just me or is the shtick getting old?
When I watch a performance such as the one described above, I instinctively know that it was both made and not made for someone like me. The twisted minds behind the Grammys want to induce shock and outrage. They revel in any disgust they can produce in conservative and God-fearing viewers, myself included. In the way that this performance was crafted to provoke conservative, churchgoing Americans, it was actually tailor-made for me.
On the other hand, such a flagrant celebration of Satanism, adultery, and LGBT “values” could only gain such a thunderous round of applause at an event like the Grammys — an event filled with a populace so out-of-touch and enslaved to the LGBT agenda and its hatred of God and beauty that they wouldn’t know good art if it slapped them in the face, Will Smith style.
Petras and Smith’s performance, and Hollywood award ceremonies more broadly, are occasions meant to draw crude political lines. If you found the performance distasteful, you are a hateful bigot. If you thought that the performance was a brilliantly subversive triumph for two rich and famous members of the oppressed classes (gay and trans), then you are open-minded and on the right side of history.
So instead of taking the bait, instead of clutching our pearls and (rightfully) condemning the abominations on our TV screens, what if we just called out Hollywood for making bad and boring art?
If you can get past the hypersexed and satanic elements of today’s popular music, you will soon realize that the music itself is objectively bad. It’s boring, trite, and desperate, so embarrassingly eager to shock that it ends up talking about the same few topics (drugs, sex, money) in increasingly debased yet unimaginative and unintelligent ways.
Of course I felt disgusted seeing Sam Smith stuffed in latex like a sausage and singing about adultery. But in no way was I surprised that yet another pop singer thought it would be cool and edgy to promote Satanism. My boredom with Hollywood has officially become stronger than my disgust.
We should not dismiss the open embrace of Satanism and anti-family values in Hollywood. We should continue to denounce it. But in addition to clutching our pearls, we should use our outrage as fuel to create genuinely beautiful art. And I’m not talking about art as thinly veiled political manifestos. I’m talking about art that honors the human spirit and gets at what it means to be a creature made by God, called to partake in both the joy and suffering that comes along with being made in his image.
Dante, Michelangelo, C.S. Lewis — these artists created for the greater glory of God, and think about what wonderful feats they were able to accomplish. Feats that speak to all of humanity, not just the oppressed few.
The call for conservatives to make their own art has been strong and steady in recent years. Many have responded and are doing great work. But we need to ramp up our efforts because this much is clear: Hollywood is full of uncreative, boring clowns.
What will we leave behind for posterity?
Isabelle Rosini (@IsabelleRosini) is a public relations specialist living in Washington, D.C.
Instead of uniting Americans around the threat of China’s military provocations, the spy balloon episode produced a fog of misinformation and partisan finger-pointing.
If there was any doubt that we are engaged in some sort of cold war or contest for global superiority with China, the emergence of the CCP surveillance balloon over the United States should eliminate that. There’s no question China is being intentionally provocative.
And why wouldn’t it? The CCP is paying close attention. Chinese leaders have correctly assessed America is so politically and culturally dysfunctional that blatant acts of provocation can be done with impunity because blatant acts of hostility will just become more fodder for our domestic political disputes.
Our lack of national unity has been a national security problem for a long time, but as far as China’s concerned, it became abundantly clear just how bad a problem it was in 2020. The media and those otherwise responsible for “fortifying” our elections decided we weren’t allowed to say Covid came from Wuhan and started banning people from social media for saying the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Regardless of the fact that China’s irresponsible behavior was to blame for the deaths of millions of Americans, it became an important domestic political priority to convert a global plague into baseless accusations of racism so it could be used as a cudgel in a presidential election.
Similarly, when the local media first noticed the surveillance balloon over the northern states, there was clearly a scramble by the Defense Department — which by all appearances was aware of the balloon and could have shot it down over the Aleutian Islands but let it continue, hoping civilians wouldn’t notice — to avoid having to explain why it was forced into doing something reactive as a result of public outcry. And since the president is responsible for national security matters, this made him look like he wasn’t doing his job, either.
What could be done so the DOD could avoid having to explain any failures here to avoid public doubt and fear? And what could Biden, who already looks tremendously weak on foreign policy after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and his failure to preempt the Russian invasion of Ukraine, do to minimize domestic political blowback?
The answer was obvious: Just go to the well for this one and blame Trump. Of course, that strategy depends on having a wholly credulous media that innately trust conflicted and compromised government officials who care more about political fallout than the safety and security of their country. So naturally, the accusation that the Trump administration looked the other way while several other Chinese spy balloons transited the U.S. was all over the media last week before anyone asked any real questions about whether this was fair or accurate.
After days of top Trump officials, including Trump’s CIA head Mike Pompeo and the former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, publicly denying the story, we’re now getting a situation so absurd it demands the mixing of metaphors: a backhanded walkback.
Monday morning, CNN was up with the story, “Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office.” If you’re inclined to believe the national security apparatus under Trump would have been a little more aggressive in confronting China’s provocations, as most realists are, now the blame has shifted so as to portray the Trump administration as too incompetent to even notice what was going on.
There remains a possibility that this version of events is true. But the way this issue was dealt with by immediately pointing the finger at the previous administration, and then admitting the accusations that made it to the press were devoid of important context, is infuriating, less than reassuring, and difficult to believe.
As for how politics might enter into this transparently insulting and unserious media narrative, it’s probably worth noting that the aforementioned CNN story was written by Natasha Bertrand, a reporter so credulous that she earned the nickname “Fusion Natasha” because she wrote so many inaccurate stories about Trump-Russia collusion that appeared to be fed to her by Fusion GPS, the dodgy opposition research firm behind the so-called “dossier,” as well as other dishonest partisan sources.
Bertrand also holds a special place in President Biden’s heart for her, well, “politically helpful” journalism on Hunter Biden’s laptop. When the New York Post broke that story in October of 2020, Bertrand, then at Politico, wrote up the now-infamous story “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The article was cited by Joe Biden himself on the presidential debate stage while he was brazenly lying about his knowledge of his son’s corruption, and the broader media used her article to dismiss the need to look into the scandal. Of course, even some of the “former intel officials” Bertrand cited now admit they knew all along the laptop was real and declared it was Russian disinformation anyway.
To bring this full circle, it’s probably worth noting that some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.
“..some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.“
Suffice to say, the situation we’re in where we have a Chinese spy balloon floating over the United States and we’re unable to trust the information we’re getting from our inept government and the corrupt media that enable it is a horrible one to be in. The end result of their excuse-making and blame-shifting is that a great many people feel more confused and less safe than when they first learned of the balloon.
National security threats can’t be used to play political games, yet that’s all we’ve seen for several years. The baseless accusations of Russia collusion under Trump were leveraged for domestic partisan political gain at the expense of actively poisoning our relationship with a hostile nuclear power with which we’re now mixed up in a war in Eastern Europe. And now we can’t bring ourselves to even speak forthrightly about the national security threat posed by communist China because it would have bad electoral ramifications for the same bad actors that regularly instigate domestic political tumult and sleepwalked into the war in Ukraine.
These bad-faith attempts of the Biden administration and the media — for once “collusion” is the right word — to examine every serious foreign policy development through a self-interested political lens have simply got to stop. Uniting Americans and the world at large around the threat China presents militarily and economically needs to be a much higher priority. And that’s simply impossible so long as China can exploit the fact that its every provocation will trigger a blizzard of dubious and divisive information coming straight from our government and sympathetic partisans in the press.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Some Democrats are leaking their disdain for Vice President Kamala Harris to the press, with a few political bigwigs arguing openly that Harris is a major liability for 2024. Harris is struggling to “define her vice presidency. Even her allies are tired of waiting,” The New York Times headlined in an article Monday. That’s because one of the few issues that some Democrats are in agreement on — whether they’re allies of the vice president or not — is that she is a disappointment, at best, the Times reported.
Vice President Kamala Harris (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”
Even some Democrats who were supposed to be supporters of Harris “confided privately that they had lost hope in her,” according to The Times. Democratic fundraiser John Morgan was one of the few voices to speak out on the record against Harris, arguing that her weakness as vice president will be “one of the most hard-hitting arguments against Biden.”
The argument only becomes stronger because of the president’s age, Morgan said.
“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘Look, with his age, we have to really think about this,’” he argued.
Joe Biden is already the oldest president ever to serve in office at 80 years old. Morgan also took aim at Harris’ record of achievement as vice president.
“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” he said.
“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” one political analyst said of Vice President Harris and President Biden. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Multiple polls reflect Harris’ general unpopularity with voters, with roughly 39% of Americans saying they approve of the vice president’s job performance, according to polling site FiveThirtyEight.
Harris has gained a reputation for flubbing speeches and speaking vaguely. One recent speech that Harris gave in honor of two former NASA astronauts was savaged on social media for sounding “like a 5-year old” wrote it.
“They strapped into their seats and waited as the tanks beneath filled with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel,” Harris told the audience.
“You’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes!” Harris said. “With your own eyes! I’m telling you, it is gonna be unbelievable.”
Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
The remains of the China spy flight shot down by the U.S. over the Atlantic Ocean this past weekend are heading to an FBI processing lab in Quantico, Virginia, senior U.S. government sources tell Fox News.
The balloon remnants are set to be analyzed in the coming days.
Possible Chinese spy balloon debris has been spotted on the coast of South Carolina, and police are asking area residents to report other possible sightings.
The news comes as China admitted Monday that a second balloon spotted over Latin America is theirs, alleging that the aircraft is “civilian” in nature and shifted off course because of weather and its “limited self-steering capability.”
A China spy flight drifts above the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina, with a fighter jet and its contrail seen below it on Saturday, Feb. 4. (Chad Fish via AP)
“With regard to the balloon over Latin America, it has been verified that the unmanned airship is from China, of civilian nature and used for flight test,” China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters Monday. “Affected by the weather and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course and entered into the airspace of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
A photo taken in Aynor, South Carolina, of the Chinese spy flight being shot down. (Fox News)
Congressional leaders also are poised to receive a top-level briefing on the intelligence gathered from the suspected Chinese spy balloon — which was said to be carrying sensors and surveillance equipment — as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to shoot it down.
Possible debris believed to be from the Chinese spy flight shot down off the coast of South Carolina. (Facebook/Brady Deal)
Republicans on Capitol Hill have demanded a closer look at Biden’s decision-making throughout last week, which saw the Chinese spy balloon cross the entire continental United States before being shot down.
The Biden administration has argued that the U.S. gained significant intelligence on the craft by allowing it to transit the U.S.
Fox News’ David Spunt, Jake Gibson and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
An Ohio school district’s board abruptly canceled a high school musical production that contained non family-friendly lyrics, an appearance of Jesus, and gay characters, several outlets reported this week.
“When we found out it was canceled, everybody was just heartbroken. Honestly, it was terrible. Everyone was just crying,” Riley Matchinga, a senior playing a lead role in the school’s production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” told Fox 8.
“The Cardinal Local School District has decided that its spring musical production will not be ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.’ Its dialogue and song lyrics contain vulgarity and are therefore not suitable for our pre-teen and teenage students in an educational setting,” Cardinal High School Superintendent Jack Cunningham said in a statement acquired by the same outlet.
Though two of the characters in the musical are gay male parents, the district denies the decision was based on discrimination, the outlet also said.
Middlefield Ohio’s Cardinal High School drama department had been working on the spring production for weeks when the Cardinal Schools Board of Education pulled the curtain on it, Geauga County Maple Leaf reported Tuesday.
“Cast members have invested hours of their time in rehearsals, characterization lessons, and group and individual voice lessons. The crew has spent equal time creating and building set pieces, scenery and props. The decision to shut this production down is heartbreaking,” Mandi Matchinga told the school board in a letter, as reported by Maple Leaf.
Matchinga is a volunteer assistant director for the musical, a former teacher in the district, and the mother of two participants.
The musical’s cancellation caught the attention of award-winning actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, best known for his roles in “Modern Family” and “Ice Age: Collision Course.” Ferguson was an original member of the “Putnam County Spelling Bee” Broadway company.
“The message that this sends to them, that that is not ‘family appropriate’ or ‘family friendly,’ rather, is toxic and harmful and kind of abusive,” Jesse Tyler Ferguson said in an Instagram video shared by Playbill Thursday.
Feguson also told the outlet he and other in the original Broadway cast members are “working on connecting with the [Cardinal High School] cast via Zoom.”
The musical’s director, Vanessa Allen, told Maple Leaf she was scheduled to meet with Superintendent Cunningham to select a different production for performance in late April or early May.
One of the most well-known female surfers in the world has publicly slammed a recent decision by the World Surf League to allow men to compete as women.
Bethany Hamilton has been participating in international surfing competitions since at least 1998. In 2003, when she was just 13 years old, she lost her left arm after a tiger shark attacked her while she was practicing. Despite the significant setback, Hamilton quickly returned to the surfboard and the competitive circuit. She wrote about her experience and her deep, abiding Christian faith in an autobiography that inspired the 2011 film “Soul Surfer,” starring Helen Hunt, Dennis Quaid, and Carrie Underwood.
Over the weekend, Hamilton, now 32 and a wife and mom of three, released a video message on Instagram criticizing the WSL’s decision to allow so-called “transwomen” to compete against female surfers so long as their testosterone levels remain at or below 5 nmol/L for at least one year. WSL claimed that the rule change, which passed unanimously, now accords with “Olympic guidelines.”
But Hamilton challenged the premise of such guidelines, proffering a series of questions that she believes have not been addressed by those advocating for men in women’s sports. “Is a hormone level an honest and accurate depiction that someone indeed is a male or female?” Hamilton wondered. “Is it as simple as this?”
Hamilton also asked, “How is this rule playing out in other sports, like swimming, running, and MMA?”
Finally, she addressed the larger issue at play: Who exactly is “pushing for” these changes and who benefits from them? According to Hamilton, it’s not “the girls currently on tour,” most of whom do not “support … this new rule” but who do “fear being ostracized if they speak up.”
Hamilton insisted in the video that she has “love for all of mankind, regardless of any differences” and that she thinks the best solution would be to offer “a different division” for so-called “transgender” competitors, “so that all can have a fair opportunity to showcase their passion and talent.” If WSL does not create a separate division, Hamilton fears that women’s sports may be doomed within “15-20 years.”
Because of her concerns, Hamilton affirms in the close of the video: “I personally won’t be competing in or supporting the World Surf League if this rule remains.”
Though Hamilton has received a lot of criticism on social media, including accusations of “transphobia,” she has also received an outpouring of support. Fellow surfer Shane Dorian responded, “Speak your truth! Thank you for being brave enough to stand up for what you believe,” while swimmer Riley Gaines Barker — who has spoken out against “trans” competitor Will Thomas, aka Lia Thomas — added, “THANK YOU for using your platform to share this. I can’t express how inspiring this is.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
MTN News and @MMtTreasures video screenshot composite
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A viral video depicting what appeared to be an explosion over Billings, Montana Friday night was met both with skepticism and concern amid widespread reports of a Chinese spy balloon flying over the state earlier in the week.
“We’re monitoring the situation. I’m talking to our National Guard to find out if they have additional information,” Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) told Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson in an on-air interview shortly after the video was posted.
Later in the evening, the City of Billings reported on its Twitter account that they confirmed with Montana’s Disaster Emergency Services and Gov. Gianforte that there were no explosions “in, around, or across” the state. In addition, the City of Billings said the video “cannot be substantiated.”
The “explosion” video, posted by an account called @MMtTreasures, appeared to show a vertical pillar of white smoke or vapor, a flash of light, and something falling from the sky. In the text accompanying the video, @MMtTreasures also describes seeing a jet and witnessing what she described as an “explosion.”
“Ok, so here’s what I just caught on video I [sic] few minutes ago out my window. I saw a jet go by so fast and then explosion in the sky. Holy crap! Billings MT.”
Ok, so here’s what I just caught I few minutes ago out my window. I saw a jet go by so fast and then explosion in the sky. Holy crap! Billings MT. pic.twitter.com/swr8ERC6pf
Dolly Moore, the woman who posted the video, described her experience in an interview with MTN News on Friday night, which was shared in a report by KRTV.
“All I could think was, oh my gosh, this is happening again from two nights ago with the spy balloon over Billings,” Moore said in the interview.
By 9:45 p.m. on Friday night, Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder, had made contact with Moore.
Linder said at that time that they believed the video was legitimate, according to a report by NBC affiliate KULR. The sheriff also reportedly added it was difficult to tell exactly what the video showed and that there was no evidence of an aircraft going down nor any evidence of an actual explosion over Billings.
Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) also says there has been no confirmation of an explosion over the state or the city of Billings, per KULR‘s reporting on Saturday.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), responded to the City of Billings tweet, saying he was “still following all these events closely and will keep Montanans informed as any new information becomes available.”
I am still following all of these events closely and will keep Montanans informed as any new information becomes available. https://t.co/Ja9avfxt1J
Gianforte did not address the video in an interview on Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends Saturday morning.
“Honestly, if this had been up to Montanans, we would have taken it out of the air the moment it came into our sovereign airspace,” Gianforte said, referencing the balloon seen in the area long before the unsubstantiated “explosion” video posted Friday night.
Gianforte also noted the Biden administration’s seeming failure to take action on the Chinese spy balloon, “endangers the American people and emboldens our enemies.”
In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68.
Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression.
But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by hijacking the internet.
Hamilton 68 was of unique interest to the unelected members of the American government who staff the national bureaucracy and compose the federal civil service. It was — and likely still is — used by these bureaucrats on a regular basis to substantiate and launder bogus intel into the government’s policy-making narrative to further establish a rule of permanent bureaucracy and chip away at the democratic nature of the American republic.
Amanda Milius, a former member of the Trump administration and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Content at the State Department, recently confirmed this when speaking to The Federalist.
Outsourcing Intelligence Makes Being Corrupt Easier
According to Milius, from the day Hamilton 68 went online, senior officials at the State Department were elated because it enabled them to effectively outsource large swaths of their information sourcing for communications. Naturally, this was a huge time saver since “everything [was] 100 times redundant,” and having access to pre-sourced and verified intel from somewhere you trust while trying to maintain a fast-paced digital communications bureau with 24-hour access to the rest of the world would be a massive time saver.
Once the department began to process intel from Hamilton 68, they insisted that they could “use it as a tool to track all the Russian misinformation, which at that moment in 2017, was the shiny ball of foreign policy.”
Milius noted that with the election of Donald Trump, there was a distinct shift in the bureaucracy’s expressed priorities. Previously, the federal government had been preoccupied with the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), but along with Trump’s ascension to the presidency, federal agencies began to place a disproportionate emphasis on utilizing “public-private partnerships” to root out alleged Russian influence.
Another former senior government official recently suggested that information-based operations, a practice that in the digital era found its roots in the GWOT, was found to be useful in the domestic private sector as well. And this is likely how Hamilton 68 came into being. Individuals who had acquired specific skills while serving the country brought those skills home and began using them in service of political goals.
And Milius’ experience with the State Department’s “bot detection” efforts that were meant to keep tabs on people spreading Russian disinformation online substantiates this. She affirmed that the public-private partnership between the federal bureaucracy and Big Tech, in particular, established a sense of comfort and familiarity between the two bodies. Because bureaucrats were able to “take free trips to Silicon Valley and hang out with people from Google and Facebook and Twitter,” the managerial elite in both entities knew they were operating on the same wavelength.
This additional face time likely provided both groups reassurance that their ideological goals were similar and that they would have allies in the quest to delegitimize and stonewall Trump’s presidency.
Swamp Creatures Tend to Be Lazy
Once Hamilton 68 came online, an inordinate amount of attention was placed on 644 Twitter accounts that were flagged as “bots” spreading “Russian disinformation.” Thanks to Taibbi’s reporting, it is now publicly documented that these accounts were overwhelmingly run by American citizens and other Western civilians with no connection to Russia whatsoever. But to people involved in conservative politics at the time, it was clear that Hamilton 68 was a con.
“It was run by the teams that ran Russiagate, so this was yet another arm of their public attack on Trump and Trump supporters,” Milius said. “I was looking at the list of users, and I was like, ‘Bro, my secret handle is on there. Like all my friends are on there. I know these people. They’re not bots.’”
Milius stated that the individuals behind Hamilton 68 were directly providing “someone or multiple people” at the State Department with the lists of accounts being algorithmically monitored.
Such collusion would indicate the government was effectively taking orders from a politically biased third party about which private citizens it should monitor, suppress, and allow to be libeled by the corporate media.
And despite the fact that — as we now can deduce — the people behind Hamilton 68 knew what they were doing was fraudulent, the users who were algorithmically placed on these curated lists had information about them used to source not only news stories about a malicious foreign presence in American domestic issues but as the basis for intel used in reports within federal agencies.
Furthermore, the data analytics included alongside Hamilton 68’s information were frequently drastically inflated to manufacture a sense of severity, Milius said, further indicating to her and to some of those with whom she worked that the entire operation was bogus. When data analysts in the State Department would compare the analytics provided by Hamilton 68 with the actual data from the monitored accounts’ traffic, they would find massive discrepancies, she noted. The people behind Hamilton 68 were blatantly lying, and if people looked in the right places the lies fell apart.
But because their numbers were few and leadership enjoyed the convenience of pre-sourced intel, Hamilton 68 continued to be utilized by the State Department.
The Deep State Is a Hammer; Everything Else Is a Nail
Even Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, knew that Hamilton 68 was bogus. There is no reason to believe that GS-15s in the State Department had a good-faith reason to accept it at face value. After all, bureaucrats overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton in 2016, so why wouldn’t they take a chance at sabotaging someone they believed would lead the U.S. down the wrong path?
Milius contends that the political bias of entrenched bureaucrats who make decisions in federal agencies played a key role in deciding to utilize a tool like Hamilton 68, subsequently prolonging the narrative of Russian collusion.
“They wanted [Russian collusion] to be true so badly,” she said. “They felt like they were freedom fighters. In their minds, every Trump appointee was probably a Russian plant because, in their minds, Trump was a Russian plant.”
“The whole media pretended that this Russaigate thing was real. It didn’t just affect citizens. It affected everyone who worked in Washington, D.C., which includes everybody that worked with the [State] Department, the CIA, and more,” she continued. “These people were going home at night being told Trump and his people were Russian agents and then would come into work with the idea that they were going to save America from us.”
If Trump and everyone affiliated with him are Russian assets, and Russian assets pose an existential threat to the country, why wouldn’t a well-meaning new hire at the State Department who wants to grow in his career treat an intelligence briefing sourced from Hamilton 68 with the utmost importance if his boss told him to?
What Else Is Being Used Against Us?
Whether they were conditioned by their superiors and Big Tech or not, hundreds if not thousands of entries and mid-level bureaucrats perpetuated the lie the Russian government hijacked American politics. They, along with the corporate media and the universities, went along with this narrative to weaponize society against people — American citizens — who supported a democratically elected president from a major political party.
Taibbi’s reporting shows how Hamilton 68 was used by Big Tech and the corporate media to perpetuate the myth of Russian collusion by unfairly suppressing and regulating speech online. Milius’ experience at the State Department indicates how it was used to weaponize one of the most important parts of the federal government against the American people.
Both narratives likely only give us a look under the hood. We know about the Hamilton dashboard — which is still operational, albeit under the slightly different moniker of Hamilton 2.0 — solely because of the “Twitter Files,” and we know of the use of Hamilton 68 at the State Department because of people like Milius who are willing to share their stories.
We have no reason to believe Hamilton 2.0 isn’t being used by the government, nor do we know whether systems similar to the Hamilton dashboard are being used to curate lists of people on platforms other than Twitter.
But we do know that unelected members of the government are weaponizing themselves against the American people in collaboration with the private sector as they chip away at our democratic republic. This is irrefutable.
So, the question remains: what else is the U.S. government using to monitor its citizens while mobilizing against domestic targets who have done nothing wrong?
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.
I went looking for aliens in Roswell two years ago on a reporting trip to New Mexico. The aliens might not exist, but the conspiracies certainly do.
In 1947, a rancher discovered a field of debris wider than a football field after a July thunderstorm at the height of the U.S. flying-saucer wave. Air Force officials initially said the material was from a flying disc before claiming it was a crashed weather balloon, but many remain skeptical of the government’s explanation given that such balloons don’t leave behind a wide area of destruction.
The military acknowledged the debris was part of a secret atomic project in 1994, but records remain classified. Though President Donald Trump said in 2020 he’s heard “very interesting” things about Roswell, he refused to declassify any documents.
Now, more than 75 years after the incident, more questions are arising over an apparent airborne espionage object 1,000 miles north of Roswell.
On Thursday afternoon, NBC News revealed that a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon is hovering over Billings, Montana. The supposed weapon of espionage had apparently flown from the Alaskan Aleutian Islands and over Canada before making its way to airspace above the U.S. nuclear arsenal. According to NBC News, the balloon was spotted over the state that’s home to 150 warheads on Wednesday, near where the Chinese have been buying up American farmland.
“The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days,” NBC reported. “Military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.”
Defense officials told reporters that military leaders refused to shoot the balloon down because a widespread debris field would pose a threat to civilian life in the rural state. According to The Wall Street Journal, President Joe Biden was briefed on the issue on Wednesday.
If the Pentagon knew the surveillance tool was on its way to the nuclear arsenal, however, why didn’t the president have it shot down when it was over Alaska? Was Biden’s Wednesday briefing his first? Why wasn’t he told sooner? Why didn’t officials inform the public when it crossed into U.S. airspace? Did our government maybe not catch the balloon and are now covering for their own negligence? And why didn’t the Canadians shoot it down?
Even more troubling is why the Chinese would have a surveillance balloon over Montana in the first place, considering Beijing’s advanced satellites in low-earth orbit that provide all the bird’s eye images they need. Are they sending a message before Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the Chinese capital next week? Is espionage through TikTok not enough? We might not have ever known about the balloon had the press not snapped a photo of it.
We don’t know what happened at Roswell, and we probably never will. Was it actually a weather balloon that crashed? Was the object part of a military experiment? Could it have even been from a foreign government? Was it from the Empire — either an alien one from a galaxy far, far away or Red China?
Will Billings be the new Roswell?
SEE MY COMMENTARY BELOW
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. 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. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
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With the exception of the COVID shots, there is perhaps nothing in the economy that has gotten more tailwind in terms of government support than electric vehicles. Whether it’s the subsidies, the mandates, the inflation of the cost of gasoline, or the construction of cumbersome electric charging infrastructure, the government has done everything it can to turn a product that is inherently costly and impractical into something accessible to the public. Yet despite it all, a new study shows fueling these cars is more expensive than most gas-powered cars, even with record high gasoline prices, which were induced by policies from the same green energy. Now is the time to end all subsidies and mandates on behalf of this pathetic industry.
It’s truly hard to quantify the degree to which government has propped up green energy and products that never would have gotten off the ground in the free market. Between making gasoline so expensive and making gas cars more expensive with fuel efficiency mandates on the one hand and subsidizing electric vehicles and all their required infrastructure on the other hand, electric cars have every reason to succeed. Heck, all blue states are even signaling the end of gas-powered cars altogether, and some are even mandating it. The subsidies reached a tipping point with the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which offers a subsidy of $7,500 per electric vehicle. But a new study shows that it still costs more to fuel an EV after spending so much more for the original purchase.
“Typical mid-priced ICE car drivers paid about $11.29 to fuel their vehicles for 100 miles of driving,” concluded a study from consulting firm Anderson Economic Group. “That cost was around $0.31 cheaper than the amount paid by mid-priced EV drivers charging mostly at home, and over $3 less than the cost borne by comparable EV drivers charging commercially.”
Oh, and let’s not forget that time is money. You have to spend an average of $18 per charge and spend 15 minutes per 100 miles traveled. Good luck on your family road trip this summer with the baby screaming in the car who was woken up after finally taking a nap, thanks to the incessant need to stop.
The only benefit the Michigan-based consulting firm found to fueling EVs over traditional cars was, of course, among the high-end luxury cars used by the elites promoting these products.
This is astounding given the record-high gas prices this past year, especially for winter months. This means that even after spending more money for the purchase of an EV, you are saddling yourself with a boondoggle to maintain. The problem for the parasitic, venture socialist industry is that the very regressive green policies that are harming the oil and car industries are doing even more damage to the electric grid. Thanks to the war on coal, oil refineries, and pipelines and the stagnation of nuclear energy by the same radical eco groups, electricity prices are skyrocketing even more than gasoline. All that “investment” in solar and wind is not there for us during our time of need. Now we face the prospect of electric grid failures more acutely than even oil and gas shortages.
Just consider what would happen during these heat waves if we only had electric vehicles. California grid operators warned people during last summer’s heat wave to ease off charging their cars. Now imagine if they had their way and 100% of cars were electric and 100% of the electricity was generated from wind and solar. Well, you’d be stuck at home … which is exactly how they want it.
Biden’s signature legislation last year handed out over $50 billion to the electric vehicle industry, including $7.7 billion for EV charging stations and $10.3 billion in grid and battery subsidies. But just like money can’t buy you love, it also can’t buy you efficacy, efficiency, or safety. Despite all of the corporate welfare for green energy, it’s still natural fuels from the earth that are holding up Texas’s grid during this cold spell and ice storm in the northern part of the state.
Texas Grid Snapshot… yet 8 out of 10 new projects are wind and solar
What was powering northern Texas during the ice storm? As the Energy Information Administration data shows, natural gas was the star player while wind collapsed, despite Texas throwing tens of billions of dollars at it.
As for efficiency, a 2021 study shows that even if EVs were more economical post-purchase in terms of fueling per mile, there are fewer miles to monetize those returns. According to the paper from the Bureau of Economic Research, the average family EV only racked up 5,300 miles per year, less than half the 13,476 miles per year driven by normal privately owned cars. Thus, the savings in operating these cars was always a mirage because they are just driven less. They could never possibly replace internal combustion vehicles, just like wind and solar cannot replace oil, gas, and coal for electricity and fuel. Yet the government has mandated automobile manufacturers to quadruple the market share of EVs in their fleets.
Then, of course, there is the issue of safety. Recently, it was found that during Hurricane Ian, electric vehicles caught in the storm surge in southwest Florida were suddenly exploding. DeWalt’s new no-turn electric mower also seems to have problems, as one model caught fire on the opening day of Equip Expo 2022. These are the sorts of issues that are worked out when a product has to rise or fall in the free market without a permanent guarantee of income. But with endless subsidies, we can only imagine the economic and societal problems from an EV-only road show.
Moreover, what this all demonstrates is that EVs were never meant to replace traditional cars to fulfill our needs and standard of living. They are serving as a Trojan horse to break our standard of living so that we will “own nothing and be happy,” as the WEF officials like to say. They want us to pay a fortune for cars and then barely be able to drive them because of the cost of electricity that they are concomitantly and artificially increasing thanks to other global warming regulations and market distortions.
Oh, and of course, no action taken against our prosperity, liberty, and mobility is complete unless it helps China. We all know China controls 76% of global EV battery production, and the nickel, cobalt, and lithium used to produce these batteries are all produced abroad. So now we are subsidizing China and other bad actors to make the rope that hangs our economy, which is pretty much in line with every other government policy. All they need now is to absolve these companies of product liability, and they will be just like the COVID shots. So why do Republican governors continue to service the electric vehicle scam? Why do they continue to place the boot of government on the scale toward these loser vehicles? The time has come for red states to completely divest from the green energy scam.
First Son Hunter Biden seeming admittance that the laptop at the center of a federal investigation belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from his lawyers prompted widespread criticism of mainstream media organizations that dismissed it as unreliable and even Russian disinformation.
“Hunter Biden admits infamous laptop is his. Not Russian disinformation, not a ‘plant’ as his father and 51 dishonest former intel officials pretended,” journalist Miranda Devine, who authored the book “Laptop from Hell,” tweeted, referring to the 51 intelligence experts who signed a letter casting doubt on the scandal in 2020.
“So Hunter Biden is now admitting, after three years, that everything on the laptop is real? Bold strategy. Especially after Democrats & their media allies spent years arguing Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation,” Outkick founder Clay Travis wrote.
First Son Hunter Biden finally admitted the infamous, scandalous laptop belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from lawyers seeking a criminal probe. (CBS Sunday Morning)
Writer Kelly Jane Torrance asked, “How many people and publications is it that owe the @NYPost an apology?”
Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote letters to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general on Wednesday calling for investigations into Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Mac Isaac, who owns the computer repair shop where Biden is said to have left his laptop. Biden’s lawyers also sent cease and desist letters to others who obtained and disseminated the laptop’s contents.
Lowell argued in the letters that Mac Isaac and the others had no right to inspect the contents of Biden’s computer, much less make copies of it to share with the media. He told Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich on Thursday, however, that the letters requesting the investigation were not an admission that the laptop belonged to his client.
🚨NEW: attorney for Hunter Biden tells me letters requesting investigation into the laptop repair store owner, Rudy Guiliani, and others, are NOT an acknowledgment that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter's: pic.twitter.com/RPbksqNR0v
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post and NPR did not immediately respond when asked if any corrections or statements would be issued in the wake of Hunter Biden’s apparent admission. Those outlets have all verified the laptop’s legitimacy to some degree in their own reporting in the years since 2020.
The laptop saga began in October 2020, when the New York Post reported about a 2015 email from a Ukrainian energy executive to Hunter Biden, thanking him for introducing him to his father, that it obtained from the hard drive of Biden’s laptop. Joe Biden was vice-president at the time of the message, and his son then enjoyed a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, raising concerns of attempted influence-peddling with his powerful father.
The laptop’s content included a peek into Biden’s overseas business dealings, as well as more sordid material like homemade sex tapes and videos showing him using illegal drugs.
The laptop was widely dismissed by print and television outlets, especially The New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN, and in an astonishing display of coordination, Twitter and Facebook blocked or limited sharing of the New York Post’s article about Biden; Twitter even locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks.
Then-CNN host Brian Stelter hypothesized the emails could be “made up” and the story was simply the “right-wing media machine” in action. “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl told then-President Trump in 2020 that the laptop couldn’t be “verified,” and NPR announced it wouldn’t “waste our time” on “stories that are not really stories.”
The Washington Post eventually did a stunning about-face in its coverage of the laptop, but didn’t inform readers of the truth until well after President Biden had occupied the White House.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ paper largely kept its readers in the dark as to the seriousness of the Hunter Biden scandal.
The Post first addressed the Biden controversy on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post broke its story, using a variation of the “Republicans pounce” trope to frame the story, running the headline, “Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden.”
Right out of the gate, the report expressed heavy skepticism towards the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s emails and sowed doubt in the GOP sources who first obtained the laptop. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler also authored a skeptical “explainer” of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the paper published multiple opinion pieces urging readers to dismiss the controversy altogether.
The New York Times and The Washington Post both eventually verified Hunter Biden’s laptop after big tech dismissed the New York Post’s bombshell reporting during the 2020 presidential election. (Getty images | New York Post)
In March 2022 the Post finally authenticated thousands of emails from the laptop in a lengthy report about Hunter Biden’s “multimillion-dollar” financial ties to the Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy.
Much like the Post, the New York Times also confirmed the authenticity of the laptop in March 2022, well after the Gray Lady reported on it skeptically during the 2020 campaign. Politico, NBC News and CNN also eventually verified the laptop.
The New York Post covered the news Thursday with a front-page story headlined, “It’s mine.”
There is not enough criticism in the world to go around regarding how the Biden campaign and their corrupt allies in the media responded to the Hunter Biden laptop news in October 2020. pic.twitter.com/ep3RRXT4pl
Hunter Biden authorized John Paul Mac Isaac to access his laptop data. Then he failed to retrieve the laptop. At that point it became abandoned property. & free game. https://t.co/MvrSOpf7Tw
Right before the election America’s top intel veterans (e.g., 5 former CIA Directors) published a letter that Hunter’s laptop was Russian. The media repeated the absurdity as fact. Joe cited the absurdity in the debates to silence the matter. Hunter now admits the laptop was his.
An upcoming hearing for the House Oversight Committee will focus on Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s original story. Other House investigations are expected to focus on Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Those investigations are likely to rely heavily on the contents of the laptop.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., is probing Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry’s secretive negotiations with his Chinese counterparts.
Comer informed Kerry in a letter sent Thursday afternoon that the committee, under his leadership, has opened an investigation into Kerry’s role in the Biden administration and, in particular, his high-level climate negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To date, Kerry has ignored information and document requests from Comer and other committee Republicans sent when they were in the minority.
“To date, you have failed to respond to any of our requests,” Comer wrote to Kerry. “Yet, you continue to engage in activities that could undermine our economic health, skirt congressional authority, and threaten foreign policy under the guise of climate advocacy.”
“The Committee requests documents and information to understand your role and provide necessary transparency over the SPEC and its activities,” he continued. “As a member of the President’s cabinet, you should be representing the United States’ interests. Your statements, however, consistently show disregard for American national security and taxpayer dollars.”
Climate envoy John Kerry attends a United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021. (Reuters/Yves Herman)
President Biden appointed Kerry to be the U.S. SPEC, a position that hadn’t previously existed and which didn’t require Senate approval, shortly after taking office in early 2021. The SPEC office is housed at the State Department and has an estimated $13.9 million annual budget with approval for 45 personnel.
Kerry’s position gives him a spot on the president’s cabinet and National Security Council. Since taking on the role, he has traveled worldwide, attending high-profile climate summits and diplomatic engagements in an effort to push a global transition from fossil fuels to green energy alternatives.
Despite the high-level role leading the Biden administration’s global climate strategy, Kerry’s office has been tight-lipped about its internal operations and staff members, sparking criticism from Republicans, including Comer, who have demanded transparency for such an important office.
“We are left with an insufficient understanding of your office’s activities, spending, and staffing,” Comer continued. “To enable long overdue oversight of your office, please provide the following documents and information.”
The Oversight Committee chairman added that Kerry has been too soft on China’s human rights violations “while promoting climate negotiations that the CCP does not even appear interested in entering.”
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., leads an organizational meeting on Tuesday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Kerry has been blasted for various comments that have appeared to downplay vast human rights abuses tied to China’s green energy supply chain. After he was asked in November 2021 about how slave labor was reportedly employed by solar panel firms in China, Kerry said he had to stay in his “lane” when negotiating with Chinese officials.
“Well, we’re honest about the differences,” Kerry said at the time. “We certainly know what they are, and we’ve articulated them, but that’s not my lane here… My job is to be the climate guy and stay focused on trying to move the climate agenda forward.”
Since assuming the SPEC position, Kerry has engaged in various private talks with Chinese counterparts, including two 2021 meetings that took place in China. Following a regional climate summit in April 2021, Kerry told CNBC that solving climate change was “not about China.”
“This is not about China. This is not a counter to China,” he told the outlet. “This is about China, the United States, India, Russia… a bunch of countries that are emitting a pretty sizable amount.”
China accounts for about 27% of total global emissions — nearly tripling the total in the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter, according to Rhodium Group — and continues to approve and construct a large amount of coal power plants.
The SPEC office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
High-priced attorneys for Hunter Biden dispatched letters on Wednesday to the Delaware attorney general and the Department of Justice pushing them to launch investigations into a slew of individuals who had shared information allegedly retrieved from the laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. But yesterday’s transparent attempt to sic top state and federal law enforcement officials on those exposing the Biden family pay-to-play scandal is already backfiring, with Biden’s clarifying the letters are not an admission that the laptop was Hunter’s.
In two detailed, 14-page letters penned by Winston & Strawn attorney Abbe David Lowell, the Hunter Biden attorney requested the attorney general of Delaware and the Department of Justice investigate whether John Paul Mac Isaac, Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Bannon, Jack Maxey, Garrett Ziegler, and Yaacov Apelbaum committed state or federal crimes. “There is considerable reason to believe” those individuals violated various laws “in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data,” Hunter’s attorney opened his Wednesday missive.
The lengthy letters then detail each of the individuals’ purported actions that Lowell claims provide “considerable reason to believe” they committed various state or federal crimes, which the Winston & Strawn attorney then identifies and analyzes.
Starting with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware repair shop where the laptop was left for repairs, Lowell asserts, “Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to gaining access to our client’s personal computer data in Delaware without Mr. Biden’s consent.”
“Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to copying that data without Mr. Biden’s consent, and Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to distributing copies of that data from his place in Delaware,” the letter to the Delaware AG continues.
Given that Mac Isaac has maintained from day one that the “computer data” he copied was contained on a laptop abandoned at his repair shop by an individual he believed was Hunter Biden, yesterday’s letters to the Delaware attorney general and the DOJ appeared as an apparent admission by Hunter that yes, the laptop was his.
But when asked whether Hunter “now acknowledge[s] he or someone on his behalf dropped off his laptop for repairs at Mac Isaac’s store,” Lowell told The Federalist, “These letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s or others’ versions of a so-called laptop. They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating and disseminating what they allege to be Mr. Biden’s personal data, wherever they claim to have gotten it.”
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, Mac Isaac’s attorney Brian Della Rocca seemed flabbergasted by the continued obfuscating by Hunter Biden’s legal team. “Is Hunter denying that he was in Delaware in April of 2019 then? To this day, he has not denied being in Wilmington at that time,” he said. “Nor has he ever denied dropping off the laptop with John Paul. Is he denying doing so now?”
“John Paul has not, nor will he ever manipulate the data on Hunter’s hard drive. That is just not who he is,” Della Rocca told The Federalist. And it would be easy to confirm the authenticity of the data, Della Rocca explained, stressing that “the data on the drive he has can be compared to the laptop, which is in the possession of the FBI, to show he has not made any changes to the information.”
Della Rocca also condemned the letters’ attempt to suggest Mac Isaac lied to law enforcement officials.
“Mr. Mac Isaac has insisted that he did not make a bit-by-bit copy or clone of the hard drive,” page eight of the Biden attorney’s letter maintained, continuing:
Nor could he make such a copy because the hard drive was soldered to the laptop’s mother board, and he could not stay logged into the waterlogged laptop long enough to copy the entirety of the hard drive because the waterlogged laptop would periodically turn off. Instead, Mr. Mac Isaac chose what he wanted to access and copy from Mr. Biden’s personal data that Mr. Mac Isaac unlawfully obtained. Thus, any representation by Mr. Mac Isaac to law enforcement that what was in his possession was the entire hard drive would have been a knowing false statement. Moreover, the absence of a true clone of the hard drive created the opportunity for mischief—namely, the addition of files to this “hard drive,” the manipulation of files on this “hard drive,” and the destruction of files from this “hard drive.”
Mac Isaac’s attorney told The Federalist this passage represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the process for retrieving data from a damaged MacBook Pro 13. “Due to the damaged condition and poor stability of the MacBook, John Paul had to manually recover the user data,” Mac Isaac’s attorney explained. “John Paul was able to recover the entire contents (220GB) [of] the folder named, RobertHunter.”
“Per Hunter’s request, no attempt to recover the remaining system files or applications was made because they did not include personal data,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer stressed. Della Rocca added that “the only law enforcement agency to which John Paul has provided a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the FBI,” and that the FBI also took custody of the laptop at the same time, making it possible for the FBI to compare what Mac Isaac recovered from the “RobertHunter” folder on the original laptop. “There would be no difference,” Mac Isaac’s attorney emphasized.
The accusation that Mac Isaac accessed Hunter Biden’s personal data without his consent is also “absolutely false,” Della Rocca told The Federalist.
While Della Rocca did not elaborate, the signed repair contract stated that if the laptop was not retrieved within 90 days of “notification of completed service,” it would be treated as “abandoned.” Hunter Biden’s attorney did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry on whether it was his position that Hunter Biden had “not abandoned the property under the repair contract,” with the Winston & Strawn attorney instead stressing the letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s “versions of a so-called laptop.”
The repair contract further provided that the owner of the equipment agreed to hold Mac Isaac “harmless for any damage or loss of property.”
Yet, here we are, with “another privileged person hiring yet another high-priced attorney to redirect attention away from his own unlawful actions,” Della Rocca scoffed. “This is entirely a P.R. move,” he added, telling The Federalist he first saw the lengthy letters from Hunter’s attorney when CBS contacted him for comment.
The public relations move, however, is already backfiring, with the general public interpreting the letter as an implicit acknowledgment that the laptop from hell was Hunter Biden’s. And things may only get worse, if the FBI is forced to confirm that, yes, the damning documents publicly circulating are authentic copies of the material contained in the MacBook’s “RobertHunter” folder.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
“Yet again, we’re seeing evidence of what happens to Black and brown people from simple traffic stops.” — Ben Crump, attorney for Tyre Nichols’ family
“It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and brown Americans experience every single day.” — President Joe Biden
“[V]iolence like what happened to [Tyre Nichols] is about how some bad cops use their power over Black and brown victims.” — CNN’s Van Jones
Hey! Where’d all the “browns” go?
George Floyd, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and on and on and on — all black people, generally “justice-involved,” who resisted the police and ended up dead. Name a civilian killed by cops of any other race that led to international protests, billboards, renamed streets, hashtags, memorials, NBA jerseys, murals, busts, tribute songs or Omagazine covers.
Only black people reflexively defend their own criminals. The “blacks and browns” scam is an attempt to rope Hispanics into the black community’s dysfunction.
Hispanics don’t champion their criminals! (Asians don’t even champion their A-minus students.) When 13-year-old Adam Toledo was shot by a cop in Chicago, “activists” did their best to incite worldwide protests, but Hispanics weren’t interested. Why are we going to take off work?
To the contrary, the residents of Toledo’s overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhood blamed his mother, complained about gangs and demanded more policing. Journalists hoping for anti-police rage instead got quotes like these:
“We are tired of gang violence; it’s sad what happened with the young boy, but he had a gun with him and his friend had been shooting, so the officer responded to the threat.”
“We can’t even go out safely because there are random shootings everywhere and you never know if a stray bullet might hit you.”
“The only reason people are talking about (killings) now is that it was a police officer who shot and killed the kid.”
Meanwhile, normal black people are made to feel like race traitors if they ever say something like, I don’t know, the guy was kind of a scumbag.
No matter how much the activists push, Hispanics simply will not rush out on the streets to protest whenever a Latino is killed by a cop. (In places like Los Angeles, Hispanics arethe cops.) Journalists are beside themselves that the “browns” refuse to be more like black people.
NBC News: “Police killings of Latinos lack attention, say activists”
Los Angeles Times: “What will make people care about police shootings of Latinos?”
The Washington Post: “Latinos are disproportionately killed by police but often left out of the debate about brutality, some advocates say”
And, no, black people are not killed by the police at a “disproportionate” rate. Every single study claiming otherwise is comparing the percentage of blacks killed by police to the black percentage in the population. This, obviously, is absurd. Lots of people never have any contact with the police. (Obey the law — you’ll see!)
It would be like accusing grizzly bears of systemic racism against Alaskans because 29% of all grizzly attacks are against Alaskans — a mere 0.2% of the population — whereas grizzlies kill zero Texans, and they make up 9% of the population! (There are no grizzlies in Texas at last count.)
Police don’t stop people at random. They stop people whom they believe to be breaking the law. Judging by the pantheon of black martyrs, they’re often right.
George Floyd was a fentanyl addict (which, of course, contributed in no way to his death) who’d just passed a counterfeit $20 bill — not to mention the armed home invasion robbery he’d committed back in Texas; Michael Brown had just knocked over a convenience store and gratuitously roughed up the small Asian owner on his way out; Freddie Gray was a heroin dealer in possession of an illegal switchblade; Breonna Taylor was the bag woman for a fentanyl dealer; Daunte Wright was driving with an expired registration and had a warrant for his arrest stemming from his choking a woman during an attempted armed robbery.
For any meaningful comparison of civilians killed by cops, the denominator needs to be “percentage of contacts with the police.” Maybe officers are searching out black people to harass for no reason whatsoever, but another explanation for the high number of police encounters is that, compared to other groups, a relatively large cohort of black people are violent criminals.
Although only 13% of the population, black people commit more than 50% of all murders, more than 50% of all robberies and more than 30% of all aggravated assaults. And yet blacks remain about one-quarter of the thousand civilians shot by police every year, the vast majority of them armed.
Instead of unveiling more George Floyd murals, how about some refresher courses on “The Talk”? (Which apparently makes much more sense in Spanish.) All these black luminaries would be alive today if they’d done one simple thing: Obey the police. It’s not that hard.
Guys, we want to help! But you’ve got to abandon this impulse to turn any member of your group who fights a cop into a beatified saint.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
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A dozen Catholic school students were kicked out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., because they were wearing beanies with a pro-life message.
The American Center of Law and Justice is representing the parents of the students from Our Lady of the Rosary School in Greenville County, South Carolina. An attorney for the ACLJ told WYFF-TV that the teenagers tried to attend the museum after attending the annual March for Life on Jan. 20.
A mother of one of the students posted to Twitter about the incident. She wrote that her daughter told the man they were wearing the hats in order to identify each other in the crowd attending the museum. They said that a security guard approached them and told them to either take off the beanies or leave the museum. When they asked why they were being asked to leave, the guard reportedly told them that the museum was a “neutral zone.”
Nora Luz Kriegel, a parent of students at the Catholic school, joined a group that wrote the museum to petition for a change in its policies.
“They should be allowed to wear the hats that they were wearing and to be able to express themselves,” said Kriegel to WYFF. “And I felt it was very wrong that this person harassed them.”
A spokesperson for the air and space museum released a statement about the incident.
“Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident, and have determine steps to ensure this does not happen again,” said Alison Wood, the museum’s deputy director of communications.
Here’s a local news report about the incident:
Greenville students removed from National Air and Space Museum for wearing pro-life hats www.youtube.com
Fox Nation host Alveda King reflects on her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, life and legacy and urges others to love and forgive.
Black History Month begins this week, just two weeks after tens of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 50th annual March for Life. This month and the March for Life collectively present an important
opportunity to highlight two of the most pressing issues facing America’s Black community today: abortion and fatherlessness.
Ultimately, the reason these issues are widely accepted in the Black community is our country’s decline in church attendance and its move away from Jesus. Yet the sad reality of our times is that these issues receive little to no attention from the mainstream media or the far left today. Instead of focusing on these issues and working to develop solutions for them, the left and the media continue to promote ideas about “systemic racism” and critical race theory while calling for ever-expanding forms of “racial equity.” Rather than responding to these distractions, we want to use this Black History Month to raise awareness about fatherlessness and abortion and the devastating effect both are having on America’s Black community.
Our Nation is home to approximately 24 million fatherless children, or about 1 in 3 of all American children. Approximately 80% of these homes are led by single mothers, and the rate of children living in single-parent households is the highest of any country in the world. Our Nation’s fatherlessness epidemic has particularly ravaged the Black community. Nearly 70% of all Black babies in America today are born to unmarried mothers, and 64% of all Black children grow up in a single-parent home.
Tragically, fatherlessness strongly correlates with negative outcomes in nearly every aspect of a child’s life. Fatherless families are 25% more likely to raise a child in poverty, and 90% of all homeless and runaway children do not have a father. Additionally, 85% of children and teens with behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes. Fatherless children also account for 71% of child substance abuse cases, and approximately 70% of all youths in state-operated institutions are fatherless.
This Black History Month, we want to draw attention away from the noise and back to the issues that matter. The rampant fatherlessness and shocking rates of abortion in the Black community should be stunning to all Americans of good faith.
The issues of abortion and fatherlessness are closely linked, as one of every three pregnancies in a fatherlessness home end in abortion. America’s epidemic of fatherless children largely correlates with abortion rates, and women raised in fatherless homes account for approximately 70% of all teen pregnancies.
Equally tragic is the vastly disproportionate impact abortion has on the Black community. Of the roughly 930,000 abortions performed in 2020, about 39% were performed on Black women, for a rate of 24.4 abortions per 1,000 Black women. This means that over the course of a year, more than 350,000 Black babies, or almost 1,000 per day, are aborted. As a result, approximately 1 million Black babies are killed in the womb every three years.
Deep down, Americans understand that fatherhood is essential to society. According to a poll by Scott Rasmussen, 84% of Americans believe a strong family is foundational to a strong America.
Most Americans also understand the relationship between absent fathers and abortion. Sixty-nine percent of Americans think a man becomes a father at the moment of conception, and 78% think the father’s financial responsibility begins at the start of a pregnancy. The book of Malachi reflects this wisdom and reminds us that God “will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”
This Black History Month, we want to draw attention away from the noise and back to the issues that matter. The rampant fatherlessness and shocking rates of abortion in the Black community should be stunning to all Americans of good faith, and we genuinely believe these two related issues are among the biggest civil rights battles of our time.
Fixing anything begins with first identifying the problem. The simple truth is that Black Americans will continue to struggle and fall behind if the fatherlessness crisis is not addressed.
At the same time, the effects of abortion on significant parts of the Black community will keep robbing our country of untold ingenuity and talent.
By highlighting fatherlessness and abortion this Black History Month, we can help the American people learn more about the biggest issues Black America faces. Then, and only then, can Americans of all stripes unite to solve them.
Jack Brewer serves as Chair, Center for Opportunity Now and Vice-Chair, Center for 1776 for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI).
Evangelist Alveda King is Chairman of the Center for the American Dream at the America First Policy Institute. A niece of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she is the author of several books, including “King Rules” and “How Can the Dream Survive if We Murder the Children.”
The FBI search of President Joe Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Wednesday, continues the search for classified material in various homes and work spaces used by the president and his family in the past decade. What is surprising about Wednesday’s search is not the fact that a sitting president has now been subject to two FBI searches of his residences, but the fact that this search has come roughly three months after the first discovery of documents in a closet in Washington.
Despite that rather lackadaisical record, Biden’s personal counsel Bob Bauer still stated on Wednesday, with no sense of irony, that this has been a “timely DOJ process.” It is “timely” if you use glacial measurements.
If this is how the FBI moves with dispatch, it is chilling to think of the schedule for lower-priority matters. The FBI waited to conduct their search until both counsel and the president went to the house. They will now see if they can find anything.
The search of the president’s small Delaware beach house is also telling in that it sits roughly 80 miles from a massive trove of Biden documents that neither counsel nor the FBI has shown much interest in. The University of Delaware is currently holding a colossal collection of Biden documents from the time before his presidency. The Bidens have effectively converted the university into a type of political safe deposit box, barring media from reviewing documents going back to Biden’s time in Congress.
Universities are usually dedicated to facilitating access to knowledge and information. However, the University of Delaware has spent public funds in resisting media requests for access to look at the documents for material linked to sexual harassment allegations and other controversies. Since some of the material reportedly included classified documents removed by Biden as senator, there is obviously the chance that the university files could also contain classified material.
The sheer size of the documents magnifies those concerns. Biden parked 33 pallets holding 1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of electronic records at the university. He then barred the public and the public from looking at the collection. The university has continued to run interference for the president in arguing technical exclusions from public access rules and by claiming to be organizing the material. This has gone on for over a decade.
Since the FBI is already in the state, they might want to consider a trip to the university. However, for the moment, no one seems to want to discuss the collection. It seems that this is all an intractable game of “Delawhere?”
At some point, the Delaware faculty need to object to the use of their institution as a political lock box. While the university’s motto is “knowledge is the light of the mind,” neither the university nor the president appear eager to shed light, let along knowledge, on what these papers contain.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Two Dutchstudies touting the great success of “gender-affirming” medical intervention on youth have been deemed bad research by experts at the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. In the report “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine” published earlier this month, researchers describe how the 2011 and 2014 studies that formed the foundation of the transgender industry in the U.S. should never have been accepted by the professional community, falling “unacceptably” short of modern research standards. The studies led to a global movement of wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” resulting in hormone experimentation on youth and, in some cases, irreversible mutilation.
The Dutch studies had several major flaws, according to the report. Study authors only recorded the cases with the best outcomes, concluded without evidence that gender dysphoria disappeared solely as a result of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and failed to properly examine the risks of the interventions, with disastrous effects.
The American College of Pediatricians responded to the report in a press release on Jan. 25 calling on organizations to “reconsider current protocols for gender dysphoric children.”
“The entire pediatric transgender industry is based on these two Dutch studies,” Michelle Cretella, immediate past executive director of ACPeds and advisory board spokeswoman for Advocates Protecting Children, told me. “This open access report is critical because it exposes the fraudulent foundation of pediatric transgender medicine in the United States.”
The Dutch studies were so foundational to the U.S. movement that the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States was opened by Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who was convinced of the necessity of “gender-affirming” interventions after visiting the Dutch physicians who published them, Cretella said.
But if these studies had been published today, the authors conclude, the research would have been recognized as very low quality and would not have encouraged the use of puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and surgery in confused children and young adults in general medical settings.
‘No Evidence’ of Genetic Cause
The report criticizing these studies was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and authors E. Abbruzzese, Stephen B. Levine, and Julia W. Mason have years of experience studying so-called gender identity. Levine has worked in the field as a psychiatrist since 1974.
“We had no bias, we are just responding to and trying to articulate the limitations of the studies,” Levine told me. “We are doing harm to an unknown percentage of kids, and the data that is supportive of this work does not really address the issue. The real issue here is what happens to these children when they get into their 20s and 30s.”
Youth who have been hormonally and surgically “transitioned” have major obstacles to their happiness and productivity later in life, Levine said.
“After people have sex reassignment surgeries … they want more surgeries,” according to Levine. “It’s very clear they have continued gender dysphoria. The idea that they are being ‘cured’ by affirmative care is an artifact, it’s a myth.”
Hormone and surgical treatment, and subsequent medical intervention, leads many people to assume this must be a “medical problem” but “we don’t have any evidence that this is genetically determined,” Levine said.
“Just because we have hormone treatment doesn’t mean there is a hormonal defect in the person,” he said. “People believe, erroneously, that there is some genetic, pre-determined factor here, but we have not been able to find a genetic cause.”
Cultural, interpersonal, psychological, and developmental factors all contribute to the development of a person’s behavior, Levine said. Gender dysphoria can be a resulting psycho-social problem.
Biased, Uncontrolled Studies
Though the Dutch studies were found to have selection bias and multiple, uncontrolled variables, they were broadly applied in the U.S.
“The Dutch study researchers only took healthy kids from supportive and reasonably healthy families,” Levine said. “They carefully screened kids, so if they had major developmental problems they were not included in the studies. But in the U.S. … the vast majority of these kids have a history of psychiatric issues before they developed gender dysphoria. The Dutch rejected these kids from their research.”
The Dutch study had 196 participants initially and only put 70 in the protocol. Only 55 then completed the protocol. As well as having selection bias, the study was uncontrolled.
“Wisely, the Dutch people gave these kids and their families continued psychotherapy during this protocol,” Levine said. “Is the positive results they found due to the psychotherapy, improvement as they got older, or affirmative care? This is an uncontrolled study. They cannot make conclusions about what caused what. But the world took this as scientific evidence.”
In the U.S., youth who had rapid-onset gender dysphoria and didn’t even meet the baseline criteria for the Dutch study began receiving interventions in pediatric clinics, with doctors utilizing the studies as justification. Furthermore, when the Dutch began this project there was also much less awareness of autism, Levine said. A very large percentage of these kids that have come to American facilities are on the autism spectrum, according to Levine.
Courageous Pediatricians Have Resisted
ACPeds physicians have spoken out against sexual disfigurement and medical intervention in youth with gender dysphoria for years.
“There are a handful of us physicians within ACPeds and across the country who have the courage and expertise to speak out on this issue,” Cretella said. “When we are able to do so in an environment open to dialogue, we are met with significant appreciation and affirmation by fellow physicians and laypersons alike.”
Most colleagues, Cretella said, appreciated ACPeds’ stance, acknowledging that the studies affirming medical intervention in gender dysphoric youth were likely flawed or fake; but too many feared losing their jobs to speak out against transgender interventions.
“Trans interventions are big money,” Cretella said. “Billionaire elites promote trans ideology over truth across all public institutions and media platforms, and [in America] a severe cancel culture results in everything from severe harassment and doxing to ending one’s career.”
Fortunately, signs of sound medical ethics triumphing over junk science are breaking through, Cretella said.
In the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, cultures that embraced transgender interventions for youth early on have reversed course. France has urged greater caution in these cases.
In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has rooted his administration in medical ethics and utilized the best science to establish pro-child treatment of gender confusion with psychotherapy, Cretella said.
Currently, about 13 other states are attempting similar legislative efforts.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.e who lives in Virginia.
“Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start.” No, those aren’t the words from a tweet banned for “hate speech” — though they could be. They’re prophetic lines from none other than Mister Rogers, who put the immutable truths to a tune decades before the trans craze.
Resurfaced in a recent TikTok, the clip shows Fred Rogers, host of the classic children’s show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” singing his ditty “Everybody’s Fancy,” which goes:
Boys are boys from the beginning Girls are girls right from the start Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
Girls grow up to be the mommies Boys grow up to be the daddies Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. pic.twitter.com/eVLPZ3J3RI
In his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson in 1980, Rogers delved into the song’s importance. When Carson asked Rogers a series of lighthearted questions about his show and asked how Rogers communicates important themes to his audience of children, it didn’t take long for the host to pivot to the topic of sex. “Are they too young for that?” Carson asked.
That’s how they learn the difference between boys and girls, Rogers replied. “Sometimes children think that they might change, they might have to change after a while,” he continued, to which the audience laughed.
But Rogers wasn’t laughing. “You know, we laugh about that now,” he said, “but it’s because we had that concern when we were little.”
Some have argued that Rogers was simply the product of his generation or speculated that he was a homosexual to explain his gentle demeanor. In a 1969 Senate Commerce Committee hearing, however, Rogers made his case clear: “I’m very much concerned about what’s being delivered to our children in this country.”
And of course, some of Disney’s most recent productions have forged ahead with an increasingly explicit LGBT agenda for children. The latest “Toy Story” installment, “Lightyear,” boasted a lesbian kiss. “Baymax!” taught kids that men can have periods.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was not a political program, but it tackled issues, both big and small, that troubled children. This included not only instilling truths about the immutability of the sexes, but reassuring kids that they wouldn’t get sucked down the bathtub drain or lose an ear during a haircut.
“Children are concerned when they get their first haircut that the barber’s going to cut more than hair,” Rogers said on “The Tonight Show.” So to assuage kids’ fears, he visited a barber to ask whether the trimmer cuts more than hair.
It isn’t that Rogers hated children who wanted to be unique—far from it. As he stated in the Senate hearing, he merely wanted to address the “inner drama of childhood.” Long before libraries began hosting drag queen story hour, Rogers tried to warn us about the dangers of gender-bending. But in true Mister Rogers’ fashion, he did so while celebrating each person for being “fancy” and unique, no transgender interventions required.
EXCLUSIVE: Texas law enforcement arrested an Iranian illegal immigrant at the southern border last week whose name and date of birth were initially flagged as a match on the FBI’s terror watchlist, but who a DHS official tells Fox News was ultimately determined not to be a match on the database after further vetting.
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) arrested 29-year-old Alireza Heidari last week after a traffic stop involving a human smuggler at the border in Val Verde County, Texas as part of Operation Lone Star. Heidari was being smuggled in the vehicle along with four other illegal immigrants. He was located in the trunk. Fox is told that Heidari was handed over to Border Patrol custody and later determined to be a match of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
Fox reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Thursday and multiple times since. Only on Tuesday did DHS refer Fox to the FBI, which declined to comment. The FBI’s website says it does not confirm anyone’s status on the watchlist.
However, on Wednesday, a DHS official told Fox News that after further vetting, Homeland Security officials determined that Heidari was not a match on the TSDB.
Jan 23, 2022: Authorities stop a human smuggler in Val Verde County, Texas.
The FBI’s TSDB contains information about the identities of those who are “reasonably suspected” of being involved in terrorism or related activities. There were 17 people stopped by Border Patrol in December alone whose names matched on the list. That brings the total of individuals arrested at the southern border between ports of entry to 38 since October.
There were 98 terror watchlist arrests in FY22, 15 in FY21 and just three in FY 20 at the southern border caught between ports of entry. At the ports of entry at the northern and southern borders, meanwhile, CBP’s Office of Field Operations has encountered 125 people on the TSDB so far this fiscal year. In FY 2022 there were 380 apprehensions, 157 in FY21 and 196 in FY20.
The increase in apprehensions between ports of entry has raised concerns that, amid a historic spike in illegal immigration across the southern border, illegal criminals and terrorists could be slipping by overwhelmed Border Patrol agents.
So far this fiscal year, nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants have evaded Border Patrol, with an average of 2,450 a day in the last 120 days, sources told Fox News last week.
In fiscal 2022, there were nearly 600,000 gotaways. There were 389,155 gotaways at the border in fiscal 2021, and fiscal 2023 is on track to easily outpace those numbers. Last week, agents told Fox News there have been more than 1.2 million gotaways during the Biden administration.
Jan 23, 2022: Illegal immigrants are caught in the back of a vehicle at the border.
Tom Homan, a former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, told Fox News on Saturday that the number should “scare the hell out of every American” and said there was a reason these migrants are not turning themselves in to Border Patrol to be processed and released into the U.S.
“Why would they not take advantage of the program? Because they don’t want to be fingerprinted, and there’s a reason for that.”
Fox News’ Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.
Biden loves big money people. He certainly could never achieve what the billionaires who support him have.
He admires them; their wealth. And they admire their ability to have someone in power whom they can and do control. You can bet that Biden is under control.
A guy like him makes too many mistakes for multiple people to not have reams of information on him and his family. Understand that Biden’s crackhead son has not one but two laptops currently being scrutinized by multiple sources; not all of which are friendly to America. For anyone in which Democrats had not invested so heavily, they would have been jettisoned like dirty mop bucket water. But Biden still has work to do for many “Johns”.
In 1973, as the Watergate investigation was ramping up, then-President Richard Nixon infamously declared, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.” Indeed they do…
That same year, 50 years ago, Joe Biden took office as a U.S. senator at age 30, one of the youngest in American history. Before his election, the sum total of Biden’s “public leadership” experience was as a member of the New Castle County Council in Delaware. But with just over a million residents, Delaware elections, like those of other small states, are comparatively inexpensive, and thus sometimes big idiots get elected. Biden, an idiot’s idiot, held that seat for 36 years until 2009, when a then-unknown freshman senator, Barack Obama, tapped Biden as his veep — ostensibly to provide a measure of gravitas and bona fides to his presidential ticket.
Notably, in 2009, Biden declared his net worth was $27,012. But in the four years after leaving office in 2017, his net worth swelled to more than $9 million — most of it reportedly from “book deals.” Of course, Biden, a.k.a. the “Big Guy,” the head of the Biden Crime Family, had Hunter Biden as his investment adviser…
Biden certainly does not owe his political success and subsequent wealth accumulation to brilliance. He owes it to his ability to lie.
He learned to ply his trade of deception from two of the most accomplished big-wig Demo prevaricators, Bill and Hillary Clinton — the latter having established herself as a consummate congenital liar. With a little help from his Democrat Party’s implementation of a massive bulk-mail ballot fraud scheme, Biden is now the prevaricator-in-chief.
Lean Mean Gaffe Machine!
Of course, Biden has proven himself to be one of the best gaffe machines in presidential history. We didn’t even get this many jokes out of Jimmy Carter’s administration, and he’s still made fun of to this very day.
Alexander adds:
Biden has a long and proven track record as a lying dog-faced pony soldier, which he has demonstrated most recently in his obfuscatory lies about the illegal possession of classified documents, some of which were reportedly taken when he was vice president, and others prior to 2009, when he was still a senator.
On rare occasions, in an unintentional moment of honesty, a man with career political ambitions will tell you exactly what you can expect from him — and Biden did just that shortly after becoming a senator. During the 2008 election, The New York Times observed that Biden’s “weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything.” Recently, I came across a 1974 Biden interview, and it is very revealing.
Some people would describe such moments as gaffes — when a politician says something mind-numbingly stupid in any number of categories, from an unintentional truth to a BIG Lie, from the creepy or inappropriate to the unintelligible. Biden has a rich history across all four types of gaffes, and he knows it. “I am a gaffe machine,” he acknowledged ahead of the 2020 election.
In that PBS interview, Biden, who shamelessly described himself as being “like the token black or the token woman,” lamented the fact that he depends on “people who have money,” and “they always want something.” And over the last 50 years, Biden certainly has proven himself as a “giver.”
He said, “You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded to run for that office.”
He added: “I went to the big guys for the money. I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it…” Apparently, the second-oldest profession is akin to the first! He insisted he was able to raise lots of money because he was “a 29-year-old oddball,” and “was able to have a national constituency to run for office because I was 29.”
Biden certainly perfected the prostitution thing, and unlike his rival Bernie Sanders, who raised much of his 2020 presidential campaign funding from small donors, Biden courted billionaires.
Show Me the MONEY!!
Remember Jerry Maguire? One of the iconic moments from the movie happens when Cuba Gooding, Jr is taunting Tom Cruise to shout “show me the money…..I love black people…..Show me the money!!!” That’s our president… he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown and all he wants is to see the money.
As Alexander puts it:
According to Biden: “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys. I get in trouble in my party when I say wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks. I’ve found no distinction.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Fans hold a candlelight vigil for Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center on Jan. 3, 2023, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and is in critical condition following the Bills’ Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals. | Jeff Dean/Getty Images
A new poll reveals that the overwhelming majority of Americans see public calls for prayer in a time of tragedy as a force for good, with such a belief extending across all demographic subgroups.
Summit Ministries, in conjunction with McLaughlin & Associates, conducted an online poll released to the public Tuesday of 1,000 likely voters from Jan. 19-23, asking them to weigh in on the power of prayer.
The poll came a few weeks after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s collapse after suffering cardiac arrest during a Jan. 2 game against the Cincinnati Bengals and his subsequent recovery. Hamlin’s recovery followed an outpouring of support from the American public, which included the offering of prayers on his behalf.
With a sampling error margin of 3.1 percentage points, the poll found that two-thirds of respondents (67%) told pollsters that they saw public calls for prayer after a national tragedy as “helpful.”
On the other hand, nearly 20% of those surveyed characterized public calls for prayer amid a national tragedy as “pointless.” The remaining 13% either had no opinion or refused to answer the question.
Belief in the power of prayer cut across all demographic subgroups, with most respondents of all races, age groups, genders, marital statuses, political ideologies and regions classifying it as “helpful.”
The share of respondents with favorable opinions of public calls to prayer in times of tragedy descended with each generation, with 77% of Americans over the age of 65 believing in the power of prayer, followed by 70% of those aged 56-65, 68% of those between the ages of 41 and 55 and 62% of respondents aged 30-40.
Americans between the ages of 18-29 were the group least likely to view public calls for prayer as effective. Fifty-five percent of respondents under 30 identified calls for prayer as “helpful,” while 27% dismissed them as “pointless.”
Liberals had a higher share of respondents who viewed public calls to prayer as “pointless” (30%).
“Some people say there’s not really a generational difference, but there is,” Summit Ministries President Jeff Myers, whose ministry seeks to provide resources to ground Christians in a biblical worldview, said in a statement. “Young adults are more likely to say that they have no religious preference and this poll seems to reflect that.”
Myers expressed gratitude that “still, more than half of young Americans, the most skeptical generation, believe that public calls to prayer are effective.”
“In times of crisis, Americans are still likely to come together even in spite of their partisan differences,” he added. “The fact that people want to pray together, I think, is one of those … increasingly rare moments of unity. If it happens around prayer, all the better.”
The poll illustrated a degree of consensus, with majorities of conservatives (80%), Republicans (73%), Democrats (65%), independents (62%) and liberals (59%) seeing calls to prayer as helpful.
Majorities of African Americans (73%), southerners (72%), women (71%), residents of the Midwest (70%), married respondents (69%), whites (67%), Hispanics (66%), Americans living in the eastern U.S. (64%), men (63%), single respondents (62%) and residents of the west coast (60%) said the same.
Summit Ministries partners with McLaughlin & Associates for a monthly poll to ask questions related to several topics, such as prayer, biblical values and the rejection of cancel culture.
The nonprofit seeks to “find out where there really is consensus in spite of the key divide that we often see in America.”
“We’re finding that probably 70% of Americans are people with solid values who just want to live their lives,” Myers added. “Thirty percent of Americans want to tell everybody else what to do and they can be nasty about it. Sometimes, the fear of the 30% causes the 70% to be silent, and I’m hoping that our polls show that they don’t need to be, that most people are with them.”
Myers expressed gratitude that the nation rallied around Hamlin and that “a lot of people, especially high-profile NFL athletes, felt comfortable with sharing their faith.”
In his first on-camera comments since his collapse on the field, the 24-year-old Hamlin said Saturday that his collapse “was a direct example of God using me as a vessel to share my passion and my love directly from my heart with the entire world.”
Since his collapse, Hamlin’s charity has raised over $9 million to help provide toys for kids in need.
“Now, I’m able to give it back to kids and communities all across the world who need it the most, and that’s always been my dream, that’s always been what I stood for and what I will continue to stand for,” Hamlin said.
Photo by Mike Ruane/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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The Colorado State University Health Network plans to host multiple vocal workshops this week to teach transgender and non-binary students to alter their voices to sound feminine, masculine, or neutral, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
According to the CSU website, the university will host three sessions teaching transgender and non-binary students how to change their voices to better align with their chosen gender identity. All three courses are free and offered to students regardless of whether they are on hormonal therapy.
“teaching transgender and non-binary students how to change their voices to better align with their chosen gender identity.”
“Voice Feminization Workshop,” the first course, will be held on January 31, and it welcomes “transfeminine and nonbinary individuals” to attend. The class promises to introduce attendees to “vocal exercises utilized for voice feminization.”
A “Voice Neutralization Workshop” will be held on February 1 to teach non-binary individuals how to make their voices sound neutral and neither feminine nor masculine.
“The class provides an overview of vocal features related to perceptually masculine, feminine, and androgynous voices,” the website states.
CSU will host the final session, a “Voice Masculinization Workshop,” on February 2, which seeks to train “transmasculine and nonbinary individuals” how to alter their voices to sound more masculine.
Maggie Hendrickson, the director of the Pride Resource Center, told the university’s news publication, the Rocky Mountain Collegian, “We really don’t want people to think that they have to be like on hormones, or so far along in their transition, or out, or any other precursors to coming to the workshop.”
“It’s just another way for people to feel more comfortable in their bodies,” Hendrickson continued. “A lot of people just think about transitioning as like, hormones and surgery, but there’s lots of other ways to socially or culturally or not medically transition. It’s really [for] people [who] are interested in voice training or experience any type of dysphoria that they think this could help with. That’s who the intended audience is for, and so this is just another tool for folks to kind of explore gender and the way that they’re received by others.“
The courses will be facilitated by Annie Schubert, a certified speech-language pathologist and clinical vocologist at the Speech and Language Stimulation Center in Fort Collins.
The center offers multiple voice programs, including “Transgender Voice Services,” which aim to train clients to modify their voices to sound like the opposite gender. The training works on altering pitch, resonance, and intonation patterns.
“Driven by each client’s goals and gender identity, we provide voice training services for transgender or gender-diverse clients seeking to modify their voice,” the Speech and Language Stimulation Center website states. “At SLSC, we prioritize using both objective feedback from voice analysis software as well as each client’s self-analysis of their speech samples across the duration of training. Above all, it is our goal to provide a supportive environment for each client on their path toward confidently presenting their gender identity.“
Schubert told the Rocky Mountain Collegian that the introductory courses also teach “vocal hygiene” and “healthy voice principles” to ensure individuals do not cause strain or injury when attempting to modify their voices.
“We talk about the different vocal features that lead to a listener to perceive a voice to be more feminine or masculine, or in that kind of gender-neutral range, and then we break it down into its parts,” Schubert stated. “So [that means] learning about the difference between average pitch and pitch variation and the different prosody and intonation patterns that lead a voice to be perceived more masculine or more feminine.“
Schubert, CSU, and the Health Network did not respond to a request for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
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Two dozen Republican senators have signed a letter to President Joe Biden noting that they do not plan to vote to raise the debt ceiling unless action is taken to address the nation’s spending problem.
The lawmakers conveyed their “outright opposition to a debt-ceiling hike without real structural spending reform that reduces deficit spending and brings fiscal sanity back to Washington. It is the policy of the Senate Republican conference ‘that any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by cuts in federal spending of an equal or greater amount as the debt ceiling increase, or meaningful structural reform in spending, such as the Prevent Government Shutdown Act or the Full Faith and Credit Act.’ We intend to stand by that policy.”
Today Senate conservatives sent a letter to @POTUS stating our outright opposition to a debt-ceiling hike without REAL spending reform. Americans are keenly aware that their government is not only failing to work for them – but actively working against them. Read the letter ⬇️⬇️ pic.twitter.com/2i2oRTNmdD
America’s massive and ever-increasing national debt is currently more than $31 trillion.
“Our nation’s fiscal policy is a disaster. Our country owes $31 trillion, a level of debt that now well exceeds the size of our economy,” the letter states. “We do not intend to vote for a debt-ceiling increase without structural reforms to address current and future fiscal realities, actually enforce the budget and spending rules on the books, and manage out-of-control government policies.”
The Republicans who signed the letter include Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, J.D. Vance of Ohio, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Braun of Indiana, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Ted Cruz of Texas, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, James Risch of Idaho, John Barrasso of Wyoming, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Katie Britt of Alabama, and Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Paul has described America’s debt as “the greatest threat to our national security.”
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed new legislation over the weekend that appeared to bar permanently deforming transgender surgeries for minors, but things aren’t always what they seem. Senate Bill 16, titled “Transgender Medical Treatment and Procedures,” was a top priority for lawmakers who introduced the measure two days after the legislature opened on Jan. 17.
Despite immediately receiving praise from numerous figures critical of transgender ideology, including a detransitioner, the bill signed into law Saturday certainly isn’t perfect. In fact, it doesn’t do much of anything.
The new law signed by the Utah governor, who has a history of introducing himself by stating his so-called preferred pronouns, only bars transgender procedures and hormone interventions for minors who have not been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In other words, minors can find a sympathetic physician steeped in wrongly named “gender-affirming care” who will give them a diagnosis that enables them to pump their bodies full of wrong-sex hormones and amputate their healthy organs. Teens focused on gender-bending can even be diagnosed online.
“who have NOT been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.“
Furthermore, under the new Utah law, once individuals turn 18, they’re free to do whatever they want. They can even schedule transgender surgeries on their 18th birthday.
“Legislation that impacts our most vulnerable youth requires careful consideration and deliberation,” Cox said in a press release after his signature. “More and more experts, states and countries around the world are pausing these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences.”
Cox also thanked the legislation’s sponsor, State Sen. Michael Kennedy, while giving a passing mention of the deficiencies in the new law. “While not a perfect bill, we are grateful for Sen. Kennedy’s more nuanced and thoughtful approach to this terribly divisive issue,” Cox said.
Ideally, Cox would have sided with lawmakers a year ago in their attempt to fight back against the transgender craze. In March last year, the statehouse had to override the governor’s veto of legislation prohibiting men from invading women’s sports.
“We will continue to push the Legislature for additional resources to organizations that work to help this important Utah community,” Cox said on Saturday. “While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.”
Despite its reputation as a deep-red state, Utah has been no exception to cultural currents imposing transgender ideology on children across the nation. Last fall, a Utah LGBT group sponsored an “all ages” back-to-school drag show with performers whose names sound like “anal leakage” and “genitalia” when pronounced aloud.
A drag queen named “Jenna Tailia” performed at an “all ages back to school drag extravaganza” in Provo, Utah pic.twitter.com/2OkdmXFhTE
Last spring, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson mocked Cox’s use of pronouns after the Utah governor’s veto of transgender sports legislation.
“Bright red Utah is now led by a cut-rate Gavin Newsom imitator named Spencer Cox,” Carlson said. “He’s beyond belief.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. 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.
The media fell head over heels for a shoddy propaganda operation spearheaded by an ex-FBI agent. Twitter, internally, understood the operation to be partisan hackery but never spoke out. Organizations full of influential ex-government officials promoted the operation. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to “The Twitter Files” that we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.
American intelligence operatives have a history of using credulous reporters to spread disinformation for political purposes. (Remember when President Nixon’s team forged cables about John F. Kennedy and tried to get them in Life? Or the fate of Jean Seberg and her baby, thanks in part to COINTELPRO and the Los Angeles Times?) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.
The consequence? Self-appointed disinformation police in government and media shape American politics with actual disinformation, crafted specifically to quiet dissent.
New Information
Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project styled itself as a “dashboard” that tracked Russian disinformation on Twitter.
As Taibbi wrote, “The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked ‘to Russian influence activities online.’ It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first ‘reverse-engineered’ Hamilton’s list in late 2017.”
The files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”
“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” another employee said. What Hamilton 68 was passing off as foreign disinformation was largely legitimate speech from anti-establishment American tweeters. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.
Who ran Hamilton 68? Created by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, the project was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts himself is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)
Institutional Corruption
It gets so much worse on three fronts: academia, Big Tech, and media.
First, Taibbi notes the suspicious research was promoted uncritically by elite American universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Second, the files show Twitter declined to call out Hamilton 68 publicly, opting to “play a longer game here,” in the words of one employee who now advises Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation.
Third, and most importantly, Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably. Taibbi found, “[Emily] Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,’ she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” Horne works for the Biden administration as well.
This is a damning illustration of the institutional corruption rotting American politics and culture. You may wonder how ex-spooks could create a secret list, hide their results, pass off the research as legitimate, convince just about every major media outlet to run with the findings, convince elite universities to run with them, and keep Twitter quiet in the process. The answer is that some institutional powerbrokers are corrupt, some are inexcusably incompetent, and others are a combination.
Media Enable It All
If the media, however, had a semblance of the competence and virtue journalists claim to have, there would be much more incentive for powerful people in other institutions to stop behaving badly.
Watts and Co. did not make an honest mistake. When leftists at Twitter saw the same information, they immediately and literally called BS — privately, at least. Even their warnings could not dissuade dozens of journalists and politicians from blasting Hamilton 68’s findings to millions of Americans for years. This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.
“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“
Journalists did their part and took the bait. Bear in mind that NBC News and MSNBC have used Watts himself as a national security contributor for years, ignoring plenty of evidence that he was a dishonest propagandist using their airwaves to advance the interests of intelligence agencies. They actually used their own “disinformation” reporters to spread more disinformation.
My colleague Mollie Hemingway called this out all the way back in 2018, when the likes of Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and an astounding array of media outlets were promoting Hamilton 68.
“Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse,” Hemingway wrote. “Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.” (Twitter seemed to be misrepresenting its internal knowledge at the time, as well.)
Five years ago, making that point was met with attacks from anti-Trump activists who engaged in amateur intellectual gymnastics to classify every argument they disliked as Russian propaganda. The effect was to turn down the volume on people who were undercutting the campaign against Trump, empowering their own false narrative. Taibbi’s reporting vindicates the people who pushed back.
Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Planned Parenthood in Peoria, Illinois. | Screenshot: Google Maps
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the arrest of an Illinois man a little over a week after he allegedly set fire to a Planned Parenthood facility, as pro-life groups maintain that federal law enforcement is not acting quick enough to bring justice to those responsible for the arson of pro-life pregnancy centers and churches.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of Illinois announced Wednesday the arrest of Tyler Massengill, 32, for the malicious use of fire and an explosive and attempt to damage a Planned Parenthood facility in Peoria, Illinois. The clinic reported on its website that the building is closed indefinitely following the “substantial fire and damage.” The fire occurred in the late evening on Jan. 15, 2023, 10 days before news broke about Massengill’s arrest.
“A review of area surveillance from the fire scene revealed that at approximately 11:20 PM, an older white pickup truck with red doors parked in an area adjacent to Planned Parenthood,” the statement reads. “Video footage depicts a man walking up to the building with a laundry detergent-sized bottle. The man lit a rag on fire on one end of the bottle, smashed a window with an object, then placed the container inside of the Planned Parenthood building. He then quickly left the area on foot.”
The rest of the announcement details the collaboration between “multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Springfield Field Office; the Peoria Police Department; and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.” If convicted on a malicious use of fire charge, Massengill faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years and faces up to 40 years in prison.
Massengill could also face up to three years of supervised release and a possible fine of up to $250,000.
According to a complaint filed Wednesday, authorities received a tip about an Illinois license plate number for the pickup truck. Peoria police “conducted an inquiry of the subject plate number in a license plate reader database system which returned a photo of an older white pickup truck, with red doors,” The Journal Star quotes the complaint as reading. The complaint further stated that Massengill told investigators that he was upset after a girl he was in a relationship with three years ago got an abortion.
The arson comes as the abortion issue has become a source of contention following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last June, finding that the U.S. Constitution does not contain a right to abortion.
Since Politico published a leaked draft decision in the Dobbs case on May 2, pro-life pregnancy centers and churches have found themselves subject to acts of vandalism and arson. While pro-abortion groups and individuals have experienced incidents of violence, a report compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that their pro-life counterparts have experienced 22 times as much violence in the 4.5 months following the publication of the leaked Dobbs draft.
Rev. Jim Harden, the CEO of CompassCare, a network of pro-life pregnancy centers whose Buffalo, New York, office was firebombed last June, praised the Peoria police for their “top-notch investigative work” in a statement released Wednesday. He also denounced the attack on Planned Parenthood, asserting that “Attacking an abortionist does not make someone pro-life, it makes them crazy.”
At the same time, CompassCare noted that after a Planned Parenthood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was targeted in an attempted arson attack, an arrest was made after four days. CompassCare believes that partisan considerations explain why federal law enforcement has handed down only two indictments of perpetrators of violence against pro-life organizations and churches.
As no arrests have yet been made in the CompassCare firebombing case, the organization partnered with the Thomas More Society legal group earlier this month to hire independent investigators to search for the perpetrators of the June 2022 attack. Vandals broke the windows of CompassCare’s Buffalo office, lit fires at the facility and spray-painted graffiti outside the building.
“What the situation in Peoria and Kalamazoo show is that the FBI has the tools, skill, and manpower to bring these criminals to justice when it is politically favorable,” Harden said. “They threw pro-life people a bone with the indictment of two pro-abortion extremists on January 18.”
A grand jury in Florida indicted two pro-abortion activists last week for vandalizing multiple pro-life pregnancy centers throughout the state. CompassCare is not the only pro-life organization to raise questions about the lack of action taken against those who have committed pro-abortion violence.
Brian Burch, the CEO of the advocacy group CatholicVote, has repeatedly raised concerns about the DOJ’s lack of action to address violence against Catholic churches dating back to May 2020, when the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, led to national unrest. He wrote a letter to the DOJ in December 2021 calling on the federal law enforcement agency to investigate the attacks on Catholic churches and symbols.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan published Tuesday, Burch wrote that Associate Attorney General Venita Gupta responded to the request in January 2022, telling the advocacy group that Attorney General Merrick Garland had ordered a “15-day review to ensure that all appropriate resources are being deployed to protect houses of worship.”
Additionally, Gupta informed Burch that the “Department is taking numerous steps to address such violence, consistent with our commitment to combat unlawful acts of hate in all their forms.”
“Disappointingly, it now appears that the promises made in Associate AG Gupta’s January 2022 letter were mere platitudes,” Burch concluded in his letter to Jordan. “To date, the federal government has only found evidence to charge two individuals involved in only a handful of cases, despite hundreds of actual incidences of violence. These charges only recently came to light, indicating the more sunshine that Congress shines on the indifference of the DOJ the more likely they will do their job.”
While the FBI has offered rewards for information that could lead to arrests for the vandalism of 10 pro-life pregnancy centers, Harden contends that the law enforcement agency’s efforts are “a day late and a dollar short.” He attributed the FBI’s embrace of reward money for information about pro-abortion vandals to “the House Judiciary Committee’s demands for cooperation in their inquiry into the ‘allegations of politicization and bias [against pro-life people] at the FBI.”
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights raised questions about a potential political bias against pro-life individuals and groups at the FBI in a Sept. 26 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“There seems to be much interest in pursuing alleged wrongdoing by pro-life activists, yet little interest in pursuing alleged wrongdoing by abortion-rights activists,” Donohue wrote.
Donohue cited the arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck for purportedly pushing a patient escort at a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood clinic as an example of an “overreaction for a minor infraction of the law.” Houck faces the possibility of up to 11 years in prison. Donohue contrasts Houck’s case with the “underreaction by the Department of Justice when the pro-life side is targeted.”
A GiveSendGo fundraiser set up for Houck’s family maintains that the escort was harassing Houck and his son as they prayed outside the abortion clinic, prompting them to walk away from the building.
“The escort followed them, and when he continued yelling at Mark’s son, Mark pushed him away,” the fundraiser stated.
Houck’s case was heard this week at a federal court in Philadelphia. Judge Gerald Pappert rejected Houck’s defense attorney’s request for the case to be dismissed. The jury remained deadlocked Friday and will resume deliberations on Monday.
Sorry, I refuse to follow the script. The script for black influencers demanded that the Tyre Nichols tragedy be laid at the feet of so-called white supremacy.
Five black cops beat a 150-pound black man to death, and the script called for more mass shaming of white people and insinuations that policing should be outlawed.
Had I followed the script, I wouldn’t be embroiled in controversy, public enemy number one of black Twitter, Ciara, and all the other blue-check virtue-signalers.
In fact, had I dishonestly blamed systemic, institutionalized racism for Nichols’ death, I would be the toast of Twitter, drowning in retweets, likes, and applause. I would be high as a kite on dopamine and swimming in interview requests.
But that’s not what I did when I appeared on Tucker Carlson’s cable news show Friday night. I didn’t lie. I didn’t concoct some fantasy narrative where five black cops shouted, “This is MAGA country!” before attacking Tyre Nichols.
I blamed the five cops for their criminal behavior and predicted that a predominantly black jury will find them guilty of second-degree murder. I then criticized CNN and other media outlets for hyping the release of the bodycam footage like it was Al Capone’s secret vault and using the video to distract from America’s escalating involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
And, when surprisingly given an opportunity to provide an additional thought, I argued that the five police officers mimicked gang behavior and that the whole sad event is a byproduct of communities overrun with matriarchal values and controlled by single black mothers. I said that the conversation we should be having in reaction to Tyre Nichols centers on the cost of destroying the black family.
That’s my written paraphrase of what I tried to convey in the final 60 seconds of an unscripted, four-minute TV segment. Watch my comments in full here. YouTube has somehow classified my remarks as “inappropriate and offensive.”
It’s impossible to analyze a situation as complex as the Tyre Nichols tragedy in four minutes. What you try to do is spark a deeper conversation by saying something that will cut through all the garbage being spewed on social media and/or promoted on ratings-hungry television networks.
My first comment was said to establish that a black police chief, black police officers, and black citizens would be in charge of providing justice for Tyre Nichols’ family. What happened to Nichols isn’t about white supremacy. And what will happen to his alleged killers won’t have anything to do with white supremacy either.
My second comment was stated to point out that the media is intentionally overemphasizing the importance of the Nichols tragedy. Our politicians are pushing us toward nuclear conflict with Russia. Millions of lives are at stake. I’m not trying to diminish the value of Tyre’s life. But in comparison to nuclear conflict, his life pales in comparison.
Tyre Nichols is a local story, not a national one. It’s being used to provide cover for more important international tragedies, such as Big Pharma’s COVID malfeasance. The TV networks dependent on the advertising dollars of pharmaceutical companies prefer Don Lemon talking about lawless cops rather than lawless and exploitative international corporations.
Finally, my third comment, the one my critics have seized upon, is an attempt to spark a conversation about the real ramifications of America’s growing preference for female authority and alternative family structures. The matriarchy doesn’t work.
We need to talk about that.
Black urban areas are dominated by matriarchal rulership. It’s an utter failure and disaster. These areas all operate similar to Memphis. Crime is astronomical. Young men settle their differences with deadly violence. Academic performance hovers at record lows. Illegitimacy rates skyrocket.
Tyre Nichols was 29. The five police officers who participated in beating him to death range in age from 24 to 32. The behavior we witnessed from the officers resembles what happens when a group of Vice Lords catch a Gangster Disciple on their turf. The Disciple will flee. The Vice Lords will chase. Violence ensues.
My point is what we saw Friday night does not appear to be an outgrowth of bad policing. I’ve yet to see video evidence that depicts what caused the traffic stop and why Nichols had to be snatched from his car. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been shown the complete story. Something about the encounter feels far more personal than anything born of the frustration created by a resistant suspect. The use of pepper spray makes zero sense.
It feels like the outgrowth of a rotten culture, a culture where black men are canonized and celebrated for handling petty beefs and disrespect with lethal violence. That type of emotional violence is commonplace within zip codes dominated by the matriarchy.
Tyre Nichols cried out for his mama for a reason. I’m not saying that to belittle Nichols. I’m saying it’s a reflection of modern black culture, a culture that inappropriately places women at the top of the food chain. Mama is the ultimate authority and savior.
That’s not what God intended. He is our Savior. He authorized man to exercise dominion over the earth. He prescribed family (man, woman, and child) as the foundation of order, obedience, and His will. No racial group in America is more out of line with God’s natural order than black people. Seventy percent of our kids are born to unwed mothers. We don’t view family as a necessity for success. It’s just one of many options. It’s prioritized well below allegiance to racial idolatry, the Democrat political party, and hip-hop culture.
Those allegiances have made us hostile to a biblical worldview, indifferent toward marriage, and convinced there’s little value in male leadership. Scripture is the kryptonite that weakens us rather than the cape we wrap ourselves in to unleash superpowers.
We’re out of order.
Ephesians 5:22-24: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
So what happens in communities without a culture of marriage and nuclear family?
In his book, Kingdom Politics, the great Christian minister Tony Evans says: “The saga of a nation is the saga of its families written large. Whoever owns the family owns the future. When family structure breaks down, all manner of calamity and chaos enter into society. When family breaks down, crime goes up, poverty goes up, abuse goes up. When the family breaks down, gender confusion and role confusion go up.”
Calamity. Chaos. Confusion.
You don’t need to be a Christian minister to recognize what’s going on in black communities with no consistent family structure. Here’s a video of the rapper Jay Z in 2019 explaining the connection between police brutality and single motherhood. And here’s a link to a story capturing the criticism Jay Z received for publicly discussing the obvious connection.
The social media matrix and corporate media are rigged to stop people from discussing the negative outcomes from the annihilation of the black family. The matrix blames “white supremacy” for everything bad that happens to black people, even when white people are uninvolved.
The culture we’ve adopted is designed to produce bad outcomes. The matriarchy doesn’t work.
My critics say my criticism is off base because Tyre Nichols has a mother and stepfather and the city’s female police chief, Cerelyn Davis, is married and a mother. My critics ignore the obvious. No one survives a rotten culture unscathed. A nutritionist will lose his way or suffer collateral damage if he’s forced to set up business inside a fast-food restaurant.
The pervasiveness of baby-mama culture harms everyone, including the non-participants forced to operate within it. The chaos and dysfunction negatively impact everyone.
Why did Cerelyn Davis and the Memphis Police Department implement a SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, the special task force the five officers worked in? They started it in November 2021 to combat the violent behavior of largely unparented young black men terrorizing Memphis. These types of units are common in high-crime, single-parent neighborhoods across America.
Police start gangs to combat gang violence. Young men without fathers in the home are attracted to gangs.
Baby-mama culture celebrates gang involvement. That’s why Snoop Dogg, a proud Crip, is such a beloved cultural figure. That’s why so many black boys and girls from two-parent households and good neighborhoods think their racial identity is tied to behaving in a ghetto or criminal fashion.
Baby-mama culture rules black America in the ‘hood and the ‘burbs. So does matriarchal culture. Black men see black women as our leaders, our saviors.
I don’t. I never will. And I was raised primarily by my divorced mother. My mother was awesome. Spectacular. She took me and my brother to church every Sunday. She took a second job and moved us out of the ghetto and into a working-class neighborhood.
But I am who I am – good and bad – because of my father. I feared and revered him. He taught me the importance of self-sufficiency and never accepting a handout. He had no tolerance for excuses. And luckily I grew up in an era when there was far less pressure to conform to a criminal black stereotype. Rappers weren’t portrayed as heroes and role models. It wasn’t cool to have a baby mama. I was raised to see myself as a leader, a protector, and a provider.
The left frames men like me, regardless of color, as misogynist oppressors. Popular culture promotes the “Woman King,” especially to black people. They ignore the failing results of matriarchal rulership and send women like Cerelyn Davis to fix problems only strong, bold male leadership can solve.
It’s going to take male leadership in the home, in the church, and in law enforcement to fix the rotting culture that took Tyre Nichols’ life. That same leadership is required throughout American society. Baby-mama, matriarchal culture is being pushed within all facets of American society. Illegitimacy rates are rising among all racial demographics.
Christian male leadership has been demonized to placate the feelings and promote the values of the BLM-LGBTQ Alphabet Mafia. Your children’s neighborhoods will have more in common with Memphis than Mayberry.
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The New York Rangers hockey team took the ice for warmups before their game on Friday night without the promised rainbow-colored jerseys and stick tape meant to show deference to the so-called “LGBTQ+” community, causing outrage among left-leaning media outlets and activists.
For the past six seasons, the Rangers have hosted “Pride Night Friday” at Madison Square Garden, and that tradition continued this year. On January 27, Michael James Scott, a Broadway star who identifies as gay, performed the national anthem. Andre Thomas, the co-chair of NYC Pride and Heritage of Pride, participated in the ceremonial, pre-game puck drop. The arena, especially the jumbotron, was emblazoned in “rainbow colors,” and members of the Rangers Blue Crew, the people responsible for inciting fan engagement, still carried rainbow-colored flags.
But the players themselves did not don any gear making reference, either by word or by symbol, to sexual relationships of any kind. Instead, they wore Reverse Retro jerseys, which depict the face of the Statue of Liberty.
Writers at many news outlets and activists have heavily criticized the Rangers organization as a result. “New York Rangers … FAIL to explain why they backtrack on promise,” a Daily Mail headline howled. Mollie Walker, the New York Post beat writer for the Rangers, complained that the team took an “otherwise a beautiful celebration of inclusivity” and turned it into a “slight” against “members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
David Kilmnick, the president of the LGBT Network in Queens, called the decision “a slap in the face.”
“If the Rangers are saying they’re going to be celebrating Pride Night, everybody needs to, for lack of a better term, ‘come out’ and celebrate,” Kilmnick insisted. “To give the OK to these hockey players to be homophobic is not celebrating pride. It’s the opposite of it.“
Promotions for the seventh-annual “Pride Night” at MSG did promise that “the Rangers will be showing their support by donning pride-themed warm-up jerseys and tape in solidarity with those who continue to advocate for inclusivity.”
The organization has not explained its seemingly last-minute costume change, though it has issued a statement:
“Our organization respects the LGBTQ+ community and we are proud to bring attention to important local community organizations as part of another great Pride Night,” the statement reaffirmed.
“In keeping with our organization’s core values, we support everyone’s individual right to respectfully express their beliefs,” it concluded.
Some have interpreted the second half of the statement to mean that at least one member of the Rangers organization was planning not to participate. Another NHL team, the Philadelphia Flyers, has had to manage a lot of unwanted attention for nearly two weeks after one team member, defenseman Ivan Provorov, publicly stated that, in keeping with the tenets of his Russian Orthodox religion, he would not wear a “pride” jersey.
“I respect everybody’s choices,” Provorov told reporters after the Flyers’ win over the Ducks on January 17. “My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say.”
No Rangers player has stated publicly that he would have refused to participate in the annual “Pride” celebration, but the entire team walked — or perhaps skated — away winners that night. The Rangers trounced the visiting Vegas Golden Knights 4-1 and are now 27-14-8 on the season, good for third place in the Metropolitan Division of the Eastern Conference.
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A massive fire engulfed a large egg farm on Saturday. The huge blaze likely killed thousands of chickens, and is expected to exacerbate the current dilemma of skyrocketing egg prices. Around 1 p.m. on Saturday, a three-alarm fire was reported at the Hillandale Farms property in Bozrah, Connecticut. WSFB reported that a total of 21 fire departments responded to the three-alarm fire, and it took firefighters eight hours to put out the blaze.
Norwich Firefighters Local 892 said a two-story, 400-foot by 100-foot chicken coop was on fire. The fire was so large that it could be seen from miles away. John Way, a safety officer for the Bozrah Volunteer Fire Co., said the coop housed an unknown number of chickens.
Multiple local reports cited the Salvation Army that around 100,000 chickens were killed, but that number has not been confirmed. No injuries were reported. The cause of the massive fire at the egg farm was not immediately clear. Authorities are still investigating the blaze.
Hillandale Farms said it raises over 20 million chickens for eggs and is one of the top five egg producers in the country. Hendrix Genetics lists Hillandale Farms as the third-biggest egg producer in the U.S. with 20 million hens.
Multiple fire departments are responding to a massive three alarm fire at Hillendale Farms where thousands of chickens produce eggs with thick smoke can be seen miles away pic.twitter.com/jqTxn4aBsz
There have been several major fires at egg farms in the past few years.
In December 2022, a fire caused $12 million in damages and killed a reported 250,000 chickens at a large poultry farm in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, according to WGAL.
In October 2022, approximately 7,000 chickens were incinerated in a farm fire in Lexington, South Carolina.
In February 2020, a blaze at the Michael Foods farm killed approximately 400,000 chickens.
In December 2020, around 240,000 chickens died when a fire burned three barns in Pasco County, Florida. The fire happened at a Cal-Maine-operated egg farm, which is “one the largest producer and distributor of shell eggs in the United States. It sells under brands including Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes,” according to CBS News.
The Animal Welfare Institute reported that nearly 1.3 million cage-free hens “perished in potentially preventable barn fires” in 2020. In December, egg prices skyrocketed 60% more than a year prior, according to Consumer Price Index data. In California, the average retail price of eggs went from $2.35 a year ago to $7.37 this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The worst outbreak of avian flu on record has caused egg and poultry prices to surge. More than 58 million birds from commercial and backyard flocks have been affected by avian influenza in the past year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
My daughter ‘was terribly bullied, but no one told me. … Please don’t let ideology harm another child,’ pleaded the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was isolated from her parents by school and court authorities and sex-trafficked twice.
A subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Monday that mandates public educators notify parents if their child “self-identifies” as something other than his or her natural sex. Introduced by Republican Dels. Dave LaRock, Tara Durant, and John McGuire, the measure (HB 2432) would provide parents with greater oversight into their children’s lives at school and increase transparency in public education. According to a summary of the legislation, if a school official “has reason to believe” that a student “is self-identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex,” said official is required “to contact as soon as practicable at least one of such student’s parents to ask whether such parent is aware of the student’s mental state and whether the parent wishes to obtain or has already obtained counseling for such student.”
Under the bill, school officials, such as counselors and clinical social workers, are barred from “encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex” or “withholding from a minor’s parent information relating to the minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”
Monday’s subcommittee vote came along party lines, with five Republicans voting in favor and three Democrats opposing.
Known as Sage’s Law, HB 2432 was introduced after it was revealed that a then-14-year-old Virginia girl ended up in the hands of sexual predators after her school failed to disclose her gender dysphoria to her mother. As The Federalist previously reported, the chain of events began in August 2021 when Sage began identifying as a boy and suffered intense bullying and harassment at school. Eventually, Sage ran away and was “found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault.”
Appomattox County High School, which affirmed Sage’s new “identity” without notifying her mother, was following model guidelines issued by then-Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration on so-called gender affirmation. Such guidance has since been terminated by current GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Throughout Monday’s hearing on Sage’s Law, witnesses supporting the bill discussed its importance in keeping parents involved in their children’s livelihoods, especially in the school classroom. During her testimony, Sage’s mother Michele called on the subcommittee to put commonsense before ideology.
“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”
Also called to testify at the hearing was Dr. Erin Brewer, a former “trans kid” who spoke about the importance of schools helping children through their gender dysphoria without affirming such confusion or concealing it from parents.
“I was insistent that I was a boy when I started first grade after a brutal sexual assault. If I had been affirmed by my teachers, it would have allowed me to completely dissociate from myself as a girl and create a new persona who could pretend that the horrible trauma that triggered my gender dysphoria hadn’t happened to me,” she said. “Instead of encouraging my confusion and hiding it from my mother, the school contacted my mother, got permission for me to be assessed by the school psychologist, and they came up with a comprehensive program to help me resolve my gender dysphoria. … I [one] hundred percent support this legislation.”
Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat and co-founder of Our Duty, a national and international parent and child advocacy group, also spoke in support of Sage’s Law. Throughout her remarks, Friday noted her personal experiences with a gender-dysphoric daughter and stated that “schools should never keep secrets from parents.”
Opponents to Sage’s Law also spoke at the hearing, with one man claiming to be a “trans woman” arguing that such legislation is “ridiculous” and that schools should be able to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from that child’s parents.
“It should be that child’s own choice,” he said. “If we wanna tell who we wanna tell, like, that’s on us.”
Despite leftists’ support for deceptively-termed “gender affirmation” and the “transitioning” of children, research has shown that “upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty” and that “children who are ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex … particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization.” Children who undergo such protocols are subjected to lifelong damage to their bodies. The practices are so horrific that nations around the world, such as England, have ended the disfiguring practices that are falsely labeled as “gender-affirming care” for minors.
“Parents should never be the last to know [about what’s going on in their children’s lives],” said Durant during the subcommittee meeting. “It’s a very strange, strange place to me that we’re in now where parents are being told to step aside, to sit down, that ‘we as educators, as counselors know better [for] your own child’ — and that’s just simply not true.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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