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A Scandal for Every Month: The Biggest Botches, Failures, And Mess-Ups of Joe Biden’s First 12 Months in Office

REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JANUARY 20, 2022

Joe Biden has been in the Oval Office (or that weird set in the Eisenhower building’s South Court auditorium with the greenscreen windows) for a year now, and he’s already managed to make his short presidency known for a long line-up of scandals, botches, and slip-ups.

It’s too hard to narrow the list down to one top failure, although his disgracefully handled Afghanistan withdrawal may be the most sobering and inflation may be the one that played the biggest role in Biden’s tanking approval ratings. Even though Biden’s mess-ups tally up to far more than 12, it’s not hard to remember a Biden-enabled disaster for every month of the septuagenarian’s first year at the stern … or in the basement.

January: Biden’s Radical First Week

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a list of radically left-wing executive orders, including an order requiring that schools must ignore the biological differences between male and female students from the athletic field to the bathroom if they wish to continue receiving federal funding. In Biden’s first week, Press Secretary Jen Psaki also signaled the administration’s plans to reinstate federal funding for abortions around the world with the reversal of the Mexico City policy, and the new president canceled the Keystone XL pipeline.

As Tristan Justice reported at the time, “Biden’s first 48 hours in office have launched the new administration with 17 executive orders, more than were issued in the first month of their presidencies by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton combined.”

February: Biden’s CDC Worked to Keep Schools Closed

In February, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced strict reopening guidelines that would keep many schools around the country shut down. “Only K-12 schools in cities and areas with low or moderate virus transmission can fully reopen for in-person learning, as long as physical distancing and mask-wearing is enforced,” Jordan Boyd reported on Feb. 12. “Any transmission rate beyond what is designated as moderate requires hybrid learning or ‘reduced attendance,’ limiting which children are allowed in the classroom at the same time.”

On the same day, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that far-left teachers unions that have worked to keep students out of school buildings over the course of the Covid pandemic had influence when the CDC created its school reopening guidelines.

March: Working With Corporations to Create Vax Passports

As The Washington Post first reported, the Biden White House spent the month of March plotting with corporations to develop a “vaccine passport” system to force Americans to show their Covid papers in order to participate fully in society. “The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Post noted.

At the end of April, Biden announced his “American Families Plan,” a list of far-left spending priorities, many of which would become hallmarks of his struggling Build Back Bankrupt agenda. The goals of the proposed $1.8 trillion spending spree included extending government schooling fully into preschool and two years of taxpayer-provided community college.

May: More Unsavory Hunter Exploits Emerge

Scandal follows President Biden’s troubled son Hunter around, as the country learned when the New York Post published damning information recovered from a laptop the younger Biden allegedly left at a repair store in late 2020. But further revelations about Hunter’s exploits emerged in May of last year, adding to the pile of unsavory behavior that may implicate the president himself.

New emails from Hunter Biden’s suspected laptop published on May 26 by the Post show that Joe Biden “met with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates of his son’s at a dinner in Washington, DC, while he was vice president” in April 2015.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together,” wrote executive Vadym Pozharskyi of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board.

Other emails published by The Daily Mail in May revealed that Hunter Biden bragged he “smoked crack with [former D.C. Mayor] Marion Barry” when he was a student at Georgetown University.

June: Record-Setting Crisis at the Southern Border

Biden’s crisis at the Southern border has been setting records all year, but it was in June that apprehensions surged past 1 million for fiscal year 2021 and border crossings were at the highest levels since 2006. In May alone, “170,000 people were captured, marking a 20-year high,” Gabe Kaminsky reported at the time. June also saw the border state of Texas declare an emergency over Biden’s border crisis, which the president helped cause by reversing Trump-era stances like the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

As the crisis raged, Biden’s border czar Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t be bothered to visit the actual U.S.-Mexico line, snapping “I haven’t been to Europe” when reporters pressed her on the topic. She finally caved and scheduled a trip, but only after former President Donald Trump announced his plans to visit.

July: Bragging about Working with Big Tech to Silence Dissent

In July, the Biden administration bragged about colluding with Big Tech to shut down perspectives with which the regime disagreed. In a press briefing on July 15, Psaki touted the administration’s policy of “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” A few days later, Psaki admitted there was nothing “off the table” in the effort to smear dissent as “misinformation” and have it removed from social media.

August: Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal

August saw the largest-scale disaster on Biden’s watch so far, when the administration’s disorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 American service members dead and thousands of American citizens and allies stranded under Taliban control.

From the administration’s decision to vacate Bagram Air Base before evacuating Americans from the country, to leaving weapons and equipment to fall into the hands of the Taliban, to Biden taking an out-of-touch, hollow victory lap after the service members’ deaths and while Americans remained stranded, to the administration’s ongoing decision to ignore the allies still behind enemy lines, every action taken by the Biden team was a disaster. In the same month, the administration carried out a drone strike targeted at ISIS operatives that actually killed at least 10 civilians, seven of whom were children.

Americans won’t soon forget the harrowing images of desperate people trampling each other in the chaotic race to the Kabul airport, of people clinging to aircraft landing gear and falling helpless from the sky, or of a lone helicopter leaving the roof of the American embassy. There is blood on Biden’s hands, and our allies won’t soon forget it either.

September: Biden Lies to Undermine His Own Border Patrol Agents

After a photo of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback was misconstrued by Democrats and their media allies to falsely accuse agents of “whipping” criminals, Biden promised to make his own CBP employees “pay” and the White House banned agents in Del Rio, Texas from using horses going forward.

“It was horrible to see. To see people treated like they did. Horses running them over people being strapped. It’s outrageous,” Biden claimed, even though the photographer who took the viral photo insisted he’d “never seen them whip anyone.”

October: Biden’s Ed Secretary, DOJ Collude with NSBA to Smear Parents as Domestic Terrorists

On Sept. 29, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the White House asking Biden to use the FBI and other federal law enforcement to target parents using terrorism laws. A few days later on Oct. 4, in response to the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and federal attorneys to investigate and address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

As it turns out, however, Biden’s own Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appears to have secretly requested the letter from NSBA, presumably to use as a pretense for the administration’s push to target parents unhappy with public schools’ closures, mask mandates, and extremist LGBT and critical race theory curricula.

November: That Tyrannical, Unconstitutional OSHA Vax Mandate

After issuing a September press release threatening a vaccine mandate for private businesses with 100 or more employees, Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released an emergency temporary standard on Nov. 4 that would require businesses to comply by Jan. 4 or incur fines of up to $14,000 per violation.

The Supreme Court struck this down in January, of course, and the Biden administration knew it was flagrantly unconstitutional all along — but exploiting the delays of the judicial system allowed the administration to bully many corporations into compliance anyway. Never mind the fact that the Biden administration had promised during the campaign that it wouldn’t mandate the Covid vaccine.

December: Supply Chain and Inflation Nightmare

December saw the climax (so far) of Biden’s joint inflation and supply chain crisis, dually caused by the administration’s radical spending and Democrats’ Covid lockdowns. As Americans faced shortages and shipping delays during their Christmas shopping, the Department of Labor released its November figures revealing 6.8 percent year-to-year inflation, or “the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1982.”

December’s inflation numbers were even higher, clocking in at 7 percent.

Bonus: January 2022: Compared Filibuster Defenders to George Wallace, Jefferson Davis

In a Jan. 11 speech urging the U.S. Senate to ditch filibuster rules in order to pass his radical and unconstitutional federalization of election laws, President Biden compared his agenda’s critics — which include Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Confederate leader Jefferson Davis.

“Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden said. Comparing his critics to notorious segregationists isn’t a good way to start year two of the Biden era.

Who knows what new scandals and embarrassments await the Biden administration in 2022? For the sake of the country, we can hope for fewer than in 2021, but it’s clear the administration has a failed track record only one year in.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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North Korea no longer the worst persecutor of Christians on Open Doors’ World Watch List

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Taliban fighters atop vehicles with Taliban flags parade along a road to celebrate after the US pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan, in Kandahar on September 1, 2021 following the Taliban’s military takeover of the country. | JAVED TANVEER/AFP via Getty Images

For the first time in over 20 years, North Korea is not listed as the worst country in the world when it comes to Christian persecution on watchdog Open Doors USA’s influential World Watch List.

Afghanistan has replaced North Korea as “the most dangerous place on the planet to be a Christian” on Open Doors USA’s 2022 World Watch List, released at a virtual press conference Wednesday morning.

Open Doors CEO David Curry said that his organization, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, takes into account “on-the-ground expert consensus about what’s happening around the world to Christians who are targeted simply for their faith.”

The World Watch List measures “pressure, intolerance and violence against the Christian faith worldwide.”

“The 2022 World Watch List reveals the most seismic changes in the history of our research,” Curry said. “For the first time ever, Afghanistan is the most dangerous place on the planet to be a Christian, coming in at No. 1 on the World Watch List. It has supplanted North Korea, which is now No. 2, for the first time in 20 years.”
Curry clarified that “North Korea has not gotten better” but rather that “Afghanistan has gotten worse.”

The ranking comes months after the Taliban Islamic radical insurgency retook control of the Central Asian country after the United States withdrew its military presence. Curry shared the personal story of a young Afghan woman who “fled for her life and went into hiding” after the Taliban took control of the country. The woman finds herself in particular danger because she is both a female and a Christian. Curry recalled a conversation Open Doors had with her and retold it from her perspective.

“A few years ago, the Taliban came, and they took my father away because he was a Christian. They tortured him for months and then killed him. A few months later, my brother also disappeared, and we’ve never heard from [him] again.”
“It’s no doubt that she knows where her fate is, and thus she and her mother are now on the run,” Curry said.

The human rights advocate maintained that the Taliban’s recapturing of Afghanistan led to a global rise in Islamic extremism that extends beyond its borders.

“In September, shortly after the Taliban seized control, a list was circulated with the names of prominent Christians. Somehow, this list fell into the hands of the Taliban,” he said.
“Those listed were among the first to be hunted,” he continued. “The Taliban’s interpretation of Islam considers Christians to be traitors, enemies of the state, enemies of the tribe and community. They are infidels from Islam, and in their mind, the punishment is death.”
Curry declared that every Christian who remains in Afghanistan “is either on the run or in hiding.”
He shared testimony from another Afghan Christian Open Doors USA spoke with, asserting that “the Taliban are going door-to-door and snatching young girls and destroying … families.”

Assessing the state of religious freedom worldwide, Curry said Open Doors’ data shows that “free societies” that protect freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are “facing a war against hatred and discrimination on two separate fronts.”

“The one battle is against tribal, religious and nationalistic extremists that’s sweeping the globe,” he described. “And there’s a second battle against authoritarian regimes who are deploying sophisticated systems of surveillance, censorship and punishment of anyone who believes or worships outside of a strictly enforced boundary.”
“Today, religious extremists and the governments they control or influence lead the World Watch List for the first time,” he said, adding that “extremism and tribalism are skyrocketing” along with “related incidents of harassment against Christians.”
“Nine of the top 10 countries on the World Watch List are run or influenced by radical Islamists or Hindu extremists,” Curry stated.
The only exception is North Korea, which is run by a “murderous dictator with a communist ideology.”

In addition to Afghanistan and North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran and India rounded out the World Watch List’s top 10 “countries where it’s most difficult to follow Jesus.”

“Our report shows that 360 million Christians globally now suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination. That’s one in seven Christians worldwide,” he lamented.
Curry emphasized that the World Watch List “also illustrates the challenges … to freedom of conscience and expression for all people, whether they have a religious faith or … consider themselves an atheist or just have different views from the majority of their culture.”

The list contains a total of 50 countries where persecution of Christians is either “extreme” or “very high.”

Open Doors USA determined that the top 10 countries on the list, as well as Saudi Arabia, have “extreme” levels of Christian persecution while the remaining 39 have a “very high” amount of persecution. While the countries on the list are primarily located in Asia and Africa, a handful of countries in the Western hemisphere made it on the list.

Mexico, located directly south of the U.S., is ranked as the 43rd most dangerous country for Christians because of “organized crime and corruption.” Cuba came in as the 37th most challenging country for Christians because of “dictatorial paranoia.”

The complete report, which contains detailed examples of religious freedom violations in each country on the list, is available on the Open Doors USA website.

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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Suicide is now a public health epidemic, not a personal problem

Reported By Hedieh Mirahmadi, Exclusive Columnist | Thursday, January 20, 2022

suicide depression — Unsplash/ Just Jack

The Surgeon General recently reported that our teenagers are more at risk of suicide since the pandemic than ever before in our nation’s history. Their feelings of isolation, uncertainties about the future, substance abuse, and other problems occurring in the home have triggered soaring rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts nationwide. Young people across every socio-economic class, race, and ethnicity are affected, with 6,600 teenagers committing suicide in 2020 alone. Our children are dealing with more uncertainty than any other generation in history. The average American youth will have seen close to 200,000 violent acts on some form of media by the time they turn eighteen, and most no longer live in two-parent households that provide emotional support. Consequently, many have an over-dependence on their peers, which ends up creating greater emotional instability.

During a recent podcast episode, my husband I were surprised to learn how many people in the church were affected by the horrible tragedy of suicide. Out of a dozen live listeners, five of them had an immediate family member who either attempted or committed suicide – including myself. My husband shared how in his early twenties, he placed a loaded gun inside his mouth, having lost the will to live. Interestingly, a commercial on TV about starving kids in Africa ultimately shocked him back into the reality that his life was worth living. For another, her son’s girlfriend committed suicide right before Christmas while pregnant with his child. It shook the family to their core, but their faith in God is helping them heal.

For myself, I deal with the powerlessness that comes from being the parent of a child who struggles with mental illness and thoughts of suicide. My faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and knowing my daughter has also accepted Christ comforts me and allows me to surrender the burden to Him. Yet, I can’t help but face the very real notion that God is ultimately in control and none of us know what life may have in store. Kay Warren, whose son took his own life in 2013, eloquently expressed the paradox in this way:

“My hope was pretty much centered around what could happen here. Rather than taking the longer view, sometimes things don’t happen the way we want them to here on Earth…Yet I can be safe and secure and even joyful with that confidence of what God is doing, ultimately.”

When anxiety about ourselves or our loved ones builds up inside, the real danger is turning away from the Lord and towards ourselves. Whether it’s money, social distancing, escapism in substance abuse, anger, or resentment against the “other,” none of these offer a real solution to the problem. In the midst of being threatened, we must realize God is our refuge. The pressure should lead us to run towards God for rest and peace rather than running away.

The threats we all face are real. People are losing their jobs, loved ones are dying, and our country is deeply divided along political lines. Suicide is now a public health epidemic, not a personal problem. We cannot treat it like something that just happens and cannot be prevented. Whether we’re health care providers, teachers, friends, or family members, we need to change our attitude towards the issue if we hope to reverse this alarming trend.

In fact, the existence of a national mental health crisis is the one issue that receives overwhelming bipartisan support. Instead of capitalizing on it, this Administration again misses the mark and decides to tackle suicide in a deeply contentious approach. Rather than creating programs to address the root causes of suicide, like improving access to mental health services or eliminating the erratic COVID restrictions, the White House strategy focuses on reducing suicide through better gun control. It is as if our government is tone-deaf, ignoring the disturbing trends in self-harm, feelings of hopelessness, and trauma from the COVID hysteria happening in cities across America. One expert refers to it as “Mask induced psychosis.” No one disputes the statistics that guns are the most common method of suicide, but shouldn’t our focus be on reducing the stressors that lead people to choose a weapon in the first place?

The past couple of years of lockdowns, financial chaos, martial pressure, and trauma for our children has taken a toll on all of us. Regardless of what the government may or may not do, the church should be a place of hope and acceptance. Survivors can be overwhelmed by feelings of anger and guilt because everyone seems to think they could’ve prevented it somehow. Yet, the reality is suicide is impossible to predict.

Having faith in the Lord does not mean we can always handle life’s unpredictability. Let us reduce the stigma of needing help for ourselves and our loved ones so we can pray and support one another. We need to provide resources for those struggling with mental illness so they do not face their demons alone.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

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10 Lies Biden Told During His First Press Conference in Months

REPORTED BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 19, 2022

Joe Biden at formal press conference 1/19/22

President Joe Biden hosted his second solo press conference ever on Wednesday but his attempts to clearly communicate how he plans to fix a country plagued with COVID-19, crime, rising prices, empty shelves, and more were nothing less of a disaster. Not only did Biden, who was once heralded as the chief unifier of the country, use the presser to repeat rhetoric trashing Republicans, he also did his absolute best to put lipstick on the pig that is the struggling U.S. economy. Unfortunately, no amount of lipstick or whoppers can cover Biden’s terrible and devastating approval rating.

Biden concluded his initial speech by claiming that “the best days of this country are still ahead of us not behind us,” but his optimism is unfounded. Recent polling suggests that only 26 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. The majority, however, are left wondering whether Biden will work to fix the myriad of crises he created.

Here are the 10 lies Biden told during his Wednesday press conference.

1. The Nation’s Problem Is COVID

“I know there’s a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country. And we know why: COVID-19, Omicron it has now been challenging us in a way that, it’s the new enemy,” Biden said.

Not only is COVID-19 a virus that’s been around for years now, therefore not making it a “new enemy,” but it’s also not the only thing plaguing voters’ lives or minds. As a matter of fact, while Biden parades around the Capitol encouraging Democrats to abolish the filibuster and legalize illegal voting practices, he’s failing to address the ongoing Southern border crisis, empty shelves, and rising urban crime.

2. Wages Are Up

Early in his speech, Biden claimed that American wages are up. What he failed to address is that real wages have decreased most of the months he’s been in office. Even in months when wages were up, Americans were forced to dig deeper in their pockets to cover their climbing gas, energy, and grocery bills.

3. Biden Created Jobs

Biden tried to circumvent the nation’s economic turmoil by claiming that he created more jobs to stimulate the economy. He ignored, however, the role the government played in creating the recession that caused job loss in the first place. And on the role his own administration played in lining the pockets of Americans with federal cash, Biden was mum.

4. The Supply Chain Crisis Isn’t That Bad

Biden hardly addressed the ongoing supply chain crisis, leading to the often popular #bareshelvesBiden hashtag, and the nation’s rising inflation which continues to plague voters’ lives as they begin considering who to vote for in the 2022 midterms.

The president hinted that the “empty shelves being shown on television” were misleading but even he admitted that they are “a few [percentage] points below what it was before the pandemic.”

5. Inflation Was Already A Thing Before I Took Office

Biden claimed that inflation was increasing long before he assumed office, but as recent reports indicate, inflation in the U.S. surged to 7 percent in December 2021, the highest level since 1982.

6. Republicans Want To Steal Minorities’ Right To Vote

In an effort to promote his campaign to initiate a federal takeover of elections, Biden claimed that Republicans want to take away minorities’ rights to vote.

“No matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and … keep them from being able to vote,” Biden said. “I think you’re gonna see the people they’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to make in order to change the law back to what it should be.”

Biden continues to parrot the blatant lie that Republicans are trying to prevent minorities from voting. pic.twitter.com/vWMjmBVoV3
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

REPORTER: "Do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and the results will be legitimate?"

BIDEN: "It all depends depends on whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to alter the outcome…" pic.twitter.com/COdhiTEYhh
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

7. Schools Aren’t Closed

“You say we’re not going to go back to closing schools. You said that just moments ago, yet they’re closing in some areas. What do you say to those teachers and principals and parents about school closings?” one reporter asked. “And what can your administration do to help make up for learning loss for students?”

“First of all, I put in perspective the question you asked, very few schools are closing,” Biden claimed. “Over 95 percent are still open.”

Yet, since the rise of Omicron in the U.S., reports of schools closing across the country have also risen leaving working parents desperate for in-person learning once more. Thousands of schools that were scheduled to reopen following Christmas break opted for virtual learning until well into January due to panic over COVID-19 spread.

8. Build Back Better Will Save Americans Money

During the conference, Biden repeated the lie that his Build Back Better legislative package “would actually lower or reduce inflation.”

This falsehood has been debunked numerous times but that didn’t stop the president from claiming that his legislation, which actually costs trillions of dollars, won’t cost taxpayers a dime.

9. White House Reporters Are The Most Informed Americans Of All Time

Biden told the White House press pool that they are “more informed than any group of people in America.”

While the statement will probably score him points with openly partisan press pool members, it’s far from the truth.

For more than a year, corporate media reporters who covered Biden’s rise to the presidency and his subsequent time in the White House have overlooked the administration’s failures to laud the Democrat for being a “moral, decent man.” They’ve wasted their precious Q+As with the president on softball questions framed in a positive light, while also failing to ask key ones. They let Biden ramble and frequently fail to point out the obvious lies lacing his winding answers.

10. I Didn’t Compare My Democrat Colleagues To Racists

Biden denied that he compared Democrat filibuster holdouts Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to confederate leaders.

“I did not say that they were going to be George Wallace or Bull Connor,” Biden claimed. “I said we’re gonna have a decision in history.”

Just last week, however, Biden asked “Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
“This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy. If you do that you will not be alone,” Biden 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 @jordangdavidson.

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: The danger of the momentum behind N95 respirators

Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | January 20, 2022

Were the cloth masks just for psychological training purposes to get us to the main course of obsequious servitude to the gods of Fauci?

It took nearly two years, but the “public health experts” are finally admitting what industrial hygienists knew from day one: Masks do not work against airborne viruses. Yet rather than immediately remove these draconian restrictions – including masking 2-year-olds on airplanes and schoolchildren for hours on end in many states – they are seamlessly gliding into the new position of promoting N95 respirators. Following the inveterate patterns of the past two years, they use the failure of their first position to their advantage to further panic people into blindly following their next recommendation … until that becomes a mandate as well.

On Jan. 2, former FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb, the media’s go-to “expert” on all things pandemic, admitted what we all knew since 2020 but that got us banned from social media for saying so. “Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection, that’s the bottom line,” said Gottlieb on Meet the Press. “This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission.”

Well, some of us knew that early on in the pandemic.

Two days later, the New York Times ran an article telling people where to get N95s, states began mailing out N95 variations, and the CDC put out a new message, which between the lines, gives the impression that if you are not wearing an N95, you don’t really have protection. The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of them to local pharmacies. But is there really any evidence that the same people who were wrong about masks are now suddenly connected to God’s word when it comes to respirators? And who says it is safe for people to wear something like that for long periods of time, which until now required rigorous testing, medical exams, and training?

Yes, N95s, unlike masks, actually meet the standard for PPE in hazardous environments. But for which sort of hazard? Not an airborne respiratory virus. Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company’s own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.

The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Neither masks nor N95 respirators can stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What’s truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.

A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. “Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza,” concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.

Also, remember, that most people are not wearing sealed N95s. They wear the respirators loosely on their faces as they do surgical masks. Also, many of them are the Chinese version KN95s. Even the CDC admits, “About 60% of KN95 respirators NIOSH evaluated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 did not meet the requirements that they intended to meet.”

The same study (Shah et.al.) that found just 10% and 12% reduction in aerosols for cloth and blue surgical masks respectively, actually found that KN95s worn improperly with 3mm gaps between the face and the respirator, as most people wear them, only offer 3.4% filtration efficiency – less than the cloth masks.

And remember, these studies are all conducted in labs, not in the real world, where no study has shown a statistically significant benefit to masks, and the basic epidemiological data has disproven the efficacy for two years.

Take Austria, for example, where they have been mandating N95 respirators in stores. Can you spot the efficacy?

The notion that children can properly wear a form-fitted N95 that effectively seals is both absurd and dangerous. And anything else will absolutely not work. There’s clearly an inverse relationship between safety and efficacy. The only thing that might possibly work will cause danger, which is why the federal government has long mandated very specific criteria for wearing respirators.

“While some misrepresent N95s as masks, they are actually respirators and will require one to follow the OSHA requirements for respirators under the Respiratory Protection Standard (RPS) 29 CFR 1910.134 (e.g., written program, medical clearance, initial fit testing, annual fit testing, no facial hair, worker training),” said Petty in an interview with TheBlaze. Stephen Petty has served as an expert witness in hundreds of industrial hazardous exposure court cases and now serves as a witness for those bringing lawsuits against irresponsible mask mandates. Here is a list of OSHA requirements, per Petty’s presentation, that would have to be met for usage of N95 respirators:

There’s a good reason why these requirements were put in place by OSHA. To the extent one actually properly seals an N95 respirator to the face (which few will do), it causes significant medical concerns. Here are some findings from an extremely exhaustive qualitative and substantive evaluation of 65 mask studies by German researchers:

In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%).

Thus, to the extent anyone could achieve a meaningful degree of efficacy against virus particles with a respirator – something yet to be proven – it will come at a terrible cost. Even with regular masks, before our public health officials lost their minds (and hearts), it was understood that they are not harm-free. Here is a write-up from the Missoula, Montana, city health department recommending against the use of masks during wildfire season in Montana:

Masks are uncomfortable (they are more comfortable when they are leaky – but then they do not provide protection). They increase resistance to airflow. This may make breathing more difficult and lead to physiological stress, such as increased respiratory and heart rates. Masks can also contribute to heat stress. Because of this, mask use by those with cardiac and respiratory diseases can be dangerous, and should only be done under a doctor’s supervision. Even healthy adults may find that the increased effort required for breathing makes it uncomfortable to wear a mask for more than short periods of time. Breathing resistance increases with respirator efficiency.

The Montana Department of Health emphatically writes in bolded letters that N95s that seal are the only things that might help against smoke particles (which are around 1 micron, 10 times larger than most viral virions), but warns of health risks. “Note that respirator masks should be a last resort, as they are difficult to fit correctly, decrease oxygen intake, are hot, and can easily leak when worn improperly.” They go on to add, “People who are not physically fit may experience difficulty going about daily tasks due to reduced oxygen intake. It is more important to have enough oxygen than to have clean air – if you are using a respirator and feel faint, nauseous, or have trouble breathing, take the mask off.”

On the Washington Department of Health’s website guidance for wildfires, it is made clear that “masks are not approved for children” and that “it is harder to breathe through a mask, so take breaks often if you work outside.” The Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, “N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates.”

Just a year ago, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky swatted down the idea of wearing N95s. “They’re very hard to breathe in when you wear them properly,” Walensky said. “They’re very hard to tolerate when you wear them for long periods of time.”

Thus, whether we are talking about masks or N95s, it’s quite evident that they are either unsafe or ineffective. They can often be both unsafe and ineffective, but they can never be effective without being unsafe, unless worn by the right person with the right training in limited environments for short periods of time.

And this is just the scope of physical harm. One speech therapist in Palm Beach County is seeing a 364% increase in referrals from pediatricians for babies and toddlers with speech delays. “It’s very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth,” said a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach.

How our governments can mandate something this immoral and illogical on our bodies indefinitely without due process, evidentiary standards, or a constitutional interest balancing test is astounding. Every state needs a constitutional amendment explicitly banning this from ever happening again. Biden promised 100 days of mask-wearing, but we are now approaching a full year without any end in sight.Just remember, if a government can criminalize our breathing without due process, what can it not do to us without recourse?

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Slow-Mo Joe

A.F. BRANCO on January 20, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-slow-mo-joe/

Trump gave us Warp-Speed COVID policies compared to Biden’s fail slow failed programs.

Biden Failed COVID Policies — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: The Message in the Polls: Trump’s Done

January 19, 2022

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jan 19, 2022

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org/

The Message in the Polls: Trump's Done

Source: AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

Our media are obsessed with Donald Trump, but Trump’s obsessed with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. For months now, Trump’s been playing the aging silent film star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” to DeSantis’ younger, prettier Betty Schaefer.

Amid the hourly, annoying group emails to Trump’s list — “YOU are one of my TOP supporters!” — there was one from Roger Stone on Nov. 2, 2021, denouncing DeSantis.

The insults sounded a lot like what Trump used to say about Stone: “Ron’s own piss-poor campaign …,” “without really delivering on his Trump-like rhetoric …,” “Governor DeSantis has failed …” and so on.

The title of this diatribe was: “WILL RON DESANTIS TAKE THE PLEDGE?” Can you guess what “the pledge” is? That is correct: not to challenge Trump for president in 2024.

Only because it was “from” Stone, a smart guy who sadly prostrated himself on the altar of Trump, did I open it. Then, I shook my head and deleted it.

Evidently, others on the Trump email list responded with more rancor.

One week later, Stone sent out a follow-up email frantically backpedaling, noting that “many” recipients of his recent email were “surprised” by his attacks on DeSantis. The crow-eating letter ended by pleading with Stone’s critics to “Please take a moment to read what I have actually said …”

That must’ve been some blowback!

No one wants Trump. He’s fading faster than Sarah Palin did — and she was second place on a losing presidential ticket. In case you don’t remember, for three years following that loss, Palin was packing stadiums with tens of thousands of Trump-like fans.

But by 2011, even she — a far smarter politician than Trump who did not spend her time whining about the last election, wallowing in self-pity or endorsing candidates because they once said something nice about her golf course — had faded. She was fun, but Republicans were starting to think seriously about the 2012 presidential election.

Trump is already two years ahead of Palin’s fade-out schedule. After his petulant endorsements this year deliver loss after loss in midterm elections that ought to be a blowout landslide for the GOP, he’ll be as popular as former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin.

As many Republicans will bitterly recall, Trump has already lost two Senate seats for Republicans in the 2021 Georgia runoffs. So far this year, he’s on track to lose — at least — another Senate race in Georgia, as well as the governor’s mansion.

Sure, thousands of people show up to his heavily advertised rallies, but they’re all the exact same people. His die-hard fans — or, as he calls them, “future Trump University students” — are like Deadheads, following him from venue to venue, dressing up in wild costumes and listening to the same songs.

Some conservatives who would never again vote for Trump wear MAGA hats, but that’s just an identity badge, like liberals wearing masks. Trump happens to be the last Republican president, and the media lose their minds over him. Wearing a “Trump” hat is the most efficient way to say, “Screw you, media.”

This is why the media’s neurotic fixation on Trump is baffling to normal people. TV hosts keep telling us that Trump is wildly popular — the 2024 nomination is his for the asking! — but facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

It turns out the media are using a sleight of hand to claim that Trump is popular with Republicans.

Nate Silver’s respected website fivethirtyeight recently announced: “Republicans remain loyal to Trump even after Jan. 6 attack,” citing a poll that shows Trump’s approval among Republicans at nearly 80%.

But there’s a lot more to the story. The poll allows readers to view Trump’s approval not only among all voters (-14%) but among specific subgroups of all voters: men, women, Blacks, Hispanics and whites, as well as any combination of these demographic subgroups. And get this: Trump doesn’t have as much as 25% net approval among any subgroup — other than “Republicans.”

Females have a negative 24% net favorable opinion of Trump. OK, fine, women don’t like him. Show me “men.” Men have a negative 3% net favorable opinion of Trump. That’s pretty much a full set. Who’s left?

I tried whites — the base of the Republican Party (and the demographic that decides every election, despite the unshakable beliefs of GOP donors). Whites have a meager 4% net favorable opinion of Trump.

We’re running out of demographics that might like Trump.

Maybe it was that massive Hispanic vote for Trump that I’ve been hearing so much about! Hispanics: negative 44% net favorable for Trump. Blacks? Negative 85% net favorable.

White men? Fourteen percent net favorable opinion of Trump. (That’s not even going to win you Alabama, Republicans.)

Non-college graduates? Negative 12% net favorable.

How about non-college-educated white men? The beating heart of the Trump base is only 23% net favorable toward Trump.

So how is it possible that 77% of “Republicans” — net — have a favorable opinion of Trump? There’s no other subgroup of the electorate that has even a third of that.

The only explanation is that an awful lot of Republicans are now calling themselves “Independents.”

Huh. Why might that be?

Maybe it’s because, day in, day out, the media tell us that the GOP is “the Party of Trump”! Apparently, this has led a lot of Republicans to conclude that they must not be Republicans, after all. (At least, among the Republicans contacted by these pollsters. I assume they didn’t have any respondents in Florida, where “Republican” has a much more favorable connotation.)

Thanks to the media’s lies, the only people calling themselves “Republicans” these days are the Trump die-hards. In other words, the blockbuster conclusion of this poll is: Trump die-hards like Trump!

Yes — and they’re the only ones who do. While Trump fanatics are indeed fanatical, everyone else is sick and tired of his nonsense.

Give voters a populist conservative who’s not a conman and a liar and they’ll be “Republicans” again. No wonder Trump hates DeSantis.

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California School District Promotes White Privilege Conference and Being ‘Race Conscious’

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 19, 2022

Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.

The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”

Distortions Of Gender

The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.

One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”

The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.

Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”

Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference

The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”

The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”

Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.

The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.

The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”

‘Dismantle White Supremacy’

Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.

One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”

The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”

Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing “The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”

The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like “You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”

“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”

An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”

The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”

Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”

The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.

Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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It Doesn’t Matter That Voters Hate Joe Biden If Democrats Can Rig Elections

REPORTED BY: BOB ANDERSON | JANUARY 19, 2022

Just a month before the 2020 election, radio host Rush Limbaugh commented that Democrats “resent the whole premise behind elections. Look, they don’t believe they should have to persuade anybody to agree with them … The modern-day Democrats have to go through the motions of campaigning, and they have to go through the motions of trying to win the hearts and minds of voters. But they resent the h-ll out of it. And in their world, it’s the one thing standing in their way: This need, this requirement to win elections. And I’m just telling you: As soon as they can figure out a way to eliminate elections, they will do it.”

Today, Democrats are engaged in a full-court press to pass legislation that would brush state election safeguards aside and codify the shenanigans of 2020 into federal law. They’ll nuke the filibuster if they can, a step never taken previously for high-priority legislation but pursued now for a bill that nobody is marching in the streets for. Anything to cement themselves into a permanent position of power.

As Joe Biden himself said, “It’s about election subversion, not just whether or not people get to vote. Who counts the vote? That’s what this is about, that’s what makes this so different from anything else we’ve ever done.” Indeed.

Voters Aren’t Clamoring for Democrat Priorities

It’s hard being a Democrat lately. Just ask Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. After promising to hold a vote to eliminate the filibuster and force through passage of their “voting rights” bill by Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 17), he had to push it back again. This, of course, comes on the heels of a stinging defeat of the Biden administration’s Covid vaccine mandate by the Supreme Court. That failure was preceded by the “Build Back Better” bill being stalled in the Senate, perhaps for good.

Party leaders are upset, but the truth is that voters are not enthusiastic about much of this. There are no marches for mandates. Nor is there any grassroots demand for Build Back Better or the federalization of state elections. And a recent poll found that support for the filibuster has only grown since Democrats began their push to eliminate it (now by a 53 percent to 27 percent approval to disapproval margin).

Democrats Mistakenly Double Down

Democrats may fail at policy, but they’ve always been reliably competent at the game of politics, zeroing in on votes with great precision. Have you noticed they haven’t been themselves lately, though? Even after taking a shellacking in statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey last November, a moment when sane politicians typically learn from defeat, they instead doubled down. In her usual well-reasoned manner, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., commented after the electoral bloodbath that Democrats were beaten, not because of the president’s agenda, but because they hadn’t done enough to “excite, speak to, or energize a progressive base.” Never mind that voters knew what was at stake — and clearly rejected it.

One would have thought that older and more seasoned politicians might have guided the young House member back to reality, but the ragin’ Cajun himself, James Carville, only sparked her outrage in saying that “stupid wokeness” had cost the Democrats. James comes from the era of old-school politics, one that abided by the cardinal rule: “Never piss off voters.” He’s surely aware of its corollary: “If you do, then turn back – ASAP.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should know better, but she responded, “no, no,” when asked if the election results in Virginia and New Jersey would cause Democrats to rethink their plans. Full steam ahead.

Democrats Out of Touch

The president lamented that his big ticket bills hadn’t been passed before Election Day, and then concluded, “but I’m not sure I would have been able to change the number of very conservative folks who turned out in red districts that were Trump voters.” For a politician who’s been in public office for nigh 50 years, that kind of logic seems disturbingly unhinged. How exactly does one surmise both that the party’s losses were due to not passing the big agenda soon enough (AOC’s position), and that it would not have mattered anyway because, you know, the red wave was coming? Excuses, blindness, or something else? It’s hard to tell.

We’re left to ponder: Have Democrats lost the ability to navigate public opinion? Does it even matter to them anymore? With the midterm elections just 10 months away, and the polls moving away from Democrats, will they continue to walk off the electoral cliff or bring themselves back to reality?

No Compromise

President Bill Clinton, who also saw his party shellacked in a midterm, acted in the way that sensible politicians normally do. He called up the new Republican speaker of the House and asked how they could work together. The result was a Democrat president signing on to welfare reform and abandoning his unpopular quest for government-run universal health care. Voters rewarded him with re-election.

Nothing seems to faze Joe, though. No compromise ever seems possible. There are, of course, times it’s noble to dig the heels in. Faced with an approaching enemy, Winston Churchill proclaimed, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” So where is the honor and good sense in ignoring voters who now give this president an embarrassing 33 percent approval rating?

Instead of finding common values to unite the nation, Biden calls those who disagree with him a bunch of racists. “Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?,” Biden pontificated in a speech pushing his “voting rights” bill. “Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy.”

Churchill battled the Nazis. Biden battles half of the country who simply disagrees with his party on a matter of policy — that is, who should control state elections — and whether we should suddenly abandon a Senate rule that’s existed for more than 200 years.

Not the Will of the People

Instead of being the moderate voters thought he was and simply calling up Republicans to find common ground legislation, policies for which voters would reward him, Biden remains ideologically ensconced in a White House driven by leftist special interest groups — venturing out to speak only to his own party’s caucus. Facing a headwind of opposition, he told the group of fellow Democrats on the Hill, “I don’t know that we can get this done … but I know one thing, as long as I have a breath in me … I’m going to be fighting to change the way these legislatures have moved.” Perhaps that’s the problem, Mr. President. You’re pushing a process rather than the will of the people.

Real Clear Politics notes that “it isn’t accidental that, in the generic ballot … the Democrats’ current vote share is 42.8%, nearly mimicking Biden’s.”

And “what does [RCP’s model] tell us about 2022? … a Republican-controlled Senate starts to come into the picture when Biden’s job approval falls to around 51% and becomes the most likely outcome at around 48%.” Biden is now at 42 percent approval in the RCP average, and that math should be clear to Democrats — but somehow, they seem unconcerned.

Maybe there’s a logical reason, a method to their madness. After pulling off the statistics-bending, six-fold swing-state wonder in the wee hours of election night 2020, perhaps Democrats now have reason to believe they’re no longer accountable to voters. Public opinion and polls become meaningless when you control the election process, when the courts turn a blind eye, and when the media blocks any honest inquiry.

Rush was right. Democrats are now working harder to change the election system than to change your mind because, as their actions demonstrate, they don’t care what you think. They just want to win.

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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Biden’s Attack on Voting Rights Far Surpasses Trump’s Election Claims

REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELANDJANUARY 19, 2022

President Joe Biden departs the U.S. Capitol after speaking at the House Democratic Caucus meeting

Democrats and the leftist media continue to champion the House’s sham investigation into the events of January 6, 2021, with news breaking just yesterday that the illegally constituted committee had subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and others. Yet, if these January 6 truthers genuinely believed that election-related rhetoric caused the capitol riots and represent a real threat to our republic, they would turn their attention to the current White House and to their own Grand Poohbah.

In one week alone, President Biden eclipsed everything Donald Trump and his supporters said about the validity of the 2020 election. By framing his false claims of “voter suppression” and “election subversion” as Jim Crow 2.0, our commander in chief has guaranteed a divided America. The only remaining question is whether he has also guaranteed a violent America.

Yesterday, President Joe “The Uniter” Biden proclaimed on Twitter that “Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s about making it harder to vote, who gets to count the vote, and whether your vote counts at all.”

And what is Jim Crow 2.0? State election integrity laws in effect in every or nearly every state, which Biden and his fellow Democrats want to gut with the passage of the so-called “Freedom to Vote Act,” which President Biden promoted in the same tweet.

One week earlier, Biden’s race-baiting rhetoric went further when he went to Atlanta, Georgia to rally support for passage of the two federal bills. While there, after recounting the horror of four young black girls murdered at a Birmingham Church and speaking solemnly of the beatings of the innocents crossing the bridge at Selma, our president segued to “the right to vote and to have that vote counted.”

It “is democracy’s threshold liberty,” Biden intoned, before proclaiming that “the votes of nearly 5 million Georgians will be up for grabs if that law holds,” referring to Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021.

Biden’s attack continued, with him stressing, “It’s not just here in Georgia. Last year alone, 19 states not proposed but enacted 34 laws attacking voting rights. . . .Their endgame? To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion—something states can respect or ignore.”

Then, came the line he repeated in yesterday’s tweet: “Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”

After assuring his audience his words were fact and not hyperbole, Biden continued: “Look, this matters to all of us. The goal of the former president and his allies is to disenfranchise anyone who votes against them. Simple as that. The facts won’t matter; your vote won’t matter. They’ll just decide what they want and then do it. That’s the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

As he ended his speech, the president encouraged passage of the bills, even if that meant discarding the filibuster, and in doing so he declared opponents of the legislation “domestic enemies” and supporters of “voter suppression” and “election subversion,” with the clear target of that suppression, according to Biden, being black Americans.

What Biden just told the country and the world is this: that when Democrats lose in November 2022, or thereafter suffer defeat in the presidential election of 2024, it will be because of voter suppression and election subversion—it will be because black Americans were denied the right to vote.

Biden’s peremptory challenge to the election results far surpasses anything Trump said or did. At least, Trump made it about him, claiming the election was stolen from him. Biden cast the die about democracy, “domestic enemies,” and race, all while declaring his words fact and not hyperbole.

May God save our country if the people actually believe him.

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Israel Study Finds 4th Booster Shot Ineffective — Moderna and Biotech Stocks Are Cratering

Reported By Jim Hoft | Published January 19, 2022

An Israeli study found that the 4th COVID booster shot is ineffective in preventing the disease.
This is horrible news for the Medical Industrial Complex.

Via James Cintolo.

A study out of Sheba Medical Center in Israel has proven that a 4th dose of either Pfizer or Moderna is ineffective against Omicron. Preliminary data was released on Monday 1/17/22 showing high antibody titers but low protection. Here’s an examination of the data, and 3 lessons we can learn from this.
To start, 274 healthcare workers at Sheba Medical Center received a 4th dose. Specifically, 154 received Pfizer, and 120 received Moderna. They were compared with a control group of nearly 6,000 healthcare workers that didn’t receive a booster. Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, lead researcher commented, “We see an increase in antibodies, higher than after the third dose,” he stated. “However, we see many infected with Omicron who received the fourth dose”. T elaborate, around the same number of individuals that received 4 doses experienced as many breakthrough infections as those who received 3. That said, there are a few lessons to learn from this.

This may explain the crash in vaccine stocks Moderna and BioTech.

Alex Berenson reported:

The hedge funds have finally realized there will be no fourth shot. And that mRNA technology, erm, still has a few issues to work out. (1 billion people aren’t gonna love hearing that, but too late now. Mistakes were made, stuff happens, amirite?)
Moderna and BioNTech are down 8-10% today, 60% since August. Oh, how I wish I could have shorted them.

Jim Hoft

Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

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CDC Says Natural Immunity Outperformed Vaccines Against Delta Strain

Reported by DYLAN HOUSMAN | HEALTHCARE REPORTER | January 19, 2022

Natural immunity from prior infection granted stronger levels of protection against the Delta variant of COVID-19 than vaccination alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a study released Wednesday. Before Delta became dominant, individuals who had natural immunity were experiencing higher case rates than individuals who were only vaccinated, the study found, but after Delta took hold, those with natural immunity caught COVID-19 less frequently than those who were only vaccinated.

The study examined four categories of people — unvaccinated and vaccinated who survived a previous COVID-19 infection, and unvaccinated and vaccinated who had never been infected — in California and New York between May and November 2021. The highest case rates were among those who had neither been vaccinated or previously infected. The most protection against infection and hospitalization was in those who had both been vaccinated and survived an earlier bout with the virus.

The agency cautioned that the data in question only measured results against the Delta variant and that Omicron may present new challenges that alter the calculus of natural immunity versus vaccination.

Biden administration officials and some public health experts have repeatedly downplayed the effectiveness of natural immunity against COVID-19, but this study is only the latest to indicate that recovery from prior infection can at least rival, if not surpass, that offered from vaccination alone. Most research has shown that for maximum protection against reinfection or severe illness, those who were previously infected should still get vaccinated.

Many legacy media outlets covered the study by minimizing the finding that natural immunity outperformed vaccines and emphasizing that a combination of both provided the best protection. Headlines from the New York Times, Associated Press, CNN and others claimed that vaccination offers the “best” or “safest” protection according to the study.

In a press call Wednesday, the CDC’s Dr. Benjamin Silk, an epidemiologist that co-authored the study, did not elaborate on the increased protection natural immunity provides and repeated the administration line that every American should get vaccinated.

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Doctor who quit her job after being suspended for promoting ivermectin, criticizing mandates sues Houston Methodist Hospital for COVID data, financial reports

Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | January 19, 2022

Dr. Mary Bowden, who was previously suspended from Houston Methodist Hospital for spreading what the hospital said was “misinformation” surrounding COVID-19 and who later quit her job there, is suing the hospital, the Texan reported. Bowden, a private-practice otolaryngologist, promoted ivermectin as a viable COVID-19 treatment in 2020 — a move with which her employers took grave issue.

She announced the lawsuit on Monday and in a press conference said that she is demanding data from the hospital on the effects of COVID-19 vaccines along with financial reports. During the conference announcing the pending litigation, Bowden said, “Medical freedom has been hijacked by hospitals, big pharma, insurance companies, and the federal agencies.” Bowden added that she and investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino requested the information contained in the lawsuit in November and December, but the hospital reportedly did not respond.

The outlet reported that the suit — which was filed in state district court on Monday — is requesting “financial documents detailing all revenue generated at the hospital throughout he COVID-19 vaccination program, including details about reimbursements or payments from government, insurance companies, and patients.” The suit is also requesting information about “any financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 treatments.”

Bowden’s suit also states that the hospital should make public the number of all recently admitted COVID-19 patients who were fully vaccinated and how many employees are experiencing breakthrough infections.

Bowden also pointed to the hospital’s 2019’s assets — which reportedly totaled approximately $4 billion — and said that the public is entitled to know how those assets have increased after 2019 and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“I want to make this clear,” she said during the conference. “I’m not seeking any financial gains from this or personal gain, I’m simply seeking the truth, which we all deserve.”

Attorney Steve Mitby, who is representing Bowen, said that he fully expects that he and his client will receive the records.

“It’s state law,” he insisted.

Bowden added, “We all know that early COVID treatment works, it saves lives, and I’m not going to be silenced, intimidated, or bullied by Houston Methodist, Houston Chronicle, or anyone else who wants to target physicians that question the narrative.”

In November, Mitby said that Bowden had never peddled disinformation, as a Stanford University-trained physician who has had vast experience in treating coronavirus patients.

“She is helping her patients, through a combination of monoclonal antibodies and other drugs, to recover from COVID. Dr. Bowden’s proactive treatment has saved lives and prevented hospitalizations,” he said at the time. “Dr. Bowden also is not anti-vaccine as she has been falsely portrayed. Dr. Bowden has opposed vaccine mandates, especially when required by the government. That is not the same as opposing vaccines.”

A Houston Methodist spokesperson declined to comment when approached by the Texan for its report.

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FROM MY INBOX

January 19, 2022

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Don’t Look Down

A.F. BRANCO on January 19, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-dont-look-down/

The media has overhyped the Omicron virus that has turned out to be much less lethal than expected.

Omicron Danger — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

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California Weighs Doubling Taxes to Pay For Single-Payer Health Care System That Would Cover All Illegal Aliens

January 18, 2022

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published January 17, 2022

California lawmakers are weighing DOUBLING taxes to pay for a single-payer health care system that would cover all illegal aliens. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) last Monday proposed a budget that would give all illegal aliens health coverage.

In 2019, California extended health coverage to illegals 26 and under. In 2021, California began covering illegals over the age of 55. Now Newsom wants ALL illegals in California to have health coverage, and Californians may see a tax increase of roughly $12,250 per household.

Fox Business reported:

California lawmakers unveiled a new bill at the beginning of the year that would establish a single-payer health care system – an ambitious plan that would be funded by nearly doubling the state’s already-high taxes.
A new analysis from the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan group that generally advocates for lower taxes, found that the proposed constitutional amendment would increase taxes by roughly $12,250 per household in order to fund the first-of-its-kind health care system. In all, the tax increases are designed to raise an additional $163 billion per year, which is more than California raised in total tax revenue any year before the pandemic.
Under the bill, the top marginal rate on wage income would soar to 18.05% – well above the median top marginal rate of 5.3% and the state’s existing rate of 12.3%. There would be an 18-bracket system, with higher taxes kicking in for individuals earning more than $149,509. The highest rate would apply to those who earn more than $2,484,121.
California would also expand the payroll tax paid by employees who earn more than $49,990 in annual income if they work for a company that has more than 50 workers. Walczak noted the plan could deter small businesses from expanding by inadvertently creating a tax cliff. For instance, if a company that had 49 workers earning $80,000 each hired one additional employee, they would suddenly create a tax bill of more than $90,000.
Finally, the state would also adopt a new 2.3% gross receipts tax (GRT) on qualified businesses minus the first $2 million in annual gross receipts, at a rate more than three times that of the country’s current highest GRT.

Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.

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Raphael Warnock to Senate colleagues: ‘You can’t remember MLK and dismember his legacy’

Reported By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, January 17, 2022

Rev. Raphael Warnock, who was elected as Georgia’s first black U.S. senator a year ago, urged his colleagues in Congress Monday not to “dismember” the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by opposing Democrat-backed voting rights legislation. The 52-year-old Warnock, who continues to lead the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and King Jr. both served as pastors, made the call during the Beloved Community Commemorative Service remembering famed civil rights leader’s life at the church on Monday.

“Our nation needs our prayers. We are at a critical moment. As pastor of this church now for over 16 years, I know that at this time of the year, everybody lines up to offer praise in memory of Martin Luther King Jr. Everybody loves Dr. King. They just don’t always love what he represents,” Warnock began.
“Everybody quotes Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend. Perhaps the most quoted speech will be that one that he delivered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. ‘I Have a Dream’ 1963, an important speech.”
However, Warnock reminded the audience that the “I Have a Dream” speech was not the first speech King gave before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
“First time he gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial the year was 1957, when Dr. King, in his own relevant and powerful and prescient way, talked about ‘all kinds of conniving methods being used to stop people from voting,’” Warnock said. “Was he talking about then or was he talking about now?” Warnock continued before taking aim at his colleagues.
“I asked the question because I’ve been to this mountain at this moment time and time again, and I know that politicians especially, God bless their hearts, would want to be seen standing where Dr. King stood,” he said. “Let the word go forth. You cannot remember Dr. King and dismember his legacy at the same time. If you would speak his name, you have to stand up for voting rights. You have to stand up on behalf of the poor and the oppressed and the disenfranchised.”
The Democrat continued that those championing the words of King “have to stand up for healthcare because he said out of all the injustices, inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”
He invoked the words of Joshua 24:15.
“I was a preacher long before I was in the Senate,” he said. “So I offer you the words of Joshua. ‘Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.’”

Democrats have been loudly beating the voting-rights drum in recent weeks, including some in the faith community. About 25 progressive faith leaders recently embarked on a hunger strike in a bid to push Congress to pass voting rights legislation by Martin L. King Jr. Day Monday.

Conservatives contend that bills, such as the one passed last year in Georgia, aim to improve the integrity of the voting process amid allegations of voter fraud. Progressives believe that such bills curtail ballot access for urban and suburban communities.

Legislation proposed since Democrats won the House in 2018 includes the For the People Act, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Last week, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that combines the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. That bill is now before the more evenly divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris breaks a 50-50 tie in favor of the Democrats. The Democrats’ voting bills have been met with varying degrees of resistance from Republicans while an ongoing debate over whether the Senate filibuster should be repealed continues to rage.

Abolishing the filibuster would give Democrats the ability to pass bills with a simple majority in the Senate rather than compromising with Republicans to meet a 60-vote threshold. Two Democrats — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have said they would not vote to end the filibuster.

“I am sometimes sitting in the chamber when some of my colleagues are making arguments against the voting rights bills that we are trying to pass right now, and as I listen to their arguments, their arguments sounded strangely familiar,” Warnock argued Monday.
“And I began to wonder why, and I went back and looked again at the history that I’ve studied my whole life, and I realized that many of the segregationists who opposed voting rights … many of the opponents of voting rights, they didn’t stand up and say we are opposed to black people voting. They made state’s rights arguments.”
He argued that “voter suppression” bills have been passed in 19 states and introduced in 49 states.
“Governors and members of the Congress are channeling old state’s rights arguments to fight against voting rights now the same way they did back then,” he contends. “So … Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. You cannot remember Dr. King and dismember his legacy at the same time.”

As progressives maintain their voting bills aims to prevent states from suppressing votes, critics of the legislation say they are attempts to defang voter identification laws passed in 35 states, ban the updating of voter rolls and block poll observers from watching the vote count.

US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a meeting with members of the Democratic Texas State Senate and Texas House of Representatives in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on June 16, 2021. | MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Several other speakers at the King ceremonial event, including Vice President Harris, who joined remotely, spoke about voting rights and the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which aims to set national standards for voting access.

“A landmark bill, as we all know, sits before the United States Senate: ‘The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. This bill represents the first real opportunity to secure the freedom to vote since the United States Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act nearly a decade ago. And the Senate must pass this bill now,” Harris said.
“You know, it was more than 55 years ago that men, women and children marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand the ballot. When they arrived at the state capitol in Alabama, Dr. King decried what he called ‘normalcy’ — the normalcy, the complacency that was denying people the freedom to vote.”
Harris stressed that the “only normalcy” King would accept is the “normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all God’s children.”
“Today, we must not be complacent or complicit. We must not give up, and we must not give in,” she said. “To truly honor the legacy of the man we celebrate today, we must continue to fight for the freedom to vote, for freedom for all.”

Despite a Democrat-imposed Martin Luther King Day deadline to vote on the voting rights bill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced last Thursday that a vote won’t take place until at least Tuesday. But Democrats don’t appear to have enough votes to pass the legislation as long as the filibuster remains in place.

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Bill Connor Op-ed: Decline in Christianity among Democrats bringing steep polarization

Commentary By Bill Connor, Op-ed Contributor | Tuesday, January 18, 2022

partisan divided — iStock / Getty Images Plus

A telephonic poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports has given a shock to many Republicans about the views of average Democrats regarding basic rights. Around half of Democratic voters (48 percent) believe government should be able to imprison and/or fine those who question the efficacy of vaccines, while only 27 percent of all Americans would support such infringement of free speech. Though 58 percent of American voters would oppose government fines on the unvaccinated, 55 percent of Democrats support such measures. Disturbingly, 59 percent of Democratic voters support confining the unvaccinated to their homes at all times, while the vast majority of American voters oppose such a draconian infringement of rights. Almost a third of Democrats (29 percent) even support removing custody of the children of the unvaccinated, and 47 percent support forced tracking devices on the unvaccinated.

Republicans, vaccinated or not, have been shocked, while Democrats generally don’t see the problem. Most Americans are starting to wonder about the source of such divergent values and worldviews and the lack of understanding. This dangerous polarization has followed an increasingly steep trend with the Democratic Party becoming secularized in recent years.

First, the secularization of America is picking up steam and bringing profound change in values. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that between 2007 and 2021, the number of Americans identifying as Christian plummeted from 78 percent to only 63 percent. During that same period, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated almost doubled from 16 percent to 29 percent. In 2007, 58 percent of Americans prayed daily, and yet that number is now 45 percent, while those who hold religion as “very important” in their lives sank from 56 percent to 41 percent. The percent of Protestant Americans fell 10 percent in the past ten years to only 40 percent today. These numbers seem to be increasing, as the numbers of Americans who attend religious services at least monthly fell 2 percent (33 percent to 31 percent) last year. By some estimates, around a third of Churches will be shutting down from the start of the pandemic to today.

Though alarming, this decline in Christianity is primarily a dynamic of the Democratic Party. Pew Research finds that the number of Republicans who believe in God has remained relatively consistent at 73 percent, while Democrat believers dropped to 55 percent. Republicans are double (58 percent to 28 percent) the number of Democrats who identify as Evangelical. The number of Republicans who attend church weekly is substantially higher than that of Democrats (44 percent to 29 percent). For those who hold religion as “very important” in their lives, Republicans outnumber Democrats 61 percent to 47 percent. Most important when it comes to the connection of religiosity to worldview about rights and values, Republicans are significantly above Democrats in two key areas. According to the Pew polls, Republicans look to religion for moral guidance over Democrats by a whopping 44 percent to 29 percent. Further, Republicans believe in absolute standards of right and wrong at over double the numbers of Democrats (47 percent to 23 percent).

Going back several decades, both parties showed comparative numbers of those who looked to religion as a source of moral guidance and believed in absolute standards of right and wrong. In the American experience, both parties generally agreed with the importance of individual rights as being from God or “endowed by our Creator” as we told King George III. Religion provided firm moral guidance on the respect for each individual and individual rights that political majorities should not infringe. The Christian belief in original sin, and therefore the danger of corruption of power, has driven the value of limiting the power of government.

The more secularized the Democratic Party has become, the more Democrats appear willing to infringe on previously held sacred rights in deference to government power. The more faith they have placed in government (over God), the more willing Democrats have been to wield power against individual rights. Republicans generally put faith in God over government and therefore put primary value in the rights of individuals.

The way out of the polarization appears to be with the Democratic Party moving back from secularization and to the unity of values. Alternatively, the Republican Party can begin repudiating God as a source of moral guidance, but most Americans would agree that’s the way to ruin. Americans have a choice to make with our values. Is it government control over individual liberty? Does the value of the “collective” outweigh the value of individuals? Religion is at the root of the answers. For me, I stand with Joshua when he reasoned with his people about these issues and concluded: “as for me and my house, we choose the Lord.”

Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book Articles from War.

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Pelosi’s Top Pick for Chairwoman of the Transportation Committee Repeatedly Crashes Her Car into Parked Vehicle, Walks Away (VIDEO)

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published January 17, 2022

Congressman Thomas Massie posted a viral video of Speaker Pelosi’s top choice to serve as the Chairwoman of the Transportation Committee repeatedly crashing her car into a parked vehicle.

Pelosi’s top pick to chair the Transportation Committee is 84-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-District of Columbia). Norton was seen on video repeatedly crashing her car into a parked vehicle, parking badly, then walking away. She didn’t even leave a note on the red vehicle after repeatedly slamming into it before blocking it with her car.

“Speaker Pelosi is seriously considering this person to serve as the chairwoman of the Transportation Committee,” Massie said. “Folks, I’m not making this up.”

VIDEO:

.@SpeakerPelosi is seriously considering this person to serve as the chairwoman of the Transportation Committee. pic.twitter.com/Gh5698ZeYU
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 17, 2022

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Democrats Whip Up Fear Of ‘Rigged’ Midterm Elections

Reported by MICHAEL GINSBERG | CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER | January 17, 2022

US-VOTE-MICHIGAN — **(Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)**

With Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refusing to eliminate the filibuster and pass a pair of election reform bills, Democratic politicians are claiming that Republicans will prevent fair midterm elections in November.

The two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would effectively nationalize elections by preventing states and locales from setting limits on absentee ballots, prohibiting ballot harvesting and changing polling locations without federal approval, among other changes. Democrats claim that these changes are necessary to prevent local Republicans from engaging in voter suppression and throwing out validly cast ballots.

President Joe Biden cast opponents of the bills as the heirs of segregationists, and laws requiring voter ID and banning line-warming as “Jim Crow 2.0.” He also claimed that individuals who support the stricter ID standards “plan to subvert the election.”

“History has never been kind to those who’ve sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights, and it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion,” the commander-in-chief said. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? The side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? The side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” he asked.

ATLANTA, GA – JANUARY 11: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to a crowd at the Atlanta University Center Consortium, part of both Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University on January 11, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris delivered remarks on voting rights legislation. Georgia has been a focus point for voting legislation after the state voted Democratic for the first time in almost 30 years in the 2020 election. As a result, the Georgia House passed House Bill 531 to limit voting hours, drop boxes, and require a government ID when voting by mail. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina defended Biden’s remarks, while questioning whether Biden’s critics had the personal experience necessary to understand his comments.

“This is Jim Crow 2.0. That was one of the strongest points of the president’s speech that I agree with. So, this whole notion, when you walk around and no one has ever discriminated against you because of your skin color or you have never had to worry about having your vote counted, you can have those kinds of statements,” he said.

During her Martin Luther King Jr. Day address, Vice President Kamala Harris asserted that opponents of the legislation wish “to interfere with our elections, to get the outcomes they want and to discredit those they do not.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer added that Republicans want to “rig the game and rig the count,” when it comes to elections, so a compromise position such as reforming the Electoral Count Act would be unacceptable to his caucus.

“If you’re going to rig the game and then say, ‘count the rigged game accurately,’ what good is that?” he asked during a Jan. 4 press conference.

Top Democrats have made these claims as polls and analysts suggest that Republicans are likely to take back the House and Senate by wide margins in the November midterms. A poll released Monday by Gallup found that Americans were more likely to support the Republican Party than the Democratic Party towards the end of 2021 than at any point since 1995, a year after the GOP netted 54 House and eight Senate seats.

Other polls have indicated that voters prefer generic Republican candidates to generic Democratic ones by as many as eight percentage points, with independents breaking sharply for Republicans.

Republicans need to pick up only five House seats and one Senate seat to win back both chambers, while the president’s party has on average lost 26 seats in the midterm elections conducted since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight. The only midterm elections in which the president’s party did not lose seats were 1998, as Republicans impeached former President Bill Clinton, and 2002, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Many Democrats assailed Republicans for equally baseless claims about the 2020 elections, while saying that Americans should not question the security and fairness of elections.

After Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley cited “allegations of voter fraud” in his announcement that he would object to the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s victory, Democratic Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar accused him of “join[ing] a coup attempt.”

Biden accused Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz of being “part of the big lie” after they objected to the Electoral College certification.

“Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the law, repeating the lie,” Biden said, name-checking Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Ooooh That Smell

A.F. BRANCO on January 18, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ooooh-that-smell/

Just when you thought it was over for Hillary, she raises her evil corrupt head again for 2024.

Hillary Clinton 2024? — **Political A.F. Branco Cartoon ©2021**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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New ‘Domestic Terror Unit’ Is A Way to Punish Americans for Thought Crimes

January 17, 2022

COMMENTARY BY: HUDSON CROZIER | JANUARY 17, 2022

DOJ agents stand around on street corner

On Tuesday, Department of Justice representatives informed a Senate committee of plans to gather a group of select attorneys to form a “Domestic Terror Unit” in light of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, noting that its number of investigations of alleged domestic terrorists have more than doubled since the spring of 2020. While admitting “there is no single federal crime labeled ‘domestic terrorism,’” a DOJ official promised to invoke a “criminal code” that allows enhanced sentences for certain crimes listed as “terror offenses.”

There are many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the federal government’s efforts against this “persistent and evolving” threat, including its conveniently blurred definitions.

The National Defense and Authorization Act’s definition of “domestic terrorism” distinctly refers to “unlawful use or threat of force of violence in furtherance of ideological agendas” in the context of political or anti-government extremism. Most other common-sense definitions clearly denote violence as an essential feature. However, federal agents have a poor track record in their use of the label, not only in the case of parents angry at school boards, but most recently in relation to Jan. 6, 2021.

In July 2021, after pleading guilty to “obstruction of an official proceeding,” non-violent Jan. 6 defendant Paul Hodgkins, who had no prior criminal record, was given a heavy eight-month sentence. Judge Randolph Moss described him as one of many “terrorists” that day, baselessly lumping him in with those who committed actual violence.

In all his insufferable rantings about an “assault on democracy” and the rebellious “symbolism” of Hodgkins raising a Trump flag, Moss could not explain how his particular crime of roaming the Senate floor for 22 minutes had enabled violence. In fact, he plainly admitted that the punishment wasn’t based entirely on individual guilt, but on a perverse idea of “balanced” justice:

The court here had to consider both what I think are the extremely damaging events that occurred that day but also who Mr. Hodgkins is as an individual. And as I think is reflected by the sentencing I imposed, I tried to strike that balance.

This implies one may be considered a terrorist by virtue of being within geographical distance of what terrorists are doing if one’s political leanings are on a similar spectrum. Despite the court’s claims, neither the prosecution nor the judge brought forth a sentencing enhancement based on the existing code of terror offenses mentioned Tuesday. Why? Because Hodgkins’ crime isn’t on it. It was terrorism because the court said it was, not by law.

More judicial malpractice occurred in the case of non-violent defendant Jacob Chansely, the infamous “Q shaman” who was held in solitary confinement for months while Judge Royce Lamberth repeatedly denied his release. In November, Chansely received an unbelievable 41-month sentence when he pleaded guilty to the same charge as Hodgkins.

While admitting Chansely committed no violent crime at the Capitol (in fact, he openly called for peace), the court cited a “need to deter others especially in cases of domestic terrorism.” By punishing a non-terrorist more harshly than necessary to “deter others,” our bloodthirsty DOJ showed a willingness to weaponize federal convictions that deplete a defendant’s civil rights just to make an example out of him.

In August, the government extended its wild accusations out of the courtrooms and into local police departments. Leading up to the anniversary of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert advising police and neighborhoods to be on the lookout for potential terror threats. Among them were “opposition to COVID measures,” or association with “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud.”

Do you oppose certain COVID policies or hold a skeptical view of the 2020 election’s security but have no intent to respond violently or illegally? The DHS draws no line; to them, you may be a terrorist. Their language spreads beyond actions to include statements or beliefs that are inherently devoid of any call to action, violent or not. One could almost call it an indictment of “thought crime.”

Lastly, while the Jan. 6 Capitol attack obviously involved acts of political violence, it hasn’t been linked to any broader, organized threat to the country, raising more questions as to what exactly justifies a new Terror Unit in response. In August, after hundreds of arrests and investigations, the FBI admitted to finding no hard evidence of an elaborate political plot on Jan. 6, a confession no one in the government has retracted since. The most concerning evidence of a plot may be the FBI’s own use of provocateurs, but it’s looking doubtful the FBI or DOJ will investigate itself.

When asked by the Senate committee if any Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with “insurrection,” DOJ representatives said they were unaware of any. That’s because the answer is no. Regardless, the feds continue to ramp up their already fanatical response to a problem they haven’t clearly defined.

Our self-serving ruling class hasn’t conducted itself responsibly or transparently in the wake of the Capitol attack, and we can expect this new development to be no different. While the Biden administration would have us believe that the aimless actions of a few foolish troublemakers represent the greatest authoritarian threat to the United States, its systematic purge of political opponents indicates otherwise.

Hudson Crozier is a Texas student and contributor to Unwoke Narrative. As a news journalist, he specializes in national and international politics as well as media analysis. He also hosts the Hudson Crozier blog, which covers broad cultural issues. Follow him onInstagram @lone_star_trooper.

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14-year-old Pentecostal girl kidnapped, forced to marry captor in Pakistan

Reported By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor | Monday, January 17, 2022

Yet another underage girl in Pakistan has been abducted and forced to convert to Islam and marry her Muslim captor and police have allegedly been slow to act on the case, according to a report. Mahnoor Ashraf, a 14-year-old Pentecostal Christian, has been missing since she left her home, along with her 8-year-old nephew in Lahore’s Cantonment area in Punjab province for a nearby shop on Jan. 4, Morning Star News reported.

The nephew later told Mahnoor’s parents that their Muslim neighbor, 45-year-old Muhammad Ali Khan Ghauri, had abducted her with the help of his friends. When Mahnoor’s father, Ashraf Masih Chaudhry, went to the alleged abductor’s house, he was informed that he had been missing ever since.

“Ghauri’s house is on the same street, and our families had good terms with each other,” Mahnoor’s older brother, Akram Masih Chaudhry, was quoted as saying. “We don’t know when he managed to lure Mahnoor into a relationship.”

The abductor is married with two children.

Chaudhry then filed a police complaint, but the investigating officer was slow to act on their case, Akram said, adding that on Jan. 7, Ghauri’s family informed them that Mahnoor had allegedly converted to Islam and married Ghauri on Jan. 4, the day she was abducted. Ghauri’s friends who allegedly helped in the abduction have been identified as Muhammad Waqas, Raza Ali and Muhammad Imran. A local cleric who performed the Islamic marriage despite knowing that she was a minor has been identified as Muhammad Ibrar.

The marriage certificate states Mahnoor’s age as 19, though her birth certificate shows her year of birth as 2007.

“The police are not doing anything to find Mahnoor,” Akram was quoted as saying.

A 2014 report by The Movement for Solidarity and Peace Pakistan estimated that hundreds of women and girls from Pakistan’s Hindu and Christian communities are abducted, forcibly married and converted to Islam every year.

“Many victims are minors taken from their families, sexually assaulted, married to an assailant, and held in captivity justified by falsified marriage and conversion documents,” the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern said previously. “Violence, threats and grooming tactics are used to compel victims to make statements in court supporting their captors.”

Religion is often injected into cases of sexual assault to place religious minority victims at a disadvantage, ICC previously reported, adding that perpetrators play upon religious biases to cover up and justify their crimes by introducing an element of religion.

International watchdog group Open Doors USA, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, ranks Pakistan at No. 5 on its 2021 World Watch List of countries where Christians face the most severe persecution. Pakistan is also listed by the U.S. State Department as a “country of particular concern” for tolerating in or engaging in egregious violations of religious freedom.

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Obama Official Pleads Guilty to Theft of Government Property, Wire Fraud and Scheme to Defraud US Govt

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published January 17, 2022

Obama’s Acting Homeland Security Inspector General Charles Edwards pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US government. Charles Edwards and his subordinate were indicted on 16 counts of theft and fraud, the Justice Department announced in March 2020.

“The indictment charges Charles K. Edwards, 59, of Sandy Spring, Maryland, and Murali Yamazula Venkata, 54, of Aldie, Virginia, with conspiracy to commit theft of government property and to defraud the United States, theft of government property, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The indictment also charges Venkata with destruction of records.”

The charges alleged that in addition to stealing government software and databases, Venkata helped Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could upload the stolen software.

“The indictment further alleges that, in addition to stealing DHS-OIG’s software and the sensitive government databases, Venkata and others also assisted Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could properly upload the stolen software and databases, provided troubleshooting support whenever Edwards required it, and helped him build a testing server at his residence with the stolen software and databases,” the Department of Justice said in a press release announcing the indictments. “As further part of the alleged scheme, Edwards retained software developers in India for the purpose of developing his commercial alternative of DHS-OIG’s software.”

Although Edwards left the DHS in 2013, according to the indictment he leveraged his relationship with Venkata to carry out the scheme which began in October of 2014 and continued to April of 2017.

Law & Crime reported:

The ex-watchdog who oversaw the Department of Homeland Security pleaded guilty on Friday to stealing propriety software and sensitive databases from his old job for his private business.
Charles K. Edwards, 61, served in the Obama administration as the Acting Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security between February 2008 until December 2013. He served before that time as the inspector general for the U.S. Postal Service.
During a federal court hearing on Friday morning, Edwards pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss to conspiracy to defraud the United States and theft of government property. Edwards’s sentencing date has not yet been set.
His attorney Courtney Roberts Forrest, from the firm Kaiser Dillon, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.

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Top Union Pacific official blasts far-left policies over ‘spiraling crisis’ of rail theft, threatens to leave Los Angeles

Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | January 17, 2022

A top official with Union Pacific revealed last week that the company could move its rail operations from Los Angeles County unless law enforcement stops thieves from raiding shipping containers. Last week, a viral video showed how thieves are pillaging through shipping containers in the infamous Logan Heights neighborhood. Tens of thousands of destroyed packages littered the area around the rail tracks.

Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022

Adrian Guerrero, general director of public affairs, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón demanding his office stop the “spiraling crisis of organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft.” Shockingly, Guerrero revealed that “over 90 containers are compromised per day.”

“Since December 2020, UP has experienced an over 160% increase in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles County. In several months during that period, the increase from the previous year surpassed 200%. In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020,” Guerrero explained. “Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties moving trains.”

However, the actual crimes are not the only issue. Guerrero explained that far-left criminal justice policies have exacerbated the problem and emboldened criminals.

Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence. Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above.

According to Guerrero, UPS and FedEx, which utilize Union Pacific’s rail services, are seeking to divert their business away from Los Angeles County — and Union Pacific may join them.

“Like our customers, UP is now contemplating serious changes to our operating plans to avoid Los Angeles County,” Guerrero wrote, adding that such a “drastic change” would significantly impact the national supply chain.
Guerrero went on to say that Union Pacific understands “the well-intended social justice goals” of Gascón, but demanded he “hold these criminals accountable.”

In response, Gascón’s office claimed they are committed to ensuring the safety of Los Angeles County’s infrastructure. In a statement, the office also said many cases are not prosecuted due to “insufficient evidence.”

“Some cases presented to our office by Union Pacific have been filed, such as burglary and grand theft, while others have been declined due to insufficient evidence. We make charging decisions based on the evidence,” the statement said.

However, Guerrero explained in his letter to Gascón that despite over 100 criminals having been arrested while actively vandalizing trains, Union Pacific “has not been contacted for any court proceedings.”

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Glenn Youngkin goes scorched earth upon entering office: CRT banned, parents empowered, vaccine mandate gone

Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | January 16, 2022

The new Republican leadership in Virginia — Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, and Attorney General Jason Miyares — went scorched earth upon entering office, which officially happened Saturday. Youngkin signed a host of executive orders fulfilling key campaign promises, while Miyares fired more than two dozen staff members in the AG’s office the day before taking office. The new governor signed nine executive orders and two executive directives to address public education, COVID restrictions, the climate, and the economy.

The first order Youngkin signed “delivers on his Day One promise to restore excellence in education by ending the use of divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, in public education.”
“Political indoctrination has no place in our classrooms,” the order reads, in part. “Our children deserve far better from their education than to be told what to think. Instead, the foundation of our educational system should be built on teaching our students how to think for themselves. Virginia must renew its commitment to teaching our children the value of freedom of thought and diversity of ideas.”

The order explains:

The vast majority of learning in our schools involves imparting critical knowledge and skills in math, science, history, reading and other areas that should be non-controversial. Inherently divisive concepts, like Critical Race Theory and its progeny, instruct students to only view life through the lens of race and presumes that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive, and that other students are victims. This denies our students the opportunity to gain important facts, core knowledge, formulate their own opinions, and to think for themselves.

The second order empowers parents to decide whether their children wear face masks at school, the fourth order initiates an investigation into the alleged wrongdoing by the Loudoun County School Board regarding sexual assaults, the sixth order declares Virginia open for business, orders seven and eight address human trafficking and anti-Semitism, and order nine begins the process to withdraw Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Meanwhile, Youngkin’s two executive directives cut “job killing regulations” by 25% and rescind the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for state employees.

“It’s Day One, and we are going to work just like we promised,” Youngkin said in a statement.

On Friday, Miyares informed 30 staff members in the Virginia attorney general’s office, including 17 attorneys, that they would not have a job in his office, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

“During the campaign, it was made clear that now Attorney General-elect Miyares and Attorney General Herring have very different visions for the office,” a spokeswoman for Miyares told the newspaper. “We are restructuring the office, as every incoming AG has done in the past.”

Miyares has pledged to be tough on crime.

“Virginia is in the middle of a public safety crisis. That’s why Virginians elected pro-law enforcement statewide officials, to end the criminal-first, victim-last policies that have led to Virginia’s highest murder rate in decades,” Miyares wrote in an essay last month.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Bidenomics

A.F. BRANCO on January 17, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-bidenomics/

This is Biden’s America, empty store shelves, High gas prices, and out-of-control inflation.

Biden Empty Shelves — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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REMEMBERING

January 17, 2022

Martin Luther King – I Have A Dream Speech – August 28, 1963

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FROM MY INBOX

January 14, 2022

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[LISTEN: Sen. Ron Johnson Has Some Questions For The ‘Covid Gods’]

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9 Times Sen. Ron Johnson Triggered the Left — And Turned Out to Be Right

Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 14, 2022

Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.

But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.

Jan. 6

During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.

The media lost it, ignoring his condemnation of the violence to smear Johnson as a conspiratorial nutjob. CNN, New York Daily News, Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and even the Washington Examiner ran articles attacking him as “deranged.”

Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.

Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.

COVID Shots

Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”

In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.

In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”

Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.

Early COVID Treatment

Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.

Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

‘Rona Vaccines for Kids

In October 2021, Wisconsin radio host Dan O’Donnell’s YouTube account was suspended after he posted an interview with the senator about opposing vaccine mandates for kids.

We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.

Hunter Biden

Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.

The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.

This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden associate Tony Bobulinski confirmed aspects of the report after its release.

Climate Change

Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”

The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.

Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.

Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.

Mouthwash

Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.

He was swiftly berated in print and on-air by the likes of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, HuffPost, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Forbes said Johnson’s “Advice Exemplifies The Rising Tide Of Anti-Science,” and MSNBC’s Joy Reid called him a “fool” and a “public health menace.”

Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.

JUST NOW: Ron Johnson, on a Wisconsin tele-town hall, pushes mouthwash as a COVID treatment.

"By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?" pic.twitter.com/V0cdxPYc7K
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) December 8, 2021

Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”

Natural Immunity

On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.

“Fact-checker” Salvador Rizzo gave it “four Pinocchios” (an analysis that Johnson’s team eviscerated), and WaPo’s bogus fact-checker-in-chief Glenn Kessler called it one of the “Biggest Pinocchios of 2021.”

Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.

Russiagate

Johnson’s years-long involvement in getting to the bottom of the Russia hoax and the Ukraine phone call impeachment is enough to fill a book (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), but suffice it to say that, true to form, the media were relentless, and the right was pretty much right about everything. In fact, the truth about that story is likely far worse than most have heard. Here’s hoping Johnson continues to pursue that truth using the powers of a U.S. senator.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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BRACE YOURSELF! The ‘Mother of All Supply Chain Shocks’ Is Coming as China Shuts Down Major Ports Due to Pandemic

Reported By Jim Hoft | Published January 14, 2022

As if there wasn’t enough bad economic news — The War Room opened their first hour on Friday warning viewers of the coming “mother of all supply chain shocks.” Zero Hedge reported on the coming Biden crisis on Thursday.

And, as we have also discussed in recent weeks, one place where this growth slowdown is emerging – besides the upcoming deterioration in US consumption where spending is now being funded to record rates by credit cards before it encounters a troubling air pocket – is China and its “covid-zero” policy in general, and its covid-locked down ports in particular.

But what until recently was a minority view confined to our modest website, has since expanded and as Bloomberg writes overnight, the effects of restrictions in China as the country maintains its Covid-zero policy “are starting to hit supply chains in the region.” As a result of the slow movement of goods through some of the country’s busiest and most important ports means shippers are now diverting to Shanghai, causing the types of knock-on delays at the world’s biggest container port that led to massive congestion bottlenecks last summer that eventually translated into a record number of container ships waiting off the coast of California, a glut that hasn’t been cleared to this day.

With sailing schedules already facing delays of about a week, freight forwarders warn of the impact on already back-logged gateways in Europe and the US and is also why HSBC economists are warning that the world economy could be headed for the “mother of all” supply chain shocks if the highly infectious omicron variant which is already swamping much of the global economy spreads across Asia, especially China, at which point disruption to manufacturing will be inevitable.

“Temporary, one would hope, but hugely disruptive all the same” in the next few months, they wrote in a research note this week first noted by Bloomberg.

Jim Hoft

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Dr. Mehmet Oz challenges Dr. Anthony Fauci to a debate, calls him ‘a petty tyrant’ and ‘the J. Edgar Hoover of public health’

Reported by ALEX NITZBERG | January 13, 2022

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is seeking to represent the state of Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate, is challenging Dr. Anthony Fauci to a debate and has called Fauci a “petty tyrant” and “the J. Edgar Hoover of public health.”

Oz released a campaign video in which he challenges Fauci to a debate.

“You got COVID wrong,” Oz says in the video. “Let’s have a debate, doctor to doctor, and give the American people the truth about COVID-19. I’m game, anytime, anywhere. Dr. Fauci, are you in?”

It's past time Fauci faces the fact that he got COVID wrong. So, doctor to doctor – let's debate. This Doctor is in, are you? pic.twitter.com/KSPTsk1dS3
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) January 13, 2022

Fauci, who has been a prominent and controversial figure during the COVID-19 pandemic, has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for more than three decades and is also the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.

“I think Dr. Fauci is basically the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He’s a petty tyrant. He got COVID wrong. He continues to get it wrong. I keep hearing from people inside the public health space, and outside, regular doctors like me, that he’s not managing this correctly,” Oz said during an interview on Newsmax.
Oz noted that he has been vaccinated but said, “If you’re older in America, you’re vulnerable, you should get vaccinated. But that’s my advice to you. Your local doctor should reinforce it. But it’s your choice, it’s your body.”

'FAUCI VS. OZ': During a Newsmax exclusive with @ericbolling, @DrOz throws out a challenge to debate "petty tyrant" Dr. Anthony Fauci. pic.twitter.com/py33iAdVYP
— Newsmax (@newsmax) January 13, 2022

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Frail Rider

A.F. BRANCO on January 14, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-frail-rider-2/

If you don’t agree with Biden, you’re Bull Conner, Jefferson Davis, and an evil Domestic Enemy.

Biden’s War on Conservatives — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Mollie Hemingway Op-ed: GOP’s Old Guard Out of Touch with Their Voters on Election Integrity

January 13, 2022

Commentary BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JANUARY 13, 2022

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden gave a speech asserting that people who oppose his plan for a federal takeover of elections are domestic enemies and racists.

“Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden asked in his speech falsely claiming that the “right to vote” was in doubt throughout the country.

Biden is lobbying to end the Senate’s legislative filibuster in order to push through his plan for a radical takeover of elections. The election bill would unconstitutionally empower the federal government to control state election procedures, and help make permanent the decreased election safeguards that caused so many problems throughout the country in 2020.

The response of the old guard of the Republican Party this week has been to wholeheartedly endorse the media narrative that the 2020 election had no significant problems, while also opposing Biden’s plan to run elections. It’s a politically insane approach.

The 2020 election was riddled with problems. Voters know this. Republican voters know this very well. Time Magazine described what happened with the election as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” They added that it was a “revolution in how people vote.”

The rigging of the election included changes to hundreds of laws and processes in the months prior to election day, flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots even as scrutiny of those ballots was decreased. Mark Zuckerberg spent $419 million to finance the private takeover of government election offices — primarily focused on the blue areas of swing states — to enable Democrats to run their Get Out The Vote operations from government offices. The funding was significant enough to affect the outcome of races, independent analysts have concluded. And that’s to say nothing of Big Tech’s election meddling in the form of censorship and algorithmic persuasion nor of corporate media’s move into straight-up propaganda.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos — formerly President Bill Clinton’s press secretary — asked in his usual biased way for Republican Sen. Mike Rounds to opine against election integrity:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You voted to certify the election last year. You condemned the protest as an insurrection. What do you say to all those Republicans, all those veterans who believe the election was stolen, who have bought the falsehoods coming from former President Trump?

Even the dumbest Republican should have been able to answer this question without accepting the premise of the biased Democrat reporter. Knowing that the filibuster and election integrity are on the line, even a lowly, distracted Republican precinct person should have been able to respond by talking about fighting the federal takeover of elections, fighting the private takeover of government election offices, fighting the unconstitutional changes of voting laws, and fighting the second-class treatment of Republican voters by the media and Big Tech.

Instead, Rounds made bizarre claims about looking at “accusations” in “multiple states,” saying that while there were “some irregularities,” none were significant. Then he claimed — ludicrously — “The election was fair, as fair as we have seen.”

I mean, heck, if the election was as fair as any in history, why not join with Democrats in their push for a federal takeover of elections to make permanent the “revolution in how people vote”? But also, why say something that is not true?

The 2020 election was not the fairest in history, not by a long shot. It was riddled with problems, whether it’s the Zuckerberg funding or the coordinated Democrat campaign to weaken election security. The man who ran that coordinated effort was Marc Elias, the same man who ran the 2016 Russia collusion hoax. His partner was recently indicted by John Durham for just some of his lies associated with that hoax that did so much damage to the country and which itself was an attack on the 2020 election’s fairness.

As soon as Rounds showed himself subservient to Stephanopoulos, the Democrat media went wild. They amplified his comments, knowing how helpful they were to their cause of decreased election security and opposition to Republican victories.

One corrupt media outlet that excitedly amplified Rounds’ comments and used them to advance their political agenda was CNN. Russia hoax co-conspirator Manu Raju, known for pestering Republicans to get them to support Democrat narratives, wrote an article gleefully headlined “Top Republicans stand up for Rounds after Trump’s attack: He ‘told the truth’.” Some lowlights:

“I think Sen. Rounds told the truth about what happened in the 2020 election,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN on Tuesday. “And I agree with him.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican who contended Democrats took advantage of more voting rules eased during the pandemic. “I’ve moved on a long time ago, and most members of Congress have, including Mike.”
Other Republicans said it was time to focus on something other than 2020. “I say to my colleague, welcome to the club,” Sen. John Thune, the senior South Dakota Republican, said of the Trump attack on Rounds — something he has endured himself in the past. “I don’t think re-litigating or rehashing the past is a winning strategy. If we want to be a majority in 2023, we’ve got to get out and articulate what we’re going to do with respect to the future the American people are going to live and the things they’re going to care about when it comes to economic issues, national security issues.”

It is absolutely charming that Cramer has the luxury of “moving on” from the important election integrity battle, but Biden sure hasn’t moved on. Pelosi hasn’t moved on. Chuck Schumer hasn’t moved on. The entire corporate media hasn’t moved on. Why has Cramer moved on?

North Dakota is a state that voted for Trump in 2020 by 33 points. Its senator should probably be able to use some of his political capital to tackle the top issue of the week for American voters.

Thune says the politically wise thing to do is to not relitigate the past but work on issues people are going to “care about.” Someone should tell him that one of the top issues Republican voters care about is … election integrity.

The Washington Post this month reported that at least 69 percent of Republicans are seriously concerned about the 2020 election. Perhaps the worst thing a party could do if it cared about serious political power would be to signal that the issue means so little to them. This pathetic cowardice and incompetent weakness are exactly what Republican voters are sick to death of.

In previous months, Biden has falsely claimed that the country is experiencing “Jim Crow” resistance to the right to vote. He asked corporations to boycott the state of Georgia after Georgia’s legislature passed a bill to mildly improve its election security. Some of them bowed to the pressure. Major League Baseball, for instance, pulled its All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Biden’s request, causing untold economic damage to the Peach State.

All of this is clearly an effort to keep Republicans from stopping Democrats’ 2020-style assault on election security. It works precisely because too many Republicans are too scared to fight. What if instead of Stephanopoulos easily pressuring Rounds into spouting Democrat talking points, Rounds had instead fought hard against these attacks on election security? What if he knew the facts about what actually happened enough to speak knowledgeably about what Republican voters want their leaders to advocate for?

What if establishment Republican politicians put away literally any thoughts about Trump — much less their anger or petulance about him — for a minute to think about the importance of election integrity and how to obtain it?

What if Republicans stopped running interference for what Democrats did in 2020 at the same moment that Dems are trying to take over the entire country’s election system? This isn’t merely academic. Old-guard Republican cowardice and fecklessness could lead to Pelosi becoming America’s election czar.

In general, Republican voters deserve a far better class of politician than what the old guard of their party has been forcing on them.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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Tony Perkins Op-ed: Military works to boot Christian ‘extremists’ from its ranks

Commentary by Tony Perkins, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Thursday, January 13, 2022

Military Chaplains — Bishops speak with military chaplains in New Orleans in this file photo. | (Photo: ENS / Sarah Bartenstein)

January 6 was a convenient background for a lot of Democrats, but especially the ones in Joe Biden’s Department of Defense. To them, it was a chance to highlight the dangers of conservatives — and fight to get them out of the ranks, once and for all.

Gearing up to the riot’s one-year anniversary in December, Press Secretary John Kirby warned that new rules on “extremist activity” were coming. “As Secretary [Lloyd] Austin has emphasized, the department is focused on prohibited activity, not on a particular ideology thought or political orientation. The department has always maintained a distinction between thoughts and actions.” So they say. But behind the camouflage, FRC’s Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin argues, is a different agenda entirely. And it’s not about weeding out extremism — it’s about weeding out the people of faith and principle.

“First of all,” he warned, “nobody in the [DOD] can define extremism. And because this is so ill-defined and because there are so many nebulous things associated with [it], what you’re going to see if that they’re going to start adding to it. And even though they say that they’re not after ideology — they’re not after people’s ideas or people’s faith or people’s leanings politically — that’s just simply not true. [They’re] going to start adding groups like ours — the Family Research Council — as an ‘extremist group,’ telling our troops, ‘You cannot be associated with them, because we stand [things like] biblical marriage.”

How does he know? Because it’s happened before. Remember, Joe Biden served under Barack Obama for eight years — and in that time, the duo turned America’s government into one of the most vicious, anti-faith institutions the country had ever seen. During the wave of “diversity training” in Obama’s second term, organizations like the American Family Association were on a hit list of “hate groups” that service members were ordered not to follow or engage. If they did, there would be consequences. If you’re associated with them, the military said, you’re risking a court-martial and dishonorable discharge.

So, this isn’t an empty threat. It’s not hypothetical. It’s already happened. Only now, unfortunately, it’s starting to progress. Thanks to radical groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who’ve partnered with the Biden administration in this extremist witch hunt, it’s not going to stop with organizations like American Family Association, Family Research Council, or Alliance Defending Freedom. Under the Defense Department’s new regulation, just released before Christmas, anyone with a natural view of “gender identity or sexual orientation” or any other biblical truth that is politically incorrect could be labeled as an extremist.

Consider what these new regulations will eventually do to chaplains who are endorsed by religious denominations that actually believe the Bible. These chaplains will silence themselves on a growing list of “untouchable” issues or they will be silenced by the military for these teaching, which they’ve labeled “extreme.”

General Boykin has seen a lot of things, but he says he’s “more concerned about our military today” than he’s ever been in his life. He points to the vaccine mandates and the good people our country is losing. “We’re recruiting the wrong people, and we’re [kicking] out the right people. We’re upside-down in the military today, and this is going to destroy our [force] if somebody doesn’t step in and turn this around. And I hope that will be Congress in 2022, when [Republicans] retake the House and Senate.”

Until then, he agrees, there’s an intentional effort to purge conservatives from the ranks, and we need to stop it. Without a viable military, we live in a vulnerable America. And obviously, if Democrats can’t succeed in abolishing our force, like the Marxist squad wants, then they’ll settle for the next best thing: hallowing it out until it’s nothing but an empty shell.

We can’t sit on the sidelines and watch. We’ve got to be engaged — and even more so now, when things aren’t going the direction we want. When we see these threats against our freedoms, it’s all the more reason to be active, informed, and hopeful — because we’re anchored in the truth. And that hope doesn’t change. It doesn’t come around every four years. It’s new every morning as we see the glory and goodness of the Lord.

Originally published at the Family Research Council.

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council.

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President Biden’s approval rating craters to disastrous new low in latest national poll

Reported by CARLOS GARCIA | January 12, 2022

President Joe Biden’s approval rating among Americans polled in the newest Quinnipiac poll cratered to a new low as high inflation continued to hamper the economy. Only a third of Americans, or 33%, said that they approve of the job Biden is doing as president. Another 53% said they disapprove of the president.

“A rocky start for President Biden gets him low grades on his year one report card,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst for Quinnipiac University.

Americans were also fearful that internal strife was continuing to damage the country.

When asked what was a greater threat to the United States, far more Americans said that political instability was a greater threat than those posed by other countries, 76% to 19%, respectively. Among those, a greater percentage of Democrats said instability was a danger, while a smaller percentage of Republicans said the same, 83% to 66% respectively.

“A fear of the enemy within, not a foreign threat, punctuates a grim assessment by Americans of a democracy in peril and a future of deepening political divisions,” added Malloy.

The poll also found that a majority of Americans, 61%, support the investigation into the rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, while only 33% oppose it. While a slim majority of Americans said that the Jan. 6 attack should not be forgotten, the percentage that said so had fallen from 57% in Aug. 2021, to only 50% currently.

Democrats are fearful that Biden’s unpopularity will worsen their prospects for holding onto power in the U.S. Congress in the midterm elections. While some have defended him by claiming that the media has been unfair to him, others have accused Biden of not supporting far left causes enough.

On Tuesday, critics of the president pounced on the news that Stacey Abrams had skipped Biden’s important speech in Georgia about the importance of passing a Democrat-backed bill bolstering voter access. Abrams said it was simply a scheduling mistake, but even mainstream journalists opined that Biden’s unpopularity was more likely the reason for the snub.

Here’s more about Biden’s damaging poll numbers:

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Stunning new data shows risk of death from Omicron is 91% lower than Delta, CDC-funded study says

Reported by PAUL SACCA | January 13, 2022

The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is far milder than Delta, according to a new study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The eye-opening data revealed that those infected with the Omicron variant are 91% less likely to die than those who are infected than the Delta strain.

The clinical study was conducted by Kaiser Permanente Southern California health care system – which operates 138 medical offices and 13 medical centers, plus has an affiliation with 37 community hospitals in Southern California. The study analyzed 52,297 Omicron cases and 16,982 Delta cases in Southern California between Nov. 30, 2021, and Jan. 1, 2022.

The study found that those infected with the Omicron variant were 53% less likely to have symptomatic hospitalization, had 74% less chance of being administered to the intensive care unit, and had a 91% lower risk of death compared to individuals with the Delta variant. Only one person of the more than 52,000 people with Omicron died, versus 14 deaths in the 16,982 with Delta. In addition, there were zero patients with Omicron who required mechanical ventilation, according to the research.

“Hospital admissions occurred among 235 (0.5%) and 222 (1.3%) of cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections, respectively,” the authors of the study said.

Patients infected with Omicron had a median duration of hospital stay of three fewer days than those with Delta.

“During a period with mixed Delta and Omicron variant circulation, SARS-CoV-2 infections with presumed Omicron variant infection were associated with substantially reduced risk of severe clinical endpoints and shorter durations of hospital stay,” the authors of the study concluded.

The CDC-funded study – which has not yet been peer-reviewed – did not reveal the ages of those who died or their vaccination status. On Wednesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky shared the study on Twitter.

Despite the promising news, Walensky tempered the optimism by saying, “While less severe, #Omicron is much more transmissible & we are seeing the unprecedented impact. Over 1M cases in a day, 99% of counties with high transmission & strained healthcare systems. Protect against #COVID19: get vaccinated + boosted, wear a mask & stay home if sick.”

While speaking at a White House Covid-19 Response Team briefing on Wednesday, Walensky said public health officials will monitor “deaths over the next several weeks to see the impact of Omicron on mortality.”

“Given the sheer number of cases, we may see deaths from Omicron, but I suspect the deaths we’re seeing now are still from Delta,” the CDC head revealed.

The Omicron strain became the dominant variant in mid-December and now accounts for an estimated 98.3% of all new cases, according to CDC data. There were 829,209 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. on Jan. 12 compared to 90,024 cases on Dec. 12.

On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged how transmissible the Omicron variant is and said nearly everyone will contract it.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison – senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

Also on Tuesday, U.S. Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said that “most people are going to get COVID.”

“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get COVID,” Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. “And what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”

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BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules on Biden’s Vaccine Mandates

Reported by Katie Pavlich | @KatiePavlich | Posted: Jan 13, 2022

BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules on Biden's Vaccine Mandates

Source: (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday to strike down President Joe Biden’s Wuhan coronavirus vaccine mandate for private businesses. Justices upheld his executive order requiring vaccination for healthcare workers at facilities receiving federal funding.

The ruling on vaccine requirements for private businesses with more than 100 employees was decided 6-3. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented.

“The Secretary of Labor, acting through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recently enacted a vaccine mandate for much of the Nation’s work force. The mandate, which employers must enforce, applies to roughly 84 million workers, covering virtually all employers with at least 100 employees. It requires that covered workers receive a COVID–19 vaccine, and it pre-empts contrary state laws. The only exception is for workers who obtain a medical test each week at their own expense and on their own time, and also wear a mask each workday,” the opinion states. “OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here. Many States, businesses, and nonprofit organizations challenged OSHA’s rule in Courts of Appeals across the country.”
“The Fifth Circuit initially entered a stay. But when the cases were consolidated before the Sixth Circuit, that court lifted the stay and allowed OSHA’s rule to take effect. Applicants now seek emergency relief from this Court, arguing that OSHA’s mandate exceeds its statutory authority and is otherwise unlawful. Agreeing that applicants are likely to prevail, we grant their applications and stay the rule,” the opinion continues.

Further, the Justices pointed out the risk from Wuhan coronavirus exists outside of the work place and therefore, limits OSHA’s regulatory power.

“COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases. Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life—simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock—would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization,” the ruling states.

The separate ruling on vaccine requirements for healthcare workers at facilities receiving federal funding through Medicare and Medicaid was decided 5-4. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito dissented.

“The Government has not made a strong showing that this agglomeration of statutes authorizes any such rule,” Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent. “The Government proposes to find virtually unlimited vaccination power, over millions of healthcare workers, in definitional provisions, a saving clause, and a provision regarding long-term care facilities’ sanitation procedures. The Government has not explained why Congress would have used these ancillary provisions to house what can only be characterized as a ‘fundamental detail’ of the statutory scheme. Had Congress wanted to grant CMS power to impose a vaccine man- date across all facility types, it would have done what it has done elsewhere—specifically authorize one. “

This post has been updated with additional information.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: The Great Epstein Cover-Up, Part 2

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jan 12, 2022

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.

The Great Epstein Cover-Up, Part 2

Source: AP Photo/Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, File

Last week, we reviewed our ruling class’s strange lack of interest in Jeffrey Epstein’s child molestation ring, in which so many of them played a part. The media cover-up is second only to the government cover-up, with prosecutors delivering loss after loss in cases they’ve been forced to bring (by the police and the public) against the child molester.

This week, we’ll look at the government’s long record of zealously trying NOT to unravel the case.

Barry Krischer was the first prosecutor to let Epstein off for child molestation. The local police presented then-Palm Beach state attorney Krischer with bales of evidence. They had affidavits from dozens of witnesses: girls abused by the pederast, the women who recruited them, the butler who cleaned up sex toys after the “massages,” as well as records of Epstein’s molestation appointments, one delayed because of a victim’s “soccer practice.”

Pretty much everything we know today about Epstein’s sex ring was unearthed by the Palm Beach Police back in 2005 and handed to Krischer on a silver platter.

Five underage girls had given police sworn statements that Epstein had sexually abused them, backed by 17 other witnesses, but when Krischer brought the case to the grand jury, weirdly, he allowed only one of the girls to testify — and then attacked her on the stand! (Epstein’s attorneys had helpfully provided Krischer’s office with the girl’s posts on MySpace, where she talked about boys and drinking, the little harlot.)

According to an extensive review by The Palm Beach Post, most of Krischer’s 2,800-page investigative file on the case consists of dirt against the teens — and against the police — given to him by Epstein’s lawyers. (Thanks, Epstein attorneys! Do we owe you anything?)

The grand jurors, who’d been meticulously kept in the dark by Krischer, ended up voting only for a single charge of “solicitation of prostitution” against Epstein in 2006. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation. No jail time, no record as a sex offender — no criminal record whatsoever.

According to Nexis, only one newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, reported at the time — or ever — that Palm Beach prosecutor Krischer gave Epstein probation for his years of child abuse.

Epstein’s friends claimed he was the victim of a crusade by Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, whom they called a “born-again nutcase.” Apparently, anyone who thinks prison is appropriate for the mastermind of a massive child sex ring has gotta be “born-again.” (How does he feel about teenage girls talking about boys and drinking?) In fact, there’s no evidence that Reiter is even a Christian — other than the fact that he’s never won an award from the ADL.

(In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League gave a “Jurisprudence Award” to … Barry Krischer! The award praised him for “exemplifying the principles upon which the Anti-Defamation League was founded.” Hey, Jonathan Greenblatt, was Harvey Weinstein out of town?)

At that point, the enraged Palm Beach chief of police took his evidence to a completely separate law enforcement agency — the federal government, even though these were mostly state crimes. U.S. attorney Alex Acosta proceeded to make a deal with Epstein — with Krischer essentially operating as Epstein’s defense counsel — resulting in a plea only slightly tougher than Krischer’s pat on the head.

According to journalist Vicky Ward, Acosta later defended this sweetheart deal to the Trump transition team, explaining: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence‘ and to leave it alone.”

Most recently, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York brought a gentle prosecution against Epstein’s pimp and fellow child molester, Ghislaine Maxwell. Federal prosecutors called a mere four girls who claimed to have been recruited and/or abused by Maxwell. They could have put dozens of her victims on the stand.

Most notably, the Southern District did not call the star witness, Virginia Giuffre, who has openly named the rich and powerful men she says these creeps forced her to have sex with, including Prince Andrew, former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, former New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, and the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, among others.

(Times of London, Jan. 9, 2022: “Alan Dershowitz asked Donald Trump to grant Ghislaine Maxwell a preemptive pardon.”)

Immediately after the Southern District accidentally won five guilty verdicts against Maxwell, the prosecutors quietly revealed that, weeks earlier, they’d dismissed all charges against the prison guards who failed to check on Epstein for more than eight hours the night he allegedly committed suicide — despite an explicit directive that they check on him every 30 minutes.

Not to brag but …

July 25, 2019, 1:05 a.m.: @AnnCoulter Dear Bureau of Prisons: Please get Jeffrey Epstein to a super Max prison pronto, or the people who want him dead will make sure we never know the truth. ACT NOW!

Aug. 10, 2019: Epstein found dead in his cell.

The feds not only did not move Epstein to a super-maximum security prison as some observers recommended, but they also did this:

— The day before Epstein died, he was taken off suicide watch.

— Against orders, his cellmate transferred elsewhere, leaving Epstein completely alone in his cell.

— All the cameras on Epstein’s floor were mysteriously broken.

— Even the footage of his earlier suicide attempt had been mistakenly erased and the backup footage destroyed “as a result of technical errors,” according to assistant U.S. attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey.

How many times can they use the “we’re completely incompetent” defense? (Hey, does anybody know if this case implicates rich people?)

Maxwell’s brother soon announced to the press — and to anyone else who might be interested! — that his sister was no snitch. She wouldn’t rat out any of Epstein’s fellow child molesters in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Maxwell is facing up to 65 years in prison, and her brother has just admitted she can name names. Hello? SDNY? Any thoughts about applying some pressure?

Unfortunately, these are the same prosecutors who just did everything in their power to blow the case against her. My prediction of their next conversation with Maxwell: This is our last offer: 30 hours of community service — and we’re not kidding! OK, 20 hours. Damn — you’re one tough negotiator.

Most strange, the ink wasn’t dry on the guilty verdicts before one of the jurors ran to the press and announced that he’d lied on his juror questionnaire. Although he’d denied ever having been sexually molested, he had been! Not only that, but — hoo boy — did his experience with sex abuse sway the jurors during deliberations!

The defense immediately moved for a mistrial and the chatty juror moved to a villa in the south of France he’s just inherited from an unknown relative. OK, the second part isn’t true (that I know of), but are you kidding me??

Are prosecutors even investigating any contact between Maxwell’s representatives and the jurors? Will he be tried for perjury?

However this ends, once it’s over, we’ll never hear about Epstein again — unlike, say, Jan. 6, which we will never stop hearing about. If America got to vote, which story do you think they would find more interesting?

Which story is more important? Doesn’t the public have a right to know how big Epstein’s sex/blackmail club was, who among America’s ruling elite were compromised, and to what end?

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fact-Checked

A.F. BRANCO on January 13, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-fact-checked/

The CDC’s credibility has been totally destroyed and fack-Checked by “the Science”.

CDC Credibility — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Senator Marco Rubio Op-ed: Democrats’ Voting Rules Takeover Is a Threat to Democracy

January 12, 2022

Commentary BY: Sen. MARCO RUBIO | JANUARY 12, 2022

When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Senate Democrats’ New Year’s resolution to abolish the filibuster and ram through a partisan federal takeover of election administration, he framed it as an attempt to protect “free and fair elections,” the “foundation of our democracy,” from state governments. In reality, it is the leftist elites and their corporate allies, not the states, that pose the greatest threat to our constitutional system.

Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, but the Democrats’ concerns about election rights are totally baseless. Progressives from all over the country — from President Joe Biden to Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Schumer — claim that Republicans are passing “voter suppression laws” to exclude their political opponents from the vote.

In reality, it is easier to vote in 2022 than it ever has been. Voter registration has been streamlined, and record turnouts show that Americans of all backgrounds are freely exercising their rights.

The left’s proposed reforms would restrict Americans’ freedom, not expand it. Legalizing ballot harvesting, for instance, would present more opportunities for corruption.

More generally, taking election administration powers away from the states and handing them to the federal government would not eliminate the potential for abusing those powers, it would just make it easier for officials in Washington, D.C., to abuse them — and it would further undermine our system of federalism.

In 2020, when election integrity fears swept other parts of the country, the state of Florida conducted its elections with peace, security from interference, and respect for all citizens, all in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. This is proof that with strong leadership, state governments are perfectly capable of holding the responsibility of election administration. Ironically, this year will be the first time that the president’s home state of Delaware allows in-person early voting, whereas Florida has had it for years.

Left’s Broader Effort to Consolidate Power

Democrats’ campaign to centralize elections is part of a broader effort to consolidate power in the hands of a leftist elite class. This class wants to use that power to silence and disempower anyone who dissents from their radical progressive agenda.

Case in point: the very same people who said in 2005 that restricting the filibuster would mean losing to “the passions of the moment” and spell “doomsday for democracy” — Biden and Schumer — want to eliminate the rule now that they are in power.

This power grab masquerading as democracy reform is bigger than just what goes on in the Senate. In 2020, leftist politicians closed churches and restricted in-home religious services while they let political protests, and eventually full-scale riots, go unnoticed. In 2021, critical race theory advocates indoctrinated our children and tried to remove parents from our schools. And this year, the Biden administration will begin forcing millions of Americans to get a Covid-19 vaccine to keep their jobs.

Collaboration from Communists and Corporations

In this movement, the political left has been aided by social media giants and mega-corporations. To gain favor with the Marxists in Washington, D.C., Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter censor dissenting voices, labeling unpopular views as “misinformation.” Amazon blacklists conservative authors. And banks that taxpayers bailed out in 2008 cancel accounts based on Orwellian “reputational risk.”

Of course, behind closed doors many of these same companies are in bed with a genocidal regime, the Chinese Communist Party. While they are eager to appear human rights champions, they lobby for trading goods made with slave labor and protect communist propaganda from negative customer reviews. It makes sense that corporations comfortable with totalitarianism abroad would be happy to silence dissent in the United States.

Those of us who are not on board with the progressive agenda should take note. America is still a free nation, and it will take some time before the situation here begins to resemble the dystopia that is communist China. But if it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and censorship and consolidation of power are two important steps on the road to tyranny.

Americans need to remember where the greatest threats to our democracy really lie. If we focus our attention on exaggerated problems and imaginary fears, rather than the leftist elite power grab unfolding before our very eyes, we do so at our own peril.

Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator from Florida. MARCO RUBIO MORE ARTICLES

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California District Pays Nearly $170k For Curricula Teaching Children to Become Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’

Reported BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 12, 2022

California’s Jefferson Elementary School District will be the first district in the United States to implement ethnic studies courses in all of their elementary and middle schools, and their new curriculum for this includes teaching children to become leftwing “co-conspirators.” The district’s curriculum that brings new state requirements for high school into the earliest grade levels was created by Community Responsive Education, a leftwing organization run by critical race theorists at San Francisco State University.

The district, which is located in Daly City, California, and serves roughly 6,000 students across ten elementary schools and four middle schools, has agreed to pay the organization nearly $170k in taxpayer money.

Public Dollars to Make Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’

District documents note that the radical curriculum will be piloted in the 2021-2022 school year. It was presented by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor at San Francisco State University and the co-director of Community Responsive Education. The presentation was given during a school board meeting in July 2021 and began with a land acknowledgment that described the Ohlone people, not the United States, as the rightful stewards of the land that JESD is on.

Tintiangco-Cubales, who uses the pronouns “she/her” in addition to “siya,” a Filipino word that means both male and female, explained that she is “a settler, an uninvited visitor” on Ohlone land before going on to note that JESD is America’s first district that “is committed to rolling out Ethnic Studies in all of their middle and elementary schools.” In late 2021, California passed a state mandate that “ethnic studies” be taught in all public high schools.

The presentation explains that the curriculum is designed to “eliminate racism and other forms of oppression” by “creating, learning, listening, uncovering, and sharing of the his/herstories, experiences, and current conditions of those who have been racially marginalized, underrepresented, and/or silenced.”

The curriculum is divided into four different units, labeled “self,” “systems,” “social movements,” and “solidarity.” Each unit is accompanied by a corresponding set of “essential questions” and “enduring understandings.”

One such “enduring understanding” under the “self” unit reads: “Learning about our own identities and those of others allows us to become more empathetic and builds our capacity to go from being allies to co-conspirators/accomplices in the elimination of oppression.”

Teaching Kids America Is Inherently Evil

The second unit condemns America as institutionally racist and teaches children that white supremacy is entrenched in American systems such as education. The unit also indicts white people as the beneficiaries of racism, claiming that they use the system of white supremacy to maintain their “wealth, power, and privilege.” Additionally, students learn that “institutional racism is the way in which white supremacy continues to oppress non-white people.”

Children are then turned into ambassadors for critical race theory at the end of the unit when they are tasked with creating a public service announcement that “denounces systems that are oppressive,” which could, according to the curriculum, include American education systems if not America itself.

Directly after accusing America’s systems of being fundamentally racist and condemning white people as beneficiaries of racism who maintain white supremacy, teachers tell children how to mobilize and engage in “transformational resistance” in the third unit.

The unit focuses on social movements and blatantly aims to turn students into racially motivated leftist revolutionaries. Tintiangco-Cubales notes that special emphasis is placed on “the notion of transformational resistance.” Students are asked “How do we build social movements to create change and impact society?”

The final unit teaches children how they can “pursue true liberation” through an understanding of “solidarity, liberation, collective action, intersectionality, and dismantling systemic oppression.” Children are also taught that “To achieve true liberation, we must actively and collectively work together to dismantle various systems of oppression (ie: institutional racism, white supremacy, etc.).”

Making Children Into Political Agitators

Students’ transformations into leftist activists are completed with their “solidarity praxis project,” where students create a campaign to address a problem in their community. Even the presentation’s imagery leaves no doubt regarding the curriculum’s intent. Each unit is introduced by a cartoon-esque flat art character holding a protest sign.

District Pays Nearly $170k For CRT Courses

Tintiangco-Cubales presented the curriculum on behalf of Community Responsive Education, an organization that offers “professional and curriculum development services for community organizations and educational institutions to begin or sustain the journey of becoming community responsive.”

At a meeting in February 2020, the district agreed to pay Community Responsive Education $40,000 in taxpayer dollars to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the meeting’s public records.

Then in August 2020, Jefferson Elementary School District unanimously approved a motion to pay the organization $28,502 for “services during the 2020-21 school year to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the school board meeting’s minutes.

The district also voted to pay Community Responsive Education an additional $100,000 “for Ethnic Studies Curriculum and Teacher Development for both Middle and Elementary school teachers beginning on July 1, 2021 until June 30, 2023” for a total of $168,502.

The concept of “community-responsive education” from which the organization draws its name, just like “culturally responsive education,” is effectively a rebranding of critical race theory. The curriculum from Community Responsive Education is predicated on a belief that U.S. institutions are defined by racism and that collective action must be taken to dismantle them, a core tenet of critical race theory.

Furthermore, CRE, just like CRT, takes the traditional Marxist dichotomy that pits the oppressed proletariat against the oppressive middle class and reapplies it to race, thereby designating moral value, victimhood, and collective guilt on people as a result of immutable characteristics.

A Dangerous Model for Extremists In Education

As America’s first school district to implement ethnic studies curriculum in all of its elementary and middle schools, Jefferson Elementary School District could have significant influence on other ethnic studies curricula across California and America.

Without sacrificing any of the usual extremism inherent to CRT, this curriculum may mark a shift towards a more strategically oriented method of instruction. Rather than simply indoctrinating children with the beliefs of systemic racism, privilege, and oppression, this course is blatantly designed to create the next generation of extreme leftwing activists operating from these false premises.

This model will not be specific to Jefferson Elementary School District. In fact, a report from Parents Defending Education found that Community Responsive Education has a foothold in a variety of other school districts, including six others in California and one each in New York, Texas, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

A number of other California districts have also taken steps to indoctrinate children with CRT. One Bay Area school district promoted materials that told children to use witchcraft against people who say “all lives matter.” The Los Angeles Unified School District lied in claiming that CRT is not taught in its K-12 institutions despite hosting a critical race theorist who taught staff to “challenge whiteness” and inviting the director of UCLA’s Center for Critical Race Studies to give input on their ethnic studies curriculum.

This overt leftwing takeover of government schools has led some California parents to support a bipartisan campaign that would enshrine school choice and tether taxpayer dollars to students. Should it receive the required number of signatures and pass a vote, the initiative would allow parents to take their children — and their money — out of schools that prioritize indoctrination over education.

Neither school board President Clayton Koo nor Tintiangco-Cubales responded to requests for comment.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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Arielle Del Turco Op-ed: Don’t let Biden off the hook for the disaster he left in Afghanistan

Commentary By Arielle Del Turco, Op-ed Contributor | Wednesday, January 12, 2022

The media has largely moved on from the Afghanistan debacle, and many are all too eager to sweep the consequences of President Biden’s botched withdrawal under the rug. Yet, the repercussions will last lifetimes.

Currently, hundreds of parents and family members are seeking help for their starving children. Last year, the United Nations warned that one million Afghan children were at risk of starvation, and now many are struggling to make it through the winter.

On the best of days, Afghanistan has a near-universal poverty rate. Now, a famine and economic collapse are making it virtually impossible for many to meet their families’ basic needs. In sheer desperation, some parents are being driven to sell their young daughters into future marriages just so the family will have a few months’ worth of food. It’s an unthinkable choice — but one that some feel is their only chance to evade death by starvation when there is no work to be found.

One father’s decision has him in agony. He told CNN reporters that he could no longer sleep at night because he sold his nine-year-old daughter into marriage. The guilt and shame have “broken” him. Following unsuccessful attempts to find work, even traveling to the provincial capital, he said, “We are eight family members. I have to sell to keep other family members alive.” The money from the sale will feed the family for only a few months.

Sadly, the economic collapse in the wake of the Taliban’s rise was predicted and shouldn’t take Biden administration officials by surprise. The question now is how to respond.

The U.S. government is rightly being careful to avoid giving any financial aid to the Taliban. And although the United States donated funds through international humanitarian aid groups, Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, has pointed out that current aid levels are expected to meet only 40% of the anticipated needs to get through the winter months. The Biden administration should seek effective solutions to get substantial help directly to suffering Afghans.

When it comes to promoting religious freedom in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has always fallen far short. The past 20 years of U.S. involvement in the country failed to produce a cultural acceptance of religious freedom or pluralism. The consequences continue. And for the Afghan Christians most endangered by the rise of the Taliban, the Biden administration’s actions (and inaction) were shameful.

Although certain groups of Afghan nationals were given Priority 2 (P-2) designation for the U.S. refugee program — which allows more direct access for individuals to apply when they are at immediate risk — religious minorities were not offered P-2 status. This is in spite of the Taliban openly threatening religious minorities and the number of minorities who would have utilized the program being small and manageable. The Biden administration should fix this error and extend P-2 status to Afghan religious minorities.

When private NGOs tried to help vulnerable Christians, women and others fleeing the Taliban, the State Department was accused of thwarting these rescue efforts. Josh Youssef, president of Help the Persecuted, helped organize refugee flights out of Afghanistan with endangered religious minorities. When he reached out to the State Department for help, he was told that he would have a better chance of the plane taking off if there were LGBT-identifying persons on board.

But religious minorities aren’t the only people with reason to fear. Amid the Taliban’s rollback of women’s rights, many women who had public professions are scrambling to hide their identities. Female athletes are on the run, changing locations every few weeks to avoid being caught and punished by the Taliban.

Women who served in the Afghan military or police are also hiding. Samima, who served in the Afghan Air Force, fled to a new location with her husband after she received phone calls from Taliban fighters and the Taliban began going door to door looking for former Afghan military members. She told The Wall Street Journal, “Thousands of girls like me are receiving threats, face an uncertain future and are being tracked by the Taliban.”

Countless Afghan girls and female university students have been kept at home and out of school since the Taliban’s return. For many, their dreams were put on hold in 2021, perhaps permanently.

Meanwhile, there are still Americans who remain stuck in Afghanistan. Not to mention the countless Afghan allies who worked for the U.S. military and were promised protection in just such a circumstance as a U.S. withdrawal.

The White House would be happy for us all to forget that the grossly mishandled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ever happened. But we must not. America spent 20 years involved in this country; the people of Afghanistan deserve better than to be abandoned and ignored in their hour of most dire need. Furthermore, the American people deserve far better leadership than President Biden has shown throughout this ordeal largely of his own making.

By electing Joe Biden, Americans entrusted him with our foreign policy. The resulting human suffering in Afghanistan ought to be remembered as a grave stain upon Biden’s presidency.

Originally published at the Family Research Council.

Arielle Del Turco is Assistant Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council.

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Liberal media deafeningly silent on report indicating Biden admin was behind letter describing parents as domestic terrorists

Reported by PHIL SHIVER | January 12, 2022

The left-leaning American news media has so far refused to cover a bombshell report indicating that the Biden administration may have been instrumental in the drafting of a letter that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists and requested the Patriot Act be used against them.

What are the details?

A newly obtained email exchange appeared to show that the highly controversial Sept. 29 National School Boards Association letter that directly resulted in the FBI using counterterrorism tactics against parents was drafted and sent to President Biden at the direction of Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

The email communication — obtained by activist group Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request — raised serious concerns that the administration had predetermined to go to war against parents protesting school lockdowns and critical race theory in classrooms, merely formulating the letter as a cover.

One would think such news would be gripping enough for media outlets to cover. But that has not been the case. Newsbusters reported Wednesday that in the roughly 24 hours since the news broke, only one news network covered it.Don’t miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now.

“Despite this stunning revelation, all three evening broadcast shows ignored the report,” the outlet said., adding, “While ABC ‘World News Tonight,’ NBC ‘Nightly News,’ and CBS ‘Evening News’ all ignored the story, Fox’s ‘Special Report’ reported on it during the show’s A-block.”about:blank

As of Wednesday afternoon, the email exchange citing Cardona as the letter’s solicitor wasn’t reported on by CNN, either. Nor was it covered by any of the three major American news sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.

The email exchange has been covered by a variety of conservative news sources.

What’s the background?

In the Oct. 5 email, the NSBA’s secretary-treasurer Kristi Swett told fellow board member Marnie Maldonado that interim CEO Chip Slaven had “told the [board] officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”about:blank

Maldonado had expressed concerns to Swett that the letter was sent without following board policy. The board member also complained that the letter “essentially allowed the White House to direct the Attorney General to consider members of our community ‘domestic terrorists.'”

Shortly after the letter was sent to Biden, on Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo dispatching the FBI to meet a supposed “disturbing spike” of “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school administrators, board members, and other personnel.

The FBI followed the orders by creating a “threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS,” for agents to “track” any “threats of violence or fear” against school personnel.

Anything else?

In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, the Department of Education denied allegations that Cardona had requested the letter.

“While the Secretary did not solicit a letter from the NSBA, to understand the views and concerns of stakeholders, the Department routinely engages with students, teachers, parents, district leaders, and education associates,” a department spokesperson said.

Following the news on Tuesday, Education and Labor Committee ranking member Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) called on Cardona to answer the allegations before Congress.

“It is abundantly clear to me that Secretary Cardona must answer to the Education and Labor Committee, Congress on the whole, and especially the American people,” Foxx said. “Anything less is an insult to the proud parents who want to better the education of their children. This pattern of behavior displayed by the Biden administration — let alone the Secretary of Education — is what one could expect from a political arsonist.”

She added that the news proved that “from the very beginning, the targeting of concerned parents has been nothing short of a witch hunt orchestrated by partisan demagogues in the White House, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education.”

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Pain In The…

A.F. BRANCO on January 12, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-pain-in-the/

Liberal women have endorsed the very transgender rights that are now biting them in the rear via Trans-athletics.

Women’s Rights vs Trans Rights — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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[WATCH: Meet The Parents: How The Moms And Dads Of Loudoun County Took Back Virginia]

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Wisconsin Parents Join National Crusade To Wrestle Their Kids Back From Left-Wing Government Schools

January 11, 2022

Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 11, 2022

Wisconsin parents town hall with Rebecca Kleefisch

WAUKESHA, Wis. — The banquet hall buzzed with impassioned chatter as parents, friends, first-time school board candidates, and other locals congregated for a Saturday morning town hall that felt more like a strategy session. After two major public school districts, Milwaukee and Madison, shut down yet again and blamed COVID, parents were fired up. Talk of critical race theory, leftist administrators, mask mandates, and school shutdowns hummed through conversations with the kind of first-hand animation that could propel once-complacent Wisconsin parents into a movement of activists capable of unleashing an unquenchable red wave in the Dairy State. They saw what happened in Virginia, and now they want to bring it home.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who’s now running to unseat Democrat Gov. Tony Evers in November, organized the event. Although Kleefisch is in campaign mode, the overarching energy of the gathering wasn’t as much, “Help get me elected,” as it was, “How can we get more of you elected?”

Calling All Parents

“We need more parent activists. This is that important,” Kleefisch said while moderating a panel of concerned moms-turned-activists.

One of those moms was Scarlett Johnson, a mother of five who, after discovering the apathy in the Mequon-Thiensville School Board, decided she needed to run for a seat.

“We just started paying closer attention,” Johnson said to the room of eager fellow parents. “I hadn’t attended school board meetings. I vote, but I never voted for a school board candidate.”

But that all changed this last year. Johnson said she and a group of other moms started getting together and doing their research. When they did, they found toxic racial propaganda in their kids’ classrooms, such as teachers assigning books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” The moms started making phone calls and sending emails to school officials. “It started a movement,” Johnson said.

In the course of her run for school board, Johnson said she’s been called a white supremacist and received death threats, but noted, “I’m still here, I’m still fighting.”

No Room for Apathy

Parents aren’t just fired up about nefarious actors in the school systems, however. They’re also on the lookout for complacent school board members and district officials. Another mom on the panel, Alyssa Pallow, is getting involved simply because her school board doesn’t seem to really know anything about dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory. Kleefisch agreed, stressing to parents that they don’t have to wait to get involved until one of their kids cracks a textbook or assignment that makes their jaw drop open. “It can be that you’re horrified by the apathy,” Kleefisch said.

“It snowballs,” said another mom, Amber Schroeder, regarding parent activism. “You will inspire people to get involved.” Schroeder and Johnson worked together in the Mequon-Thiensville district to organize a recall election of four school board members.

“People are afraid to do it alone,” Schroeder continued. “Once you realize you’re not alone, a lot more people get involved. … If you build it, they will come.”

A Time for Choosing

Other parents have been shocked to watch their children become casualties in the left’s Covid crackdowns. Mattie Allen stressed the importance of school choice after her kids had a horrible academic year due to lockdowns. Allen’s son spent his first year in school doing it virtually, “which was horrendous,” she said. Her daughter spent one year at Milwaukee Public Schools, where her GPA plummeted, and it was “one of the worst years.” Thanks to school choice, they’re now in a charter school with just one grade per class. “Their school is so open, and I love it,” Allen said, noting that her daughter’s GPA is back up, she’s on the honor roll, and she’s playing volleyball.

But some families aren’t so fortunate. One of Allen’s friends who is stuck with her kids in Milwaukee Public Schools is watching the district once again shut down. This single mom has a first-grader and a third-grader, meaning she had to switch to third shift just so she could fulfill the roles of both teacher and provider. She’s “up all day, up all night,” Allen said, getting choked up. “How do we give all moms that [school choice] option?”

Maggie Vinopal, a mom in the Eau Claire school district, has also had enough with the COVID madness, saying school officials are weaponizing Statute 252, a state quarantine law, to punish and quarantine unvaccinated kids. Her healthy seventh-grade daughter has been quarantined four different times for a total of 14 schools days, despite coronavirus posing almost zero risk of severity to healthy children. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 is required to “isolate,” Vinopal told The Federalist. But when students come into contact with a positive case, only the unvaccinated have to “quarantine,” despite the ability of the vaccinated to contract and spread COVID.

On the very first day of school, Vinopal’s daughter was seated at the same lunch table as a vaccinated student who later tested positive and had to isolate. While the vaccinated students at the table were allowed to proceed as normal, Vinopal’s daughter was required to quarantine and provide proof of a negative test.

Jumping in the Ring

Covid nonsense like this is what inspired people like first-time Waukesha School Board member Kelly Piacsek to run. When a number of people decided to “abuse our children in the name of science, I got really mad,” said Piacsek, who is now known for holding firm on a decision to end a harmful federally-funded school lunch program in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks. “That’s what motivated me.” Running for school board is “absolutely worth it,” she told parents. “We’ve got to take this on because we have a front-row seat to the consequences.”

Piacsek inspired people like Slinger parent Bill Brewer to run for his school board. Brewer, a veteran, has lived in Slinger for approximately 18 years. He coaches youth football there and is now involved in the league’s leadership. But the school board’s apathy and lack of urgency against dangerous ideologies have prompted him to get involved.

“Marxism doesn’t come and punch you in the face in round one. It creeps in,” Brewer said.
“I just can’t have that, not for my community, not for these kids. They deserve better.”

Brewer said his strategy isn’t so much a campaign “as a giant, three-month listening tour.”
“Once I get elected, that’s not going to stop,” Brewer said.

That seems to be the Kleefisch campaign strategy too. Rather than spending two hours rattling off campaign promises, the gubernatorial candidate opened the floor on Saturday for parents to voice their concerns and asked attendees to fill out cards with the top three issues that matter to them to help guide her policy. That’s more than these weary parents have gotten from Evers, who has worked to keep parents in the dark. In December, the governor — who was the state superintendent of public instruction for a decade — vetoed education transparency legislation that would have required districts to publish classroom materials online. This anti-parent action from Evers followed his school-closing impulse that kept kids home and tanked their academic advancement.

“We need you to be successful and aggressive,” Kleefisch rallied, encouraging the parents fighting in local races. If the energy in the Waukesha banquet hall was any indication, these parents won’t have any problem with that.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now

Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) January 4, 2022

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

When you've lost CNN's chief propagandist… you've truly, truly lost. pic.twitter.com/4hjCuh2H5g
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) January 9, 2022

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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In 2020 GP Was First to Report “Only “6%” of COVID Deaths” Were Caused Strictly by COVID, President Trump Retweeted, Fake News Pounced — Now CDC Admits We Were Right

Reported By Joe Hoft | Published January 10, 2022

The world is finally waking up to what we reported a year and a half ago – there is a difference between someone dying “from” COVID and someone dying “with” COVID. The Gateway Pundit first reported this fact back in August 2020. And oddly enough, we even grabbed this information from the CDC website. It was all published there for all to see.

SHOCK REPORT: This Week CDC Quietly Updated COVID-19 Numbers – Only 9,210 Americans Died From COVID-19 Alone – Rest Had Different Other Serious Illnesses

Our Gateway Pundit article received a huge amount of attention as word got out that only 6% of all deaths reported as COVID deaths were strictly due to COVID only. The remaining 94% of the deaths reported as COVID deaths were deaths “with COVID” where those who died had multiple other co-morbidities as well. On average, those who were labeled as dying from COVID had more than two other co-morbidities.

President Trump shared this fact as well as his son Don Jr and many others on Twitter. “6%” was shared all over the Internet. We at TGP were attacked and criticized and “fact-checked” for making the claim that only 6% of COVID deaths died from COVID only, even though the information came directly from the CDC’s site.

Last Weekend We Posted a Viral Report on COVID-19 Numbers that Was Tweeted by the President – Now Democrats, Their Media and Fact Checkers Are Smearing Us – Here’s Our Response

By late 2020 the number of fatalities that were counted as COVID deaths that died from only COVID was down to 5% per the CDC.

WE WERE RIGHT: In August 2020 TGP Reported Per the CDC That Only 6% of All COVID-19 Deaths Were Caused EXCLUSIVELY by the COVID-19 Virus – Today It’s Down to 5%!

Yesterday the Head of the CDC was asked how many people died from COVID and how many with COVID of the reported 836,000 COVID deaths. She didn’t answer.

Asked "how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to Covid are FROM Covid or how many are WITH Covid," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky says "those data will be forthcoming." pic.twitter.com/JVcFk3aunc
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 9, 2022

Walensky also finally admitted that the vast majority of individuals who died with COVID had at least four comorbidities.

EXCLUSIVE: CDC COVID-19 Hospitalization Data Will Shock You – What the Media is Not Showing You

The fake news mainstream media is finally waking up to our reporting that a vast majority of all the COVID deaths were not caused by COVID alone.

We were right — And so was President Trump.

Joe Hoft

Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy. @joehoft

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Taliban Vows to Overrun DC with 2,000 Suicide Bombers, Biden Admin Silent as the Grave

Reported By C. Douglas Golden | January 11, 2022

Remember how, after the fall of Kabul, we were promised Taliban 2.0? It was going to be a softer, gentler theocracy — one which was going to include a multitude of voices in government and which definitely wouldn’t be embracing terrorism like it did during its first tenure running the country of Afghanistan.

Yes, well, about that: A report states the group, currently the de facto government of Afghanistan, has now threatened to send 2,000 suicide bombers to Washington, D.C. And yet, there’s nary a peep out of President Joe Biden’s administration.

It’s not that we couldn’t have seen this coming. Since the Biden administration’s capitulation in Afghanistan this summer, the Taliban has made it clear through their actions they’re still the same extremists they were when we chased them from power. The Western Journal has been bringing readers the truth about just how bad the situation in Afghanistan is — and why the president is directly responsible. You can help us bring America the facts by subscribing today.

The suicide-bombing threat was first reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a watchdog which keeps an eye on communications from extremist groups and media sources.

According to a December report, during ongoing talks in Doha, Qatar — where the Taliban government seeks international recognition — Maulvi Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, Afghanistan’s acting defense minister, said that if America wanted troops in Afghanistan to reopen its embassy there, the Taliban wanted an equivalent number of terrorists in our capital.

“If America wants 2,000 English [i.e., American] troops at its embassy in Afghanistan, we also want 2,000 Fidayeen Mujahideen [i.e., suicide bombers] from the Fateh Force at the embassy of Afghanistan in America,” a Dec. 11 tweet from Yaqoob read.

MEMRI noted that “Fidayeen” is another term used by jihadi groups for their suicide bombers.

“‘Fateh Force,’ or ‘victorious force,’ is a ‘martyrdom force’ within the Badri 313 unit of the Islamic Emirate,” the group reported. “Badri 313 is named after the Ghazwa-e-Badr, the first Islamic battle led by Islam’s founder Muhammad in which 313 Muslims defeated thousands of non-Muslim tribesmen.”

It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming, either. Yaqoob is the son of Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid, the deceased co-founder and spiritual leader of the Taliban. When the acting defense minister of Taliban 2.0 is from the family line of the extremist originator of Taliban 1.0, you can bet it’s not exactly an upgrade.

The threat isn’t an idle one, either. Last week, MEMRI reported that Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a Pashtu-language radio station the Taliban is readying units of suicide attackers.

Taliban Spokesman and Deputy Minister Zabihullah Mujahid: Our Army’s Special Forces Will Include Martyrdom-Seeking Battalions #Afghanistan #Taliban pic.twitter.com/BXkDrRhLUd
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 6, 2022

“Our mujahideen in the Ishtishhadi Kandaks [martyrdom-seeking battalions] will be part of the army and [they] will be Special Forces and organized under the defense ministry,” Mujahid said.
“The Special Forces will be established in a specific number and used for special operations.”

One assumes that no matter where the talks between the U.S. and Taliban envoys in Doha go, there won’t be an agreement by which we’re allowed 2,000 troops to open our embassy in Kabul if 2,000 members of the Ishtishhadi Kandaks are stationed in the District of Columbia. However, Yaqoob’s tweet came during the latest round of talks in Doha — and, if the threat was made as reported, it wasn’t anything that fazed the Biden administration.

In October, the Biden administration agreed to send humanitarian aid to Afghanistan after talks in Qatar but refused to recognize the government there. Furthermore, The Associated Press reported the U.S. delegation “made it clear that the talks were in no way a preamble to recognition of the Taliban, who swept into power Aug. 15 after the U.S.-allied government collapsed.”

The Taliban said those talks “went well.” State Department spokesman Ned Price, meanwhile, said they were “candid and professional” and gave the same line the Biden administration has been giving since the beginning: The Taliban’s actions, not its words, would determine how things went going forward.

During a further round of talks in November, Voice of America reported, the Taliban pressed the United States to end sanctions and unfreeze assets as remedies to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

Taliban Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi tweeted that their side “urged immediate unconditional unfreezing of Afghan reserves, ending of sanctions & blacklists, & disconnecting humanitarian issues from political considerations … Overall the sessions were positive and both sides agreed to continue such meetings moving forward.”

Price, meanwhile, said our side “remains committed to ensuring that U.S. sanctions do not limit the ability of Afghan civilians to receive humanitarian support from the U.S. government and international community while denying assets to sanctioned entities and individuals.”

However, to the extent Afghanistan is in a dire humanitarian state, the Taliban are the authors of that mess and bear the brunt of the responsibility for the devastation. Even if they won’t accept it publicly, they need to negotiate that way if they expect aid from Western powers. Instead, we see credible reports Taliban 2.0 is the same as Taliban 1.0, threatening the United States with a wave of suicide attackers and promising to spend some of the country’s meager resources on establishing a suicide-attacker unit within its army.

It’s difficult to imagine any other president — in particular, former President Donald Trump — letting this go unanswered. Just like during the fall of Kabul, however, the Biden administration seems unconcerned with the ugly optics or grim realities their policies have created in Afghanistan.

C. Douglas Golden, Contributor,

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.@CillianZeal Facebook

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