Terrorists who had been rounded up across Afghanistan are now on the loose.
One prize in the total collapse of the former government and military of Afghanistan was that the Taliban were able to overrun Bagram Air Base on Sunday, where, according to the BBC, occupying forces began to set free inmates there at Pul-e-Charkhi prison.
In early July, when the U.S. handed control of the base to Afghan forces, CNN reported that between 5,000 and 7,000 prisoners were housed there, including “senior al Qaeda and Taliban figures.”
100s of Pakistani Taliban – TTP – fighters including key commanders were freed in various Prison breaks in Afghanistan during recent advances of Taliban especially from Bagram Prison & Pul-e-Charkhi Prison. Fate of Daesh IS-K prisoners probably be decided by Taliban's courts. pic.twitter.com/0OHoet2eVw
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley noted Sunday in a call with senators that instead of the original estimate] that terrorist groups could use Afghanistan as a base to rebuild within the next two years, the new timeline could be sooner.
This is what victory looks like — You get to call the shots.The Taliban is now telling Joe Biden and Democrats what the new rulers expect in the next four weeks. Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen says the US should “withdraw all their forces” by 11 September.The 9-11 Anniversary out to be a special day this year for the Biden regime, globalists, New York liberals, and Taliban leadership.
A senior spokesperson for the Taliban has warned that the US military personnel in Afghanistan must be gone by September 11, after Washington redeployed soldiers to watch over the evacuation. The US must remove all its troops from Afghanistan by September 11, Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban’s political office and negotiation team in Qatar, told Sky News.
Shaheen said the militants remain committed to not attacking US servicemen, and their immediate goal is to maintain security and prevent incidents around Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen says the US should "withdraw all their forces" by 11 September, but adds "we are committed not to attack them"
The group’s spokesperson previously said that foreign diplomats and aid workers will not be harmed.
The US planned to withdraw its troops by August 31, but was forced to dispatch around 5,000 additional soldiers to facilitate the evacuation of American diplomatic personnel and their allies from Kabul, as Afghanistan’s capital and largest city was swiftly seized by the Taliban on Sunday.
The sudden arrival of the militants sparked panic, with locals swarming the airport in the hope of catching a flight from Afghanistan. According to reports, several people died during the ensuing chaos and US troops reportedly fired in the air to prevent desperate Afghans from flooding the runway.
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.
Former President George W. Bush issued a statement Monday expressing “deep sadness” over the debacle in Afghanistan. Bush was president when America launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan to hunt down those responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Last month, in a rare display of comment on the policies of a successor, he said he disagreed with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all military troops from Afghanistan, according to The Washington Post. Bush said he was “afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm” as a result of the withdrawal.
“I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad. And I’m sad. Laura and I spent a lot of time with Afghan women. And they’re scared,” he said,
“I think about all the interpreters and people that helped — not only U.S. troops, but NATO troops — and they’re just, it seems like they’re just going to be left behind to be slaughtered by these very brutal people,” Bush said.
“And it breaks my heart.”
On Monday, he said in his statement that he and former first lady Laura Bush“have been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness. Our hearts are heavy for both the Afghan people who have suffered so much and for the Americans and NATO allies who have sacrificed so much,” he said, according to a statement sent by the Bush Center.
Bush said no ally should be left behind.
“The Afghans now at the greatest risk are the same ones who have been on the forefront of progress inside their nation. President Biden has promised to evacuate these Afghans, along with American citizens and our allies,” he said.
“The United States government has the legal authority to cut the red tape for refugees during urgent humanitarian crises. And we have the responsibility and the resources to secure safe passage for them now, without bureaucratic delay. Our most stalwart allies, along with private NGOs, are ready to help,” Bush added.
Amid scenes of panic from Kabul, Bush said that with the American military in charge, there is hope for the best possible outcome.
“Laura and I are confident that the evacuation efforts will be effective because they are being carried out by the remarkable men and women of the United States Armed Forces, diplomatic corps, and intelligence community,” the statement said.
Bush then added a statement to veterans and service members.
“Many of you deal with wounds of war, both visible and invisible. And some of your brothers and sisters in arms made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror. Each day, we have been humbled by your commitment and your courage,” he said.
Bush sought to validate the sacrifice of the more than 2,000 Americans who died and the more than 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan.
“You took out a brutal enemy and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven while building schools, sending supplies, and providing medical care. You kept America safe from further terror attacks, provided two decades of security and opportunity for millions, and made America proud. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts and will always honor your contributions,” he said.
Bush, who was president in America’s dark days of adversity, said hope always endures.
“In times like these, it can be hard to remain optimistic. Laura and I will steadfastly remain so. Like our country, Afghanistan is also made up of resilient, vibrant people. Nearly 65 percent of the population is under twenty-five years old. The choices they will make for opportunity, education, and liberty will also determine Afghanistan’s future,” he said.
The former president then quoted Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan Institute of Learning, who helped open schools for girls, as saying, “The Taliban cannot crush a dream. We will prevail, even if it takes longer than we wanted it to.”
“Laura and I, along with the team at the Bush Center, stand ready as Americans to lend our support and assistance in this time of need. Let us all resolve to be united in saving lives and praying for the people of Afghanistan,” the statement said in closing.
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.
Matt Zeller, a former CIA officer and U.S. Army officer who served as an embedded combat adviser with the Afghan security forces, mocked MSNBC host Brian Williams to his face Monday for praising President Joe Biden’s speech on Afghanistan. Before asking Zeller — also a former Democratic candidate for Congress who admits he voted for Biden — his reaction to Biden’s speech, Williams claimed Biden “owned his decision” and “didn’t run from it.”
Zeller flatly disagreed.
“I hope he gets to own [Afghans’] deaths, too,” Zeller shot back. “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled.”
“There was such a profound bold-faced lie in that speech — the idea that we planned for every contingency? I have been personally trying to tell this administration, since it took office, I’ve been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming,” Zeller continued. “We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us. They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies; they’re trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour.”
Zeller continued, lambasting Biden:
The thing that they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation. Well, they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it. We had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago, and we did nothing. I’m appalled that he thinks that we only need to take 2,000 people. There’s 86,000 people who are currently left behind in Afghanistan alone; we’ve identified all of them for the government. I have no idea why he claims that people don’t want to leave Afghanistan. I have a list of 14,000 names right now of people who want to get out of Afghanistan.
And the idea that the Afghan military should be blamed for this? Do you know how many casualties the Afghan military took in an average year? More than the United States did in 20. When you’re not getting paid on a regular basis, when you’re not getting fuel, when no one is supplying you with ammunition, and yet you’re still showing up to the fight? How dare us for having to blame these people for not having the audacity to be able to survive a Taliban onslaught.
No, no, no. What we need to be doing right now — and what I am appalled that the president didn’t say — was we need to be talking about how we’re going to get every single one of these people out.
MSNBC's Brian Williams on Biden's speech: "He didn’t run from it, he owned it. He owned this decision. He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him."
Later in the interview, Zeller made an impassioned case for saving every Afghan who helped America during its military campaign, saying the U.S. military should fight the Taliban until every such Afghan is rescued. But if Biden’s administration chooses to abandon them? “I’ll never forgive my country for doing this,” Zeller pledged.
Unaccompanied minors ride atop the wagon of a freight train, known as La Bestia (The Beast) in Ixtepec, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, June 18, 2014. | Reuters/Jose de Jesus Cortes
A federal judge has directed the Biden administration to restart President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which dealt with a surge in illegal immigration by requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their court hearings in the United States.
In a 53-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, said the Department of Homeland Security “failed to consider several critical factors” before scrapping the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
President Joe Biden reversed many Trump-era immigration policies, including “Remain in Mexico,” on his first day in office on Jan. 20 and halted construction on the border wall. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas formally ended “Remain in Mexico” on June 1 of this year.
Many Republicans blame the Biden administration’s border policies for the massive increase in the number of immigrants crossing the southern border that’s overwhelming U.S. border agents and area towns and cities.
Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, said the city is “running out of money” and has been forced to issue an emergency disaster declaration.
The declaration warned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is releasing an alarmingly substantial number of immigrants into the City, including [thousands of] individuals that are positive for COVID-19.”
The judge’s ruling came Friday in a lawsuit filed by the states of Texas and Missouri, which said the discontinuation of the policy had aggravated the situation at the border and was leading to criminals slipping into the U.S.
One of the factors the Biden administration failed to consider was how some immigrants with asylum claims that lacked merit had started returning home voluntarily due to Trump’s program, the judge said.
Mayorkas sent a memorandum to top immigration officials in June, saying the department reviewed the policy and determined that it “does not adequately or sustainably enhance border management in such a way as to justify the program’s extensive operational burdens and other shortfalls.”
Referring to the memo, the judge wrote: “At the very least, the Secretary was required to show a reasoned decision for discounting the benefits of MPP (Migration Protection Protocols). Instead, the June 1 Memorandum does not address the problems created by false claims of asylum or how MPP addressed those problems. Likewise, it does not address the fact that DHS previously found that ‘approximately 9 out of 10 asylum claims from Northern Triangle countries are ultimately found non-meritorious by federal immigration judges,’ and that MPP discouraged such aliens from traveling and attempting to cross the border in the first place.”
“This decision is a win for America and an indictment of this administration’s reckless immigration policies,” Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which had filed briefs backing Texas and Missouri in the lawsuit, said, The Washington Times reported.
According to numbers released by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, over 188,000 border enforcement encounters took place in June. Before the pandemic last June, there were over 104,000 border enforcement encounters. The year 2021 has seen the highest number of unlawful border crossings in over 20 years.
Mayorkas finally admitted in July — when over 212,000 migrant apprehensions were made along the Mexican border — that there was unprecedented illegal activity.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who was tapped to be the border czar, has been criticized by Republicans for not being proactive in response to the border, and instead focusing her efforts on what she considers root causes in the countries of origin.
Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and Trump secretary of state, blasted President Joe Biden on Sunday after the Biden administration attempted to blame former President Donald Trump’s administration for the melee unfolding in Afghanistan.
During a “Fox News Sunday” interview with Chris Wallace, Pompeo said that Biden had no other move but to blame the former administration for its mistakes.
Wallace asked, “How dire is the situation in Afghanistan as we talk today? Is a full Taliban takeover of the country now inevitable?”
Pompeo responded, “Well, Chris, it certainly looks like it. It looks like the Biden administration has just failed in its execution of its own plan. This reminds me of when we have seen previous administrations allow embassies to be overrun. It’s starting to feel that way. It also looks like there’s a bit of panic having to reinsert soldiers to get them out. The plan should have been, much like we had, was that we would have an orderly conditions-based way to think about how to draw down our forces there.
“Were I still the secretary of state with a commander in chief like President Trump, the Taliban would have understood that there were real costs to pay if there were plots against the United States of America from that place,” Pompeo added. “Qassem Soleimani learned that lesson, and the Taliban would have learned it as well.”
Pompeo added that Biden was only trying to deflect blame onto Trump.
“If the risks weren’t so serious, Chris, it would be pathetic,” Pompeo added. “I wouldn’t have let my 10-year old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting. He should be less focused on trying to blame this on someone else than to solving the problem of making sure that we protect and defend American security. Chris, it’s worth noting this did not happen on our watch. We reduced our forces significantly and the Taliban didn’t advance on capitals all across Afghanistan. So it’s just a plain old fact that this is happening under the Biden administration’s leadership now almost a quarter of our way into his first term, this is not the way leaders lead, by pointing backwards.”
He continued, “We had a bad deal we inherited — the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal]; we got out of it. We secured America from the risk from Iran. We inherited a horrible deal in Syria where ISIS controlled real estate the size of Great Britain. We crushed them. Every president confronts challenges. This president confronted a challenge in Afghanistan. He has utterly failed to protect the American people from this challenge.”
Not only is President Joe Biden being mocked for his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal in the homeland, but international allies are also targeting Biden after witnessing the swift victory of emboldened Taliban terrorists. In what is being described as worse than America’s humiliating evacuation from Saigon in 1975, the haphazard Afghanistan withdrawal is eroding the confidence of international allies that his administration is capable of fulfilling his foreign policy promises.
British MP Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Defense Committee in the British Parliament, mocked Biden’s “America is back” foreign policy.
“Whatever happened to ‘America is back’?” Ellwood told the Washington Post.
“People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat,” Ellwood added. “This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we’re being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?”
Riad Kahwaji, whom the Post described as “the enigma security consultancy in the United Arab Emirates, which hosts one of the biggest American military contingents in the Middle East,” told the newspaper that Biden’s withdrawal “is raising alarm bells everywhere.”
“The U.S.’s credibility as an ally has been in question for a while,” Kahwaji said. “We see Russia fighting all the way to protect the Assad regime [in Syria], and now the Americans are pulling out and leaving a big chaos in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post that German lawmakers are furious with the decision of Biden’s administration.
“The Biden administration came to office promising an open exchange, a transparent exchange with its allies. They said the transatlantic relationship would be pivotal,” Clüver Ashbrook said. “As it is, they’re playing lip service to the transatlantic relationship and still believe European allies should fall into line with U.S. priorities.”
Biden has attempted to defect blame for the disastrous withdrawal on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. But those attempts ring hallow. While it is true that Trump initiated the Afghanistan withdrawal, the withdrawal strategy falls squarely on Biden’s shoulders. In fact, Biden was confidently telling reporters just last month the Taliban would not retake control of Afghanistan, denying comparisons to Vietnam.
However, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out, Biden has overturned countless Trump-era policies. Why is Biden’s administration now claiming that Trump’s May 1 withdrawal deadline is one they could not overturn, too?
From the WSJ:
Note that Mr. Biden is more critical of his predecessor than he is of the Taliban. The President has spent seven months ostentatiously overturning one Trump policy after another on foreign and domestic policy. Yet he now claims Afghanistan policy is the one he could do nothing about. This is a pathetic denial of his own agency, and it’s also a false choice. It’s as if Winston Churchill, with his troops surrounded at Dunkirk, had declared that Neville Chamberlain got him into this mess and the British had already fought too many wars on the Continent.
Biden, in fact, reportedly ignored top military commanders, who recommended retaining a nominal American force in Afghanistan to help maintain security and facilitate a transfer of security responsibilities. Instead being motivating by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Biden approved the immediate full withdrawal of U.S. forces, a disastrous plan whose consequences are being laid bare as the world watches.
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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.
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.
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.
A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell
A Virginia school district has passed a new policy that, among other things, allows trans-identified students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and requires teachers to refer to students by their preferred names and pronouns. The Loudoun County School Board voted 7-2 on Wednesday to approve Policy 8040: Rights of Transgender and Gender-Expansive Students despite considerable opposition to the proposal.
Among its provisions, Policy 8040 requires that school faculty and staff use the chosen name and pronouns of a student who identifies as “gender-expansive or transgender.”
“School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their consistently asserted gender identity,” reads the policy.
“The use of gender-neutral pronouns is appropriate. Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a student’s gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy.”
The policy also allows students to use the restroom or locker room “that corresponds to their consistently asserted gender identity,” noting that school administrators should consider adding “gender-inclusive or single-user restrooms” for additional privacy.
The school board also provided a frequently-asked-questions document on the new guidelines and their implementation. The page notes that while there will still be facilities explicitly marked for males and females, LCPS plans “to improve student privacy and to promote the creation of single-user restrooms that are available to all students in a ratio appropriate for the enrollment and size of the school.”
According to the FAQ document, LCPS recommended that school staff “make efforts to eliminate gender-based practices to the extent possible,” claiming that such practices “can have the effect of marginalizing, stigmatizing, and excluding students, regardless of their gender identity or gender expression.”
“Examples of practices that may be based on gender, and which should be eliminated, include grouping students for class activities, gender-based homecoming or prom courts, limitations on who can attend as ‘couples’ at school dances, and gender-based events such as father-daughter dances,” continued the FAQ document.
Critics of the controversial policy include Loudoun County School Board member Jeffrey Morse.
“The policy is not needed. The policy does not solve the issues that it’s purported to solve. The policy has forced our focus out of education and I will not support it,” stated Morse, as reported by Fox 5.
The policy garnered national attention when Bryon Tanner Cross, a teacher at Leesburg Elementary School, was suspended by LCPS for speaking out against the proposed policy at a school board meeting in May. During the public comments section of the meeting, Cross told the board that as a Christian, he was unable to “affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa.”
“My name is Tanner Cross, and I am speaking out of love for those who suffer with gender dysphoria,”stated Cross at the meeting.“I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences.”
Cross sued the school district in response to the suspension, with a judge granting the Christian teacher a temporary injunction for his reinstatement in June. LCPS is appealing the decision.
A federal judge has struck down several pro-life laws in Indiana, dealing a blow to the momentum experienced by pro-life activists in the state following a previous court decision.
Judge Sarah Evans Barker, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, originally appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, issued a lengthy ruling Tuesday weighing in on the constitutionality of several pro-life laws enacted in the state in recent years. Barker’s ruling follows a lawsuit filed by Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, All-Options, Inc., and Dr. Jeffrey Glazer seeking to challenge “Indiana’s statutory and regulatory restrictions on abortions.”
Barker’s ruling struck down several Indiana laws, including a requirement that abortionists schedule in-person visits with their patients before dispensing abortion pills, thus prohibiting clinics from dispensing the drugs to women via telemedicine appointments. It also struck down laws requiring that second-trimester abortions be performed in hospitals or surgical centers, and that abortion clinics meet basic health and safety standards. In addition, Barker ruled that mandatory disclosure requirements included in a perinatal hospice brochure informing women seeking abortions about a baby’s ability to feel pain, the fact that life begins at conception and the mental health risks associated with abortion were unconstitutional.
She contended that this information violated the “truthful and non-misleading standard” laid out in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that upheld the right to obtain an abortion as determined by Roe v. Wade.
Under the aforementioned standard, Barker explained, “the state may enact measures aimed at ensuring that the woman’s choice [to have an abortion] is philosophically and socially informed and communicate its preference (if it has one) that the woman carry her pregnancy to term.” However, the measures must include information that is “truthful and not misleading.”
Barker cited testimony from Dr. Daniel Grossman, described by National Review as a “prominent abortionist and abortion advocate,” who argued that the brochure’s assertion that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm” did not live up to that standard because “there is no recognized medical definition for ‘human physical life,’ nor is there any scientific, medical consensus as to the moment in time or human biology when ‘life’ begins.”
While Barker did uphold some of Indiana’s abortion laws, pro-life groups and politicians characterized her ruling as a major disappointment. Indiana Right to Life CEO Mike Fichter slammed Barker’s ruling as “horrific,” warning in a statement that it will “lead to a massive expansion of chemical and late-term abortions in Indiana.”
“The sweeping blockage of these common sense laws jeopardizes the health and safety of women, [and] leaves women in the dark on issues of fetal pain and the development of human life,” he added. “This is judicial activism at its worst.”
Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., also released a statement in response to Barker’s ruling, and expressed disappointment that “the U.S. District Court struck down several common sense, pro-life provisions in Indiana state law that were designed to protect women and children.”
Walorski added, “The U.S. Constitution clearly safeguards life, and it’s my hope that this decision will be appealed.”
The laws Barker upheld include: Requiring that abortion facilities show the ultrasound image to mothers before deciding whether to go through with an abortion; that minors seeking an abortion obtain permission from a parent or guardian; that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital; abortion facilities collect detailed information about their patients and enter it into a database and undergo annual inspections by the state, as well as a law requiring that only licensed doctors perform first-trimester abortions.
Barker’s ruling comes less than two weeks after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Indiana law requiring abortion facilities to report to the state any complications that arise from abortions performed at their clinics. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky had challenged the law as being “unconstitutionally vague.”
As Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita indicated in a statement, the Seventh Circuit also upheld the in-person counseling law that Barker struck down as part of her ruling. Rokita hinted that his office intends to appeal Barker’s ruling to the Seventh Circuit, vowing to “continue to fight to defend Indiana’s common sense laws and to build a culture of life in Indiana.”
The New York Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Project Veritas in its lawsuit against the New York Times. Project Veritas will be permitted to depose the New York Times. A motion for a stay was denied.
The New York Times tried to dismiss the case but the New York Supreme Court denied their motion, ruling terms “deceptive” and “disinformation” apply to the New York Times reporters’ actions and claims.
The Court blasted the Times in an opinion:
“Here, having failed to convince the Court that [Project Veritas’] case should be dismissed, [The New York Times] also failed to demonstrate the extraordinary justification required for the imposition of the drastic remedy of a stay pending appeal.”
The Court also said that “despite the fact that the NY Times has been permitted to file anti-SLAPP motions to dismiss for decades, the NY Times failed to cite any cases in which an unsuccessful moving was granted a stay pending appeal.”
“Ladies and gentlemen: Let the depositions begin. Stay tuned. We’re about to drop the first New York Times deposition any day,” Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said on Thursday.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with Border Patrol agents in Texas, reportedly stating “we’re going to lose” the border crisis in an audio recording leaked on Friday.
“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said, according to audio reportedly obtained by Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.
Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the border crisis in leaked audio:
“We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it,” he added.
“In July there were over 212,000 illegal immigrants who came into the country (and that’s not counting the ‘got-aways’ / only God knows how many we missed),” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted.
“The men and women of the Border Patrol are heroes who are being asked to do the impossible.”
The leaked audio comes as it was reported authorities made 212,672 apprehensions at the southern border in July. The number marks a 13 percent increase over June and a 21-year high for a single-month total, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“The U.S. also saw a 24 percent uptick in the number of unaccompanied children at the southwest border as well as a nearly 50 percent jump in the number of families,”The Hill reported on Thursday.
The surge of illegal immigrants has led Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs to pursue the impeachment of Mayorkas. Biggs filed the articles of impeachment on Tuesday, tweeting, “I just filed articles of impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas.’
“His impeachment is well overdue and critical for the security of our nation.”
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton agreed with Biggs, tweeting on Thursday, “Time for Secretary Mayorkas to go.”
Even so, the impeachment is unlikely to move forward in the Democrat-controlled House.
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.
In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul is writing to a church that just came out of a very depraved lifestyle, so when he gives these warnings, they relate to it. It is astonishing how these words still resonate over 2,000 years later.
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator… Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another… Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”(Romans 1: 24-27, 32)
The most alarming aspect of how similar we are is that “those that know the righteous decree” are either foolishly or knowingly supporting precisely the kind of immorality we are warned to avoid. Modern ideas of the “woke culture” — gender fluidity, legitimizing same-sex relationships, and humanism are not biblical principles. According to the American Humanist Association, “Religious Humanism is without a god, without a belief in the supernatural, without a belief in an afterlife, and without a belief in a “higher” source of moral values.” How then can a Christian then find common ground with such ideals?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Lord also commands the church to be as one body, united in faith under one Spirit. However, unity is impossible without agreement. The Body of Christ must be unified around the ultimate truth that is contained in the Bible. Though we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s ideals, the Church should not condone immoral principles. All of humanity needs salvation, but it requires repentance from sin, the desire to turn away from it, and the acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior.
These seemingly contradictory principles leave Christians with the difficult task of reconciling the commandment to avoid evil and achieving unity within the Body of Christ. We must be wise enough to distinguish between people simply acting foolish or naive instead of espousing wickedness. Being wise is not as the culture defines it but being wise in the ways of God means following His commands. Through knowledge of God’s word and prayer, we will gain the discernment and wisdom to know the difference.
Kids are being indoctrinated to believe that if it feels good, do it. They are being taught there is no absolute truth — not their gender, the notion of marriage only being between a man and woman, and even rejecting the founding principles of our country.
Professors say you can’t legislate morality, but of course, you can! That is why we do not drive 100mph in a school zone, and child pornography is a crime. Morality isn’t something you invent; it comes from God. Tacit support by the Church of principles that stem from a denial of God’s law leads to the destruction of our youth, our families, and eventually the moral fabric of our country. God can and does gives such a society over to its wicked desire.
“Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity.” (Romans 1: 28-29)
Sometimes, believers are following trends in our culture out of ignorance. We extend grace and compassion for them until it becomes clear they are unwilling to relent in support of depravity. As God says in Jude, “And on some have compassion, making a distinction; but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.”
Other times, Christians have a hero mentality, thinking they can “save” people, but we must understand that some people do not want to be saved. They are filled with unresolved trauma, anger and resentment that only the Lord can change if He so chooses.
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.” (2 Timothy 3:1-5)
Notice again, Paul warns that the threat will come from those claiming a “form of godliness,” but he does not say to pursue them relentlessly. We simply have to avoid them.
We should not be too proud of ourselves or so enamored with our civilization that we do not heed God’s warnings. If we accept modern principles that defy God’s law, purposely or unwittingly, it leads to a debased mind where God no longer reigns over our lives and the lives of our families and communities. Yes, we love our neighbors and pray for their salvation, but we cannot compromise the Gospel to please them.
Hedieh Mirahmadi was a devout Muslim for two decades working in the field of national security before she experienced the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and has a new passion for sharing the Gospel. She dedicates herself full-time to Resurrect Ministry, an online resource that harnesses the power of the Internet to make salvation through Christ available to people of all nations, and her daily podcast LivingFearlessDevotional.com.
A high level Democrat party official in Minneapolis has called Black Lives Matter terrorists lighting a police station on fire an “act of pure righteousness.”
Devin Hogan, the chair of the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party which is the state affiliate of the national Democratic Party, wrote in an op-ed for Southside Pride that “the cops started it.”
“At this point the world was paying attention. Friends and family were reaching out. How come words won’t satiate people? Why Minneapolis? The cops started it, I replied. They killed George Floyd and took every opportunity to escalate, agitate and make things worse. The cops are rioting and the people are responding,” Hogan wrote.
In a now-deleted Facebook post, Hogan was unapologetic even after facing backlash for his endorsement of violent riots and arson.
“The truth hurts. Accurately describing reality is not a call to arms. Explaining the conditions of violent repression with the reasons why and how people react to that oppression is not condoning violence. Fetishizing decorum over substance is a hallmark of white supremacy. If antiracism offends your sensibilities then please use this moment to examine the role you play in maintaining and upholding these systems. Which side are you on?” Hogan wrote in the post.
In April, a rioter named Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, 23, was sentenced to four years in prison and $12 million in restitution for the arson.
“On the night of May 28, 2020, Mr. Robinson chose to depart from lawful protest and instead engaged in violence and destruction,” said a statement by Acting U.S. Attorney Anders Folk, whose office prosecuted the case. “The arson at the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct put lives at risk and contributed to widespread lawlessness in Minneapolis.”
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.
On Wednesday night’s episode of “ReidOut,” left-wing MSNBC host Joy Reid resurfaced the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to paint conservatives as terrorists and claim that the Republican Party is “harboring” a “white nationalist insurgency.” Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California also appeared on the progressive cable TV show, where he said members of the GOP are “starting to kill our kids” because of their opinions on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Reid kicked off her show by rehashing the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the fourth anniversary of the deadly event.
“Four years ago tonight, we got our first on-camera glimpse of the fascism right in front of us,” Reid claimed, then compared the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally to the “torchlight rallies held at Nuremberg during the Third Reich.” Reid purported that Charlottesville was the “tinderbox” that led to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building.
Reid then welcomed MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance, who said the conservative base believes that Democrats “must be destroyed by force of arms.”
“You know, there’s a substantial portion of the gun-slinging conservative base that really doesn’t support QAnon,” Nance said. “Even though, and I said this a year ago on this program, QAnon would take over the Republican ideology, and it has, even though they don’t allow Q shirts at Trump rallies and things like that, the belief in the inherent evilness of all Democrats and that that there’s a global cabal that must be destroyed by force of arms, that is now standard throughout the conservative base.”
“The Republican Party — you know, I used to joke that they were Vanilla ISIS, right, all of these militiamen and everything out there. They were like ISIS,” Nance ranted, as reported by NewsBusters. “They were like al Qaeda in the sense that they radicalized online, they would meet together in secret and they did all of these activities, which were very much like a terrorist insurgency.”
“Now, I think they have shifted,” Nance hypothesized. “The Republican Party is more like Sinn Fein and the relationship between Sinn Fein, the Irish Nationalist Party, and the Irish Republican Army, provisional Irish Republican army terrorist group, who called themselves freedom fighters and insurgents and had Americans, American congressman sending them money to buy, you know, heavy machine guns.”
Nance said some conservatives see themselves as the second coming of the Sons of Liberty and alleged many of them “are preparing for civil war right now.” Nance asserted that Republican lawmakers are “subliminally” encouraging their base to fight.
“There are many of them right now that are ready to fight and we’re seeing politicians in the statehouses and the Capitol who are actually, you know, pushing them subliminally to fight,” Nance claimed.
Reid asked Swalwell if he felt “comfortable and safe” working with Republicans in Congress, “who at minimum are willing to live with that kind of fascism and white nationalism in their party?”
Swalwell responded by making the accusation that Republicans would have joined in on the Capitol riots had they not been in Congress.
“No, Joy, I don’t,” Swalwell said of feeling safe. “And we look at many of our colleagues and believe that had they not been in Congress on January 6, they would have been on the other side of the door right next to Ashli Babbitt. And so I’m not working with them.”
Swalwell then pivoted to how Republicans are “literally killing us” by conservatives claiming “the lie that the election was stolen” and “the lie that vaccines do not work also propagated by Tucker Carlson, Kevin McCarthy and, you know, those guys in the Republican Party, it’s killing Americans and it’s starting to kill our kids.”
Without presenting evidence, Swalwell has attacked “those guys” in the “Radical Republican Party” for “lying about vaccines.” In Twitter posts from this month, the failed Democratic presidential candidate blamed Republicans for the CDC’s guidance on wearing masks indoors, including for the fully vaccinated.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
The New York Times recently ran an indignant article on the Department of Justice’s arrest of two fugitives in Mexico who were accused of involvement in a mostly peaceful arson during the #BLM protests in the Twin Cities last year. As the Times described it: “One night in the Twin Cities, shortly after the killing of George Floyd, someone set a fire in a Goodwill.”
Why would law enforcement authorities be so obsessed with such a minor offense? “To fellow protesters,” the Times explained, “it’s part of an extreme crackdown on those who most fervently demonstrated against America’s criminal justice system.”
A former FBI agent, Michael German — now working for the anti-police Brennan Center for Justice — confirmed that former Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice had pursued BLM protesters “very aggressively,” adding, “It wouldn’t surprise me that this case would have been a high-priority one.” (Do any FBI agents support law enforcement?)
Luckily, that’s changed under President Biden!
Whereas the Times was upset that the perps were caught, my takeaway from the story was: HECKUVA JOB, IMMIGRATION AUTHORITIES!
It seems our arsonist heroes are Jose Angel Felan Jr., a Mexican immigrant with multiple felony convictions, and his accomplice, Mena Dyaha Yousif, an Iraqi generously taken in by this country as a child because of a war in her own country. (Of course, our government won’t just come out and tell us when criminals are immigrants, but the Felan family’s specialization in transporting illegal aliens across the border is a pretty good hint.)
Although the Times wasn’t overly prolix about the arsons, Felan didn’t just light up a Goodwill store. He also started blazes at a school for disadvantaged youth and an Asian-owned black hair products store — establishments that practically scream “White Supremacy Power Structure”!
Jin Lim, owner of the black hair products store, described the effect of the “fervent” protests on his business: “Completely destroyed.” Insurance covered only 60% of the property damage.
But who cares about Lim? Certainly no one at the Times.
Inexplicably, U.S. law enforcement refused to let bygones be bygones, and tracked the fire-bugs to Mexico, finally arresting them in February.
Felan’s criminal record (slipped in around paragraph 2,000 of the Times article) includes “a drug possession charge when he was 18 that led to an almost seven-year prison sentence …”
Hold it right there! Seven years for a first offense, at the tender age of 18? That’s not a run-of-the-mill drug case.
He also went to prison for, among other things, “transporting undocumented immigrants near the Mexican border.” Perhaps someday, those “undocumented immigrants” will also fervently protest racial injustice by setting fire to businesses in minority neighborhoods!
To quote the motto of the school Felan torched: “Unity Through Diversity!”
After fleeing from Minnesota to Texas, our model immigrants were assisted in their getaway by Felan’s family. According to law enforcement, Felan’s mother switched cars with the perps, allowing them to evade authorities. Then his brother, also previously convicted of transporting illegals, helped get them across the border to Mexico.
Again: Bang-up job, U.S. immigration authorities! Of all 158 million people who want to immigrate to the U.S., you guys let in an entire family of criminals.
But it was not the failure of our immigration system that got the Times’ goat. Nor the culprits’ wanton destruction of a poor neighborhood or flight from justice. It was that facial recognition technology might, in theory, have led to the fugitives’ capture.
That was the whole point of this 3,200-word article: The arrest of criminal immigrants in Mexico “exposed a growing system of global surveillance.”
By “global surveillance,” the Times means “cameras.” It’s one thing to have cameras recording cops 24/7, but when cameras are used to catch criminals, well, gentlemen, we’re looking at a civil rights case.
Except it turns out, no cameras were used to catch these Dreamers. It was a tip to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that led to their capture, for which the AFT paid out a $20,000 reward.
But high-tech cameras might have helped nab the accused felons — and isn’t that just awful? You don’t have to take the Times’ word for it! Adam Schwartz, attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “It’s very upsetting.”
In the Times’ ideal world, we bring other countries’ criminals here, they commit felonies with abandon, and as long as they make it out of the country without getting caught, they’re home free!
In my ideal world, we stop bringing other countries’ criminals here.
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.
Cars drive in Washington, D.C. with the U.S. Capitol in the background. | Unsplash/Abdullah Konte
As the U.S. Senate voted to pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package Tuesday that appears to have attracted a degree of bipartisan support, some conservatives are warning about some controversial aspects of the bill, which some argue have little to do with infrastructure.
Nineteen Republican senators — nearly a third of Senate Republicans — voted with all Senate Democrats to pass the infrastructure package.
However, not all GOP senators share their colleagues’ enthusiasm for the package, which is described as a bill “to authorize funds for Federal-aid highways, highway safety programs, and transit programs, and for other purposes.”
Some Republican senators and conservative activists are shining a light on some provisions tucked away in the 2,702-page legislation.
The bill must pass the House of Representatives before it is sent to President Joe Biden’s desk.
In the following are three unexpected aspects of the infrastructure package.
1. Ban on sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who voted against invoking cloture on the infrastructure bill and thereby ending debate on its contents, pointed out that the infrastructure package includes a reference to “gender identity.”
Last week, Hawley tweeted out: “Now gender identity is infrastructure. Can’t wait to see what else is in this bill.”
Hawley’s tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of the bill, which includes a declaration that “the term ‘gender identity’ has the meaning given the term in section 249(c) of title 18, United States Code.” The mention of gender identity is included in Title III of Division F of the bill, which deals with broadband distribution and outlines a legislative initiative called the Digital Equity Act incorporated into the infrastructure package.
The Digital Equity Act also includes a nondiscrimination provision proclaiming that “no individual in the United States may, on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity that is funded in whole or in part with funds made available to carry out this title.”
The inclusion of the language drew the ire of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group. Hawley shared a screenshot of a letter written by Quena Gonzalez, the Family Research Council’s senior director of government affairs, to members of the U.S. Senate. Gonzalez expressed concern that the infrastructure bill would advance “a radical agenda on marriage and sexuality,” specifically highlighting the elevation of “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to a specially protected class status.”
“SOGI should never be elevated in this manner; doing so is unnecessary, has numerous tangential consequences, and is coercive,” she wrote.
“This particular clause is in reaction to access to broadband and is clearly agenda-driven, mirroring prior efforts to implement a comprehensive law (like the Equality Act) piecemeal,” Gonzalez added.
The Equality Act is a bill championed by Democrats to enshrine nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community into federal law. While the bill passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, it has stalled in the Senate.
2. Advanced drunk and impaired driving technology
The infrastructure bill also calls for the inclusion of “advanced drunk and impaired driving technology” as “standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.” It would require the secretary of transportation to issue a rule three years after the passage of the infrastructure bill requiring all new vehicles in the U.S. to contain such equipment. The rule would give car manufacturers two to three years to comply unless the secretary extended the deadline, meaning the technology would likely be required in all new cars by the end of the decade. It is part of Title IV of the infrastructure bill, which outlines priorities for enhancing “vehicle safety.”
According to the definition laid out, “advanced drunk and impaired driving technology” can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.” The technology should “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected” or “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than” the legal limit. The technology should “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit is detected.”
While the infrastructure bill does not explicitly outline what “advanced drunk and impaired driving technology” consists of, Fox News host Tucker Carlson elaborated on the type of technology that may soon become commonplace in American vehicles on his show last week.
“This bill requires all new vehicles in the United States to come with monitoring technology such as eye scanners or breathalyzers,” he said.
Carlson expressed concerns about the implications of this technology.
“Going forward, you will need the express permission of your federal overlords before you start your car in the morning because it’s their car now,” he quipped.
3. Clearinghouse for marijuana research
The infrastructure bill calls for the establishment of a “national clearinghouse to collect and distribute samples and strains of marijuana for scientific research that includes marijuana and products containing marijuana that are lawfully available to patients or consumers in a state on a retail basis.”
The clearinghouse would enable researchers in states that have not yet legalized recreational marijuana to obtain “access to samples and strains of marijuana” for “purposes of research on marijuana-impaired driving.”
The would package require the secretary of transportation to collaborate with the attorney general and the secretary of health and human services to release a report with recommendations for “increasing and improving, for scientific researchers studying impairment while driving under the influence of marijuana, access to samples and strains of marijuana and products containing marijuana that are lawfully available to patients or consumers in a State on a retail basis.”
The report on marijuana research is one of several provisions introduced in Title V of Division B, which focuses on “Research and Innovation.”
Division B consists of the Surface Transportation Investment Act of 2021, one of several smaller pieces of legislation featured in the larger, comprehensive infrastructure bill.
Reports and studies, some of which have little to do with what is commonly understood as infrastructure, are consistently woven throughout the bill.
According to Fox Business, “the word ‘study’ appears more than 300 times in the legislation” while the word “‘report’ appears more than 500 times.”
Inflation increased at a rapid 5.4% clip compared to August 2020, the Department of Labor said Wednesday. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a common tool used to measure inflation, increased 0.5% between June and July, according to the Labor Department report. “It will be another very hot number with the fingerprints of the pandemic all over it,” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC before official numbers were released.
Energy and food costs contributed the most to the higher-than-normal figure, rising 0.7% and 1.6% respectively last month, the report showed. Gasoline ticked up 2.4% in July and a whopping 41.8% year-over-year.
The CPI increased at an annual rate of 5.4% in June, 5% in May and 4.2% in April, according to governmentdata. Inflation rose 0.9% in June, the quickest increase since August 2008.
The Federal Reserve, which has downplayed rising consumer prices as a temporary product of the rapid economic recovery, acknowledged last month that inflation could be “higher and more persistent” than it previously forecasted. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently predicted continued “rapid inflation” over the medium term, after months of suggesting it would subside quickly.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell appears for a Senate Banking Committee hearing on July 15. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The White House has repeated the predictions made by the Federal Reserve and Yellen, calling inflation transitory and ensuring it would return to normal by 2022.
“It’s also important to note, though — because we rely on the Federal Reserve for projections — that they are projecting to come back to normal levels next year, and this is still foreseen as a transitory impact on prices,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday.
She added that inflation remained at an elevated level due to a large number of supply chain shortages around the world, a theory prominent economists have backed.
“The kind of inflation now is driven by the fact that there aren’t enough used cars, that the oil markets are rocking and rolling, that housing construction demand is high and there’s been trouble getting sawmills up and running,” Beacon Economics founding partner Christopher Thornberg told The Wall Street Journal.
Used car prices have surged 41.7% over the last year, according to Wednesday’s Labor Department report. Conservatives and other economists have blamed Biden’s high-spending for the increased prices affecting Americans.
“The Democrats’ reckless tax & spending spree fuels Biden’s raging inflation crisis & will drive U.S. debt to $45 TRILLION,” Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott tweeted Tuesday.
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.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. | AFP via Getty Images/Andrew Caballero
An activist who spent over two decades advocating for critical race theory has opened up about how she came to understand how the theoretical framework contradicts Christian teachings. Now she is encouraging supporters to reach out to friends and loved ones “wrapped up in the critical social theories.”
Monique Duson, the co-founder of The Center for Biblical Unity, spoke about her experiences with woke ideology and CRT as part of a livestream event sponsored by Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina on Saturday. CRT, which is tied to Marxist critical theory, criticizes the U.S. and Western nations as being oppressive and promoting institutional “systemic racism” or “white supremacy.” It teaches that systemic racism is ingrained in every aspect of American life.
Chantal Monique Duson, the co-founder of The Center for Biblical Unity, speaking about her time as a proponent of critical race theory at a virtual event held by Southern Evangelical Seminary on Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021. | Screengrab: YouTube/Southern Evangelical Seminary
When discussing her eventual rejection of CRT and overall woke ideology, Duson said that “leaving wokeness is never done alone, and it’s rarely done without a fight.”
Duson cited her lengthy dialogue with theologian Krista Bontrager on issues like CRT, social justice and other provocative topics as a key factor in her leaving “secular frameworks.”
“If your friends or loved ones are wrapped up in the critical social theories, critical race theory or social justice, don’t get mad at them,” Duson advised.
“It’s usually done or embraced from a posture that is very compassionate and wanting to do good. They’ve just not been [given] a proper exegetical framework.”
Duson told her audience to encourage their CRT peers, especially their Christian friends sympathetic to the worldview, “to truly get into the Word of God to understand truly what it means.”
“We must have compassion as we embrace young people and older people who are espoused to this ideology so that we can influence them with the Gospel of truth,” she continued. “Jesus is our only hope for racial unity.”
“If someone in your life is espousing critical race theory or the social theories, know that it is not too late for them to walk out. Your participation is going to be desperately needed.”
Duson talked about her upbringing in South Los Angeles, California, growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood. She explained that her childhood involved living in a crime-ridden neighborhood rocked by the Rodney King riots of 1992, with a heavy emphasis on learning to be black, especially “in contrast to what it means to be white.”
Duson noted that while the term “critical race theory” was not used by the people she knew growing up, “everyone used some of the same terms or some of the same phrases.”
These terms and phrases included the ideas that racism was pervasive, that whites will not change on a race-related issue until it directly benefits them and allegations of “white privilege.”
“I knew Bible verses, but I didn’t know context. I knew about justice, but I didn’t know the bigger story of the Bible,” said Duson, who became a Christian as a teenager. “These are things that help to prevent or offer boundary with things like critical race theory.”
“Knowing proper context, knowing the bigger history or the bigger story of the Bible. Like many CRT-affirming Christians, I participated in syncretism, where I mixed Scripture and culture.”
Regarding her eventual departure from CRT beliefs, Duson credited “divine intervention,” saying, “I did not wake up alone.”
“It takes divine intervention,” she stressed. “God Himself is the primary agent of my awakening. He orchestrated specific encounters with people who caused me to begin to question my paradigm.”
This included meeting white individuals who were victims of racism or suffered economic injustices comparable to African Americans living in the inner-city, such as rural whites living in Appalachia. Duson was part of a one-day virtual event titled “Awaken: Thinking Well About Wokism, Social Justice, & Racial Reconciliation.”
In addition to Duson, other featured speakers for the digital event included civil rights activist Bob Woodson of 1776 Unites and former police officer Eric Muldrow of Code Red Conversations.
“The ‘Awaken’ event will examine the questions surrounding systemic racism in America, police violence and people of color, the nature of true social justice, and how someone can escape wokism,”explained SES.“We cannot love others well by sacrificing truth on the false altar of wokeness ideology.”
The Christian Post’s Executive Editor Richard Land was the president of SES until July 2021 and presently serves as an adjunct professor and president emeritus.
A federal judge in Texas blocked an Obama-era mandate reinstated by the Biden administration requiring medical facilities and health insurers to cover or provide gender transition procedures and abortions. U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas granted a permanent injunction on Monday against the regulation in the case of Franciscan Alliance, Inc. et al. v. Xavier Becerra.
O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded that the mandate issued through the Department of Health and Human Services violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by unjustly harming the plaintiffs’ religious practices.
“No party disputes that the [Transgender Mandate] threatens to burden Christian Plaintiffs’ religious exercise … by placing substantial pressure on Christian Plaintiffs, in the form of fines and civil liability, to perform and provide insurance coverage for gender-transition procedures and abortions,” wrote the judge.
“When the RFRA violation is clear and the threat of irreparable harm is present, a permanent injunction exempting Christian Plaintiffs from that religion-burdening conduct is the appropriate relief.”
Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, a legal nonprofit representing a religious hospital and a group of over 20,000 healthcare professionals, said in a statement that the ruling is a “victory for compassion, conscience, and common sense.”
“No doctor should be forced to perform controversial, medically unsupported procedures that are contrary to their conscience and could be deeply harmful to their patients,”
In 2016, the Obama administration implemented the regulation via Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. The controversial regulation required healthcare providers to perform gender transition procedures, including on minors, even if the providers held sincere religious objections. Violators of the rule could have faced penalties for unlawful discrimination based on “termination of pregnancy” and “gender identity.”
To justify the rule, the Obama administration interpreted federal discrimination code that bans sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, although neither of those terms are found in federal civil rights law passed by Congress. The mandate was the subject of much litigation, with various religious entities that provide medical services filing lawsuits against the Obama administration.
Although the Trump administration finalized a new rule repealing the 2016 mandate, multiple courts moved to restore portions of the 2016 mandate. In May, the Biden administration pledged to revive the policy. The justification for the restoration was the U.S. Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton County. The nation’s high court concluded that federal Title VII protections against sex discrimination applied to gender identity and sexual orientation.
The Franciscan Alliance lawsuit is one of multiple legal challenges against the mandate, with the district court initially ruling in its favor but not giving a permanent injunction. Taking office in January, the Biden administration has worked to defend the Obama-era mandate in court, appealing a similar ruling against the mandate to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in April.
O’Conner also ruled against the mandate in 2019. But in April, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a per curiam decision sending a case back to the district court level for further consideration, though it did not rule on the lawsuit’s merits.
The Senate on Tuesday passed its bipartisan infrastructure bill, moving what would be the largest public works package in decades one step closer to becoming law months after negotiations first began. The bill, which advocates praised as the largest investment in America’s infrastructure since the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, passed 69-30. Nineteen Republicans joined every Democrat in voting for the package.
The legislation, titled the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), was on a glide path to passage after beating a Senate filibuster Sunday night, when 68 senators voted to end debate.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the bill’s lead Democratic negotiator, said Monday on the Senate floor that the bill would “make America stronger and safer, create good-paying jobs and expand economic opportunities across the country,” and praised her colleagues for their commitment to reaching an agreement. “This is what it looks like when elected leaders take a step toward healing our country’s divisions rather than feeding [them],” she added.
The IIJA costs $1.2 trillion over eight years, $550 billion of which is new government spending, and puts hundreds of billions of federal dollars toward roads, bridges, ports, broadband and more. It was led by Ohio Sen. Rob Portman on the Republican side, and was the product of negotiations among 22 senators and President Joe Biden.
“[This is] landmark and needed legislation in fixing our roads, railroads, our ports, electrical grid and more,” Portman said on the floor. “I’m proud of what was done on that … It will improve the lives of all Americans. It’s long-term spending to repair and replace and build assets that will last for decades.”
Talks first began with West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, but collapsed after she and the White House could not agree on the overall size and scope of the bill. Negotiations then shifted to the bipartisan group, but remained precarious for weeks as they struggled to compromise on how to finance the new spending and what it should cover.
It was late July when Portman announced that the group had reached agreement on the “major issues,” and that Republicans were ready to move forward.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks after the bipartisan bill cleared its first procedural vote in July. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The bill cleared its first procedural vote hours later with the support of 17 Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a clear indication that it had the necessary support to beat a filibuster and pass. Two days later, 16 Republicans joined Democrats in officially voting to begin debate.
Senators originally sought to pass the bill last week or over the weekend, but were blocked from doing so by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, who refused to forgo hours of scheduled debate. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill would add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, arguing that the legislation was not fully paid for, unlike what its negotiators previously said.
Hagerty’s delays earned praise from former President Donald Trump on Sunday, who had repeatedly tried to intimidate Republicans into opposing the package. In multiple email statements he disparaged McConnell for supporting the bill, calling it a “disgrace” and the “beginning of the Green New Deal,” and floated backing primary challengers against other Republicans who backed it.
With the IIJA’s passing, senators are now set to take up their budget resolution, keeping them in Washington for another marathon session with dozens of politically tricky amendment votes and eating into their prized August recess. The mammoth resolution, unveiled by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday, addresses priorities omitted from the infrastructure bill including health care, climate change and immigration and as outlined costs $3.5 trillion.
“This legislation in so many ways begins to address the working families of our country,” Sanders said on the Senate floor Monday. “But in one important way, maybe the most important, is as we address the needs of our people in health care and education and climate, we are going to create many millions of good-paying jobs that the American people desperately need.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders authored Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget, which he has acknowledged will likely pass on party lines. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
While Republicans unanimously oppose the reconciliation package, Senate rules allow for Democrats to pass it with just a simple majority vote, meaning that it could pass strictly along party lines if their caucus all votes for it.
McConnell on Tuesday accused Democrats of playing “Russian roulette with our country” and said the budget would be the “largest peacetime tax hike on record.”
“This new reckless taxing and spending spree will fall like a hammer blow on workers and middle-class families,” McConnell said. “If all 50 Democrats want to help [Budget Committee] Chairman Sanders hurt middle-class families … well, that’s their prerogative, but we’re going to argue it out right here on the floor at some length.”
Several progressives, however, have sought to tie the bipartisan bill with the reconciliation package, with some in the House hinging their support for the former on Senate Democrats passing the latter. In an attempt to hold her narrow majority together, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she will not bring the bipartisan bill up for a vote until the Senate passes the reconciliation package as well, despite moderates urging her to bring up the infrastructure package as soon as possible.
Others have also been critical of the infrastructure bill, which was adopted as a substitute for the $715 billion surface transportation bill that the House passed in July, arguing that it inadequately invests in climate, housing, child care and more.
Oregon Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, the chair of the House Transportation Committee, reportedly called the bill “crap” after a deal was reached, lamenting the fact that it omitted large swaths of the transportation bill he authored and disregarding the White House’s endorsement of it.
“I could give a damn about the White House. We’re an independent branch of government,” he told reporters in July. “They cut this deal. I didn’t sign off on it.”
RINOs help to give Biden a win toward collapsing the country by helping them pass the bloated Infrastructure Bill.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.
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. ParlerFacebookTwitterPinterestFlipboardTAGGED
In July Steve Bannon invited Professor David K. Clements from New Mexico State University and former Army intelligence captain and former baseball analyst Seth Keshel on The War Room to discuss their latest analysis on the 2020 election. Seth Keshel dropped a BOMB on the War Room. According to Seth, President Trump won Pennsylvania by 6-8% in 2020.
Even worse than I thought. PA was a slam dunk for Trump, with a 244k -12k (21 to 1 ratio) of net new registration in 4 years. Previously predicted Trump flip in 2016.
Fraud in PA horrific. Only 3 counties I see as relatively clean, with 27 classified with major fraud. 60 of 67 counties should have demonstrated GOP improvement per registration trends, but only 20 trended more GOP. Erie and Northampton were flipped, and should have been slam dunks for Trump.
Trump crushed Obama ’08 total in a shrinking state, only to be passed on strength of what I assess to be 504k excess votes! Trump margin, if accurate, should have been 52.0% to 46.1% (5.9%), or 424k votes. A bludgeoning in keeping with registration trend.
On Sunday night Seth Keshel released his latest analysis of Pennsylvania with analysis of five counties with enough fraudulent ballots to flip the state to Trump.
Here is the promised voter registration rolls with analysis on FIVE COUNTIES holding an estimated 92,000 extra Biden votes (AKA, enough to flip the state!)
*ERIE *LUZERNE *FRANKLIN *MONTGOMERY *YORK
This is only useful if you guys do something locally with it, demand action, and pressure the living hell out of the PA RINO coalition to have these explained. Every word in this document is understandable and we have the rolls for when they ask.
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.
Last month French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a Covid passport would be required in order to enter restaurants and theaters. Macron also announced a new mandatory vaccine mandate for all healthcare workers.
Tourists visiting France will have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test via a digital passport. The Covid passport requirement went into effect and French police are patrolling restaurants checking patrons’ Covid passports.
“The first checks of Police started as a preventive measure at Paris in cafes and restaurants where the Pass Sanitaire is mandatory as of today. Verbalization of 135 euros from next week, up to 9,000 euros in the event of a repeat offense.” Reuters reporter Antony Paone said on Monday.
VIDEO:
Les premiers contrôles de #Police ont démarré à titre préventif à #Paris dans les cafés et restaurants où le #PassSanitaire est obligatoire dès aujourd'hui. Verbalisation de 135 euros à partir de la semaine prochaine, jusqu'à 9000 euro en cas de récidive.#Passanitaire#reuterspic.twitter.com/Vvyh75sun3
Young unaccompanied migrants, wait for their turn at the secondary processing station in the Department of Homeland Security holding facility on March 30, 2021 in Donna, Texas. The Donna location is the main detention center for unaccompanied children coming across the U.S. border in the Rio Grande Valley. It is an overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 kids and families are kept in pods, with the youngest kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping. | Dario Lopez-Mills – Pool/Getty Images
The mayor of a Texas border town is pleading for help in responding to the immigration surge as an influx of positive COVID-19 cases flow across the border, leaving the town of McAllen overwhelmed.
“We finally need help,” Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, shared on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” last week, adding that politicians in Washington “could change this with the stroke of a pen.”
“People blame us sometimes here in the municipality and we tell them it’s outside of our jurisdiction,” he shared. “If you want to place blame, we know exactly where to do it and that’s in Washington. And whether it’s the president, Congress, the Senate, whatever it is, they’re the ones who can take care of it.”
McAllen is a town of over 144,000 people located at the southern tip of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. The lack of support from the White House and U.S. Congress places a heavy burden on local governments to contain the immigration surge, which puts a strain on their resources and workforce.
“At the very end, this is not our responsibility. We don’t do this. We don’t deal with immigration,” the mayor of McAllen said.
Villalobos also said the city is “running out of money,” and shared how the overflow of immigrants has led the city to set up emergency tents and issue an emergency disaster declaration. The declaration warned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is releasing an alarmingly substantial number of immigrants into the City, including individuals that are positive for COVID-19.”
The city of McAllen announced over 7,000 COVID-positive migrants had been released by CBP since mid-February, including over 1,500 COVID-positive immigrants released in the past week,Fox News reported.
Immigrants released by CBP are sent to be tested by Catholic Charities, a third-party, and are asked to quarantine in a room if they test positive, according to Fox News. In its declaration, the city warned that nonprofits, including Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center, are “overwhelmed with the unanticipated influx of individuals and can no longer adequately feed, house, provide medical attention or otherwise accommodate the individuals being released into the City.”
The city said the “rapidly escalating” surge in immigration is developing a crisis bigger than the city can handle.
“Despite the City of McAllen and its community partners’ best efforts, the sheer number of immigrants being released into the city has become a crisis: a crisis the City of McAllen did not create and has proactively tried to avoid for seven years,” the city said in a statement.
“This significant change increases the threat of COVID spread or other lawlessness within the city.”
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham asked the mayor if he had noticed a difference in the handling of immigration between the transition from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.
Young unaccompanied migrants, ages 3-9 watch TV inside a playpen at the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley in Donna, Texas, March 30, 2021. The youngest of the unaccompanied minors are kept separate from the rest of the detainees. | DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Without trying to be political, the mayor said that “six, seven, eight months ago, we did not have the issues we have now.”
“It’s totally different,” the mayor stressed.
Biden has reversed many Trump-era immigration policies on the first day in office, including halting construction on the border wall. Many Republicans blame the new administration’s border policies for the uptick in immigrants crossing the southern border in 2021.
According to numbers released by the CBP, over 188,000 border enforcement encounters took place in June. In June 2019, the last year before the pandemic, there were over 104,000 border enforcement encounters. The year 2021 has seen the highest number of unlawful border crossings in over 20 years.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who was tapped to be the border czar, has been criticized by Republicans for not being proactive in response to the border, instead focusing her efforts on the root causes in the countries of origin.
Fears of COVID-19 surging because of an increase in immigrants testing positive and the introduction of the delta variant has sparked an order restricting some immigrants from crossing the border. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended an order last week restricting the introduction of certain immigrants coming from Canada and Mexico to protect public health and the spread of COVID-19 through Title 42 public health protections. In effect, the order means that the Biden administration will continue the Trump-era policy of quickly expelling migrants and asylum seekers from the U.S. to Mexico, CBS News reports. The order also includes an exemption for unaccompanied minors.
“As part of the United States’ mitigation efforts in response to the rise in COVID-19 cases due to the delta variant, the Department of Homeland Security has begun to transport individuals expelled under Title 42 by plane to the Mexican interior,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Fox News on Friday.
Antifa members assaulting a prayer and worship event in downtown Portland, Oregon. | YouTube/Mary Todd
Dozens of black-clad Antifa militants carrying shields and melee weapons on Saturday assaulted Christians, including children, who were attending a prayer and worship event in downtown Portland, Oregon, featuring Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski. Portland police looked on as Antifa bear-sprayed Christians and their children, lobbed “flash bombs” into the crowd, and reportedly threw the sound equipment being used for the prayer event into the Willamette River, PJ Media reported.
In black bloc and riot gear, armed Antifa could be seen in a video physically confronting the Christian attendees. One of the members sprayed a congregant with what appeared to be pepper spray. The attendees stepped back to evade the assault, The Post Millennial reported.
“Where is your God now?” one of the Antifa members can be heard shouting in the video.
A woman attending the prayer event described the group as “ruthless.”
“Antifa just rolled in like an angry mob, started throwing flash bombs at everybody, macing everybody … rotten eggs,” CBN News quoted her as saying. “They threw a flash bomb into a group of kids that were out there from 4 months old to like 10.”
Pawlowski, who serves as pastor of Street Church and Cave of Adullam Church in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and has been seen in viral videos documenting his encounters with law enforcement over COVID-19 restrictions, was also sprayed in the face with mace.
An attendee who helped the pastor was quoted as saying, “Walked up to ask them to stop throwing things at the children. There’s kids down there. I mean, they’re toddlers and they sprayed me too.”
“Welcome to Portland. You won’t like it here, pastor,” tweeted an Antifa member, who identifies herself as Melissa Lewis on Twitter.
In an earlier interview with The Christian Post, Pawlowski spoke about his interactions with authorities over the past year and doubled down on his characterization of local law enforcement as Nazis and communists. Pawlowski has compared the measures taken by law enforcement officials to enforce novel coronavirus restrictions on churches to the actions taken by authorities in his native Poland when it was under communist rule.
In March 2020, he was informed that Street Church would have to “shut down and stop taking care of the poor.” Pawlowski refused to obey that order, concluding that by issuing “orders to stop feeding them [and] giving them necessities of life, they were sentencing them to death. [And] some of them did die.”
“All of those people wandering the streets, if I don’t feed them or someone like me does not feed them … they’re going to attack your house or break into your car,” he added. “You got to provide people with food if they cannot get it on their own for whatever reason. … Addictions or mental illness or whatever it is, those people will eat this way or that way. I prefer to feed them instead of letting them go and hurt other people to get what they need.”
The Saturday prayer and worship event in Portland was announced a month ago, which gave Antifa enough time to plan the attack.
Antifa has also attacked several churches in Portland.
In this case, NBC was the middleman in an Olympics where many of the athletes were less than thrilled to be representing the United States.
On July 26, for example, there were only 14.7 million people watching primetime coverage — a 49 percent drop from the 2016 Olympics and a 53 percent decline from the 2012 Olympics, Fox News reported. These ratings are so poor that the network began re-airing commercials for advertisers at no additional charge.
The Monmouth University Polling Institute released a poll showing that 43 percent of Americans did not have much interest in watching the games whatsoever. Patrick Murray of the polling institute told Fox News that the reason might have been the politicization of the games by some athletes.
“The Olympic spirit is a bit dampened this year,” he said.
“The delay from last year and lack of spectators have taken the edge off the typical anticipation and excitement for this event. But the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the sports world has also led to a backlash among some Americans.”
“I’m just here to represent, man,” she said last week, CNN reported.
“I know a lot of people like me, a lot of athletes like me, a lot of people are scared to succeed or speak out. As long as I can represent those people, I’m fine.”
Berry also had an “X” written on her hand in protest during the final.
Fencer Race Imboden did the same thing, saying he did so in “support of athletes of color, Ending Gun violence, and all the athletes who wish to use their voice on the platform they’ve earned,” according to CNN.
Shot-putter Raven Saunders crossed her arms during her medal ceremony, explaining later that the “X” was “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.”
Then there is U.S. soccer captain and social justice connoisseur Megan Rapinoe, who led the charge in kneeling in protest before her team’s games.
“It’s an opportunity for us to continue to use our voices and use our platforms to talk about the things that affect all of us intimately in different ways,” Rapinoe said, according to The Associated Press.
“We have people from Team USA, from all over the country, from all backgrounds, and people literally from all over the world for every other team so I obviously encourage everyone to use that platform to the best of their ability to do the most good that they possibly can in the world, especially as all eyes are on Tokyo these next couple weeks,” she later added.
Rapinoe and her team went on to finish a disappointing third in Tokyo.
While they certainly have the right to protest, Americans have the right to turn off the television when they feel their country is being insulted or disrespected.
Tamyra Mensah-Stock—the first black woman to win gold in wrestling for the U.S.A.—also shared her contagious love for America: “I’m so happy I get to represent U.S.A.!” 🤼♀️🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/mqDL2G9qzM
There were many athletes who were extremely patriotic on the world stage, but the social justice warriors have become martyrs in the establishment media and have monopolized the coverage.
Cable television is already a dying medium, and wokeness could be the nail in the coffin.
Cameron Arcand is a political commentator based in Orange County, California. His “Young Not Stupid” column launched at The Western Journal in January 2021, making Cameron one of the youngest columnists for a national news outlet in the United States. He has appeared on One America News, and has been a Young America’s Foundation member since 2019.@cameron_arcand
TIME’S UP co-founder Roberta Kaplan has resigned after an investigation into Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo found her implicated in helping discredit Cuomo’s accusers.
“I therefore have reluctantly come to the conclusion that an active law practice is no longer compatible with serving on the Board at Time’s Up at this time and I hereby resign,” said Kaplan, who is representing Cuomo secretary Melissa DeRosa in the attorney general’s inquiry.
A report on the investigation released Tuesday said that both Kaplan and TIME’S UP co-founder Tina Tchen helped Cuomo’s team craft an op-ed discrediting accuser Lindsey Boylan.
The letter was part of larger efforts by Cuomo and his aides to discredit the governor’s accusers, according to the report, in which the Cuomo administration not only sought help from Kaplan but also from Human Rights Campaign co-founder Alphonso David and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.
TIME’S UP co-founder Roberta Kaplan has resigned after an investigation into Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo found her implicated in helping discredit Cuomo’s accusers.
“Robbie Kaplan, board co-chair, has stepped down from the board,” TIME’S UP said in a press release Monday. “We and she agree that is the right and appropriate thing to do.”
“We hold ourselves accountable,” the TIME’S UP statement continued. “The events of the last week have made it clear that our process should be evaluated and we intend to do just that. We need more transparency about our vision of change-making, and we need a more inclusive process to engage the broader survivor community, many of whom have spent years doing the noble work of fighting for women.”
Kaplan also submitted a letter Monday announcing her resignation from TIME’S UP, a prominent non-profit established at the height of the #MeToo movement, The New York Times reported. The TIME’S UP co-founder said her work as an attorney prevented her from openly answering questions about her dealings with both Cuomo and his secretary Melissa DeRosa, who resigned late Sunday night.
A report on the investigation released Tuesday said that both Kaplan and TIME’S UP co-founder Tina Tchen helped Cuomo’s team craft an op-ed discrediting accuser Lindsey Boylan. The op-ed “denied the legitimacy of Ms. Boylan’s allegations, impugned her credibility, and attacked her claims as politically motivated,” according to the New York attorney general’s report.
The investigation released Tuesday found that the governor had “sexually harassed a number of State employees through unwelcome and unwanted touching, as well as by making numerous offensive and sexually suggestive comments” and that this conduct “was part of a pattern of behavior that extended to his interactions with others outside of State government.”
The letter was part of larger efforts by Cuomo and his aides to discredit the governor’s accusers, according to the report, in which the Cuomo administration not only sought help from Kaplan but also from Human Rights Campaign co-founder Alphonso David and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, the governor’s brother.
Tchen has vigorously denied involvement in discrediting any Cuomo accusers.
Boylan originally accused Cuomo of sexual harassment in an early December tweet thread. She later shared details of her allegations in a Medium post, describing Cuomo’s behavior and workplace as riddled with “pervasive harassment,” and accusing him of kissing her on the lips without her consent.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a press conference at One World Trade Center on June 15, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
After she came forward with her allegations in December, Cuomo “and a group of advisors worked on a draft letter or op-ed” which attempted to discredit Boylan by tying her, among other items, to supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“The various drafts of this letter included complaints against Ms. Boylan that were part of the Confidential Files,” the report said. “The drafts also discussed alleged interactions between Ms. Boylan and male colleagues other than the Governor.”
Cuomo asked DeRosa to send a draft of the letter to Kaplan, who is an attorney for Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, the report said. Kaplan also represents E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who accused Trump of sexual assault, as well as Trump’s niece, Mary Trump.
Kaplan shared the letter with Tchen, according to the report.
“According to Ms. DeRosa, Ms. Kaplan read the letter to the head of the advocacy group Times Up, and both of them allegedly suggested that, without the statements about Ms. Boylan’s interactions with male colleagues, the letter was fine,” the report said.
Cuomo’s advisers could not find factual support for parts of the letter and suggested it was an “overreaction,” the report said, but DeRosa told the governor that Kaplan and the Tchen reportedly thought the letter was “okay with some changes.”
Tchen serves as president and CEO of both TIME’S UP and the TIME’S UP Foundation, though TIME’S UP reportedly does not have control over the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund operations.
The TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which has committed over $10 million to support #MeToo allegations in the workplace, told Biden accuser Tara Reade in February 2020 that its charitable status would be put at risk if it financially supported her because Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. TIME’S UP strongly backed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Ford throughout the justice’s contentious confirmation hearings in September 2018.
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.
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.
Ryan Schiavo, an American street evangelist, preaches in England. | Ryan Schiavo
After facing arrest and detention for preaching that homosexuality is a sin, an American evangelist is warning that “things are getting very bad” in the United Kingdom and other Western countries, suggesting that the situation has deteriorated to the point where they are “becoming communist.”
Ryan Schiavo, who describes himself as an “evangelist and missionary,” was arrested in London on July 22 for preaching that homosexuality is a sin. While Schiavo is an American, he spends a considerable amount of time in London and frequently ministers to British youth and others gathered in the public square.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Schiavo recounted the events leading up to his arrest and warned about its implications for free speech and freedom of religion in the U.K. and Western civilization as a whole.
“I was preaching the Gospel on the streets as I frequently do, but it was about a 30-minute message, and in the course of a long message I can touch on many topics that I believe are pertinent,” he said. “At one point, I talked about the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism. I said that homosexuality is a sin; I talk about how it’s destructive, and the damage the transgender agenda is doing to children right now in the schools because it’s being pushed on children at a very young age here.”
Schiavo told CP that one of the things he said while preaching was that “the churches that have rainbow flags on them” were “not real churches.” His message drew the ire of one young woman, whom he believed was a lesbian. According to Schiavo, she was “very upset at what I had said, and so she called the police and the police came.”
Ryan Schiavo, an American street preacher, is arrested by Metropolitan Police for asserting that homosexuality is a sin, July 22, 2021. | Courtesy of Ryan Schiavo
As documented in a video of his arrest, Schiavo was detained for purportedly violating Section 4A of the Public Order Act, which bans people from causing “intentional harassment, alarm, or distress.”
The law declares that “a person is guilty of an offense if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm, or distress, he — (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior, or disorderly behavior, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting.”
As Metropolitan Police officers moved in to arrest him, Schiavo declared, “It is an honor to suffer for Jesus Christ.” He predicted that “God is going to judge this country so severely” because of its embrace of LGBT ideology.
“This is because I am a Christian!” he exclaimed. “That’s why this is happening.”
Schiavo told CP that when he was taken to jail, he was “put in a cell for 10 hours and given a mental health evaluation by the National Health Service before being released in the middle of the night.” He lamented that situations like his “egregious” detention were becoming “all too common.”
Describing the mental health evaluation to CP, Schiavo maintained that he was asked “personal questions about my family and about my work and how I was doing physically.” Schiavo cited the fact that he had to undergo a mental health evaluation as evidence that “things are getting very bad” in the U.K. regarding freedom of speech and religious expression.
“All these institutions are working together with each other; they’re anti-Christ,” he added. “It’s time for the church to wake up and to be prepared for persecution. Freedom of speech and expression are very much under attack in the Western world, and I’m concerned that many of these Western countries are becoming communist.”
Elaborating on his mental health evaluation, Schiavo recounted that he “did talk about the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism” with the man who was questioning him. “I said to him, ‘Would you call a banana a carrot?’ And the point I was making was this is what we do with people now. We call men women and women men.”
“I didn’t say that to him. I just said, ‘Would you call a banana a carrot?’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘If somebody was offended, I would.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘I should be the one asking you the questions.’”
Schiavo contended that his mental health evaluation, which lasted for 30 minutes, was an effort to “convince me not to talk about homosexuality in public anymore.” He told CP that “he (the mental health evaluator) wanted me to affirm him and just say, ‘OK,’ and agree, and I never did.”
The evangelist attributed his hostile treatment by the police to the fact that British law enforcement officials are “so trained to hear ‘homosexuality’ or ‘Islam’ because those are the two most protected demographics in Britain right now.” He stressed that in the U.K., “you cannot speak against homosexuality or transgenderism and you can’t speak against Islam.”
“So if they hear those words, their antennas are up because they go through all of this pro-LGBT training … in their schooling, … at every other level of society people do here, it’s being pushed on them,” he continued. “And so when they hear that word, they’re immediately thinking ‘hate crime,’ ‘hate crime.’”
Although he wasn’t formally charged with a crime, Schiavo’s arrest puts him “in the national police records for three years.” He’s now working with the U.K.-based Christian Legal Centre to “get this overturned.”
“I did not commit a crime,” Schiavo insisted. “It is not a crime in the U.K. to say homosexuality is a sin in public or to say that churches with rainbow flags on them are not churches. This is protected speech.”
In a separate interview with CP, Linda Thacker, who attends church with Schiavo when he’s in the U.K. and videotaped the arrest, explained why she decided to document his interaction with law enforcement officials on camera: “I didn’t like the security guard’s attitude toward Ryan. He seemed very hostile.”
“We wanted to make sure that there was no kind of false accusation,” she said.
Thacker characterized Schiavo’s arrest as “a bit of a wake-up call for me,” expressing concern that “the right to have free speech and to express how we feel personally about … anyone else’s lifestyle … will put you in the position of being called a domestic terrorist or some kind of hater.” Like Schiavo, Thacker fears that the U.K. is “heading toward a communist state.”
Before his arrest, Thacker said there had been confrontations between Schiavo, his supporters and LGBT individuals that weren’t captured on camera.
“The lesbian was very threatening and kicked his drink down the road. [She] also tried to tear my husband’s Bible out of his hands, which she didn’t manage to do, but she got a leaflet out of his Bible … and flung it into the street.”
While Schiavo did face hostility following his comments about homosexuality, he also received support, including from an atheist, who was featured in Thacker’s video. Schiavo told CP that while the man “said that he disagreed with 99% of what I said,” he nonetheless argued to the police that ‘This man has not done anything warranting … an arrest, he’s just exercising his freedom of speech.’”
In spite of the man’s impassioned defense of Schiavo, the street evangelist lamented that the police “never even took a statement from him.” Instead, Schiavo said, “the police only took one formal statement on the street … and it was from this young girl … [who] was upset with what I said.”
“From the beginning, they weren’t interested in getting to the truth. … It was just this one girl’s testimony that they listened to.”
Thacker seconded Schiavo’s accusation that police had conducted a one-sided investigation: “All they were interested in doing was arresting him on the grounds of this lesbian that said that she had been distressed by what was said.”
Schiavo is not the only street evangelist to face legal consequences for sharing Christian teachings about marriage and homosexuality with the British public. As CP previously reported, British Pastor John Sherwood was arrested by police in April for emphasizing the biblical definition of marriage as he preached from a step ladder in the Northwest London town of Uxbridge.
Meanwhile, the Epsilon variant that was initially discovered in California in 2020 is spreading in Pakistan and is proving to be resistant to vaccines, according to researchers.
Despite these early studies, previous studies have shown vaccines, including those available in the United States, work against “variants of concern,” such as the Delta variant. The vaccines also prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death in most breakthrough cases where a fully vaccinated person tests positive for the coronavirus.
For example, a U.K. study published in May showed two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88% effective at preventing against symptomatic infection of the Delta variant and 96% effective against preventing hospitalization.
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.
In May we reported on the University of Pittsburgh’s program that included growing scalps from aborted babies on lab rodents. This is straight from a horror movie.
The scientists are using human baby fetal skin processed via removal of excess fat.
Now this… The NIH under the direction of Dr. Tony Fauci approved of funding and oversaw the experiments on the fetal organs.
The University of Pittsburgh targeted minority infant organs.
The federal government gave at least $2.7 million in taxpayer money to researchers who sought out minority babies who had been aborted in order to harvest their organs, according to internal documents released Tuesday.
The University of Pittsburgh targeted minorities in its request for infant organs—including those taken from full-term babies—to create a “pipeline” for fetal research. Researchers said they needed 50 percent of the donated fetuses to be minorities and specified that 25 percent must come from black women. The Pittsburgh metropolitan area is 85 percent white and 8 percent black. Researchers stressed the importance of maintaining organ blood flow in the request, which watchdogs say could violate federal law by asking doctors to illegally preserve organs during labor-inducing abortions.
The National Institutes of Health has overseen experiments on fetal organs at the University of Pittsburgh since 2015 in what the school claimed to be a “tissue hub.” Aborted babies used in this research ranged from 6 to 42 weeks of gestation, according to government documents. The grant request from the university to the government agency redacts key information, including how many fetuses were obtained and who provided them. Its language, however, raised troubling questions.
David Daleiden, founder and president of the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, called on the federal government to investigate the NIH and Pitt after obtaining more than 300 pages of information related to the program through a public records request.
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.
An altercation between an Aberdeen, Washington, business owner and a transgender council member made headlines after the two engaged in a screaming match over a sign in the business owner’s shop that reads “If you are born with a d**k, you are not a chick.”
According to a Thursday report from KING-TV, Council member Tiesa Meskis, who identifies as a transgender woman, confronted Sucher & Sons Star Wars Shop owner Don Sucher over what Meskis said was a transphobic and bigoted a sign hanging in Sucher’s store. The exchange between the two was captured on video and soon went viral.
In the video, Sucher said, “Let me tell you this. You are f***ed in the head. You are f***ed in the head. You are an embarrassment to the community.”
“I think you need to look in the mirror when you say that,” Meskis fired back.about:blank
Sucher stepped back and gestures toward Meskis, saying, “Well look at yourself, for Christ’s sake. … You are not a f***ing chick! Do you still have a d**k? ‘Cause if you do, guess what—”
Meskis responded, “You know what, that is none of your f***ing business.”
“Do you think that there’s one person who really thinks that you’re a chick?” Sucher continued. “Nobody confronts you, that’s the problem. Why are you doing this?”
“This is who I am,” Meskis seethed.
Sucher waved off the response and said, “F*** that s**t. F*** that s**t!”
“It doesn’t mean that you can put up a sign like that,” Meskis continued.
Sucher said that Meskis makes him uncomfortable and told the trans woman to leave the store.
As Meskis exited, Sucher followed and said, “You’re f***ing nuts.”
“Trans women are women!” Meskis shouted back in defiance and began chanting the phrase from the sidewalk outside of Sucher’s store. The two continued shouting at each other for several more minutes before Meskis walked away shouting, “Stop staring at my ass!”
Meskis told KING, “What he wrote [in the sign] was so demeaning and so dismissive of who I am, who any trans woman is.”
“I don’t care what they do, but don’t come in here and complain to me about stuff,” Sucher told the station. “I have free speech.”
Both say that they have received messages of support from around the country.
“Everybody’s loved it,” Sucher said about the sign. “Everybody’s taken pictures of it. … I don’t give a [expletive] about feelings anymore. I went to Vietnam to fight for all this [expletive]. Do you think I care about something [expletive] feeling? Absolutely not!”
Meskis said that her supporters plan to demonstrate at 10 a.m. Saturday outside of Sucher’s store. Apparent supporters of Sucher took to Google to leave glowing reviews for the elderly business owner. One reviewer wrote, “Thank you for taking a stand against this misogynistic war. You are speaking reality and for the majority!”
Another added, “Great experience and an excellent owner — and Vietnam Veteran — who stands up for what he believes in (which is medically-accurate reality). If you like keeping your sci-fi as entertainment, rather than letting the delusions of the mentally unhinged bleed into the real world, support Normals.”
“Here from NY just to show support for great Americans such as yourself. Thank you for being you, Sir!” another reviewer added.
At the time of this reporting, Sucher’s store has received more than 1,700 reviews tallying up to a 4.8 out of 5 rating.
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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.
And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.
Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.
Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.
It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:
“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”
May I pat your head?
“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”
That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.
Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”
Here are excerpts:
“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”
Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.
The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.
It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.
Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”
Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.
Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.
There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.
Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.
The cost of living is on the rise, calls for yet another wave of pandemic restrictions have begun and now, buried deep in the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill, the left has laid out yet another idea to bring Americans to their knees. Make no mistake: The suffering is intentional, goal-oriented and not bound to stop anytime soon. Still, one proposal in the 2,702 page infrastructure bill seems especially cruel — cruel enough to make it too expensive for many Americans to even drive a car.
Nick Short of the Claremont Institute highlighted an item on Pages 508-519 of the bill that would introduce a national per-mile motor vehicle user fee on a trial basis.
“Buried on page 508 of the 2,702 page infrastructure bill is a pilot program for a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee (MBUF) which is basically a long-term plan to make it too expensive to drive a car,” Short said Tuesday on Twitter.
The pilot program is set up “to test the design, acceptance, implementation, and financial sustainability of a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee, to address the need for additional revenue for surface transportation infrastructure and a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee” and “to provide recommendations relating to the adoption and implementation of a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee,” the bill says.
An article from The Lid Blog attached to Short’s tweet detailed the proposal even further, breaking down each component, from the program’s objectives to its proposal that “volunteers” from each state should discover different ways to collect data on miles driven by “both commercial and private vehicle operators.”
On Page 513, the proposal says that the “Secretary of the Treasury shall establish, on an annual basis, per-mile user fees for passenger motor vehicles, light trucks, and medium- and heavy-duty trucks.” In theory, these per-mile user fees would vary by vehicle contingent upon several factors, including — you guessed it — environmental impact.
To ease any apprehension about participating in the pilot program, the measure indicates that participants’ identities will be protected, perhaps, as The Lid said, to prevent ostracization “if this happens and achieves the desired result.”
The left can chalk up this test run of what eventually might turn into a full-blown measure to make owning a vehicle next-to-impossible as an effort to be “environmentally conscious,” but is it instead another way to cripple our existing ways of life?
We might dismiss it now, but imagine telling yourself five years ago that the government would order small business closures, codify when and how Americans could worship and adopt an increasingly draconian “do as I say, not as I do” policy to address a global pandemic.
From the way we work to the way we breathe, so many aspects of our lives have already changed — albeit willingly, for some. What’s so different about changing how we get to one place from another?
With $10 million dedicated to this program for each year from 2022 to 2026, it’s easy to see how the government doles out what it acquires from hardworking Americans.
Any Republican lawmakers who vote in favor of this “bipartisan” bill have no right to label themselves “conservative.”
Taylor Penley is a political commentator residing in Northwest Georgia. She holds a BA in English with minors in rhetoric/writing and global studies from Dalton State College. As a student, she worked in government relations and interned for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. She previously published an article with Future Female Leaders and published a rhetorical analysis of President Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate Address in a collegiate journal. She aspires to earn an MA and a PhD in journalism in the near future.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows spoke with Sean Hannity Wednesday night on the current crisis along the US-Mexico border, labeling Joe Biden a hypocrite for supporting vaccine passports while dispersing illegal migrants across the USA.
“Obviously there is no explanation. Joe Biden is missing in action. He’s ignoring what’s happening in our cities. He would rather support mandates and passports in New York and give people coming across our southern border a free pass,” said Meadows. “He’s providing buses, jobs, but he’s not providing any protection to American citizens.”
“It’s really very hypocritical, but why should we be surprised?” he added.
Meadows’ remarks echo those from Ted Cruz, who said the people of Texas “are pissed.”
“This is the biggest super-spreader in the country,” said Hannity. “Any American that’s infected because Joe’s not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden.”
“You’re exactly right. People across the state of Texas are pissed. People are dying, and Joe Biden doesn’t care. Kids are getting assaulted; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t care… We’ve had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months, and they don’t care,” said Cruz.
“They released 7,000 migrants into McAllen, Texas all of whom were positive with COVID. That’s 5% of the population of the city,” concluded the Senator.
James Younger with his father, Jeffrey Younger. | Screenshot: YouTube
A court in Texas has ruled that a boy at the center of a custody battle will temporarily live with his mother, who wants to have him undergo a gender transition to look more like a girl, while the father, who opposes it, will only be allowed limited visitation.
For the past couple of years, Jeff Younger and his ex-wife, Anne Georgulas — a pediatricianin Coppell, Texas, and non-biological mother of James and his twin brother, Jude — have fought over who has custody over their son, James, whom Georgulas calls “Luna” and wants to see transitioned into a girl.
In a memorandum ruling issued Tuesday, Judge Mary Brown ruled against Younger, citing his purported “unwillingness or inability to follow the order designed to serve the best interests of the children.” The court gave Georgulas various “exclusive rights on a temporary basis,” including the right to establish the children’s primary residence, the right to consent to various medical decisions, the right to determine their education, and a host of other privileges. Brown did, however, stop short of giving Georgulas the exclusive right to have James undergo experimental trans procedures such as prescribing puberty blockers or hormonal suppression “without the consent of the parents or court order.”
In addition, the court required that “Younger’s possession periods shall be continuously supervised by Forensic Counseling Services … at Mr. Younger’s sole cost and expense.”
The Facebook page “Save James” denounced the court order, saying in a statement Wednesday that it “ruled against the safety and protection of James and Jude.”
In October 2019, a Dallas jury ruled 11-1 to not give Younger sole conservatorship of his twin sons, opening to the possibility that James might undergo gender transition at the insistence of Georgulas. Georgulas filed a court petition requiring Younger to accept James as “Luna,” with her claiming that James himself has affirmed a preference to identify as female.
“When James is with me, he shows no signs of wanting to be a girl when given the choice. Even when in female company, away from me, James rejects a female gender expression,” stated Younger in an entry on the “Save James” website.
During court proceedings, Younger has argued that his son prefers to identify as a boy and reportedly threw out a bunch of dresses that his mother had bought him.
The highly publicized custody battle prompted some Texas state lawmakers to sponsor a bill that would ban the medicalized gender-transitioning of children; however, the measure died when it failed to be scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives.
U.S. men’s 4 x 100 relay finishes sixth in qualifying heat. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)
The Olympic 4 x 100 relay is racist. That’s the only logical explanation for the embarrassing performance of the United States men’s relay team last night and over the past two decades. We can’t do it. We certainly couldn’t do it last night. And we’ve struggled doing it for the past 20 years.
In a qualifying heat at the Tokyo Games, Team USA finished sixth, behind China, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Ghana. It’s impossible to make the relay final from sixth place in a heat. The United States won’t be winning any sort of medal in an event we absolutely dominated until the race turned racist after our 2000 title at the Sydney Games.
Up until 2004, Team USA had won the gold in 15 of the 20 4 x 100 relays held in Olympic history. We owned the track and virtually all the sprints. We flashed our God-given gifts, our work ethic, and our ability to work as a team for the greater good. It was a showcase of black American excellence. Bob Hayes, Jim Hines, Carl Lewis, and Maurice Greene took the baton symbolically handed to them by Jesse Owens and represented this country at the highest level.
Then something very disturbing happened at the 2004 Olympics. Systemic racism started easing its way into the event at the Athens Games. America finished second in Greece.
Ibram X. Kendi argues the systemic relay racism was always there. But it wasn’t until 2008 that black Twitter and ESPN pointed out that the Proud Boys, Trump supporters, and right-wing insurrectionists began manipulating the relay batons and the baton exchange zones. This manipulation made it impossible for black American men to excel in track and field’s premier relay event. America has not won a single medal in the relay since white bigots took control of the relay.
OK, I’m being sarcastic. Systemic racism has nothing to do with the two-decades-long failure of our once-dominant relay team. Systemic dysfunction actually explains the failure. What we witnessed last night is a symptom of a larger problem we in black America are loath to discuss. Rather than having uncomfortable conversations with white people, we need to have uncomfortable conversations amongst ourselves concerning the fact that black men don’t function well together. It’s obvious to everyone else. We’re the only people who refuse to talk about it. We just hope the Crips and Bloods get old and retire. We think our kids will learn to resolve conflict without resorting to violence when white liberals decide to teach us other options. If we ignore our dysfunction long enough, it will go away.
That kind of wishful thinking led to last night’s relay fiasco. What transpired last night surprised no one paying attention. It’s the equivalent of feigning disbelief on a Monday morning when you learn of how many black men or boys were gunned down over a weekend in Chicago, or Baltimore, or Indianapolis, or New York City. Black male dysfunction is expected.
Last night, U.S. sprinters Ronnie Baker and Fred Kerley struggled mightily to complete the second baton exchange. It took three attempts. By the time it was completed, Baker and Kerley were side by side and Kerley was at a relative standstill. Anchorman Cravon Gillespie briefly climbed to third place and then faded badly as he began to look around at his competitors. Reaction to the collapse was swift and angry.
“The USA team did everything wrong in the men’s relay,” Carl Lewis complained via Twitter. “The passing system is wrong, athletes running the wrong legs, and it was clear that there was no leadership. It was a total embarrassment, and completely unacceptable for a USA team to look worse than the AAU kids I saw.”
We got smoked by China. Not a Jamaican team led by Usain Bolt. China won the heat. Germany beat us. Ghana beat us. Ghana advanced to the final. Ghana apparently doesn’t give a damn about the Proud Boys and the insurrectionists. We can’t use COVID protocols as an excuse. All the other countries have had limited practices because of the pandemic. You can’t cover up 20 years of failure with excuses.
I know I keep making sarcastic jokes about racism. I’m doing it because the most damaging racism impacting black people today is the use of racism to eliminate accountability and responsibility for black men. Our sprinters are irresponsible because we fail to hold them accountable for their failure.
Black people across the globe immigrate to America and achieve their dreams because they embrace a far different mentality than what’s cultivated in black American culture. Black sprinters in Ghana, Jamaica, Canada, and everywhere else don’t have the kind of baton problems we have.
We can’t work together. What happened?
When you’re raised in family dysfunction, that dysfunction follows you for life, especially when you never acknowledge it, pretend it never existed, or believe it’s white people’s responsibility to address it or adjust to your dysfunction.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with black people. The problem is culture. We’ve embraced a culture that undermines our success. We’ve been programmed to believe our actions don’t really determine our destiny. The actions of white people are all that matter. This worldview eliminates accountability and empowers irresponsibility.
Re-watch the 4 X 100 relay qualifier. Maybe one member of the Chinese relay is good enough to make our relay team. But China smoked us. How? Why? It’s not talent. It’s culture. It’s an inability to set egos aside and work together in a cohesive fashion.
Let’s say white people pitted us against each other. Let’s say it started in slavery. No problem. I agree it happened. I also think it’s insanely foolish to expect white people to fix it. It’s not going to happen. It’s no different from a man breaking your leg in a fight and expecting him to do the rehabilitation. Only you can do the rehab.
Black men, we have a culture problem. What are we going to do about it?
A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered the Biden administration to respond to a lawsuit from a coalition of housing groups challenging a new eviction moratorium enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich gave the Department of Justice a 9 a.m. ET deadline on Friday to respond to an emergency legal challenge filed by the Alabama Association of Realtors late Wednesday, Reuters reports. The emergency motion accuses the CDC of issuing the new ban on evictions “for nakedly political reasons — to ease the political pressure, shift the blame to the courts for ending the moratorium, and use litigation delays to achieve a policy objective.”
“[T]he CDC caved to the political pressure by extending the moratorium, without providing any legal basis,” the motion says. “In substance and effect, the CDC’s latest action is an extension of the same unlawful ban on evictions that has been in effect since September 2020.”
In March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, a coronavirus relief bill that created a 120-day ban on evictions that applied to rental properties receiving federal assistance. At the end of that period, the Trump administration Department of Health and Human Services issued a second eviction moratorium through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that unlike the CARES Act applied to all rental properties nationwide. President Joe Biden renewed that order several times and the realtor groups challenged it in court.
In May, Friedrich declared the CDC’s order unlawful and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ultimately agreed with the lower court’s decision but permitted the order to remain in effect until it finally expired on July 31.
Writing in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the CDC could not extend the moratorium past July 31 without specific authorization from Congress. Progressive lawmakers sought to pass a bill creating a new moratorium to ensure that the more than 15 million people in 6.5 million U.S. households who are currently behind on rent payments would not be evicted, but Congress failed to pass new legislation before the CDC’s moratorium expired.
Facing pressure from Democrats, Biden’s CDC took action Tuesday to create a new federal eviction ban that applies to “counties experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels” of COVID-19. The White House has defended the new moratorium, which appears to be in direct violation of the law and the Supreme Court’s opinion, as a “new, targeted eviction moratorium — focused on counties with High or Substantial (coronavirus) case rates.” The new eviction moratorium is set to expire on Oct. 3 and is estimated to apply to 82% of U.S. counties and more than 90% of the population.
Facing questions from reporters on the legality of the CDC’s new order, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the Biden administration doesn’t believe most Americans care whether the order is legal or not.
“I’m not sure there are Americans evaluating it to that degree, maybe there are some you’ve talked to,” Psaki told a reporter who asked about the constitutionality of the order. “[Biden]’s gonna do everything in his power to make sure they can stay in their homes as long as possible.”
FANTASTIC question from @CBSNewsRadio's @StevenPortnoy about the legality of extending the eviction moratorium: "What's the White House's message, then, to Americans who…are now disappointed the President is signaling that he doesn't respect the rule of law." pic.twitter.com/ymci5wkWVl
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
There’s a disturbing trend among post-Trump populists to think that just because they’ve rejected the old GOP ideas about tax cuts and permanent war, they should also reject standard GOP ideas about big government social engineering projects. Currently, the most embarrassing of the allegedly populist right-wing enthusiasms is the pro-natalist position. The idea, in a nutshell, is that family formation is good for society, so why not create government programs that encourage family formation?
The main way the government could do that is by eliminating 90 percent of itself, but that’s not in the cards. So instead, Sens. Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, among others, want to pay women to have children. Vance recently suggested giving parents extra votes for each of their children, which I’m hoping was just a brilliant satire of political pandering. A slew of populist-conservative male icons, like Gavin McInnes and Mike Cernovich, are constantly haranguing young men to “put a ring on it” and start popping out kids.
One is left with the strong impression that these marriage and child boosters are people who are sorry they got married and had kids, so they have to turn their life’s greatest regret into the equivalent of landing at Normandy.
Human reproduction doesn’t require a P.R. team. Who would think that activities humans have engaged in for millennia require government incentives, except the unhappily married or those who consider heterosexual sex a horrible drudgery?
What was the worst calamity ever to befall this country? Nope, not the 1965 immigration act, but that’s a good guess. Not World War II or 9/11, terrible though those were. Not even the Jan. 6 ATTACK ON THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF OUR COUNTRY — NAY! DEMOCRACY ITSELF!
It was the government paying women to have kids.
During the most destructive period in American history, the rollout of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs, the federal government thought it would be a peachy idea to pay women to have babies. You’ll never guess what happened next!
Lots and lots of women started having babies — at a clip that didn’t allow time for acquiring a husband first.
Within a decade, the world had gone to hell, taking the black family down with it. While many blamed the implosion of the black family on African customs, slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow and so on, a black demographer at the Rockefeller Foundation, Erol Ricketts, looked at the evidence.
It turned out the black family was thriving until the What-Could-Go-Wrong? Great Society programs of the 1960s. Based on nearly a century of U.S. Census reports, Ricketts found that between 1890 and 1950, black Americans married at higher rates than whites. (You’ll find this and other amazing facts in “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.”)
The marriage rate for black women fell below 70 percent for the first time in 1970.
Today, we’d hold ticker-tape parades if 70 percent of black kids were being raised in intact families.
Why do some conservatives think we should do more of the exact thing that destroyed the black family — and did a number on all American families? The opposite of “Establishment Republican” shouldn’t be “moron.”
We’re told that tax credits, payments, subsidies — extra votes! — for having kids is “pro-family.” You know what’s “pro-family”? Life is pro-family. Any government intervention repeals the natural consequences of life, and is, therefore, anti-family.
But if we’re too afraid to let life take its course and want a government program to give us happy families, how about 30-to-life for adultery and divorce? Sending out a government check to those who manage the amazing feat of human reproduction is simultaneously dysgenic and small-bore.
Back in the 1960s, conservatives could only predict disaster from these allegedly pro-child policies. By now, we’ve been running the experiment for more than a half-century. We’re living the disaster. Paying women to have kids actively destroys families, which I believe is the opposite of “pro-family.”
Incidentally, the “pro-family” line is the exact same con open-borders Republicans ran on Christian groups when promoting “family reunification” policies in the 1990s, allowing endless waves of immigrants’ extended families to relocate to the U.S. and outvote the Christians. Whenever you hear about some great new government program that’s “pro-family,” reach for your gun.
National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru claims that paying women to have kids is less a government intrusion than “a way of helping them to live out what they already want.” In surveys, it seems, American women say they want more kids than they ultimately end up having.
This is why researchers distinguish between “stated preference” and “revealed preference.” For example, I think the ideal number of times to have fish every week is: two. But the number of times I actually eat fish each week is: zero. Please, conservatives, don’t help me by subsidizing fish.
It is simply asserted that it’s a terrible thing for a nation’s birthrate to fall below replacement level. But the only concrete downside to a declining birthrate is that the Social Security system will collapse without a never-ending supply of younger workers to fund it. Apparently, the government lied to us about a Social Security Trust Fund, and now the till is dry, requiring a constant influx of withholding taxes to keep the system afloat.
That’s a great way to govern: Create a new government program to paper over the failure of an earlier government program!
As a matter of psychology, it’s probably true that a people who are pessimistic about the future of their country won’t be keen on having a lot of kids. But the solution to that is to fix the country, not to pay people to simulate one single behavioral characteristic of optimists.
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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.
Wallace Henley, former Senior Associate Pastor of 2nd Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Scott Belin
The present crisis in the United States is worse than most realize.
There is a troubling dynamic that works subtly in nations passing through critical eras: The more intense the crisis the greater the lure of power.
The dangers of our time loom on every horizon — spiritual, political, economic, social, cultural. We face in these times corruption in churches, pandemic, disintegration of society, ever-widening division in the nation, shattering of moral boundaries, dissolution of family, uncertain leadership, intensifying lawlessness, perversion of education … the list could go on. Add global threats squeezing in from every direction and an immigration crisis of unprecedented proportions.
“We have to do something about all this!” goes the urgent cry in governing institutions from the White House to the congressional house to the state house to the county seat to the city hall to the town hall.
And that’s when the lure of power and the loss of freedom begins creeping through the land.
Extreme measures are needed for extreme times goes the rationale. Of such panic dictatorships emerge, tyrannies arouse, and freedoms are lost.
Obviously, we need strong leadership in times like these. However, the stronger the leader the more important he or she understand the differences between power and authority.
George Washington got it.
John Adams wanted America’s chief executive to be called one of the following: His Highness, the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same, or His Elective Majesty, or even His Mightiness.
George Washington was concerned that Americans know they were not getting a monarch, but a leader who could be turned out at the will of the people, and who understood that he had not been elevated to office because he had a right to it, but because he was a servant of the people.
Washington was a no-frills person, and let it be known that “President of the United States” would be the title he and his successors would carry.
In our time, especially with the rise of the megachurch, there are in some places imperial pastors who are untouchable and deck themselves with lavish titles. They, as well as power-grabbing leaders in all spheres, understand the wiles of power but little about the biblical revelation concerning true authority:
Authority is granted from the higher to the lower; power is seized by the strongest
Authority is accountable to its transcendent source; power is accountable only to itself
Authority is sustained through loving relationship and service; power is sustained by raw strength
Authority leads through example and the free choice of those who are led; power controls through manipulation, intimidation, condemnation, domination.[1]
King Saul violated all these principles. During a strategic battle between Israel and the Philistines, Saul was at Gilgal, eagerly awaiting news of the outcome. Finally, his impatience took over. Saul arrogantly assumed that his position meant he could step into the office of Priest, which was occupied by Samuel. But Samuel was not present, and so Saul ordered the sacrifices. This hubristic presumptive action ultimately cost Saul his kingdom. (See 1 Samuel 13).
Our times certainly call for strong, decisive leadership. But the men and women in those roles must understand the ominous lure of power in dangerous periods.
Like Calvin Coolidge.
Just six years before Coolidge came to the presidency communists seized power in Russia. Western leftists watched eagerly for the implementation of socialism in the hopes that Europe and the United States would embrace or be forced into acceptance of the philosophy. (That effort goes on now).
Coolidge saw through it all. As a U.S. senator prior to becoming vice president and then president, Coolidge was called upon to help settle a bitter strike. Even after the issues were settled, he was concerned by the “violence and cynicism” he had noted on the part of the strikers.
In fact, “silent Cal” was “exasperated.” He wrote his stepmother a letter expressing concerns sharply relevant for today: “The leaders [of the strike] are socialists and anarchists, and they do not want anybody to work for wages. The trouble is not with the amount of wages; it is a small attempt to destroy all authority, whether of any church or government.”[2]
Coolidge was one of those enigmatic presidents who appear at the right time at the right place for right reasons. It was possible for people like Coolidge to rise to the presidency because of the nation’s core worldview.
G.K. Chesterton, the 20th century British journalist and author, was asked, “What is America?”
He replied that America is a nation with the soul of a church … the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed … set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. … It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.[3]
Therefore, “powers” can only be exercised under proper authority, flowing from God to the people, and through them to the government they choose, all “under God.” This is a major shift in governing style that had dominated six thousand years of recorded history.
It is vital in times of intense crisis that we and our leaders not forget the kind of nation we are and have been at our best in the worst of times.
That will save us from the lure of power and its distortions.
[1] I am indebted to Dudley Hall, an insightful Bible teacher and dear friend, for the four categories of control employed by raw power listed here.
[3] Raymond T. Bond (ed.), The Man Who Was Chesterton (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960), 125.
Wallace B. Henley’s fifty-year career has spanned newspaper journalism, government in both White House and Congress, the church, and academia. He is author or co-author of more than 20 books. He is a teaching pastor at Grace Church, the Woodlands, Texas.
It would seem that United States Olympic wrestler Tamyra Mensah-Stock has no time or inclination to act cool or witty or snarky or sassy. Nope. All she has time for these days is getting ready to hit the mat — and pin her next opponent. Then when she scores her next victory, Mensah-Stock’s emotions simply come flooding out.
And at no time was her unguarded, unaffected, pure joy — through tears and laughter — more apparent than when she won the women’s light heavyweight (68-kilogram) gold medal Tuesday at the Tokyo Olympics.
“I’m feeling very happy, and I keep trying not to cry, but it keeps happening!” she said, trying to catch her breath, at a news conference with an American flag wrapped around her shoulders following her victory.
Mensah-Stock, 28, became only the second U.S. woman — and the first black woman — to win Olympic wrestling gold, NPR said. She is from Katy, Texas. A reporter noted to Mensah-Stock in a brief moment of composure that “you started wrestling in the 10th grade” — and BOOM! More tears.
“I knew I could do it when I first started wrestling,” she explained while continuing to cry. “I felt like I could be an Olympic champ, so I kept going.” With that, Mensah-Stock pounded her hand down and said, “I did it!”
The reporter then brought up her father who died when Mensah-Stock was in high school — in a car accident on the way home from one of her wrestling meets, Yahoo Sports said. With that, harder tears from Mensah-Stock as she placed her head on top of her arms on the podium as the reporter asked how her dad might be reacting to her victory. She then stood, cried some more, and rubbed her eyes: “He would be so proud! He would be so happy!”
Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @MrPatMineo
Mensah-Stock then broke into a smile when she noted that her late father was from Ghana and that he was “like enemies with Nigeria,” which made her final match against Nigeria’s Blessing Oborududu “kind of like poetic.”
Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @MrPatMineo
Jumping up and down
She turned things up a notch when the reporter brought up that women’s wrestling has been an Olympic sport only for a couple of decades — and with that, Mensah-Stock began jumping up and down. “Yeah!” she cried before explaining how proud she is that younger girls can look up to her and perhaps follow in her footsteps.
‘By the grace of God’
Mensah-Stock added later in the interview that “it’s by the grace of God I’m able to even move my feet. Like, I just leave it in His hands and I pray that all the practice … the hell that my freaking coaches put me through pays off, and every single time it does, and I get better and better, and it’s so weird that there is no cap to the limit that I can do. And I’m excited to see … what I have next.”
And when the reporter asked how it felt with the American flag around her shoulders, she had more than enough gas in her tank to give a shout out to her home country: “It feels amazing. I love representing the U.S. I freaking love living there. I love it. And I’m so happy I get to represent U-S-A!”
Yahoo Sports noted that when Mensah-Stock was asked what she would do with the money attached to gold medals, she had a very specific idea.
“I wanted to give my mom $30,000 so she can get a food truck, ’cause it’s her dream,” Mensah-Stock said, according to the outlet. “And I told her five years ago, ‘Alright mommy, I’ll get you your food truck, but you gotta be responsible. So my mom’s gettin’ her food truck!” Yahoo Sports noted, not surprisingly, that she danced from side to side, adding that her mom is “gonna have her little cooking business. She can cook really, really, really well. Barbecue!”
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
NEWSMAX
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Spiritual
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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James O’Keefe
What Did You Say? 
Written
on August 6, 2021