President Donald Trump closed the gap on Democrat Joe Biden’s lead in Georgia on Monday by nearly 800 votes after edging out Biden by a nearly 2-1 ratio in a batch of 2,600 ballots that were discovered in Floyd County.
Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the new statewide election system for the state, said that the unofficial breakdown of ballots was 1,643 for Trump, 865 for Biden and 16 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. The mistake happened because election officials reportedly missed uploading a memory card containing the votes to a ballot counting machine.
“The Georgia Secretary of State is asking for the executive director of the Floyd County Board of Elections, Robert Brady, to step down after 2,600 ballots were left uncounted prior to the county’s initial certification,” Fox 5 Atlanta reported. “The error was discovered on Sunday during the third day of the state’s audit.”
Officials were quick to caution that the additional votes for Trump were not enough to change the outcome of the presidential election in the state.
The Daily Wire reported on the development earlier in the day:
The recovered votes may also help out GOP Sen. David Perdue, who is roughly 14,000 votes away from securing 50% of the vote in his bid for reelection and avoiding a runoff against Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff.
“It’s very concerning,” Martin said. “But this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said the votes were missed because election workers failed to upload a memory card containing the votes into a ballot counting machine. The Floyd County discrepancy does not appear to be a widespread issue, the office of the secretary of state said.
Floyd County has had other problems tallying votes this election cycle. About half of a batch of 5,000 ballots were not initially recorded after being missed by scanner.
Project Veritas has insiders in the Georgia recount that are catching votes wrongly attributed to Joe Biden.
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“The second person was supposed to be checking it right, three times in three minutes she called out Biden,” the RNC monitor told Project Veritas. “The second auditor caught it and she said, “No, this is Trump.”
He continued, “Now, that’s just while I’m standing there. So, does the second checker catch it every time? But this lady in three times in three minutes from 2:09 to 2:12 she got three wrong.”
The RNC monitor told Project Veritas that the ballot counter became hostile toward him after he reported her to the elections officials.
WATCH:
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered an audit and recount of all Georgia ballots, however officials are not checking signatures. The statewide recount is still ongoing in several counties, the deadline for completion is 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.
On Monday it was revealed in Floyd County, Georgia over 2,600 votes were not counted due to a server error, allegedly by a Dominion tabulating machine. The found votes reportedly favor President Trump almost two-to-one, cutting Joe Biden’s approximate 14,000 vote lead by about 800 votes.
Brad Raffensperger on Monday evening immediately called for the elections director to step down. David Shafer, Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party said GOP observers are limited to one credentialed monitor for each ten counting tables.
“Congressman Doug Collins and I asked for a one to one ratio yesterday but our request was refused,” David Shafer said.
Commentary written several days after the November 3rd election:
Dear Friends,
There is a heaviness within my spirit today on behalf of our beloved nation. I’m sure I share that sentiment with many of you. In a sense, Shirley and I are also grieving over the potential passing of an era, during which I believe God gave America a spiritual reprieve. President Donald Trump was partially responsible for this crucial change of trajectory.
He isn’t a perfect man, and his relationship with the Lord is a very private matter. But he attempted during the first four years of his presidency to get acquainted with, to honor, and to learn from Christian leaders. He is very close to Rev. Franklin Graham, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Rev. Paula White, Dr. Jack Graham, former Governor Mike Huckabee, and at least 30 others, including myself. He once said while greeting us at a formal dinner, “This is your house. Welcome to it.” He then led us on a tour upstairs in the private residence.
Donald Trump is the first president to celebrate the National Day of Prayer (NDP) in the Rose Garden, which he did all four years of his presidency. President George W. Bush also took the NDP very seriously and held formal services in the East Room of the White House during his eight years in office. Shirley served as chairperson of NDP, and spoke at each event. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush also celebrated the National Day of Prayer during their terms in office. Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama held NDP ceremonies at the White House.
Back to Donald Trump, he is the most pro-life president in American history. He is the only Chief Executive to have spoken at the March for Life, which is an annual remembrance of the millions of babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973. One of Trump’s most significant decisions has been the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She never wavered on her pro-life beliefs even during her contentious confirmation hearings.
People who know the President best tell us he is one of the most hard-working and dedicated men ever to serve in the Oval Office. We saw that indefatigable nature during his final campaign, when he once held nine rallies in two days. He is also remarkably resilient. The media and his political opponents hammered him every day for four years. There was never a respite. President Trump arose every morning knowing he would be unfairly ridiculed and attacked from morning to night. This criticism began before he was elected and continued throughout his presidency. Nevertheless, he stood like a rock and his list of accomplishments could fill a book. Yes, I admire Donald Trump. He is sometimes brash and aggressive. But as a New York entrepreneur and as a president under siege, he has had to be tough to deal with his challenges. But there is no doubt that he loves America and its people. Speaking personally, I will miss his presence on the national stage when he is no longer our President.
But by the way, we’re told that 81 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump this year, while only 14 percent voted for the Biden ticket. I think I know why.
I won’t speculate on the voting controversy. If, however, American citizens have handed over the reins of power to the Biden/Harris ticket, it is important that we examine the platform on which they ran. Elections have consequences, as we know. The promises made in writing and on the campaign trail should disturb every conservative Christian. Let’s look first at the sanctity of human life.
Mr. Biden has told us emphatically that he will bring an open season on the unborn child. This is what LifeNews wrote about him.
– he will force Americans to fund abortions during his first week in office
– he will implement abortion on demand nationwide without any limits
– he will force Americans to fund Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion provider1
– he will force Christians such as the Little Sisters of the Poor to fund abortions in [their] health insurance plans2
– and he will stack the courts with pro-abortion judges who would keep abortions legal for decades to come3
That should break the heart of every lover of God’s children. We, as American citizens, will be complicit in the deaths of millions. How can Joe Biden say he wants to be president of ALL the American people? What does he have to say to the half of us who vigorously oppose abortion on demand, paid for by taxpayers through nine months of pregnancy and perhaps beyond, in America and, by inference, in nations around the world? If Donald Trump has been the pro-life President, Joe Biden will be the radical abortion president from his inauguration forward. If Biden does become president, I will do what I can to oppose his pro-death policies every day he is in office.
Biden’s regime will also usher in other forms of moral depravity. For example, he recently suggested that kids as young as eight or ten years old should be able to undergo irreversible transsexual transformation. That’s what the man said! Kamala Harris, who may be our next vice president, said she wants this country to legalize all prostitution.4 What other moral outrage will come from this godless administration? Heaven only knows! Joe Biden and the Democrats also support open borders. So much for the wall! That means that people around the world will be invited to enter this country legally and take up permanent residence within it. From the day of their arrival, they will be entitled to free welfare, free legal services, free medical care, free education, and who knows what else. Millions of people must be out there thinking, “How can I get to that promised land?”
We have also been told to expect trillions of dollars to be spent for the foolishness of the Green New Deal, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the helm. That could bankrupt the nation. And can you imagine how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will deal with hostile governments, including those in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? That is an international nightmare in the making.
The institution of the family will find no friends in the White House or in the halls of Congress. Taxes are likely to skyrocket for middle-class parents and others. We can also expect unprecedented assaults on religious liberty and churches could be stripped of Constitutional protection. Also at risk are our Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, and other provisions within the U.S. Constitution. Democrats are talking about defunding the police and even the military. Radical change is about to descend on the nation. America is about to be over-run by the most leftist regime in history.
If that sounds discouraging and hopeless, we have to remember Who is in charge here. I believe the Almighty has had His hand of protection on this land since the days of its founding fathers. Our ancestors cried out to Him at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Midway, and Normandy. I don’t believe He has forsaken us now. So how do we explain the predicament that confronts us? I don’t know. Millions of people have been praying about the outcome of this election because we knew it would have such profound moral and spiritual implications. But who can discern the mind of God?
I grappled with such matters in my book, When God Doesn’t Make Sense. I wrote one morning after pacing back and forth in my study, “We must never forget that He is God. He is majestic and holy and sovereign. He is accountable to no one. He is not an errand boy who chases the assignments we dole out. He is not a genie who pops out of the bottle to satisfy our whims. He is not our servant—we are His. And our reason for existence is to glorify and honor Him . . . even when nothing makes sense. I then heard Him say, ‘Trust Me.'”
And trust we shall. Still, we ask, “Why did this election come tantalizingly close to a victory for life and morality, only to end tragically?” Could it be because America has abandoned its moral convictions? I wrote in my general letter several months ago that our popular culture has become utterly wicked. If that is accurate, how could a nation murder 62 million babies, fresh from the hand of the Creator, without expecting judgment to fall upon them? Clearly, we stand guilty before Him.
If this explains the disaster that has now befallen this great nation, there is only one biblical response. It is repentance. It is for us to kneel humbly before our righteous and all-seeing God and beg for forgiveness, both corporately and individually. That alone will save us.
We may have lost this election battle when it comes to the policies that matter most to us. Yet, the culture war rages on, and the gospel message of Jesus Christ is our banner and greatest hope. This is why we do what we do at the Dobson Family Institute. Faith and family remain the mission, and our conviction has never been more ardent. We are ambassadors for Christ, and we still have work to do. Are you with us?
Let us pray:
Lord, this is my prayer for my nation. Forgive us for our profound sinfulness, our arrogance, our pride, and our hands that have shed innocent blood. Restore our marriages and our churches. Bring a spirit of renewal and revival across this land. And Lord, in Thy wrath, remember mercy.
Amen and Amen.
P.S. To help remind us of the eternal hope that only comes from our Savior God, I want to share the text of a sermon aired nationally a few days before the election. It was delivered by my friend, Dr. Jack Graham. He is pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. He explains that America, like Israel, has forgotten God, and our only chance for survival is to cry out to the Lord. I couldn’t agree more, and I hope you will read the enclosed message carefully. Dr. Graham based it on Psalm 80, which was written after northern Israel had been defeated horribly by the Assyrians. We will find solace and direction therein.
This letter may be reproduced without change and in its entirety for non-commercial and non-political purposes without prior permission from Family Talk. Copyright, 2020 Family Talk. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed in the U.S. Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk is not affiliated with Focus on the Family.
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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.
To read reports in the mainstream press about the throngs of President Trump’s supporters who rallied in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, you’d think the crowd was made up of a bunch of conspiracy theory-addled rubes and delusional far-right extremists all of them hoodwinked into thinking the election was stolen. To read David Frum’s Twitter take, you’d think they were all Nazis.
The march came on the heels of a poll last week that found a staggering 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the presidential election was free and fair. That news, like news of the self-described Million MAGA March, was met with a mix of contempt, hysteria, and condescension from Democrats and the media.
Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was “no fraud” in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD,” has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are “baseless,” “unfounded,” and have “no evidence” behind them.
There’s a palpable nervousness about the media’s insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.
How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring “voter access” during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.
No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Taken together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.
Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they’re just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.
Even more egregious than voter fraud (and harder to redress) are cases where election bureaucrats or activist judges simply ignored restrictions that GOP legislatures had passed into law. In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court brushed off rules set by lawmakers and extended a deadline for when absentee ballots could be received. Extending deadlines for absentee ballots is of course an invitation to break election laws—especially in Philadelphia, a city with a long history of ballot-stuffing and bribing election judges.
In other states, the corruption of election integrity was voluntary. In Georgia, the state government settled a lawsuit in March with a cadre of Democratic Party groups that changed the rules for accepting mail-in ballots. Instead of the signature on the ballot having to match the signature on the voter rolls, it only had to match the signature on the mail-in ballot application. You don’t need to be a sophisticated election thief to figure out how to get a fraudulent ballot counted under such rules.
On and on it goes. A dozen states temporarily expanded mail-in voting just for the 2020 election. Others mailed ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. Many others extended the mail-in ballot deadline, set up ballot drop boxes, and allowed mail-in ballot harvesting on a mass scale.
Any reasonable person can look at these changes and conclude they create conditions ripe for fraud and abuse. Only the most naïve, pollyannaish observer would survey all of the above and conclude, as our mainstream media has, that there was “no fraud” in the election. Of course there was, and everyone knows it.
Whether it was enough to change the outcome of the election, we’ll probably never know, partly because the kind of abuses and criminal activity engendered by mass mail-in voting are hard to detect and even harder to prove in court. But pointing all of this out, and having a problem with it, even to the point of saying you don’t have much confidence that the election was free and fair, doesn’t make you a rube or a conspiracy theorist.
By contrast, pretending that none of this had any effect on the election, and demonizing anyone who says it did, as the media is doing now, is a reaction born of self-doubt and desperation—like labeling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor or a Nazi. There’s an exhausted nervousness about it, a contempt rooted in insecurity. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve written off your countrymen, and given up on the idea of a republic.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
A Biden Campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others in a massive ballot harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have “video evidence, documentation and witnesses” to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots, one Harris County Democrat operative allegedly bragged.
The investigators—a former FBI agent and former police officer—claim that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts have been “hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots” and ordering operatives to them fill out for people in Harris County illegally, “including dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election,” Patrick Howley of the National File reported.
While law enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating these potential crimes, nothing will be done about it until “well after the November 3, 2020 election” the former FBI agent said.
Dallas Jones was appointed the Biden campaign’s Texas Political Director in late August.
Congratulations to Dallas Jones, President and CEO of Elite Change, Inc., for being selected to serve as the Texas Political Director for the Biden Campaign! We look forward to helping Biden/Harris win Texas in November! #vote #BidenHarris2020 #BlueWave #TurnTexasBlue pic.twitter.com/Th8XIOaOiu
— Elite Change, Inc. (@EliteChange) August 28, 2020
Mark A. Aguirre and Charles F. Marler provided sworn affidavits as part of a class-action lawsuit in the Texas Supreme Court, Steven Hotze, M.D. et al., against Harris County and the state of Texas. The National File obtained the private investigators’ affidavits. In his testimony, Aguirre stated that he is a retired captain with the Houston Police Department and now a private investigator.
“I am currently involved in an investigation related to a wide-ranging and fraudulent ballot harvesting scheme in Harris County intended to rig the elections in the Houston/Harris County area. This scheme involves voter fraud on a massive scale,” he stated.
Based on interviews, review of documents, and other information, Aguirre identified three individuals, including a state senator and the Harris County Commissioner, who are working with Jones on the ballot harvesting operation: “District 13 Texas State Senator Borris Miles, who is the handler of Mr. Jones, political consultant Gerald Womack, and Precinct 1 Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis.” Aguire added: “One of the companies these individuals are using as a front for this operation is AB Canvassing, although there are others that have been identified that we are investigating.”
Aguirre noted that the ballot harvesters have been exploiting the elderly with the complicity of nursing home staff.
I have in my possession video-taped interviews of witnesses attesting to the aforementioned people having groups of people completing thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots, including completing ballots for deceased individuals; illegally going into nursing homes, with the complicity of the nursing home staff, and filling out and forging the signatures of nursing home residents; signing up homeless individuals to vote using the ballot harvester’s address then completing the ballot and forging the homeless individual’s signature.
This entire operation is being run by the elite politicians of the Democrat Party in Houston/Hams County. FURTHER AFFIANT SAYETH NOT.
Private investigator Charles F. Marler stated in his testimony that he formerly worked for the FBI where he was an Investigative Specialist “conducting undercover operations on espionage and terrorist targets.” Marler stated that former Harris County Clerk Diane Troutman was so concerned about being implicated in the fraud, she resigned earlier this year, citing “personal health reasons.”
Biden’s Texas Political Director Implicated in Massive Mail-In Ballot Harvesting Scheme in Harris County September 30, 2020 Admin
Find what drives you at Beaman Auto! by Debra Heine
A Biden Campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others in a massive ballot harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have “video evidence, documentation and witnesses” to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots, one Harris County Democrat operative allegedly bragged.
The investigators—a former FBI agent and former police officer—claim that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts have been “hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots” and ordering operatives to them fill out for people in Harris County illegally, “including dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election,” Patrick Howley of the National File reported.
While law enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating these potential crimes, nothing will be done about it until “well after the November 3, 2020 election” the former FBI agent said.
Dallas Jones was appointed the Biden campaign’s Texas Political Director in late August.
Congratulations to Dallas Jones, President and CEO of Elite Change, Inc., for being selected to serve as the Texas Political Director for the Biden Campaign! We look forward to helping Biden/Harris win Texas in November! #vote #BidenHarris2020 #BlueWave #TurnTexasBlue pic.twitter.com/Th8XIOaOiu
— Elite Change, Inc. (@EliteChange) August 28, 2020
Mark A. Aguirre and Charles F. Marler provided sworn affidavits as part of a class-action lawsuit in the Texas Supreme Court, Steven Hotze, M.D. et al., against Harris County and the state of Texas.
The National File obtained the private investigators’ affidavits.
In his testimony, Aguirre stated that he is a retired captain with the Houston Police Department and now a private investigator.
“I am currently involved in an investigation related to a wide-ranging and fraudulent ballot harvesting scheme in Harris County intended to rig the elections in the Houston/Harris County area. This scheme involves voter fraud on a massive scale,” he stated.
Based on interviews, review of documents, and other information, Aguirre identified three individuals, including a state senator and the Harris County Commissioner, who are working with Jones on the ballot harvesting operation: “District 13 Texas State Senator Borris Miles, who is the handler of Mr. Jones, political consultant Gerald Womack, and Precinct 1 Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis.” Aguire added: “One of the companies these individuals are using as a front for this operation is AB Canvassing, although there are others that have been identified that we are investigating.”
Aguirre noted that the ballot harvesters have been exploiting the elderly with the complicity of nursing home staff.
I have in my possession video-taped interviews of witnesses attesting to the aforementioned people having groups of people completing thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots, including completing ballots for deceased individuals; illegally going into nursing homes, with the complicity of the nursing home staff, and filling out and forging the signatures of nursing home residents; signing up homeless individuals to vote using the ballot harvester’s address then completing the ballot and forging the homeless individual’s signature.
This entire operation is being run by the elite politicians of the Democrat Party in Houston/Hams County. FURTHER AFFIANT SAYETH NOT.
Private investigator Charles F. Marler stated in his testimony that he formerly worked for the FBI where he was an Investigative Specialist “conducting undercover operations on espionage and terrorist targets.”
Marler stated that former Harris County Clerk Diane Troutman was so concerned about being implicated in the fraud, she resigned earlier this year, citing “personal health reasons.”
Marler stated that the harris County Commissioner “was not deterred and continued to move forward with the plan to mass mail ballots and expand the illegal ballot harvesting scam.”
“In December of 2019, I was approached by two individuals who witnessed activity from an illegal ballot harvesting operation in Harris County. Since that date, I have been investigating the illegal ballot harvesting operation,” he testified.
During my investigation, a core group of names continued to surface regarding the organization and operation of the voter fraud scheme. Witnesses have stated to me that Precinct 1 Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis and District 13 Texas State Senator Borris Miles are leading the illegal ballot harvesting operation in Harris County, Texas. Their chief lieutenants are Houston businessman Gerald Womack and political consultant Dallas Jones who work directly under them in executing the ballot harvesting operation in Harris County, Texas.
Witnesses have shown me and described to me how the ballot harvesters take absentee ballots from the elderly in nursing homes, from the homeless, and from unsuspecting residences’ mailboxes. The ballot harvesters then complete the ballots for their preferred candidate and forge the signature of the “voter”. Two witnesses stated to me that there are two individuals employed at the Harris County Clerk’s Office who are aware of the illegal ballots and help facilitate and mask the processing of the ballots into the legal stream of ballots.
I have been made aware of a law enforcement investigation in the Spring of 2020 regarding illegal ballot harvesting. Several interviews of individuals were conducted. After the interviews became public, former Harris County Clerk Diane Troutman, resigned alleging health concerns due to COVID-19. However, witnesses have told me that Ms. Troutman was arguing with Commission Rodney Ellis about the legality of the mass purchasing and mailing of mail-in ballots and that Troutman was concerned she would be included in the eventual arrest pertaining to illegal ballot harvesting. Instead of coming forward and exposing the scheme, Ms. Troutman abruptly resigned. Witnesses have stated that Commissioner Ellis was not deterred and continued to move forward with the plan to mass mail ballots and expand the illegal ballot harvesting scam. Another witness stated to me that an employee of Commission Ellis, Tyler James, has bragged that he could guarantee that the illegal ballot harvesting operation, with the help of mass mail-in ballots, could harvest 700,000 illegal ballots.
It appears that law enforcement agencies are currently investigating these alleged crimes and I will provide them with the evidence that I have already collected and am continuing to collect. Sadly, these law enforcement agencies will be working to prosecute these crimes well after the November 3, 2020 election.
Citizen journalist Colleen Vera had previously discovered evidence of what appears to be a massive vote harvesting ring operating in the state of Texas involving mail-in voting and various Democrat political campaigns.
Vera’s evidence includes video of a Democrat campaign surrogate harvesting mail ballots from a nursing home during a 2018 primary race, and audio of a Democrat campaign worker admitting to harvesting ballots from a nursing home, and mail-in ballots from Harris County that all have the same handwriting and envelope process.
According to the National File, the ongoing private investigation is working with law enforcement.
Roughly 20 million people could be vaccinated against the coronavirus in December, the head of the Trump administration’s vaccine and drug accelerator said Friday. Americans can expect that about 25 to 30 million people could be vaccinated each month afterward, said Moncef Slaoui, co-lead of Operation Warp Speed, during a Rose Garden event with President Donald Trump and other top health officials.
That timeline depends on the Food and Drug Administration authorizing the emergency use of one or more vaccines — which could happen in a matter of weeks, Slaoui noted.
Pfizer announced promising data this week suggesting its vaccine is more than 90 percent effective, and has said it will apply to FDA later this month. Moderna, which is working closely with the National Institutes of Health, is preparing to announce its own efficacy data in a matter of days. An emergency-use application could soon follow, Slaoui said.
Gen. Gustave Perna, Operation Warp Speed’s chief operating officer, said that the government would begin vaccination within 24 hours after a shot secures emergency authorization.
But while manufacturers have developed coronavirus vaccines in record speed, and dozens more are still in the pipeline, Slaoui’s projections mean it will likely take months just for first-priority groups such as health care workers and the elderly to get a shot.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are given as two doses, effectively cutting in half the government’s initial order of 100 million doses from each of the those manufacturers.
But Slaoui added that there could be more authorized vaccines in the spring, boosting chances for more people to get vaccinated. Four vaccines, including the Pfizer and Moderna shots, are now in late-stage U.S. trials, and at least one other company plans to start such a study this month.
“We may be able to immunize a larger number of Americans on an ongoing basis, per month,” Slaoui said after name-checking other promising candidates from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
The government has not yet released a comprehensive plan to distribute any coronavirus vaccines, including how it will handle logistics for shots that need to be shipped in below-freezing temperatures and outreach to skeptical communities.
Because of the real-world challenges of vaccine distribution and supply, federal health officials including CDC Director Robert Redfield project that broad access will not be a possibility until summer 2021.
Pastor John MacArthur leads Grace Community Church in California in a video posted October 2020. | Screenshot: Grace Community Church
Public health officials in Los Angeles have lifted all outbreak-related requirements and restrictions on Grace Community Church, which were put in place last month after three cases connected to the California church were confirmed.
“We are glad to announce that we received a notice from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health … saying that we have been cleared of COVID-19 outbreak,” the church says on its website.
L.A. County requires places of worship to report to the Public Health Department when there are at least three COVID-19 cases within a span of two weeks, after which the agency determines whether there is an outbreak.
“After a thorough investigation, Public Health officials have decided to rescind all outbreak-related requirements and restrictions on Grace Community Church,” the church, led by Pastor John MacArthur, said.
“Praise the Lord for His blessings and perfect provision. Thank you, Pastor John, for your example as you have walked this road,” a church member, Matt Mckinney, wrote on Grace Community’s Facebook page. “Your humble and unwavering strength, anchored in your trust of the Lord’s sovereignty to work this out to the counsel of His own will, for His own purposes and glory, are such an encouragement. Blessings my brother.”
Thousands of people have been attending the Sun Valley, California, church after it reopened in the summer despite restrictions on indoor worship services during the coronavirus pandemic. MacArthur and elders of the church said it was the church’s biblical duty to remain open and that they would not disobey “our Lord’s clear commands.”
The church has also argued that in the many months it’s been open, no one had been hospitalized with the disease.
In response to the three confirmed cases last month, Jenna Ellis, attorney for the church, said it was not an “outbreak,” given the more than 7,000 people who attend.
“It has never been the church’s position that it is only safe to hold services if no one ever tests positive, or for example, if no one ever gets the flu during flu season. Our position has been that LA County shutting down churches indefinitely amid a virus with a 99.98% survival rate, especially when state-preferred businesses are open and protests are held without restriction, is unconstitutional and harmful to the free exercise of religion,”she said.
Indoor worship services are currently banned in Los Angeles County, which has a Tier 1 status (when COVID-19 is “widespread“). Congregations are only allowed to meet outdoors with certain restrictions.
Grace Community Church and Pastor MacArthur have been in a legal battle with the county over the restrictions.
“They don’t want us to meet, that’s obvious,”MacArthur said after the county secured a stay of the trial court ruling in August that would have allowed the congregation to meet indoors with masks and social distancing.
“They’re not willing to work with us. They just want to shut us down. But we’re here to bring honor to the Lord.”
MacArthur said he didn’t know “exactly what the city is trying to do with us and to us,” and clarified that the indoor service was not aimed at being “rebellious.” “We’re meeting because our Lord has commanded us to come together and worship Him.”
The church’s attorneys argued that the county’s demands to comply with COVID-19 restrictions were unreasonable. The church offered to have the congregation comply with mask-wearing and social distancing indoors until the matter could be fully heard.
At the start of the pandemic earlier this year, Grace Community Church initially moved to a livestream model and closed down in-person services. But within a few weeks, MacArthur said parishioners started showing up again. They decided to restart in-person worship services, with church leaders saying that the government did not have the authority to stop them from gathering.
While parents in general believe institutions serve their children well, many are worried the majority, like churches and schools, have been serving their daughters better than their sons under norms of gender equality, new research suggests. And the only institutions where at least white parents believe boys are served slightly better are sports and other clubs.
Data from the 2020 American Family Survey, released in September, show that a striking minority, just 36%, of parents believe churches are serving their sons well. This share is almost equal to the 33% who say the same about how the criminal justice system is serving their sons. A minority of parents also believe churches are serving their daughters well but that number is five percentage points higher at 41%.
Daughters were also shown as being better served by every other institution highlighted in the survey, including the education system and friend networks. The only exceptions were sports and other clubs, which some 42% of particularly white parents believe are serving their sons well compared to 37% who say the same about how they serve their daughters.
The latest American Family Survey, was conducted between July 3 and July 14 in a partnership between the Deseret News and Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. The study explored several areas of family life, including relationships, economics, politics, health and culture. Market research and data analytics firm YouGov interviewed 3,251 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3,000 to produce a final dataset reflective of a sampling frame based on gender, age, race and education.
Surprising results
American Family Survey
Jeremy C. Pope, co-director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and one of the lead investigators on the survey, told The Christian Post that he was particularly surprised by how poorly parents rated the church in serving their children, especially their sons.
“My first reaction to that institutions data was I was surprised churches didn’t do so well. I didn’t really think about this deeply ahead of time but I thought that churches would do a little bit better than they did,” he said.
“I was not surprised that the criminal justice system was low but to be honest, churches are kind of in there with the criminal justice system and that surprised me. In future years, we want to follow up on that because it suggests a bit of dissatisfaction in how churches in particular are serving sons.”
Pope, who is a father of three daughters, said he was also struck by the data showing almost all of the institutions underserving boys and he believes the push for gender equality could be “blinding us to problems with boys.”
“It’s striking to me that daughters tend to be served better by virtually all the institutions except for sports or other clubs and it is also striking to me that friend networks, which you wouldn’t necessarily think is fantastic, dramatically outperforming churches in terms of satisfaction with how it’s serving their kids,” he noted.
“I think within the norm of gender equality, that may be blinding us to problems with boys and problems facing boys that the public knows are out there but is sometimes reluctant to talk about because nobody wants to favor boys over girls.”
Pope further argued that what the data reveals is an increasing concern about the well-being of boys and he doesn’t believe the concern is misplaced.
“I have three daughters. I don’t worry a ton about them. They are great young women,” he said.
“The thing that I think this survey highlights this year about gender is that increasingly I see signs that society is concerned about boys. I have a feeling that that concern is not misplaced. I think we should be concerned about how our sons are doing, what their prospects are in life. And it probably means that parents and maybe more as a society [need to think] about what it is we need to do to make the environment for sons hospitable to them, helpful, what sort of skills do they need to acquire? What sort of expectations should we be setting for them because it does look to me that there is some sort of dissatisfaction out there with how our sons as a society are growing up.”
The largest disparity between how parents believe institutions serve their sons and daughters was reflected in the education system where 63% of parents said it served their daughters well but only 55% said the same about their sons.
A small experiment
Pope and his colleagues noted in their report on the survey that to gauge the overall concern about boys and girls among respondents, they conducted an experiment where some were questioned only about their worries over girls, while others were asked about boys. Another group of respondents were asked about both boys and girls.
Parents who were only asked to think about their worries about girls responded with concern only 30% of the time. The group asked about both girls and boys responded with concern almost equally — 35% for girls and 36% for boys.
When respondents were asked only about boys, however, the level of concern shot up to 45%.
“This experiment highlights something key about society and it is a topic we plan to follow up on in future years. When the public is simply asked about boys and girls they tend to follow an ethic of equality. They will claim to have similar levels of worry about both genders. However, when only asked about girls the percentage of the public with concerns shrinks a bit and when only asked about boys the percentage of the public with concerns grows substantially,” the report on the survey said.
“What is the best way to characterize these results? Are people concealing concerns when asked about boys or girls? We doubt it. Our assumption would be that each of the responses is genuine it’s just that people do harbor some latent concerns about boys that come out when asked the question in a slightly different way. There is, probably, more concern about boys and young men in our current society but it can be masked by norms of gender equality,” the report added.
‘Absolutely accurate’
Michael Gurian of the Gurian Institute talks about brain science. | Gurian Institute
Michael Gurian, a social philosopher, family therapist and corporate consultant, called the AFS findings “absolutely accurate” in an interview with CP.
As a social philosopher, Gurian pioneered efforts to bring neurobiology and brain research into homes, schools, corporations and public policy. He has provided information on the educational needs of boys and girls to the White House and briefed members of the 114th Congress on the boy crisis in America.
“We’ve found this for more than 30 years. These findings are absolutely accurate and would corroborate what a number of us have been looking at for decades,” Gurian said.
He explained that systems in institutions like schools and churches reflect the overwhelming influence of women who populate them.
“These systems are set up more toward female brains in a number of ways. One is to a great extent they are populated by females. The women are great people but they think like women,” Gurian said, noting that training, which his institute has done successfully overtime, has helped address these disparities in both schools and churches.
“Without training, they (female teachers) walk into systems and their behavioral expectations for boys. When you add on boys of color, black and brown boys, then that’s a different data set; … the stats are even worse than for white boys. Even when you take race out of it and [look at] just boys, it’s kind of grim,” he explained.
“Not that they’re malicious, it’s just that they are women who think like women and teach to the behavioral academic and even spiritual expectations of females and so it’s kind of gradual, taking place over a period of decades. Of course, 100 years ago, churches and schools were much more male so we wouldn’t make this argument but in the last number of decades,” a transition has happened, he said.
While the AFS data reflect a frustration parents have with the way institutions have been underserving their sons, the Gurian Institute has successfully help hundreds of schools, churches and other institutions address the disparity with many success stories on their website.
“Since we began this program a year ago, Oak Hill School has seen positive improvements in academic achievement and school culture, and with increased teacher effectiveness and student engagement,” wrote Peter M. Schroeder, a principal at Oak Hill School in Missouri, 2019. “We believe that being designated a ‘Gurian Model School’ will help us maintain our competitive edge in the St. Louis marketplace as an independent, Catholic school. Our work with the Gurian Institute has helped us adapt our already powerful teaching model to provide excellence in our academic program-for both girls and boys.”
Gurian said, “For those people who say ‘well, we know there’s this problem but nothing is happening,’ what I always say is there are organizations that solve this problem. The schools that use the Gurian Institute’s research framework, they have solved this problem. They don’t have these issues anymore. So it’s really important to say to people that solutions exist. And if they are feeling paralyzed, they don’t have to feel paralyzed.”
David Murrow, who started Church for Men, an organization that helps congregations reconnect with men and boys, in 2005 around the same time he released his book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, believes the key to help churches better respond to the needs of boys and men could lie in the creation of more gender neutral churches.
“I hear stories all the time from churches that buy 10, 15 copies of the book for their elders and leaders and there are a lot of churches that are implementing more man-friendly programming, boy-friendly things for young men. I think one of the secrets to the growth of the megachurches has been their ability to gender neutralize their worship spaces and create an environment where men walk in and feel like this is something for them and not just something for their grandmother,” Murrow told CP.
“The typical church in America is about 80 to 90 people. It’s what I call a grandma church. There is a lot of older members and the ladies of the church decorate the sanctuary with quilts and flowers and ribbons and lace doilies and the Sunday school rooms look like something out of a kindergarten classroom,” he explained.
“They’ve got construction paper and yarn. It’s a very feminine space that they create and there’s a lot of talk of nurture and relationships. And then the ministry opportunities, the volunteer opportunities typically revolve around female roles — caring for the sick, preparing meals for potluck dinners.
“The whole enterprise is pitched towards a middle-aged or older woman with an empty nest who wants to spend time with kids. So men, particularly young men, come into those little family churches, they see the décor, they see the opportunities and they find nothing for themselves. One of the things the megachurches did is they intentionally focused on young men and particularly these would be men with young families,” Murrow said.
Two megachurches Murrow said that have done a great job in appealing to men are Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, founded by Bill Hybels.
Warren reportedly designed his church based on his own door-to-door survey of 500 residents. He found that his target audience was “Saddleback Sam,” a prototypical yuppie who believes in God but has not attended church since childhood. The “Sams” told him they weren’t going to church because sermons were boring, people were aloof, childcare was a problem and pastors were too interested in money.
“They had a mythical parishioner named Saddleback Sam. I mean they went straight for this guy. He was a guy who represented all the values of Southern California — he’s overextended in time and credit. God is OK but he’s not interested in church or religion,” Murrow said.
Willow Creek’s target was a “mythical parishioner named Unchurched Harry,” Murrow noted.
“They were focusing on that guy because they realized something. When you attract the man of the family you tend to get the rest of the family on the deal. And so they made their churches not macho, they didn’t turn their church into a monster truck rally or anything like that. All they had to do was sort of take out the cues that were saying to men this is something for your wife and kids and really engage the men on a heart level,” he said. “And then growth took care of itself and that’s really been the secret of the megachurches. It’s their ability to attract and retain men and in the process retain the entire family.”
Of the estimated 344,894 churches in the United States, only about 1,750 of them are classified as megachurches with 2,000 or more members.
Murrow said about 15 years ago, his own church in Alaska got rid of the old model of Sunday School and rebranded it Adventure Land in an approach that involves more movement with male teachers leading boys and female teachers leading girls and they have seen a lot of success.
“This model has been very successful in reaching young men. The tragedy comes when we move into junior high and high school ministry,” he said, which involves a lot of singing to Jesus, which boys don’t like.
The power of fathers
Citing research such as The Demographic Characteristics of the Linguistic and Religious Groups in Switzerland, which reviewed the results of a 1994 survey of Swiss religious practice, Murrow also argued that the most effective way for parents to lead the spiritual life of their children is through their own personal witness. The study also highlighted the outsized influence of a father in the transference of faith to the next generation.
In that study, for families where neither parent attended church, only 4% of their children ended up attending church regularly. Some 15% went on to become irregular attendees while more than 80% did not attend at all.
When the mother attended church in families but the father did not, some 2% went on to attend church regularly, 37% attended irregularly and 61% not at all. When both parents attended church regularly, 33% of their children when on to do the same regularly, 41% irregularly and 26% did not attend at all.
In homes where the father was a regular church attendee and the mother’s attendance was irregular, the study found that 38% of the children went on to regularly attend church, 44% attended irregularly and 18% did not attend at all. The results showed that fathers who attend church more faithfully influences more faithful church attendance in their children.
“There is really nothing to compare with it. We can have all the youth groups, the retreats, … the praise and worship extravaganzas and all those things help,” Murrow said. ”But the one thing that towers above all other factors in a child’s decision to follow Christ as a young adult is whether his father was following Christ. And so that would be the most effective thing a church could do is to equip fathers to be witnesses to their children.”
He urged believers who are concerned about the way their church is serving their sons to try to engage their leaders under the guidance of the Holy Spirit as conversations about these issues can be delicate.
Making a cultural shift to help boys
Tim Wright, pastor of Community of Grace Lutheran Church in Peoria, Arizona, who authored Searching for Tom Sawyer and created a rite of passage for boys with Gurian called Following Jesus: Heroic Quest for Boys, said he was inspired to become an advocate for boys by Murrow’s book, Why Men Hate Going to Church.
“I read the book and I was so challenged by it that I invited David to Arizona to speak,” he told CP.
“He spoke for eight minutes and he was holding eggs in his hand. And his sermon was about boys and the disconnect of boys from the faith. And he kept dropping eggs and he said ‘now in the eight minutes I’ve been speaking, these eggs represent the number of boys who left the church.’ And so I did some quick research and found that the statistic is anywhere from 70 to 90% of all boys who leave the Christian church in their teens and 20s and most won’t come back and that really got my attention,” he said.
He eventually learned about Gurian and his use of brain science research to talk about boys and girls and how they learn.
“I hired him as a consultant and we became such good friends that we moved away from a consulting relationship and we became partners in creating different products for people,” he explained.
He argued that society needs to stop functioning as if girls are still behind educationally. While that may have been the case decades ago, Wright said, it is no longer true.
“Back in the 1960s we recognized educationally that our girls were behind our boys in part because of the feminist movement, in part because we were looking over all these different experiences with our daughters and seeing them fall behind. The whole country, metaphorically speaking, came together and said ‘we’ve gotta fight for our girls and get them caught up in school.’ The federal government at that time committed $100 million to helping our girls get caught up,” he explained.
“And here’s what happened. The great news — I raised a daughter, I’ve got two granddaughters; I’m all pro-girls and we want to make that clear and Michael had two daughters — in 1982, girls not only caught up to boys but they flew right by them. And now in 2020 our boys are behind and they are behind significantly our girls in every area of education from pre-school to graduate school,” except for perhaps STEM, Wright noted.
“The problem is that we still think culturally, we have so ingrained in us that our girls are behind … that when they caught up and passed boys we still live with the old story that our girls are behind, our boys are OK. And because of that, we tend not to see our boys. They become invisible,” he said.
“The challenge in terms of advocating for boys is we still sort of believe boys are doing OK when they are not. They are dramatically behind, not just in education but they are falling behind emotionally. They are falling behind economically. In almost every area of life, boys and men are doing worse,” Wright added.
Pointing to the disparities in how girls and boys are being served by institutions in the AFS research, Wright said he believes it’s this disconnect that, for example, is causing families to rank sports clubs as better institutions for boys over churches.
“We have gone far more to the female brain than the male brain in our churches, in our schools and that’s why sports are doing so well. And really, sports have become the new religion for men and for boys. I see that in my own family with my son and his kids. They are far more engaged with sports than they are with church because sports is movement, it’s teamwork oftentimes, but it’s also character building,” he said.
“It’s not always ‘aww, you’re just great because you’re great.’ It’s ‘hey, that was a great play, you missed that one; you let the team down’ and it starts to forge character,” he explained.
“We’re afraid of that for some reason. And what’s happening now is our boys tune out from things like school or church and if they don’t have good men or even good women who are both building up their character and calling them out when they’re not being boys of character, the boys sort of just check out or they make it up on their own.
“Most of our culture will never say this but increasingly in a world where feminine values have become the benchmark, boys and men are feeling left out. We can’t articulate our feelings the same way and if we want to articulate our feelings, they are not the right kinds of feelings.”
When asked what would happen if churches and schools were able to collectively make the cultural shift to better serve men and boys, Murrow said he believes it could be seismic.
“A lot of the dysfunction in our culture comes from poorly socialized men. There are more men in jails, men are more likely to commit suicide, more likely to commit crimes and this is not just the United States, this is the world over. And this goes back to thousands of years. The great question of every society is how do we socialize and harness the power of men to social good and not toward mayhem,” he told CP.
“My background is in anthropology so the first thing they teach you is the whole purpose of society is to socialize men. So if we had a church and we had schools that were more successful in engaging men, I think the result would be a kinder, more loving society. It would be a fairer society and it would be … a lot less family distress, way fewer men falling through the cracks,” he said, noting that women would also be able to find more suitable men to marry.
“Study after study shows that when men embrace religion in general, they tend to be more kind and considerate. They are less likely to gamble and drink to excess. A host of anti-social and negative behaviors fall away when they become engaged in the church and that’s the sociological reason for creating an environment where men and boys feel more welcome. And they feel like it’s something for them and not just something for women.”
Though the Million MAGA March was a major success, there were too many cases of Black Lives Matter and Antifa hordes antagonizing and assaulting Trump supporters.
Big League Politics has documented some of that footage here. It’s true that DC police can’t be everywhere at once and thus can’t prevent every single assault, but at least one clip from Saturday shows DC police unequivocally failing to protect a group of Trump supporters.
In a video captured by Jorge Ventura below, three Trump supporters ask to get through a manned blockade that appeared to be cordoning off a group of BLM counter-protesters. The police tell the Trump supporters that they’re not allowed through and proceed to reroute them. But the police rerouted them through the BLM group, which they had to have known would lead to violence.
Watch:
This seems to be the clearest-cut case of police failing to protect Trump supporters. There could very well have been similar cases elsewhere that weren’t documented on video.
Now the vast majority of individual cops are good cops, and we should defend them when they’re unjustly demonized for doing their jobs. Nevertheless, it does not logically follow that the police as an institution are the friend of Trump supporters and conservatives, especially in big cities and The Swamp. Police are the armed wing of the government, of the state. If the government orders them to back down and effectively allow BLM and Antifa to loot businesses and set cars on fire, the police will do so. If the government orders them to prioritize arrests only when one side hits back at the antagonizing side (which is virtually always Trump supporters hitting back at BLM and Antifa), the police will do so.
If the US—God forbid—became the kind of country that cracks down on “hate speech,” the police will be the ones knocking on your door telling you to cool it with your social media posts.
Hopefully the assaults in DC and even the chaos that happened over the summer remind us that we have to rely on ourselves for our own safety and security first. We cannot place it entirely in the hands of the police.
Joseph Stalin famously said: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Stalin was right. And today we are seeing this play out in the United States of America.
Smartmatic, a UK based company, is a George Soros linked company that has provided voting technologyin 16 states including battleground zones like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The company was formed in 2000 and a Chavez campaign adviser was placed on the board as well. The chairman of Smartmatic is Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, who sits in the British House of Lords and on the board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. He was formerly the vice-chairman of Soros’s Investment Funds and even the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations when he worked as chief of staff to Kofi Annan.
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According to Wikileaks documents Smartmatic machines were used to rig the 2004 Venezuela elections in favor of Marxist candidate Hugo Chavez.
The company came out of nowhere to snatch a multli-million dollar contract in an electoral process that ultimately reaffirmed Chavez’ mandate and all-but destroyed his political opposition.
The Smartmatic owners, were denounced in June 2004 by the press for having received a US $200,000 equity investment from a Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (BRV) joint venture fund called FONCREI which was a Chavez organization. A Chavez campaign adviser was also placed on the board as well.
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The Pan Am Post reported on the links between Smartmatic and Dominion this past week week.
Dominion is the name of the company involved in the recent U.S. elections.
Its name is associated with irregularities due to the failure of its electronic systems, whose technology was purchased from Smartmatic through its subsidiary Sequoia, revealed American Thinker.
Dominion denies its link, although, at one point, it allowed Smartmatic to market its same technology abroad in places where Dominion did not do business.
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The Dominion Voting Systems are used in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. All those states have seen razor-thin margins in returns from the presidential election, which is officially undecided. The Gateway Pundit has reported on impossible data ratios found in Dominion machines in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
We have more reports coming on the unquestionably suspect and impossible ratios reported in these states by Dominion Voting Systems.
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.
A journalist who tested Nevada’s signature verification process for mail-in ballots found that the state is wide open for fraud. Columnist Victor Joecks of the Las Vegas Review-Journal conducted his experiment noting that the issue is deeper than any single contest.
“Leave aside the presidential race. Even small amounts of fraud can swing results,” he wrote, pointing to a race where a state senator won an election by 24 votes.
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Joecks said in his piece Thursday that he proved a voter could vote many times.
“Clark County election officials accepted my signature on eight ballot return envelopes during the general election. It’s more evidence that signature verification is a flawed security measure,” he wrote, saying the assurances from elections officials that the process was secure were so much puffery.
Joecks noted that among the “facts” assembled on a state website was this gem: “All mail ballots must be signed on the ballot return envelope. This signature is used to authenticate the voter and confirm that it was actually the voter and not another person who returned the mail ballot.”
Given the vast amount of reporting that has shown images of ballots dumped here, there and everywhere, the assertion intrigued Joecks.
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“I wanted to test that claim by simulating what might happen if someone returned ballots that didn’t belong to him or her,” he wrote.
Joecks had nine co-conspirators. He wrote their names for them to then copy, trying to imitate his handwriting. The citizens had to sign the ballots to ensure there was no fraud perpetrated while conducting the test.
Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria told Joecks that if ballots signed by someone else “came through, we would still have the signature match to rely on for identity,” he said.
Queried about his confidence in his office’s ability to pluck a fake ballot out of a sea of the documents, he told Joecks, “I’m confident that the process has been working throughout this process.”
“He was wrong,” Joecks wrote. “Eight of the nine ballots went through. In other words, signature verification had an 89 percent failure rate in catching mismatched signatures.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Joe Biden declared that he plans to vastly increase the number of annual refugees admitted into the United States. Under the Trump administration, the maximum number of refugees permitted in the U.S. per year is 15,000. Biden pledged that he will dramatically raise that number to 125,000. Biden made the declaration in a prerecorded video created for a virtual celebration of the 40th anniversary of Jesuit Refugee Service.
“The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response,” Biden said on Thursday, as reported by the Religion News Service.“I promise, as president, I will reclaim that proud legacy for our country.”
“The Biden-Harris administration will restore America’s historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere and raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000,”Biden announced.
In June, Biden released a statement on World Refugee Day, in which he said, “Fear-mongering, xenophobia, and racism are the unabashed tenets of Trump’s refugee and immigration policy,”
“I also recognize that it is not enough to simply reverse or dismantle the heartless policies of the Trump Administration,” the former vice president stated. “We need to look for ways to do better.
“As President, I will increase the number of refugees we welcome into this country, setting an annual global refugee target of 125,000,” said Biden, who then hinted that he could raise that amount. “And will seek to further raise it over time commensurate with our responsibility, our values, and the unprecedented global need.”
Biden added, “I will repeal the Muslim ban — and other discriminatory bans based on ethnicity and nationality — and restore asylum laws, including ending the horrific practice of separating families at our border.”
In October, President Donald Trump released a memo that read, “The admission of up to 15,000 refugees to the United States during FY 2021 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
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.
Election workers sort absentee ballot envelopes at the Lansing City Clerk’s office on November 02, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. For the first time, Michigan law is allowing clerks in Michigan cities to expedite the vote-counting process by removing secrecy envelopes from outer mailing envelopes one day ahead of the election. …John Moore/Getty Images
Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, host of The Dershow, told Breitbart News on Thursday that President Donald Trump is likely to win a lawsuit his campaign filed in Pennsylvania challenging the legitimacy of mail-in ballots received after Election Day.
Dershowitz predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would take up the Trump campaign’s lawsuit if the number of votes being challenged are enough to change the outcome of the presidential election in Pennsylvania.
“I do think that Trump will win the Pennsylvania lawsuit,” said Dershowitz on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Joel Pollak, “namely, the lawsuit that challenges ballots that were filed before the end of Election Day but not received until after Election Day.”
Dershowitz continued, “The [Pennsylvania] legislature had basically said no to that and the [Pennsylvania] Supreme Court said yes because of the pandemic. That may have been the right decision in some theoretical sense, but the Constitution doesn’t permit anybody in the state but the legislature to make decisions about elections.”
LISTEN:
“That was decided correctly in Bush versus Gore, and I think that four-to-four vote would become a five-to-four vote if the issue came before the Supreme Court and there were not disputed ballots to make a difference in the outcome of the election. That remains to be seen.”
Dershowitz remarked, “As I understand the facts of the case — although I think what the judiciary did may have been the right thing morally: if you get your ballot in on time, you shouldn’t be denied the vote just because the post office screwed up — I don’t think you can really make that argument under Article Two. I do think that the Republican argument is the stronger one.’
“The Supreme Court will take the case only if it would make a difference, only if the plaintiffs — the Republicans — can show that the number of disputed ballots that were subject to sequestration by Justice Alito’s decision exceeds the difference between the winning margin and the losing margin.”
Dershowitz concluded, “The Pennsylvania constitutional argument is a wholesale argument that clearly belongs in federal courts..”
The Supreme Court ordered Pennsylvania election boards on November 6 to separate the count of mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day in the event that the Supreme Court revisits election lawsuits related to such votes.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
If I told you an incumbent president had 52 percent approval on Election Day and ended up winning 10 million more votes than during his first election, would you predict victory? What if 56 percent of voters felt they were better off since the president had entered office? What if you knew that the incumbent had a nearly 30 percent enthusiasm edge over his opponent, or that when asked for whom they thought their neighbors were voting, nearly 10 percent more Americans expected the president to be re-elected than to lose?
With those numbers in mind, wouldn’t you feel pretty confident that the sitting president had, indeed, been re-elected? Alternatively, wouldn’t you consider it an amazing feat if, instead, the president’s challenger was victorious? The improbability of that result should be newsworthy all on its own.
Donald Trump has majority approval. Nearly six in 10 Americans feel better off today than when Barack Obama was in office, and 15 percent more voters pulled the lever for his re-election than in his 2016 victory. These are not the numbers of a losing candidate, yet we’re told Joe Biden managed to prevail.
The media and pollsters, of course, predicted a Biden landslide, not a very narrow squeaker in which Democrats lost in almost every other avenue of government. Considering the following five facts about the election, it’s no wonder Biden failed to achieve a landslide victory.
1. 10 Million More Votes
Not since President Grover Cleveland’s re-election campaign in 1888 has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost 5 million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election.
By comparison, Trump not only added about 10 million votes to his 2016 haul but also shattered the record for most votes received by a sitting president. Trump won a greater share of minority votes than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 and brought more Democrats over to his side than in 2016. More than nine in 10 evangelical Christians voted to re-elect the president. For Trump to expand his coalition of voters so substantially and still lose is historic.
2. 56 Percent of Americans Better Off Than in 2016
This is a huge number. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of Americans say they aren’t better off since Trump was inaugurated. No sitting president has lost re-election when more than half of the country is doing better than before the incumbent entered office.
In fact, Obama, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all won re-election, even though only about 45 percent of the country felt better off than when their presidencies had begun. For Biden to have won the election, despite nearly six in 10 Americans doing well under the current president, is noteworthy. It simply has never happened before.
Part of the reason for Americans’ strong sense of being better off under Trump surely stems from the unprecedented prosperity Americans were experiencing until this past spring when the Chinese coronavirus stopped the world’s economies. Under the president, minority unemployment had reached record lows, and minority wealth savings had reached record highs. At the same time, the stock market had risen to all-time record highs. In other words, the Trump economy was benefiting Americans at all economic levels.
After the pandemic caused an election-year recession, the economy has steadily rebounded since summer. Unemployment has already dropped back below 7 percent, much faster than many economists thought possible, and the stock market is back to its pre-pandemic highs.
In the past, the performance of the S&P 500 in the three months before Americans head to the polls has predicted 87 percent of elections since 1928 and 100 percent since 1984. If the S&P is in positive territory by the end of those three months, the incumbent party almost always wins. On the last trading day in July, the S&P 500 closed at 3,271, was up nearly 7 percent by mid-October, and closed at 3,310 on the Monday before the 2020 election. The market predicted a Trump victory.
3. Nearly 30 Percent Enthusiasm Gap Favoring Trump
In June, during the middle of the pandemic, pollster Scott Rasmussen was blown away by the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters. He wrote in amazement: “Wow! 76 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 49 percent of Biden voters.”
This enthusiasm gap, measured consistently as somewhere between 15 and 30 percent, was picked up by many pollsters. Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, told the New York Post in mid-October that enthusiasm for Trump “is historically high,” while “Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low.”
Anyone who saw a Trump rally would not be surprised. At one of his last campaign stops before Election Day, about 60,000 Trump supporters showed up to see the president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump tractor parades, boat parades, and 30-mile-long highway caravans have been a common feature of the 2020 campaign.
Republican support for the president has been higher than for any president of either party since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Until Biden’s presumed victory, no incumbent president winning so handily in voter enthusiasm had lost re-election.
4. More People Thought Neighbors Were Voting for Trump
Just as in 2016, polling this election cycle proved decisively wrong. Republicans in the House, Senate, and state legislatures across the country all out-performed polling estimates. Pollsters consistently predicted a Biden blowout, but instead, the race is one of the closest in American history.
Pollsters have partially excused their efforts by pointing to a “shy Trump voter” error in the polls that failed to capture the president’s true support. To get around this problem, some pollsters asked respondents to name the candidate for whom they believed their neighbors would likely vote, hoping to elicit more candid voting intentions.
By a 7 percentage-point margin, Harvard/Harris polling found in late September that more Americans believed their neighbors would vote for Trump’s re-election than for Biden. In the week before the election, USC Dornsife published a poll asking a similar question: “Do you think your friends and neighbors are voting for Trump?” USC concluded that “it’s looking like an Electoral College loss for Biden.”
5. Trump Still Has 53 Percent Approval
Just 12 days before the election, Trump’s approval rating popped over 50 percent and has held steady since that time. As Gallup noted, “[A]ll incumbents with an approval rating of 50 percent or higher have won re-election, and presidents with approval ratings much lower than 50 percent have lost.”Rasmussen and Zogby both had Trump hitting that “holy grail” approval number tied to certain re-election.
On the day before the election, Rasmussen had Trump at 52 percent approval. At the same point in his presidency, and before his own re-election, Obama had 50 percent. As of Nov. 11, Rasmussen shows 53 percent of the country approves of Trump, compared to 46 percent who disapprove. No incumbent president has ever lost re-election with numbers such as these.
All of these numbers have historically contributed to a victory for an incumbent president. Considering them, it’s no surprise Biden didn’t win in a landslide, but that they did not produce a win for Trump in 2020 is almost unbelievable.
J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.
Fraud represents only one aspect of concern over the results from last week’s election. Of equal import when judging the legitimacy of the next president of the United States is whether states complied with the election rules established by their legislatures. These are not questions of mere “technical errors,” but raise significant constitutional concerns.
On Wednesday, Jim Geraghty of National Review tweeted his “Morning Jolt” summary of post-election lawsuits. “The Trump campaign,” Geraghty stressed, “conceded in oral arguments they were not contending fraud or improper influence, merely technical errors,” he wrote of a recent election case. Geraghty’s article, linked in his tweet, continued: “It is one thing to fume on Twitter that there is a sinister effort to steal an election; it is another thing to assert that sweeping claim in a court of law, before a judge, under penalty of perjury and/or disbarment.”
Not to pick on Geraghty, whom I respect immensely, but he is conflating two separate issues: fraud and violations of the election code. Those are two distinct problems, yet there has been little analysis of the latter, which over the next several weeks might prove more significant.
There are multiple allegations of fraud, such as the middle-of-the-night arrival of unsecured ballots in Detroit or the dead man voting in Nevada. Then there’s the even more devastating suggestion that votes for Donald Trump were swapped to Joe Biden via vulnerable computer systems. Frankly, this idea strikes me as unbelievable, but then again, so did the idea that the FBI would obtain illegal secret court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and we know how that turned out.
Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’
Violations of the election code, however, are a different matter, and unfortunately, sometimes the public views election officials’ bending of the rules as a harmless ignoring of technicalities. As the attorney in the Montgomery County Board of Elections case noted after “conceding” he was not alleging fraud: “The election code is technical.”
That makes technical violations constitutionally significant because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 grants state legislatures the ultimate authority to appoint the electors who choose the president: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”
In Bush v. Gore, former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stressed the significance of this constitutional provision in a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Rehnquist wrote, that clause “convey[s] the broadest power of determination” and “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointment of electors. Furthermore, “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.”
The three concurring justices in Bush v. Gore concluded that the Florida Supreme Court’s order directing election officials to count improperly marked ballots was a “significant departure from the legislative scheme,” and “in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.” Accordingly, those justices would have declared the Florida recount unconstitutional under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.
While the concurrence in Bush v. Gore failed to garner support by a majority of the justices, the Supreme Court’s composition has changed dramatically since then, and the reasoning of this concurrence provides a strong basis to view deviations from the technicalities of the election code as unconstitutional. As Rehnquist stressed, “[I]n a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”
So, if the legislative branch mandates voter signatures, or verification of signatures, or internal secrecy sleeves, or counting only in the presences of poll-watchers from each party, it is no answer to say it is a technicality and not fraud at issue. The state legislatures, through the election code, define the validity of votes, and allowing state officials or courts to read those provisions out of the law raises serious questions under Article 2 of the Constitution.
Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection
Allowing state officials to fudge on the mandates of the election code raises a second significant constitutional issue, this one under the Equal Protection Clause, which served as the basis for the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. The majority in Bush v. Gore held that the varying standards violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, reasoning: “The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”
When state officials ignore the technicalities of the election code, however, it virtually guarantees voters will be denied equal treatment. The proof is in Pennsylvania. There, for instance, even though the election code prohibited inspecting ballots before Election Day, some county officials — those in larger counties with access to mail-sorting machines that could weigh ballots — weighed the ballots to determine if the voter failed to include the required inner secrecy sleeve.
Then those officials, again contrary to the election code, provided information to representatives of the Democratic Party so they could identify the voters whose ballots would be canceled. Voters whose election officials abided by the technicalities of the election code, however, did not receive that notice nor the opportunity to “cure” their ballot.
Now thanks to the unprecedented push toward mail-in voting over the last year, we are seeing this same pattern repeat itself throughout the country. Some election officials bent (or broke) the rules the legislative branch had set, while others followed the letter of the law. As a result, voters in different counties in the same state were treated disparately and on an arbitrary basis. Unlike the situation in Bush v. Gore, however, it is not the state courts altering the plain language of the election code, but secretaries of state or local election officials.
The majority in Bush v. Gore recognized the rightful place of election officials to interpret and apply the rules established by the legislative branch. This difference provides some leeway to states, which through interpretative guidance tweak the technicalities of the election code. But as in other areas of the law, such interpretations must be reasonable and must not violate the clearly expressed intent of the legislature.
The Supreme Court will likely decide where that line will be drawn in the coming days.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
As arguments about voter fraud have escalated across the country, it’s time to recognize that despite what an unmitigated disaster widespread expansion of absentee balloting has been, concerns about its abuse aren’t the most important argument in the ongoing fight over the legitimacy of this election. Sure, the media and Big Tech’s widespread white-washing and censoring of very real voter fraud concerns are damaging to the social fabric in existential ways, just as ignoring norms (and in some cases laws) requiring transparency destroys public trust and confidence in the outcome.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit isn’t yet proof that election-altering fraud occurred, although it does present compelling evidence that if proved shatters the media narrative on election security. A closer look at the allegations of direct fraud weighed against the likelihood of proving that enough occurred to alter the outcome — on a shortened timeline — reveals a daunting task for the president’s legal team.
President Trump’s lawyers, however, aren’t making the same argument as your uncle on Facebook; they’re playing for keeps. Some Republicans have been content to publicly call for the “process to play out” while privately predicting losses or maybe a few favorable rulings on some esoteric technicalities. But the president is not tired of winning yet.
Shortly after the filing, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, put it succinctly: “Pennsylvania is irredeemably compromised.”
The thrust of their legal argument doesn’t hinge on the numbers of fraudulent ballots cast, but on the inconsistent and illegal application of Pennsylvania election law, which dilutes legally cast votes — so-called disparate treatment, from which the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect us.
The other key legal argument is that those changes in the election law, which were implemented by an unelected appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch, namely Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, were an impermissible usurpation of the legislature’s prerogative even if Pennsylvania’s judicial branch approved them.
Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns
Underlying the president’s legal argument is the recognition that the Pennsylvania legislature implemented an imperfect regime that rationally valued security of the election as more important than avoiding disenfranchising any voters. Even amid a pandemic, the Pennsylvania legislature understood that their expansion of ballot-by-mail increased risks to election security, and thus sought to mitigate that as best they could. It was partisan state courts that unilaterally overrode those determinations in the middle of a presidential campaign in an unconstitutional way.
The discussion about what types of fraud, and how much, is important because it goes to the very heart of election integrity, and our system cannot stand without trust in the outcome. That argument, however, won’t decide the Pennsylvania case from a legal standpoint. It will come down to whether a ministerial appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch can work with Pennsylvania’s judicial branch to subvert the expressed will of the legislature, and hastily put in place an election process wherein citizens who chose to vote differently had their votes disparately treated.
Recall that in 2000, the legal argument that eventually carried the day was equal-protection grounds; by implementing different methods for recounts and different scrutiny for different counties, voters were receiving unequal treatment. The Supreme Court held 7-2 that “Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work.”
Twenty years is a long time as far as the public attention span goes, and most have allowed the “selected not elected” mantra to pervade our consciousness. Contra the prevailing narrative, however, Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas framed their decision as one of judicial restraint that saw a key part of the court’s role was in protecting the Florida legislature from impermissible interference by the Florida courts:
In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law. That practice reflects our understanding that the decisions of state courts are definitive pronouncements of the will of the States as sovereigns. Of course, in ordinary cases, the distribution of powers among the branches of a State’s government raises no questions of federal constitutional law, subject to the requirement that the government be republican in character. But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them. … Thus, the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.
A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.
If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)
Admittedly, this “Article II view” was a more expansive view on why the ongoing Florida recount was suspect than the Supreme Court ultimately held, but clearly, at least three justices believed that the courts — even state courts, which usually receive great deference to interpreting state law — don’t have a right to tweak the express will of the state legislature about presidential electors.
To be sure, the equal-protection claims also present differently, so they aren’t a slam-dunk here, and the Rehnquist concurrence isn’t controlling precedent (two of the three justices who signed on to the opinion are no longer on the court), so it might not carry the day.
Three of the young lawyers on the Bush team advocating this view of the law in 2000 have received pretty notable promotions since that time, however, and three other guys likely to have a say have signaled their belief in exactly this interpretation, stating recently, “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”
It’s anyone’s guess how the Supreme Court would rule if it gets to that point, but when three current justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) have signaled they’re sympathetic to the basic legal argument, and three other justices (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were part of the team that advanced very similar legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, the president and his team must like their chances.
The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden
Pundits and some Trump supporters have engaged in navel-gazing and resigned themselves to the line of reasoning that “maybe Trump shouldn’t have down-talked absentee voting.” We know in addition to increased risk of fraud, however, voters who cast absentee ballots have historically had a significantly greater likelihood of being disenfranchised than in-person voters.
For Trump to push his supporters to vote in ways that were more likely to count isn’t irrational. It instead raises the question of why former Vice President Joe Biden wasn’t concerned with his voters being disenfranchised if they voted absentee, given the historical risks.
Both the potential for fraud and increased probability of disenfranchising voters sound intuitively like things we should fix, but the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t. They saw fit to keep the bar high to offset the risk of fraud and associated effects to public confidence in the election that unrestricted mail balloting would cause.
There’s a rational basis for that, and the entire saga has played out nationally. With the non-legislative changes, absentee voters were significantly less likely to be disenfranchised than before — indeed, Boockvar’s unilateral changes in Pennsylvania removed nearly every barrier the duly elected state legislature had put in place.
This created an environment where the constitutional guarantee of one person, one vote was tilted significantly in the direction of a voting modality (mail balloting versus in-person balloting). Not only was this ripe for greater abuse, but that tilting of the playing field disproportionately benefited the voters of one presidential candidate. Making this even more obvious are new revelations that show how the larger Democratic strongholds were equipped to quickly pre-sort potentially invalid ballots, and Democratic operatives were gearing up to capitalize on the eventual changes to the statutory pre-canvass period before Boockvar’s office even announced them.
What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election
For conservatives, an intellectual challenge now presents itself: If you were OK with the Supreme Court stopping the Florida recount in 2000, you need to prepare yourself to be comfortable with the same court invalidating the Pennsylvania electors. Indeed, you should want them to, whether or not there was underlying direct fraud sufficient enough to affect the outcome. Alternatively, you should start working on your tortuous rationale for why, on constitutional grounds, what was legitimate in 2000 is not legitimate in 2020.
Whether you’re persuaded by the equal protection reasoning in the Bush v. Gore holding or in the minority’s separate concurrence emphasizing the plenary powers of the Pennsylvania legislature under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, if the case makes it to the Supreme Court it won’t hinge on some threshold level of fraud that tipped the scales against Trump, nor will it be about the raw power of a conservative court to hand the election to Trump (which will certainly be the media narrative if it gets to that point). It will be, and always has been, about the rule of law.
Where the actual fraud becomes important — an actual measure of it, and whether it delivered an illegitimate win to Biden — is in how the Pennsylvania legislature, and potentially Congress, should react to the Court prohibiting the certification of the November election with respect to presidential electors. There is nothing wrong or abhorrent to our constitutional system if the elected representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania are required to weigh in and clean this up on behalf of their voters. They need to be prepared to make their case to their voters if the predominant media narrative remains that the fraud wasn’t significant enough to affect the election outcome in Pennsylvania.
Regardless of how the Pennsylvania case gets resolved, it won’t change the overall outcome on its own. The 20 electoral votes wouldn’t be enough to swing the election to Trump if existing media projections for Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan stay in Biden’s column. If any of those changes, whether through ongoing canvassing efforts or other simultaneous legal challenges — such as the president’s filing Wednesday in Michigan making similar constitutional claims — well, Katy, bar the door.
Our way of government is strong enough to endure this. The only way through is through.
For nearly twenty years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered an unusually inflammatory public speech Thursday night, starkly warning about the threats he contends religious believers face from advocates for gay and abortion rights, as well as public officials responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Speaking to a virtual conference of conservative lawyers, the George W. Bush appointee made no direct comment on the recent election, the political crisis relating to President Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat or litigation on the issue pending at the Supreme Court.
However, Alito didn’t hold back on other controversial subjects, even suggesting that the pressure Christians face surrounding their religious beliefs is akin to the strictures the U.S. placed on Germany and Japan after World War II.
“Is our country going to follow that course?” Alito asked. “For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It’s often just an excuse for bigotry and can’t be tolerated, even when there is no evidence that anybody has been harmed. … The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs.”
Alito argued that some recent Supreme Court decisions, including the landmark ruling upholding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, fueled intolerance to those who believe marriage should be limited to unions between one man and one woman.
“Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now, it’s considered bigotry,” he said.
Alito also seemed to minimize the significance of a refusal of a Colorado baker to produce a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The justice noted that the couple involved “was given a free cake by another bakery” and that the high-profile standoff prompted “celebrity chefs” to come to their defense.
Justices often include pointed, even barbed, language in their opinions. Indeed, Alito regularly does so, and many of his remarks Thursday night echoed similar comments he’s made in caustic dissents. Still, it is uncommon for a justice to weigh in on hot-button topics like abortion or gay rights in speaking appearances open to the press or public.
During his half-hour-long speech, Alito warned that not only is freedom of belief increasingly under threat, but freedom of expression is as well.
“One of the great challenges for the Supreme Court going forward will be to protect freedom of speech. Although that freedom is falling out of favor in some circles, we need to do whatever we can to prevent it from becoming a second-tier constitutional right,” he said.
While the conservative justice insisted he was not opining on the legal questions related to coronavirus lockdown orders and similar restrictions, he painted those moves as oppressive.
“The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty,” Alito said, insisting that such an observation was transparently true. “The Covid crisis has served as a sort of constitutional stress test and in doing so it has highlighted disturbing trends that were already in evidence before the pandemic struck.”
Alito also used his address to trash a brief Democratic senators filed last year in a gun rights case, warning the court that lawmakers might move to restructure the court if it continued to produce what the senators asserted were politically motivated rulings.
“It was an affront to the Constitution and the rule of law,” Alito said, paraphrasing remarks he made in court. “It is … wrong for anyone, including members of Congress, to try to influence our decisions by anything other than legal argumentation. That sort of thing has often happened in countries governed by power, not law.”
Alito did not make reference to Trump’s numerous public affronts to federal judges. In 2018, those relentless attacks prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to issue an unusual statement coming to the defense of the independence of the judiciary.
Many lawyers took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse Alito of hypocrisy for delivering a highly politically charged speech that was devoted in part to complaining about lawmakers casting the court as political.
“This speech is like I woke up from a vampire dream,” University of Baltimore law professor and former federal prosecutor Kim Wehle wrote. “Unscrupulously biased, political, and even angry. I can’t imagine why Alito did this publicly. Totally inappropriate and damaging to the Supreme Court.”
Alito also engaged in another regular lament from legal conservatives, complaining that law schools are hostile to those with right-of-center political views and others whose beliefs go against the majority viewpoint.
“Unfortunately, tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply in many law schools and in the broader academic community,” the justice said. “When I speak with recent law school graduates, what I hear over and over is that they face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy.”
Alito, who attended Princeton as an undergraduate and Yale for law school, used a century-old precedent related to a smallpox outbreak in Cambridge to take a not-particularly-veiled shot at a prominent Ivy League school he did not attend: Harvard.
“I am all in favor of preventing dangerous things from issuing out of Cambridge and infecting the rest of the country and the world. It would be good if what originates in Cambridge stays in Cambridge,” the justice joked.
Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.
Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this week that the country is headed toward “Covid hell.” Cases are rising as more people grow tired of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday. Colder weather is also driving people indoors, where the virus can spread more easily. A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, he told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Osterholm clarified his comments, saying “it was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it.”
“My only point was if we are going to keep making restrictions state-by-state, there is no compensation for the businesses that are being impacted,”he added. “What we’re doing right now is not working.”
A Biden transition official told NBC News that a shutdown “is not in line with the president-elect’s thinking.”
Osterholm was appointed to Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board” on Monday. The panel of advisors is co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University. Other task force members include Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard, and Dr. Rick Bright, the vaccine expert and whistleblower who resigned his post with the Trump administration last month.
A representative for Biden did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Osterholm on Wednesday referenced an August op-ed he wrote with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.
“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,”they wrote in The New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
On Wednesday, Osterholm said such a lockdown would help the country bring the virus under control, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.” Epidemiologists have repeatedly pointed to New Zealand, Australia and parts of Asia that have brought the number of daily new cases to under 10 as an example of how to contain the virus.
“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,”he said Wednesday.
On the current trajectory, Osterholm said the U.S. is headed for dark days before a vaccine becomes available. He said health-care systems across the country are already overwhelmed in places such as El Paso, Texas, where local officials have already closed businesses and the federal government is sending resources to handle a surge in deaths caused by Covid-19.
Osterholm said the country needs leadership. The president-elect is up to the task of providing that leadership, Osterholm said, adding that it could also come from local and state officials or those in the medical community. He referenced the fireside chats broadcast over radio during former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms, through which Roosevelt addressed the country on issues ranging from the Great Depression to World War II.
“People don’t want to hear that El Paso isn’t an isolated event. El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm,” he said. “I think that the message is: How do we get through this? We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, ‘This is what in the hell is going to happen.’”
The Trump Campaign scored another win against the lawless Left on Thursday. A Pennsylvania judge ruled that crooked Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar lacked the statutory authority to override election law.
A Pennsylvania judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign Thursday, ordering that the state may not count ballots where the voters needed to provide proof of identification and failed to do so by Nov. 9.
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State law said that voters have until six days after the election — this year that was Nov. 9 — to cure problems regarding a lack of proof of identification. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be accepted three days after Election Day, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar submitted guidance that said proof of identification could be provided up until Nov. 12, which is six days from the ballot acceptance deadline. That guidance was issued two days before Election Day.
“[T]he Court concludes that Respondent Kathy Boockvar, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Commonwealth, lacked statutory authority to issue the November 1, 2020, guidance to Respondents County Boards of Elections insofar as that guidance purported to change the deadline … for certain electors to verify proof of identification,” Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt said in a court order.
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.
The late mentor of Raphael Warnock, pastor and one of Georgia’s Democratic candidates for US Senate, had advocated for the “destruction of everything white” and demonized white Christians as “satanic.”
James Hal Cone, who passed away in 2018, was a pastor, professor, and passionate defender of “black liberation theology,” which he outlined in his 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power. Warnock has praised Cone as a “poignant and powerful voice”of high “spiritual magnitude.”
Cone has a Wikipedia page that describes his black liberation theology:
His message was that Black Power, defined as black people asserting the humanity that white supremacy denied, was the gospel in America. Jesus came to liberate the oppressed, advocating the same thing as Black Power. He argued that white American churches preached a gospel based on white supremacy, antithetical to the gospel of Jesus. Cone’s work was influential from the time of the book’s publication, and his work remains influential today. His work has been both used and critiqued inside and outside the African-American theological community.
The Washington Free Beacon dug up the following quotes from Black Theology and Black Power:
“The white God is an idol created by racists, and we blacks must perform the iconoclastic task of smashing false idols. White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity.”
“There will be no peace in America until white people begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’”
“If there is one brutal fact that the centuries of white oppression have taught blacks, it is that whites are incapable of making any valid judgements about human existence. The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods.”
“With the assurance that God is on our side, we can begin to make ready for the inevitable—the decisive encounter between white and black existence. White appeals to ‘wait and talk it over’ are irrelevant when children are dying and men and women are being tortured. We will not let whitey cool this one with his pious love ethic but will seek to enhance our hostility, bringing it to its full manifestation.”
“We have reached our limit of tolerance, and if it means death with dignity, or life with humiliation, we choose the former. And if that is the choice, we will take out some honkies with us.”
The Free Beacon also notes that Raphael Warnock cited Cone’s book over a dozen times in his 2013 book titled The Divided Mind of the Black Church.
Warnock is also being questioned for his relationship to Jeremiah Wright, who was Barack Obama’s former pastor in Chicago and a controversial figure for past comments and a 2008 speech titled “God Damn America.”
Despite being a first-time candidate for office, Warnock is heading for a January runoff against sitting senator Kelly Loeffler, as neither obtained 50 percent of the vote on November 3.
A Pennsylvania judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign on Thursday, ordering that the state may not count ballots where voters did not provide proof of identification before Nov. 9. Existing Pennsylvania law states that voters have up to six days after the election to cure issues with a ballot, such as a lack of identification. Election Day was Nov. 3 this year, meaning that voters had until Nov. 9 to correct their ballots.
In September, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be accepted three days after Election Day. The issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and following a 4-4 tie, Pennsylvania was permitted to accept ballots three days after Election Day.
Two days before Election Day, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar (D), who oversees elections in the state, issued a guidance that proof of ID could be provided up until Nov. 12 to cure ballots. President Trump’s legal team argued that Boockvar had no power to change the date. The ballots received from Nov. 10 through Nov. 12 were segregated until there was a ruling to determine if they would be counted or not.
On Thursday, Pennsylvania Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt ruled that Boockvar “lacked statutory authority” to enable an extension period to cure ballots.
“[T]he Court concludes that Respondent Kathy Boockvar, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Commonwealth, lacked statutory authority to issue the November 1, 2020, guidance to Respondents County Boards of Elections insofar as that guidance purported to change the deadline … for certain electors to verify proof of identification,” Leavitt said in a court order.
“Accordingly, the court hereby orders the respondents County Board of Elections are enjoined from counting any ballots that have been segregated pursuant to Paragraph 1 of this court’s order dated November 5, 2020, granting a special injunction,” Leavitt wrote.
“None of the votes affected by the ruling had yet been included in the state’s official tally,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. No indication was given on how many ballots were affected by Judge Leavitt’s ruling.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden currently holds a 54,325-vote lead over President Trump in Pennsylvania.
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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.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden promised unity in a speech Saturday night following the corporate media’s projections that he would win the presidential election.
“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” Biden said. “It’s time for Americans to unite. And to heal.”
While the former vice president mounted the stage on the East Coast to declare his victory and pledge to “work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did,” that same night, rioters on the opposite coast were parading around Portland, Oregon destroying things to demonstrate their opposition to his leadership.
Earlier in the week, including on Election Night, Portland descended back into its all-too-familiar anarchical state seen over the summer. Rioters burned an American flag, threw Molotov cocktails and glass bottles, vandalized local businesses, and continued to raise a commotion as they had done following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The destructive group, highly suspected of being Antifa, pushed Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to call in the state’s National Guard after she delayed the decision for at least six months while violence plagued the city. The violence, however, was not limited to Election Day or the few days that followed.
Even after the media projected that Biden was the winner of the presidential election on Saturday, Antifa members in Portland led a “violent anti-Joe Biden protest” on Sunday during which they attacked the Multnomah County Democrats building, smashing windows and spraying it with graffiti promoting anarchy and Black Lives Matter.
Even the Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a progressive Democrat who was complicit as violent mobs lit things on fire for months, tried to soothe the tension in Portland with words, saying “We’re going to need to come together as never before to address short-term issues and the long-term changes and investments needed to rebuild our economy, rebuild confidence in law enforcement and restore hope for our future.”
The mayor, however, was rejected by the rioters, who repeatedly protested outside of his apartment building and even organized a sit-in, demanding that he “reduce the Portland Police Bureau budget, commit to never voting for police budget increases again, and resign.” Wheeler’s challenger in the Portland mayoral election was Antifa advocate Sarah Iannarone, who netted nearly half of Portland citizens’ votes.
Despite some Democrats’ high hopes that unity could be achieved once the bad orange man left office, it is clear that, as many conservatives tried to warn earlier in the year, the mob is insatiable. The people who are arrested for rioting and destroying property in Portland only to be released and start the process all over again don’t care about Biden or the Democrats’ political chatter.
They desire anarchy. They want revenge. They long for chaos. And they won’t stop on their own.
Trump’s calls for law and order were criticized and laughed at by the media and liberals, but he was right. Unless someone steps up to denounce and actively counteract the chaos, it will prevail.
Do Biden’s Promises Extend to Antifa?
Biden claims he wants peace, unity, and healing, but so far, he has only loosely condemned the violence seen in U.S. cities. As far as Antifa in Portland goes, Biden has mostly ignored the issue, perhaps hoping that it would fizzle out on its own. But it’s not going away.
The question now is will Biden, who claims he’ll work hard for those who don’t support him, continue to ignore the destruction and erosion caused by Antifa in Portland, or will he try to gather them all around the fires they start outside of the Portland Police Bureau to sing Kumbaya and proclaim that racism is cured?
Either way, Portland will reject him, just as they rejected Wheeler. Nothing is good enough for them. They may have hated Trump, but they hate Biden just as much. And their cries of “F— Trump, F— Biden, death to America! We want something better than this trash, and we’re going to take it” will continue.
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
One of the big changes we should expect under a Joe Biden administration is an explosion of illegal immigration and a renewed crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. The reason for this is simple: the immigration and border policies the Trump administration has put into place over the past four years have succeeded in driving down illegal immigration, and Biden has promised to reverse nearly all of them.
Throughout the campaign, Biden was forthright about his plans to dismantle Trump’s immigration and border security agenda. His team is now planning to carry out those plans, including a 100-day moratorium on deportations, directives to curtail arrests of illegal immigrants, and a full restoration of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
These actions will almost certainly trigger a wave of illegal immigration up and down the southwest border. Why? Because Trump’s policies helped bring illegal immigration under control. Undoing them will be interpreted, rightly, as an invitation to would-be migrants in Mexico and Central America, who will respond accordingly, especially as those countries continue to suffer from worsening conditions under the pandemic.
Although pandemic restrictions and border security policies in the United States and Mexico helped decrease the number of apprehensions at the southwest border over the summer and fall, illegal immigration was steadily declining long before the outbreak, largely because of programs and policies implemented by the Trump administration in response to a dramatic rise in illegal border crossings and apprehensions in 2019.
The Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “remain in Mexico” program, which requires most asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard by a U.S. immigration judge, has been one of the most prominent—and controversial—Trump administration policies aimed at curbing illegal immigration. In cooperation with the Mexican government, it has also been successful at deterring illegal immigration and reducing specious asylum claims.
Since the program’s inception in late 2018, some 67,000 people have been returned to Mexico after having been caught crossing the border illegally. Many of these migrants have opted to return to their countries of origin, citing dangerous conditions in Mexico and the likelihood they will lose their asylum cases in court. Biden has said he will end the program.
Another major action taken by the Trump administration was the termination of the Flores Decree, a 1997 court decision that prevented U.S. officials from detaining migrant families and unaccompanied minors for more than 20 days. Because Flores all but guaranteed that an adult who crossed the border with a child would, upon claiming asylum, be quickly released into the United States, it created a powerful incentive for families to cross the border illegally and make questionable asylum claims.
It also fueled a lucrative and exploitative human smuggling industry stretching from Central America to the Rio Grande. Flores meant children were used as “passports” into the United States—not just by families but also by unscrupulous smugglers and cartels that profit handsomely from illegal immigration. U.S. officials discovered thousands of “fake families” at the border in recent years, with adults posing as parents of unrelated children, and even cases where children were “recycled,” crossing the border multiple times with unrelated adults.
By ending Flores, the Trump administration was able to more or less end this practice, since it removed the promise of a quick release if you had a child with you and claimed asylum. Biden has said he will effectively reinstate Flores, releasing asylum-seekers who arrive with children before their court dates and funding various case-management programs in hopes that they don’t simply disappear into the immigration underground once they are released.
Biden has also said he will restore DACA, the Obama-era program that allowed illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors a reprieve from deportation and renewable, two-year work permits. The promise of minors being allowed to stay in the United States helped fuel a surge of unaccompanied children and teenagers to the border beginning in 2014, with smugglers promising parents that they and their children would be granted “permits” to remain in the United States.
It didn’t matter that DACA didn’t actually apply to these minors. Unscrupulous smugglers, known as “coyotes,” sold families on the line to pocket their passage fees, with cartels taking their cut at the Rio Grande.
The Trump administration announced it was ending DACA in 2017, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration hadn’t followed the proper procedures for ending the program, leaving it for the time being in administrative limbo. Even so, as the case has been wending its way through the courts the past few years, the message has gotten back to sending communities in Mexico and Central America that unaccompanied minors don’t have a guaranteed way to stay in the United States through DACA. Once Biden restores it, they will.
Another Border Crisis Is Already Brewing
All of these changes promised by the Biden administration will not go unnoticed by would-be migrants seeking entrance to the United States, or by the smugglers and cartels who profit off getting them here. Messaging and sometimes even minor U.S. policy changes have a ripple effect on the migration pipeline that runs from South Texas all the way to Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa.
What’s more, Biden need not have the cooperation of Congress to do these things. Indeed, Trump didn’t have congressional support for most of his immigration and border policies, and neither did President Obama. Most Americans don’t realize it, but U.S. immigration law gives wide latitude to executive branch agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to create and implement policies at the border, from the detention and processing of migrants caught crossing illegally to the procedures and requirements for asylum adjudication.
That’s partly by design: Congress has long abdicated its responsibility for immigration, instead delegating authority and policy-making to an ever-growing executive bureaucracy.
That means every time the White House changes hands, U.S. immigration and border policy goes through a massive upheaval. All along, Biden has been candid about his plans for the border, and if he follows through on them—like Trump, mostly via executive order—it will trigger a wave of migration from Central America and Mexico that U.S. border officials will be largely powerless to stop.
To suppose otherwise is not only to ignore recent history, but to assume that the people of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have no agency. Already in late September, at least one large caravan was reportedly forming in Honduras, headed for Mexico and the U.S. border.
Others will follow under a Biden administration, their ranks filled with people drawn by the resurrection of Obama-era policies that will grant them, by various mechanisms, entry to the United States. They will be making a rational and reasonably informed choice. And on understanding just how drastically U.S. immigration policy can shift with a presidential election, and how much easier it will be to get in under Biden, they won’t be wrong.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
Georgia’s on the mind this fall as both Senate races head to winter run-offs. The contests pit Republican incumbent Sen. David Perdue against Democrat Jon Ossoff, and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was nominated to fill a vacant seat just last year, against Raphael Warnock.
At first glance, the two Democrats appear to be dream candidates. In Ossoff, team blue has a young man with a Justin Trudeau look and an economics education from London running against an older incumbent. In Warnock, they have a black Baptist minister who literally leads Martin Luther King Jr’s old church running against a never-elected incumbent accused of insider trading.
Historically, Georgian Democrats have toed a more conservative line. A Georgian congressman was a co-founder of the moderate Blue Dog Democrats, for example, and the last Democratic senator to represent the state was Zell Miller, who famously growled “nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators” in a fiery Republican National Convention speech endorsing George W. Bush over John Kerry.
But southern Democrats don’t run quite like they used to. Ossoff first came onto the scene in a special election in 2017 with a run for Congress, raising more than 95 percent from out-of-state donors, mainly Californians and New Yorkers. The year after, Stacey Abrams launched her ridiculous, never-conceded 2018 run for governor, landing frequent appearances on “The View” and other popular shows despite her failure.
Since these races, the major contests in the changing state have routinely become marquee-topping, left-wing, Hollywood and New York-funded events, thus far ending in failure, not unlike Texas’s blue hopes. In 2017, for example, despite running “the most expensive House contest in U.S. history,” Ossoff lost. Now he’s back with the same playbook, and in October he raised more than 87 percent of his funds from out of state, besting Warnock’s nearly 80 percent. On Monday, both candidates attended their first fundraiser of the run-off — with Silicon Valley elites in a San Francisco restaurant.
So what about these two Democrats attracts so much progressive money while Ossoff, for one, denies support for Green New Deal, defunding police, Medicare for All, and packing the Supreme Court? Check out Ossoff’s Instagram account for a starter, where he crows about his wife’s testimony against the Georgie heartbeat bill that protects babies with a beating heart. Then dig into his actual positions.
He’s told Georgians he supports the Paris Climate Accord, yes, but he also supports “historic infrastructure plan that includes massive investments in clean energy, energy efficiency, and environmental protection.” “A huge infrastructure plan, you say?” the left-wing New Republic joked. “One that reduces emissions while also providing well-paying jobs? That sounds mighty familiar.”
Similarly, he stands against defunding police while saying he’d “take a look” at the funding for police departments. He supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” including amnesty. He doesn’t like gun rights much either. Sounds right by California.
So how about Warnock? He’s carefully crafted himself after Martin Luther King Jr., attending the same college and now leading the same church. Like King, he’s an activist and a preacher, but unlike King, his sit-in arrest was over Obamacare — and he believes abortion “is consistent with” the Bible.
Warnock also loves Rev. Jeremiah Wright, calling his “God damn America” speech “a very fine sermon.” As recently as the ’90s, the New York City church Warnock pastored at chanted Fidel Castro’s name in jubilation, welcoming a dictator who closed churches, silenced priests, called Catholics “social scum” and even banned Christmas. He stayed with the church, actually rising in its ranks.
While he claims he is against defunding the police, Warnock’s said they have “a gangsta and thug mentality” and that it’s “often those who are sworn to protect cause more trouble.” And then his senior adviser thinks defunding “will actually make us safer.” While he’s to the left of Ossoff on packing the Supreme Court, he sure seems to share Ossof’s hope he beats the president’s supporters so badly they “never show [their] face in public again.”
Democrats face an uphill battle in both Senate races, with anti-Trump turnout non-existent in early January, but both races are still very competitive. “That Jon Ossoff’s message seems moderate,” Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote in 2017, “is a sign of how far Democrats have shifted.” If that message can work in the strange, only-recently conservative state of Georgia, will serve as an important signal to national Democrats — and could decide control of the Senate.
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on Twitter.
A lawsuit filed Nov. 8 in Michigan alleges that Detroit, Mich. elections officials oversaw and openly encouraged election fraud totaling many “tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, plus other illegal election-tampering.
The complaint filed by an in-state conservative nonprofit legal group alleges numerous instances of illegal and suspicious activity in the Democrat stronghold encompassing Detroit, Wayne County. President Trump’s legal team has filed a separate lawsuit alleging additional voting crimes and irregularities in the county.
The current results of the presidential race in Michigan suggest an approximately 146,000-vote gap between President Trump and Joe Biden, and an 84,000-vote gap between U.S. Senate candidates Gary Peters (D) and John James (R). The Associated Press and the state’s Democrat officials say Biden has won the state’s electoral votes and that Trump’s claims of fraud are insulting and inaccurate.
Wayne County is estimated to have been the site of some 850,000 votes this year. If this lawsuit is accurate, however, a massive portion of these votes is fraudulent.
The Great Lakes Justice Center complaint provides “eyewitness accounts and direct evidence” that “approximately 40,000” unsecured, irregular ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates at Detroit’s only vote-counting location, TCF Center, in the wee hours of the Nov. 4 morning during a shift change in election workers. Eyewitnesses signed affidavits saying that every one of this group of 40,000 ballots they saw “was counted orally and attributed only to Democratic candidates,” specifically Joe Biden.
Other eyewitnesses signed affidavits under penalty of perjury stating they saw multiple other piles of ballots, together additionally numbering in the tens of thousands, that were counted despite violating election law, sometimes at the direction of local election officials. This allegedly happened both before the election, during early voting, and during the election and subsequent vote count.
“After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed,” the complaint says. It also alleges:
“Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.”
Poll challenger Daniel Gustafson signed an affidavit stating he “witnessed tens of thousands of ballots being delivered to the TCF Center that were not in any approved, sealed, or tamper-proof container…Large quantities of ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in what appeared to be mail bins with open tops. Contrary to law, these ballot bins and containers did not have lids, were not sealed, and did not have the capability of having a metal seal.”
The Federalist reported earlier this week on one affidavit filed in this complaint, from former Michigan Assistant Attorney General Zachary Larsen, but there are many, many more, and the details are scandalous.
The First Big Batch of 40,000 Suspicious Votes
An affidavit signed by poll challenger Andrew Sitto tells more about the 40,000 ballots he says he saw brought in: “At approximately 4:00 a.m. on November 4, 2020, tens of thousands of ballots were suddenly brought into the counting room through the back door…by vehicles with out-of-state license plates (Exhibit C). It was observed that all of these new ballots were cast for Joe Biden,” summarizes the complaint.
Sitto’s affidavit expands on what he saw while observing the vote-counting process from election night, Nov. 3, overnight into the early morning of Nov. 4. He says by 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, right before a 5 a.m. shift change between poll watchers, one of two men in charge of the vote counting “got on the microphone and stated that another shipment of absentee ballots would be arriving and would have to be counted.”
“At approximately 4:30 a.m., tens of thousands of ballots were brought in and placed on eight long tables. Unlike the other ballots, these boxes were brought in from the rear of the room. The same procedure was performed on the ballots that arrived at approximately 4:30 a.m., but I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” his affidavit states. “While counting these new ballots, I heard counters say at least five or six times that all five or six ballots were for Joe Biden. All ballots sampled that I heard and observed were for Joe Biden.”
There Was a Second Big Dump of Suspicious Ballots
The lawsuit alleges the 40,000 vote dump is not the only suspicious one observed on Nov. 4 in Detroit. Poll challenger Robert Cushman attested that on Nov. 4, 2020 at approximately 9 p.m., he “was surprised to see numerous new boxes of ballots arrive at the TCF Center in the evening… I estimate these boxes contained several thousand new ballots when they appeared.” He noticed that none of the names on these new ballots were of registered voters, which poll workers were supposed to verify.
“I saw the computer operators at several counting boards manually adding the names and addresses of these thousands of ballots to the QVF system,” his affidavit states. “When I asked what the possible justification was to counting ballots from unknown, unverified ‘persons,’ I was told by election supervisors that the Wayne County Clerk’s Office had ‘checked them out.’” Subsequently, Cushman challenged the entire process encompassing these “thousands of ballots.”
Election workers are supposed to match the name on each ballot with a registered voter on the state’s official lists. Instead, Cushman says, the Wayne County Clerk’s officers told poll workers to add all the names on the ballots from these boxes to the state’s list, giving them all a false birth date of January 1, 1900.
Election rules also say absentee voters are supposed to be added to the state’s registered voter lists before 9 p.m. on Nov. 3, election day. All of the voters for these ballots were added after this deadline, at the direction of local election officials, Cushman says.
“None of the names of these new ballots corresponded with any registered voter,” the complaint says.
Whistleblower: Election Officials Broke the Law Big-Time
One of the affidavits is signed by a Detroit Elections Department worker whose identity is concealed in the court documents under whistleblower protections. A Great Lakes Justice Center attorney told The Federalist she snuck out yellow sticky notes during ballot processing to be able to stay and observe some of the illegal activities alleged in her affidavit. The affidavit alleges numerous illegal activities conducted by Wayne County election officials, affecting thousands if not tens of thousands of votes atop all those outlined above.
The whistleblower says that during her work processing early votes, “I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.” If true, this is fraud and election tampering.
The same sort of fraud, she alleges, happened on Nov. 4. That day, she says, “I was instructed to improperly pre-date the absentee ballots receive date that were not in the QVF [the state’s registered voter list] as if they had been received on or before November 3, 2020. I was told to alter teh [sic] information in the QVF to falsely show that the absentee ballots had been received in time to be valid. I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots.”
Throughout her daily elections work in September through November 2020, the whistleblower says, “I directly observed, on a daily basis, City of Detroit election workers and employees coaching and trying to coach voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party.” This is also illegal. “I witnessed these workers and employees encouraging voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. I witnessed these election workers and employees going over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.”
The whistleblower also says Detroit election officials actively avoided verifying voters’ identities: “During the last two weeks while working at this satellite location, I was specifically instructed by my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo I.D. when a person was trying to vote.”
The whistleblower also alleges encouraged voter fraud through the possibility of double voting: “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in-person, but they had already applied for an absentee ballot. These people were allowed to vote in-person and were not required to return the mailed absentee ballot or sign an affidavit that the voter lost the mailed absentee ballot.”
The suit names the City of Detroit, the Detroit Election Commission, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, and the Wayne County Board of Canvassers as defendants. The Democratic Party has made a motion to join the lawsuit as defendants, meaning it is volunteering to be also sued for these alleged crimes.
Media outlets have called the presidency for Joe Biden, but by all accounts his win was much narrower than many Democrats expected, and Democrats down ticket performed much worse than expected, meaning that Democrats did not get the clean sweep on Election Day they hoped.
The “split decision” thus rendered by the American people on Election Day has led to an already spectacular amount of infighting among Democrats who are eager to point fingers for the party’s failure. In particular, the party’s liberal and more moderate wings have been particularly eager to point fingers at the other camp, with moderates aggressively blaming progressive policies like “defund the police” for their losses.
Massachusetts Sen. and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D), meanwhile, is confident that Biden’s expected win is a victory for “the most progressive economic and racial justice platform of any general election nominee ever,” as she wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
As for the fact that the American people likely elected a Republican Senate and a larger number of Republican congressmen and therefore perhaps were not quite as keen on the most progressive platform ever? Warren argues that Biden should ignore that fact, saying, “We need to deliver [on progressive promises], even as Republican leaders can’t acknowledge the election outcome and plan to grind Congress to a halt.”
The fact that Republicans won enough elections in 2020 to grind Biden’s agenda to a halt is, apparently, an “election outcome” that Warren isn’t interested in acknowledging.
Instead, she argues that “there are lots of big changes that a Biden-Harris administration can achieve through executive orders and agency action on day one.” Among other things Warren thinks Biden should do without Congress, Warren argues that Biden should:
Cancel “billions of dollars” in student loan debt
Bypass patents for companies that have expended millions of dollars in research funds to develop life-saving drugs
Raise the minimum wage for all federal contractors to $15 an hour
Establish a “Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force” to “review racial disparities in pandemic funding.”
Declare the the climate crisis a national emergency
Warren concludes, “Even so, we know that Washington insiders and their establishment allies are ready to declare that unity and consensus mean turning over the governing keys to giant corporations and their lobbyists — the exact opposite of what voters want.”
Warren does not state who these people are who are arguing this, because they do not exist. Nevertheless, having demolished this straw man, Warren concludes, “Instead of allowing insiders to hijack the message sent by voters in both parties, we should listen to those voters and deliver real solutions to the problems we face.”
The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.
A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.
I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.
Unity Is a Joke
These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.
They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”
In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniters, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naive.
While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.
Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.
For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.
Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War
This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.
When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches.
That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.
For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.
For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.
Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way
That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds the other hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.
So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.
Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Richard Drew
Trending
Here are the times Democrats have conceded a presidential election with grace and dignity:
OK, now on to my column.
I hope someone is recording the media’s demands that Trump supporters ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTION! inasmuch as the Democrats refuse to accept the results of any presidential election they lose, unless it’s a landslide, and sometimes even then.
After George W. Bush won the 2000 election — despite the media depressing Bush turnout in Florida by calling the state for Gore when polls were still open in the conservative panhandle — Gore contested the election until Dec. 13, the day after the Supreme Court called off the endless recounts (in only certain Florida counties) demanded by Gore.
The night of the court’s ruling, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who’d argued one of Gore’s cases before the court, and Ed Rendell, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went on TV and said it was time for Gore to concede.
Both were immediately attacked by their fellow Democrats and forced to retract their statements. Gore’s deputy campaign manager, Mark Fabiani, for example, told The New York Times that Rendell “seems to be more interested in getting his mug on TV than in loyalty.”
The next day, Gore conceded, telling his supporters he had “congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States,” adding, “while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”
But that still wasn’t the end of it! Weeks later, the Congressional Black Caucus tried to prevent congressional certification of the Electoral College for Bush, raising objection after objection on the House floor.
Over the course of the next year, the Florida ballots were painstakingly recounted by an independent investigative firm at a cost of nearly a million dollars, paid for by the same media outlets currently telling you to shut up and accept the results — including The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and the Associated Press, along with several others.
The year-long, million-dollar recount led to this shocking conclusion: Bush still won. As the Times put it, contrary to the claims of Gore partisans, “the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore.”
And yet, to this day, Democrats claim Bush was “selected, not elected,” as so wittily put by Hillary Clinton.
Hillary was still harping on Bush’s stolen election when she ran for president in the 2008 cycle. At a 2007 primary presidential debate, she delighted the Democratic audience by remarking, “Well, I think it is a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. (APPLAUSE) I actually thought somebody else was elected in that election, but … (APPLAUSE).”
At a subsequent primary debate in 2008, Hillary said that she and President Clinton had been making great progress “until, unfortunately, the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George Bush.”
In 2006, Michael Kinsley claimed in The New York Times that the 2000 election was “actually stolen.”
And so on.
When Bush was reelected in 2004, Democrats again refused to accept the results of the election, and again attempted to block Congress’ counting of electoral votes, this time with the connivance of Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Their smoking gun? The election results in Ohio didn’t match the exit polls! If that’s not enough proof for you, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be, the voting machines were manufactured by Diebold, and Diebold’s CEO was a Bush supporter. Yes, apparently, the voting machines in Ohio were rigged to flip votes from Kerry to Bush.
This crackpot theory was pushed assiduously by Vanity Fair (Michael Shnayerson in the April 2004 issue, and Christopher Hitchens in the March 2005 issue), Rolling Stone magazine (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., June 15, 2006), and in books: John Conyers’ “What Went Wrong in Ohio” — introduction by Gore Vidal — and “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?” by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss. (You’ll have to read it to find out!)
I haven’t even mentioned the craziest of the Democrat media complex’s attacks on the results of an election: Reagan’s 489-49 electoral landslide against Jimmy Carter in 1980. (Stay tuned!)
Election results, according to Democrats:
— 1960: Kennedy wins a razor-thin victory after a surprisingly high turnout of dead voters in Texas and Illinois — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 1964: Landslide election for Lyndon Johnson — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 1968: Nixon won with his racist (and mythical) “Southern strategy.”
— 1972: Nixon landslide — no provable cheating.
— 1976: Carter won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 1980: Reagan won by traitorously colluding with Iran to prevent the release of American hostages before the election!
— 1984: Reagan landslide — no provable cheating.
— 1988: Bush 41 won in a landslide because of his racist Willie Horton ads.
— 1992: Clinton won with 43% of the vote — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 1996: Clinton won with 49% of the vote — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 2000: Bush 43 was “selected, not elected” after the Supreme Court stole it for him.
— 2004: Bush won because of Diebold hacking the voting machines in Ohio.
— 2008: Obama won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 2012: Obama won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!
— 2016: Trump won after colluding with Russia to persuade them to purchase $200,000 in Facebook ads.
If that’s how we’re supposed to “accept the results of the election,” then WOW — game on!
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.
Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a victory speech Saturday night calling for national unity, insisting the country to move past partisan divides to new heights.
“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,”Biden said celebrating his media-declared victory. “It’s time for Americans to unite. And to heal.”
True to form, however, Biden cast no blame on the loudest voices within his own party or the Trump-deranged media vilifying the president and his supporters as white supremacist enemies of the state at every turn. In truth, Democrats want Trump-supporting Republicans to heel, not heal, while punishing those billed as “complicit” in the president’s supposedly authoritarian regime cutting taxes and opposing Democrats’ draconian lockdowns.
“You can’t heal or reform the GOP who are now an extremist party,” wrote New York Times writer Wajahat Ali, the same columnist who mocked Trump supporters as ignorant rubes on CNN earlier this year. “They have to be broken, burned down and rebuilt. When Biden is in power, treat them like the active threats to democracy they are. If those who committed crimes aren’t punished, then they will be more emboldened.”
The usual culprits concurred, offering their own remedies to rooting out Trumpism, which was supported by more than 71 million Americans at the ballot box this year. New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first to promote the idea of creating Soviet-style dissident lists to harass heretic Trump supporters.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?”Ocasio-Cortez pondered on Twitter.
The socialist congresswoman proceeded to mock the response from those she wished to punish.
“Lol a the ‘party of personal responsibility’ being upset at the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years,”she wrote.
Moments later, former Pete Buttigieg staffer Hari Sevugan responded to the congresswoman’s request touting the launch of the “Trump Accountability Project,” creating the lists in question “to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.”
Sevugan has since threatened potential future publishers and employers of ex-administration officials who dare make contracts with those who supported the president.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin joined the chorus, demanding retribution against those demanding Trump have his day in court and every vote be counted before certifying the results of the election.
Labor Secretary Robert Reich had already recommended creating a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to put Trump backers on trial in October.
The calls for punishment of Trump supporters comprise just the latest episode in the nation’s downward spiral after the left and their allies in the corporate media spent years liberalizing definitions of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and homophobia to cast their opponents as contemptuous villains in the way of their utopian empire featuring actual racism. Biden has been no exception by calling Trump America’s first racist president, and neither has his running mate California Sen. Kamala Harris, who ushered donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund bailing out Minneapolis rioters who burned down the city in the name of social justice.
The former vice president is not serious about national unity. If he were, he would have forcefully condemned calls within his own party to prosecute supporters of his November opponent. Biden cannot unify a country while still ignoring the loudest voices in it calling to punish political opponents for differences of political opinion.
Meanwhile, nothing about this president suggests he’s a white supremacist operating as a covert Klansmen in the Oval Office for the sole purpose of oppressing minorities. By the end of his first and potentially only term in the White House, Trump has probably condemned white supremacy more than any other president in front of a hostile media repeating this same question over and over. Whenever the media ask Trump to denounce white supremacy, it’s never a question, and it’s never presented in good faith. It’s always an accusation, an exhausting one at that.
A look at the exit polls, on the other hand, shows the media’s purported white supremacist president made considerable gains among Asian, black, and Hispanic voters while losing major ground among whites. That means there’s only one party that got more white this election, and it wasn’t the Republican Party.
In a concrete bid to “unify,” Biden’s transition team has floated the possibility of appointing Republicans to cabinet-level posts. Among the names touted, however, include Republicans who publicly engaged in the same attacks by the radical left on Trump and his supporters.
Elevating this kind of Republican is just as divisive, such as John Kasich who, while on a crusade for partisan unity has underhandedly fomented the very divisions the former governor claims to despise by endorsing impeachment and warning that Trump was rotting America’s “soul.” If Biden were serious about forming a bipartisan cabinet, then the media-declared president-elect would opt to include actual Republicans who espouse conservative ideas rather than token GOPers to claim unity.
Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Voter fraud was allegedly committed in Nevada during the early voting period, according to a Clark County poll worker who told Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” what she witnessed in an exclusive interview Tuesday night.
The whistleblower, whose identity was hidden and whose voice was modified at her request, told host Laura Ingraham that she noticed white envelopes being passed around and ripped open near a Biden-Harris van while on a walk during her lunch break. The envelope handlers then leaned against the side of the van in order to mark the papers, which she recognized as ballots.
“As I got closer, I thought, ‘Those are ballots,’” she said. “I walked by four or five times. On the next time I walked by, they were putting them in the envelopes. They were putting them in a white and pink envelope.”
After the worker realized the irregularity, she claimed a “human wall” was formed to obstruct the view of anyone looking on. The worker told Ingraham that she was scared by this. The worker asserted she did not intervene because she and the other workers were not authorized to speak with anybody outside the polling center.
The same worker has released a sworn affidavit to the Trump campaign disclosing what she claimed to have witnessed. The affidavit, which has been submitted to the Justice Department, also claims voters were allowed to cast ballots without valid identification.
Last week, state officials in Nevada denied any evidence of voter fraud and Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford referred to the Trump campaign’s legal efforts as “garbage.”
“A sworn declaration from an eyewitness is the literal definition of evidence,” a Trump campaign attorney said in a statement. “Those on the left and in other quarters that have been screaming that there’s no evidence will need new talkers and most importantly, will have to now focus on the legitimate issues that have been raised. ”
Destroyed houses are seen in the recently attacked village of Aldeia da Paz outside Macomia in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique on Aug. 24, 2019. On Aug. 1, 2019, the inhabitants of Aldeia da Paz joined the long list of victims of a faceless Islamist group that has been sowing death and terror for nearly two years in the north of the country. | AFP via Getty Images/MARCO LONGARI
Suspected Islamic State-aligned militants beheaded dozens of people and abducted others in weekend raids in the southern African country of Mozambique, according to state media. Bernardino Rafael, who commands Mozambique’s police force, told media during a Monday briefing that extremists carried out attacks on several villages in the Miudumbe and Macomia districts of the Cabo Delgado province. With the beheading of over 50 people, Rafael said the terrorists also abducted women and children as well as burned down homes.
“They burned the houses then went after the population who had fled to the woods and started with their macabre actions,” Rafael said, according to Al-Jazeera.
Witnesses of the attack over the weekend told local media that the perpetrators herded residents onto a local soccer field in Mautide, where they were killed. According to the BBC, the privately-owned Pinnacle News reported that villages in Mautide who tried to run were taken to the field and chopped to pieces.
“Police learned of the massacre committed by the insurgents through reports of people who found corpses in the woods,” an unnamed officer in the neighboring Mueda district was quoted as saying, according to Al-Jazeera.
“It was possible to count 20 bodies spread over an area of about 500 meters (1,640 feet). These were young people who were at an initiation rite ceremony accompanied by their advisers.”
One aid worker told the outlet that body parts of victims had been sent to their families for burial on Tuesday.
According to the BBC, sources told the state-run Mozambique News Agency that another group of attackers raided Nanjaba village on Friday night while chanting “Allahu akbar,” an Arabic phrase meaning “Allah is the greatest.”
Along with the destruction of homes, militants were said to have beheaded two people and abducted several women.
The oil-rich Cabo Delgado province, a coastal region on the Indian Ocean, has seen a rise of terror attacks since 2017 due to the emergence of a jihadi movement that has displaced thousands and killed hundreds. In the region, security forces have been fighting a group called Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jammah. ASWJ officially pledged allegiance to IS last year and became part of its Islamic State Central Africa Province, according to the New York-based Counter Extremism Project. The group is known locally as Al-Shabaab but is not believed to have an association with the terror group known by the same name in Somalia.
Although some of the group’s attacks have been claimed by the IS, some question how concrete the links between IS and the ASWJ are since the group is made up of mostly local youth from an impoverished part of the country.
The United Nations previously warned that hundreds of villages have been burned and abandoned because of an “indiscriminate campaign of terror” in the last three years. Last month, Amnesty International estimated that as many as 2,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 2017. Also, as many as 300,000 have been displaced. In April, about 52 people were massacred, with some being beheaded, in another attack in the Cabo Delgado province. In May, Mozambique’s government called for regional help in its battle against the Islamic extremists.
“Terrorism, you can’t fight alone, this is the experience which we have,” President Filipe Nyusi said earlier this year when he met with other African leaders. “We need to share forces, not only in the region but probably for Africa.”
In October, about 300 ASWJ militants attacked a Tanzanian village near the border of Cabo Delgado. According to Bloomberg, the perpetrators burned down homes, killed three soldiers, destroyed vehicles and stole military equipment. In August, ASWJ militants attacked villagers in the port of Mocimboa de Praia, where militants reportedly overtook government troops to temporarily seize control of the area, according to the BBC. The Counter Extremism Project stated that the “port is pivotal in the transit of oil and gas equipment.”
“Mozambique’s government, however, is ill-equipped to counter the growing number of radical insurgents,” the project warned in a report. “Additionally, there have been reports that Mozambique’s security forces have fled scenes of insurgent activity as the number of insurgents greatly outnumbers security forces in the area.”
Islamic extremist attacks have also risen in other regions of Africa in the last several years, such as Nigeria, where Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province have displaced millions in the northeast. Additionally, Sahel countries like Burkina Faso have also seen an exponential increase in displacement due to radical terrorism.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has announced that they will be conducting a hand recount and full audit of every single ballot that was submitted.
Raffensperger had announced last week they would be doing a recount after ballots turned up in the dead of night and pushed the state for Joe Biden.
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Following the announcement, the Trump campaign asked Georgia election officials to count all ballots by hand instead of using high-speed scanners, which they have agreed to do. This is the first time a full vote audit has ever been conducted in the state.
“With the margin being so close, it will require a full, by-hand recount in each county,” Raffensperger said during a news conference Wednesday morning. “This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount and a recanvas all at once. It will be a heavy lift but we will work with the counties to get this done in time for our state certification.”
Biden currently leads the state by about 14,000 votes.
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“My office will continue to investigate each and every incidence of illegal voting. Double voting, felon voting, people voting out of state — if you report it we will investigate it. Every legal vote will count,” Raffensperger said.
Biden’s lead in the state was exceptionally narrow. Georgia’s Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling said that it is the kind of margin you’d see in “a large high school.”
Cassandra Fairbanks is a former leftist who came out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. She has been published in the International Business Times, RT, Sputnik, The Independent and countless other publications.
“In a democracy, you cannot ignore honest questions from citizens. You’re not allowed. You can’t dismiss them out of hand as crazy and immoral for asking. You can’t just cut away from coverage you don’t like. You can’t simply tell people to accept an outcome because force doesn’t work in a democracy. That’s dictatorship,” Carlson said.
“In a free society, you have to convince the public of your legitimacy. You have to win them over with reason. Democracy is always a voluntary arrangement. Telling voters to shut up is never enough,” he concluded.
The entire rant can be seen here:
He is responding to the shameful editorial decision by Cavuto and Fox News earlier in the day to censor McEnany in order to keep up the ruse that Joe Biden is the president-elect:
It is being speculated that Carlson may not be long for Fox News. However, he is a ratings giant who brings in the bacon to a network that is quickly growing reviled to its own core base.
Big League Politics has reported on how consumer boycotts from angry, triggered liberals have been ineffective at stopping the juggernaut freight train that is Carlson:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been dogged by ad boycotts from commercial terrorism entities like Sleeping Giants for telling the truth about the marxist Black Lives Matter revolution, but the whining of the snowflakes has not had much of an effect, as Carlson brings in tens of millions to Fox News.
According to MediaPost, ad revenues for prime time cable TV news shows have risen by 31.5 percent over the prior three-month period. Fox News did particularly well during this time period, rising 44.3 percent to $79.7 million, due to Carlson’s dominance as well as the success of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
Standard Media Index’s Accu-TV says that “Tucker Carlson Tonight” raked in $37.2 million, ahead of “The Ingraham Angle” and “Hannity” by a small margin. Other more left-leaning news networks also rose during the period, as the public becomes more tuned into the news with a presidential election coming into focus. CNN rose 28.4 percent to $45.7 million and MSNBC gained 11.8 percent up to $33.3 million.
Big League Politics has reported about Carlson’s ratings dominance amidst his emergence as a lone voice of compassion and sanity for the forgotten man in America…
Carlson is cultivating America’s patriot awakening during a time in which it is being besieged by the enemies of civilization.
If Fox News dumps Carlson, it will probably be the death blow to the beleaguered network that has fallen far since founder Rupert Murdoch’s retirement.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has sent a letter to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, after several media outlets declared them the winners in the election against President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, telling the Democrats, “We want something for our vote.”
The letter was signed by Cullors “on behalf of the Black Lives Matter Global Network,” and began by congratulating Biden and Harris on their reported victory before setting out demands for the group’s agenda.
“We are requesting a meeting with you both to discuss the expectations that we have for your administration and the commitments that must be made to Black people,”Cullors wrote, declaring, “We want something for our vote.”
Cullors asserted:
Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome. In short, Black people won this election. Alongside Black-led organizations around the nation, Black Lives Matter invested heavily in this election. ‘Vote and Organize’ became our motto, and our electoral justice efforts reached more than 60 million voters. We want something for our vote.The BLM leader went on to remind Biden and Harris, “both of you discussed addressing systemic racism as central to your election campaigns. Both of you also expressed regrets regarding your record on issues impacting Black people.”
She closed the letter by writing, “We look forward to meeting with you at your convenience to begin the immediate work of Black liberation. We would like to be actively engaged in your Transition Team’s planning and policy work. Again, congratulations on your win. Let’s get to work!”
The Daily Wire noted that Cullors is not only the co-founder but executive director of the Black Lives Matter, and pointed to an Associated Press story that reported:
Since the wave of protests sparked by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, BLM has undergone a somewhat quiet transformation. As the words “Black lives matter” began appearing in city-sanctioned street murals coast to coast, the BLM network banked millions of dollars from a surge of donations — so much that Cullors established a grant fund of more than $12 million.
Cullors’ letter was dated Nov. 7, the same day several mainstream media outlets called the 2020 presidential race for Biden. Meanwhile, President Trump has not conceded the race, and his campaign has filed several lawsuits in key battleground states alleging instances of voter fraud.
A postal service worker in Pennsylvania is disputing House Democrats’ claims that he recanted allegations that his supervisors ordered employees to back-date mail-in voting ballots after Election Day.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said in a statement on Tuesday that Richard Hopkins, a postal worker in Erie, Pa., retracted his story during interviews with investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s office of the inspector general. Hopkins claimed in an interview with the conservative group Project Veritas last week that he overheard supervisors discussing backdating mail-in ballots received after the election on Nov. 3 so that they would still be counted in the state’s vote tally.
Videos of interviews with Hopkins have received millions of views and attracted congressional attention. Hopkins also set up an online fundraiser that had generated $130,000 in donations until it was taken offline on Tuesday.
Hopkins’ supervisor, Rob Weisenbach, has vehemently denied allegations that he directed employees to back-date mail-in ballots.
“The Erie Post Office did not back date any ballots,” Weisenbach, the postmaster in Erie, wrote on Facebook over the weekend, according to the Erie Times-News.
He said Hopkins’ story was “100% false” and that Hopkins had recently been disciplined multiple times.
Hopkins’ allegations gained traction among Republicans who have questioned the vote tally in Pennsylvania and other swing states. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham cited Hopkins’ allegations in a press release saying he would investigate all credible allegations of voter fraud. If Hopkins’ story is accurate, the voter fraud he claims to have witnessed is likely not extensive enough to swing Pennsylvania in President Trump’s favor. Joe Biden currently leads President Donald Trump by 48,000 votes in the state.
The Associated Press projected on Saturday that Biden won Pennsylvania, giving him enough electoral college votes to win the general election.
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several swing states but has not provided evidence of voter fraud on the scale that would change the outcome in any of the swing states.
House Democrats asserted that Hopkins had “completely” recanted his allegations on Monday following an interview with postal service investigators. The IG’s office briefed Congress on its investigation of Hopkins’ claims, Democrats said.
Hopkins was adamant in an interview with Project Veritas published on Tuesday that he did not recant his initial story.
“I did not recant,” he said in a video posted by Project Veritas president James O’Keefe.
O’Keefe published an edited audio file of Hopkins’ interview with postal service investigators. Hopkins told O’Keefe that he thought investigators were trying to coerce him into changing his initial story.
A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.
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.
US President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a Keep America Great rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 19, 2020. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
President Trump is continuing to make gains in Arizona, reducing Joe Biden’s (D) lead by the thousands over the course of the last week.
Another Maricopa County drop on Monday evening showed Trump reducing Biden’s overall lead from 16,952 on Sunday afternoon to 14,746. According to the Arizona Republic, Trump fell short in the Monday evening drop of ballots in terms of overall pace, taking 49.2 percent of the 6,495 votes. Trump needs to take 60 percent of the remaining ballots in the state in order to take the lead.
The paper believes 63,000 ballots remain, over half of which are provisional, though Data Orbital estimates the remaining number to be around 61.6K:
Over the weekend, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit in Arizona alleging that in-person voters had their ballots wrongfully rejected, as Breitbart News reported:
The lawsuit details cases in Maricopa County, Arizona, where eligible voters showed up on election day to cast their vote and subsequently had their ballot rejected.
In one case, Mia Barcello said she marked her ballot at an Anthem, Arizona, polling site with an ink pen that permeated through the ballot. When the ballot was fed through a tabulation device, it was rejected, according to the lawsuit. Barcello said she was told to press a “green button labeled ‘Cast’ on the device but was not told that doing so “likely would cause her selections in all candidate races or ballot proposition affected by the putative overvote or other defect or irregularity to be automatically disqualified and not tabulated.”
Trump’s team has continually expressed confidence that he will emerge victorious in Arizona and has called on Fox News and the AP to retract their premature calls.
On Election Night, I was crowded around the television with a dozen college friends in a tiny apartment above our government professor’s house. The Virginia night air seeping through the window was rescuing the feeble air conditioning unit and someone had propped up the three-legged TV with a handful of textbooks. Everyone watched the colorful maps on TV flip colors and we good-naturedly heckled CNN hosts who had been talking nonstop for the better part of two hours.
When Trump started gaining votes in Pennsylvania, everyone glanced at the three Pennsylvanians in the room. “All the Republicans just got off work,” said one, a pastor’s son from Pittsburgh. We all laughed.
But his joke stuck with me. I imagined that amorphous group of Pennsylvania Republicans going about their days, serving customers, trading smiles, clattering dinner plates in the kitchen. They would vote proudly and then they would move on with their daily responsibilities to the people around them.
I can’t say for sure if those Norman Rockwell-esque voters in rural Pennsylvania exist the way I imagined, but I have been inspired and convicted by their imaginary example following the election. They cheerfully did their civic duty, and they went about their day. They didn’t drop the responsibilities and joys around them to hang all hope of salvation on a presidential candidate.
As Christians, that’s how we should approach the electoral process — both before and after the results are announced. We should be educated and enthusiastically involved in our governing authority. We should surely fight to protect our families, our right to worship, and the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. But at the end of the day, we do all we can and then leave the results in eternal hands.
We preach that Christ alone is the hope of our salvation. But how graciously we handle the results of this election will show those around us whether we mean it.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be rightly concerned about protecting the electoral process where there is evidence of voter fraud. It also doesn’t mean we should give up being politically involved or holding our elected officials accountable for their words and actions. Advocating for liberty and justice in the civic process is a legitimate and necessary calling.
But it does mean we have an excellent opportunity to live out our faith by remembering that we trust in something greater than elections. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation,” the psalmist says. “Blessed is he whose hope in is the Lord his God.”
Because our hope is not in this world, we have no reason to be fearful. We may be disappointed and should be aware of policies that threaten our ability to live as we have been called. Yet we have no need to feel afraid, distraught, or betrayed. Any earthly idol would betray our trust.
It is because we hope in an eternal savior that we joyfully continue our daily lives. We don’t need a week off of classes or work to mourn an election. Our daily joys have suffered no loss of meaning. We continue to enjoy fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. We keep going to work and serving those around us. We go on cooking dinner and enjoying it around the family dinner table. And we remain completely fulfilled by the daily grace of God. Because of our faith, we know that politics isn’t everything (and thank God it isn’t). Our lives shouldn’t revolve around who sits in the Oval Office.
After all, the whole concept of government is merely a means to enable people to live well in community with each other. We cannot let the means become the end. Instead, we should continue to live full and fruitful lives with the people placed around us. Furthermore, watching other reactions to election results reminds us how dangerous and disappointing it is to place our trust in fallen human beings.
Avideo of a woman screaming uncontrollably at Trump’s inauguration in 2016 became a meme because it captured the disconsolate reaction to Trump’s victory by some of his opponents. “I’m so sorry to my world,” the woman sobbed. “There’s so much potential for beauty and for devastation in this one moment, it’s just almost incomprehensible that they can exist right now.”
Other Clinton supportersreminisced a full year after Trump’s election about how devastated they were by his victory. “It kind of just hit you,” said Trent Vanegas, explaining how he broke down in tears when the 2016 election results were announced. “One moment, there’s hope and the next moment it’s complete despair.” Another Clinton voter expressed fear that he and his wife would have to raise their newborn child under a Trump presidency.
Even the positive reactions to Biden’s apparent victory show an obsessive and unhealthy faith in political power. Members of the media literally wept on television when they called the race for Biden. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much,” MSNBC contributor and former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said. “I keep crying, I’m going to cry now.”
“I’m very emotional,” CNN’s Don Lemon said. “So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” CNN’s Van Jones repeatedly wiped his eyes with a tissue on camera.
And then therewas Stephen Colbert on Thursday night, in what was supposed to be a comedy routine. Because of Trump, “I’m not sitting down yet, I just don’t feel like it yet,” Colbert said. “I’m also dressed for a funeral, because Donald Trump tried really hard to kill something tonight.”
Two minutes into the show and without having told a single joke, Colbert hung his head and just stood awkwardly in silence. “What I didn’t know is that it would hurt so much,” he finally added. “I didn’t expect this to break my heart, for him to cast a dark shadow on our most sacred right.”
Comedian Marc Maron led off hispodcast on Monday — after about 30 seconds straight of profanity — by proclaiming “the weight has been lifted…I don’t know that people really fully understand the power, the symbolic power of the head of state that determines on some level how grounded people feel in the country.”
“We just barely f—ing avoided real fascism, people,” he added, before calling Trump supporters “brainf—ed, brainwashed people or just people who believe that fascism is the way to go.”
Watching these reactions, we should not make a mockery of their joy or sorrow. We should, however, be inspired to share the promise that we have. After all, we are blessed with the confidence that politics is not our final hope. And we are called to live accordingly.
Elle Reynolds is an intern at the Federalist, and a senior at Patrick Henry College studying government and journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
If 2020 didn’t already feel enough of a Kafkaesque nightmare, the latest bit of depravity from the “hate has no home here” totalitarian left is a ghoulish scheme announced by three former Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg staffers on Twitter last week called “The Trump Accountability Project.” Aspiring apparatchiks Emily Abrams, Michael Simon, and Hari Sevugan lauded the website whose stated mission is to “never forget those who furthered the Trump agenda.”
According to the now privatized site, whose internet archives were captured, anyone associated with the Trump administration, including those who elected him, staffed his government, funded him, endorsed him, worked in law firms for him, and who supported him in general, should be “held accountable.”
The site includes a comprehensive list of “known collaborators,”including U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, White House Chief of Staff Mike Meadows, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, campaign advisors Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, and the 56 federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump. No one is spared: assistants, receptionists, stenographers, calligraphers—our diligent Comrades know how to name names.
The idea of punishing people who have supported Trump also surfaced among media types including Jake Tapper of CNN and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. All of them have called for at least social recriminations such as keeping the “guilty”from being able to support themselves and their families through paid employment.
So what exactly are these Trump deplorables going to be “held accountable” for? The reasons cited are the administration’s purported assault on democracy, separation of children from their families, encouragement of racism, and “the country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Is this reasonable? Has the Trump administration, aided and abetted by its staff, supporters, donors, endorsers, and even independent judges, produced so horrific an environment that, even as we enter our glorious post-Trump One Party era, we should implement a program of purges and punishment?
The allegations regarding democracy are preposterous. The Democratic Party’s various policies and tactics since 2016 overwhelmingly surpass the most exaggerated allegations of Trump “authoritarianism,” and the left knows it.
Also questionable are factually selective cries about children being separated from their parents. A border policy of removing children from their rightful parents is wrong and should never have been implemented. But the complicated and grim reality is that some parents are the ones doing the separating, paying human smugglers to traffic their children over the border.Some don’t want their children brought back to their countries of origin.
Furthermore, the moral outrage over this issue is particularly disingenuous considering the left’s support for obscene abortion laws that butcher close to 1 million babies, give or take, each year. And these policies are racially targeted. Almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of black neighborhoods.Roughly a third of all babies aborted each year are black, even though black women represent approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population.
The claim of “antisemitism”is similarly ludicrous. Under Trump, the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem, a promise made under previous presidencies but never delivered. A historic diplomatic accord was recently signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and subsequently Bahrain. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the agreement heralded a “new dawn of peace.” It’s no wonder that President Trump is the overwhelmingly preferred presidential candidate for the Israeli Jewish public.
As for the administration’s COVID response, the pandemic took everyone by surprise. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were still accusing Trump of fear-mongering and xenophobia weeks after he closed the borders to China. Since then, and despite rapid mobilization efforts under Operation Warp Speed, Democrats and their media allies have consistently slammed Trump for not being able to magically control a new virus.
Yet Biden has not yet been able to articulate what exactly he would do differently, other than imposing a national lockdown. Considering that the most devastating economic impact has been felt in blue states where governors have stubbornly kept their economies shut down, this sort of strategy would be a calamity.
But none of this can get in the way of some good old-fashioned witch hunting. How will these Trump deplorables be held accountable? A consideration of Soviet communist tactics offers some interesting possibilities. Farcical show trials were held to liquidate perceived national traitors and thereby eliminate political opposition.
In Czechoslovakia, the children of shopkeepers, professionals, and intellectuals were barred from higher education. As for the judiciary, Communists resolved the problem of ideologically suspect pre-war appointed judges by issuing decrees that subordinated the judiciary to state ministries of “justice.”
Proponents of Trump purges have proposed their own ideas. Comrade Sevugan tweeted on Friday that CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “reported WH staff are starting to look for jobs”and warned that “employers considering them should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.” So-called “pro-democracy”commentator Rubin tweeted that those questioning the election results and making claims of voter fraud should “never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite society.’”
As if that perversity wasn’t enough, she appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy over the weekend and argued that “it’s not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose.” She added, shockingly, that “we have to collectively in essence burn down the Republican Party” because “if there are survivors… they will do it again.”
Evan McMullin, a budding Stalinist dressed up as a defender of the republic, proposed that “we should keep and publish a list of everyone who assists Trump’s frivolous and dangerous attacks on the election.”For the good of the country, we should “name and shame forever,” he said.
Not surprisingly, socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is totally on board with implementing this “accountability” agenda. She tweeted concern that “Trump sycophants” might “downplay or deny their complicity”by deleting tweets, writings, and photos. Fortunately for her, the lists are already being tabulated.
Had we not just spent the better part of a year battling a host of assaults on individual, religious, and political freedoms, we would not have believed such an outrage possible. Indeed, once upon a time in 2019, sane people on both sides of the political spectrum would have regarded this sort of garbage as a blatant rights and basic decency violation. Now, once presumably normal people are salivating over the prospect of purges and punishment, a tactic that is rooted in communist propaganda: the enemy narrative. According to this pernicious lie, our very existence is under such threat by an evil adversary, that the erosion of human rights and undemocratic seizure of power are justified.
For the Soviets, the villain was capitalism and the parasitical Western imperialists; for today’s Totalitarian Left, the enemy is the Orange Man in the White House and his racist supporters.Comrades Sevugan, Rubin, and McMullin are spewing the same bile that communists have used to poison millions:the evil must be stamped out and its enablers humiliated and exiled to protect our very existence.
We must pray that this roadkill of an election is cleaned up and truth and freedom preserved so the circling vultures find some other carrion to gnaw. Resorting to Soviet-style tactics to intimidate their 70 million fellow Americans who support President Trump is despicable. And it only reinforces the widespread belief that the totalitarian left has officially abandoned any pretense of a commitment to democratic freedoms and rule of law.
Carina Benton is a native Australian living in Washington state. She is a practicing Catholic and has taught for many years in Catholic and Christian schools. She is a mother of two young children.
One of the biggest stories in this election is how President Trump, whom leftists and their media allies have constantly called a “racist,” made great inroads with minorities. The left is clearly shocked. Rather than humbly spending some time on self-reflection, however, they are doubling down on identity politics by blaming minority Trump voters.
Since Election Day, leftists have been attacking minority Trump voters from two angles. First, they claim minorities who voted for Trump are “white” voters who shouldn’t be classified as minorities. This nonsense is nothing new. Prior to the election, Joe Biden famously said black voters who vote for Trump “ain’t black.”
Immediately after the election, this nonsense came up again courtesy of none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the now-debunked 1619 Project. When it became clear that Trump would win Florida thanks to enthusiastic support from Latino voters, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains [sic] why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
National Public Radio’s Gene Demby quickly endorsed Hannah-Jones’ assertions. In an NPR post-election segment, titled “Who is the White Vote?” Demby said:
It’s important that, you know, we think about the ways that there are many, many white Latinos. And because whiteness so thoroughly informs voting behavior, we should probably be asking better questions about Latino voters, like whether they identify as white or not. That might be more illuminating than simply whether someone refers to themselves as Latino in some ways.
No, Democrats Don’t Own Brown People
Here is the thought process behind these kinds of comments Only white people vote for Republicans. Since skin color trumps ethnicity, of course, light-skinned minorities would vote for a Republican candidate because of their “whiteness.” They shouldn’t be counted as minority voters at all.
This thought process is deeply flawed. Dividing the Latino community by skin color is possibly the most racist thing to do. Latino voters are unique, both as individuals and based on their diverse Latin American countries of origin, but it’s wrong to use colorism to explain Latino voters’ behaviors. Regardless of skin color, many Latino immigrants have suffered or watched their families suffer under socialist policies in their home countries. Many came to America to escape socialism, so naturally, they will not vote for Democrats, whose party enthusiastically embraces it.
Further, claiming skin color drives a voter’s behavior is an insult to minority voters’ intelligence. During Trump’s first term and prior to the pandemic lockdowns, both black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at historic lows. The black and Hispanic household median annual income increase (adjusted for inflation) more than doubled during Trump’s term compared to the Obama years. Minority voters, like any other voters, will naturally support the candidate whose policies have benefited them.
By the same token, minority voters will reject candidates whose policies might bring them harm. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, explained to a puzzled NPR journalist why Biden lost Latino support in Texas. “For example, a lot of the Border Patrol law enforcement are heavily Latino in the Rio Grande Valley,” Garcia said. “So when you are talking about defunding the police, and you don’t stand up to those types of rhetoric, then it leaves an opening for Republicans to come in and take advantage of that.”
When will leftist pundits such as Hannah-Jones and Demby ever realize it is the radical policies and ideas they support that have driven away minority voters?
The Left Believes Minorities Have No Agency
Apparently, blaming minority Trump voters’ “whiteness” doesn’t go far enough for some on the left. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, complained that some minority Trump voters have Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response that occurs when abuse victims bond with their abusers.
In his most recent article, Blow listed statistic after statistic showing that “a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016,” including Trump doubling black women’s support from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020, and increasing black men’s vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. “It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists,” Blow said, calling all Trump voters either racists or accomplices of racism.
There’s more. According to Blow, the number that really put him on his heels was “the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia, the number was 33 percent.”
Although none of the statistics Blow presented even remotely support the title of his piece, “Exit Poll Points to the Power of White Patriarchy,” he found a way to blame white patriarchy and demean minority Trump voters in the end. According to Blow, Trump’s widening support across racial and gender groups “points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
In the eyes of leftists such as Blow, nonwhite voters and non-straight voters who supported Trump are nobody but coattail riders who have neither personal agency nor the ability to make it on our own in the world. I had never read anything more racist, more divisive, and more insulting than this, and I am not the only one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a fellow at the Hoover Institute, tweeted: “This is the dumbest, most divisive drivel I’ve read in a long time. We should be talking about what unites us now. Not doubling down on ID-Politics. Shame on you!”
Minorites Had Good Reason to Vote for Trump
It is obvious that leftist pundits are dumbfounded by Trump’s widening support among minority voters in 2020. Since the 2016 election, rather than trying to understand half of the country who voted for Trump the first time, these talking heads turned toward nurturing their hatred of Trump and getting him out of office as their full-time jobs.
They thought that after repeating “Orange Man Bad” day after day for four years, the electorate would just follow their lead. They have no clue why someone they despised so much could have attracted even more minority votes this time around. Since they are unable to come up with any reasonable explanation, let me shed some light on the matter.
Minorities like me voted for Trump because we like his policies: lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and strong national security. American people, especially minorities, have seen real economic benefits during Trump’s first term. He stands up to socialism and promises, “America will never be a socialist country,” and his unconventional foreign policy approach has brought a historical breakthrough of peace in the Middle East.
We want a safe environment to raise our families. We don’t want to see our cities burned, our shops looted, and our statues toppled. We want good-paying jobs so we can enjoy the lifestyle we desire through our own hard work. We want all families, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to choose the best school that matches their children’s educational needs. We want to continue to express ourselves without being censored or canceled.
We certainly don’t believe race and sex are the roots of nor the answer to every social ill. We are tired of identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture, all of which have sucked the fun out of life and shut down the exchange of ideas. We know our country has room for improvement, but it is not a racist nation. We take pride in being Americans and in all the progresses our nation has made, and we are tired of the left condemning our country’s founding and the American ideal.
As long as leftists continue to weaponize identity politics and dress us down as if we are mindless cattle, their candidates will continue to lose our support.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen’s new book, “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” is available for pre-order with a release date of October 20, 2020. Follow her on Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
Legacy media are lying when they claim that all of President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are baseless. I know, because I argued a case on the president’s behalf in federal court in Philadelphia.
At issue was President Trump’s request for an order changing the way Pennsylvania absentee and mail-in ballots are being reviewed at the Philadelphia Convention Center. CNN and others claim he “lost.”That’s false: he won. As I made that argument on behalf of the president’s campaign, I can tell you what really happened.
President Trump went to court about two problems: First, only a handful of Republican observers—substantially fewer than the Democrats had there—were being admitted to the room at the Philadelphia Convention Center where inspections were being conducted. Second, the few who could get in weren’t permitted to get close enough to see what was actually happening. The most important questions all have to ask are: Why all the hiding? What’s being hidden?
At the Convention Center counting location, I personally observed dozens of Trump campaign volunteers being barred from the counting room even though they’d been properly registered as observers. That’s why I urged Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski, who were on the scene, to authorize the filing of a request that a federal court order the Board of Elections to stop this nonsense.
More hiding: despite a binding order of the state’s Commonwealth Court, the handful of Republican observers who could get into the room weren’t being allowed up to the barrier set at six feet from the closest tables where work was being done. So even though they were in the room where it was happening, they had no way to tell what was happening. If there’s no fraud, why is the Democrat-controlled Board of Elections unwilling to let people get close enough to actually see what its people are doing?
So on a borrowed laptop at around 2 p.m. on election day, I typed up a very short document to start a federal lawsuit and to request that the federal court intervene to prohibit these unfair practices. At about 4:30 p.m., its filing was authorized by the campaign.
The federal judge ordered a hearing that began at 5:30 p.m. and went for two hours. In open court, the judge compelled the Board of Elections to agree that the Republicans could have up to 60 representatives in the room. That was a huge victory, not only for Republicans but for anyone who actually wants to have a vote tabulation worthy of belief.
He also compelled the board to agree that all observers, Democrat or Republican, could get up to the six-foot barrier. While the Democrats claimed that of course, of course, they had always been letting people in and letting them up to the barrier, I had a long list of witnesses who were prepared to testify that this was false. The judge told the defendants pointedly that if they didn’t do what they’d promised in his courtroom they would, he had plenty of authority to make them keep their word.
Having secured this agreement from the Board of Elections, the court dismissed the president’s motion for court-ordered relief as moot. Courts often do that when they secure an agreement between the parties. It means the court doesn’t have to issue an order, which would be appealable, granting or denying the motion, and it means the court doesn’t have to write an opinion. What it doesn’t mean is that the request made on behalf of President Trump to stop the election fraud was moot, despite the false spin CNN and other mainstream media put on it. All of this was a victory for President Trump and anyone else who believes in open government.
I’m no longer surprised by anti-Trump non-news coming from the likes of CNN. But I cannot imagine why Pennsylvania Republican leaders have suggested there’s no reason to think that anything wrong or fraudulent is going on in the counting of Pennsylvania’s votes.
If that were true, why in the world would the Democratic-controlled city government be working so hard to keep Republicans out of the room where those votes are being counted? In a world where every car that drives down the street is on video, why isn’t all of this counting being conducted in broad daylight, under watchful eyes? What do they have to hide?
Other people have gathered substantial evidence that there are indeed things to hide, including this video showing, among other things, footage of government officials wearing Joe Biden facemasks filling in blanks in already-submitted mail-in votes. The hearing I attended wasn’t about that, but it was about the conditions that make that possible.
No one who wants a legitimate vote count should be working to keep observers out of the room where the votes are counted. Yet for some reason the City of Philadelphia sent three lawyers, including the city solicitor himself, to a hearing to try to persuade a federal judge that he shouldn’t even bother addressing President Trump’s request.
Fortunately, the federal judge didn’t take that advice, and he forced the Board of Elections to do the right thing. I call that a solid victory for everyone—except for those with something to hide. For some reason, all of this hiding was being done by Democrats, for Biden.
Jerome M. Marcus is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
Joe Biden and the corrupt Marxist machine is trying to steal Pennsylvania with illegal ballot harvesting and massive midnight mail-in ballot dumps. But their plans are crumbling.
The Pennsylvania House GOP members tomorrow (Tuesday) will call for a legislative-led audit of the 2020 election and demand election results not be certified, nor electors be seated, until the audit is complete,” according to a press release.
Via the Philly Inquirer:
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It’s just not Joe Biden’s night.
First Trump’s campaign on Monday evening filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging “creation and implementation of illegal ‘two-tiered’ voting system for the election.”
“Voters in Pennsylvania were held to different standards simply based on how they chose to cast their ballot, and we believe this two-tiered election system resulted in potentially fraudulent votes being counted without proper verification or oversight,” Matt Morgan, Trump’s general counsel said.
Real Clear Politics on Monday night pulled their call for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania which means Biden isn’t even pretend president-elect anymore.
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Joe Biden came from a 700,000 vote deficit on Election night and with the help of OVER ONE MILLION NEW VOTES overtook President Donald Trump by Friday!
US Attorney General Bill Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 presidential election is certified, per the Associated Press.
“In a memo to U.S. attorneys … Barr wrote that investigations ‘may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.’”
US Attorney General Bill Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 presidential election is certified, per the Associated Press.
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“In a memo to U.S. attorneys … Barr wrote that investigations ‘may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.’”
President Trump’s campaign on Monday evening filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging “creation and implementation of illegal ‘two-tiered’ voting system for the election.”
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“Voters in Pennsylvania were held to different standards simply based on how they chose to cast their ballot, and we believe this two-tiered election system resulted in potentially fraudulent votes being counted without proper verification or oversight,” Matt Morgan, Trump’s general counsel said.
The Trump campaign is seeking an emergency injunction to stop Pennsylvania officials from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
Poll watchers in Wayne County filed a lawsuit alleging Detroit officials knowingly committed mass voter fraud.
There are other allegations of voter fraud in Clark County, Nevada, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Atlanta, Georgia.
Project Veritas has released videos of USPS whistleblowers in Pennsylvanian and Michigan claiming their supervisors told them to backdate ballots.
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Another major development tonight:
Real Clear Politics on Monday night pulled their call for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden came from a 700,000 vote deficit on Election night and with the help of OVER ONE MILLION NEW VOTES overtook President Donald Trump by Friday!
After illegally stuffing the ballot box with harvesting and midnight ballot dumps, Biden leads Trump in Pennsylvania by approximately 40,000 votes.
Former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, who’s now a Fox analyst, released a new book inspired by his popular series, called “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” to help facilitate racial reconciliation. He says the Church can do a better job at breaking the racial divide as well.
“This is my Esther moment, for such a time as this,” Acho told The Christian Post in an interview about how the Lord has been using him to bring blacks and whites together for dialogue.
The 29-year-old athlete has gone viral this year with his internet series, “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” which was launched on the heels of the national unrest in America that followed the death of George Floyd.
Acho’s “uncomfortable” conversations on YouTube have included Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey and “Fixer Upper” stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. He also sat down with interracial couples — gold medalists Lindsey Vonn and her husband, P.K. Subban, and “The Bachelorette’s” Rachel Lindsay and her spouse, Bryan Abasalo — as well as a unit of police officers and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, to name a few.
“Let’s not be distracted,” the Texas native of Nigerian descent told CP. “Let’s keep our focus on truly making change and being a part of the reconciliation.”
Acho teamed up with media mogul Oprah Winfrey to publish his new book, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, which is now available. Winfrey said she partnered with Acho because of how much his new series has impacted her.
In the book, Acho creates an honest dialogue for anyone seeking answers on how to really mend the racial divide in the world today.
The following is an edited transcript of CP’s conversation with Acho where he speaks directly to people of faith on how to tackle this sensitive topic head-on. Though it may be uncomfortable, he says it’s necessary to not dub it as simply “a sin issue” while ignoring the “real issue.”
Christian Post: You are a man of faith. Do you consider having these uncomfortable conversations with white people a service unto God or call from Him?
Acho: I do. But I consider everything that I do and try to do for a purpose, as ministry, as I’m using my platform. I’ve told Oprah, this is my Esther moment, for such a time as this because I believe God ushered me into this moment for such a time as this. It was kind of one of those “Here I am, send me” type of moments. I didn’t seek this moment out. I wasn’t asking for this moment. But the man met the moment and I’m always like, “God, why did you choose me?” But I think that everything I went through in my life was for this specific point in time.
Playing in the NFL wasn’t to make money. I think it was to integrate myself into a culture that I would never be integrated in. With going to a predominantly affluent white college preparatory school, it wasn’t to get a great education, it was to immerse myself in a culture that I otherwise wouldn’t be immersed in. So that is how I see this. I think God ordained all of this, to use me for this moment.
CP: In your interview with Carl Lentz, he shared that he believed the Church propagates racism. As a black person, is that something that’s a thought in the back of your mind when you attend church?
Acho: I would submit this: I would submit that the Church doesn’t do a good enough job to break racial divides. Let me submit this: there’s a difference between diversity and inclusion. Diversity — being invited to the dance. Inclusion — being asked to dance. I think the church attempts diversity, “All our doors are welcome. We’re a multicultural church or a multiethnic church, we’re a nondenominational where everyone is welcome because God loves everyone.” But what are you doing within your congregation to promote inclusion? Because black culture is different than white culture and the black church experience is different than the white church experience. I know because I go to both.
When I was in college, I would literally go to white church at 7 a.m., then go to black church at 11 a.m. I say black versus white church because as much as my dear brothers and sisters, black and white, want to act as though we have diverse churches, we’re missing the mark still in that regard. So I wouldn’t say that I don’t feel safe or welcomed. I would just say I feel uncomfortable.
CP: What are you really hoping happens with your book, Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man?
Acho: I think in Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, it’ll do two things. One, it will expose you of your ignorance and it will educate you on what you didn’t even know. When you start having dialogues, you start to expose things that you didn’t even realize were misconceptions. A dear pastor, a friend who I have met several times, a friend who I enjoy his work, he came out during a conversation about racism and talked about slavery and said it was a “white blessing.” See, until you start having these dialogues, you don’t even realize that that’s in your head or in your heart. So while so many people criticized him for that, and I could understand the criticism, I’m [clapping] because if you don’t have the conversation, then you live your whole life with that misconception.
So I’m hoping that my book will essentially allow so many of my white brothers and sisters who are great intended white brothers and sisters to now have direction because intention without direction is void and meaningless. So many white people, specifically in the Church, my white brothers and sisters [have] incredible intentions, God-fearing, they love the Lord, Praise Jesus, all that but they just don’t have the right direction and I try to provide some direction as well.
CP: Why do you think the phrase Black Lives Matter triggers some to say “marxism” more than agreeing with the statement?
Acho: I try to avoid triggers. Here’s what I mean, I separate Black Lives Matter the noun from Black Lives Matter the adjective, Black Lives Matter the noun meaning the organization. I don’t ever talk about the organization; please do what you will with your organization, research it, find out if you support it or if you don’t, but let’s talk about the adjective black people and their lives mattering because there’s nothing that can be triggering around that. I don’t get into all the nuances of politics because people get distracted by politics. I’m just here to talk about life. Life isn’t necessarily politics. My life mattering, your life mattering — that’s not political. That’s just humane. So that’s my plan of action. When I discuss those. Let’s not be distracted. Let’s keep our focus on truly making change and being a part of the reconciliation.
CP: Is it exhausting having to explain the inequalities and try and bridge the gap while you too are grieving because of the injustice?
Acho: I would say it is a worthy burden. Is it exhausting? I definitely don’t have energy. But I would say that it is a worthy burden. Some burdens are worthy, some are not. This burden is worthy.
In team sports, sometimes you have to carry your teammate while they’re down, and they’ll carry you at one point in time. Right now, I just consider the fact that I’m just doing a lot right now but it’s for the betterment of our society so I don’t really have time to worry about my exhaustion. I’m trying to breed reconciliation.
CP: What advice do you have for your black brothers and sisters or people of color during this season?
Acho: Well, I would say two things. Number one, it’s not your responsibility to educate your white brothers and sisters. It’s not. But I would also submit this: I think it behooves us to educate those who are willing to listen. It’s not your responsibility to and I’m not going to put an increased weight on black people who are dealing with so much right now. But I do believe that it is in our best interest that if somebody is willing to listen, then I’m not going to be the reason that they don’t hear. That’s how I take it out. Black people, we’re not one monolithic group who all think the same way. But my train of thought is very simple: If they’re willing to listen, I’m not going to be the reason they don’t hear.
CP: You end the book with how to end racism. Do you think that’s possible? There are people of faith who say this is a heart issue and a sin issue that will always be present.
Acho: Let me speak to that. I love my white brothers and sisters but we can’t sit here and say that “it’s not about race, it’s about grace; it’s not about skin, it’s about sin.” It is about sin but it’s also about skin. It is about grace but it’s also about race because sin is playing itself out in the skin issue. I would also submit this: There are degrees of murder in America. First-degree murder is premeditated, second-degree murder is a crime of passion. Then you move down to involuntary manslaughter. It’s not intentional, but it’s still unlawful. It’s not intentional but it still led to a death.
So many of my white brothers and sisters, specifically my Christian white brothers and sisters, they’re not committing first-degree racism. They’re not shooting black people. They’re not committing second-degree racism. They’re not putting a knee in a black person’s neck. But they do fall under that rung of involuntary manslaughter. They are killing emotionally their black brothers and sisters and they’re even unaware of it.
It’s not a matter of sin because he who knows what is right and doesn’t do it, this is sin. So the question then becomes, do my white brothers and sisters know what is right? When the pastor uttered that slavery was a white blessing, to me that’s not a sin issue because he didn’t know what was wrong. To not know something is wrong and not do something is not an issue. To me, knowing something is wrong and not doing anything about it now becomes an issue. So I am trying to, with my book, allow my white brothers and sisters to know what is right because he who knows what is right and doesn’t do it, this is sin.
I’ll end with an analogy. If I’m walking in a door and I don’t see you behind me and I don’t hold the door, I’m not at fault. I didn’t see you behind me. See, but if I’m walking in that same door and I turn and I peek and I now see you behind me, but I still try to scurry in that door and let it shut right after me without holding it open for you, now that’s a different issue because now that’s a hard issue.
So in closing, I would conclude and I would submit to my white brothers and sisters: Let’s not use that it is a sin issue as a masquerade for the real issue. Let’s understand the real issue. It’s not currently exclusively a sin issue right now. Let’s understand the real issue. And then let’s address both issues as we can.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell heatedly criticized Democrats in congress for their reaction to conservative’s skepticism of the 2020 presidential election. A presumed confidence in the election and an expectation for the immediate acceptance of its results is, in McConnell’s view, a matter of hypocrisy.
McConnell pointed out that Democrats have spent the last four years questioning the validity of the presidential election that put Trump in office—even in going so far as to blame Russian involvement for the President’s victory in 2016.
Now that a number of conservative voices—including legal challenges from the Trump campaign—have expressed concerns about the legitimacy of the vote, McConnell says Democrats don’t have a leg to stand on if they’re going to try to criticize that concern.
“Let’s not have any lecture about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept the preliminary election results from the same characters who spend four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated this election would be illegitimate too,” McConnell said.
Recounts have been requested by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. These recounts have been largely criticized by leftward political figures as illegitimate attempts by Donald Trump to hang on to the presidency.
The Kentucky senator debunked Democratic claims that Donald Trump’s legal challenge to some voting results were a threat to the integrity of the election process.
“A few legal inquiries from the President do not exactly spell the end of the republic,” McConnell said. “We will wake up on January 21 still blessed to live in the greatest nation the world has ever seen. And in no small part that is because we respect the rule of law, we trust our institutions and neither of those things is outweighed by partisans or the press.”
The official results of the presidential election will be declared by Congress in January after recounts have been conducted.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
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What Did You Say? 
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Written
on November 16, 2020