Chapel worship at Cedarville University of Cedarville, Ohio, February 2023. | Facebook/Cedarville University
A Christian university in Ohio is seeing spontaneous prayer and worship among its student body days after a revival began at Asbury University in Kentucky.
Cedarville University President Thomas White described what was happening as “a special outpouring and sensing of the presence of the Lord,” adding that it “will be left to the historians” to determine if it was truly a revival.
According to White, the outpouring began during Cedarville’s Monday morning chapel service on campus, as students were going through the Old Testament passage of Psalm 86.
“So, we took a moment to pray and to sing a song,” recounted White. “And during the song, without an altar call or invitation of any kind, we had some students who began to come forward and pray.”
“And so, when I went back up to the stage — the sermon was over at that point — we just began to pray and began to sing. And, before the chapel was over, there was an altar full of students just praying and some were weeping, others were hugging one another.”
Chapel worship at Cedarville University of Cedarville, Ohio, February 2023. | Facebook/Cedarville University
White explained that “chapel just continued” after its regular time to end at around 10:45 a.m., with most students staying into the next class period for prayer and worship, with some students returning to the chapel after class.
The typical chapel service at Cedarville University has around 3,000 students, with approximately 1,000 opting to stay for additional prayer and singing, according to White.
“When I left work that day to go home to get dinner at 5:30, we still had a small group of students,” said White. “We came back to the chapel that night to do an eight o’clock prayer meeting.”
“I would guess we had about 1,000 students who showed back up that evening, and we prayed, we sang praise songs to Jesus, we read Scripture, and we were still there after 10 o’clock.”
On Tuesday, during chapel service, White made an altar call with many students coming forward. The campus again held an unplanned evening worship gathering on Tuesday at 8 p.m. that lasted until after 10 p.m., with some students still praying around 11 p.m.
For Wednesday, White said Cedarville students who felt called to do so went out to other schools in the area to evangelize, praying that “the Lord will have a unique outpouring on those campuses.”
The spontaneous worship at Cedarville University started days after a similar revival took place at Asbury University during its chapel service, in which students stayed after the official end of worship to continue in praise and prayer.
Alexandra Presta, a senior at Asbury who is also the executive editor for the campus newspaper, The Collegian, told The Christian Post in an earlier interview she estimated that at one point, as many as 1,000 people were worshiping after the service had officially concluded.
“This is a pure act of the Holy Spirit pouring out love, peace and healing — hearts are being transformed and that should be praised,” Presta said.
“[Chapel speaker] Zach Meerkreebs has acted as a leader throughout the revival and has reminded us periodically that this comes out of radical humility, humbling ourselves before the Lord.”
Regarding any parallels between the two spiritual gatherings, White told CP that he did not “think it has been continuous” like at Asbury, adding that he felt God was “not working here the same way that He is working at Asbury.”
“He works in different places in different ways and that’s great,” he said. “We’re just happy He’s working all across the country.”
While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to reestablish some semblance of sanity in the Sunshine State’s education system, the District of Columbia’s Board of Education is doubling down on wokeism.
According to a Feb. 12 article in The Washington Post, the city’s public school system — serving 96,000 students — is preparing to roll out a new social studies curriculum for the 2024-2025 school year that will eliminate what one school board member called “problematic” and “archaic” material. A closer look at the proposed revisions serves as Exhibit A for why parents need to follow what’s happening in their children’s schools.
Sexual and Racial Radicalism
Amazingly, D.C. officials aren’t hiding how truly radical they aim to make the city’s social studies curriculum. Kindergarteners will learn how to understand their “gender identities,” as well as “identify different kinds of family structures, including single-parent, grandparent-headed, multiracial and LGBTQ+,” according to the Post.
First graders currently learn “to identify symbols and traditions associated with the United States” and to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But that will seemingly be scrapped in favor of learning how “one can work together to achieve a shared goal,” which sounds suspiciously like a means of encouraging activism rather than citizenship.
In case you think such fears seem conspiratorial, consider that under the old curriculum, second graders learned how a person “becomes a U.S. citizen and what it takes to be a good citizen,” but under the new curriculum, there will instead be a “special focus” on “the geography of Indigenous nations,” presumably so students will be well equipped to perform land acknowledgments. And in case that seems conspiratorial, consider that third graders will be taught the “contributions of Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples to the D.C. region.”
It just gets more bizarre. Third graders will “discuss the importance of ‘affirming spaces,’ which are safe places for people to express their identities,” as well as “the Home Rule movement and discuss how a lack of statehood affects residents.”
Fourth graders will learn about the importance of the year 1619 (a nice little nod to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project) while fifth graders analyze the rise of “queer culture.” Sixth-grade students are urged to “consider who is harmed by border policies, how racism, privilege and bias affect the way resources are distributed (and how that distribution has influenced racism and imperialism) and the extent to which a European worldview has dominated global society.’”
Good Little Liberal Activists
Elementary schoolchildren in the nation’s capital will be inculcated in the talking points of the Democratic Party. They will be trained to look for systemic racism, white privilege, and the patriarchy (10th graders learn about “Eurocentrism”). They will be formed not into citizens who love and respect their nation for the unprecedented goods it has delivered to generations of Americans, but into aggrieved activists who believe themselves victims of an oppressive regime.
At least in the District of Columbia, the story of America will no longer be one of freedom and virtue encouraged and protected by republican government, but one of victimized parties suffering under the yoke of “European colonizers.” Little surprise, when seventh graders learn about George Washington, they focus on “his legacy as an enslaver.” In that same grade, students learn about the “rise of white supremacist groups,” I’m guessing because officials in the District, like those governing all our establishment institutions, believe (risibly) such tiny, inconsequential groups are currently the greatest existential threat to our nation.
Multiple times in the curriculum, D.C. students will be taught that the evils of our nation were performed by “primarily white men” or “mostly white men.” Unsurprisingly, the WaPo derides the old curriculum for including biographies of prominent historical figures who “acted righteously,” which I presume is a woke way of claiming that the great figures of American history have been too valorized. (In my 12 years in Virginia public schools, and my time as a public high-school history teacher in Virginia, I never remember any American hero described as “righteous.”) Regardless, the point seems to be that our history should not provoke pride, but shame, and drive the next generation to further labor to dismantle all vestiges of patriarchal, racist power.
This Will Spread Like Kudzu
Officials have collected feedback from parents, students, and teachers, and expect to adopt new standards this spring, according to the Post.
Of course, it’s true, we are talking about Washington, D.C., one of the most liberal places in the United States, where Joe Biden won a staggering 93 percent of the vote in the 2020 presidential election. But these things have a way of spreading, as demonstrated by the fact that once-peripheral ideas about systemic racism and white privilege found only in graduate seminars are now taught in schools across the country to millions of American children, thanks to the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Hard History” program. If parents do not invest the necessary time to understand what their local schools are teaching, they will discover in time that an entire generation of American youth has been radicalized.
Yes, undoubtedly, American children need to learn about the mistreatment of indigenous tribes and the unjust enslavement, exploitation, and disenfranchisement of blacks. Conservative resistance to new woke curricula is often panned as wanting to shield children from such inconvenient truths. That is a ridiculous caricature.
In truth, conservatives fear a very different kind of simplistic historical narrative, one that presents the American story primarily through the lens of victims and victimizers. According to the new curriculum, D.C. seniors will investigate “the ways BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) and queer youth are impacting change.” How is that not foregrounding identity politics in the name of victimhood?
Conservatives fear that American children will learn not to love our country, warts and all, but despise the (admittedly imperfect) heroes who built the greatest nation on Earth. They fear, not without warrant, that American children will be taught white men are categorically evil, and persons of color are categorically heroic.
Yet all binary historical narratives are superficial and dissatisfying. Human nature is too complicated for that. The problem is that the apparatchiks in D.C. don’t even realize they are the ones promoting such facile fictions, to the detriment of thousands of students in our nation’s capital. Parents across America must take heed.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is routinely the target of deranged smears from American leftists, and sadly, this week has been no exception with the return of the “Uncle Tom” attack.
On Tuesday, the Georgia Senate successfully passed SB 69, which, if approved by the state House and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, would allow for the placement of a monument of Thomas on the grounds of the state capitol. In remarks to his colleagues, bill sponsor and GOP Sen. Ben Watson spoke to Thomas’ character and praised the justice for living a life “marked by tremendous achievement,” saying:
This native son of Georgia deserves a place of honor and recognition on our Capitol grounds, a place where future generations of Georgians can learn valuable lessons from his legacy and gain inspiration and belief that their lofty dreams are obtainable too in America, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born.
Meanwhile, the upper chamber’s Democrat members couldn’t have been less enthused. Not only did every single Democrat senator vote against the bill, but several of them used the opportunity to slander the Supreme Court’s most senior justice.
While some Democrats such as Sen. Nan Orrock went after Thomas’ judicial career by calling his service on the nation’s highest court “problematic,” the comments from leftist hacks like Sen. Emanuel Jones were much more vitriolic. During his unhinged diatribe, Jones referred to Thomas, the second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, as an “Uncle Tom,” and said he betrayed “his own community.”
“I’m just trying to tell you what we have in the African American community when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community — we have a term in the black community,” Jones said. “That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’ An Uncle Tom … talks about a person who back during the days of slavery sold his soul to the slave masters.”
A Pattern of Racist Attacks
Unfortunately, Jones’ Tuesday rant is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the years, so-called “progressive” Democrats have hurled a barrage of racist and degrading attacks at Thomas for the crime of daring to think for himself.
During a 2014 interview, for instance, Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi didn’t just call Thomas an “Uncle Tom”; he also claimed the justice “doesn’t like black people” and “doesn’t like being black.”
But it’s not just Democrat politicians lobbing racist insults at Thomas. Prominent legacy media members such as MSNBC host Joy Reid have also joined in on the smear campaign in recent years. After then-President Donald Trump forecasted plans to take his 2020 election challenges to the Supreme Court shortly after the Nov. 3 contest, Reid openly questioned the legitimacy of the court and invoked the “Uncle Tom” slur by referring to Thomas as “Uncle Clarence.”
“So, I think what scares people is that if [Trump] decides to do something that legally makes no sense … but if they somehow manage to stumble into the Supreme Court, do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence and Amy Coney Barrett and those guys to actually follow the letter of the law?” Reid asked her colleagues. “No! I mean, it’s a completely politicized Supreme Court that you can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”
In addition to Reid, actor Samuel L. Jackson is among those who has levied the “Uncle Clarence” slur against Thomas.
Unlike many of today’s social justice warriors who love to feign “oppression,” Thomas grew up in an era of real oppression. Born into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, Thomas was raised by his grandparents in Savannah during the height of segregation. With his biological father missing from his life, Thomas’ grandfather assumed the role, providing his grandson with a foundation for hard work and discipline.
Despite the harsh circumstances of his beginnings, Thomas would go on to excel in academics, attending the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. After spending years working in the legal profession, Thomas was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Not long after in 1991, he was nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court (no thanks to Democrat partisans like then-Sen. Joe Biden), where he has faithfully served for the past 31 years.
If we lived in a world where Democrats earnestly stood by their professed belief in championing the success of non-white people, Thomas wouldn’t be getting one statue, but a hundred. His journey to success is something that shouldn’t just be celebrated but shared to inspire others to overcome adversity and chase their dreams with hard work and strong principles. Then again, leftists’ racial pandering isn’t about helping people.
For Democrats, Thomas’ devotion to the Constitution and willingness to do right by the American people stands in the way of their conquest to centralize government power in the hands of a few elites. His originalist jurisprudence is a roadblock to that goal, therefore making it perfectly acceptable in their eyes to use any tactic, no matter how grotesque, to undermine him.
Despite their best efforts, the left’s bid to slander the legacy of this great man will fail. No matter what kind of rhetorical garbage they throw at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices and public servants in U.S. history. His understanding of what it means to be a judge and adherence to the Constitution have rightly garnered him adoration from millions of Americans. And that is something the left will never be able to change.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Elon Musk used an unlikely forum this week to protest the formation of a single global government: the “World Government Summit.”
Speaking at the conference in Dubai via remote signal, Musk warned that a one-world government creates “a civilizational risk” that could result in the collapse of modern society.
“I know this is called the ‘World Government Summit,’ but I think we should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government,” Musk said.
“If I may say, we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having — frankly, this may sound a little odd — too much cooperation between governments,” he added.
Musk explained that throughout history civilizations have risen and fallen. But neither their rise nor their fall “meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there’ve been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.”
Specifically, Musk cited the rise of Islam in the Middle East and the simultaneous fall of the Roman Empire, probably referring to the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, which ultimately fell to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. He observed that this separation of empires led to the preservation of knowledge and advancement of science.
“I think we want to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a single civilization because if we are too much of a single civilization, then the whole thing may collapse,” Musk went on to say.
“I’m obviously not suggesting war or anything like that. But I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much,” he said. “It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization that the whole thing doesn’t collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.”
Not only does Musk believe that a one-world government threatens society and humanity, but he has previously warned that “civilization will crumble” if people do not start having more children.
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Ancient primitives — or as we now call them, “Indigenous people whose land we stole” — believed in talismans, voodoo, rain dances and other versions of “A preceded B, so A caused B.” Today, we consider such reasoning classic fallacy. Except at The New York Times.
First, you need to understand that the Times is no longer a newspaper, but more of a shaman. The paper used to report news. Anyone reading it for information these days might as well pull into a gas station and expect the nice man in a crisp white shirt to dash out and pump his gas.
Much like a Starfish tuna factory, the news comes in, then has to be cleaned, chopped up, soaked in oil and tightly packed into a tin can. If you peered into the Times’ back room, you’d find hundreds of woke scriveners repacking the news to fit the narrative.
Second, an urgent cleanup operation was needed to explain the paroxysm of violence that followed 2020’s anti-cop mania pushed at places like the Times. It simply could not stand to have people imagine that revering criminals while anathematizing the police would have any effect on the crime rate.
No, that wouldn’t do. The facts had to be retrofitted into an alternative narrative. What was the best backup explanation? The pandemic!
Attributing the massive crime wave to the pandemic solved two problems that would have arisen had the Times simply reported the facts: the upsurge in black crime, and the Times’ active encouragement of such.
Unfortunately, doing a rain dance to bring rain is quantum mechanics compared to the Times’ cause-and-effect theory about “The Pandemic” inciting the post-George Floyd violence.
Here are the facts.
During the first few months of the pandemic, violent crime plummeted everywhere. You couldn’t have missed it. The Washington Post, Politico, Voice of America, Cambridge University, and on and on and on — even the Times itself! — reported that violent crime had virtually disappeared in cities around the world due to the COVID shutdowns.
And then on May 25, a fentanyl addict with a bad ticker died in police custody in Minneapolis, whereupon the de-policing demands of Black Lives Matter swept the nation with the active encouragement of all organs of elite liberal opinion, especially the Times.
Cops, the only people who seem to really believe “black lives matter,” risking their lives to bring safety to dangerous neighborhoods, were viciously slandered and kneecapped at every turn. Again, especially by the Times.
You’ll never guess what happened next.
After going into free fall during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic, homicides and aggravated assaults in the U.S. rose by about 35% from Floyd’s death to the end of June. Burglaries, mostly commercial, shot up by an eye-popping 190% the last week of May — the height of looting during the “mostly peaceful protests.”
Other countries, also affected by the pandemic, saw no such rise in violent crime.
During the Summer of Floyd, murders increased by 42% in the 21 largest U.S. cities. By the end of 2020, the national murder rate had increased by 30%. That’s double the next largest hike on record, in 1968, the heyday of the country’s last experiment with liberal crime policies, when the murder rate rose by a comparatively paltry 12.7%.
Rarely has data on any change in human behavior been so clearly demarcated as it is in the crime rate pre- and post-George Floyd’s death.
Blacks — you know, the people whose lives allegedly “matter” — bore the brunt of this orgy of violence. The CDC reports, for example, that firearm murders of black people surged by nearly 40% in 2020, the greatest increase of any demographic group.
It’s understandable that the very same news outlets fanning the flames of anti-police hysteria in the wake of Floyd’s martyrdom —directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of black people — would want to shift blame to “The Pandemic.” But witch doctors have more empirical evidence for their diagnoses than the Times does for its repeated pronouncements that thepandemic caused violent crime.
At least voodoo practitioners probably believed their magical thinking. The Times’ Tourette-like hectoring about the pandemic proves the paper is lying and knows it’s lying. Nothing true needs to be endlessly repeated with such tenacity. (See also: “Climate Change.”)
In an article this week on the skyrocketing crime on New York City subways, Times reporter Ana Ley blamed the pandemic nearly a dozen times for the explosion of violence — violence that inexplicably began 10 weeks into the pandemic, but immediately after May 25, 2020.
E.g.:
“… an uptick in subway crime during the pandemic …”
“… safety concerns, which climbed among passengers during the pandemic …”
“… safety on public transit had gotten worse since the pandemic began …”
“… she has stopped riding the subway past 6 p.m. during the pandemic.”
It’s as if the Times has a typewriter key “during the pandemic” that must be inserted into any sentence mentioning “crime.”
It’s hard to make yourself stupid enough to come up with a similar post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, but how about right-wingers start attributing mass shootings to “the Clinton presidency”?
… an uptick in mass shootings that began during the Clinton presidency …
… mass shootings, which climbed during the Clinton presidency …
… mass shootings have become more common since the Clinton presidency…
… dance studio says it will reopen after 67th Clinton-era mass shooting …
… as mass shootings continue, Hillary Clinton struggles to talk about other issues …
At the Times, the pandemic is a sorcerer’s hex, the cause of violent crime. For unfathomable reasons, it just takes a few months to kick in. The COVID god works in mysterious ways.
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.
Students gather at Hughes Auditorium at Asbury University during a revival event that began on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. | Sadie Gayheart
Reports from Asbury University are so very encouraging! Since last Wednesday, there’s been 24/7 prayer, worship, testimony, confession of sin, Scripture reading, silence, and more in the chapel at this Kentucky school. People from across the United States are flocking to the campus to experience what God is doing.
One of those who attended is evangelist Jon Burdette, my good friend and co-conspirator in the advancement of the Gospel.
He told me this:
“Attending the revival at Asbury was an unforgettable experience. We could literally feel the ‘weighty’ presence of God as soon as we walked into the building. Sensing God’s presence in that way and knowing that this was an unplanned service that had continued since Wednesday morning, I got emotional within the first few minutes of being there.
There was passionate, authentic worship, brokenness, people praying at the altar, people praying at their seats, and people praying with each other in groups around the room. For this particular segment of the service, there was just one person leading worship on a piano. No microphone, no words on a screen, no service rundown. Just Spirit-led worship that ranged from calm, quiet harmonies to eruptions of loud singing, clapping, and testifying.
My daughter Shailynn was there with me, and she said she couldn’t describe it in words. She wanted to stay all day!
The best way I can describe it is that you felt a sense of tranquility all throughout your being that made it difficult to leave the room. No programs, but complete peace. There were no ‘rules,’ but it was totally in order. There was lots of emotion, but no emotionalism. I can’t wait to see how God uses this to advance the Gospel near and far.”
What now?
Social media is abuzz with stories from those who’ve experienced what’s now tagged #asburyrevival. And the reports give me hope that we could once again see a sweeping awakening across this nation.
But throughout church history, there’s always been a spillover effect of true revival. What is it? Evangelism!
We see this spillover effect in the Welsh Revival of 1904; in the spiritual movement that happened in and through the Moravians; in the First Great Awakening, led by George Whitefield and John Wesley; and in the Jesus Movement, just 50 years ago in the United States. Every significant spiritual movement results in evangelism.
A biblical precedent
In Acts 4:31, we get a clear glimpse of the spillover effect in the midst of a powerful move of God:
“After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.”
1. The power of prayer shook the building
“… the place where they were meeting was shaken …”
As exciting as being in the chapel at Asbury University is right now, imagine what it would be like to be in the room when the hand of God literally shook the building in response to the early believers’ prayers. Talk about an amen! Talk about a literal move of God. He moved the building!
2. The power of the Spirit shook the believers
“… they were all filled with the Holy Spirit …”
The early believers in this passage prayed in unity and got filled with the Holy Spirit simultaneously. God was doing something special in that room 2,000 years ago.
From every report I’m getting about the Asbury Revival, the exact same type of thing is happening. Believers are praying and praising in unity. It’s not an out-of-control show. It’s not hype. It’s a Spirit-orchestrated meeting with Spirit-filled believers, with the focus on Jesus — and Jesus alone.
3. The power of the Gospel shook the city
“… and spoke the word of God boldly.”
But the revival didn’t stay in the room. It spilled over into the streets. The power of the Gospel shook the city! These believers “spoke the word of God boldly,” despite the recent religious declaration that outlawed Christian evangelism.
These believers would not be stopped. They’d just experienced the power and presence of God, and now they were taking it to the streets!
A defining characteristic of true revivals is that they never stay in the room. They always eventually spill out onto the streets!
A historical precedent
According to a Ministry Watch report by Kim Roberts, when a similar revival broke out at Asbury University in 1970, “2,000 witnessing teams were sent out from Asbury to churches and colleges across the country.”
The original revival that started at Asbury University spilled out onto the streets.
I’m very hopeful that what’s happening now at Asbury University will end up with evangelism teams, once again, being mobilized around Kentucky and across the nation.
Pray with me that this happens.
We need revival now in this country more than ever. We need what’s happening right now at Asbury University to experience the spillover effect of true revival: the Gospel being proclaimed beyond the chapel walls.
Greg Stier is the Founder and President of Dare 2 Share Ministries International. He has impacted the lives of tens of thousands of Christian teenagers through Dare 2 Share events, motivating and mobilizing them to reach their generation for Christ. He is the author of eleven books and numerous resources, including Dare 2 Share: A Field Guide for Sharing Your Faith. For more information on Dare 2 Share and their upcoming conference tour and training resources, please visit www.dare2share.org.
Poor mental health and suicidal ideation and attempts have increased among high school students over the last decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half of girls struggle with “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”
The CDC’s findings are reflected in the latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey prepared by the health agency’s Division of Adolescent and School Health. The report highlights trends in adolescent health and well-being using data collected every two years among a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students.
“Nearly all indicators of poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors increased from 2011 to 2021. The percentage of students who experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, seriously considered attempting suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide increased,” the report says. “The percentage of students who were injured in a suicide attempt did not change.”
In 2021, the report says, “some 42% of high school students felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped doing their usual activities.”
Nearly 60% of female students were found to be more likely to experience these feelings, followed by Hispanic and multiracial students who were more likely than Asian, black and white students to harbor these feelings. The report added that nearly 70% of LGBT-identified students or students involved in same-sex relationships reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness, making them the most at-risk category of students.
Researchers found that the percentage of female students who seriously considered attempting suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide also increased. Some 10% of female students attempted suicide even though, for example, only 3% of students overall attempted suicide in 2021.
“In 2021, 3% of high school students made a suicide attempt that resulted in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse during the past year. Female students were more likely than male students to be injured in a suicide attempt. American Indian or Alaska Native students were less likely than students from most other racial and ethnic groups to be injured in a suicide attempt. Black and Hispanic students were more likely than Asian and white students to be injured in a suicide attempt,” the report says.
Increased percentages of suicide attempts were found in black and white students but decreased for Asian students. There was no change registered for Hispanic and multiracial students.
While the report sounds the alarm on poor mental health among high school students, researchers also highlighted a number of factors to help improve the situation.
“School connectedness, which is the feeling among adolescents that people at their school care about them, their well-being, and success, has long-lasting protective effects for adolescents. Youth who feel connected at school are less likely to experience risks related to substance use, mental health, violence, and sexual behavior,” the report explains. “School connectedness also protects against the co-occurrence of these risks.”
Researchers measured school connectedness by asking whether students felt close to people at their school.
Parental monitoring was also identified as another “important protective factor for adolescents.”
“High parental monitoring, defined as parents or other adults in a student’s family most of the time or always knowing where they were going or who they would be with, is associated with decreased sexual risk, substance use, experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,” the report says.
Housing stability was also highlighted as a factor impacting student health.
“Housing stability is one important social determinant of health,” the report notes. “Youth who are unstably housed are more likely than their stably housed peers to experience violence, use substances, and have higher rates of poor mental health.”
Last week, a whistleblower came forward in The Free Press to expose how the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital engages in experimental interventions (aka “gender-affirming care”) on children that are “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in [their] care.”
The stories Jamie Reed outlines are horrific. Young girls were given testosterone, with gruesome side effects. Mentally ill individuals were chemically castrated with virtually no attempt to find another alternative. Parents were kept out of the loop, and people permanently altered their bodies as children, only to regret the decision shortly after. For the majority of these individuals, it is already too late.
Let’s get this straight. They are taking children who are sexually “confused” and feed them more information that ADDS to their confusion, then support that confusion by talking them into having life altering surgeries, WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE (in some cases), and then leave them alone to fend for themselves as a mutilated creature. We need to apologize to Dr. Frankenstein.
Many of us have heard these stories before and have been desperately trying to get people to pay attention. Calling out the transgender agenda for what it truly is, an experiment on our nation’s children, of course, comes with backlash from trigger-happy leftists who deem this language “hateful,” “transphobic,” or “anti-LGBT.” For conservatives, that reality is something we have learned to live with.
The risk for the whistleblower was far greater. Reed describes herself as “a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” and is “married to a transman.” Her social and political circles are undoubtedly populated by people of similar viewpoints who are likely very supportive of so-called “gender-affirming care.”
This background is important — to come out as she did and to expose the horrors she witnessed at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital will almost certainly earn her a scarlet letter from her social and professional circle. She will likely face the realities of unemployment and social humiliation for standing up for the truth. She already knows the risks yet also knew that standing up on this issue was far more important.
Not only is this incredibly courageous, but it should be a message to others on the left who listen to the antics of glory seekers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ilk, who have blamed the pushback for these practices on the “radical right.”
The whistleblower’s story is gut-wrenching in and of itself, but it reveals the endgame of drugs and surgery to chemically castrate and irreversibly damage children physically and mentally. That endgame does not happen in isolation.
It begins at school.
Schools Indoctrinate Early
In the early years of children’s K-12 education, they get to read books like “It Feels So Good to Be Yourself,” an illustrated book for ages 4-8 that encourages kids to question their sex at any age. One example in the book is Ruthie, a biological boy who tells his parents that the doctors got it wrong, and he is now a girl. Ruthie is 5 years old.
As children get older and enter puberty, the books encouraging this only grow more plentiful. Students will often see titles such as “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” prominently displayed in their school libraries.
Meanwhile, school policies are changed to allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the sex with which they “identify,” to compete in sex-segregated athletic events pursuant to the sex with which they “identify,” and to be referred to by the “pronouns” they desire, regardless of whether other students and teachers have religious or moral objections.
Students who “identify” as a different sex are effectively given rights above and beyond everyone else. It’s no wonder young adolescents would deal with their growing pains in a way that gives them a feeling of acceptance, validation, and being part of a new “civil right.” In other words, a social contagion takes root.
Children are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. When this was highlighted in Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage,” the transgender lobby went on the attack, and her book was pulled from the shelves of Target. Those who dare suggest a social contagion is at play will be met with articles from corporate media citing so-called “experts” denying its existence. But now even a far-left whistleblower tells us of “clusters of girls” arriving at the clinic “from the same high school,” and says that “the doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.”
As this is all going on, schools work overtime to keep parents in the dark. Don’t like books encouraging transgenderism? Too bad, the book stays on the shelf and you had better hope you like being branded a “book banner.”
Even worse, schools require that staff not share with a student’s parents that their child is identifying as a different sex while at school. The reason? They consider transgender interventions to be health care, as articulated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. Therefore, if you are not providing such health care to your child, you are a child abuser. They often won’t say this out loud or call Child Protective Services on you, but make no mistake — it’s coming.
Resisting the Profit Seekers
None of this is to say there aren’t actual cases of gender dysphoria that occur when a person feels a persistent incongruence or disconnect between their biological sex and the one with which they identify. These cases are extremely rare (in .06 percent of the population), and approximately 75 percent of children with gender dysphoria will age out of this condition.
Further, and as noted first by Shrier and then by the whistleblower herself, prior to the 2010s the vast majority of cases involved boys, but beginning in 2015, “teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.”
Dealing with the rare cases of gender dysphoria is not what is happening, however. Rather, the powers that be have set up academia to become a pipeline for a dangerous ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents. That ideology denies biology to provide customers for a rapidly expanding market that has experienced exponential monetary growth and is on pace to grow 11.23 percent over the next 10 years to become a $5 billion industry.
If you speak out, you will face repercussions. The activists in the space do not play by the rules, and they will seek to cancel and destroy you for daring to question the mutilation of children. But if we have learned anything from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital whistleblower, it is that people must stand up to stop this unethical, dangerous, and anti-science war of physical destruction being waged on children, regardless of politics.
Ian Prior is a senior advisor to America First Legal and author of upcoming book “Parents of the World Unite!”
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies, and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning.
From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations, and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history — from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddied by birth.”
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, health care, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
Although no hard numbers exist on the exact size of the industry, the “DEIfication” of America is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, California, cash-strapped municipalities have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Startups and small companies that once relied on their own employees to promote an inclusive culture now feel compelled to hire diversity consultants and sensitivity trainers to set them straight.
At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute — about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average — about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.
For smaller organizations that cannot afford a full-time equity officer, there are other options for shoring up social justice bona fides — namely, working with any of the hundreds of DEI consulting agencies that have risen like mushrooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” millennials. With some firms, the social justice goals are unmistakable. The Racial Equity Institute is “committed to the work of anti-racist transformation” and challenging “patterns of power” on behalf of big-name clients like the Harvard Business School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With others, the appeal has less to do with social change than exploring marketing opportunities and creating a “with-it” company culture, where progressive politics complement the office foosball tables and kombucha on tap.
“Diversity wins!” declares the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Certainly diversity officers have been winning, although opposition is building in Florida and elsewhere, where the wider woke agenda that includes DEI has advanced. Even minimally trained practitioners are in high demand, and signs of their influence abound.
Major tech companies like Google publicly chart the “Black+ and Latinx+” people they’ve hired and assure the public that Artificial Intelligence will prioritize the DEI political agenda. ChapGPT, an AI model that can generate remarkably cogent writing, has been designed with a liberal bias, summarily rejecting requests that don’t conform to the algorithm’s notions of “positivity, equality and inclusivity.”
In education, college students are required to take DEI-prescribed courses. Community college employees in California are evaluated on their DEI competencies. Loyalty oaths to the DEI dogma are demanded of professors. Applicants to tenure-track positions, including those in math and physics, are rejected out of hand if their mandatory DEI statements are found wanting. Increasingly, DEI administrators are involved in hiring, promotion, and course content decisions.
“Academic departments are always thinking, ‘We need to run this by Diversity,’” says Glenn Ricketts, public affairs officer for the National Association of Scholars.
The industry’s reach can also be seen in the many Orwellian examples of exclusion in the name of inclusion, of reprisals in the name of tolerance. Invariably, they feature an agitated clutch of activists browbeating administrators and executives into apologizing for an alleged trespass against an ostensibly vulnerable constituency. When that has been deemed insufficient or when senior executives have sensed a threat to their own legitimacy, they’ve offered up scapegoats on false or flimsy pretexts. That might be a decades-long New York Times reporter, a head curator at a major art museum, an adjunct art history professor, a second-year law student, or a janitor at a pricey New England college. (The list is long.)
Often enough, the inquisitions have turned into public relations debacles for major institutions. But despite the intense criticism and public chagrin, the movement marches on.
The expansion “happened gradually at first, and people didn’t recognize the tremendous growth,” Perry says. “But after George Floyd, it really accelerated. It became supercharged. And nobody wanted to criticize it because they would been seen as racists.”
Not playing along with the DEI protocols can end an academic career. For example, when Gordon Klein, a UCLA accounting lecturer, dismissed a request to grade black students more leniently in 2020, the school’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office intervened to have him put on leave and banned from campus. A counter-protest soon reversed that. However, when Klein also declined to write a DEI statement explaining how his work helped “underrepresented and underserved populations,” he was denied a standard merit raise, despite excellent teaching evaluations. (He is suing for defamation and other alleged harms.)
Scores of professors and students have also been subject to capricious, secretive, and career-destroying investigations by Title IX officers, who work hand-in-glove with DEI administrators, focusing on gender discrimination and sexual harassment. As writer and former Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis recounts in “Unwanted Advances,” individuals can be brought up on charges without any semblance of due process, as she was, simply for “wrongthink” — that is, for having expressed thoughts that someone found objectionable.
With activist administrators assuming the role of grand inquisitors, “the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear,” she writes. And it would appear that students and professors would have it no other way. By and large, they want more bureaucratic intervention and regulations, not less.
As more institutions create DEI offices and hire ever more managers to run them, the enterprise inevitably becomes self-justifying. According to Parkinson’s Law, bureaucracy needs to create more work, however unnecessary or unproductive, to keep growing. Growth itself becomes the overriding imperative. The DEI movement needs the pretext of inequities, real or contrived, to maintain and expand its bureaucratic presence. As Malcolm Kyeyume, a Swedish commentator and self-described Marxist, writes: “Managerialism requires intermediation and intermediation requires a justifying ideology.”
Ten years ago, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg found that the ratio of administrators to students had doubled since 1975. With the expansion of DEI, there are more administrators than ever, most of whom have no academic background. On average, according to a Heritage Foundation study, major universities across the country currently employ 45 “diversicrats,” as Perry calls them. With few exceptions, they outnumber the faculty in history departments, often two or three to one.
At Michigan, Perry wasn’t able to find anyone with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in his job title until 2004; and for the next decade, such positions generally remained centralized at the provost level, working for the university as a whole. But in 2016, Michigan president Mark Schlissel announced that the university would invest $85 million in DEI programs. Soon after, equity offices began to “metastasize like a cancer,” Perry says, across every college, department, and division, from the college of pharmacy to the school’s botanical garden and arboretum, where a full-time DEI manager is now “institutionalizing co-liberatory futures.” All the while, black enrollment at Michigan has dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1996.
Despite the titles and the handsome salaries, most DEI administrative positions are support staff jobs, not teaching or research positions. In contrast with the provisions of Title IX, DEI is not mandated by law; it is entirely optional. DEI officers nevertheless exert enormous influence, in part because so few people oppose them. The thinking seems to be that if you’re against the expanding and intrusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, you must be for the opposite — discrimination, inequality, and exclusion.
“By telling themselves that they’re making the world a better place, they get to throw their weight around,” says Ricketts. “They have a lot of money, a lot of leverage, and a lot of people who just don’t want to butt heads with them — people who just want to go along to get along. People who are thinking, ‘If we embrace DEI, nobody can accuse us of being racist or whatever.’ They’re trying to cover their backsides.”
Some organizations, it seems, are merely trying to keep up with cultural trends.
Consider Tucson, Arizona, where diversity is not a buzzy talking point but an everyday reality. With a population that is 44 percent Hispanic, 43 percent white, and only 4.6 percent black, the city has had no major racial incidents in decades. Yet like hundreds of others communities, Tucson suddenly decided in direct response to the Floyd murder 1,600 miles away that it needed an office of equity.
To many observers, it seemed that the city was just “getting jiggy with it,” pretending to solve a problem that didn’t exist. After a two-year search, it hired Laurice Walker, the youngest chief equity officer in the country, at age 28, with a salary of $145,000 — nearly three and a half times what Tucson’s mayor, Regina Romero, earns.
Not that the mayor is complaining. “I think this position is about putting an equity lens into all that we do,” Romero said in May, by which she means — well, nobody is quite sure what “equity” means, particularly with respect to federal legislation clearly prohibiting positive and negative discrimination alike.
But trying to get out in front of the DEI train can also result in getting run over by it.
When the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, hired Kimberlee Archie as its first equity and inclusion manager, its members probably didn’t anticipate being accused of having a “white supremacy culture.” After all, city manager Debra Campbell is black, as are three of the seven women making up the city council. The council had cut police funding and unanimously approved a reparations resolution.
Archie nevertheless complained that her colleagues still weren’t doing enough to advance racial equity. “What I describe it as is kind of like the bobblehead effect,” she said in 2020. “We’d be in meetings … and people’s heads are nodding as if they are in agreement. However, their actions didn’t back that up.”
The drama in western North Carolina illustrates a dilemma that organizations face going forward. They can pursue an aggressive political agenda in which white supremacy is considered the country’s defining ethos (per The New York Times’ “1619 Project“) and present discrimination as the only remedy to past discrimination (see Ibram X. Kendi). Or they take the path of least resistance, paying rhetorical tribute to DEI enforcers as the “bobbleheads” that Archie disparages but doing little more than that. After all, they still have universities, businesses, and sanitation departments to run, alumni and investors to satisfy, students to teach, research to pursue, roads to be paved, sewage to be treated, costs to be minimized, and profits to be maximized.
Perhaps, too, senior administrators and executives are beginning to realize that, despite the moral panic of 2020, the most culturally diverse country in the world might not be irredeemably racist, even if it’s no longer acceptable to say so. The United States twice elected an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. His first attorney general was a black man, who would be replaced by a black woman. His vice president would pick a woman of mixed race as his running mate. The mayors of 12 of the 20 largest U.S. cities are black, including the four largest cities.
Likewise, many of the people whom Americans most admire — artists, athletes, musicians, scientists, writers — are black. Lately, most winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants are people of color. Gay marriage is legal, and enjoys wide public support, even among conservatives. The disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent are applauded for their courage and resilience. And nonwhite groups, particularly Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, have been remarkably upwardly mobile (often without official favoritism).
Clearly, troubling disparities persist for African Americans. What’s much less clear is that racism, systemic or not, remains the principal cause of these disparities or that a caste of equity commissars will reverse them. And now, it would seem that narrowing these disparities runs counter to their self-interest.
“I don’t want to deny that there’s genuine goodwill on the part of some of these programs,” says Prof. Schuck, stressing that he hasn’t examined their inner workings. “But some of these conflicts are not capable of being solved by these gestures. They have to justify their own jobs, their own budgets, however. And that creates the potential for a lot of mischief. They end up trafficking in controversy and righteousness, which produces the deformities we’ve been seeing in policies and conduct.”
Still, to hear DEI officers, it’s they who are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Yes, they have important-sounding jobs and rather vague responsibilities. They are accountable to nobody, really. Rather than fighting “the man,” they now are the man, or at least the gender-neutral term for man in this context. But this also means that they are starting to catch flak, particularly as the evidence mounts that the institutions they advise and admonish aren’t actually becoming more fair, open, and welcoming. They’re not even becoming more ethnically diverse.
Like other DEI advocates, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education has declined to answer questions for this article. Its officers are too busy traveling to conferences to do so, a spokeswoman said.
But at a recent association meeting, Anneliese Singh of Tulane University invoked Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat to discrimination. Although Parks was a housekeeper and diversicrats have comfortable university sinecures, their struggles are analogously distressing, Singh suggested. The latter, too, are on the “front lines” in a harrowing war. However, she said, her colleagues needed to remember what mattered most: Looking out for themselves.
“It is not self-indulgence,” she said, now quoting the feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lord. “It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.”
For the moment, it’s a war Singh and her DEI colleagues are clearly winning.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Mere days after an F-22 fighter jet downed a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean, three unidentified flying objects were shot down over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan in just three days. The Biden administration pledged from day one to “bring transparency and truth back to government” but is eerily silent about what the objects were and why they were shot down.
Not only has President Joe Biden gone days without saying anything about the downed objects, but the Pentagon also refused to give clear answers to reporters or the public about the unusual activity in the sky. U.S. officials say they don’t know what the objects, which clock in at the size of a small car, are. They claim they don’t know what the objects are capable of nor do they know who sent them. They don’t even know how to hit some of them with a $400,000 missile on the first try.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of both U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), went so far as to say the U.S. hasn’t “ruled out anything” including an extraterrestrial threat, a claim the White House rejected on Monday.
That’s a bizarre statement that certainly does not instill confidence in Americans that our financially bloated Department of Defense can properly assess and neutralize threats to U.S. national security. That also means any reassurance from the Pentagon that “these objects don’t present a military threat to anyone on the ground,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday, is pure speculation. As is the White House’s claim that these “could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.” If the Pentagon does actually know what’s going on, then the DOD is clearly stonewalling any attempts to inform the public.
Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media alike are frustrated with the Biden administration’s lack of communication. Even after a classified briefing about the objects Tuesday, some senators say the Pentagon is deliberately keeping information from Americans.
“99% of what was discussed in that room today can be made public without compromising security in this country,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told Fox News.
If that’s the case, why aren’t Americans getting answers?
Rewind One Week
If the way the Biden administration handled the Chinese spy balloon at the beginning of the month means anything, we won’t get clear answers about these mysterious aircraft for a while — if at all.
It was a day after a big white object was spotted in Montana that reports indicated the Pentagon had “been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days.” If the balloon hadn’t been spotted by the public, there’s a good chance the DOD would not have told Americans about it.
Through The New York Times, an anonymous “official” at the Pentagon once again claimed without evidence that “the balloon did not pose a military or physical threat” to Americans.
When the Defense Department finally announced it downed the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean, an unnamed official at the DOD allegedly told reporters at an off-camera press briefing on Feb. 4 that Chinese balloons like this one “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”This unsourced claim spread like wildfire through the corporate media even though multiple Trump-era officials went on the record to deny it. It wasn’t until two days after the Pentagon’s initial accusation that VanHerck “clarified” that “we did not detect those threats” at the time Trump was in office. So, the DOD knew Trump couldn’t be blamed for failing to shoot balloons he was never informed about but let lies about the former administration spread among the public without consequence or pushback.
A Pentagon that prioritizes its political agenda ahead of the security of the American people it is sworn to protect clearly doesn’t have its priorities straight. Why should we believe anything they say about the series of UFOs?
Even if the Pentagon finally decides to release information about these last three objects, who sent them, and why they were hovering over North America, will Americans even believe it? Trust in the U.S. military is falling and currently sits under 50 percent. It has broken the trust of Americans, and that won’t be helped by further obscuring information.
I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on with the downed UFOs. What I do know is the Pentagon and the Biden administration both have long histories of lying to Americans to protect their political agendas.
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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
What we found: You can make a long road trip without fear of getting stranded, as long as you plan ahead.
That means juggling route-planning apps and billing accounts with various charging companies, which can get confusing.
And be prepared for the unexpected, like glitchy charging equipment touchscreens, billing questions and inoperable plugs.
First, the car: The EV6 is a great choice for a road trip because its 800-volt charging system makes it among the fastest charging EVs available today.
At a 350 kW DC fast-charger, the EV6’s battery can go from 10% to 80% (good for up to 217 miles) in under 18 minutes, according to Kia.
It’s also roomy and comfortable, with lots of advanced technology — including a heads-up display with augmented reality and various driver assistance technologies.
Details: My husband, Bill, set out from Detroit last Tuesday in the all-wheel-drive EV6 GT-Line, which has an EPA-estimated battery range of 274 miles.
The plan was to meet up in Washington, D.C., and then travel together to Winter Garden, Florida.
His first recharging stop was at an Electrify America station outside Cleveland, per the advice of an app called A Better Route Planner. But he was anxious about the car’s driving range.
What he said: “When I left Detroit, the temperatures were in the low 30s and the vehicle said it had a range of 216 miles. A Kia engineer told us that the cold would put extra stress on the battery, draining it faster than normal. So I used only the heated steering wheel and heated seats while driving — no cabin heat.”
After a chilly 151 miles, he arrived at the recharging spot with 16% left on the battery, which helped him get over his range anxiety.
“But I did learn a lesson: Know where your next charging stop is before you leave, and make sure to have extra range upon arrival in case that charger is inoperable.”
This was a leisurely trip, with stops to visit friends and do some sightseeing. If we cannonballed from Michigan to Florida, it would have taken about 24 hours. We did it over four days.
But we were constantly thinking about where to charge next. It occupied our minds more than where to eat or spend the night.
We stopped 12 times to recharge over the 1,500-mile journey. Charging times varied between 20 minutes and 55 minutes, depending on the state of the car’s battery and the speed of the chargers we used.
Sometimes we were just topping off to make it to the next destination.
The bottom line: Gradually, our confidence grew. We never felt range anxiety again — even when the battery level fell below 10% and the dashboard flashed orange warnings.
Yes, but: We learned a lot from the challenges we faced, and we’ll share our key takeaways in an upcoming story.
What’s next: We’ll be heading north again in a few weeks on a different route, so stay tuned.
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.
Imagine not only having injected 5.5 billion people with multiple doses of the failed COVID shots, but destroying lives and denying humane treatment on account of them. Now imagine knowing everything we know about the efficacy and safety of these novel therapies and still forging ahead with more doses and now RSV and flu shots built upon the same platform. Bad enough, right? Well, it gets even worse. Fauci now concedes that all respiratory viral vaccines are garbage, including those for flu, coronavirus, and RSV. Yet the policies never match the new admissions, as they race to accelerate the new flu and RSV shots within months.
In probably the most impactful story ignored by the media in recent weeks, Fauci co-authored an academic paper in Cell last month, along with the senior scientific adviser of NIAID, absolutely dumping on not just coronavirus vaccines, but all respiratory vaccines. It was a paper that could have been written by censored doctors like Ryan Cole, Peter McCullough, and Pierre Kory, and it reveals that Fauci indeed had a deep knowledge all along of the shortcomings of suboptimal antibody responses generated by this genre of vaccine.
First, the authors concede that flu vaccines are often only 14% effective and have never improved over the years. “After more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted.”
Then they go on to admit that the vaunted COVID shots are in the same boat. “Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent. The vaccines for these two very different viruses have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.”
Remember, to this very day, we still have children being kicked out of day-cares, people being denied organ transplants, and hospital workers losing their jobs on account of a premise that Fauci quite blatantly admits was false all along.
Fauci and company demonstrate the common thread between the failures of coronavirus, flu, and RSV vaccines in that respiratory viruses do not lend themselves to a blood-based antibody response, as so many of the doctors on my podcast have been saying for two years.
In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. … As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2, tend to repeatedly re-infect people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable protection.
Fauci et al. ask the question: “If natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”
Say what?!!! This got me banned from Twitter for six months! Fauci is acknowledging that this genre of vaccine – before we even explore the dangers with spike protein, mRNA, and lipid nano particles – simply does not target the virus in the respiratory tract and in fact never achieves immunity! You can keep getting the virus again and again, as we now see. But nothing that he is positing is new. This is not some new revelation. From reading the piece, it’s clear Fauci understood this principle of immunology all along. Yet to this day, there are still COVID shot (and even flu shot) mandates looming over the military, medical settings, schools, and other important places.
It’s not just a lack of efficacy on transmission. As we’ve been warning for two years based on doctors who got this right from day one, whenever you have a leaky, waning vaccine built upon suboptimal antibodies with a rapidly mutating virus, it creates immune tolerance and imprinting so that the misfiring of the immune response actually generates negative efficacy. While this paper does not officially acknowledge negative efficacy, it does acknowledge the concern of “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which stem from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”
Given that we now see endless negative efficacy associated with the COVID shots and numerous studies showing a misfiring of antibody classes, why is there no concern that this shot and other respiratory viral shots are causing immune tolerance leading to negative efficacy? Numerous flu shot studies warn about the shots tamping down T cell responses and making people more vulnerable to infection. Moderna’s clinical trial of COVID shots for babies seemed to be associated with a dramatic increase in RSV cases, which seemed to play out globally during the off-season surge of RSV in the summer of 2021 and the early fall of 2022.
So this is not just about failure to stop transmission, but also about clinical outcomes as well as negative efficacy. A Canadian study of vaccine efficacy during the 2018-2019 flu season found negative efficacy for some age groups because “vaccine mismatch [a form of original antigenic sin] may have negatively interacted with imprinted immunity.”
Despite all the fanfare around the flu shot, a 2005 study published in JAMA soberingly found that there was no correlation between “increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.” The only mortality decline researchers discovered was against H3N2 in those born before the 1968 pandemic because of natural immunity, not the vaccines.
Despite everything we now know (and people like Fauci clearly knew for years), you can’t go into a pharmacy for half the year without being harassed to get a flu shot, and many schools and places of work strongly encourage if not mandate it. But do any of these fake medical practitioners even understand the issues with suboptimal antibodies, negative efficacy of the flu shots, and immune suppression of T cells?
Fauci and company conclude the paper with a shocking concession about these long-standing respiratory vaccines and the ones currently being studied, including RSV vaccines:
Challenges to developing next-generation respiratory vaccines are many and complex (Table 2). We must better understand why multiple sequential mucosal infections with the same circulating respiratory viruses, spread out over decades of life, fail to elicit natural protective immunity, especially with viruses that lack significant antigenic drift (e.g., RSV and parainfluenzaviruses), if we are to rationally develop vaccines that prevent them. We must think outside the box to make next-generation vaccines that elicit immune protection against viruses that survive in human populations because of their ability to remain significantly outside of the full protective reach of human innate and adaptive immunity.
Any sane person reading these statements does not get the impression that Fauci believes we are just weeks away from cracking the code on RSV shots. He believes the challenges are “many and complex,” are prone to mutation with “antigenic drift,” and require “outside the box” thinking to “make next-generation vaccines.”
With remarks like this from the undisputed champion of the vaccine movement, how are we to accept an RSV and flu shot – not just on the traditional platform but on the dangerous mRNA platform – being forced upon us within months through expedited review? How do we not have legal safeguards in place to subject Moderna, essentially created and funded originally by DARPA, to liability and to prevent all mandates, coercion, and pressure to take it? How do we not have a better pharmacovigilance system in place? How do we not fix what went wrong with the trials for COVID? Then again, the FDA plans to keep producing and administering the same COVID shots that are for variants that don’t exist, which Fauci acknowledges in this piece is a function of the problematic antigenic drift.
Do facts no longer matter? Do human lives no longer matter? And for what? For the flu and RSV that we’ve lived with for decades?
Despite everything we are seeing about respiratory viral vaccines failing and mRNA not staying in the shoulder muscle, the FDA has granted Moderna “breakthrough therapy” designation for its RSV mRNA shot. This is a status usually granted for targeted treatment for deadly ailments that allows the FDA to speed up approval process, yet it is now being used for a virus that’s been around for decades and with a biological platform that everyone agrees has just failed. Pfizer and GSK also have RSV shots in the pipeline, and both Moderna and Pfizer have mRNA flu shots likely to be released later this year.It’s quite evident at this point that all of the safety nets protecting the public from Joseph Mengele-like experimentation have been breached. Our will to fight back is all we have left.
Students crowd the altar at Hughes Auditorium at Asbury University during a revival event that began on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. | Josh Sadlon
In the Asbury University newspaper we read: “Very few seats remain empty, but people crowd the walls, the floor and the balcony. It’s been almost 60 hours since a pure Holy Spirit revival broke out.” Others declare they have never seen the student chapel with so many people. It started in a normal chapel service where there was a confession of sin by a student and 30 people stayed behind to seek God.
As we browse social media and look up hashtags such as #asburyrevival, one cannot miss all the criticisms, judgments and doubts about what is happening. The critical voices seem to be very loud shouting over some of the rejoicings by others.
The services have been not four or five hours but virtually non-stop for the last 100+ hours. Some are decrying this as “emotionalism.” This sort of thing is not just breaking the mold but making a lot of people feel uncomfortable or convicted!
If we consider revival history, there have always been the unusual, with God working in ways that broke the molds of those days.
Often, the generation after a revival seeks to sanitize it and the radical things God did through it. It is best to let God be God and not try and explain away everything or discard what was seemingly extreme.
Here are a few reasons why we often doubt when revival takes place:
1. When it goes beyond our ability or experience
When God called Moses or any other person by faith, it went against the natural reason and ability of the individual. If God’s call can be accomplished in our own strength, it’s not a call from God. Revival always empowers believers to do what they cannot do on their own.
God’s work always requires God’s strength to accomplish it. The Bible goes so far as to say that whatever is not done in “faith” is actually sin. If we are not acting in ways beyond our strength and ability, we are not acting in faith.
When God is doing a work by His Spirit, we need to tread slowly, carefully examining the fruit by His Word. God will not act contrary to His written Word, but neither will He act in-line with our preferences in order to please our carnal minds or appetites. We pray like this: “God, send revival but just do it when we want and how we want it!” Of course, words like that don’t really fall from our lips, but if we’re honest, that is really what is in our hearts.
2. When it goes against our rational mind
We can fall into the danger of ignoring what the Spirit of God desires in a revival.
One way we can position ourselves is by humbly praying: “God please send revival; do it how you want; when you want; in whatever way you want; with whomever you want.” Or, at the very least, we can come to God asking Him to bend our wills to His own so we think and pray according to His will.
Revival is considered too loud or emotional by some. Sometimes revival breaks a traditional mold that has been in place for many years. The fact is that from time to time, God starts to run the Church in the way He desires, not in ways that we find acceptable or comfortable.
3. When it is something new
John Wesley, early in his ministry, started doubting the work of God in his midst. He was later part of the great Methodist Revival in England.
In his journal we read, “Sat. 16. We met at Fetter-lane, to humble ourselves before God, and own he had justly withdrawn his Spirit from us, for our manifold unfaithfulness. We acknowledged our having grieved him by our divisions and above all, by blaspheming his work among us, imputing it either to nature, to the force of imagination and animal spirits, or even to the delusion of the devil.”
The work of God was so powerful and “new” that he doubted God’s work.
We read again in his journal, “In that hour, we found God with us as at the first. Some fell prostrate upon the ground. Others burst out, as with one consent, into loud praise and thanksgiving. And many openly testified, there had been no such day as this since January the first preceding.”
God had mercy on Wesley and the move of God continued.
If the presence of God is not with us, are we grieving Him? May we humble ourselves and pursue Him as our first love.
God can have mercy and help you in carrying forth His purposes through the revivals He initiates.
Is God sending revival in Asbury College? At the very least we know something strange is going on. May we be careful not to doubt, grieve or criticize God’s work.
Greg Gordon is the founder of SermonIndex.net, which was established in 2002. Millions of audio sermons have been distributed through this world-wide ministry. He has also been involved in organizing over 12 international historic revival conference events where thousands of lives were impacted. Website: https://www.sermonindex.net/. email: greg@sermonindex.net
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency on February 27, 2021, in Orlando, Florida. Begun in 1974, CPAC brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has signed a bill into law that bans sex change surgeries and experimental puberty blockers for children and teens who struggle with their sexual identities and can be influenced into having irreversible procedures, such as chemical castration.
Noem signed House Bill 1080, also known as the “Help Not Harm” bill, on Monday, days after the state Legislature overwhelmingly passed the legislation.
“South Dakota’s kids are our future. With this legislation, we are protecting kids from harmful, permanent medical procedures,” said Noem in a statement. “I will always stand up for the next generation of South Dakotans.”
The signing of the bill received praise from groups like the American Principles Project, which noted that South Dakota was the seventh state to pass such legislation.
“The transgender industry’s assault on vulnerable children is appalling,” stated APP President Terry Schilling. “Kids rushed into dangerous, life-changing procedures without fully comprehending the consequences. Parents [were] misled or even outright cut out of the process. It is truly a horror show.”
“Noem and South Dakota legislators deserve a great deal of credit for acting to protect children in their state from this medical malpractice. The momentum for this movement fighting the transgender industry continues to grow, and we’re just getting started.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, which supports the trans-ing of kids, by contrast, denounced the signing of HB 1080, claiming in a Facebook post that “Noem signed a law banning gender-affirming health care for any transgender person under 18.”
“This ban won’t stop South Dakotans from being trans, but it will deny them critical support that helps struggling transgender youth grow up to become thriving transgender adults,” the ACLU said.
“As much as Gov. Noem wants to force these young people to live a lie, we know they are strong enough to live their truth, and we will always fight for communities and policies that protect their freedom to do so.”
The ACLU of South Dakota vowed to continue to fight on behalf of trans-identified youth, pointing out that courts have blocked similar laws in Alabama and Arkansas.
According to the new law, “a healthcare professional may not, for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or to validate a minor’s perception of, the minor’s sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
This prohibition includes banning puberty blockers, the administering of “testosterone, estrogen, or progesterone, in amounts greater than would normally be produced endogenously in a healthy individual of the same age and sex” and surgeries that involve castration or sterilization.
The law provided exemptions for treatments involving a child that was “born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development, including external biological sex characteristics that are irresolvable ambiguous,” any minor “diagnosed with a disorder of sexual development” or a child that needs “treatment for an infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused or exacerbated by any action or procedure prohibited” by the law.
Additionally, if a medical professional began performing sex reassignment surgeries for a minor before July 1 and it is determined that “immediately terminating the minor’s use of the drug or hormone would cause harm to the minor,” then the drugs can be “systematically reduced” during a period that “may not extend beyond December 31, 2023.”
The Biden administration is facing scrutiny over the Ohio train derailment that ultimately prompted officials to conduct a controlled burning of toxic, cancer-causing gases as new details emerge surrounding the incident.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has faced mounting criticism for largely ignoring the derailment that happened earlier this month in East Palestine, involving about 50 train cars. On Monday, Buttigieg spoke at an event where he emphasized that infrastructure jobs in urban areas typically go to White workers from other neighborhoods.
“The people of East Palestine, Ohio, and folks across the country … do not live in this sphere that matters to Pete Buttigieg and the Biden administration and that is the politically delicious world of intersectionality,” FOX Business host Dagen McDowell said during “Outnumbered” on Tuesday.
“Democrats, liberals and the left have repeatedly denigrated people like those who are now living in this Chernobyl that is East Palestine, Ohio, calling them deplorables, bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles, smelly Walmart choppers,” she continued.
“I can go down the list of ways that the left and people like Buttigieg and people who represent Biden and his administration, even Biden himself, have showed their disdain, that runs deep and wide.”
FILE – A black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of a controlled detonation of a portion of the derailed Norfolk Southern trains, Feb. 6, 2023. ((AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, file))
Buttigieg addressed the disaster twice via Twitter this week, but has been called out for not doing more, even by members of his own party.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was one of those critics demanding action from the Biden administration official.
“East Palestine railroad derailment will have a significant negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the residents for decades and there is almost zero national media attention,” she tweeted on Monday.
“We need Congressional inquiry and direct action from Pete Buttigieg to address this tragedy,” she continued.
The train originally derailed on Feb. 3, but it wasn’t until three days later that officials conducted a controlled burn of the toxins inside the cars in order to avoid an explosion.
This photo taken with a drone shows the continuing cleanup of portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed Friday night in East Palestine, Ohio, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023. ( (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar))
Following the burn, black smoke tainted the community as toxins like vinyl chloride, hydrogen chloride and phosgene filled the air.
Govs. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and Josh Shapiro, D-Penn., along with officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the air quality has been tested many times since the controlled burn and is safe for consumption despite community concerns.
But some residents are reportedly experiencing breathing trouble and other symptoms that they worry could be associated with the incident.
Buttigieg made a public appearance on Monday and failed to address the disaster but spoke about construction sites not employing local workers in minority communities and outsourcing the jobs to White people. He took to Twitter again on Tuesday to ensure residents that their safety is the utmost priority.
“From day one, our USDOT personnel have been assisting in the response to the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio,” he tweeted. “As NTSB conducts its investigation and EPA works to keep residents safe, our Federal Rail and Pipeline and Hazardous Material teams will continue to offer support.“
From day one, our USDOT personnel have been assisting in the response to the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio. As NTSB conducts its investigation and EPA works to keep residents safe, our Federal Rail and Pipeline and Hazardous Material teams will continue to offer support.
Regardless, the bipartisan scrutiny surrounding Buttigieg’s handling of the derailment has grown in recent days. McDowell called his absence “disgraceful.”
“Buttigeig has really hit a new low here,” McDowell said. “You mentioned this was February the third, and the fact that it took Ilhan Omar going on Twitter and shining a light on how embarrassing he is, and really plumbing new depths of heartlessness by ignoring what is a toxic waste site with farm animals dying, thousands of fish dying in creeks.”
“Questions about whether the Ohio River is now contaminated, and he couldn’t pick up his phone and maybe record a video for the people of East Palestine, Ohio?” she questioned. “From empathy to antipathy, it’s disgraceful.”
Earlier on “Fox & Friends,” author and potential 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy slammed Buttigieg for focusing on issues of equity and climate change instead of actual threats to human health.
“That’s one of the problems with the focus of our leaders, even as it relates to environmental issues. If it does not relate to their narrative of existential threats, risks from climate change or diversity in workforces, for that matter, it doesn’t get the level of attention that it needs. This is actually a tragic incident and should be a wake-up call. But so far, their response suggests that they’re still asleep at the switch,” he said.
Bailee Hill is an associate editor with Fox News Digital. Story ideas can be sent to bailee.hill@fox.com
As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
Three of the 10 counties chosen as beneficiaries of a program from the nonprofit that helped fund the private takeover of government election offices in 2020 are refusing to accept those dollars leading up to the 2024 cycle.
Election officials from Brunswick and Forsyth Counties in North Carolina and Ottawa County in Michigan have chosen not to accept funds from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a program that plans to funnel $80 million in election grants to jurisdictions across the country over the next five years. The alliance is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of two groups that funneled over $328 million of private money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as “Zuckbucks,” to government election offices mostly in the blue counties of swing states, mobilizing Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and swinging the race in Joe Biden’s favor.
Many of the jurisdictions chosen as recipients for the 2024 cycle lean heavily Democrat and are located in swing states, indicating CTCL is hoping to replicate its successful scheme in the next presidential election in purple states Democrats need to win, such as Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. While CTCL might once again try to hide its efforts by claiming the alliance is also giving money to red counties, expect more than double or triple the funds to be spent on Democratic-leaning counties compared to Republican ones, just like in 2020.
Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told RealClearInvestigations he will refuse the grant money offered to his county because of transparency concerns. When Roebuck asked the alliance about its criteria for the amount of money given to each county, those running the program refused to give a clear answer.
Tim Tsujii, director of elections for the Forsyth County Board of Elections, told RealClear that Forsyth will not take any grant money because the county has adequate funds to administer its elections. Forsyth and Brunswick Counties will still be part of the alliance, but Tsujii raised concerns about members having to pay a fee for being part of the program.
“There is all this talk about the money going to elections offices and the counties, but what about the money going from the counties to the alliance?” Tsujii said.
To be a part of the alliance, election offices must pay an annual fee, $1,600 for a basic membership or $4,800 for premium, which the CTCL-created program says gives officials access to “coaching,” tutorials, consulting, and any other as-needed handholding, such as revamping voter forms and websites. The alliance also obligates members “to make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance,” such as participating in its events and sharing election data, documents, and forms.
While the program goes to great lengths to stress its “commitment to nonpartisanship” — “We will never attempt to influence the outcome of any election. Period” — its own founding organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has demonstrated the catastrophic and deeply partisan consequences of welcoming outside groups to infiltrate government election offices.
These three jurisdictions are not the only beneficiaries raising concerns about the integrity of the alliance and the problems associated with accepting its funds. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut, narrowly approved a $500,000 grant from the program after town representatives and concerned residents wrote a letter to their local newspaper signaling their opposition to accepting the grant. The letter cited outside influence by the partisan groups in Greenwich’s election process as one reason to reject the funds.
As RealClearInvestigations noted:
When [Greenwich] residents heard that its elections office was tapped to receive $500,000 in grant money from the CTCL, a member of the town’s legislative council sent an email to the center seeking more information, including audits of the group’s books, a copy of the group’s annual report, and its conflict-of-interest policy.
The CTCL declined to provide the documents, insisting that its audited financials and conflict policies “are not publicly filed documents.”
The alliance has also failed to disclose how exactly the grant money will be used, instead keeping things vague and saying it will vary depending on each office. But if CTCL’s past is prologue, that could mean working with left-wing third-party groups to create absentee ballot forms, targeting likely-Democratic voters by harvesting and curing their ballots, and crafting automatic voter registration systems. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is already hoping to do this on a much broader scale than in 2020. As The Federalist previously reported, CTCL has an elaborate plan to infiltrate more than 8,000 local election departments across the country by 2026.
That county election officials and town leaders are suspicious of the alliance and are starting to opt out of its grant money should set off alarm bells for other jurisdictions committed to conducting free and fair elections. Unless more localities reject these private funds and memberships, CTCL — under the guise of its new U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence program — will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.
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.
One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.
The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.
Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks. The point of amplifying the report is twofold. First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run. The Washington Post is clear about that:
Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.
Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented history of enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.
Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan even bizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden family business leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.
The Political Enemy Playbook
Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.
They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.
Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomal of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be.
There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.
They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.
“Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.”
Why COBALT? It’s one of the primary components of EV batteries.
No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.
Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government, the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.
When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.
It’s About Joe, Stupid
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.
“Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections. Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”
Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.
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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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.
For the third straight year, the black national anthem was performed at the Super Bowl. NFL fans were deeply divided on whether it was appropriate to perform the black national anthem before Super Bowl 57.
Before the Philadelphia Eagles took on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII at State Farm Stadium in Arizona, 10-time Academy of Country Music award-winner Chris Stapleton sang the national anthem. Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds – a 12-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist, songwriter, and producer – sang “America the Beautiful.”
Emmy-winning actress and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was designated as the “black national anthem” in 1917 by the NAACP.
Reactions on Twitter show NFL fans were staunchly opposed and vehemently supportive of the black national anthem being performed at Super Bowl LVII.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.): “America only has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing multiple!? Do football, not wokeness.”
TheBlaze contributor Delano Squires: “I grew up singing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ during assembly in my all-black elementary school. We also sang the Star Spangled Banner and said the pledge. It’s a beautiful hymn, but I feel like it’s being used by people who think we need a new founding (1619), flag, and anthem.”
Political pundit CJ Pearson: “The National Anthem is for EVERY American. What’s the purpose of a black one? Super Bowl Sunday should UNITE America, not divide it by race. It’s not the 1960s.”
TheBlaze contributor T.J. Moe: “Thank God we played the ‘blacknational anthem.’ Nothing screams unity like separating everything.”
Police officer and podcast host Zeek Arkham: “My ‘black’ National Anthem is the same anthem I’ve been singing since I was a child. The same one children of all races have been singing. My National Anthem never needed a color. Do they want racism to die, or do they want to keep finding ways to divide us all?”
Former GOP candidate Lavern Spicer: “The BlackNational Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. The White National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. The Mixed National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. If you live in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, your National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner.”
Commentator Matt Walsh: “No other country on Earth is ridiculous enough to permit different racial groups to perform their own national anthems before major events.”
Actor Kevin Sorbo: “The @NFL is going to play a black national anthem before the Super Bowl. Seems racist and divisive.”
Radio host Gerry Callahan: “The ‘Black National Anthem’ could be the single best example of corporate cowardice and shameless pandering in American history. You have one national anthem or no national anthem. Roger Goodell is pathetic.”
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier: “There is no Blacknational anthem. There is no White national anthem. There is no Hispanic national anthem. There is only THE National Anthem. God Bless America!”
Former GOP candidate James Bradley: “Having a black national anthem is just another way that Democrats keep us divided.”
Political commentator Jack Posobiec: “The only thing that can unite America forever is creating separate national anthems for each different ethnic groups. I demand each one be played before every game Especially the Super Bowl.”
There were people who supported the black national anthem being played at the Super Bowl.
Republican strategist Paris Dennard: “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was a poem written by Republican, James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother put it to music and it was first performed by children at Johnson’s segregated FL elementary school to celebrate Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s birthday – which is today.”
Forbes writer Exavier Pope: “It’s informally called the Black National Anthem, but that’s not the name of the song & when the song is referenced by Black people, we use the formal title of the song. Also, to refuse the song is to dismiss its origin, history, it’s lineage, & all the reasons it STILL matters.”
Journalist Skylar Baker-Jordan: “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has been called the Black national anthem for longer than ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ has been the U.S. national anthem. This tweet is for all the conservatives currently or about to lose their s**t over a song praising God and freedom.”
Public education activist Mitchell Robinson: “Please add ‘Black national anthem’ to pronouns, books, schools, LGBTQ folks, and the other harmless things that frighten conservatives.”
Screenwriter Matt Mikalatos: “What’s especially baffling to me is Christians complaining about a hymn playing before the Super Bowl. Maybe they should reflect on the lyrics.”
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (the "Black National Anthem") has been playing before *every* NFL game this season.
What's especially baffling to me is Christians complaining about a hymn playing before the Super Bowl. Maybe they should reflect on the lyrics. pic.twitter.com/xIe2vtxAhE
A previously recorded version of the black national anthem sung by Alicia Keys was played at Super Bowl LV in 2021. Gospel duo Mary Mary and Youth Orchestra performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during Super Bowl LVI in 2022.
Jason Allen/ISI Photos / Contributor, Nick Cammett / Stringer, Cooper Neill / Contributor, Tim Nwachukwu / Staff, Mitchell Leff / Contributor, Cooper Neill / Contributor | Getty Images
Let’s call it “The Sopranos Bowl.”
Super Bowl LVII, Kansas City’s 38-35 victory, unseated “Made in America,” the finale of the iconic HBO mob series, as the worst ending in television history.
With a little less than two minutes to play and the score tied at 35-35, a would-be Super Bowl classic cut to black, leaving more than 100 million fans pondering what could have been.
Would Philly capo Jalen Hurts rally the Eagles from a three-point deficit and win the game or force overtime? Or did Kansas City underboss Patrick Mahomes and button man Harrison Butker whack the Eagles?
We’ll never know because a referee flagged Philly corner James Bradberry for defensive holding on third and eight at the Philadelphia 15-yard line. The penalty gave the Chiefs a first down, allowed them to drain the clock, and set up a game-ending 27-yard field goal with eight seconds to play.
The unnecessary and unjustified call ruined the Super Bowl.
I don’t care that Bradberry defended the ref.
“It was holding,” Bradberry told reporters. “I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.”
No dice. No way.
It was a horrible call. I’ve watched the replays a dozen times. Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster never broke stride. Bradberry’s contact never impeded Smith-Schuster from getting into his route. The refs stayed out of the game for 58 minutes. There were no mystery holding calls in the secondary or along the line of scrimmage. It was a clean game. It was a great game. Until the bogus holding penalty on Bradberry.
I’m not a bitter Eagles fan. I’m a happy Chiefs fan. I lived and worked in Kansas City for 16 years. My mother moved to Kansas City in 1984. I moved there in 1994. The Chiefs are my favorite football team. I bet money on Kansas City winning Sunday’s game. I’m thrilled with the outcome.
It’s the same way I feel about “The Sopranos.” It’s one of my two or three favorite shows in the history of television. It’s right there with “The Wire” and “The Shield.”
But more than anything else, “The Sopranos” is remembered for its trash ending. The screen cut to black. Sopranos fans have spent years arguing whether a hit man in a Members Only jacket clipped Tony Soprano as he ate dinner with Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. as “Don’t Stop Believin’” played on the jukebox.
Endings are important. They can taint the memory of an otherwise perfect story. “The Sopranos” might be the undisputed king of television if not for its blown final episode.
A perfect ending can elevate a TV show. “The Shield” pulled off the greatest finale in history. “Family Meeting,” “The Shield’s” final 72-minute episode, is flawless. Dirty cop Shane Vendrell poisons his wife and kid and then blows his own head off. Dirty cop Ronnie Gardocki is dragged off to jail seconds after finding out his trusted leader, Vic Mackey, snitched to save himself. Mackey forfeits his kids and career, is exposed as a cop killer, and is trapped at a desk job surrounded by federal agents who hate him.
The ending enriched all seven seasons and the 87 preceding episodes of “The Shield.”
Sunday’s Super Bowl was a bitter reminder of what’s wrong with the NFL. Referees have too much influence over the outcomes. They have too many judgment calls to make. The officiating is uneven and inconsistent. Sometimes the games feel manipulated. Calls of pass interference and roughing the passer determine outcomes more than the players.
I don’t believe the NFL is rigged. Nor do I believe former NFL running back Arian Foster’s outrageous suggestion that the games follow a script.
What was scripted was the reaction to Sunday’s game-deciding penalty.
I believe the NFL persuaded Bradberry and the Eagles not to whine about the costly penalty. I believe the league persuaded its television partners to downplay the penalty on Sunday. I don’t blame the NFL for this. It’s smart business. The league’s showcase event botched the ending. Roger Goodell wants fans talking about the magnificent performances of Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Nick Bolton, the Kansas City linebacker. It’s better to discuss the coaching brilliance of Andy Reid than the fact that NFL referees are in an impossible position.
Remember the Saints-Rams pass-interference no-call that sent Los Angeles to the 2019 Super Bowl?
The refs swallowed their whistles and let the players decide the game. The refs were ripped. Saints coach Sean Payton whined for months. He wore a Roger Goodell clown T-shirt. A New Orleans fan filed a lawsuit against the NFL (and later dropped it).
The “Nola No Call” in the NFC Championship is more memorable than the Patriots’ 13-3 Super Bowl victory.
Whelp, this time a ref didn’t swallow his flag. He threw it. He directly influenced the end of the game.
The NFL is a television show. Its goal is to create television stars. Its biggest star, Tom Brady, just retired. Patrick Mahomes is the next man up. The NFL is determined to stop a bogus penalty from tainting Mahomes’ second Super Bowl title.
The final episode of “The Sopranos” aired in June 2007, well before the social media matrix distorted truth with controlled narrative. Sixteen years ago, we were all free to rip “Made in America.” Now algorithms and partnerships determine criticism and dissent.
They want us to “fuhgeddaboudit.” That’s Sopranos slang for “forget about it.”
Democrats are working overtime to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next candidate will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A state court judge refused to halt the Texas Bar’s assault on Attorney General Ken Paxton for his decision to challenge several swing states’ execution of the 2020 election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a little-noticed perfunctory order published in late January revealed.
While the partisan targeting of Paxton represents but one of the many attempts by Democrats to weaponize state bars to dissuade attorneys from representing Republicans, court documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that in the case of the Texas attorney general, the bar went nuclear.
In March of 2022, as Paxton prepared to face Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the May 2022 GOP runoff for attorney general, news leaked that the State Bar of Texas intended to advance an ethics complaint against the Republican attorney general. Then, soon after Paxton prevailed in the primary, on May 25, 2022, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which is a standing committee of the State Bar of Texas, filed a disciplinary complaint against Paxton in the Collin County, Texas district court.
While the Texas Bar’s disciplinary complaint represents an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on the attorney general, as will be detailed shortly, the backstory is nearly as troubling — both the machinations underlying the charge against Paxton and, more broadly, the barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.
Bars Gone Rogue
The D.C. Bar’s investigation into former Trump administration Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark based on a complaint from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., exemplifies the partisan co-opting of the various professional responsibility boards charged with overseeing attorneys’ conduct.
In Clark’s case, the ethics charge was both “demonstrably false and premised on the fraudulent narratives pushed by the partisan politicians running the Jan. 6 show trial and their partners in the press.” Yet Clark has been forced to fight for his livelihood because the D.C. Bar allowed Democrats to convert a disagreement over Clark’s legal opinion into a question of professional ethics. Clark has attempted to put a halt to the proceedings by moving to remove the case to the federal district court, but Clark’s motion has been stalled there for several months.
More recently, the California State Bar joined in the political witch hunt when it filed a 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint against attorney and former law professor John Eastman. The California State Bar’s complaint alleged Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” As I wrote at the time:
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible for any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
Eastman’s long and costly battle against the California Bar is only beginning. And that is precisely the point of involving state bars: to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next presidential candidate — or senatorial or congressional candidate — will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A Broader Campaign
These efforts are well-coordinated and well-funded, with the group 65 Project launching in March of 2022 ethics complaints against 10 lawyers who worked on election lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election. According to Influence Watch, “65 Project was ‘devised’ by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss,” and is managed by attorney Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with the DNC-connected law firm Perkins Coie. David Brock, of Media Matters fame, advises the group, and the advisory board includes, among others, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
The 65 Project reportedly “seeks to disbar 111 lawyers from 26 states in total,” but is “not targeting any Democratic-aligned attorneys who have challenged election laws or results in the past.” Rather, the project’s sole aim is Republican lawyers, such as Eastman, with the group pushing for Eastman’s disbarment from the Supreme Court Bar.
It is not merely private attorneys the Democrat project targets, however. In September, the 65 Project filed complaints against the attorneys general of 15 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, advocating the bars in those states take disciplinary action against the attorneys general for conduct related to the 2020 election.
Texas AG Paxton didn’t make the list, though, because local Democrats had already taken up the charge. And here, the backstory reveals the troubling politicization of state bars is not limited to Democratic-connected groups like the 65 Project or to the bars in leftist locales such as D.C. and California.
Anti-Paxton Crusade
In Paxton’s case, the state bar received at least 85 complaints about Paxton related to Texas v. Pennsylvania. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel reviewed the complaints and dismissed them, finding “the information alleged did not demonstrate Professional Misconduct.” But then four attorneys appealed the dismissal, including one who, according to court filings, was the president of the Galveston Island Democrats and a friend of a Democrat seeking to run against Paxton for attorney general in the then-upcoming 2022 election.
An appeals body within the Texas State Board reversed the dismissal of the complaints, and later a fifth complaint was added to the charges against Paxton. Paxton was then forced to respond to the allegations, which itself proved difficult because they consisted of vague rhetoric, such as claims that Paxton “violated his duty and obligations as a Texas attorney” and “filed an utterly frivolous lawsuit,” bringing “shame and disrespect to the State of Texas and the legal community of Texas.”
Nonetheless, Paxton filed a detailed response, expanded on the theories Texas asserted in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and provided the bar with an extensive discussion of the factual and legal basis underpinning the court filings. The Texas Bar then handed the complaints over to what Paxton described as “an investigatory panel comprised of six unelected lawyers and activists from Travis County.”
As Paxton’s later court filings would stress, “as a group, the panel donated thousands of dollars to federal, state, and local candidates and causes opposed to Attorney General Paxton.” “What’s more,” Paxton argued in opposing the bar’s case against him, “members of the panel voted consistently in Democratic primaries for over a decade. Several have maintained highly partisan social media accounts hostile to Paxton.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan panel found “just cause” existed to believe that Paxton had violated a catch-all provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, namely the canon prohibiting attorneys from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
But in making this finding and filing a disciplinary petition in the state court, the Texas Bar wholely ignored the fundamental flaw in its crusade against Paxton — and one of constitutional dimension: The state bar, as a bureaucratic arm of the judicial branch, violates the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of separation of powers by challenging Paxton’s execution of his duties as attorney general.
Separation of Powers
Paxton concisely exposed this reality in his briefing, first quoting Texas precedent that teaches: “The Texas Separation of Powers provision is violated … when one branch unduly interferes with another branch so that the other branch cannot effectively exercise its constitutionally assigned powers.” “The Commission’s suit against the Attorney General violates the Separation-of-Powers doctrine,” Paxton continued, because the “decision to file Texas v. Pennsylvania is committed entirely to the Attorney General’s discretion. No quasi-judicial body like the Commission can police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.”
In seeking the dismissal of the state bar complaint against him based on separation-of-powers principles, Paxton’s argument shows the politicization process becomes nuclear when the target is the state’s attorney general, writing: “Unelected administrarors from the judicial branch attempting to stand in judgment of the elected attorney general who is the sole executive officers with the authority to represent the State of Texas in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
While it is bad enough that the state bar has been used as a sword to attack political enemies, such as Eastman in California and Clark in D.C., to deter attorneys in the future from representing unpopular cases or parties, the weaponization of the state bar against a state’s attorney general is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. As Paxton wrote:
No other attorney in Texas, no one else on the planet can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the State … but we’ve got an administrative arm of the judicial branch, unelected state bureaucrats telling the chief legal officer of the State of Texas how he can exercise his sole prerogative and his exclusive authority to bring a civil lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas.
Yet unelected bureaucrats — many of whom are political enemies of Paxton — have put the attorney general literally on trial for exercising the executive function with which he was constitutionally charged. And while Paxton fully briefed his position — that as a matter of constitutional law and the doctrine of separation of powers, the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed on the bar’s complaint against him — the trial judge summarily rejected Paxton’s motion, merely stating the motion was “denied.”
Paxton has yet to state publicly whether he plans to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss to the Texas Court of Appeals. But as a matter of principle he should; this case represents not merely an attack on him personally, but on the position of attorney general.
The Federalist obtained copies of the relevant court filings and they are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
“He Gets Us” is spending upwards of a billion dollars on an advertising campaign to expose millions of people, including those who tuned in to the 2023 Super Bowl, to Jesus. But its attempt to win over the world with a modernized version of Christ failed to endear some of those it sought to engage. The first commercial flipped through a series of black-and-white photos of children helping others in need. The 30-second clip ended with the tagline “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” a reference to Christ’s teaching about childlike faith in Matthew 18.
“If I could see the world through the eyes of a child, what a wonderful world this would be,” the song narrated.
These commercials offer the vaguest and most inoffensive and uncontroversial picture of Jesus possible, even to people who already have a distaste for Christianity. In fact, they are part of a larger campaign known for making radical comparisons between Jesus and the U.S. border crisis, which is harnessed by corrupt cartels for profit, and bold conflations of Jesus and his disciples with groups who roam the streets today, “challeng[ing] authority” and “ma[king] a lot of people uneasy,” in an attempt to appeal to current culture.
“We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life,” the campaign’s website states.
The hope in running these eyebrow-raising ads, campaign representatives disclosed, is to use an updated portrayal of Christ to sympathize with the plights of people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical” of organized religion.
In other words, the ads were deliberately designed to look, walk, and talk like the social justice agenda that has found its way into every American institution in the last decade in a last-ditch effort to appeal to a worldly culture.
Yet the universal messages communicated by these videos were still broadly rejected and smeared.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” progressive darling and Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter shortly after the second “He Gets Us” ad aired, with her tweet garnering nearly 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 retweets as of this writing.
No matter how hard Christian campaigns — especially evangelical ones — like He Gets Us try to win over the world by twisting the Gospel to fit our culture’s standards, they will fail.
Jesus said, 19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:19-21 (NIV)
Do Not Conform to This World
It should come as no surprise that even the tamest of ads that barely mentions Jesus was doomed from the start. Christian campaigns like He Gets Us operate under the premise that repackaging the Gospel to make our society think Christians and Jesus are cool entices people to consider following Jesus. Oftentimes, they go to great lengths to trash their own — faithful Christians — to be viewed and accepted by the same world that despises Christ-followers who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life.
He Gets Us was born out of the idea that the Christians of today are not good enough at marketing Jesus. After all, an alarming number of Americans are abandoning church.
“How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” organizers ask on the campaign’s website. As a result, they claim “many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today.” They say:
Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.
Anyone who reads his Bible, however, knows our society will never welcome the Good News with open arms. That’s because the Gospel, in its truest form, is offensive to the world. It announces unequivocally that every person is a vile sinner who deserves death and that even the so-called good works we do are tainted by self-interest and are filthy in the eyes of a holy God. It tells of a loving Father who gave up his only Son Jesus to live a perfect life and die the most brutal death imaginable as a sacrifice for the same sort of people who murdered Him. It proclaims that this Jesus miraculously rose from the grave, and it demands that anyone who follows Him must lay down his own comfort and desires and even his very life every single day.
Nothing about this offensive message conforms to our culture. In fact, the written Word of God demands that we “do not conform to the pattern of this world.”
Dressing up the Word of God to appeal to the masses is the exact opposite of what Jesus and the apostles did and what Christians are commanded to do. We are told to sow the seed of the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, to preach Christ crucified — not water down the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God, who detests sin, into someone who perfectly embodies the modern culture.
Jesus Doesn’t Need Rebranding
There is nothing wrong with bringing Jesus to the masses — it’s what we’re commanded to do — but we have to do it well.
Jesus’ mission from God to die for the sins of the world cannot be reduced to a few choice words he said. We care about what Jesus said, but we can’t separate that from what He did. Jesus didn’t just preach love your neighbor or love your enemies or have childlike faith. He rebuked sin, cast out demons, and promised eternal life for those who repent.
That alone is great news that doesn’t need editorializing or tweaking or watering down. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
He Gets Us sends a different message: that maybe the pure Gospel is something to be ashamed of because maybe the power of God, absent fresh aesthetics and modern social justice narratives, isn’t enough to save.
That doesn’t mean we stop sharing the Good News on whatever platforms we can. There’s certainly a space for Christians to share the love of God — and the gift of new life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ — to the millions watching the biggest sporting event of the year and everyone else. But let’s not squander that opportunity by peddling convenient narratives.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A former case manager for a pediatric gender clinic in Missouri recently blew the whistle on the American medical system for “permanently harming” gender-questioning vulnerable children, the New York Post reported.
Jamie Reed, a 42-year-old woman from St. Louis who describes herself as a “queer woman” and “politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” published an article in the Free Press on Thursday explaining why she walked away from her job at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Reed, who is married to a transgender man, stated that she “could no longer participate in what was happening” and claimed the medical professionals at the clinic were “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”
Reed noted that when she started her position, there were approximately 10 calls a month from gender-questioning children, and when she left, there were 50. According to Reed, 70% of new patients were female adolescents who sometimes arrived at the center in groups.
“This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then,” Reed said. “There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
Most girls arriving at the gender clinic had “many comorbidities,” including depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, or obesity.
“Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had,” Reed explained. “We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).”
According to Reed, doctors at the St. Louis clinic believed that the children’s incorrect self-diagnoses resulted from social contagion. However, doctors rejected the idea that the children’s questioning of their gender identity might also be a manifestation of social contagion. Instead, they claimed it was “something innate.”
Adolescents who wished to medically transition commonly only needed to see a therapist once or twice, Reed explained. Therapists were even provided a template for writing a letter supporting the child’s transition.
Side effects from the gender transition medications are many, including sterility.
After years of working in patient intake, Reed concluded that “teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.”
“Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body,” Reed wrote. “I doubt that any parent who’s ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes.”
Reed said she recently brought her concerns to Missouri’s Republican attorney general.
“He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars,” she stated.
Reed called for “a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria” because of the “secrecy and lack of rigorous standards.” She added that referring to transgender treatment as a “national experiment” is incorrect.
“Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: ‘We are building the plane while we are flying it.’No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft,” Reed concluded.
A spokesperson for St. Louis Children’s Hospital told KMOV, “We are alarmed by the allegations reported in the article published by The Free Press describing practices and behaviors the author says she witnessed while employed at the university’s Transgender Center. We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts. As always, our highest priority is the health and well-being of our patients. We are committed to providing compassionate, family-centered care to all of our patients and we hold our medical practitioners to the highest professional and ethical standards.”
After being swarmed by health providers who enabled her to medically transition as a minor, Prisha Mosley now says she’s been abandoned by the medical community as she attempts to navigate a complicated and painful detransition.
“I was under the impression that my doctors, who were transitioning me, loved me. They said they didn’t want me to die, they were saving my life, they were worried about me, and they wanted me to be healthy and happy,” Prisha told me. “Clearly, they don’t love me. As soon as it’s not profitable, they don’t want to help.”
Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.
“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.
Prisha also hopes that with estrogen supplements, she’ll experience some muscle and fat redistribution. After years of testosterone broadened her neck and shoulders, she now carries more weight in her upper body, which causes her chronic pain. Her throat is sore, she can no longer sing or raise her voice, and she suffers hair loss, as well as hair growth on her body, which she has to treat with costly laser hair removal sessions.
Another side-effect Prisha is seeking medical attention for is severe sexual dysfunction, which is so bad, she says she can no longer use tampons.
“I used to be able to, and now I can’t,” she said. “And that sucks. There’s pain, there’s irregular periods, and atrophy.”
No Medical Professionals Will Help
Hormonal care to fix her endocrine system, she hopes, could help her become more feminine — and perhaps fertile again. But she said every primary care physician, endocrinologist, obstetrician, and gynecologist she’s approached on her insurance list has turned her away or said they can’t help.
“I could call and be rejected every single day,” according to Prisha.
Professional organizations that represent many of these providers claim to offer open, inclusive, supportive care for “transgender” and “gender diverse” individuals. That offering, it appears, doesn’t apply to individuals seeking to detransition.
Prisha isn’t the only detransitioner who feels abandoned by the medical institutions that pushed her into wrong-sex hormones and surgery. Over the past year, Independent Women’s Forum has documented multiple stories of detransitioners who also report being abandoned by medical and mental health professionals after deciding to detransition.
“I reached out to every physician, every therapist who is involved with this, and I haven’t really gotten any help at all,” said Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who was fast-tracked down a medical transition as a child by a team of eager doctors. Left to navigate the detransition process on her own, Chloe stopped taking testosterone “cold turkey,” and is still struggling with urinary and other complications that doctors have yet to help fix.
Cat Cattinson, a woman who medically transitioned to a wrong-sex identity in her 20s before realizing it was a major mistake, said access to medical care from providers who are knowledgeable is one of the major barriers detransitioners face:
Because of the experimental nature of gender medicine, doctors know very little about the long-term effects of medical transition and even less about the health-care needs of those who detransition. Surgeries, obviously, are irreversible, but hormonal interventions can also have lasting effects requiring treatment to mitigate. Testosterone caused irreversible changes to my vocal cords, resulting in daily discomfort and pain, but most ENTs [ear, nose, and throat doctors] and other voice ‘professionals’ are not informed about how testosterone affects a female voice or how to help someone in my situation.
Prisha doesn’t know why she’s been turned away from so many doctors and medical providers — whether it’s about money, politics, or a lack of knowledge to help. If it’s the latter, one might ask why medical professionals are allowed to put individuals, including minors, on drugs and “treatments” that they’re unable to later undo or address, should that patient change his or her mind.
Whatever the reason, the inability to access medical attention is having a profound effect on Prisha, beyond her physical health.
Prisha’s Mental Health Struggles
Prisha, who attends school in Big Rapids, Michigan, has a long and complicated history with borderline personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. Now 24, Prisha says she used transitioning as a cover for her deeper-rooted mental health issues.
Since detransitioning, Prisha’s been in dialectical behavior therapy to manage her borderline personality disorder — therapy she credits with saving her life.
“When I treated that, all of the symptoms started getting better,” she said. “Nothing that I did to transition treated those things that were causing me mental suffering.”
But now as a detransitioner, even her therapy treatment is in disarray. A few months back, Prisha lost her health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. Under her new insurance, instead of being charged $10 per therapy appointment, she is being charged $96, an increase she wasn’t aware of for five months. Prisha now owes nearly $3,000 to her therapist, a service she depends on.
Upon going public with her story, Prisha started a campaign to raise money for breast reconstructive surgery, something she wishes to pursue to resolve the “phantom breast syndrome” she often experiences, and to appear more feminine.
But because the surgery is not deemed “a medical necessity,” Prisha would have to pay for it fully out-of-pocket. She would also need at least two surgeries to stretch her skin and reconstruct her breasts, estimated at more than $11,000 each. During this process, Prisha says she was told she would risk losing her nipples, which her plastic surgeon removed and reattached in more masculine positions.
The dream of breast reconstructive surgery and the $4,000 she’s raised for it thus far were put on hold, as Prisha is left using every penny she has to pay for her therapy and basic health insurance coverage.
“I feel like it’s like a bottomless pit — the medical needs, and I need the therapy because I can barely do this,” she said. “And I’m absolutely not going to, once again, medicalize my body without taking care of my mind.”
Now in debt and being rejected by one doctor after another, Prisha is at a loss for what to do. In an act of desperation, she turned to Plume, a company that has raised millions of dollars to connect patients with physicians who can prescribe them “gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy” online, including a “one-time medical letter of support for surgery with a one week turnaround time” for a fee of $150. But this time, instead of affirming her identity as the opposite sex, Prisha sought the help of Plume to get blood tests and hormone treatments to affirm her true sex: a woman.
Screenshot of Plume website.
After paying $99 and scheduling an appointment with a provider, Prisha said she was “ghosted” 40 minutes before the appointment. Plume hasn’t responded to Prisha’s requests for an explanation or even a refund. She suspects the provider canceled last minute because Prisha disclosed that she was “detrans” in initial paperwork she completed just minutes before the canceled appointment. After she submitted her intake forms, “All contact dropped off,” Prisha said. She then took to YouTube to share her devastation.
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who to go to because no one will help,” Prisha said through tears. “I was really hoping that they would care about me and help me. I just want to feel better. I just want to be better. I don’t want my body to be like this anymore. I’m in pain. … I can’t take it anymore.”
Independent Women’s Forum reached out to Plume to ask whether the company offers its services to detransitioners. Plume did not respond to our request.
The situation led Prisha to consider self-medicating. But due to her family history with mental illness and addiction, she’s doing everything in her power to resist that path.
“I’m feeling pushed to go that route because no doctor will help me,” she said. “It is deeply triggering my [borderline personality disorder] abandonment and rejection issues. It’s really easy to slip into the mindset that everyone hates me, I’m a medical monster, I’m bad and evil, and I deserve this.”
“It’s just being abandoned,” Prisha added. “I feel abandoned.”
Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.
Anonymous sources were once rarely used in journalism. They would only be cited when trying to preserve someone’s physical safety or report on the most sensitive national security matters, and there was an expectation that such unusual sourcing be reviewed by editors and carefully corroborated whenever possible.
Now anonymous sourcing has become the norm in reporting and is frequently used as a political weapon to disseminate Democrats’ talking points and smear their enemies. The illicit use of anonymous sources to launch libel against Democrats’ enemies ballooned after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, and the tactic was used to develop the Russia-collusion hoax and multiple other smears.
The most recent example may be the Chinese spy balloon news cycle. When word reached the public that Red China spent days hovering over the United States collecting sensitive information, public outrage ensued. Dozens of legislators and governors and Trump demanded President Joe Biden shoot down the balloon as soon as possible.
The Biden administration refused, claiming that neutralizing the airborne threat could cause harm to civilians. This initial claim aired in corporate media, sourced to an anonymous “official” who offered no evidence, that “the balloon did not pose a military or physical threat” to the United States. This decision, once again, drew ire from Americans.
Once the administration finally did shoot down the balloon over the Atlantic, the Biden administration pointed fingers. An unnamed official at the Department of Defense allegedly told reporters at an off-camera press briefing on Feb. 4 that Chinese balloons like this one “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”
That admission kicked off a corporate media frenzy. The press took the Pentagon’s word for it and accused Republicans of a “double standard.” Those who called for the end of the balloon, the press claimed, were hypocrites and Trump even more so because he “failed” to shoot down the spy equipment while in office.
Less than one day later, Trump and several high-level Trump national security officials who would have been briefed about a security breach during their tenure went on the record, with their names behind their statements, to deny any knowledge of Chinese spy balloons surveilling the United States under their watch. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/109812699029727017/embed
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Mark Esper, who was defense secretary from 2019 to 2020, told CNN.
Christopher Miller, who was acting defense secretary from 2020 to 2021, admitted “the first time I ever heard of anything like this was this weekend.”
“Had not a clue,” Miller said. “If something like that had happened, that’s like a national security threat.”
“I certainly never became aware that there was a three-bus-sized floating device coming across our country for five days, either as CIA director or secretary of state. [And] I’ve talked to others who are on my teams — they don’t know anything about it either,” said Mike Pompeo, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and secretary of state under Trump.
Robert O’Brien, another former Trump national security advisor, said, “Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue.” Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe outright stated the Biden administration’s anonymously sourced claim was “not true.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reiterates his statement that there were not 3 Chinese spy balloon incidents under Trump:
Even former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has a history of fabricating intel and smears about Trump, said the Biden administration’s conveniently timed revelation was news to him.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton told Fox News. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, “clarified” two days after the Pentagon’s initial accusation that “we did not detect those threats” at the time Trump was in office. The Narrative™ that Trump failed to shoot down Chinese spy balloons had already made its way onto the pages and TV screens of millions by the time the Biden administration decided to walk back its smears against the previous administration filtered through an anonymous source to compliant media outlets.
On Feb. 7, days after Trump staff denied on the record and one day after the Pentagon claimed Red China’s repeat airborne espionage was only discovered retrospectively, corporate media still insisted spy balloons were “spotted on several occasions during President Donald Trump’s administration, including three instances where they traveled near sensitive US military facilities and training areas.”
The source? “People familiar with the matter” who worked under Trump. The people making these claims were conveniently not named, giving them cover to make any accusations they liked and media to air them with no accountability for either entity.
The Smear Operation Playbook
Classic journalism ethics state anonymous sourcing should be rare because the “public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.” Yet the practice of relying on unnamed information suppliers to communicate breaking news has become commonplace, especially when fronting smears against Democrats’ opponents. As a matter of fact, anonymously sourcing what later prove to be complete lies is often rewarded by the journalism industry today.
The most notable example of anonymous sourcing as a weapon was the Russia hoax. That is a years-long coup led by Democrats and intelligence agencies with the eager help of the corporate media to disqualify Trump from the White House and prevent his presidency from being effective. The Russia hoax also resulted in failed impeachments. It’s fair to say it never could have been pulled off without outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more using unnamed sources to discredit their political enemies.
The Trump years were rife with media manipulation involving anonymous sources. In one dramatic episode, the media claimed to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was sent an email by Wikileaks giving him early access to leaked emails from top Democrats. Not only was the report untrue — CNN never saw the source email to Donald Trump Jr. and instead relied on the word of two anonymous sources who got the date on the email wrong — but the botched CNN report dramatically exposed how anonymous sources can lead to misinformation.
CNN’s faulty reporting was immediately “confirmed” by MSNBC and CBS. Of course, confirming erroneous reporting is an impossibility unless all three news outlets were relying on the same sources, confident that their anonymity would create the false impression that multiple sources could verify the story. In this case, the sources appear to have come from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff, a known liar and key perpetrator of the Russiagate hoax. This issue of multiple news outlets citing the same anonymous source has happened more than once, and it continues to be a problem.
But that failure was just the tip of the iceberg. During the Trump years, the media also claimed Trump’s national security adviser illicitly reached out to Russia’s government before Trump took office; that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was linked to the Russian Direct Investment Fund; that Trump attorney Michael Cohen confessed that Trump “directed” him to lie about contacting a Russian official; that Russia offered members of the Taliban bounties in exchange for killing American soldiers and Trump knew about it; that Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state’s office to “find the fraud”; and many, many more complete fabrications relying on sources who hid their smears behind anonymity.
All of these claims were unvetted, untrue, and should have never been published. Instead, some were showered with praise and status. Others were barely corrected long after the coverage served its political purpose.
Real reporting requires due diligence. Corporate media, desperate to aid Democrats in their conquest of any Americans who disagree with them, have become pipelines of government information manipulation, especially from intelligence agencies. As a result, anonymous sources are easily duplicated and repackaged as “independent confirmation,” and so-called “news” sites are plagued with unverified intelligence and information — or, worse, allegations they verifiably know are untrue.
And they are happy about it. In 2019, then-New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd denounced her employer for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” quickly about Trump’s nonexistent connection with Russia.
“The idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote. “If you know the FBI is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
Her call to normalize the unprofessionalism of partisan actors in newsrooms received amplification from fellow journos. The ubiquitous use and elevation of this unethical practice may have been popularized during the rise of Trump, but it has far outlived his presidency, something that independent media have routinely observed for years.
Today’s media complex relies on readers to keep trusting what it says, regardless of its extremely tainted records. The press doesn’t deserve that kind of benefit of the doubt.
Americans are still unclear on how many Chinese aircraft have compromised U.S. airspace and who let them. What they shouldn’t be unclear about is that the corrupt, untrustworthy, and democracy-threatening corporate media use anonymous sources to advance disinformation operations and push political narratives that often have no relationship to the truth.
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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The U.S. military shot down an “object” that was flying in territorial waters over Alaska, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Friday afternoon during a White House press briefing.
“I can confirm that the Department of Defense was tracking a high altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours. The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight. Out of an abundance of caution and the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object. And they did. And it came in inside our territorial waters,” Kirby said.
Kirby added that the “object” landed on frozen waters, and that “Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command took down the object within the last hour.”
He also added that the “object” was “much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“The way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car as opposed to a payload that was like two or three buses sized,” Kirby said.
Kirby said that he doesn’t know of any “outreach” to the Chinese government about the object, and said that the government doesn’t know who owns the unmanned object.
“We do not know who owns it, whether it’s state owned or corporate owned or privately owned,” he said.
President Biden speaks to reporters as he and first lady Jill Biden leave the White House and walk to Marine One on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 27, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker)
Kirby said that the object was shot down because it was flying at around 40,000 feet and could have posed a threat to civilian aircraft versus the Chinese spy craft discovered last week, which Kirby said was at 65,000 feet and posed no threat to civilian aircraft.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Friday afternoon that the military has located a significant amount of debris from the object, stating that it was shot down by an F-22 using an A9X missile out of Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. He said the object entered U.S. airspace on Thursday.
“Debris that’s been recovered so far is being loaded on to vessels taken ashore, cataloged, and then moved onwards to labs for subsequent analysis. And while I won’t go into specifics due to classification reasons, I can say that we have located a significant amount of debris so far that will prove helpful to our further understanding of this balloon and its surveillance capabilities,” Ryder said.
Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
“We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin,” Ryder added.
Just over a week ago, defense officials said that a Chinese spy craft was spotted over Billings, Montana. After it traveled at high altitudes around 60,000 feet, it was shot down on Saturday by an F-22 using a single A9X missile.
President Biden ordered on Feb. 3 that the spy craft should be shot down whenever the military determined that it’s safe to do so without potentially harming civilians on the ground.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement after the balloon was shot down that “President Biden gave his authorization to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path.”
U.S. forces recover debris from a shot-down Chinese surveillance balloon. (US Fleet Forces)
“After careful analysis, U.S. military commanders had determined downing the balloon while over land posed an undue risk to people across a wide area due to the size and altitude of the balloon and its surveillance payload. In accordance with the President’s direction, the Department of Defense developed options to take down the balloon safely over our territorial waters, while closely monitoring its path and intelligence collection activities,” Austin said.
Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
Last fall, a high school senior in Iowa was suspended for wearing a pro-Second Amendment shirt to her government class, and now her mother is suing the teacher, the principal, and the district. On Monday, Janet Bristow of Johnston, Iowa, a northwest suburb of Des Moines, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court alleging that the suspension violated her daughter’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
In late August 2022, Tom Griffin taught his government students at Johnston High School that their rights were “extremely limited” once they entered the classroom, despite the 1969 landmark SCOTUS ruling, Tinker, which affirmed that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Griffin insisted that he would forbid students from wearing any clothing which depicts “guns, alcohol, or any other ‘inappropriate material,'” the lawsuit states.
Bristow’s daughter, identified in the lawsuit only as “A.B.,” was in that class and determined that Griffin had erred in his assessment. Two days later, on September 1, she went to school wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a rifle and the phrase “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you not understand?” emblazoned on the front. Bristow alleged in the lawsuit that A.B. had worn that shirt before without incident and that the girl’s older brother, who graduated from Johnston High School in 2019, also wore the shirt without a problem during his time at the school.
A.B.’s shirtScreenshot of the lawsuit
But Griffin had a problem with the shirt, and he dismissed her from class and sent her to the administration. Bristow soon afterward arrived and discussed the issue with Nate Zittergruen and Randy Klein, both associate principals, and Ryan Woods, the school’s principal. Zittergruen told Bristow that the shirt could be perceived as threatening or offensive, and the administrative team gave A.B. the choice either to change her shirt or face suspension.
Chris Billings, the district’s executive director of school leadership, supported the administration and claimed that the shirt violated school dress code. So, after A.B. refused to change her shirt, she was issued an out-of-school suspension.
Later that evening, Bristow said she received an apology from Superintendent Laura Kacer as well as Billings, who said he had come to realize that the shirt is, in fact, “political speech.”
While Bristow was grateful for the apologies, she does not believe that the issue has been resolved. For one thing, Griffin has neither apologized nor clarified the issue with his class, leaving the impression that “A.B. was wrong and that her opinions were not welcome in the classroom,” the document stated. A.B. also still has the suspension listed on her school record.
In the suit, Bristow is seeking the following forms of relief:
affirmation that clothing featuring firearms “in a non-threatening, non-violent manner” is protected under the First Amendment;
a permanent injunction which will prevent the defendants listed in the lawsuit from ever restricting such clothing again in the future; and
compensation for damages, the costs associated with the legal process, and any other “relief” the court deems “appropriate.”
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.
Sam Smith performs onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
This past Monday morning, I was teaching hundreds of ministry school students at Christ for the Nations in Dallas on the topic of demons and deliverance. During the class, I stated that in the days ahead, I believed that satanic manifestations would become much more open and overt in our society. Rather than hiding himself in the culture, the devil will reveal himself more clearly.
After teaching, I got back to my room and began to read headlines and receive emails that confirmed the very thing I was saying. (More on that in a moment.)
Of course, we’ve been seeing this trend for years now.
One prominent example would be the rise of Drag Queens in our culture, some of them in overtly satanic attire, reading to toddlers in libraries, and performing at churches.
Another prominent example would be the “Shout Your Abortion” movement and the celebration of radical, pro-abortion legislation. This is in stark contrast to the old Bill Clinton adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a radical feminist group with the acronym WITCH, standing for the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. (I kid you not.) They certainly got their message across!
But most groups are not that overt (even if tongue in cheek), and gay activists learned decades ago that the in-your-face, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” approach was not working. Instead, gay strategists adopted a policy of presenting themselves to be exactly the same as the couple next door, just like you in every way, except gay. (This was laid out in the watershed 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer It’s Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)
So, from a strategic viewpoint, most groups wanting to bring about radical change to society do so in more covert, incremental ways rather than announcing, “We’re a terrorist conspiracy from Hell!”
In the same way, Satan doesn’t march around as a huge, horned dragon carrying a pitchfork.
As a senior demon counseled a younger demon in C. S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, “The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”
These days, however, it’s as if Satan is coming out in full force, red tights and all — if not literally, then metaphorically. What else can be said of the performance of “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards this past Sunday night? As the Breitbart headline announced, “Non-Binary Pop Star Sam Smith Performs BDSM, Devil-Themed ‘Unholy’ at the Grammys.” How lovely!
But even that only told part of the story.
As explained in more detail by the American Family Association, “During the annual Grammy Awards ceremony on Feb. 5, originally designed to recognize outstanding artists in the music industry, Pfizer pharmaceutical company felt it fitting to sponsor performers Sam Smith, who claims to be non-binary, and Kim Petras, who claims to be transgender. These two gave the nation a Satan-themed performance of their song ‘Unholy,’ in which Petras performed inside a cage with drag queens dressed in devil costumes, while Smith gyrated in a costume with devil horns sticking out from a top hat.
“The entire ‘performance’ depicted a hellish scene with lots of darkness, blood red colors and flames.”
So, you have: 1. the name of the song, “Unholy”; 2. both lead performers denying their biological realities, one of them wearing devil’s horns; 3. drag queens in devil costumes; 4. BDSM-related themes; 5. and the fires of Hell. I would say that is pretty clear!
No wonder podcaster Liz Wheeler tweeted, “Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”
Compared to some other past hits (whose lyrics are virtually unrepeatable in moral circles), the lyrics to “Unholy” are relatively tame. It is the overall message of the Grammy performance that shouts out its depravity loudly and clearly.
Similar to this is the announcement from The Satanic Temple that it is raising funds to provide “free religious [meaning Satanic] telehealth medication abortion care in New Mexico.”
But this could be good news for us as followers of Jesus. The greater the darkness, the clearer our light is seen. May it shine brightly in front of the whole world! And may we shine as lights without shame, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.
And don’t be surprised if, in the days ahead, in front of your very eyes, you witness scenes as if taken straight out of the Bible where, in broad daylight, visibly demonized people get set free in Jesus’ name — dramatically, gloriously, and in full public view.
Things are heating up.
(For a great “holy” version of “Unholy” by a contemporary Gospel artist, go here. It’s titled, “If Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ ‘Unholy’ were a Christian song by Beckah Shae.”)
When Joe Biden accused Republicans of planning to “cut” Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union address, it was — like virtually all the other things he said — a lie. His claim was tantamount to accusing Democrats of supporting a “plan” to shut down air travel because Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once proposed it.
The president was referring to Rick Scott’s ill-timed “12 Point Plan to Rescue America,” which included, among numerous other nonstarters, a proposal to sunset all federal spending programs every five years. The proposal, contra Biden’s contention, had no support from Republicans and nothing to do with the debt ceiling fight.
None of that means that asking Congress to reauthorize federal spending bills every few years isn’t a great idea. Why would stalwarts of “democracy” oppose revisiting spending decisions made by legislators nearly 90 years ago? No living person has ever voted on them. And though “liberals” are generally more protective of Social Security than the Bill of Rights, entitlement programs aren’t foundational governing ideas, they do not protect our natural rights, nor are they at the heart of the American project. Government dependency is, in fact, at odds with all of it.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of private-sector establishments go out of business, and yet not a single federal government program ever does. While nearly every facet of society embraces cost-saving efficiencies, the federal government perpetually grows. It is madness. Simply as a function of good governance, it would be reasonable for Congress to review the efficacy and cost of existing federal programs, and then make suggestions for reforms or elimination or — yikes — privatization. Forget entitlements. Is there any reason we shouldn’t revisit the billions spent on the obsolete Natural Resource Conservation Service (created in 1935 to help farmers deal with soil corrosion) or the Rural Electrification Administration (created in the same year, when large swaths of rural Americans did not have electricity) or the counterproductive Small Business Administration or the subsidy sucking Amtrak corporation?
Indeed, there is widespread support for Social Security — a Bismarckian import, first championed nationally by corrupt populists like Huey Long to augment retirement. One suspects this is largely because Americans have been compelled by the state to pay into the pyramid scheme. Many people build their retirements around the program. They have no choice. Compulsion is a hallmark of leftist policy, from entitlements to Obamacare to unionization to public school systems. And by forcing participation, we’ve created a generational trap. Voters have been fearmongered into believing that any reform means something is being stolen from them, when no serious proposal has ever cut existing benefits.
In the 1970s, Biden supported re-upping federal spending authorization every four years and requiring Congress to “make a detailed study of the program before renewing it.” Obviously, Biden hasn’t stuck to a single principled position in his entire career. But it is worth noting there was plenty of bipartisan support for sunsetting bills from 1970 through the 2000s — including from Ed Muskie, Jesse Helms, liberal “lion” Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush.
Until very recently the center of both parties also agreed entitlement reform would be necessary to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent. In today’s Idiocracy, we have a president who argues that a $5 trillion spending bill costs “zero” dollars, so we’re about a zillion lightyears away from responsible governance.
If Social Security is so deeply popular — and everyone saw cowardly Republicans promise Biden they wouldn’t do anything to fix these programs that are bankrupting the country — what’s the problem? Even with the highly remote chance of a sunset law, the chances of reform would be still more remote. Look at how Washington almost perfunctorily lifts the debt ceiling. The only shared principle in D.C. is risk aversion.
Still, if Congress were automatically impelled to vote on existing law, it would create more political space to at least suggest changes and perhaps revisit mistakes. If nothing else, Congress would be marginally more “productive” if it was forced to occasionally deal with existing problems rather than concocting new ways to create them.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.
The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story.
Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.” But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”
What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive.
Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”
“That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate.
Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts.
Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.
And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”
Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!”
Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.”
And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.
In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”
Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”
Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”
Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”
Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave.
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely.
Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.
Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according to Roth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.
Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested 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.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”
Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.
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.
After several executive agencies in the Biden administration were sued for refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from conservative advocacy group Citizens United over the White House’s attempt to federalize elections, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Affairs finally turned over its first batch of requested documents. There’s one problem: More than half of the 54-page document is completely redacted.
“The Biden administration is the least transparent in history, and these absurd redactions are just the latest example. What are they trying to hide from the American people?” Citizens United President David Bossie told The Federalist.
As The Federalist previously reported, in March 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing hundreds of federal agencies to engage in a federal takeover of election administration. It also permitted federal agencies to work with “nonpartisan” third-party entities to get voters registered, yet left-wing dark money group Demos publicly admitted it’s worked with federal agencies, “in close partnership with the ACLU and other allies,” to advance the aims of Biden’s directive.
Such an order set off alarm bells among Republicans and good government groups, reminiscent of the widespread takeover of government election offices by Democratic activists and donors in the blue counties of key swing states during the 2020 presidential election. Through their infiltration of state and local offices, Democrats were able to conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations and swing the election in then-candidate Biden’s favor. This order is a taxpayer-funded version of that effort, turning federal agencies — including those that dole out federal benefits — into voter registration hubs and partisan get-out-the-vote centers.
Citizens United wanted to find out more about it, which is why last June, it filed FOIA requests with the DOI and State Department seeking email and text messages that mentioned both the executive order and the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in election activities. When the agencies failed to comply, Citizens United sued. On Jan. 31, DOI sent its first round of documents per Citizens United’s request.
But the 54-page PDF sent to Citizens United is mostly redacted, save for logistical emails between White House staff and agency department heads. The plan and implementation scheme for the “Promoting Access to Voting” executive order itself are completely redacted.
In a cover letter sent with the documents, the Biden administration defended the redactions under U.S.C. § 552(b)(5), which allows agencies to withhold information under the “Presidential Communications Privilege” (exists to ensure “the President’s ability to obtain candid and informed opinions from his advisors and to make decisions confidentially”) and the “Deliberative Process Privilege” (“protects the decision-making process of government agencies and encourages the frank exchange of ideas on legal or policy matters”).
But according to Jason Foster, president and founder of Empower Oversight, a transparency and government accountability group that frequently files FOIA requests, these redactions are a prime example of the federal government’s blatant over-redacting and censorship.
“Federal bureaucrats do everything in their power to conceal information from the public,” Foster told The Federalist. “Whether it’s over-classification or improper redactions and stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests, they instinctively err on the side of hiding information to avoid embarrassment, conceal misconduct, or cover up corruption. It’s up to Congress to reform the FOIA process, and in the meantime, it’s up to independent organizations to sue aggressively to force the federal government to comply with transparency laws.”
While good government groups can sue over improper redactions, this process can usually take about a year to uncover just one document from a series of files, those familiar with the matter said. Now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, however, they have the power to compel the federal government to produce non-redacted versions of requested documents, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.
During the 117th Congress, nine House Republicans wrote a letter to the White House raising concerns about the executive order, specifically regarding the fact that the order supplants the authority of the states to set election law and administer elections under the Constitution. When asked about the Biden administration’s secrecy over its election’s directive, Freshman Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., who chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, echoed her colleague’s sentiments.
“Everyone should have concerns about this executive order and the involvement of any federal agency in our election process,” Hageman told The Federalist. “First and foremost, elections are the constitutional responsibility of the states, not our federal bureaucracy. This is yet another example of the federal government overstepping its authority and infringing upon states’ rights. Even if this order was well intended — and I have serious doubts that it was — it is unconstitutional.”
Hageman emphasized that the White House cannot get away with such extensive redactions of election-related processes.
“Large-scale redactions are not in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act,” Hageman added. “This is one of the few tools we have to hold our government accountable. Are we to accept that the information is classified to such an extent that the document is unable to be coherently interpreted? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the federal government cannot be allowed to continue to obscure and obstruct.”
Of particular interest in the 54-page document is a draft letter on page 32 from Indian Affairs Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland to White House Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, formerly President Obama’s national security advisor and “right-hand woman” who is known for her involvement in spying on the Trump campaign in 2015 and lying about it. In that role, she also spread lies about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, helped Obama staffers target Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and turned a blind eye to the Biden family’s foreign business affairs.
One line in the draft letter reads: “The plan promotes voter registration and voter participation (REDACTED) and the Department’s agency action to achieve these objectives.” The redacted portion might point to a Hatch Act violation, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.
“These documents relating to the Biden White House’s efforts to turn the federal workforce into a partisan voter registration committee must be released to the public in their entirety,” Bossie said. “Congress must investigate this executive order to see if the Biden Administration is violating the Hatch Act on a massive scale.”
When asked why the Interior Department isn’t being transparent with the public about Biden’s federal takeover of elections, the Bureau of Indian Affairs referred The Federalist to the U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) exemptions in the cover letter sent to Citizens United.
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.
Despite MSNBC treating Biden’s State of the Union address like the royal wedding, you probably didn’t watch it. But it doesn’t matter because … I’ve got the highlights reel!
FUNNIEST DEMOCRATIC BASE SUCK-UP: “I met a young woman named Saria, who is here tonight. For 30 years … she’d been a proud member of Ironworkers Local 44 …”
Good for Saria, but 95% of ironworkers are men. Democrats, can’t you ever give it a rest?
[Note to fact-checkers: Did Neil Kinnock ever know a “Saria”?]
BIGGEST LIE: “[We are] the only nation in the world built on an idea.”
First of all, this hoariest of all cliches, autoloaded into every Democrat’s teleprompter, is patently false. Tons of other countries are based on ideas! Ukraine: We will be a nation of corrupt grifters who suck dry the treasuries of other countries. Canada: Accomplish nothing, be incredibly boring, and have a nincompoop as prime minister. Nigeria: We will send you emails every 15 minutes saying you can share in a $30 million inheritance.
In fact, our country is not a mere “idea.” If it were, we could just give it to other countries. We’ve been trying to do that, often forcibly, by invading and nation-building, forever. It hasn’t worked. They all still want to move here.
America is a nation of British Protestants, based on beautifully written governing documents, from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermons to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Demographically, it remained about 80% to 90% white, 10% to 20% black and overwhelmingly Protestant for several centuries.
Thus, in 1776, King George referred to the American Revolution as “a Presbyterian war,” and, in 1900, Mark Twain said of the British and Americans, “We have always been kin: kin in blood, kin in religion, kin in representative government, kin in ideals, kin in just and lofty purposes.”
(Maybe after 18 semesters studying Emmett Till and redlining, schoolchildren could be taught this.)
The “America is an idea” scam is meant to convince us that our country is nothing special and we have no right to prevent anyone else from moving here.
BEST HECKLE: “It’s your fault!” — when Biden talked about fentanyl “killing more than 70,000 Americans a year,” adding, “let’s launch a major surge to stop fentanyl … at the border.”
MOST SURREAL MOMENT: Getting Democrats to applaud “American.”
“And when we do these [government] projects … we’re going to buy American.” [WILD APPLAUSE]
(OK, maybe they were cheering for yet more government pork.)
LEAST BELIEVABLE CLAIM (This was a very competitive category!): Pointing out Tyre Nichols’ parents in the audience, Biden said he’d never “had to have ‘the talk’ that brown and black parents have had to have with their children.” And why would you, with a son like Hunter?
You’ve probably heard me say this before, but I don’t think “the talk” is taking. My evidence is this: Every famous case of a black person being killed after an interaction with police has NOT involved hyper-politeness on the part of the arrestee.
E.g.:
— Michael Brown (tried to grab officer’s gun, refused to stop, then turned and charged at him);
— Breonna Taylor (boyfriend was shooting at cops);
— Daunte Wright (refused to be handcuffed, despite a warrant for his arrest, attempted to drive off with an officer dangling from his car window).
MOST REFRESHING MOMENT: “Let’s also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.”
Finally, an American president courageous enough to support poisoning and mutilating confused adolescent girls.
WORST ADVERTISEMENT FOR BIG PHARMA: Maybe ease up on the Adderall, Mr. President. Biden was like the Energizer bunny on crack, one moment curing cancer and the next talking about airline luggage fees.
MOST ADORABLE ATTEMPT TO BLAME LIBERAL INSANITY ON JAN. 6: Plagiarizing this part of his speech from MSNBC, Biden claimed that a druggie’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi was inspired by Jan. 6.
“Just a few months ago, unhinged by [Trump’s] ‘big lie,’ an assailant unleashed political violence in the home of the then-speaker of the House of Representatives, using the very same language the insurrectionists used as they stalked these halls and chanted on Jan. 6th.
“Here tonight in this chamber is the man who bears the scars of that brutal attack, but is as tough and as strong and resilient as they get.
“My friend, Paul Pelosi.”
San Francisco, the city that sells tourists a human feces walking map, has decriminalized crime, and hands out syringes, tinfoil and pipes to drug users. In this 100% Democrat-controlled, liberal utopia, Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, was the prototype of the Bay Area good citizen.
The mentally ill nudist advocate with a history of drug use lived in a bus with a Black Lives Matter sign and a flag with pot-leaf symbols and the LGBTQ rainbow. Crazy people, like DePape, babble enough nonsense that partisans can claim he’s anything — BLM, QAnon, a Trump supporter, a standard-issue Democrat or Napoleon Bonaparte.
But it’s California liberals who allowed this nut-bag to walk the streets.
MOST ANNOYING CLICHE: “My fellow Americans, we meet tonight at an inflection point.” At least he deftly avoided, “Asking for a friend.”
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 Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.
At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had “created more jobs in two years than any president created in four years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. But Biden’s contention was exceptionally misleading, considering he inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown. If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open.
On more than one occasion during the night, a mercurial Biden contended that Covid-19 had shut down the economy. No, states did. Politicians did. Biden was an aggressive proponent of those shutdowns. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the president regularly attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal health officials. Even in August of 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was still criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a new round of Covid authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way” of those trying to “do the right thing.”
Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Today, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of 3.4 percent. More than 30 million people lost their jobs to Covid lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The one big difference is that the labor participation rate still hasn’t recovered to pre-Covid numbers. It’s great that people are working again. But millions fewer are in the market for jobs.
Biden also boasted that Americans were seeing “near” historic unemployment lows for black and Hispanic workers. These historic lows were achieved before Covid lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit for this, doesn’t Trump? Of course, there is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment rate 0.1 percent lower than the previous administration. Washington wasted trillions of dollars propping up an economy that it previously shut down.
Speaking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which you might recall was initially called “Build Back Better,” had helped alleviate spiking prices. Only when inflation became non-transitory, and a politically problematic issue, did Biden begin arguing that more spending would mitigate inflation. And only then did Democrats rename their bill, which was crammed with the same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive wish-list items. “The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate change,” Biden said during his address, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are often unduly blamed or given credit for economic events beyond their control. But it is no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped hundreds of billions into a hot economy (in the case of the “infrastructure” bill, with the help of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable problems with policies that disincentivize work and undercut energy production. All this led to the biggest inflation spike since 1982. We are still at historic highs. A slew of products that consumers rely on still remain atypically expensive, and fears of additional price hikes have started to seriously corrode consumer confidence.
Biden lied that “25 percent” of the national federal debt was incurred by the previous administration when most of that debt was driven by entitlement programs passed, expanded, and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t enough.
Biden went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the rich don’t pay taxes — “[n]o billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter!” — and proposed higher rates on the wealthy and corporations. He also promised to micromanage the economy with a slew of new regulations that would interfere in voluntary contracts struck between employees and employers and consumers and businesses.
Biden implored Congress to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would empower the government to impose unions on businesses and workers who want no part of them. Biden hawked an entire menu of crude economic populism — including price controls and protectionist trade policies that would undermine growth, competition, job creation, and innovation while driving up the cost of virtually every construction project in the country.
There were numerous lies, half-truths, and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated economic ideas and sloganeering. But, surely, the president’s biggest lie of the night was to claim, “I’m a capitalist.”
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A new poll found that a record percentage of Americans say they are doing worse financially under President Joe Biden’s leadership. 41% of respondents to the ABC News/Washington Post poll said they were financially worse since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, the highest figure for the question in 37 years that it has been polled. Only 16% of respondents said that they were better off. By contrast, under the Trump administration the poll found that 25% of respondents said they were better off while only 13% said they were worse off.
The poll also found that former President Donald Trump would easily defeat Biden in a hypothetical matchup, with 48% of respondents saying they would vote for Trump and only 44% saying they would vote for Biden. When narrowed to registered voters, the margin only shrunk by one percentage point.
The poll is the latest data point in the debate roiling the Democratic Party whether to have Biden run for another term or to replace him as the party’s candidate for the 2024 election. Many are pointing to his advanced age as a problem that might dissuade many voters from supporting his reelection campaign.
Of respondents who said they were Democrats or independents who lean Democrat, only 44% supported Biden as the party’s nominee in 2023. Nearly half, 49%, said that the party should choose another nominee.
The president angrily lashed out at a reporter in July after he asked him to respond to polling showing many Democrats didn’t want him to run again.
“They want me to run,” he exclaimed and yelled at the reporter. “You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92% of Democrats if I ran would vote for me.”
Biden is likely to tout his economic policies during the State of the Union speech on Tuesday. While the unemployment rate remains low, wage growth has been minor and mostly undone by the plague of high inflation.
The poll also found that 53% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s job performance and only 42% approved of his performance.
Here’s more about the damaging Biden poll: Breaking down the recent ABC News/WaPo poll ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union l ABCNL www.youtube.com
The United Nations announced plans to release a report in June regarding “perceived contradictions” between “the right to freedom of religion or belief (FoRB)” and “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).” The report aims to push governments to “fully comply” with international human rights law to “protect and empower” the participation of LGBT+ people in religious communities, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Sounds like more “One World Government” push.
The U.N. requested calls for input from all interested governments, religious leaders, academics, activists, and human rights organizations regarding “perceived points of tension” between FoRB and SOGI. Respondents were requested to indicate any policies or laws protecting discriminatory religious practices.
One question asked, “What are the key trends or significant instances of discriminatory or abusive practices by individual providers of goods or services in the public sphere against LGBT+ and gender-diverse persons that rely on religious narratives?”
The report’s findings will be shared during the 53rd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in June. It will also include “recommendations to States and other relevant stakeholders to fully comply with their obligations under international human rights law to protect and empower LGBT+ persons to pursue happiness, exercise and enjoy all their human rights, and choose how to contribute to society on an equal footing with everyone, including through effective participation in religious, cultural, social, and public life.” In charge of the report is Victor Madrigal-Borloz, an independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, who has been a longtime LGBT+ advocate.
The U.N.’s announcement argued that religion has “historically been used to promote, enable, and condone institutional and personal violence and discrimination against individuals based on sexual orientation or gender identity (real or presumed); repress sexual and gender diversity; and promote cis-gendered and heteronormative norms of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
According to the U.N., such practices cannot be “justified” under human rights law. The upcoming report aims to “introduce voices from LGBT-inclusive belief systems” to “better recognize and protect LGBT+ persons’ access to faith and spirituality.”
Grace Melton, senior associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, told the DCNF that the report could result in the “politicization” of religious freedom.
“My biggest concern is the premise of the report which seems to suggest that freedom of religion and rights based on sexual orientation are the same,” stated Melton. “But certainly as a function of international law, they are not the same. Freedom of religion or belief, or freedom of conscience, is an internationally protected human right. It’s codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is a legally binding treaty.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, a fellow for the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that the U.N.’s report is a “bold attack” against religious freedom.
“Despite saying that we shouldn’t have these rights pitted against one another, but when you keep reading on you see that the author of the report really does see [rights and religion] as being in conflict,” Picciotti-Bayer said.
“This narrative is not only harmful because it could make people doubt the importance of religion in their own lives and their communities, but it’s also harmful because it will undermine really important social protection,” Picciotti-Bayer added. “Religion and religious freedom is a stabilizing presence, and for the cases where religion is being misused to oppress, the answer isn’t to shut down religion entirely.”
Neither the U.N. nor Madrigal-Borloz responded to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
Hollywood is in desperate need of new ideas. Take Sunday’s Grammy Awards, for example. If there were ever a spectacle that could simultaneously be described as demonic and trite, it would be Sam Smith’s performance of “Unholy,” which rang the final death knell for the satanic-ritual-as-art trope.
As Federalist contributor Isabelle Rosini wrote, it was as boring as it was unoriginal. Stiletto-clad devils? Latex pants? Whips? Women in cages? Bursts of flame to signify — in case it wasn’t clear enough — that Smith was singing from the pit of hell? “Been there, done that,” artists ranging from Lil Nas X to Lady Gaga would say.
And it all fell flat. Despite the media’s attempts at running interference — with all the typicalRepublicans–pounce framing — the awards show was decidedly uninteresting, and this points to a broader crisis within the arts world itself. There is nothing it can produce that will shock the American public, quasi-satanic orgies and all.
Modern American culture has become a willing collaborator to the arts world — from Hollywood to the Oval Office, from TikTok to the public school classroom — thanks to the ascendancy of leftist orthodoxy in cultural and political institutions. Art can no longer be subversive once the political and broader media establishments espouse its values, whether those be sexual perversion or anti-religious bigotry.
Thus art has ceased to be interesting or subversive. Instead, the arts world and the establishment have merged — First Lady Jill Biden presented at the award show after all — producing mediocre content according to its tastes. If art wants to become subversive again, it must reject the values most prized by our modern culture. It must discard the idols of the left, from sexual deviancy to bitter racism. It must trash wokeness. Until it comes up with a fresh message, expect a continued mass exodus.
Reactionaries who really want to buck establishment tastes are congregating not in an art museum or mosh pit — but, ironically, at church. As Julia Yost described last summer in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” pandemic-weary Manhattanites have rebelled against leftist orthodoxy by embracing traditional morality and the Catholic Church:
By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church — and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.
Comedian Tim Dillon has noticed the same phenomenon. “All the cool kids now are unwoke and some of them are going back to Christianity because it’s the only way to be rebellious — because everybody’s blue-haired, non-binary, talking about piss orgies,” Dillon said in a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
That to be “transgressive” in this day and age means attending church and rediscovering religious orthodoxy is quite the plot twist, but it’s encouraging for the West’s prospects. Let’s hope this trend continues, and that so-called artists like Sam Smith and his tired satanism shtick get the red, latex boot.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
Republicans convened the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday to evaluate the “front lines of the border crisis” but Democrats were less than cooperative in the GOP’s efforts to hear from two chief patrol agents.
“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history,” committee chairman Republican Rep. James Comer said in his opening remarks.
Comer and several other GOP members on the committee pointed to President Joe Biden as the reason millions of migrants, including suspected terrorists, illegally cross the border. Witnesses — CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin and Chief Patrol Agent of the Rio Grande Valley sector Gloria Chavez — confirmed this in their testimonies.
“In the Tucson sector, interviewing people post-arrest, what became the most common response [from migrants] was that they believed that when the administration changed that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border,” Modlin said.
The chiefs agreed that border security measures like the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which Biden eliminated with the stroke of a pen at the beginning of his term, were “effective” at combatting the staggering number of illegal migrants flooding the border.
And staggering those numbers are.
“We went from what I would describe as unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,” Modlin said.
Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability
House Democrats, who had two years to give Biden’s disastrous border the oversight it required but failed to do so, were less interested in asking the CBP officials questions and far more interested in criticizing Republicans for suggesting that Democrats’ lax border policies are responsible for the worst migrant influx in U.S. history.
Before the hearing, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security tried to obstruct oversight by Republicans by keeping CBP officials from testifying. Democrats joined in their attempts to taint the GOP’s investigation into the border crisis with smears that Republicans wanted “to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories instead of a comprehensive solution to protect our borders and strengthen our immigration system.”
The “QAnon caucus” and “anti-immigrant” name-calling continued in the hearing after ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin launched another round of politically motivated attacks in his opening remarks.
The same Democrats who bought into and promoted the border patrol whipping lie claimed that Republicans “demonize migrants” and refuse to fund the border through Democrats’ omnibus wish list. Washington D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton even went so far as to blame the GOP for the El Paso Walmart shooting.
Despite Democrats’ attempts to turn the hearing into a political circus painting the border crisis as a funding problem, instead of a policy problem, the witnesses confirmed that the U.S. southern border is comprised in a way it’s never been in the past.
Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’
A large part of the Republicans’ border inquiry centered on the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border against cartels, which Chavez said have become “more active” in trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. in “recent years.”
“Cartels are leveraging chaos at the border. They are using their human smuggling operations to overwhelm U.S. Border Patrol agents with large migrant groups, often placing migrants in peril,” Comer said. “They create these diversions at the expense of human life to traffic dangerous narcotics like fentanyl, across our southern border. These deadly drugs then make their way into communities across the United States and poison our neighbors and our children.”
“No one crosses the border in Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin confirmed in his testimony. Chavez testified the same about her district.
“[Migrants are] pretty much confined to whatever those cartels require to be able to see their family member again,” she said.
Democrats tried to claim that the problems at the border are a “humanitarian crisis, not a criminal one.” Yet, none of them mentioned the connection between cartels’ illegal activities and migrants, including the criminals’ lack of care for the men, women, and children who have to bribe them for passage to the U.S.
“What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are failing to recognize is in order to get here, [migrants] have to deal with a group of people that is not interested in human rights. They place no value on humanity. If they can make money on it, they will exploit it,” Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong said. “I think one of the mistakes we make quite often is we talk about [cartels] like they’re drug cartels. They’re in the business of making money and whatever the path of least resistance is, is how they make money.”
Cartels’ billion-dollar migrant smuggling business, Modlin and Chavez said, deliberately puts illegal border crossers in danger so Border Patrol agents will leave their posts to conduct rescue missions.
“There are a lot of migrants out there that are out there requiring rescue. So, a lot of times, our agents are out there rescuing people, being task-saturated in rescues, abetting frontline operations, so therefore cartels take advantage of that,” Chavez said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S. is a serious issue that needs addressing. What the representatives did not agree on is that it’s Biden’s policies that embolden the cartels to manufacture and smuggle fentanyl into the states.
Multiple Democrat representatives tried to blame the proliferation of fentanyl on U.S. citizens who are often selected to bring the drugs to the United States. Rep. Katie Porter even had the audacity to argue that because CBP is seizing more fentanyl now than it was before 2020, border security under Biden is a “success.”
“Regardless of who’s bringing it across the border, U.S. citizens, ports of entry, between ports of entry, not ports of entry, the drugs that are killing people in my communities are being made by the cartels,” Armstrong pointed out.
Modlin and Chavez both said their agents are overworked and overwhelmed by the crisis. Unless there’s a national policy shift on the border, the historic crisis is only going to get worse.
“What happens on the border affects the entirety of the country,” Modlin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Such a smash success has Joe Biden’s presidency been so far that even the Chinese are sending up balloons. That’s more or less what Biden will say, over and over, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The economy is humming. Inflation is cooling. Electric vehicle sales are raging. There has never been a more orderly southern border.
It will all sound very scary to viewers who will rightly begin to question their own sanity. Or perhaps it will make you feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you’re inexplicably falling behind.
Don’t panic. When confronted with these anxieties, there are steps you can take to re-ground yourself in reality. For instance, when Biden says something confusing — something like, “Folks! Energy costs are down, folks!” — remember to yourself that this is a lie. As of Monday, national gas prices averaged higher per gallon than a year before. It’s more than a dollar per gallon higher than it was in January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated.
Biden will likely also mention “steps” he has taken to control the unabated flow of hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In that stupefying moment, take a deep breath and refer to this chart maintained by Biden’s own administration, showing that December had the highest number of illegal aliens encountered by border agents — ever. That month, there were more than 250,000 migrants who unlawfully crossed into the U.S. The month before, almost 235,000. That’s nearly half a million migrants throwing themselves into the care of the American taxpayer in just two months’ time. They openly say they’re here because of Biden.
Democrat congressmen will leap to their feet and clap with ferocity when Biden says inflation is down. (Or even that higher prices are actually a great thing!) He might even say costs increased less than 6 percent from this time last year. If you feel a spinning sensation, close your eyes, count to 10, then look at this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The less-than-6 stat is if you exclude food and energy prices.
In other words, if you don’t account for the things you depend on to survive, inflation really isn’t that bad! By itself, food cost is actually up more than 10 percent. It’s probably close to 12 — and maybe much more. Energy is up more than 7 percent. Mind you, this has been a year of rising costs, where each month it’s been more expensive to simply live than it was the same time a year before.
Biden’s vertigo-inducing speech will surely go on for what feels like an eternity, earning applause for assertions that are the exact opposite of reality. But remember, this too shall pass.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday failed to slow down the House Republican push for new oil and gas leases on federal land, after GOP lawmakers shot down her attempt to require further study of the public health impacts of energy extraction.
The House National Resources Committee met Tuesday to adopt its work plan for the new Congress. Included in that plan is language that says the Biden administration has leased fewer federal acres for oil and gas development than “any presidential administration” since the end of World War II.
“The Committee will examine the lack of oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands in the western United States, including focusing on administrative actions that have created permitting delays and disincentivized production on federal lands,” the committee’s plan said.
Before adopting the plan, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., offered an amendment that would require the committee to collect “public health data and other impacts of new drilling on federal lands.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., failed to convince Republicans that new drilling on federal land should be linked to a study on public health. (Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“There is a failure to acknowledge the disproportionate impact that these changes have on communities of color and other frontline communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She added that there should be “no objection to gathering better data on the health impact of these policies.”
But Republicans pushed back and said her proposal ignores the health benefits that energy development has delivered to people for generations.
“How can you ignore the millions of people around the Earth that have had clean water, indoor plumbing, lights, electricity provided to them, making their lives better, extending, literally extending their life span, lifting them out of poverty by having access to electricity that’s been provided by coal, oil, gas, or other fossil fuels?” said Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.
“It simply can’t be ignored – their lives are better, their lives are longer as a direct result of that,” he said. “So to sit there and to say that we should be trying to eliminate these fuels is absolutely absurd, ridiculous.”
Rep. Thomas Tiffany, R-Wis., pressed that point by asking Ocasio-Cortez if her amendment would require a study of all health impacts, good and bad, or just the bad ones.
Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., was one of several Republicans who rejected Ocasio-Cortez’s push for a health study. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) ( (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images))
“I do not dispute the inclusion of any positive health impacts,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “But of course, there is a large degree of concerning information about potential health impacts, breathing impacts, cancer exposure, etc.”
Tiffany replied that her response made it clear she’s only interested in the negative health effects of drilling.
“I will not be able to support this amendment because there was a ‘but’ in there, in the answer,” he said. “It is not focusing on also the good things that have happened…”
Other Republicans similarly saw the amendment as an effort to block new leasing on federal lands. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., mocked the amendment as an attempt to force climate change theory into the GOP’s effort to ensure the U.S. controls its destiny and shores up its national security by ensuring ample energy supplies.
“I’m not here to deny climate change, I don’t think anyone here is,” Boebert said. “It happens four times every year, we’re very, very much aware of that.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., squared off in the hearing over new public drilling on federal land. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Ocasio-Cortez stressed that her amendment is not a proposal to “stop drilling.” She said her amendment language is neutral and that it could allow a study on both the positive and negative health impacts of drilling and said it’s critical to consider this factor for families.
“I have visited with families who say that they will be near an extraction site, and at different times of the day their lungs start burning,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I personally represent an area of the country that has some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the world.”
“People deserve to know if they’re being poisoned, people deserve to know if there is no health impact,” she added.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., closed the debate by saying his committee would be crossing into the jurisdiction of other committees if it accepted Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment.
“The gentlelady almost had me with this amendment,” Westerman said. “We all care about public health, we all care about safety. I think that’s our duties as members of Congress.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment failed to be adopted as part of the committee’s work plan in a party-line 15-21 vote.
Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.
Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males. Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.
Alexander informed The Epoch Times that St. Joseph’s Catholic High School told him that his attendance at the school would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students. Alexander said the school labeled his beliefs as “offensive” and “bullying” because there was a transgender student in his class. Alexander insists that he has no plans to be violent in defending his ideology, and doesn’t feel as though he is bullying anyone.
“Offense is obviously defined by the offended. I expressed my religious beliefs in class and it spiraled out of control,” Alexander explained. “Not everybody’s going to like that. That doesn’t make me a bully. It doesn’t mean I’m harassing anybody. They express their beliefs and I express mine. Mine obviously don’t fit the narrative.”
He said, “This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”
Alexander told The Post Millennial, “They’re using it as a technicality to say that they’re not disciplining me, and it’s just a form of exclusion to protect the other students.”
However, Alexander is already enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, which reportedly bars him from enrolling at any other education programs.
Alexander said, “I am unable to do any other form of education because as long as I’m enrolled in the Catholic board, I’m not allowed to take an alternative route of education. So I’m enrolled, but I’m not allowed to attend school. So right now I actually have no form of education.”
Alexander stated that he plans to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.
Alexander is appealing his suspension. However, his appeal is reportedly being held up because Alexander previously asked for parental independence so as not to drag his parents into this quandary.
Alexander’s lawyer James Kitchen said, “He does live with his parents and they have an excellent relationship. He seeks guidance from them and they gladly give it to him. But he runs his own life. And that’s actually by design, because that’s how his parents raised him to be.”
St. Joseph’s Catholic High School principal Derek Lennox and Mark Searson, the director of education for the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board, both said they could not comment on the situation.
Indian Catholic devotees offer the way of the cross prayers after an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Mary’s Basilica in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on March 5, 2014. | AFP via Getty Images/Noah Seelam
Christians faced harassment in more countries than any other religious group amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to a recent Pew Research study finding an increase in 45 countries where followers of Christ face social or government abuse or violence since 2012.
The data on restrictions to religion around the globe, released last November, was featured in a Jan. 27 report showing that Christians face harassment in over 155 countries in 2020, an increase from 110 in 2012. The organization’s definition of “harassment” can include a wide range of actions, including verbal abuse to physical violence and killings committed by governments, social groups or individuals. The study captured “cases where individuals or groups feel singled out or unable to express their religious belief or nonbelief.” The study rated 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion using the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.
Pew’s Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices, while its Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. Researchers sifted through over a dozen publicly available data sources for the report, including the U.S. Department of State’s annual peports on international religious freedom and annual reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Overall, physical harassment related to religion occurred in more than two-thirds of countries in 2020, the research shows. Muslims faced harassment in 145 countries, an increase from 109 in 2012. Jews, who make up 0.2% of the global population, face harassment in 94 countries, up from 71 in 2012.
The study found that Christian groups were “targeted by private individuals and organizations in nine countries” as Christians were often blamed for the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In Turkey, an Armenian Orthodox church’s door was set on fire, and news reports said the man told police that he acted because “they [Armenian Christians] brought the coronavirus” to Turkey,” the Nov. 27 Pew report states.
“In Egypt, conspiracy theories blamed the pandemic on the Coptic Orthodox Christian minority, which international Christian observers said exacerbated the discrimination the minority group already faced.”
In India, two Christians were beaten and killed while in police custody for violating COVID-19 curfews in Tamil Nadu, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual international religious freedom report.
The study also found a nine-fold increase in countries where non-religious people face harassment. Pew named the United States among 27 countries where “religiously unaffiliated people” were harassed in 2020.
“Restrictions on religion don’t just affect those who are religious. Religiously unaffiliated people also are harassed because of what they believe,” states the Jan. 27 report by research analysts Sarah Crawford and Virginia Villa, which focuses on harassment against the religious unaffiliated.
Pew study says religiously unaffiliated face harassment in the US | Screenshot/Pew Research
The report also found that the religiously unaffiliated faced harassment in 12 majority-Muslim nations and six majority-Christian countries.
Forms of government harassment for atheists, according to Pew, included atheist groups in Croatia — a majority-Catholic country — who alleged the presence of the cross and other Roman Catholic symbolism in public buildings like hospitals and courtrooms were unconstitutional.
And in countries like Pakistan, where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion, atheists are not given a “no religion” option for their identification cards, although the “government requires people to state their religious affiliation.”
Examples of social harassment cited by Pew included a political satirist in Lebanon who called atheism the “religion of donkeys” during a program on a TV channel backed by that nation’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement political party.
While the rise of the religious “nones” isn’t new, Pew predicts the trend could result in the number of Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to as low as 35% of all Americans by 2070.
The Pew findings come as the global persecution watchdog organization Open Doors reported last year that over 360 million Christians experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination across the globe.
But even as more people shy away from identifying with any religion, many of those who report no religious affiliation still partake in a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices and beliefs.
According to a 202 Baylor University study, many “nones” still attend religious services, pray, meditate, believe in God or a higher power, have religious experiences, and believe in Heaven, Hell and miracles.
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