The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 released the transcript of the probe’s interview with conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas Friday, revealing why she wasn’t mentioned once in the panel’s more than 800-page final report. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had nothing of consequence to offer her inquisitors — whether it be about the Capitol riot, efforts to overturn the 2020 election, or her husband’s work on the high bench — despite attempts by the panel and its corporate media allies to malign and bully her and her family.
In September, Thomas appeared before lawmakers to justify her choice as a private citizen with political opinions to petition her own government in the aftermath of the last presidential contest. Text messages published by the committee between Thomas and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in March revealed the longtime activist pressing the administration to “stand firm” in its challenges against the final result.
“You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice,” Thomas wrote as news organizations began to call the race for President Joe Biden. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Publicizing her private messages had its intended effect: tar the Thomas name and even provoke left-wing calls to impeach the sitting justice. Several Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded Justice Thomas recuse himself from relevant cases to the 2020 election, resign altogether, or face impeachment because his wife is politically active. But out of the 29 messages between Meadows and Ginni — among more than 2,300 text messages recovered from Meadows’ trove of data handed to the committee — not one, according to The Washington Post, included a direct reference to Justice Thomas. And Ginni made that clear to the panel.
“Regarding the 2020 election, I did not speak with him at all about the details of my volunteer campaign activities,” Ginni said. “And I did not speak with him at all about the details of my post-election activities, which were minimal, in any event. I am certain I never spoke with him about any of the legal challenges to the 2020 election, as I was not involved with those challenges in any way.”
While dispelling myths about alleged collusion with her husband, Ginni did not back down from her conviction, shared by millions of Americans, that the 2020 election was conducted unfairly with irregularities that warranted challenges. When pressed by Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the panel, on the avenues to contest an election result, Ginni brought up Democrats’ challenges to every presidential election won by Republicans since the start of this century.
“Democrats have done that in many instances — 2000, 2004, 2016,” Ginni said. “It seemed like there were a lot of people who claimed President Trump was illegitimate for 4 years and tried to undermine his administration.”
In 2017, Democrats objected to electoral votes from more states than Republicans did last year.
“As she told the Committee, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about potential fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election, and her minimal activity was focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated,” Mark Paoletta, Ginni’s attorney, told The Federalist in an exclusive statement. “Beyond that, she played no role in any events following the 2020 election. She also condemned the violence on January 6, which was reflected in one of her texts to Mark Meadows at the time. In short, the Committee discovered nothing new because there was nothing to discover.”
Despite the committee’s decision to thrust Ginni into the spotlight of the Jan. 6 investigation over her messages to Meadows, her name was never mentioned in a single one of the committee’s show trial hearings.
At the conclusion of Ginni’s deposition, the committee asked whether there was anything Ginni would like to add. Ginni responded by condemning political violence on all sides and reminding lawmakers of her security concerns after Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded justices “pay the price” for decisions that run counter to his leftist wishes.
“Violence on both sides is abhorrent, and the more you guys focus on just one side, it can do significant damage to our country,” Ginni said. “And, certainly, I’m living with Senator Schumer having said some things on the steps of the Supreme Court that unleashed a lot of things that have us living with Marshals right now.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
‘I’d say it’s, it is, I haven’t… look. I have trouble even mentioning, even saying to myself, in my own head, the number of years. I no more think of myself as being old as I am than fly.’
It’s no secret President Joe Biden is no longer in his prime physical and cognitive state. The 80-year-old isn’t just a serial liar. He’s a chronic gaffe machine who puts the country at risk pretty much every time he opens his mouth. The president is so bad at giving speeches that Generation Z made some of his most notable verbal stumbles into a TikTok trend.
Contrary to corporate media claims, these blunders aren’t just byproducts of Biden’s childhood stutter, they are signs of a bigger problem. Here are 10 gaffes from the grandpa in the White House that should make every American question whether he’s just a figurehead.
1. Biden Forgets What Year It Is
Biden started off 2022 strong with a New Year’s-themed White House address in which he forgot what year it is.
“There’s a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020,” Biden said.
Joe Biden — January 4, 2022: "There's a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020…" pic.twitter.com/Ipc3m1tz0g
Regime change in Russia is the unofficial policy of our ruling class, but the corporate media, unwilling to admit it, called Biden’s outburst a “gaffe.” The White House, similarly, couldn’t decide between standing by Biden’s comments or downplaying them as simple “moral outrage” toward Putin.
4. ‘Repeat the Line’
In July, during a speech about his new abortion-focused executive order, Biden struggled to properly vocalize the script on his teleprompter.
Joe Biden accidentally reads the part on the teleprompter that says "repeat the line" when they wanted him to say the line again lmfao pic.twitter.com/pS3GdXPe5N
Clips of the speech clearly show the gaffe-prone president saying, “End of quote. Repeat the line.” The White House transcript of Biden’s address, however, claims Biden said, “End of quote. Let me repeat the line.”
When pressed about the retroactive edits, White House Assistant Press Secretary Emilie Simons tried to gaslight her Twitter followers into believing Biden wasn’t really reading cues directly from the teleprompter.
“No. He said, ‘let me repeat that line,’” she wrote.
5. Biden Falsely Claims He Had Cancer
In a “climate crisis” speech about fossil fuels in Massachusetts in July, Biden incorrectly claimed he has cancer caused by oil pollution. Biden said that growing up, pollution in Delaware was so bad that his mother had to use windshield wipers to “get literally the oil slick off the window.”
“That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up [with] have cancer,” Biden said.
Biden says that his mother using windshield wipers to "get literally the oil slick off the window" is "why I and so damn many other people have cancer." pic.twitter.com/YIoBlZadRJ
The White House physician rushed to release a statement clarifying that Biden does not, in fact, have cancer.
6. Biden Says American Troops Are ‘Selfish’
During a trip to the Middle East in July, Biden mixed up the words “selfish” and “selfless” at the most inconvenient time possible.
“We’ll always honor the bravery and selfishness — selflessness,” Biden said. “And sacrifices of the Americans who served, including my son, Major Beau Biden, who was stationed in Iraq for a year.”
7. Biden Calls the Holocaust Honorable
During a visit to Israel, Biden claimed he was there to “keep alive the truth and honor of the Holocaust.”
“And continue — which we must do every, every day — continue to bear witness, to keep alive the truth and honor of the Holocaust,” Biden said.
He later corrected himself by saying the “horror of the Holocaust.”
8. ‘Where’s Jackie?’
Perhaps the worst of Biden’s 2022 blunders was when he tried to call upon Rep. Jackie Walorski weeks after she died in a car accident in her home state of Indiana.
“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? She must not be here,” Biden said at the Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on Sept 28.
President Biden seems to forget that Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) died in a car crash in August, seeking her out in the audience:
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to brush off Biden’s mistake by claiming Walorski was “on top of mind.”
“These moments of confusion are happening with increased frequency, Karine,” one reporter, unsatisfied with Jean-Pierre’s answer, shouted above the hubbub.
W.H. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre battles the media after President Biden called out the name of deceased congresswoman Jackie Walorski, as if she were in the room. "Jackie, where's Jackie?," Biden asked.
Polling conducted shortly after the Jackie incident found that a majority of Americans, including Democrats, were at least “somewhat concerned” about Biden’s mental state.
9. A ‘Mental Focus’ Word Salad
Biden isn’t particularly fond of people questioning his cognitive abilities, and his attempts to convince Americans he is mentally equipped for office, or even a walk in the park, fall short.
“How would you say your mental focus is?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked during a “60 Minutes” interview in October.
“Oh, it’s focused,” Biden replied. “I’d say it’s, it is, I haven’t… look. I have trouble even mentioning, even saying to myself, in my own head, the number of years. I no more think of myself as being old as I am than fly.”
REPORTER: How is your mental focus?
JOE BIDEN: *nervous wheeze* “Oh focused. Ha ha ha I’d say it’s, it is I haven’t … here, look. I have trouble even mentioning, even saying to myself, in my head, the number of years. I no more think of myself being old as I am than fly.”
Even when he’s not speaking, Biden shows severe signs of mental impairment. Shortly after his speech during the Global Fund’s Seventh Replenishment Conference in New York, Biden appeared to get lost on the stage before eventually finding his way down.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
“Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic mechanism, from which one extracts what one needs.”
That quote from the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump” reminds us all that while everything is subject to interpretation, or personal exegesis, does not change its original intent or meaning.
There has been much said about the word speech. It, along with the prefixes “free” and “hate” rule most news and social media cycles, especially in recent years. More specifically, since the election of America’s 45th president. So, what exactly does it mean?
Defining Terms
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary describes speech as the following: “the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words.” Simply put, words are only words, speech is only speech, regardless of your personal issues.
According to an article in Business Standard, there has been a reported 500% rise in hate-speech cases in the last seven years; again ironically, since around 2017. Another article, this time in the American Library Association, states: “In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear.” It also offers that, “There is no legal definition of “hate speech” under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.”
Speech, much like crime, has been nitro-fueled by many adding their own levels of toxicity personal biases. While sticks and stones can indeed break your bones and words alone can never hurt you, in the proper context words can be very powerful. Unfortunately, many of those on the right don’t realize the power of words.
Unrecognized Powers
As talk-show host and journalist Tucker Carlson once reminded his audience, “only the Left understands the importance of language.” Unfortunately, we have arrived at a time where if something is said that you’re uncomfortable with, it need not break any laws or statutes for the ‘accused offenders’ sentence to be carried out. The only requirement to fulfill my animus- filled retribution is to add “hate” as a prefix.
“Upholding free speech is hugely important to open societies that respect human rights. Human Rights Treaties outlaw offensive speech when it poses a risk or threat to others. Speech that is simply offensive but poses no risk to others is generally NOT considered a human rights violation.
Hate Speech becomes a human rights violation if it incites discrimination, hostility or violence towards a person or a group defined by their race, religion, ethnicity, or other factors.”
So, who determines the line between ‘speech’ and ‘hate-speech? Good question. One of the best examples of apparent purveyors of grief is of course, former president Donald Trump, who offers a never-ending supply of this type of “speech.”
In one example of such ‘speech,’ Trump tweeted this during the George Floyd riots: “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right. These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.”
Were those that attempted to level and burn Minneapolis to the ground not thugs? Another example considered inciteful was the following (in the same Tweet): “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Inserting Common Sense
Was that hateful or incendiary? Doesn’t the shooting usually follow the looting? Regardless of never having crossed any lines or expressed guidelines, including during in his January 6th address, his Twitter account was permanently locked.
Despite the constant barrage of hate speech claims, two things irrepressibly come to mind. First, such claims have no legally defined perimeters, because making offensive, disparaging statements- regardless of the wording, crosses no legal or ethical boundaries; only moral and/or personal ones. Secondly, anti-white, and other racially degrading statements by Blacks (regardless of context) against ANY race including Blacks are strangely ignored on both mainstream and social media platforms.
In 2021, 22-year-old Gabby Petito’s body was found in Wyoming after she was missing for several weeks. In response to the horrific discovery, Joy Reid stated the following on her MSNBC show, “The Reid Out” concerning the missing hiker: “the way the [Petito] story has captivated the nation has many wondering why not the same media attention when people of color go missing (keep in mind that Reid, as part of the media herself ignored such stories)?
Double Standards at Play
Well, the answer actually has a name: “missing white woman syndrome,” determined by the late and great Gwen Eiffel to describe the media in public fascination with missing white women like Lacey Peterson & Natalie Holloway, while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.” On yet another episode she opined, “In America, there’s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears,” Reid said. “Particularly male, white tears. Really white tears in general, because that’s what Karens are, right? They can Karen-out and then as soon as they get caught, bring waterworks.”
Regardless of having crossed many lines and expressed guidelines, including several anti-gay statements, her Twitter account was never locked. There are clearly double standards, especially where color and political affiliations are concerned. Truth be told, words are still merely words; speech is still merely speech- regardless of content. Like the old saying concerning “sticks and stones,” if you allow words to hurt you- it is a choice you make.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who recently purchased the social media giant Twitter, said that “almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.”
Many Americans were silenced in recent years when they attempted to exercise free speech online and share their opinions on various issues.
Elon Musk "To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true." pic.twitter.com/zBDY3AcrRq
Specifically, Americans were often banned or censored if they criticize Joe and Hunter Biden’s shady overseas business dealings. People were also banned from mentioning the possible origins of the COVID-19 virus from a lab in China or the possible adverse effects of the recently developed COVID-19 vaccine.
It’s been widely speculated that government officials and intelligence agents were colluding with social media giants behind closed doors. It turned about to be true.
Musk said, “To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.”
Turns out we were being very conservative about the rampant corruption inside of the walls of Twitter.
— 🔥 Eye of Truth, Empire of Reason 🔥 (@Silent_Kindling) December 25, 2022
Nearly every conspiracy theory everyone had about Covid was also true. There’s a long list of true “conspiracy theories”. That’s why silencing dissenting voices is catastrophic to a functioning society.
Musk revealed shocking and disturbing documents proving that FBI agents and others inside the intelligence community colluded with social media giants to censor Americans and protect Joe and Hunter Biden.
The FBI wrongfully claimed that news about Hunter’s laptop right before the 2020 presidential election was part of a Russian misinformation campaign. These “Twitter Files” showed the FBI has regularly contacted employees at Twitter to target Americans who “may” be violating the company’s terms of service.
The FBI has responded to Musk by claiming they never told Twitter to “take action” using their false information about the Bidens. Twitter took action nonetheless and banned accounts. FBI officials told Fox News, “We are providing it so that they can take whatever action they deem appropriate under their terms of service to protect their platform and protect their customers, but we never direct or ask them to take action.”
Journalist Matt Taibbi showed multiple internal files between Twitter workers and FBI employees.
One email reads: “Hello Twitter contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.”
A Twitter employee responded that three of the four accounts were suspended. One of the banned accounts tweeted on Nov. 8, “I want to remind republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday November 9.”
The FBI also suggested another tweet needed to be censored because the person joked on November 8th, saying, “Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9th.”
An FBI employee wrote in an email that one user “claimed in her posts that she is a ballot counter in her state and, in additional posts, states, ‘For every negative comment on this post, I’m adding another vote for the democrats’ and ‘If you’re not wearing a mask, I’m not counting your vote.’”
Taibbi said these tweets were merely jokes and satirical, but the FBI still suggested the company should ban or censor these Americans exercising their free speech.
Exactly. There are no conspiracy theories, just truth suppressed by governments. 🤔🔥
Image source: YouTube video, Central Maine News – Screenshot
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
On account of legislation sponsored and approved by Democrat politicians, the 24-year-old transsexual who butchered his parents and family dog on Halloween in 2016 — claiming they provoked him by refusing to indulge his fantasy of being a woman — has received a “female” designation and is no longer in a men’s-only prison.
What are the details?
Andrew Balcer, now 24, was held at the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, Maine, prior to his conviction in 2018 for the murder of his parents. A program manager at the secure juvenile facility testified in court that Balcer demanded to be called “Andrea” while in custody and further requested that people use female pronouns when describing him, reported the Kennebec Journal.
After receiving his sentence, Balcer was sent to the Maine State Prison, a maximum-security facility for men. However, it appears that the double murderer has since had his accommodations upgraded.
The feminist publication Reduxx reported that Balcer now resides in the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, a mixed-sex medium-security facility where he is likely kept with real women.
According to the MCC website, the facility is Maine’s primary adult reception facility for both male and female residents and is where “residents sentenced to less than five years are directly admitted.”
The Maine Department of Corrections lists Andrew Balcer, a biological male looming at over six feet tall and weighing in at over 245 pounds, as a “female” with the alias “Andrea Balcer.”
Andrew BalcerMaine Department of Corrections, inmate profile
Reduxx noted that the so-called “Act to Protect the Rights of Certain Incarcerated Individuals,” sponsored by Democrat state Rep. Charlotte Warren and approved by Democrat Gov. Janet Mills in 2021, enables men to be housed with women in the event that the men identify as women.
The act “provides to a person residing in a correctional or detention facility the right to have that person’s consistently held gender identity respected and acknowledged and to have staff and representatives of the correctional or detention facility use the pronouns, titles and names identified by the person.“
Extra to affirming the inmate’s supposed gender dysphoria, housing and search procedures must be consistent with the inmate’s gender identity.
In addition to potentially residing with real women, Balcer is also permitted dysphoria-affirming apparel.
Fox News Digital noted that MDOC Commissioner Randell Liberty rolled out a policy in 2020 requiring state-run prisons to provide clothing that aligns with an inmate’s so-called gender identity, meaning that men can be given bras and women can receive chest binders. Balcer would be eligible to receive such gear.
The murders
WGME reported that on Oct. 31, 2016, Balcer murdered his parents, Alice and Tony Balcer, and then slaughtered the family’s chihuahua because it kept barking.
In a 911 call played in court, Balcer confessed to the murders, saying, “I snapped. I took my little Ka-Bar [U.S. Marine Corps combat knife] there and I drove it straight into my mother’s back.”
Balcer later told Maine State Police detectives that he had stabbed his mother when she came over to give him a comforting hug.
The murderer noted at the time of the 911 call — which was punctuated by his apparent laughter — that his mother’s corpse was lying on the floor, “messy.”
“My father came up because he heard her screams and I stabbed the f*** out of him,” said Balcer. “I stabbed the dog too. She was barking.”
Alice Balcer was reportedly stabbed nine times and Tony Balcer was stabbed 13 times.
The murderer reportedly asked his brother Christopher Balcer if he wanted to die, but ultimately permitted him to escape unmolested.
Judge Eric Walker said, “The only possible motive for the murders appears to be Andrew’s perception that his parents were unwilling or unable to deal with his transgender issues. We will never know if Antonio or Alice Balcer would have been accepting, because they were ambushed and murdered by Andrew.”
Contrary to the murderer’s claims, Alice Balcer’s brother Carl Pierce said, “There was no hatred. There was no malice. There was no ill will. There was resignation to be sure but ultimately there was acceptance.”
The murderer’s brother Christopher Balcer similarly suggested that the victims had been accepting of their killer’s identity, reported the Sun Journal.
Christopher Balcer also suggested that the murderer’s claims of abuse at the hands of his parents were similarly lies, calling the allegations “the most absurd I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Christopher shared a letter he sent to his brother in jail with the Kennebec Journal, in which he wrote, “I still hear our dearest mother’s screams, every night as I fall asleep. Every morning as I awaken, they echo in my head. Her screams as she was stabbed by the son she doted on so much, the son she only wanted the world for, and would accept nothing less.”
“I remember the foul things you accused her of, and the looks of horror upon the family’s faces as they heard about them. You are an inhuman creature and the fact that you continue to pretend otherwise sickens me,” added Christopher.
Tolerance is a good thing in most aspects of life. But when it comes to the immune system, artificially juicing up the body to create antibodies with long-term tolerance to a pathogen is a recipe for disaster. Amid thousands of papers on COVID and the vaccines, a new German paper published in Science Immunology should be the headline story this week. Although the subject matter is very dense, the implication of it is that the Pfizer shots (and possibly other mRNA spike protein shots) caused the immune system to misfire, thereby creating an endless feedback loop of viral immune escape, perpetuating the pandemic in the macro, and creating immune suppression for the individuals who received them.
The vexing question of 2022 is why the virus is even still with us to this day. Why is it that so many countries in the Pacific Rim that did so well in 2020 and 2021 now have a bigger problem in 2022 with less virulent strains of COVID? Why does it appear the pandemic will never end and so many people continue to get the virus multiple times? None of this is normal.
Wherever you turn, the most vaccinated countries are not only experiencing rampant side effects from the shots, but worse outcomes from COVID itself following their endless booster campaigns.
During the last six months, 98% of all reported covid deaths have occurred in nations where more than 1 vaccine dose has been administered per person.
Portugal is the most vaccinated nation in all of Europe (95% vax'd, 70% boosted) and yet just as many people are dying now as in 2021 and significantly more people than in 2020 (when no one was vax'd and no one had immunity and covid was more virulent).
But even more telling than an epidemiological comparison of one nation to another is a comparison of outcomes within nations themselves between pre- and post-vaccination/booster campaign. Prior to the mass vaccination, two parts of the world largely escaped excess deaths from the virus: continental Africa and the Pacific Rim nations. Yet whereas Africa flatlined in terms of COVID deaths throughout 2021-2022, countries like Japan only experienced meaningful numbers of deaths after the mass vaccination program.
Here is a chart of the daily COVID deaths per million in Japan, a country that is super vaccinated (and mask-obsessed).
Notice how Japan is experiencing progressively worse death curves, which only began after everyone (particularly seniors) was boosted, even though Omicron is less pathogenic than the earlier strains. Japan is also the current world leader in cases per million.
Australia is a similar story:
Now contrast these two countries to Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.
One could assert that there are some unknown factors as to why Africans appear not to die from COVID, compared to the high death rates in North America, South America, and Europe. However, the Pacific Rim countries like Japan and Australia seemed to enjoy almost as low a death rate prior to the booster campaign. After that point, Nigeria (and the rest of Africa) seemed to flatline and be done with the virus, as we would typically expect by now, while the other countries incurred skyrocketing cases and a relatively massive spike in deaths. Obviously, Nigeria’s vaccination rate is much lower than these other countries, but its booster rate is almost nonexistent.
Even within Europe, Scandinavian countries like Norway largely escaped a massive death curve during the first two years of the pandemic. That all changed in 2022. Norway now has the highest COVID death rate per million in the world.
Adding these three Omicron waves together, we see that Norway is beginning to rival the U.S. in terms of death curves. However, America is a much unhealthier country, and America experienced the death curves with the more pathogenic Wuhan and Delta strains.
If you track the number of boosters given per 100 people in some of the aforementioned countries, you will see that the current death curves track almost perfectly in a positive correlation.
Indeed, Chile now has the most deaths per capita in South America, even though the country already suffered a substantial number of deaths and should be done with the pandemic. Nigeria and the rest of Africa indeed are done with the pandemic, and the U.S., which has an average booster rate, is somewhere in the middle in terms of current COVID rates.
So, this is about a lot more than “oh, the vaccines don’t stop transmission.” They appear to proliferate it and also to worsen clinical outcomes. But why?
A group of German researchers tested for which specific antibody levels spike at what time. Specifically, they tested the Pfizer shot against the AstraZeneca shot and discovered something very concerning. Increasingly over time, and particularly with three doses of Pfizer, the immune response switched from the more neutralizing IgG1 and IgG3 antibodies to the non-neutralizing “tolerating” IgG4 antibodies:
High levels of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2-antibodies are an important component of vaccine-induced immunity. Shortly after the initial two mRNA vaccine doses, the IgG response mainly consists of the pro-inflammatory subclasses IgG1 and IgG3. Here, we report that several months after the second vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies were increasingly composed of non-inflammatory IgG4, which were further boosted by a third mRNA vaccination and/or SARS-CoV-2 variant breakthrough infections. IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination. This induction of IgG4 antibodies was not observed after homologous or heterologous SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenoviral vectors [emphasis added].
Why is this so important?
Importantly, this class switch was associated with a reduced capacity of the spike-specific antibodies to mediate antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement deposition. Since Fc-mediated effector functions are critical for antiviral immunity, these findings may have consequences for the choice and timing of vaccination regimens using mRNA vaccines, including future booster immunizations against SARS-CoV-2 [emphasis added].
So not only do these shots fail to produce the first line of defense antibodies known as IgA in the mucosal, something we knew from day one, but even the blood-based antibodies are increasingly the wrong type. This problem seems to get worse over time and with more doses of the shot, which correlates perfectly with numerous studies showing negative efficacy increasing over time, with more doses, and how the vaccinated take longer to clear the virus.
This topic is both very dense and fascinating. You can find clear explanations of this study about IgG4 antibodies in layman’s terms here, here, and here. But the important outcome for us from a policy standpoint is understanding the deadly subterfuge that has been foisted upon 5.5 billion people of the world and how it will be used with many more novel vaccines coming down the pipeline. The medical establishment successfully convinced the world that a vaccine is nothing more than simply stimulating an antibody response and is something that can be done within days of discovering a virus. This is why they now seek to get vaccines approved not based on accurate clinical trials and clinical outcomes but on “immunobridging” – the measuring of antibody levels. Indeed, this is how they got the bivalent booster shots and the JYNNEOS monkeypox vaccine approved and how they plan to get future shots approved.
However, merely measuring antibody levels in the abstract is meaningless and potentially masks harms to the body. God designed our bodies to create the right sort of antibodies, in the right amount, at the right time, in the right place. Any fault in any of those factors can create auto-antibodies, Trojan horse antibodies (antibody dependent disease enhancement) or a misfiring of the immune system, which is some form of original antigenic sin or pathogenic priming that teaches the body to tolerate a specific strain of the virus or respond for a wrong strain. This is why vaccines take years to develop. And this is before we even discuss the fact that these shots are not even vaccines, but are gene therapies that code your body to produce a pathogenic spike that was the result of gain-of-function research and seems to potentially damage every organ system, particularly the cardiovascular system.
In the case of the COVID shots, what the German study discovered is that over time and with increased doses it actually trains your body to tolerate rather than fight the virus it was designed to destroy. The other class of blood-based antibodies are designed to neutralize pathogens; however, the IgG4 class was specifically designed to tolerate innocuous cells (that don’t reproduce) that it repeatedly contacts, such as pollen or peanut particles. They serve an important role and help ensure that people don’t respond with excessive inflammation to everyday encounters with pollen, but to see 20% of the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 (it was as high as 42% in those experiencing infection after boosters) be something that tolerates it is astounding … and dangerous! In other words, whereas your IgG1 or IgG3 antibodies are like the SWAT team, your IgG4 antibodies are like social workers. You don’t want social workers responding to replicating pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2 spike.
The long-term implications of this study are still unclear, but like every earth-shattering finding, this one will not be studied by governments. If this shot is really upregulating an IgG4 response for most of the population, it could easily explain why herd immunity is out the window with SARS-CoV-2. It’s literally teaching the body to not only respond to the wrong pathogen but to tolerate its existence and not remember to fight it. Also, what does this mean long-term for people who don’t create pro-inflammatory antibodies to defend against pathogens? What sort of damage is being done by not having the virus sufficiently neutralized before it invades the system so deeply?As Kilian Schober, one of the authors of the study, notes (after calling our interpretation of the study too “simplistic”),”Our findings do, however, raise some questions about how to proceed.” But in the past, we used to answer those questions before experimenting on humans, not begin to raise them (and then never answer them) after 5.5 billion people were already injected with the product.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Former first lady Michelle Obama revealed that she “couldn’t stand” former President Barack Obama for a decade. During an interview with Revolt TV, while promoting her book, Michelle Obama recounted how she was disgusted with her husband for a decade. Michelle Obama declared, “People think I’m being catty for saying this: It’s like, there were 10 years where I couldn’t stand my husband.”
The former first lady of eight years added, “And guess when it happened? When those kids were little.”
The wife of the 44th president added, “For 10 years while we’re trying to build our careers and worrying about school and who’s doing what and what, I was like, ‘Argh, this isn’t even!’”
She continued, “And guess what? Marriage isn’t 50/50, ever. Ever. There are times I’m 70, he’s 30. There are times he’s 60, 40. But guess what? Ten years. We’ve been married 30. I would take 10 bad years over 30 — it’s just how you look at it. People give up — ‘Five years; I can’t take it.’“
Michelle Obama said, “Do you like him? I mean, you could be mad at him, but do you still look at him and go, ‘I’m not happy with you, but I respect you. I don’t agree with you, but you’re still a kind, smart person.‘”
She proclaimed, “Little kids, they’re terrorists. They have demands. They don’t talk. They’re poor communicators. They cry all the time.“
Michelle, 58, met Barack, 61, at a law firm in Chicago in 1989. Michelle married Barack Obama on October 3, 1992. The couple had two daughters: Malia and Sasha. Michelle, Barack, and their daughters lived in the White House from Jan. 20, 2009, until Jan. 19, 2017. The Obama children were ages 7 and 10 when they moved into the White House.
In 2017, Michelle Obama secured a $65 million book deal. In 2018, the Obamas notched a $50 million deal with Netflix.
The New York Post reported in 2018, “Forbes estimated the couple made $20.5 million in salaries and book royalties between 2005 — when Barack Obama became a US senator and they first arrived in Washington — and 2016. They are now worth more than $135 million. And like her husband, Michelle Obama is currently in demand as a speaker for corporations and nonprofits, commanding $225,000 per appearance.”
You can watch the entire Revolt TV interview with Michelle Obama below.
REVOLT x Michelle Obama: The Cross-Generational Conversation www.youtube.com
There’s a strange thing happening in the American economy right now — what we read in the newspaper or see on TV doesn’t match what we’re witnessing with our own eyes. Job numbers reported in the media seem wonderful. Amazingly low unemployment that hasn’t been witnessed in 50 years! Hundreds of thousands of new jobs created monthly. Yet for all these rosy numbers, when we look at the real world, we see critically understaffed businesses, long waits for repairs, and customer service in the gutter.
America’s young men are in crisis, and the answer to this problem is spiritual, not economic or political. While the media continues to trumpet good news about the economy, the reason your real-life experiences don’t match such optimism is because these reports typically only give you part of the picture. What corporate media doesn’t tell you is that about 11 million jobs remain unfilled right now.
That’s why service is lousy everywhere and you can’t get a plumber. Those jobs go unfilled because millions of young American men between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t working. At all. As Bloomberg reports, they’ve been left behind, with a lower percentage of men between those ages working than in 1970 — a statistic that emerged before the economic disaster brought by coronavirus lockdowns.
Millions of Young Men Doing Nothing All Day
So, how can millions of men be out of work when unemployment is extremely low? Easy, if you don’t count them.
Yes, the unemployment rate hovers at a record low figure, but this number doesn’t count all unemployed people. It only includes those who don’t have a job and are actively seeking one. This cheery (and erroneous) unemployment rate doesn’t count the millions of young men who aren’t looking for a job. Young males fitting this description are often referred to as “NEETs,” an acronym originating in the U.K. that stands for “Not in Employment, Education or Training.” These fellows aren’t working and, worse, aren’t interested in work.
Of course, this was already a growing problem in the last decade. But unemployment went full supernova during the coronavirus lockdown — and finally smart people are paying attention to it. Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame recently hosted a podcast discussion on the crisis of young men not working.
To further understand the problem’s depth, Rowe interviewed economist Nicholas Eberstadt, who wrote “Men Without Work.” It explains the seriousness of this issue, documenting how the unemployment crisis goes far beyond simply not having a job. Too many men in their prime have fallen into a hollow existence. And their parents — and our tax dollars — subsidize such incredible waste.
What do such men do with their copious amounts of leisure? According to Eberstadt, they aren’t only not working. They aren’t going to church. They typically aren’t dating. They aren’t engaging in charity work or civic activities either, or even helping with housework.
Instead, they play video games, binge watch TV and movies, and, perhaps most concerningly, abuse drugs. So many young men are not only lost to our economy but lost to their families as well. They are at risk of becoming another gloomy statistic in the opioid epidemic.
Social and Spiritual Solutions
So, what is the answer? Unsurprisingly, it depends on who you ask. Eberstadt, the expert on young men dropping out of the economy, believes in secular and market-driven solutions to this crisis. He explains to Rowe on the podcast that we could use shame as a powerful motivator, much like our nation has shamed smokers to give up the habit.
But a campaign to shame men is already widespread in America — and not particularly helpful. In recent years, so many expressions of traditional male values have been labeled “toxic masculinity.” Combine this message with readily available drugs ranging from prescription opioids and fentanyl to legal marijuana in many states, and it almost feels like society is encouraging young men to disconnect from the real world and play “Call of Duty” all day.
We therefore believe the real solution to this crisis is spiritual. And we don’t mean just dragging young men away from the TV and into church. When Eberstadt’s book was first published in 2016, The New York Times highlighted it with an op-ed that made an eye-opening point about the root cause of the problem.
In the article, the journalist explored the issue via an interview with a young man who lost his job in the oil industry. He told the interviewer he feels as if America doesn’t care about him. He says he feels as if he’s “considered nothing.” This is a tragedy that likely resonates with millions of other young men not working. No shaming campaign will solve this. It will only worsen things.
Instead, these men would do well to unite. We suggest they form small groups with other men to help each other and provide non-judgmental spaces to work through life’s problems.
If young men feel isolated and valueless, the answer is to bring them together in brotherhood to help them understand their worth. “Power of 4” emphasizes how much more powerful men can be when they don’t try to go it alone. When a man has three brothers to meet with regularly to work through life’s challenges, he is much better off than trying to handle his problems on his own.
Consider a hypothetical Power of 4 group comprised of men not in the workforce. They could work together to build each other up, for instance, by engaging in charity work while also collaborating on resumes and professional networking. (Simply having regular face-to-face contact with other men who are not keen on blaming themselves for their station in life will do worlds of good for young men in crisis).
An even more powerful approach to a Power of 4 group might be to mix together men with established careers with those not in the workforce. Young men who feel lost and without purpose could get unimaginable benefits from spending time with men who are on solid footing in their profession. Such successful men might even assist their Power of 4 brother by arranging an internship or introductory position.
What’s more, men currently working know just how nearly every employer is screaming out for quality employees now. That means a resume with some gaps in it won’t necessarily hold back a man who wants to better his situation. Undoubtedly, our young men in crisis can transform their lives once they realize they do have value — and even the potential for greatness. All it takes is a determination to relinquish those behaviors holding them back — whether it be drugs and alcohol or Netflix and PlayStation (or all of the above!).
Ultimately, we are deeply concerned by the crisis of young men dropping out of society. Despite so much bad news, we see many positives in the future. If men come together to support each other, this problem can and will correct itself.
With the right support system, young men can achieve tremendous personal growth. Every human has value, a fact lost on so many men for far too long. With the help of three brothers, our blueprint for the Power of 4, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, American men will return to a society that so desperately needs them.
What’s the modus operandi of our dystopian government? Creating a needless deadly crisis, blocking the effective way for dealing with it thereafter, and foisting upon the world instead a dangerous and ineffective way of dealing with it. That might sound a lot like COVID, but it’s largely what officials have been planning for a long time with energy, and now that the population is primed for lockdowns, disruptions, and total authoritarian control as a result of COVID, that is what they plan to do with our energy grid. All for a lie.
This was the coldest Christmas in a half-century in much of the U.S., with many localities setting records, including those not accustomed to the cold like Tallahassee, Florida. Many of us are disgusted at those limiting our natural energy in favor of novel, ineffective energy, thereby causing a doubling or even tripling of home heating bills. But we must also realize that if they had their way, we’d have no heating in our homes at all.
Just like the supposed source of COVID and how to deal with it were lies, our energy crisis is wholly contrived and built upon the lie of global warming. Typically, you would have to make sure we are 100% correct about the “science” behind such irrevocable economic and societal changes before committing civilization suicide by destroying the only reliable sources of energy we have. But in a post-“Great Reset” world, this is par for the course. In fact, the science behind global warming is just as flimsy as the science behind lockdowns, masks, and mRNA shots.
During the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, chief climate priest Al Gore asserted, “Some of the models suggest … that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” Predictions like this upended our lives with more expensive and more decrepit vital products and services being produced for a generation under the false pretense of taming a crisis that never existed. It turns out that since 2012, the mass of Arctic sea ice is up 31% and Greenland is gaining, not losing, ice. Meanwhile, Antarctica, which was always gaining ice during the period when the Arctic was losing ice, subsequently lost ice last decade and is now regaining it. In other words, the science behind polar ice caps seems to be rooted in the same cherry-picked timing and data as the faux science behind global warming causing either fewer or more hurricanes.
Yet somehow, we are to believe the science is all figured out on how to tamper with global temperatures, just like it was with COVID. Rather than people being more primed to believe in government control after COVID, any thinking person should be even more suspect of official climate lies and the accompanying life-altering policy changes governments want to induce based on them. And boy, would these policy changes be life-altering.
When officials speak of “net zero” for carbon emissions, it means, many times of the year, you would have net zero energy for heating. Picture those nights this past week of below-zero temperatures for much of the nation. Would you want to rely on “renewable energy,” even after billions upon billions in subsidies failed to move the needle on its effectiveness?
At 8am this morning, wind was providing about 1% of the electricity to 13 Mid-Atlantic states and Wash DC.
'Net zero' is how much electricity you will be able to have under climate idiocy. pic.twitter.com/UuMXeQmagA
Temperatures dropped to near zero in Amarillo, Texas, over the Christmas weekend, with wind chills well below zero. Even south Texas faced several nights of once-in-a-generation record cold. Yet even with all that wind blowing, when Texans needed energy most, it was natural gas that held the grid for Texans, while wind and solar collapsed, according to the grid tracking info from the Energy Information Administration.
God might have been sending those wind gusts of 50 mph, but Santa most certainly was not delivering wind energy through the chimney to Texans on Christmas. Now imagine how much better Texas would be doing if the state had invested a fraction of the $66 billion it used for wind and solar in energy sources that actually energize the world rather than in sources that need help from other energy to produce a fraction of the output at a higher cost? Imagine how much cheaper heating prices would be without the global warming mandates and green energy diversions.
If Republican states don’t start looking at how to expand natural God-given fuels and end the green energy scam, the next cold wave could be worse, and we will face energy rationing like the Europeans. For example, depending on the type of job, German regulators now set the thermostats in Germany’s workplaces anywhere between 54 and 66 Fahrenheit. France is preparing for rolling blackouts to close hospitals and schools in a shutdown scenario that could rival the COVID lockdowns used in 2020 to strategically acclimate the public to the new climate of scarcity, pain, and control. Keep in mind, Europe is facing this magnitude of an energy crisis after it has already spent over $1 trillion on “renewable” energy since 2004.
As much as Republicans appear united on energy policy, if you watch carefully, they drop buzz words like a “smarter transition” to “clean” energy and a “better” way of dealing with global warming. Half the Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, just voted to expand an international treaty banning the key coolants in air conditioners, thereby agreeing to the false premise of global warming. Most GOP governors continue to promote tendentious treatment for wind, solar, electric cars, and biofuels that are enabling the dangerous globalist quest to phase out viable energy.
Republicans must end this mealy-mouthed agenda of pursuing a “smarter transition” to green energy, all built upon acceptance of the false premise of global warming. States must audit every regulation that accepts the premise of global warming and harms consumers and work to eliminate it from state policy – be it a law, mandate, subsidy, or regulation.
As we are seeing in Europe, there is no middle ground on this road to the hell of scarcity, which will lead to complete government control every aspect of our lives. In a post-COVID/Great Reset world, there is no longer an excuse to feign ignorance about the “science.” Anyone with working cells in their brain should realize the dark end to that path. The road to a transhumanist hell is paved with “the scienceTM”.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
A spokesperson for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his office was investigating a “Drag Queen Christmas” show for possible violations of the state’s laws against exposing children to sexually explicit themes. The Christmas drag show was held on Monday at the Broward Center of the Performing Arts in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Chris Nelson, a local activist, recorded a video at the event where he claimed several young children were present. Nelson left the event after interrupting with a protest against the presence of children at the drag show. He was escorted off of the premises by Broward sheriff’s deputies.
On Tuesday, DeSantis spokesperson Bryan Griffin said the event would be investigated for possible legal violations.
“The Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) is aware of multiple complaints about a sexually explicit performance marketed to children held in Fort Lauderdale on December 26th,” Griffin wrote in the statement.
“The Department is actively investigating this matter, including video footage and photographs from the event. DPBR will, like in other cases, take action,” the statement read. “Exposing children to sexually explicit activity is a crime in Florida, and such action violates the Department’s licensing standards for operating a business and holding a liquor license.”
DeSantis has previously expressed his opposition to drag shows with explicit themes allowing children to be present.
One online advertisement for the Broward Center “Drag Queen Christmas” made it clear that there were “adult themes and content” in the performance and limited attendance to people over 18 years old unless the minors were accompanied by a parent.
“The Department frequently conducts investigations into these matters upon tips provided by the public, and we thank the public for continuing to bring attention to these incidents. Investigations of such allegations will remain a priority for the Department and, indeed, are ongoing,” the statement concluded.
Here’s more about the drag show controversy:
Biden Subtly Defends Drag Shows for Kids…Internet ERUPTS www.youtube.com
The dust of the 2022 midterm contests has barely settled and Democrats — invigorated by the Red Wave that evaporated under extended lax voting policies — are out to make sweeping changes to our nation’s election laws once again.
Think back to 2020, when Democratic governors and unsuspecting Republican lawmakers made unprecedented changes to state election policies in the name of Covid that included mandating universal mail-in balloting and a month of early voting. Some states have kept these changes permanently. But Democrats are not satisfied, and why should they be? With their gubernatorial power retained (they kept all but one of the governor’s offices) and newfound control of state legislatures in both Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats are keen to ram through a whole gamut of unprecedented and unconstitutional changes. It’s working, so they’re going to keep doing it.
As The New York Times reported, Democrats’ list of policy proposals for 2023 includes expanding automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote, granting the franchise to felons, and criminalizing what the left thinks is election “misinformation.” Of course, all these policy prescriptions have little to do with “voting rights,” but Democrats package them as such, and slander their opponents as — you guessed it — racists.
Make no mistake about what these proposals are meant to accomplish. Take automatic voter registration. The New York Times notes that such a system — already adopted by 20 states — “adds anyone whose information is on file with a government agency — such as a department of motor vehicles or a social services bureau — to [a state’s] voter rolls unless they opt out.”
During the 2020 election, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sent out automatic voter registration forms to all eligible Michigan residents. As a result of the mailer, 114,000 people were automatically added to Michigan’s voter rolls. Many were duplicate and otherwise inaccurate registrations. By padding state voter rolls with new unlikely voters, Democrats can target unsuspecting blocs of voters, harvest their ballots, and put their candidates over the top. Various leftist 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations are solely dedicated to this.
As I’ve previously reported regarding Democratic attempts to court high school-age kids, multiple left-wing organizations are targeting young people to effectively propagandize them into future Democratic Party voters. As two-thirds of Gen Z voters backed Democrats this past midterm election cycle, Democrats are hoping to capitalize on this emerging voting bloc while also setting their sights on even younger kids. While leftist organizations have tried to couch their outreach efforts as bipartisan, Democrat politicians admit they’re going after younger voters to benefit the left.
“[Targeting young people] is something the left’s been pushing for quite a while — along with enfranchising noncitizens and automatic restoration of felon voting rights,” executive director of the Honest Elections Project Jason Snead told me earlier this month. “They’re always looking for new people to bring into the election system and calculating the targeted groups who will be more likely to vote Democratic.”
Along with making the state a key player in their efforts to pad voter rolls in their favor, Democrats are also intent on criminalizing any information that could hurt their electoral prospects. Known Democratic Party hack and Michigan Secretary of State Joycelyn Benson told the New York Times that she wants new rules and penalties for individuals peddling “misinformation” in election mailers or language on proposed ballot amendments.
“The greatest threats to our democracy right now continue to be the intentional spread of misinformation and the threats and harassment of election officials that emerge from those efforts,” Benson said.
With Democrats’ history of using Big Tech to label the New York Post’s verified story on Hunter Biden as misinformation and its subsequent censorship during the 2020 election, as well as myriad true scientific claims that countered the bureaucracy’s Covid narrative, it’s clear Benson and fellow Democrats’ desire to censor “misinformation” is code for cracking down on any information Democrats don’t like.
What’s To Be Done
Republicans must be wary of Democratic efforts to fortify elections in 2023 and beyond. While some congressional Republicans might think the post-2020 election integrity fight is over, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Democrats have a massive ground game advantage over Republicans already, and if they pass these policy proposals — under the insufferable label of “voting rights” — in key swing states, that advantage will only grow to an insurmountable one. Republicans must realize election integrity is not a seasonal push nor a battle isolated to 2020. Rather, they must be on offense for years to come.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is relying on a network of foreign investors to present an illusion of broad support for the agency’s proposed climate disclosure rule, which threatens to increase structural risks to the American economy.
In March, the trade agency outlined new regulations requiring firms to report their estimated energy emissions. While the SEC technically only has jurisdiction over publicly traded companies, the broad nature of the agency’s proposal aims to coerce private businesses into carbon calculations that track the behavior of their customers. Firms that fail to comply with government standards are subject to fines and lawsuits.
The new rules are “a disingenuous power grab by the SEC,” Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in an interview.
“By requiring the corporations the SEC regulates to make scope 2 emissions disclosures, those corporations will be forced to require the businesses they source from to calculate and disclose their emissions or stop doing business with them,” Hild told The Federalist. “So even if a business is private (not publicly traded) but their customers are public companies, then the SEC will have effectively forced them to participate in the disclosures scheme.”
According to an analysis of the SEC’s proposal from the Western Energy Alliance, a coalition of predominantly small independent oil and gas producers, more than 80 percent of asset managers cited by the agency as supportive of the new regulations are foreign. Just 7 percent of American asset managers support the disclosure rules.
The white paper from the Alliance published in June outlines how activist investors are masquerading as representative of majority sentiment on Wall Street despite just a handful of firms forming multiple coalitions. According to the report, seven major climate change advocacy organizations cited by SEC as behind the agency on mandated disclosure include the same investor coalition groups working in close collaboration. It’s as if the same 50 members of Congress formed 100 different caucuses that pledged support to particular legislation to show proof of consensus.
“These groups are so intertwined that it is not at all clear they represent anything other than a minority of investors advancing a particular policy agenda,” the Alliance report reads. “Across those seven climate initiatives and the global network of non-profit organizations that support them, only 19 percent are American. More than half are European.”
Among the groups behind the SEC climate disclosure is Climate Action 100+, a coalition of investors pushing to eliminate highly efficient fossil fuels through public and private policy. Earlier this month, House Republicans on Capitol Hill launched an antitrust probe into the group, where they described Climate Action 100+ as a “cartel” to “ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take… action on climate change.’”
The Alliance white paper also highlights Russian influence at the center of the SEC’s proposed rule via an endorsement from the Sea Change Foundation. In 2015, the Environmental Policy Alliance described the Sea Change Foundation as “a conduit for funneling Russian government money to U.S. environmental groups in order to undermine American natural gas and oil production to Russia’s benefit.”
Kremlin oligarchs stand to profit by Washington’s elimination of fossil fuels because that would force global markets to rely on Moscow for their energy needs.
In March, 20 House lawmakers sent a letter to Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., that raised the alarm on Russian interference in the American environmental lobby sabotaging energy security.
“Given the impact that Russia’s control of the European energy market has had in the lead up and prosecution of the war in Ukraine, it is critical that Congress gains a better understanding of the role that Russian financing has had in shaping American environmental policy and sentiment,” lawmakers wrote.
Maloney, however, continued to preside over hearings that targeted oil and gas producers as Democrats demand that reliable power from fossil fuels be replaced by less-reliable wind and solar.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
It seems like every time I turn around, an editor assigns me a story related to the mental health crises of our children. Most of the health experts I speak to correlate Covid lockdowns and our children’s fragile state. Closing schools played a major role in this phenomenon, but what if other crucial factors are being overlooked?
Another story, seemingly unrelated to the mental health crisis, is making the rounds in the corporate press. Church attendance is on a rapid decline. The “nones,” survey respondents who say they have no religious affiliation, are the fastest-growing group in the United States every year. We now have a generation of adults that grew up not attending worship services weekly, and they are raising their children in a similar fashion.
The “nones” seem to prefer a parenting style that says: “We’re fine without church and worship and religious instruction and institutions, thank you very much.” But they are not fine. Their children are not coping and managing the day-to-day stresses and inconveniences thrown at them. They are fragile and increasingly so.
The “nones” will tell you it is because we need to better embrace children’s differences and preferences (like their pronouns) while empowering them with positive affirmations and encouraging personal acceptance through self-esteem workshops. We clutter their calendars with sports, theater, STEM clubs, and dance classes. If none of that pans out, we allow our kids to self-medicate with hours spent on social media.
Parents will do all of this, but won’t take their families to church. Yet research shows that children who attend weekly worship services have higher GPAs, score higher on standardized tests, and are less likely to be held back a grade. They also are more likely to achieve a bachelor’s degree in college.
So why aren’t parents taking their children to weekly worship?
When surveyed, parents often respond that their children and teens do not want to attend worship. This democratic approach to family decision-making only seems to apply to church attendance, however. For other important decisions like wearing a seatbelt or vaccinations, parents balk at giving their children voting privileges. A child’s vote carries more weight when it aligns with a parent’s desire to stay home in pajamas on a Sunday morning.
Why should church attendance be considered a powerful tool for parents to boost their children’s mental health? We can look to the research for the answer.
In a 2018 study, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found some surprising benefits to children and adolescents who attend weekly worship. It turns out that children and teens who attend church grow up to be young adults with higher rates of reported happiness and life satisfaction. They were less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, less likely to use illicit drugs, and less likely to engage in early sex and contract sexually transmitted infections.
In addition, these same young adults were more likely to embrace volunteering and reported feeling a sense of mission and purpose than their non-church-attending counterparts.
With all of these positive outcomes for children who attend weekly worship, should we be surprised that children who do not have a similar structure in their lives experience an inverse phenomenon? Is it any wonder that anxiety and depression among children and teens are on the rise when every day, their still-forming brains are bombarded with information about doom and destruction while they drown in a sea of gender confusion and racial animus?
We think we can combat all the negativity by telling children: “You are perfect! You are awesome! You keep being you!” We put these pithy platitudes on T-shirts and backpacks and stickers with unicorns and rainbows. At the end of a bad day, our kids know that this is no substitute for the real deal.
Each of us knows these sentiments are superficial. We are poor, miserable sinners in need of forgiveness. Where do we go with all our baggage when the church is not an option? We go to therapists and pharmacists, but trends show that the last place parents want to go is the place actually offering a solution.
What could families find at church that they won’t find anywhere else? Hopefully, something that is woefully lacking in the world around them: the truth.
Newsflash, kids! You are not perfect! You know that mean thing you did to your classmate in the cafeteria? That was a sin. And that nasty thought you had about that person? That was a sin. And the snide comment you made to your mom when you were hangry? Yep. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Good news: you’ve come to the right place! Jesus came for sinners. As a matter of fact, the church is filled with them. Each week, they come to hear the message that even though we are sinful human beings, Jesus died for those sins. When we confess those nasty thoughts and horrible things we did, we can receive forgiveness — a clean slate!
Will we mess up again on Monday? Of course. But that’s why we can look forward to church. Can we try harder to be better people? Kinder people? Yes, we can. Does our forgiveness depend upon what we do and how we perform each week? Nope. You are forgiven because God loves you that much, so much that he sent his son to take the punishment that should have been yours and mine.
Imagine what a burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them that grace. How much better could they cope with a bad day, knowing that each moment offers a fresh start? How much more resilient could our children become?
Parents, we put our children at a disadvantage when we do not give them the very thing they need for their mental and spiritual health. It is time to put a new priority on the family calendar every Sunday. If we won’t do it for ourselves (and we should), let’s do it for our children. The next generation depends on it.
Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.
It seems like all I hear these days is how liberals are red-hot for teaching history, while retrograde troglodytes on the right are demanding that we suppress the teaching of history by banning critical race theory (CRT). Haranguing students, day in day out, about their white privilege is just teaching history.
On this beloved Kwanzaa week, here’s some history for you.
Celebrated exclusively by white liberals, Kwanzaa is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural gibberish that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves.
In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. (It’s the same function Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez serves today.)
By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.
Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.
No, those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanzaa-reform, and we are not that observant.)
It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public schoolteachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.
In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize Nigerian newspapers that claimed that certain American black radicals were CIA operatives.
Now we know the truth: The FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police. Whether Karenga was a willing FBI dupe or just a dupe remains unclear.
In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot two Black Panthers to death on the UCLA campus: Al “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as the chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University at Long Beach.
The left has forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa. The esteemed Cal State professor’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another invention of The Worst Generation.
In 1974, Patty Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, famously posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snakehead stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani. These are the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.
When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites. (And here’s something interesting: Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)
While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” (is that the mass murder or the seizure of private property?), Karenga said Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.”
There’s an inclusive philosophy for you!
Sing to “Jingle Bells”:
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!
Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black Americans celebrate Christmas.
The United States Department of State has just issued its annual watchlist of the world’s worst religious freedom offenders, and strikingly, Nigeria did not make the cut. The country is among the most dangerous in the world to be a Christian, and daily we hear news of abuses imperiling the human rights of all Nigerians. In breaking news: Since at least 2013, the Nigerian military has conducted systematic, wide-scale forced abortions on at least 10,000 women and girls, many of which were kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants.
Yet in spite of clear-cut evidence of mass human rights atrocities, the U.S. government remains silent, failing to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern.” Between January 2021 and March 2022, more than 6,000 Christians were targeted and killed in Nigeria. In May of this year, Christian student Deborah Yakubu was stoned to death and her body burned in Sokoto State, Nigeria, after classmates deemed her WhatsApp messages blasphemous. Following this tragedy, Rhoda Ya’u Jatau, a Christian woman from the northeast, is now on trial for blasphemy for sharing a WhatsApp message condemning Deborah’s brutal killing. And earlier this year, humanist Mubarak Bala was sentenced to 24 years in prison for social media posts critical of Islam.
What will it take to break the Biden administration’s silence? Now, Nigeria is garnering international attention as a result of an upcoming case at its Supreme Court challenging a law criminalizing so-called “blasphemous” expression. You can be put to death under Nigerian law for this “crime.” Musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, currently imprisoned and facing the death penalty for blasphemy charges, has petitioned the court to protect his fundamental human rights after being convicted under the Sharia Penal Code of Kano State.
In March 2020, Yahaya shared song lyrics via WhatsApp. This simple act would forever change his life. Accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad for what he shared, his house was burned to the ground by a mob, and he was arrested and charged with blasphemy. Without the support of a lawyer, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced by a local Sharia judge to death by hanging.
Innocent of any crime, Yahaya filed his notice of appeal in November at the Supreme Court, and this potential landmark case could abolish once and for all Northern Nigeria’s Sharia blasphemy law.
Twenty years ago, the 12 states in Northern Nigeria introduced Sharia into their criminal law codes, despite the Nigerian Constitution’s protections for religious freedom. These laws are only supposed to apply to Muslims, but leave little room for theological diversity among Muslims, and could potentially be applied to converts to Christianity or those who have left Islam. It is imperative that the Supreme Court bring justice to Yahaya, saving his life and offering much-needed legal clarity to end the horror of blasphemy laws for all in Nigeria.
International law, including the international treaties to which Nigeria is bound as a party, is unambiguous — the right to religious freedom is for everyone, and nobody should be punished, much less killed, for what they believe. Moreover, Nigeria’s own constitution protects Yahaya’s rights to free expression and religious freedom. Any person of faith or no faith at all can be penalized, and even killed, as a result of a blasphemy accusation. In a country of more than 200 million, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims, it is clear that all Nigerians stand to lose under the blasphemy regime.
Blasphemy laws are not unique to Nigeria. Approximately 40 percent of countries in the world have blasphemy laws in some form, and there are currently at least seven countries where a conviction for blasphemy can result in the death penalty. Nigeria has before it a crucial opportunity to step out as an international leader, serving as a model for the abolishment of these dangerous laws.
The world awaits justice for Yahaya. Last week, the U.K. prime minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, Fiona Bruce, urged “the international human rights community to speak out on behalf of Sharif-Aminu and for Nigeria to repeal its blasphemy laws.” As he fights for his life, let us remember that this is a fight for the human rights of all Nigerians, and stand with him in advocating for the rights of all people to express themselves without fear.
Paul Coleman is the author of Censored and serves as executive director of ADF International overseeing the global, alliance-building legal organization. ADF International is supporting the case of Yahaya Sharif-Aminu at the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Find him on Twitter @Paul_B_Coleman.
When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct ‘odd,’ it’s clear who’s discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.
Emails released on Saturday as part of the latest dump of the “Twitter Files” reveal that the week before the 2020 presidential election, the FBI field office investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter — so many in fact, a top attorney for the tech giant found it “odd.” This blockbuster detail from the weekend came mere days after the FBI issued a statement framing coverage of the “Twitter Files” as “misinformation” being peddled by “conspiracy theorists.”
The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille stressed in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille continued, before telling Baker to let her know if he had any other questions.”
Less than an hour later, Baker responded to Cardille, noting it was “odd” that the FBI is “searching for violations of our policies.”
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi published these emails as part of a 50-something Christmas Eve “Twitter Files” thread that he remarked showed “the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The entire thread is newsworthy, but that FBI agents in both the Baltimore field office and at FBI headquarters were running keyword searches for supposed Twitter violations proves hugely significant because both offices were involved in the Hunter Biden investigation.
While the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office is — and was at the time of the 2020 election — handling the investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly for potential money laundering and tax crimes, there is no separate Delaware FBI field office. Rather, the Baltimore FBI field office covers all of Delaware for the bureau and thus supported (and continues to support) the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office in its investigation of Hunter Biden.
We also know from multiple FBI whistleblowers that FBI headquarters entangled itself in the Hunter Biden probe: In July 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” had claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”
“The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
Given the involvement of both Baltimore FBI and FBI headquarters in the investigation of Hunter Biden — and the latter’s attempt to shut down the probe — the revelation that “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ” were “doing keyword searches for violations,” suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election.
Previously released “Twitter Files” and statements from Twitter and Facebook established the FBI lied to the tech giants, representing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and prompting the censorship of the Biden-family scandal mere weeks before the 2020 election. Internal Twitter communications also revealed that the night before the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, “the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive.”
The “Twitter Files” also exposed “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” as Taibbi explained in an earlier thread. The “Twitter Files” Taibbi previously reported showed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” Those communications indicated “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
These earlier threads, however, all focused on either communications coming from the San Francisco FBI field office or discussed the monthly and then weekly meetings between Twitter and the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF. As Taibbi noted, the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to the FITF following the 2016 election, with the task force swelling to 80 agents.”
With FBI San Francisco and the FITF already liaisoning with Twitter, why then would the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters have any involvement in communicating with Twitter? And as Saturday’s emails reveal, those officers were not merely passing on information they received, they were, according to a Twitter legal executive, running “keyword” searches — something even Baker, who was previously general counsel for the FBI, found “odd.”
And the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters conducted these “keyword” searches and shared the results with Twitter for one reason only: to prompt Twitter to censor the speech the week before the 2020 presidential election.
“Odd” doesn’t even begin to capture the situation — which, given the connection between those two FBI offices and the Hunter Biden investigation, suggests a new wing to the Big Tech scandal: one in which FBI agents proactively sought out people and speech to censor for the benefit their politician of choice.
Ironically, the Wednesday before Taibbi broke this latest news, the FBI issued a statement claiming that “the correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. … It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct “odd,” it’s pretty clear who is discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Well, the Jan. 6 committee has produced its long-awaited report. In a surprise move, the committee referred former President Donald Trump for criminal prosecution, accusing him of inciting insurrection, among other crimes.
In fairness, Jan. 6, 2021, was the day that Trump announced he would open our southern border and allow nearly 5 million unvetted illegal immigrants into our country, whereupon they would be flown to various cities around the U.S. and given full access to all our welfare programs.
Obviously, this constitutes insurrectionary behavior. The committee had no choice but to demand criminal charges.
LATE BULLETIN: It was NOT the former president who did this, but the current president, Joe Biden. In another development, it turns out that engineering a foreign invasion of our country has been redefined as a “humanitarian mission.”
When will this “humanitarian mission” end? Apparently, never — not until all 7 billion humans living in places less luxe than America have moved here, at which point America won’t be so hot anymore, so no one will want to come.
Thus, The New York Times quoted Jennifer Quigley, of Human Rights First, saying of our intervention in Afghanistan: “We can’t claim mission accomplished. There are still too many vulnerable people abroad.”
After spending billions of dollars trying to build a semblance of civil society in that stone-age culture, evidently now we’re supposed to open our doors to everyone who lives there. Even granting that absurd notion, I can’t help but notice that Quigley seamlessly shifted from “Afghanistan” to “people abroad.”
So we have to take in every “vulnerable” person who doesn’t already live in the U.S.? Is there any other way to interpret her statement?
CNN demands that we fly Afghans here directly, not content to wait for these future Nobel Prize-winners to take the air-land route from Afghanistan through Central America into our country — which they are also doing.
For the last few weeks, CNN has aired a story almost every hour about how Afghans “risked their lives” to save Americans, so now we owe them permanent residency in our country. It’s unclear whom we were ever fighting, inasmuch as everyone in the country seems to have been a “translator.”
CNN hosts triumphantly produced a letter by “retired diplomats,” warning that if the U.S. doesn’t “support its allies” [by allowing them to move here], “in the future our allies will be less likely to support the U.S. missions.” (And then who will teach third-worlders about feminism, gays and George Floyd?)
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan must be relieved to hear liberals admit that how we treat those who put their lives on the line for our country will determine how we are willing to do so in the future. Whelan, you’ll recall, is rotting in a Russian prison, because a lesbian, Women’s National Basketball Association star (but I repeat myself) took precedence over him in a prisoner trade. We’re looking for a few good men. Anybody? Anybody?
We’ve already taken in 76,000 Afghans since Biden’s smooth withdrawal last year. (Please, God, tell me we rescued the Afghans who helped paint the George Floyd mural.)
And look at what a blessing they’ve been!
Mohammad Haroon Imaad was among the first batch of beloved Afghan “translators” brought to America last year. He was still living on the Fort McCoy military base in Wisconsin when he was charged with beating and choking his wife. She explained that he beat her all the time back in Afghanistan, once blinding her in both eyes.
Obviously, the Imaad household is going to be a real boon to our country. Yeah, we’re gonna have to raise the Social Security retirement age and start means-testing, but on the bright side, we’ve provided housing to Mrs. Imaad and paid for her astronomically expensive eye operations.
On the very same military base, another cherished Afghan ally, Bahrullah Noori, committed multiple forcible sexual assaults on children within weeks of arriving. Other Afghans flown to Fort McCoy showed up with child brides and multiple wives.
Just weeks after the Afghan-of-the-Month competition at Fort McCoy, another Afghan on our “must-have” list, Zabihullah Mohmand, was accused of raping a woman in Missoula, Montana. How long had he been here? A week? But the good news is, Mohmand was fully vetted by our government, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. If you can’t trust those guys …
In response, the media promptly stopped reporting those stories. Perhaps a better idea would be for CNN to have a word with the 76,000 “translators” already deposited on our shores. Hey, guys! Remember, for the next few months, NO RAPING!
Again, these were the most-favored Afghans, the ones who qualified for the first round of emergency admissions. And they just keep coming.
Now, that’s what most people call an “insurrection.”
COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106; 816-581-7500
In 2010, Bill Gates famously articulated a four-part equation to reducing the world’s carbon output. Seemingly bizarrely, his first component was reducing the population — through vaccination. “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion,” bemoaned Gates in his now infamous TED Talk. “Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10% or 15%.” Until recently, I thought this must have been a gaffe. After all, how could vaccines reduce the world’s population? Well, enter the COVID jabs – if you even want to call them vaccines – and we might have our answer.
Questions about fertility issues, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths began to be raised last winter when Scotland experienced a month of higher infant mortality than at any time over the past three decades. Then in the spring of 2022, roughly nine months after most young adults were jabbed with the COVID shots, COVID data analysists began noticing unusual drops in birth rates. The hope was that these numbers were just short-term aberrations due to some unknown transient cause. But months later, the evidence is growing too strong to ignore, suggesting a much longer-term problem, which bizarrely has garnered little concern from policymakers, governments, the medical establishment, or the media. It ranks alongside “died suddenly” both in terms of its magnitude to humanity and the shocking degree of silence in response.
In fact, some media outlets were even celebrating the low birth rates without expressing any curiosity as to the sudden cause. While it’s impossible to prove definitively that the correlation equals causation, it’s stupefying that these shots are not under suspicion given that they are already tied to heart problems, blood clots, massive inflammatory syndromes, and menstrual irregularities and that the lipid nano particles are deposited largely in the ovaries and the testes.
When you are dealing with 1-in-1,000-year anomalies, it takes a civilization-changing event to account for the anomaly. COVID itself cannot be a factor in the sudden drop, because the birth rates were not declining nine months after COVID hit or even in the first year and a half. The other culprit could have been lockdowns, which perhaps disrupted travel, relationships, and cohabitation. But if that were the case, by now we should be seeing a bounce-back effect. Instead, as my friend “Gato Malo” points out on his Substack, the numbers are getting worse.
Sweden is a perfect country to study because it never locked down and should not have been affected socially by the lockdowns. Yet not only did the Swedes experience a sharp decline in births nine months after their vaccination program, the numbers are further deteriorating over time. According to Statistics Sweden, live births are down 8.1% for the year (8.7% per capita), but as Gato observes, the worst month was October 2022 (the most recent month with data), which saw a 13.2% per capita decline. What on earth could explain the fact that this trend is getting worse, other than … you know what? He collated the data from 25 years, and this data, which is in plain sight, raises the question of why there is no policy concern whatsoever.
He further demonstrates that the plummeting birth rates correlate perfectly with the uptake of the vaccines in Sweden among the childbearing population.
Furthermore, any hypothesis as to the cause of the plummeting birth rates would also have to logically account for the rise in neonatal deaths. For example, lockdowns would not explain why the babies being born are experiencing more health problems. The spike protein embedded in the babies’ blood, however, would. Israeli researcher Josh Guetzkow obtained neonatal death data from Israeli health insurance fund Maccabi, which covers 25% of Israelis. He found a tripling of neonatal deaths in two of the quarters post-vaccination.
The timing is very peculiar, according to Guetzkow:
In February, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health started to officially recommend COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women in their 2nd and 3rd trimesters, so the timing of the second quarter spike would coincide with women being jabbed later in their pregnancy 2-4 months prior.
The 4th quarter spike coincides with the booster vaccination campaign in Israel in August and especially September — a drive that aggressively targeted pregnant women. Unfortunately the health insurer claimed not to have information on the vaccination status of pregnant women, so we are not able to differentiate by vaccination status.
This clearly rules out COVID as the culprit, because the neonatal deaths in the earlier quarters in 2020 were low. He goes on to note that this data complements earlier findings he publicized from two major Israeli hospitals showing a sudden increase in stillbirths, miscarriages, and abortions (collectively, SBMA) around the same time. The insurance data does not illuminate the vaccination status of the mothers suffering these reproductive problems, but his earlier data showed a 34% higher rate of SBMAs in Rambam hospital in Haifa among vaccinated women through October 2021.
Obviously, we all understand that you can’t definitively prove causation from correlation, but the lack of any curiosity from the medical community or the government is appalling, especially when the mechanism of action of the spike protein can logically cause these complications (including low sperm count and motility). We have now entered a new era of “speed of science” in which governments can foist novel products upon our bodies with multiple glaring and blaring safety signals setting off alarm bells all over the world, yet until we can prove conclusively the therapeutics are responsible for 100% of the anomaly, they will continue to be promoted. That is completely backward and represents a flagrant violation of the Nuremberg Code.
In a sane world, the makers of these therapies would be behind bars, but instead they are getting a promotion to concoct even more products with this same dangerous technology. Last week, the U.K. announced the formation of a 10-year partnership with Moderna to invest in more R&D for mRNA technology and to build a vaccine manufacturing center that can produce 250 million vaccines a year, particularly for the very problematic RSV shot the company is planning to release next year. In the irony of all ironies, the U.K.’s Health Security Agency will be overseeing this partnership. The UKHSA was the first health surveillance body in the world that published comprehensive weekly COVID updates showing negative efficacy of the shots almost a year and a half ago.
Typically, failure of a corporate partner is an impetus for a government to break the partnership. In the case of vaccines, however, the more they fail, the more they are elevated, subsidized, and even mandated. Unless their definition of failure is the opposite of how humanity would define it.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
While electric vehicles may seem to be all the rage in the automotive space, Toyota Motor Corporation president Akio Toyoda is pumping the brakes on the idea of an all-in approach.
“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Toyoda told reporters during a trip to Thailand, according to the Wall Street Journal. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”
“Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option,” he said, according to the outlet — during the past few years, he said, he has attempted to communicate this idea to stakeholders in the automotive space, including government figures, but he indicated that his effort had been tiring at points.
“Is there interest in electric vehicles? Yes. Is it more than 10% to 15% of our customer base? No way,” said Ryan Gremore, a dealer based in Illinois who owns a number of brand franchises, according to the outlet.
According to the Journal, Toyoda said that other options like hydrogen-powered vehicles were starting to receive a better reception from government leaders, media figures, and people in the vehicle industry.
The left has been fanatically pushing electric vehicles as it peddles climate change alarmism.
But electric vehicles remain impractical in many cases — for instance, they require significant time to recharge, which could be an inconvenience when recharging in the middle of a long trip. They are also less affordable to purchase than traditional gas-powered vehicles.
Conservatives on Twitter blasted the news that the Senate had passed the massive $1.7 trillion omnibus bill on a 68-29 vote Thursday, especially targeting the 18 Senate Republicans who voted in favor of more government spending. The Senate approved the 4,000-page bill that funds the government for the rest of the fiscal year, until Sept. 2023. The omnibus included $858 billion for defense, $787 billion for non-defense domestic programs and more than 7,200 earmarks costing over $15 billion.
Though many Republican Senators had spoken out against the large bill, the final tally revealed several Republicans voting in line with the 50 Senate Democrats. Right-leaning social media users and other Republican senators were quick to pile on the “sellouts” who voted in favor of massive Democratic projects and more spending despite high inflation rates.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., voted for the omnibus bill Thursday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I’m looking forward to 7% approval rating Mitch McConnell’s next lecture on candidate quality after leading the charge to take away the new GOP House majority’s leverage over the budget for an entire year,” X Strategies Senior Digital Strategist Greg Price tweeted.
I'm looking forward to 7% approval rating Mitch McConnell's next lecture on candidate quality after leading the charge to take away the new GOP House majority's leverage over the budget for an entire year.
ACT for America founder Brigitte Gabriel wrote, “Who is worse? The Democrats who are actively destroying the country or the Republicans who are sitting on their hands watching it burn?”
“Yuck,” American Commitment President Phil Kerpen exclaimed.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wrote, “I’m disappointed in some of my fellow Republicans, who voted against respecting the taxpayers and for empowering themselves to spend your money with reckless abandon.“
Sen. Rand Paul called out his fellow Senate Republicans for voting in favor of the spending bill. (Associated Press)
Internet Accountability Project senior counsel Will Chamberlain tweeted, “Every single Republican Senator should be asked – point blank – is the Russia/Ukraine border more important than our own southern border?“
“I never want to hear any of the Republicans who voted for this monstrosity pretend that they’re for fiscal sanity or border security ever again,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., wrote.
I never want to hear any of the Republicans who voted for this monstrosity pretend that they’re for fiscal sanity or border security ever again. https://t.co/hvXet6fvFm
Bishop previously went viral after tweeting a lengthy thread on the projects that will be funded within the omnibus bill. Among them included over half a billion dollars into “reproductive health” in areas that “threaten” endangered species.
“On a more sinister note, here’s at least $575 million for ‘family planning’ in areas where population growth ‘threatens biodiversity.’ Malthusianism is a disturbing, anti-human ideology that should have ZERO place in any federal program,” Bishop tweeted.
Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., called out the $1.7 trillion spending bill in a Twitter thread. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via REUTERS)
Other stipulations in the bill included funding for a DEI and “structural racism” National Institute of Health subdivision and the prohibition for the Customs and Border Patrol “to acquire, maintain or extend border security technology and capabilities.”
Lindsay Kornick is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to lindsay.kornick@fox.com and on Twitter: @lmkornick.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has announced that it seized more than 50.6 million fentanyl-containing “fake prescription pills” and in excess of 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder during the 2022 calendar year — the DEA laboratory estimated that this amounts to greater than 379 million possibly lethal doses of the dangerous drug.
Fentanyl “is a highly addictive man-made opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin,” according to the DEA’s press release, which also said that a mere two milligrams of the drug is viewed as a potentially lethal dose.
“These seizures – enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every American – reflect DEA’s unwavering commitment to protect Americans and save lives, by tenaciously pursuing those responsible for the trafficking of fentanyl across the United States,” DEA administrator Anne Milgram said, according to the press release. “DEA’s top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels—that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today.”
The press release noted that “Most of the fentanyl trafficked by the Sinaloa and CJNG Cartels is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”
DEA laboratory testing this year found that six out of 10 fentanyl-containing fake prescription pills included a possibly deadly amount of fentanyl, according to the government agency, which also noted that it seized more than twice as many of the fentanyl-laced pills in 2022 as it did in 2021.
The pills are created to appear the same as genuine prescriptions, but include filler and fentanyl and are frequently lethal, according to the DEA.
The DEA has also nabbed almost 131,000 pounds of methamphetamine, over 4,300 pounds of heroin, and more than 444,000 pounds of cocaine this year.
When it comes to vaccine injury, silence is certainly golden, because it’s the only currency valuable enough to cover up the atrocity of what was done to the entire global population over the past two years. The medical establishment has relied on doctors to turn a blind eye to vaccine injury, allowing those injured to languish without a proper diagnosis and treatment, and continue doubling down on even more doses of this dangerous therapeutic. Thankfully, a few of the former top enforcers of this dogma in the key Western countries of Australia and Israel are making amends for their past misdeeds.
As a lesbian who is married to a woman, a lifelong leader in sex education, former left-wing member of parliament, and former head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr. Kerryn Phelps is not exactly your candidate for right-wing conspiracy theorist. But in a wide-ranging interview with the Chronicle, the Sydney-based doctor publicly acknowledged her own injury as well as that of her partner and divulged how she faced censorship, a lack of treatment options, and a painful journey countless others are facing, a number she says is a lot higher than governments are willing to admit.
“This is an issue that I have witnessed firsthand with my wife, who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor, and a registered nurse at the time of immunization,” the 65-year-old former AMA president said to the Chronicle.
“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year and a half later, with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance, and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”
Phelps noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration failed to follow up with her reported injury, and many
doctors have told her that not only are they seeing the injuries in droves, but many practitioners themselves were injured but refuse to speak out.
“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunization, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” she said.
In other words, there are thousands of doctors who know what is going on, many experiencing it themselves, but who refuse to speak out. Some remain silent; others downright continue promoting the shots. What is quite telling is how even Dr. Phelps herself was still promoting the shots on social media a month after she claims to have been injured by the shots.
For “ineligible for a vaccine”, substitute “inadequate supply of vaccine available for his age group”. #covid19 Profound sympathy for this 15 yo boy’s family as his death has just been confirmed 💔 https://t.co/batoAnRBtD
It demonstrates how entrenched the vaccine cult is and how long it took for even someone injured this badly (along with her partner) to speak out.
The bombshell from Dr. Phelps is significant enough given her biography, but an even more explosive convert to the cause of truth is Professor Shmuel Shapira, who headed the Israel Institute for Biological Research from 2013 to 2021 and literally led the development of Israel’s coronavirus vaccination scheme, in the country that Pfizer referred to as the laboratory for its experimentation. Shapira has been speaking out against the shots for months, but not after he was personally injured by his third dose. Last week, he wrote a series of tweets describing his conversion:
I was wrong 3 times: * In the first shot * In the second shot * and in the third shot Who said that those who are injected do not admit that they were wrong?
The pigs from the animal farm, got time off for the final and were sent to trash. I touched them at a painful point. Yes then I will repeat it, I was wrong 3 times when I was injected the first, second and third time. Unlike the dwarfs, I'm proud of everything I've being doing.
Why aren’t others speaking out? Well, when even the man who was almost the Fauci of Israel gets this much blowback, it’s no wonder few have the courage to fight.
You have no idea what a campaign of slander and anonymous threats I go through. Some of it is quoted to me by journalists and others. The traces clearly lead to what used to be the Ministry of Health ,but not only to him. They aren't even smart enough to clean a fingerprint.
What this means is that there are likely a great many others who know this is going on – perhaps from personal experience – and yet, like a death cult, they will not admit they were wrong. They are trained to find only medical ailments they are primed to look for. If it’s not in their memorized and regimented protocols, then it doesn’t exist. The medical system has become so monotonized and streamlined that almost no doctor is willing to even cognitively question the hierarchy, much less articulate opposition.
This code of silence would be bad enough if the vaccination campaign were over and it was just an issue of treating those already injured. Yet the pressure and even mandates still exist in some settings, and almost all doctors still promote the vaccines. Furthermore, they are pushing mRNA technology for flu and RSV shots as early as next fall.
Silently accepting this degree of short-term and unknown long-term risk would be bad enough if the shots actually worked against COVID. But as we’ve known for well over a year and a half, the more you inject, the more you infect. The latest evidence is from a Cleveland Clinic preprint study of over 50,000 of CC’s in-house health care workers. The retrospective cohort study shows a strong positive correlation between an increase in vaccine doses and a stronger likelihood to test positive for the virus. The unvaccinated performed the best, and the boosted were three times more likely to get infected.
This is just over 90 days. We’ve seen in the past from other studies that the negative efficacy intensifies over the months, which might explain why for the first time in history this virus shows no signs of going away, except in Africa, where few people were vaccinated. Last year, long before the negative efficacy of the shots associated with Omicron that we are seeing today, Sweden conducted the most comprehensive long-term study of vaccine effectiveness in the world and found that after six to seven months, “no effectiveness could be detected” from the Pfizer shot. In fact, the study found negative efficacy after 210 days for those over 50, which harmonizes with what we are seeing before our very eyes throughout the world. For some older adults, the shots are as much as -77% effective, and the numbers seem to drop every month.
Shockingly, this cycle of failure allows the same duplicitous doctors to fearmonger even more people into getting even more doses, perpetuating and exacerbating an endless cycle of viral immune escape, mutations, and pathogenic priming that leads to negative efficacy reflective of suboptimal antibodies and a leaky vaccine.
For months, Walgreens has been posting the results of its weekly COVID testing by vaccination status. They have consistently shown the unvaccinated to have the lowest number of cases relative to the number of tests (the unvaccinated are subjected to more testing mandates in the workforce).
As you can see, the unvaccinated have the lowest positivity rate. It’s also self-evident that the negative efficacy intensifies over time since the duration of the last dose. And even the Omicron boosters, which were tested on eight blind mice, are now addressing a variant that is nearly extinct. According to the CDC, BA.4 is extinct and BA.5 represents only 10% of cases and is rapidly declining.
Yet the FDA just approved these extinct, dangerous, negative-efficacy shots for babies! It’s no longer a tenable position for Republicans to merely oppose mandates. Mind you, so many red states still have mandates on health care and in public colleges. They must completely stop promoting the shots, oppose any future mRNA shots under the current design, sponsor treatment for those injured, create state-based vaccine reporting, and encourage rather than punish doctors to speak out and dissent. “See something, say something” needs to be the catchphrase in the medical profession. Too many lives are on the line to remain silent.
Democrats and RINO Republicans are pushing a $1.7 Trillion Omnibus bill that spends $47 Billion for Ukraine and $410 Million for Border security in the Middle East but nothing for our southern border.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., exposes left-wing agenda in omnibus bill.
The massive $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that was made public by federal lawmakers Tuesday includes a $750,000 earmark for a Los Angeles-based transgender Latina group that wants to “dismantle” the U.S. criminal justice system and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and inject “transgender history and discourse” into elementary schools, among other progressive initiatives.
The release of the bill, which spans 4,155 pages, came after negotiations between Senate Republicans and House and Senate Democrats. The sprawling package, which contains $858 billion in defense spending and $772.5 billion in non-defense discretionary spending, has to pass by the end of the week to avoid a partial government shutdown.
The bill, under “disclosure of earmarks and congressionally directed spending items,” directs $750,000 to the TransLatin@ (pronounced “trans Latina”) Coalition, which has local chapters in nearly a dozen states, for “workforce development programs and supportive services.”
The earmark was requested by Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who sits on the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., center, and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rep. Karen Bass, second from right, call on civic leaders from all over Los Angeles to initiate a plan of action to address the racist, anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Indigenous, anti-Armenian recordings at a press conference on Oct. 21, 2022. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Gomez’s office did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
According to the TransLatin@ Coalition’s “#TransPolicyAgenda,” posted on its website, the group wants to end all construction of detention centers, shut down existing jails and prisons, and decriminalize what it describes as “survival crimes,” like loitering, sleeping outside, panhandling and sex work.
“In an ideal world, we’d begin by abolishing the police force as it currently exists, however this is not a realistic outcome through policy,” the group’s agenda states. “We approach criminal justice work with an internal abolitionist lens, intending to critique, dismantle and rebuild our criminal justice system with community members in and out of jail and prison.”
Bamby Salcedo, president and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition, gives remarks at the White House summit on “The United State of Women” in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2016. (Getty Images/File)
The group also wants the U.S. to “dismantle” ICE and completely open its borders to transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex (TGI) individuals, stating that “our freedom to access and protections is a divine right.“
“Migration is not a crime and our policies must reflect this truth,” the agenda states. “TGI communities should be free to migrate without fear of government terrorism, especially when escaping government violence.“
“To truly reach global trans rights and work toward TGI liberation, we must collectively eliminate the ongoing violence ICE continues to ensue against TGI migrants,” it continues. “ICE has done more harm than good and it must be dismantled.“
The group also wants transgender-specific “history and discourse” to be mandated at the state level for elementary and middle school students. The group argues that while the FAIR Education Act in California mandated the inclusion of LGBTQ people in school curricula, it often leaves out TGI communities.
“Implementation of the policy began in 2017, and although there is acknowledgement [sic] of two-spirit people history and other Transgender leaders, the majority of curriculum is focused on the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual community,” the agenda states. “Transgender history and discourse must begin in schools and primary education to promote respect and acceptance from early ages.“
From left: Reps. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif.; and Al Green, D-Texas, applaud during a rally on the eviction moratorium at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., wears a mask reading, “EXPEL MTG,” referring to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., outside the Capitol on May 13, 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images)
The group also wants taxpayer-funded paid medical leave for gender transition surgeries and treatments.
“Medical leave access in employment is centered around family or pregnancy, which is necessary, but access to medical leave should also extend to address the health needs of TGI people,” the agenda states. “We advocate for policy that expands existing medical leave law to include transition related and gender affirming care and protects employees from being denied medical leave for reasons related to recovery from said surgeries.”
GENDER AFFIRMING CARE RESULTS.
According to its Strategic Plan for 2022-2027, the group is exploring the possibility of dropping the word “Latinx” in favor of “Latine” for Latin transgender individuals.
“While we recognize the use of the term Latinx in the English language, we are cognizant that does not improve the perception of Trans individuals,” the plan states. “We have been exploring the use of the term Latine, the projection and use it has in the Spanish language. Our board will continue to explore the impact it will have in adopting its use in our organization and potential changes our organization will adopt.”
The TransLatin@ Coalition recently announced that its president and CEO, Bamby Salcedo, joined the transition team for Los Angeles Mayor-elect Karen Bass, whom Gomez endorsed and campaigned with ahead of the November election.
It’s official: @RepKarenBass is the next mayor of LA!
Congratulations Madam Mayor on making history. Looking forward to continue our work together from the halls of Congress to City Hall!https://t.co/DYS9xcp2SZ
Salcedo was celebrated several times by the Obama White House and joined then-Vice President Joe Biden onstage during a June 2016 “United State of Women Summit.”
The group made headlines in October 2018 after members protested the Trump administration’s policies by unfurling a banner that read, “Trans People Deserve to Live,” during Game 5 of the World Series in Los Angeles.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Schools across America are affirming the gender dysphoria of children without parental consent. While some educators have been exposed for intentionally confusing children on matters of sex and identity, entire school boards are doubling down, with some battling in court to keep facilitating students’ so-called transitions without telling parents.
When Jennifer — who omitted her surname for the sake of her child’s privacy — caught her school covertly transitioning her 10-year-old daughter; she rescued her little girl and began homeschooling.
In many similar cases, the cards appear stacked against parents, particularly those unable to homeschool but wary of strangers confusing their kids and putting them on paths to sterile, drug-dependent, and disenchanted lives.
Jennifer recognized that while her little girl was spared, she wouldn’t be the last targeted; that educators, school administrators, pharmaceutical companies, psychologists, and other power- and profit-incentivized parties were just getting started. Recognizing that other parents may need help and that this is a battle worth winning, Jennifer and other parents are now going on the offensive.
TheBlaze recently spoke to Jennifer about the fight her volunteer organization, Partners for Ethical Care, is taking to the loose coalition of bad actors apparently eager to transmogrify children, usurp parental rights, and turn a profit at the expense of innocence.
What are the details?
In November, Jennifer told Wesley Yang, who runs the Substack “Year Zero,” about how her school first socially transitioned her 10-year-old daughter without informing her.
“The school was using a name that she made up, so not her name that was given to her, and different pronouns,” said Jennifer.
Jennifer’s daughter no longer used the girl’s bathroom. Had she been 13 or older, she would have been able to use boy’s facilities without Jennifer knowing, but as she was still only 10 at the time, she instead used the office washroom.
A school therapist would regularly meet with Jennifer’s daughter, ultimately in excess of five hours.
In these meetings, the therapist would reportedly employ biologically inaccurate pronouns in reference to the little girl and egg on the child’s temporary identity crisis.
One teacher went so far as to suggest that Jennifer’s little girl be assigned to a boys’ cabin at camp.
For the most part, the school elected not to keep Jennifer’s family in the loop.
“It just felt so much like an injustice,” she told TheBlaze. “I knew I was gonna try to do whatever I could to push back against it.”
Despite fearing that Child Protective Services might break up her family, citing her refusal to accommodate the so-called transition, Jennifer ultimately pulled her daughter out. CPS fortunately never came, and Jennifer now homeschools her child.
Her daughter’s previous confusion, exacerbated by her LGBT friend group and by social media, dissipated over time.
While her battle for her daughter’s well-being was over, Jennifer’s war against the “medicalization of children” was just beginning.
Partners for Ethical Care
While Jennifer and her family enjoyed the requisite stability to homeschool, she recognized that not all parents have that as an option. She also suspected that soon, CPS and other state agencies would be weaponized against families antipathetic to the medicalization of their children.
“I do remember at some point, my mother’s saying to me, ‘This is so huge. … What are you going to be able to do?’ I said I don’t know, but if I don’t, who will do something?” said Jennifer. “Everything has to start somewhere, right?”
Jennifer noted that at the time, she wasn’t aware of some of the other groups committed to protecting children from the transsexual agenda but is now well acquainted with the work of Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend and others in the U.S. extra to the “vast underground network of parents” committed to the fight.
Keen to do undertake an initiative of their own, Jennifer, Alix Aharon of the Gender Mapping Project, Jeannette Cooper, and several others banded together in fall 2020.
Jennifer recalled the sentiment early on: “We’re like, let’s start this organization. Let’s fight. Let’s fight the medicalization. … We were looking to create awareness because there didn’t seem to be much outside of our tiny bubble. And to gather stories to potentially help [in legal efforts].”
The group they founded is called Partners for Ethical Care.
“No child is born in the wrong body” is the understanding underpinning the work undertaken by the volunteers behind PEC, all committed to stopping the “medicalization of children.”
As part of its campaign to raise awareness, PEC shares testimonials on both its website and podcast from families adversely affected by transsexual ideology as well as from those who have “desisted” (i.e., ended social and or medical transmogrifications.)
PEC also provides parents with resources detailing methods by which they can opt their kids out of gender education programs and find “gender-critical” therapists as well as what to look out for in the way of deceptive practices widely employed by school administrators and educators.
The awareness and resource campaign is critically important, suggested Jennifer, since the fight against the medicalization agenda targeting minors and the true nature of the underlying problem is “under a media blackout, especially in left-wing media, mainstream media.”
Best practices
Jennifer highlighted three major ways parents can confront this threat posed to their children.
First, she suggested that parents should regulate and monitor their kids’ interactions online.
“The biggest thing is for parents to keep their kids off the internet for as long as possible,” she said. “My daughter did learn some of these things in an online forum — a drawing forum.”
Whether it’s on Discord or in online games, “The internet is a predator’s playground right now.”
According to Jennifer, both predators and the ideologically-motivated seek out the vulnerable online.
Narrowing kids’ exposure to content that inspires and promotes gender dysphoria online is important but only a partial measure.
Second, Jennifer suggested that parents need to stand up for their kids in their school districts.
Any ground conceded by parents regarding how their children are to be raised is ground that will ultimately be taken by bad actors. Thus, parents need to keep “standing up for their kids and trying to change the harmful policies” in schools.
“I will say it’s scary for a lot of people to go up [against school boards and educators],” she said, noting how parents critical of transsexual bathroom policies and the crimes they enabled in Loudon County, Virginia, “got framed as terrorists.”
Jennifer suggested that the PEC, like the parental rights movements combatting transsexual propaganda and policies in Virginia and the coalition of Muslim and Christian parents who recently sued a school board in Ohio, are not, contrary to the suggestion of some LGBT activists, “powered by hate.”
“We are not getting paid. We’re doing this out of love. We’re doing this because we care that much,” she said.
This can be hard, she said, because oftentimes schools keep their real intents and policies hidden.
The foundation for these three tactics is awareness.
We’re proud to announce our first event—and it’s a big one. Join us in Austin, TX on April 20, 2023 to learn from a panel of experts from around the world going step-by-step through the process of how Gender Inc Manufactures Trans Kids. Tickets: https://t.co/9WjVuO3RGG
— Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) (@ethical_care) December 5, 2022
Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes.
Comments Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made on Tuesday show why he has become the single biggest obstacle to GOP success.
The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.
McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1
The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.
Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim. It ranked higher as a priority before American taxpayers gave Ukraine more than was given to their war effort by nearly every other country in the world combined. But even at the height of support for the effort, before it turned into a massive proxy war with an unclear relationship to the U.S. national interest, it was not the top issue for Republicans, coming behind the economy and the U.S. border.
A majority of Americans polled a few months ago said more money should be given to Ukraine only after wealthy European countries match what Americans have already sent — something nowhere near happening.
Republicans care deeply about borders and national sovereignty, but they rank the protection of their own open border far above the protection of the borders of other countries. It is worth remembering that the longest government shutdown in U.S. history occurred in 2019 over a fight between Congress and President Donald Trump over whether to commit a relatively paltry $5 billion to protect our country’s southern border, which Congress had refused to fund.
About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package
Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.
McConnell: "I'm pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities." pic.twitter.com/RuVcsvNX0B
The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.
Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.
The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.
Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals
What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.
It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.
McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.
However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.
The politically toxic McConnell has continuously ranked as the country’s least popular politician, well behind Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is so disliked by Americans that he is underwater by an average of 35.3 points in polls gauging his favorability.
Unfortunately for Republicans, he has been the top elected Republican in the country for the last two years, a period marked mostly by inexcusable impotence, fecklessness, and muddled messaging from the GOP.
Rather than present a coherent and persuasive vision of what Republican control of the Senate might look like, or even demonstrating consistent opposition to Democrat policies, too often McConnell overtly or covertly helped Democrats pass their signature policy goals. He had his deputy Sen. John Cornyn negotiate a bill to restrict Second Amendment rights. He notoriously and embarrassingly caved on a promise to help Democrats get huge numbers to pass their CHIPS subsidy, giving Biden a huge win he could celebrate with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo two weeks before the midterm elections.
McConnell also famously trashed Republican candidates and the voters who selected them, refused to advocate strenuously for the candidates, and failed to develop or pursue a persuasive message to Americans for voting to give Republicans control of the Senate.
When Democrats poured $75 million — not even counting the outside spending — into defending Mark Kelly’s Senate seat in Arizona, McConnell left Republican challenger Blake Masters high and dry. Masters had only $9 million. Instead, McConnell interfered in Alaska’s Senate race even though the top two contenders were both Republican. He gave his valuable cash to weak Republican Lisa Murkowski, the candidate who did not even win the Alaska Republican Party’s endorsement! Murkowski is known for not voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, among other notable decisions.
After the disappointing midterm loss, McConnell blamed others. He also allowed a dozen Republican senators to vote for a bill that would enable assaults on Republican voters who, on religious grounds, oppose redefining marriage.
So long as Mitch McConnell is the top elected Republican in D.C., eagerly trashing Republican voters, vociferously advocating for Democrat policy goals, pushing $1.7 trillion Democrat spending packages, and weakly fighting for whatever Republican goals he can be bothered to pursue, Republicans have a major problem. This is beyond obvious.
Everyone outside D.C. knows this even if few inside D.C. are willing to acknowledge it. Until they do, the Republican Party will continue to suffer.
Nearly 30 incidents of abortion-related attacks toward churches happened directly following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a report by the Family Research Council (FRC).
Between January 2018 and September 2022, 420 anti-Christian incidents were reported by 397 churches across 45 states, including “vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more,” according to FRC.
Arielle Del Turco, the author of the report, told the Daily Caller News Foundation she believes the report barely “scratches the surface.”
Dozens of U.S. churches have been targets of pro-abortion “hostility” since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Family Research Council (FRC) report found.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked on May 2, 2022, churches saw a spike in graffiti incidents with pro-abortion messages and protests that interrupted church services,” the report stated. “This trend has continued since the Dobbs decision was officially handed down and Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022.”
FRC, a “nonprofit research and education organization,” released its report last week after looking into hostility against churches over a five-year period from 2018 to 2022. In 2022 alone, churches experienced 57 incidents of “hostility.” From 2019 to 2021 only five similar incidences involving pro-abortion rhetoric were reported, indicating a sharp increase over the last year likely related to the overturn of Roe, according to FRC.
Arielle Del Turco, the author of the report, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that she felt there is a “disturbing trend” of increased incidents during times of “heightened political tension” like the Dobbs decision. Over all five years, 420 incidents were reported by 397 churches in 45 states, including Washington, D.C., such as “vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more,” according to the report. The report noted that the level of hostility also increased over time. Not all of the reported incidents were tied directly to pro-abortion rhetoric. In that same period, California, Texas, New York and Florida had the most amount of incidents with California ranking number one with 51, according to the report. Vandalism made up 77% of the incidents with arson coming in second at 13%.
Del Turco also said she believes the report barely “scratches the surface.”
“There are any number of reasons that churches would have been vandalized or attacked and we wouldn’t have heard about them either because the church isn’t alerting news outlets or we’ve heard of churches that it happens to all the time so they are going on their fifteenth, sixteenth time its happened and they are just not reporting it every time,” Del Turco explained.
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 07: Abortion-rights activists gather outside of a Catholic church in downtown Manhattan to voice their support for a woman’s right to choose on May 07, 2022, in New York City. The protests at the Basilica of St. Patricks Old Cathedral, which have been occurring weekly and where a small number of anti-abortion activists worship, have been given added urgency by the recent leaked Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
“Criminal acts of vandalism and destruction of church property are likely symptomatic of a collapse in societal reverence and respect for houses of worship and religion — in this case, churches and Christianity,” FRC stated in the report. “Americans appear increasingly comfortable lashing out against church buildings, pointing to a larger societal problem of marginalizing core Christian beliefs, including those that touch on hot-button political issues related to human dignity and sexuality.”
FRC also noted the increase in reported hate crimes against Christians in the same period.
The FBI’s annual statistics showed hate crimes against Christians went up steadily from 2019 to 2021 with a small dip in 2020 likely due to lockdowns from COVID-19, according to an FRC analysis.
“In 2021, the most recent year with available data, the FBI reported 240 anti-Christian ‘hate crimes,’” FRC stated. “This was up from 213 anti-Christian incidents in 2020 … the FBI reported 217 anti-Christian incidents in 2019 and 172 in 2018.”
Del Turco said the increasing anger towards Christians shows a concerning trend of hostility toward religious institutions and that Americans need to “resolutely condemn.”
“Churches are just bearing the brunt of this political anger, however, the fact that they attack churches and not any other type of institution you could think of, I think it says something,” Turco concluded. “To me it indicates a hostility to Christianity generally and so when something flares up in the news that they are particularly angry about churches are then blamed.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
One of the things I get asked from time to time by readers is, what can ordinary people on the right, Christians and conservatives, do to help save the country — besides voting on Election Day?
It’s a good question, and it comes from the very understandable feeling of helplessness many people feel about the direction of the country and, let’s be honest, the collapse of Western civilization that’s now well underway. It’s especially easy to get frustrated after an election cycle like the one we just had, in which Republican leaders thoroughly botched it and left things more or less where they were before the voting. Put another way, if voting doesn’t really change anything in our so-called democracy, what will?
There’s an answer to this question, but you’re not going to like it. The plain truth is this: You’re going to have to save the country yourselves. Donald Trump isn’t going to save it. Ron DeSantis isn’t going to save it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that a GOP majority in Congress is going to save it.
By all means, keep voting in national elections. Keep making your voices heard at the ballot box. But salvation won’t come from Washington, D.C. If America is going to be saved, or even just parts of it are to be saved, then ordinary men and women, God-fearing patriots all across the country, are going to have to do it themselves, one town at a time. And they will have to do it the old-fashioned and unglamorous way, by taking over the local institutions of civic life, organizing and winning elections for city council and school board, finding reliable and competent people willing to be candidates and staff and volunteers.
It’s going to be a long, thankless slog, but there’s no other way. Neither is there any guarantee of success. I speak here only of towns and suburbs, not of cities, many of which have become unlivable after decades of failed Democrat governance and leftist policies. Conservatives who can manage it should move to places where they can join with other like-minded Americans to take back their communities and instill a civic culture that reflects their beliefs.
We got into this situation through passivity, and only a sustained effort at the local level will get us out. For decades, conservatives did nothing while the left marched through academia — and then kept right on marching, down from their ivory tower and into the public square, into the schools, the libraries, corporate boardrooms, local police and fire departments, even the churches. These people have radical views far outside the American mainstream but nevertheless control all our institutions. If you want them back, you’ll have to take them back, post by post.
This is not the kind of thing the right likes to hear. By temperament and principle, conservatives would rather be left alone to run their businesses, raise their families, worship in their churches, and build up their charities and local communities. Unlike liberals and leftists, they tend not to be ideologues. They are not trying to fundamentally change the country. They mostly want to be left alone.
But of course, they will never be left alone. The woke radicals will never stop — until someone stops them. A kind of conservative radicalism, or at least activism, is going to be required to accomplish that.
A good example of what I’m talking about is playing out in the small central Texas town of Taylor, population about 17,000. Taylor, some 35 miles north of Austin, is a rather conservative place of the sort you can find all over the country. It recently made national headlines over its traditional Christmas parade; a longstanding town tradition organized by a coalition of local churches. Last year, organizers accidentally approved a parade float for a group calling itself Taylor Pride, which the parade committee naively mistook for the name of a group that was just proud of their town. What they got instead was a float featuring two men dressed in drag, dancing suggestively in what paradegoers assumed was going to be a family-friendly event.
Parents and attendees were understandably perturbed. To ensure it didn’t happen again, the consortium of local churches that runs the parade sensibly decided that this year, parade floats must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values. The point wasn’t to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not — like the Taylor Pride drag queen float — contrary to Christian teachings.
The City of Taylor responded by announcing it would stage its own separate LGBT-friendly “holiday” parade, on the same night as the traditional Christmas parade, on the same route, following right behind it. The decision was made not by the elected members of the city council, who are accountable to voters, but by the municipal staff who actually run things. There was no public notice or deliberation and no consultation beforehand with members of the city council. The municipal bureaucracy acted on its own authority to use (or rather misuse) public funds and resources to sponsor a parade that was wildly out of step with the community at large.
Kevin Stuart, a Taylor resident and assistant professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas, wrote about all this recently in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the problem in Taylor has deep historical roots. The outsourcing of decision-making to so-called experts has been happening in American towns and cities for more than a century, such that professional bureaucrats now run small towns across America like “ideological colonizers.”
“There is now a yawning ideological gap between the people who live in American towns and the professionalized cadre of city staff who pass through those towns on their way up the career ladder,” writes Stuart. He goes on to argue that residents of towns like Taylor are partly to blame for ceding too much political power to an expert class whose interests and values don’t align with the people they’re supposed to serve.
He’s right about that — and also about how “communities can’t remain strong if they are unwilling to defend common sense and get involved in the political process.” The lesson of Taylor’s dueling Christmas parades is that even in small, conservative towns in deep-red states like Texas, conservatives can’t be complacent. As I wrote last month about the Taylor fracas, there’s nowhere Christians can run and hide from the left. They have to stand and fight.
In Taylor, that means residents who until now might have never been involved in local politics will have to roll up their sleeves, give up some weekday evenings, and get involved. They will have to put up their own conservative candidates and vote out of office the city councilors who empowered a woke municipal bureaucracy. They will have to fire the cadre of leftist bureaucrats who run things and replace them with their own people. They might even have to change the city charter so that elected members of the city council actually do the work of the public in City Hall, not an unelected city manager who sees the job as merely a steppingstone to a bigger city.
The same goes for the library, the school board, and every other local institution in every American town like Taylor. Conservatives have to take them over if they can. To answer the question we began with, that is what ordinary people can do. And they have to start now. No one is coming to help, and time is running out.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
New materials released Monday as part of the ‘Twitter Files’ suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The night before the New York Post published emails recovered from an abandoned Hunter Biden laptop that established Joe Biden’s connections with his son’s business dealings, the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive. While those documents and others remain cloistered at Twitter headquarters — likely because they are designated as classified — additional materials released Monday as part of the “Twitter Files,” part seven, suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Latest
“Heads up,” FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan opened an Oct. 13, 2020 late-evening email to Yoel Roth, the then-head of site integrity for Twitter. Chan’s email alerted him to a “Teleporter link” that would allow Roth to download 10 documents. “It is not spam!” Chan stressed, asking Roth to confirm receipt of the link. Two minutes later, at 6:24 p.m., California time, Roth acknowledged he had received the message and downloaded the files.
Chan’s Oct. 13, 2020, email was one of several internal communications published Monday by Michael Shellenberger in his thread on part seven of the “Twitter Files.” While the email contained no further details about the content of the 10 documents provided to the top Twitter executive, that Chan sent the email the evening before the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop hit and mere hours after a lawyer for the Biden son had contacted John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had abandoned his laptop, proves suggestive.
That the email came after normal business hours, via the private one-way communications channel used by the FBI, and included an alert to Roth to watch for the communication all also indicate that the message and the attached 10 documents concerned a matter of urgency. And what could be more urgent than the laptop October surprise?
By 9-something in the morning of Oct. 14, 2020, Jim Baker, the now-former deputy general counsel of Twitter, had already “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails,” as he told Roth and 11 other colleagues in an email. “The formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications,” Baker explained. Another email also showed Baker had arranged a phone conversation with Matthew Perry in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel for that same day.
For his part, by 10:00 a.m., Roth wrote some 15-plus colleagues that they had decided to block the Post’s Hunter Biden story as hacked material, explaining that a “key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak that learned from the 2016 Wikileaks approach and our policy changes.”
“The suggestion from experts — which rings true,” Roth continued, “is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware (and was coincidentally reviewed in a very invasive way by someone who coincidentally then handed the materials to Rudy Giuliani).”
Those “reliable cybersecurity folks” and “experts monitoring election security and disinformation,” of which Baker and Roth spoke, might not have been connected to the FBI, or the documents Chan sent the prior evening. But if they are, which seems possible — if not likely — the evidence implicating the FBI in lying to interfere in the 2020 election just multiplied exponentially.
Prior to Monday’s “Twitter Files” dump, Roth acknowledged in a statement to the Federal Election Commission that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said. Roth further explained that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg likewise confirmed during an interview with Joe Rogan that the tech giant’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story stemmed from the FBI basically telling his team, “Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert.” “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” Zuckerberg recalled the FBI warning his tech company, adding that the agency told them, “We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”
“So, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020,” Zuckerberg noted, “Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”
Of course, the Hunter Biden laptop story was not false and was not part of a “hack-and-leak” operation, and the FBI knew it, having seized the laptop from Mac Isaac in December of 2019. Thus, these statements from Roth and Zuckerberg establish the FBI lied to the tech giants, prompting them to censor the New York Post’s reporting and thereby interfere in the election.
Roth and Zuckerberg’s statements should be enough to cement the FBI’s peddling of false intel to interfere in a presidential election as one of our nation’s worst political scandals. But if the FBI’s Oct. 13, 2020 Teleporter message and documents provide further concrete evidence that the FBI fed Twitter the opinion of supposed experts that the laptop was hacked or fake, it will be difficult for even the propaganda press to keep ignoring the story.
It’s Classified
Unfortunately, Shellenberger references neither the underlying Teleporter message from Oct. 13, 2020, nor the content of the 10 documents. Matt Taibbi — who in his coverage of part six of the “Twitter Files” on Friday also referenced a Chan email from Oct. 16, 2020, directing two high-level Twitter executives to monitor their Teleporter messages for two important documents — likewise did not make any mention of the content of the Teleporter message or the two important documents attached. Why is that?
Another email released in Shellenberger’s thread on Monday provides a clue.
On July 15, 2020, Chan wrote to Roth and another individual at Twitter whose identity was redacted. In that email, Chan proposed “30 days out from the election,” providing Twitter temporary clearances, with Roth and his colleague picking who would receive clearances. And by Sept. 15, 2020, the FBI was adamant that “no impediments to information sharing exist,” including of classified information.
Given that Taibbi and Shellenberger make no mention of the content of the Teleporter messages and attachments and given that Teleporter served as a one-way communications system from the FBI, it seems likely the FBI used Teleporter to transmit classified materials to the select Twitter employees provided temporary security clearance. That possibility would also account for the cryptic way Baker and Roth describe the supposed experts’ view of the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop to other Twitter employees who likely lacked clearance.
So, once again, it appears the FBI will hide behind classification markings, just as it did to mask its malfeasance in obtaining four FISA surveillance warrants for Carter Page. But Republicans now hold the majority in the House, meaning there is a chance for the country to learn what Elon Musk can’t tell us.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
According to the latest drop of “Twitter Files” from Michael Shellenberger, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” It appears that Twitter still has 14 employees on the payroll who worked at the FBI and CIA.
In addition to covering what was happening at Twitter, Weingarten details a broader number of suspicious links between Silicon Valley and U.S. intelligence agencies. Given the near-constant string of deep-state scandals and social media censorship we’ve endured in recent years, a big question we should all be trying to answer right now is, “What exactly are all these spooks doing at tech companies?”
So far, the answer appears to be: “They’re almost certainly up to no good.” After the first batch of “Twitter Files” dropped, it was revealed that Elon Musk fired Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker. Prior to going to work at Twitter, Baker was a top lawyer at the FBI from 2014 to 2017. In that capacity, he played a significant role in shepherding FBI’s baseless and illegal Russiagate investigation.
In fact, it’s probably safe to assume one of the reasons Baker exited the FBI was to dodge any accountability for the FBI’s reckless and politically motivated attempt to investigate the president of the United States. Twitter was a pretty soft landing.
Or at least it was, until it was revealed that Baker, who was still employed at Twitter as of a few weeks ago, got fired after he intercepted the internal company communications Musk was giving to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to expose the censorship and misdeeds of the company’s previous management. Nobody has quite figured out what he was doing, but there’s widespread speculation Baker may have removed Twitter communications with the FBI or other damning info before it could become public.
Yes, large global corporations need high-level, discreet corporate security, and potentially for benign purposes the particular skillsets that former law enforcement and intelligence personnel provide. However, the situation with Baker makes the problem plenty obvious. If you’re inclined to automatically trust the professionalism and integrity of the FBI and CIA, please have your head examined.
I want to know how many of these FBI and CIA agents are “sheep dipped.” In the intelligence world, “sheep dipping” is a term of art. It describes a tactic whereby a member of the military is “officially discharged from service” to do covert work. In secret, they are still eligible for rank promotions and military benefits.
I first learned the term from my father, because he was “sheep dipped.” He worked for the CIA in Laos in the early 1960s lead-up to the Vietnam War. He was a young Marine officer. During his year in Laos, his normal service records were replaced with records saying he was separated from the Marine Corps, to allow the government to deny any responsibility if anything happened to him. When he returned from Laos, they swapped out the files saying he’d left the Marine Corps with his regular service record, all as if nothing unusual had happened.
Suffice it to say, during this episode, dad witnessed the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling and other unsavory behavior. The whole episode left a very bad taste in his mouth.
Fun fact I learned earlier this year: The man in charge of CIA operations in Laos when my father was there was the legendary spymaster Ray Cline. One Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory relates that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was still serving in the Marines when he briefly defected to the Soviet Union, didn’t really defect. He was sheep dipped and working for the CIA on an intelligence-gathering mission inside the Soviet Union.
The whole crazy escapade, according to the tale, was possibly organized by Cline, the local CIA station chief at the same time and place as one of Oswald’s previous overseas deployments. For what it’s worth, Cline also happens to be the former father-in-law of Stefan Halper, the dubious paid informant who was the FBI’s source for much of their bogus Trump-Russia investigation.
In case, you’re keeping track, why yes, I did just draw a line, albeit not a particularly straight one, that connects the Kennedy assassination and the Russiagate scandal. (It would have been too digressive to mention Cline and Halper’s connections to Watergate and Iran Contra, but I think you get the drift.)
Now, as clarification, I should say that “sheep dipping” seems to apply mostly to the intel community’s use of military personnel and isn’t necessarily an all-purpose phrase for CIA or FBI undercover work. One of the most annoying things about being subjected to years of completely credulous Russiagate and Steele dossier coverage was every pundit suddenly becoming an armchair expert on espionage and throwing around phrases such as “SIGINT” when we all know they just learned what signals intelligence was 15 minutes ago.
But the point here isn’t to offer up conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination. It’s to make the point that one reason conspiracy theories are so easy to believe is that it’s well-known the Deep-State Industrial Complex employs a lot of tactics such as sheep dipping that are expressly about manipulation and deception.
Combined with so many official denials over the years that turned out to be lies, this makes it impossible to believe intel agencies when they say they aren’t doing something. It was very much denied that American soldiers were in Southeast Asia when my dad was in the jungle learning how to eat soup with chopsticks. More recently, we have very dishonest denials about domestic spying by Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper that in a just society should have led to criminal charges.
The FBI response to “Twitter Files” revelations that they were working behind the scenes with the social media network and encouraging censorship is about the furthest thing from reassuring. “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” an FBI spokesman told journalist Jon Nicosia. “Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”
Based on what we know, there’s absolutely no reason not to assume that, of the numerous former FBI and CIA employees at Twitter, some weren’t either informally or directly working for intel agencies. Further, it is incredibly alarming that the watchdogs that are supposed to protect us from rogue government agencies eroding our rights can’t be bothered to investigate this.
For most of my life, the corporate media, and the activist left in particular, treated these agencies with extreme skepticism. Revelations such as these would formerly have set off klaxons in newsrooms. But now? “People’s brains are so drowning in partisan muck that the Bernie/AOC left — which still pretends to find the CIA and FBI nefarious if you force them to take a stance — refuses to care about the grave dangers in what [Matt Taibbi] reported about FBI’s role [at Twitter],” says Glenn Greenwald. Worse, Greenwald observes that their shared partisan obsessions mean that the left has completely surrendered to the corporatist imperatives of liberal institutions such as the media. “The only real enemies they see are the Trump movement and GOP. That’s why I use ‘left-liberal’: their core worldviews have merged,” he further observes.
With the exception of an under-resourced conservative media and a few independent lefty journalists such as Taibbi and Greenwald — who have dared to stay true to ideals that most of the journalists now trying to discredit them claimed to hold six years ago — no one is interested in solid evidence suggesting intel agencies have been secretly curbing Americans’ First Amendment rights, and possibly doing so to explicitly influence elections.
The fact that so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech, even when the evidence is staring them in the face, should be a national scandal. Americans deserve to know the truth about whether our intel agencies are being used against citizens. We should be concerned that the full extent of what they’ve done — and what they likely continue to do — to us will never be known.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
A so-called literacy coach near Chicago is testing the bounds of her free speech rights by creating several videos in which she rails against concerned parents and other “right-wing conspiracy theorist nut jobs” and then posting the condescending videos to TikTok.
Heather Marie Godbout, whose job title claims she is a “literacy coach” at Crete-Monee High School, has posted a series of education-related videos on TikTok under the handle @thatliberaleducator. In various videos, she excoriates conservatives as “people who could know better if they could get out of their own little bubbles” and accuses them of “trying to bring down our democracy and create a Christian nationalist theocracy.”
In one particular video, which has the phrase “Indoctrination? Yes please!” emblazoned at the top and is replete with furrowed brows and audible lip smacks, she claims that it’s “[t]ime to own up to” indoctrinating students.
“All you right-wing conspiracy theory nut jobs who seem to think the teachers are out here just indoctrinating children into some sort of woke agenda that you can’t actually define, I’m just going to come clean,” Godbout begins.
“I am, in fact, indoctrinating your children,” she admits.
She then spends another minute or so clarifying what her version of indoctrination entails.
“I’m indoctrinating children into understanding their own agency and learning how to think critically about the issues that impact their lives,” she says after claiming to foster a love of “reading and books.”
She then appears to have a clarifying moment of self-awareness when she claims to teach students to “not just accept whatever some crazy person on the internet says at face value” but to “do their own research.”
She concludes the video by claiming that her work teaches students “to be loving, kind, compassionate human beings” who will make the world “a better place.” She implies that she presents herself to students as a living model of such behavior.
When viewers criticized Godbout’s condescending approach, she created a follow-up video in which she said she will always refuse to be respectful to people who disagree with her politically — whom she derisively refers to as “those people” — because “they’re talking about legislation that will literally unlive people.” She also accused one of her critics of “tone-policing” and of shutting “down conversation, especially from people in marginalized groups.“
Godbout elsewhere stated that she does not fear reprisal from her employer for the videos, claiming, “[M]y administrators fully support my First Amendment rights to free speech on my own social media platforms.“
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
The U.S. Supreme Court granted a request from several Republican states asking for the end of the controversial Title 42 “Remain in Mexico” policy to be delayed. Title 42 was implemented during the Trump administration in order to allow immigration officials to expel migrants who were seeking asylum from the country while their applications were processed. The Biden administration has sought to end the policy despite objections from those who say it will result in a further surge of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
While the policy was scheduled to end on Wednesday, the order from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Monday temporarily extended it until a response can be filed Tuesday. More than a dozen Republican states filed the lawsuit to keep Title 42 in place, including Texas, whose governor responded to the ruling on social media.
“U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts has HALTED the lifting of Title 42 for now. Texas and other states are insisting that the Court leave Title 42 in place,” tweeted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Today’s order is a step in that direction. This helps prevent illegal immigration,” he added.
The policy was struck down in November in a ruling from District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., who called it an “arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”
Illegal immigrant advocates excoriated Title 42 and accused former President Donald Trump of being motivated by racism against immigrants. Supporters of the policy have argued that it was needed in order to stem the tide of illegal aliens streaming across the border and seeking asylum.
A poll in May found that 65% of Hispanics supported a temporary closure of the U.S.-Mexico border so that illegal crossings could be prevented. That was 9% greater than the number among all voters who supported the same.
Here’s more about the controversial policy:
US braces for surge in migrants with Title 42 set to expire | ABCNL www.youtube.com
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Kirk Cameron speaks during an interview with The Christian Post in Nashville, Tennessee. | The Christian Post/Leah Klett
Christian actor Kirk Cameron said that two public libraries are working with him to host a reading of his new faith-based children’s book once Cameron indicated he was prepared to seek legal help after multiple libraries across the United States refused to host him.
The actor is scheduled to speak at the Indianapolis Public Library in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Dec. 29 and at the Scarsdale Public Library in Scarsdale, New York, the following day. The two libraries, which have previously hosted drag queen story hours and other programs celebrating the diversity of opinions, initially refused to host Cameron. The libraries changed their minds after the actor and his publishing house, Brave Books, threatened to challenge the denials in court.
“I’m happy that the two libraries changed their decision and will allow my voice to be heard and my book to be read,” the actor said in a statement published Monday by Fox News.
“I hope they realized that their position of denying me a story hour reading was not only unfair and illegal but that we would all be better off if we listened to each other’s perspectives.”
The 52-year-old actor hopes that “children from Indianapolis and Scarsdale can learn something about biblical wisdom and the fruits of the Spirit from ‘As You Grow.'”
Cameron is best known for his work on the television sitcom “Growing Pains.” Earlier this month, the actor published a book titled, As You Grow, which teaches children about biblical values, such as love, joy, peace, kindness and faithfulness.
In a Friday interview with CBN’s Faithwire, the actor and children’s book author revealed that he and his publishing house wrote a letter to libraries across the U.S. that refused to host him. They also sent a free copy of Cameron’s book for the libraries to share with their patrons.
“If they double down on their discrimination and excluding certain viewpoints just because they think that they don’t like them, well, then, I told them that I’m prepared to assert my constitutional rights in court,” Cameron said.
“It’s not OK to say ‘yes’ to drag queen story hours and teach children one kind of value and say ‘no’ to other community members who would like to have their children taught other values in the same library, in the same room, for the same amount of time as other people are allowed.”
The “Growing Pains” star expressed surprise that libraries would hesitate to teach the values found in his book to children, emphasizing a need for the country to “get back to the Word of God.”
In an interview with The Christian Post earlier this month promoting his film “Lifemark,” a pro-life movie about adoption, Cameron encouraged Christian parents to involve themselves in the culture after over 50 libraries refused or ignored his request to host a reading of his book.
“We need all hands on deck. The family of faith needs to get off the defense, get on the offense, and when we do, we will join that great cloud of witnesses from the past,” Cameron assured. “We will be part of God’s loving army of compassion that cannot be stopped and the gates of Hell cannot prevail against it.”
One of the libraries that declined to host Cameron, the Rochambeau Public Library in Providence, Rhode Island, told the actor’s publisher, “No, we will pass on having you run a program in our space. We are a very queer-friendly library. Our messaging does not align.”
Peter Doocy reports on growing crisis with Title 42 expected to end. Video footage obtained by Fox News shows a Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, overwhelmed with migrant arrivals. State Rep. Tony Gonzales shot the video at the Border Patrol Central Processing Center on Friday. At that time, around 4,600 migrants were in federal custody despite capacity being only 1,040.
In a video taken Friday from Rep. Tony Gonalez, R-Tex., a Border Patrol Central Processing Center is seen at over four times its capacity with migrants. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
The footage shows migrants crammed into the processing facility, many of them sprawled out on mattresses on the floor.
Migrants crammed into a processing facility. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
A voice of the intercom can be heard calling out names while the migrants wait.
El Paso, like many towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, continues to witness an influx of migrants into its community. The city is also expecting a surge of migrants when Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that reduced the number of asylum seekers the U.S. would allow under the COVID pandemic, expires on Dec. 21.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more.
Father Frank Pavone, a firebrand pro-life activist who has stirred controversy over the issue within the Church, was removed from the Roman Catholic priesthood this fall. Pavone was officially removed from the clergy on November 9 following receipt of a letter from Pope Francis’ representative in the U.S., according to the New York Times. The letter ordered that Pavone was to be removed with no possibility of appeal.
“This action was taken after Father Pavone was found guilty in canonical proceedings of blasphemous communications on social media, and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop,” the letter reportedly reads, without specifying the communications.
Pavone claimed he had received no communication from the Vatican in an interview with the Catholic News Agency Saturday. Nevertheless, he said his removal comes as little surprise.
“I’ve been persecuted in the church for decades, decades. This is nothing new for me,” he told CNA. “They just don’t like the work I’m doing for these babies.”
Father Frank Pavone, left, celebrates Catholic Mass for attendees at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 27, 2021. (SOPA Images / Contributor via Getty Images)
VATICAN – 2021/12/19: Pope Francis greets and blesses the children assisted by the Vatican’s Santa Marta Pediatric Dispensary at the Paul VI Hall. (Photo by Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) ((Photo by Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images))
He went on to mention the circumstances of his “blasphemous communication,” saying that he had typed the world “goddamn” in a Tweet in 2020.
“I used the word G-D in a response to somebody in a tweet and for that they want to throw me out of the priesthood,” he said.
Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Pope’s representative to the United States, alerted U.S. bishops of the decision on Dec. 13, according to the Times.
“As you will know, Father Pavone was a very public and high profile figure associated with the Right to Life Movement in the U.S.,” Archbishop Pierre told the bishops. “His dismissal from the clerical state may, therefore, be a matter of interest among the faithful. In anticipation of that potential interest, the attached statement regarding Father Pavone is provided for your information.”
Demonstrators march and gather near the state capitol following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Austin, Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is being sued by health care providers over allegedly threatening ot prosecute abortion providers. (AP)
Pavone’s defrocking comes months after the U.S. pro-life movement achieved a landmark victory when the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The ruling thrust abortion into the limelight for the 2022 midterm election cycle, something many commentators believed actually helped Democrats.
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.
“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch becamea paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”
As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.
The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.
The pro-life advertisements The Dispatch blocked highlighted the abortion-until-birth positions of 2020 Democrats, including Joe Biden. At the time, the NeverTrump website claimed the ads included “partly false information.”
“Biden has not expressed support for late-term abortions—which, while not being a medical term, generally refers to abortions performed at 21 weeks or later. And neither candidate has voiced support for abortion ‘up to the moment of birth,’” the false Dispatch fact-check stated.
Shortly after The Federalist published an article amplifying the censorship, The Dispatch claimed that the fact check, which remained up on social media for three days before deletion, was still in “draft form” and was published in “error.”
That didn’t stop The Dispatch from continuing to take money to shut up conservatives and conservative causes. For their willingness to participate in Big Tech’s anti-free speech crusade, these suppressors are paid from Facebook’s more than $100 million “fact-checking” investment.
Publications like The Dispatch are not ashamed of their partnership with Facebook. In fact, there is clear indication on both The Dispatch and Facebook’s websites that they are proud to be advancing the goal of silencing anyone they deem problematic together.
Similarly, French is not ashamed of his partnership with Big Tech. If his writing indicates anything, French, the man infamous for performative outrage about the moral failures of Republicans like former President Donald Trump, basks in his role as a censor who can shut dissidents up with the click of a mouse.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Part 6 of the “Twitter Files” broke late Friday when independent journalist Matt Taibbi published a 40-something-tweet thread titled: “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.” Here are six highlights from the latest drop of internal communications bandied back and forth between Twitter executives and government officials.
1. The FBI Was the Hand in Twitter’s Glove
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” Taibbi opened his “Twitter Files” thread from Friday. Then over the course of some 45 tweets, Taibbi provided proof from internal communications of the tech giant to support his claim and what Taibbi dubbed both the “master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter” and a “unique one-big-happy-family vibe” between Twitter and the FBI.
For instance, the “Twitter Files” revealed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” And the emails and other communications showed “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.” “What stands out,” Taibbi stressed, “is the sheer quantity of reports from the government.”
Twitter’s relationship was not limited to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, nor were communications limited to emails, Friday’s installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed. A Sept. 15, 2020 email from a then-legal executive at Twitter, Stacia Cardille, to Jim Baker, who served at the time as deputy general counsel, confirmed these points. The email, titled “Elections Work,” summarized Cardille’s elections-related work and opened by discussing “Government-Industry Sync.”
“I participated in our monthly (soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threats.” Cardille then noted several items of import — more on those later. Key here, however, is the revelation that Twitter and “industry peers” had monthly and “soon to be weekly” meetings with the “FBI, DOJ, DHS, and ODNI,” or Office of the Director of National Intelligence, showing Twitter was not the only tech company groomed by the feds to spy on and censor Americans, and that it wasn’t merely the FBI involved.
So maybe “hands-in-gloves” is a more apt descriptor.
2. Bloated FBI Task Force Pushed for Silly Censorship
While Cardille’s email to Baker cast Twitter’s relationship with the FBI and other federal organizations as related to “election threats,” the emails exchanged between the feds and Twitter reveal the government regularly pushed Twitter to target select accounts for posts far removed from any semblance of an election threat. Or, as Taibbi reported, “a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
For instance, in one Nov. 10, 2022 email, “Fred” wrote, “Hello Twitter contacts,” “FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” Four Twitter account names followed, which were all suspended, including “one account whose tweets are almost all jokes,” but the latest of which Twitter considered “civic misinformation.”
Taibbi provided several more examples of the FBI alerting Twitter to accounts that the FBI believed were violating Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi then provided screen grabs of the offensive accounts while stating that “many of the above accounts were satirical in nature,” and nearly all were “relatively low engagement.”
The FBI’s targeting of such “low engagement” accounts seems strange until you realized the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to its “social media-focused task force, known as FTIF,” created following the 2016 election. The task force “swelled to 80 agents,” Taibbi noted, before making a profound point: “The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.”
3. Feds Thread the Constitutional Needle — or Try To
While Friday’s drop of the “Twitter Files” revealed the FBI and other federal agencies pushing Twitter to censor users, and Twitter acted as if the “ask” was a “tell,” the communications also show that the agents carefully crafted their requests to avoid triggering the Constitution.
Here it is necessary to understand the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence, which holds that when the government seeks the private censorship of speech, “what matters is the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce,” and “a public-official defendant who threatens to employ coercive state power to stifle protected speech violates a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights.” Conversely, a mere request does not trigger the Constitution.
Notice, then, the care the FBI used in its communications with Twitter: The FBI focused not on the government’s interest in censoring the speech, but on the Twitter accounts the FBI said it believed were “violating your terms of service.” The agents used the same or similar boilerplate language in the emails Taibbi published on Friday. Those same emails also ended with the caveat that the information provided by the FBI is “for any action or inaction deem[ed] appropriate within Twitter policy.”
An email from the FBI’s National Election Command Post to the San Francisco field office also parrots the key language necessary to avoid triggering the Constitution. Specifically, the FBI’s national election group asked the San Francisco field office to assist in coordinating efforts with Twitter to obtain “any location information associated with the accounts that Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI in assigning any follow-up deemed necessary to the appropriate FBI field office.” The same email makes clear the FBI would use the necessary “legal process” to obtain access to account-holders’ information.
For all the screaming about the First Amendment, then, and the declaration by many that the “Twitter Files” prove the FBI violated Americans’ constitutional rights by seeking the censorship of speech, these exchanges show the FBI attempting to thread the needle to avoid making Twitter a state actor.
Whether the FBI and Twitter succeeded in these efforts, however, remains to be seen because, as one of the country’s most preeminent First Amendment scholars Eugene Volokh explained in his essay “When Government Urges Private Entities to Restrict Others’ Speech,” there may be “room for courts to shift to a model where the government’s mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government’s part.”
4. Are Feds Playing Fast and Loose with Classified Info?
The FBI’s efforts to maintain separation between itself and Twitter to avoid triggering the Constitution apparently didn’t prevent the federal government from sharing classified information. The Sept. 15, 2020 email from Cardille to Baker revealed this concerning detail.
“I explicitly asked if there were any impediments with the ability of the government to share classified information or other relevant information with industry,” Cardille wrote about her most recent “monthly (soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threads.” The “FBI was adamant that no impediments to information sharing exist,” Cardille told Twitter’s then-deputy general counsel.
How could that be? Do the FBI and other intelligence agencies ignore classification designations when working with the tech industry? Or is the supposed intel the FBI is feeding to the social media giants with the goal of censoring private speech so mundane it isn’t classified? Both scenarios are troubling, just for different reasons.
5. The FBI Outsources Its ‘Misinformation’ Flagging
Another important revelation from part six of the “Twitter Files,” Taibbi concisely punctuated thusly: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
This conclusion followed from Taibbi’s review of communications received by Twitter via its “Partner Support Portal,” which the Center for Internet Security created. The Center for Internet Security, according to Taibbi’s reporting, is a non-governmental organization that serves as a DHS contractor. The Center for Internet Security “describes itself as ‘partners’ with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS.”
When the Center for Internet Security receives complaints related to supposed election “misinformation,” it says it will “forward it to our partners,” which in addition to the DHS’s Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, includes the “Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University.” In turn, according to the “Twitter Files,” the Stanford University project will report “misinformation” to Twitter.
Taibbi provided an example in which Stanford flagged as misinformation a video it called “legal-heavy.” Then to support the idea that the video represented misinformation, the Center for Internet Security’s analysis of the legal issues was quoted at length. What was unclear from the exchange, however, was whether the Center for Internet Security accurately represented the content of the video or properly analyzed the law, as well as whether the video included other accurate points.
That Twitter would be willing to censor someone’s “legally heavy speech,” based on the say-so of various private third parties, may not implicate the First Amendment, but it is a dangerous squelching of free speech that prevents the public from learning and assessing conflicting viewpoints.
6. Some Very Suspicious Timing
A final and more isolated point from Friday’s Twitter dump concerns an email Taibbi highlighted because it showed the multiple channels Twitter and the FBI used to communicate. In the email Taibbi highlighted, San Francisco Special Agent Elvis Chan wrote to Roth and Cardille to “be on the lookout for a Teleporter message from me with two documents to download.” But that email is suggestive beyond the relevance noted because of the date and the suggestion that the message is significant.
Chan’s email to the high-level Twitter executives was dated Oct. 16, 2020, and began, “Twitter folks, I just got something hot off the presses today” — something apparently so important that Chan directed Roth and Cardille to monitor their Teleporter messages.
Now what could those two documents “hot off the presses” concern? Well, the FBI agent’s email to the Twitter executives came a mere two days after the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, raising real suspicions that the two documents related to that scandal.
And so, while the “Twitter Files” confirm many previously known facts and reveal some new details, they also raise more questions.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
The latest gaffe-filled speech from President Joe Biden featured him confusing his wife’s father for her grandfather, making an implausible claim of how his uncle was awarded the Purple Heart, and greatly exaggerating how many trips he made to Iraq and Afghanistan. President Biden also struck a nerve in the same speech when he denigrated Irish people.
Biden delivered a speech to U.S. veterans during a town hall event on Friday in New Castle, Delaware.
Biden praised 102-year-old World War II veteran Ray Firmani for flying 25 missions over Germany. Firmani responded, “Thank you so much.”
Then Biden inexplicably and incorrectly delved into his family’s heritage.
The 80-year-old Biden told Firmani, “Thank you. I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”
President Biden continued, “I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter. So, you know, I got a little Italian in me now, you know?”
However, Jill Biden’s father is Donald Carl Jacobs from Hammonton, New Jersey. Jill’s grandfather is Domenic Giacoppo – who is a second-generation immigrant from Italy.
Some reactions on Twitter declared Biden’s comment about the Irish to be demeaning.
Daily Signal senior reporter Mary Margaret Olohan decried Biden’s remarks as a “hate crime” against Irish people.
Washington Examiner investigative reporter Jerry Dunleavy explained, “Biden loves this Bidenism (he’s said it in the past before) — just casual old school anti-Irish stereotyping, but he thinks it’s a fun part of his gift of the gab because he considers himself Irish (his great-great-great grandfather moved to America from Ireland in the 1800s.).”
Businessman Eoghan McCabe tweeted, “Irishman here. I feel neutral because I think he actually is stupid.”
Biden made the exact same disparagement about the Irish as well as confusing Jill Biden’s grandfather and father on St. Patrick’s Day in March.
You know, I — my dad, when I got elected Vice President, he said, “Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge.” He was not feeling very well now — not because of the Battle of the Bulge. But he said, “And he won the Purple Heart. And he never received it. He never — he never got it. Do you think you could help him get it? We’ll surprise him.”
So we got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house, and I came out, and he said, “Present it to him, okay?” We had the family there.
I said, “Uncle Frank, you won this. And I want to… He said, “I don’t want the damn thing.” (Laughter.) No, I’m serious. He said, “I don’t want it.’ I said, “What’s the matter, Uncle Frank? You earned it.” He said, ‘Yeah, but the others died. The others died. I lived. I don’t want it.”
However, Biden’s father, Joseph R. Biden Sr., died on Sept. 2, 2002. Joe Biden officially became vice president on Jan. 20, 2009.
Frank Biden died in 1999.
The New York Post reported, “Frank Biden’s tombstone does not identify him as a Purple Heart honoree, nor does his obituary. A partial registry of known Purple Heart recipients also doesn’t note anyone by that name receiving the award, though that database is not comprehensive.”
Forbes reported, “There doesn’t appear to be any record of Biden giving his uncle the honor—the president hasn’t mentioned the story in the past, there have been no news articles written about it and Frank Biden’s name does not appear on a list of recipients held by the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, though the list is incomplete.”
Joe Biden says after he was elected VP, he awarded his Uncle Frank with a Purple Heart he earned at the Battle of the Bulge.
There is no evidence any of that is true — and Biden's uncle died in 1999, while Biden wasn't elected VP until 2008. pic.twitter.com/FlJLjFAE4A
Biden also greatly exaggerated how many times he has visited Iraq and Afghanistan.
Biden claimed, “And, you know, I think that there’s a — I’ve been in and out — not as a, obviously, combatant — but in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq and these areas 38, 39 times as — not as President, only twice as President, but from the time I was a senator, but particularly when I was Vice President.”
Biden exaggerated his number of visits to the Middle Eastern countries back in 2019, and at the time the Biden campaign admitted that the correct number of trips is 21.
The Daily Mail noted that Biden was last in Iraq in 2016, and last visited Afghanistan in 2011. Biden has not visited Afghanistan or Iraq as president.
Today, Joe Biden said he has been to "Afghanistan and Iraq and those areas" twice as president.
For at least a half-century now, every special pleader in America has made the following argument: Yeah, but what if we were black?
This is supposed to be rhetorical kryptonite, capable of anathematizing “discrimination” against any group: atheists, women, gays, immigrants, illegal immigrants, the disabled, Muslims — basically anyone except a fully abled, cis-gendered, white male born in this country.
Oh my gosh! You’re right — we DO have to let girls try out for the Green Bay Packers!
OK, fine, we’ll hire more blind lifeguards.
Of course, Shadi Abdullah is welcome to be president of our campus Hillel group.
Naturally, the “What if they were black?” argument came up ad nauseum at the Supreme Court last week during oral arguments over Colorado’s “anti-discrimination” law. According to Colorado, making two gay guys who are married to one another feel “unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable or undesirable” is the equivalent of separate water fountains for black people.
A web designer had petitioned the court, objecting to the law’s requirement that she design a website celebrating a gay marriage, in contravention of her religious beliefs. But if you’d heard only the questions from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, you’d think the petitioner was refusing to design websites for black people.
E.g.:
JUSTICE JACKSON: “[C]an I ask you a hypothetical … [What if] they want to have a sign next to the [shopping mall] Santa that says, ‘only white children.’ Why isn’t your argument that they should be able to do that?” [The hypothetical went on for hours, but that was the gist of it.]
These were a few of Justice Sotomayor’s questions:
— “What’s the difference between that and ‘I don’t believe black people and white people should get married’?”
— “Tell me how that’s different, by the way. What you’re basically saying is, in our Ollie’s Barbecue case, the company there said, ‘I’ll serve blacks but only on a takeout window, not inside my restaurant because that sends a message that I endorse integration ….’”
— “Well, when I sit down to eat a meal by a full chef who creates this beautiful picture on a plate, why can’t he say, ‘I make specialized meals for my clients. I will not serve a black person.’”
Here’s a cheat sheet that should help answer the justices’ questions:
Can I refuse to let black kids sit on Santa’s lap? — NO.
Can I refuse to serve black people at my restaurant? — NO.
Can I refuse to bake one of my wedding cakes for black people? — NO.
Can I refuse to write speeches for black people? — NO.
Can I refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for black people — NO.
Can I refuse to let black people into the Marines? — NO.
Can I discriminate against black people for any reason, ever? — NO.
Displaying his own unique approach, Eric Olson, Colorado’s solicitor general, who was defending the law (popular name: “We Won the Right to Gay Marriage and Now We’re Shooting the Wounded”), made this pioneering argument: “What [a business] can’t do is say, ‘I reserve the right to refuse service, which means in practice I will not serve black people.’”
A good rule of thumb is that any claim of discrimination that requires a comparison to black people is sophistry.
No offense — I’m sure the rest of you have really moving tales of woe, full of pathos and suffering. But gays, atheists, disabled people, women (whatever the hell that is), immigrants, illegals, please try to remember: YOU’RE NOT BLACK.
It’s discrimination on the basis of race — and only discrimination on the basis of race — that is forbidden by our Constitution. Other forms of “discrimination” may be stupid (if so, the market will punish you) or blindingly logical (football teams allowing only healthy young men to try out, or religious groups limiting officeholders to practitioners of the religion).
Only one type of discrimination ever stirred up such mass revulsion in this country that we decided to amend our Constitution to prohibit it: race discrimination.
You’d think that at a moment when our entire national dialogue is fixated on the legacy of slavery, it wouldn’t be so difficult for people to grasp that black Americans’ unique history is not amenable to cut-and-paste victimhood.
To make up for slavery and Jim Crow, we abrogated constitutional provisions about freedom of association, freedom of contract and freedom of speech. We tossed out basic rules of fairness to allow (temporarily) affirmative action, set-asides and quotas. Behemoth departments were created in Washington to stamp out the last vestiges of discrimination on the basis of race.
By now, of course, the only discrimination involving black Americans is in their favor. But that doesn’t change the rule: NO DISCRIMINATION ON THE BASIS OF RACE.
As G.K. Chesterton said, “When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom, you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”
That’s what “discrimination” law is today. Instead of one big law: “No Race Discrimination!” we have a million little laws about strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, rational basis test, public accommodations, bona fide occupational qualifications, and on and on and on. At the same time, we have open race discrimination against whites and Asians.
Unless you’re alleging race discrimination, take your lumps like a cis-gendered white man. You can be fired, not hired, turned away, rejected, called names, disciplined, looked askance at — and no one cares.
This simple rule allows us to live in what we call “freedom.” As the libertarians would say (if they were real libertarians), start your own website business, bakery, Hillel organization, professional football team, holiday, all-women’s eating club, etc. etc. etc.
Gays, you’re not black. (And you’re not Allan Bakke.) Gays’ median household income is about $115,000 — the highest of any group in America. It’s $45,000 for black people. To my gay readers, answer this honestly: When you move into a neighborhood, do home prices go up or down?
Blacks must be looking at gay rights activists in bewilderment, thinking: Why couldn’t we be oppressed like that?
For the rest of you, memorize this, recite it in the shower, write it on your hand: “Unless I’m being discriminated against on the basis of my race, I will stop being a pain in everyone’s ass.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Composite screenshot of Fox News YouTube video and Liberty Elementary School District website
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
An Arizona mom spoke at a local school board meeting dressed as a cat to point out the ridiculousness of so-called transgenderism in general and to direct public attention to one particular school board member, who identifies as transgender.
Lindsey Graham, who hosts a conservative podcast called “Patriot Barbie,” showed up at a Liberty Elementary School Board meeting some time last month dressed up in a cat costume, complete with ears, a printed suit, and whiskers. When it was her turn to speak, she pretended to be a cat in much the same way that so-called transgender individuals pretend to be a member of the opposite sex.
“I’m a cat. Meow, meow. I’m not a woman dressed as a cat. I am a cat,” Graham insisted.
But then she challenged fellow meeting attendees to admit the truth: “How many of you believe and confess that I’m a cat? How many of you believe that your child or a child from this school would believe that I’m actually a cat?”
No one raised their hands, not even a board member who identifies as transgender. Paul Bixler, 72, began identifying as a woman after his wife passed away in 2017. He still goes by the first name “Paul.”
“I don’t think I’ve changed at all,” Bixler told a news outlet last summer. “I think I am who I am. And I think I’ve always been who I am. And so my parents named me Paul. I’ve always liked being Paul. Paul Bixler’s had a really good life.”
Graham — no relation to the male Republican senator from South Carolina, who shares the same name — does not accept Bixler’s supposed gender transition. She appeared on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Tuesday to criticize Bixler’s attempt at feminine cosplay.
“He’s a man, he’s very clearly a man,” Graham noted.
“The only thing he does to identify as a female is put lipstick on,” she continued. “He grew his hair out a little bit, and he wears his deceased wife’s clothing to school, to sporting events, to school events to fundraisers, school events in front of the children.”
Graham stated that people like Bixler, who insist they’re a member of the opposite sex, have a “mental illness” which can confuse impressionable school children.
“[S]omeone with this kind of mental illness can enjoy that mental illness all they want in the comfort of their home,” Graham argued. “But when you put them in charge of children, we’re talking about a new type of indoctrination, and that’s what’s really terrifying, is seeing these people in charge of our kids’ education.“
Bixler — who spent decades as a teacher, coach, and principal in both Arizona and Texas — was never actually elected to the Liberty Elementary School District Governing Board, which oversees eight schools in the metropolitan Phoenix area. He was appointed to it in 2021, when the election was canceled. His current term ends in 2024.
For many years, Graham lived in Oregon but moved to Arizona after the Oregon state government attempted to shut down her beauty salon in 2020 and then fined her $14,000 when she refused to comply. She sued the state for $100,000. She then moved to Arizona and penned a book, entitled “TARGETED: One Mom’s Fight for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” about that experience.
“[O]bviously, you can’t just identify as whatever you want and demand that other people identify you as whatever you want,” she told Watters.
“This is elementary school, so these are young vulnerable minds,” she added. “The teachers, the rest of the school board are identifying [Bixler] as ‘Ms.’ while he’s talking in just the deepest manly voice that he was born with. And so to see these parents take no responsibility for the education of these kids and to teach them true right and wrong and true biology and true facts and science and truths is just so alarming that we have this in the school system.”
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey over his order to pile up shipping containers at the border to create a wall and deter illegal migrant crossings. Ducey began filling gaps in the border wall with shipping containers stacked on top of each other in August. The Department of Justice objected to the policy, and Ducey filed a lawsuit in October to keep the container wall in place.
“Arizona is taking action to protest on behalf of our citizens,” he said at the time. “With this lawsuit, we’re pushing back against efforts by federal bureaucrats to reverse the progress we’ve made. The safety and security of Arizona and its citizens must not be ignored. Arizona is going to do the job that Joe Biden refuses to do — secure the border in any way we can. We’re not backing down.”
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in an Arizona district court accusing the state government of acting unconstitutionally.
“Officials from Reclamation and the Forest Service have notified Arizona that it is trespassing on federal lands,” the lawsuit said. “Not only has Arizona refused to halt its trespasses and remove the shipping containers from federal lands, but it has indicated that it will continue to trespass on federal lands and install additional shipping containers.“
The government also argued that Ducey is violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says that federal laws take precedence over state laws when there’s a conflict between the two.
Ducey has said that the state has stacked about 130 shipping containers along 3,820 linear feet.
On Wednesday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said California was in a fiscal crisis over the number of illegal immigrants who had been sent to the state by the federal government.
Here’s more about the container wall conflict:
Feds sue Gov. Doug Ducey over shipping containers at the border www.youtube.com
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
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
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
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
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
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
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
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
Written
on December 23, 2022