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.
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In a message to students, faculty, and staff, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler said that drag performances denigrate women and declared that the school will not host a drag performance on campus. In an Instagram post earlier this month, the WTAMU “Spectrum” student organization advertised the drag event, noting, “Spectrum is working with F1RSTGEN and other orgs on campus to produce A Fool’s Drag Race, coming soon!”
While Wendler condemned drag in his message, he suggested that people send money to the Trevor Project, an organization the drag show had been slated to benefit.
“West Texas A&M University will not host a drag show on campus,” Wendler wrote. “It was advertised for March 31, 2023, as an effort to raise money for The Trevor Project. The nonprofit organization focuses on suicide prevention—a noble cause—in the LGBTQ community.”
“As a performance exaggerating aspects of womanhood (sexuality, femininity, gender), drag shows stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood. Any event which diminishes an individual or group through such representation is wrong,” Wendler wrote.
“Drag shows are derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny, no matter the stated intent. Such conduct runs counter to the purpose of WT. A person or group should not attempt to elevate itself or a cause by mocking another person or group. As a university president, I would not support ‘blackface’ performances on our campus, even if told the performance is a form of free speech or intended as humor. It is wrong. I do not support any show, performance or artistic expression which denigrates others—in this case, women—for any reason,” he declared.
“A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it. Supporting The Trevor Project is a good idea. My recommendation is to skip the show and send the dough,” Wendler wrote.
Spectrum pushed back in a statement, arguing that “Drag is not a mockery,” but “a celebration of … queerness, gender, acceptance, love and especially femininity.”
The group requested that Wendler reinstate the drag performance, apologize, and step down from his role as university president.
A petition page posted on Change.org declares, “We, the students of WTAMU … urge him to reinstate the drag show on-campus. We are holding this drag show whether we have his support or not, but his extreme lack of compassion for the LGBT+ and activist student population on campus shows with this latest e-mail.”
Back in 2020, Wendler recognized the 30-year milestone of the school being a part of the Texas A&M University System:
A hand holds up a small transgender pride flag. The blue and pink stripes represent the colors for a boy and girl, while the white stripe represents self-declared gender identities, such as transitioning, intersex, neutral and undefined gender. | Getty Images
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has implemented an emergency regulation imposing what his office calls “guardrails” on gender transition interventions for minors as the push to ban the controversial practices continues on a state-by-state basis.
In a statement Monday, Bailey said he is “issuing an emergency regulation clarifying that, because gender transition interventions are experimental, they are covered by existing Missouri law governing unfair, deceptive, and unconscionable business practices, including in administering healthcare services.”
“As Attorney General, I will protect children and enforce the laws as written, which includes upholding state law on experimental gender transition interventions,” Bailey said. “Even Europe recognizes that mutilating children for the sake of a woke, leftist agenda has irreversible consequences, and countries like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all sharply curtailed these procedures. I am dedicated to using every legal tool at my disposal to stand in the gap and protect children from being subject to inhumane science experiments.”
The new regulation “clarifies that state law already prohibits performing experimental procedures in the absence of specific guardrails.” The guardrails require medical professionals to inform patients that “the use of puberty blocker drugs or cross-sex hormones to treat gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is experimental and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and that “the FDA has issued a warning that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness.”
The Attorney General’s office characterized the move as “necessary due to the skyrocketing number of gender transition interventions despite rising concerns in the medical community that these procedures are experimental and lack clinical evidence of safety or success.”
The emergency regulation will hold the force of law for either 30 legislative days or 180 days, “whichever is longer.”
Additional mandatory disclosures outline how Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare determined in a February 2022 report that the risks associated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “outweigh the possible benefits.”
The regulation also urges providers to cite the Endocrine Society’s finding that “the large majority (about 85%) of prepubertal children with a childhood diagnosis did not remain GD/gender incongruent in adolescence.”
“One scientific study notes that an individual whose friend identifies as transgender is ‘more than 70 times’ as likely to similarly identify as transgender, suggesting that many individuals’ incorrectly believe themselves to be transgender and in need of transition’ because of social factors,” the release from the attorney general’s office states.
The regulation also bans gender transition interventions if the patient has not “received a full psychological or psychiatric assessment” consisting of at least 15 hour-long therapy sessions over a period of 18 months “to determine, among other things, whether the person has any mental health comorbidities.”
An additional requirement imposed on providers seeking to perform gender transition interventions on minors seeks to ensure that “any existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved.”
The regulation also stipulates that doctors must “adopt and follow a procedure to track all adverse effects that arise from any course of covered gender transition intervention for all patients beginning the first day of intervention and continuing for a period of not fewer than 15 years.” Doctors seeking to provide such interventions must also screen patients for autism and examine whether or not their gender dysphoria results from “social contagion” on an annual basis.
The regulation comes after the attorney general announced an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a former employee submitted a sworn affidavit stating that the clinic has sterilized hundreds of children and even lied to parents. The clinic has denied Bailey’s request for a moratorium on prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones as his office investigates the claims.
The new regulation is opposed by LGBT advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood. Dr. Colleen P. McNicholas, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, called the claims made in the announcement “medically false and harmful.”
“Scientific evidence shows — and the medical community agrees — that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, and life-saving,” McNicholas said in a statement shared on Twitter. “We denounce this government interference in the practice of medicine, and we demand politicians leave health care between providers and their patients. Shame on any politician who uses trans youth for political theatrics.”
More than a half dozen states have implemented bans on some or all gender transition interventions for minors, specifically Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.
In the absence of action by the state legislature, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Commissioner of Family and Protective Services Jaime Masters have issued formal opinions characterizing gender transition services as a form of child abuse. The moves by state legislatures and executive officials related to gender transition interventions for minors come in response to concerns about the long-term impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries.
The American College of Pediatricians has identified the potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment” as well as sterility. The organization has listed “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as some of the potential long-term impacts of cross-sex hormones.
As for gender transition surgeries to remove and/or create synthetic body parts in order to align a person’s sexual organs with their stated gender identity, graphic images posted on social media last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office reveal scars left behind from double mastectomies that remove healthy breasts from trans-identified females as well as scarred forearm tissue used to create synthetic penises in trans-identified females.
Last year, the U.K’s National Health Service proposed new guidelines warning doctors not to so easily encourage minors to socially transition by changing their names and pronouns because many children dealing with gender dysphoria may be going through a “transient phase.”
The proposed guidelines followed an independent review led by Dr. Hillary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which found that “social transitioning” is not a “neutral act” and could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning.”
“The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence, being mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for prepubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes,” the guidelines state.
Detransitioner Chloe Cole has emerged as a prominent voice for a community of young adults who formerly identified with the opposite sex but saw their gender dysphoria subside as they got older.
Cole is suing doctors, attributing the suicidal thoughts and deteriorating state of mental health she experienced as a teenager to the life-altering double mastectomy she received at the age of 15.
While Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” she discovered that her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion.
All big companies!
Really.
It sounds responsible. But it turns out DEI courses are often useless and sometimes racist.
First comes groveling.
My new video about DEI shows a conference that begins with a “land acknowledgement.” A Microsoft employee apologizes for taking land from “the Sammamish, the Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot” and more.
I guess it’s a nice gesture. But they aren’t giving the land back!
Companies go through the motions.
“They feel like they have to,” says York College professor Erec Smith. “They have to signal to the world that they’re doing something.”
They hope it will protect them from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and lawsuits.
Smith was once a diversity officer. He left the position because he thought it was “useless.”
Or worse. “It makes people less likely to interact with people unlike them,” he says. “It’s a minefield now.”
At diversity trainings, employees learn about “microaggressions,” speech that’s subtly biased.
“If you ask somebody what they do for a living, somehow that’s racist,” says Smith. “If you learn that, then why would you take a chance? … ‘I’m going to silence myself’ … not talk to Black people.”
A Coca-Cola diversity training tells employees, “Be less white.” “Being white” includes being “oppressive, arrogant, defensive, ignorant.”
“That is by no means a white thing,” says Smith. “The point is to demonize the other side.”
Worst of all, despite the $3 billion spent on DEI training by American companies today, DEI trainings don’t do what they’re supposed to do.
A Harvard professor analyzed studies of them and says, “Sadly enough, I did not find one single study which found that diversity training leads to more diversity.”
A different Harvard Business Review study analyzed data from 800 companies and found that five years after diversity training, the share of Black women managers decreased by 9%.
“It is not about data,” says Smith. “It’s about a power grab.”
One that starts in schools.
Smith attended a conference of rhetoric professors where the conference leader, Asao Inoue, declared it racist to grade students on traditional English.
“If you use a single standard to grade your students’ language, you engage in racism. … White language supremacy.”
Smith sent a group email in response, saying it’s a disservice to minority kids not to teach standard English. Instead of addressing Smith’s point, other professors attacked him, calling him racist.
“Do you enjoy using Western modes of argument to invalidate people of color?” “I hope for the day that folks like you will learn how to check their privilege.”
“We are professors in communication,” Smith told me. “I thought we could communicate. I was so wrong. … They saw in me a threat. … a Black person saying it’s OK to teach Black students standardized English.”
An academic named Eve accused Smith of “perpetuating harm.” Other academics joined in to praise the “tremendous labor” Eve spent writing the email.
“They’re victims!” I say, bewildered.
“That’s the point,” Smith responds. “Perpetuate the victimhood.”
“This isn’t even logical! Has academia gone insane?” I ask.
Smith laughs. “Yes, it has gone insane.”
Today some sensible people are pushing back. Education reformer Chris Rufo proposes a DEI alternative called “EMC.” EMC stands for equality, merit and colorblindness.
Sounds good to me, but woke college activists say “colorblindness” is evil because it denies that racism exists.
“Merit” is bad because the way it’s measured must be biased, because the results show racial disparity.
This is why some colleges have dropped admission tests and why many high schools eliminated honors classes.
“If you wanted to hold down a group of people,” says Smith, “… this ‘woke’ thing is a good strategy.”
The achievement gap between Black and white students has been widening lately.
A better solution, says Smith, is to ignore the censors. Debate.
“People don’t say what they feel because they don’t want to get canceled, get called racist. People are censoring. We have to stop doing that.”
The NYPD officers mobilized to quell any unrest in New York City upon news of a possible indictment against former President Donald Trump can probably rest easy: the grand jury isn’t meeting today and possibly tomorrow. No reason was offered, but the panel that’s to decide whether Trump broke the law regarding his hush money payment scheme to former porn star Stormy Daniels isn’t going to issue any indictment this week (via Politico):
'The DA’s office didn’t tell the court why the day off, [they] just said, ‘I don’t want them today, maybe tomorrow" – senior law-enforcement official.
The Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star won’t meet Wednesday as regularly scheduled, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The reason for the adjournment wasn’t immediately clear. The grand jury typically meets Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, one of the people familiar with the matter said, and it heard from witnesses earlier this week.
“The grand jury has been told to stay home today. They’re on standby for tomorrow,” one senior law-enforcement official said.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been facing immense pressure since Trump declared on his platform, Truth Social, that he would be arrested this week. There’s no evidence that an arrest warrant has been issued; there’s no indictment yet. Trump’s team even acknowledged that they were unaware of any development. Still, it brought the former president back into the news cycle with attacks against Bragg, who Republicans, especially Trump supporters, are accusing of playing politics with the justice system. That criticism is not unfounded, as the charges against Trump are reportedly not felony-level, but Bragg’s office is allegedly trying to finagle ways to make that case. The statute of limitations has also expired on the charges purportedly being considered, so this is another witch hunt.
Bragg’s office also could decline to charge Trump, too. That’s another real possibility. This week has been fraught with reports and sources claiming that an arrest is a real possibility, with the backdrop of mass law enforcement mobilization offering some credibility to those developments.
American media has bombarded us daily from all directions to make sure we know that Donald Trump indirectly paid a woman to shut her mouth as she and her now-convict lawyer, Michael Avenatti, shook him down for money.
In New York, false financial accounting can be a low-level misdemeanor, but it’s rarely prosecuted. Now Alvin Bragg, a municipal prosecutor, is trying to make a name for himself by charging former President Trump with that crime.
This is the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate. George Soros, Bragg’s benefactor, must be grinning from ear to ear.
Hillary Clinton Got Off For a Worse Deed
Trump’s former lawyer accounted for the payment as consulting or attorney’s fees. Allegedly, so did President Trump, and $130,000 changed hands.
For perspective, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid $1 million for the infamous fictional “Steele dossier.” They paid for this using one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent lawyers, Marc Elias, as a cutout to hide who was paying for this opposition research that falsely claimed Trump was colluding with Russia.
They then laundered the dossier through various contacts to try to destroy Trump and get Clinton elected president. Those people officially accounted for the $1 million dossier expense as “legal fees.” So, one side paid people to lie. The other paid someone not to lie, or at least not to speak.
Clinton lives in New York, the state in which Trump is likely to be charged over a $130,000 payment. She has not been charged for the $1 million payment. Do these events really sound vastly different to you?
Bragg hopes to spin that unserious charge into a federal campaign finance violation. Meanwhile, the dossier fraud, which affected two presidential elections and two presidential impeachments, was settled with a $113,000 fine.
Bragg’s Case Is a Mess
City prosecutors cannot charge people with federal crimes. Only feds can charge federal crimes, not some city prosecutor. Bragg has allegedly met with the Secret Service about how they will react to a New York City police officer approaching President Trump with handcuffs (if they can find one who will do it). Bragg is way over his head and wading into deep political waters.
New York Attorney General Tish James ran for office almost exclusively on a “get Trump” platform. She hated the man and promised to find a crime he committed, rather than responding to a crime and looking for a perpetrator. After years of not finding anything, she did not charge Trump with any crimes. Same state. Same New York laws. More investigative tools. Yet she passed on the opportunity to arrest a president.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the same alleged crime and also chose not to prosecute. Every prosecutor in the state above Bragg’s office passed on this one knowing they could not prove President Trump committed a crime. Or they realized that no serious person could charge Trump and not also indict Democrats.
Bragg is the same Manhattan DA who has publicly decriminalized crimes in the name of wokeness. This alleged prosecutor will ignore criminal violence and release people on their own recognizance after a stern talking to for beating someone half to death or attacking police. But he wants to charge Trump for this garbage after every one of his superiors has declined to do so. Why? Incompetence? Tunnel vision? Irrational hate? Why choose?
Democrats’ Hate Could Prompt a Constitutional Crisis
Many Democrats want Trump arrested for anything. They want to see him in cuffs more than they want their own kids to be happy and healthy. They have been searching for someone stupid or reckless enough to “perp walk” the man for the cameras. They might very well have found him. If Bragg does it over this fluff, it will prove to be a poor career choice for him and could have much broader implications that are rungs above his pay grade.
Some Dems even want conservatives to riot if a cop cuffs Trump, just like a lack of security made it easy for people to barge into the Capitol through open doors just to be charged and arrested. They might get their wish. And it is likely a trap. If it happens and people protest, see whether New York City will give them all “room to vent” like city officials gave lefty rioters for months. Hopefully, any protests will be peaceful. I will not be involved in any of it.
A lot of people continue to be surprised at these events and have truly had enough of the second set of rules for conservatives. If the hard left keeps pushing this kind of thing, it will eventually be deeply sorry.
Feds raided Trump’s house with a tactical team over papers a librarian wanted. Oddly, CNN was present and ran the story on a loop. Joe Biden dropped 50 years of classified documents all over the country and the feds let his personal lawyers (who lacked security clearances) sort them before giving them to the government at their leisure.
They investigate Trump from all sides. They give Biden a pass on everything. The feds investigated Trump’s sons and son-in-law for any irregularity. Yet Hunter Biden, a man in a long line of alleged Biden bag men, lives in a $40,000-per-month Malibu beach house and sells splatter paintings to anonymous purchasers for exorbitant amounts.
Wildly Unequal Legal Treatment
Everyone is supposed to just sit back and accept the different treatment and think it is okay and normal. This is far from normal—it is a thumb in the eye of half the American population.
Even apparently peaceful Jan. 6, 2021 protestors have been in pre-trial detention for two years. Black Lives Matter and Antifa got carte blanch to riot and burn courthouses with impunity with at least tacit support from the White House and open support from the vice president, who encouraged people to donate money to bail the rioters out of jail.
Firebomb a pro-life crisis pregnancy center and take credit for it, and Biden’s inept AG will give you a pass. Pray in front of an abortion clinic and you will be charged with a list of felonies. This is not sustainable. People, in large numbers, will eventually stop taking it.
The Acceleration of Dangerous Trends
In accordance with their oaths, prosecutors are not supposed to charge people with crimes they cannot prove, since doing so can ruin people’s lives even if they are eventually acquitted. The citizenry remembers the charge, not the acquittal.
Likewise, presidents are not supposed to issue executive orders they know will be overturned as unlawful, just for political gain and show. Both have been happening for the last two years at a clip never before encountered. Team Biden is daring half the country. Stand up, but do not take the bait.
Many think Bragg will charge Trump soon because he can. These people might not be ready for the fallout they will provoke. And by that, I do not mean violence. I mean turnabout.
Republicans may politically finally address Democratic Party lawfare, taking an eye for an eye. Some have recently shown backbone their predecessors lacked. Their voters will increasingly elect officials who promise to do so. Trump himself was a harbinger of this.
Republicans Need to Respond, Good and Hard
If Bragg pulls the proverbial trigger, everyone had better be really sure about his next moves. Bragg and his upstream cronies will not be able to take it back, apologize, call for calm, or put that leftist authoritarian genie back in the bottle.
If they think they are right and their ideas the best, Democrats should square up and try to beat at the polls whomever the Republican candidate is in 2024. Another round of transparent politically driven rigging, especially like this, after the ridiculous failures of their impeachment efforts and Jan. 6 show trials, will light a dangerous fuse for which the American people have lost patience.
Most countries that fail to address unequal treatment start dying from within. Every American should want to avoid that for all our sakes. Bragg staying out of presidential politics and focusing on the skyrocketing violent crime rate in his own backyard would be a welcome next step.
When Republicans take the White House, they should make sure prosecutors at every level have every resource and unclassified document they require to investigate and, if mandated, charge everyone on team leftist. No letting things slide. If the Dems want old-fashioned dirty politics, the other side might finally give it to them good, hard, and thoroughly.
Thomas Crist is a husband, father, lawyer, and political conservative who loves his country and despises all myopic hypocrisy regardless of its source.
A health-care executive who claims Jim Biden defrauded him was interviewed multiple times by the lawyer Joe Biden just nominated to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. According to two sources, while the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office is aware of the allegations, that office is not investigating the potential fraud, leaving the matter solely in the hands of the conflicted-future U.S. attorney.
On Monday, President Biden named Eric Olshan, currently an assistant U.S. attorney in the Pittsburgh office, to fill the vacancy left open when former U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung was confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
As I previously reported, Chung, whom President Biden had nominated to the federal appellate court, had been overseeing the criminal investigation into the bankrupt health-care business Americore—a business Jim Biden allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from to finance repairs for his beach house. Jim Biden is the current U.S. president’s brother.
Now, President Biden seeks to replace Chung with Olshan, raising serious concerns about a potential conflict of interest given Olshan’s involvement in the investigation of the Jim Biden-connected business, Americore.
Olshan had previously served as the lead investigator in the criminal case against Daniel Hurt. Hurt pleaded guilty to soliciting and obtaining kickbacks from the rural Pennsylvania hospital Ellwood City Medical Center, or “ECMC,” which Americore owned. ECMC had allegedly received some $25 million in fraudulent Medicare reimbursements.
According to an affidavit signed under oath by ECMC’s former CEO, Grant White, the president’s brother directed White to loan him (Jim Biden) approximately $400,000 to repay a past-due personal loan secured by Jim Biden’s Florida beach house. Jim Biden allegedly later pulled additional funds from ECMC, totaling about $250,000, but he would only repay about $25,000 to the medical center. ECMC would later go bankrupt and close, prompting a federal investigation.
To date, no charges have been filed related to Jim Biden’s alleged misappropriation of funds from Americore. Nor has anything come from the additional accusations made by Michael Frey, the president and CEO of the Tennessee-based Diverse Medical Management, against Jim Biden and his business partners.
Frey claims Jim Biden represented himself as a “principal” for Americore—even providing him a business card—and then entered into a scheme to defraud him. According to Frey, Jim Biden and his business partners promised to provide capital to implement Frey’s business model for rejuvenating failing rural hospitals.
But after Frey worked with various medical groups to put the plan in action, Jim Biden and his partners reneged on their agreement, he says. That left Frey holding the bag, forcing him to cover costs of about $1 million until he could unwind the various deals that had been put into motion.
The Tennessee business executive sued Jim Biden and the others allegedly involved in the scheme, before entering into a confidential settlement agreement with the defendants. The defendants breached the deal, however, according to Frey.
Frey plans to enforce the settlement agreement but told The Federalist he first intends to retrieve copies of the thousands of text and email messages exchanged by the parties, hoping those documents will assist in his efforts. Frey says the text and email messages will confirm his allegations against Jim Biden and the others involved in the deal.
Frey’s accusations against Jim Biden are particularly concerning because Frey discussed his allegations and evidence with an FBI agent from the Pittsburgh field office, as well as with Olshan.
“I spoke with Olshan both before and after Joe Biden became president,” Frey told The Federalist. They last spoke about six to eight months ago, Frey noted, adding that Olshan stated his office would reach back out to Frey. To date, however, he has heard nothing more.
Frey also told The Federalist he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware or Baltimore offices. This proves significant because the U.S. attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, is handling the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicate Jim Biden in some of those deals.
Further, Weiss’s status as a holdover from the Trump administration has given Attorney General Merrick Garland the only cover he has from claims that a conflict of interest necessitates the appointment of a special counsel. But according to Frey, he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware office. Nor has anyone from the Baltimore FBI field office—the FBI office covering Delaware-related investigations—contacted Frey, he says.
A person familiar with the Delaware investigation confirmed for The Federalist that while the U.S. attorney’s office there is familiar with Jim Biden and his wife Sara’s connections to the Americore case, the Delaware office is not investigating the matter. Rather, the investigation into Frey’s accusations was being handled out of the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Frey also told The Federalist that members of the House Oversight Committee have asked him to testify before Congress and he is open to doing so. “Somebody has to stop them from ruining people’s lives,” Frey said, referring to Jim Biden and his partners. “What they did to the $12-an-hour employees at these hospitals is a travesty.”
Whether Jim Biden and his partners hold any criminal responsibility related to Americore’s raiding of rural hospitals is unclear. What is clear, however, is that with Joe Biden appointing Olshan to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the entire Americore investigative record should be turned over to the Delaware U.S. attorney, stat.
The Federalist asked Olshan whether he would recuse from the investigation and refer the matter to the Delaware office now that Joe Biden has nominated him to serve as the next U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Olshan did not respond to the inquiry.
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.
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.
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USA Today has named Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke as its “Women of the Year” honoree for the state of Minnesota — but Finke, who identifies as a transgender, is a biological man.
Finke, who entered office in early January after winning election in November 2022, is the first transgender individual elected to the Minnesota state legislature.
“The trans and LGBTQ community, we have to expand our understanding of what it means to be successful and happy and thriving, but also how to be creative and expansive in how we want the future to look for everyone. I think trans people are on the leading edge of that. We are here creating a path forward for everyone, and everyone will benefit from the work that we’re trying to do for our young people,” Finke said, according to the St. Cloud Times. “Trans liberation is upward flowing, all liberation movements flow outwards. Everyone will benefit from it and it’s worth committing yourself to.”
“Tell the truth and lead with your values, that’s what I tell myself. Tell the truth and lead with your values. And that way you won’t have to apologize, you won’t have to take things back, you won’t have to look back at all,” Finke said, according to the outlet.
And there it is. A clue as to why the Left is so diligent in pushing transgenderism. It’s a recruiting tool for the homosexual lobby. Transvestites (Drag Queens) entertaining children by reading to them, adds to their recruiting efforts. It has never been about making homosexuality normalized. It’s about recruiting children into their chosen lifestyle, and the poisoning their confused minds.
Some of USA Today’s “Women of the Year” national honorees this year include actress Goldie Hawn, former first lady Michelle Obama, and actress Sheryl Lee Ralph. Last year, Admiral Rachel Levine, another biological man who identifies as a woman, was named among the honorees.
Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement on International Women’s Day in which he declared that “trans women are women.”
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The contrast couldn’t be clearer. A devastating train derailment and subsequent toxic fires rock a community in Ohio that President Trump carried by 29 points. Forty days later, President Joe Biden has yet to set foot in East Palestine despite numerous pleas from residents.
A few weeks after the train crash, news breaks about a well-connected bank few have ever heard of crumbling on a Friday afternoon. At a time of the day his supporters say he usually does nothing, Biden is in front of the television cameras telling the world that the U.S. government will bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which is located in a city Biden won by almost 50 points. Biden’s climate buddies and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wine companies are no doubt relieved.
For those keeping score: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is an emergency that requires Biden to get out of bed before 9 a.m., while the people of East Palestine continue to wait for answers.
Looking at those who work with or benefit from SVB, one begins to understand Biden’s urgency. The White House may say climate is our worst existential crisis, but it looks like green dollars for leftists’ eco-friends required the quickest action.
It’s easy to wonder if President Biden’s actions are driven by the bank’s connection to climate companies. This article highlights a few, noting “Silicon Valley Bank served as a banker to dozens of climate and energy-tech companies, holding their cash on a day-to-day basis and issuing billions of dollars in loans in support of the type of large-scale, one-off projects that are essential to the sector.”
Read it again: Dozens of climate companies. Billions in loans. Holding their cash on a day-to-day basis. Now, it gets interesting.
Steyer once played a key role on a Zoom fundraiser for Biden that raised $4 million dollars. That’s a lot of money for a single conference call. Many of the donors were from Silicon Valley and have deep pockets. That’s why it should be no surprise that when it came time to find someone to oversee $369 billion in taxpayer dollars for green investments, Biden would reach back into Steyer’s world.
Another company reported to have close ties to SVB is Lowercarbon Capital. It doesn’t take long on their website to find their managing partner is a strong Biden ally. They proudly tell you the partner is not only a longtime supporter of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but “was on their 2020 campaign’s National Finance Committee and is a member of Climate Leaders for Biden.”
Wait, there’s more. According to the reports, another major company with ties to SVB is Sunrun Solar. The company saw money from SVB going back to 2014 and arranged for a loan of more than half a billion dollars less than three months ago.
All this government cheese would be bland without a little wine. Take a moment to appreciate Newsom’s tone-deaf actions about SVB. Not long after Biden’s announcement, Newsom heaped praise on the move, and now we’re starting to see why.
Newsom is the owner of some wine companies, and you’ll be shocked to hear those companies are reportedly held by SVB. And if you can handle one more vomit-inducing dose of hypocrisy, an SVB bank president sits on the board of a charity run by Newsom’s wife.
Joe Biden’s Climate Cult: Membership has its privileges. It’s too bad the people of East Palestine couldn’t get in on the ground level.
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future and has appeared on Fox News, Newsmax and One America News. You can find him on Twitter at @larrybehrens or email at larry@powerthefuture.com.
A Manhattan grand jury appears poised to indict Donald Trump, according to news reports and the former president himself. Here’s what you need to know to understand the chatter about the anticipated criminal charges against Trump—and why the move to indict a former president for the first time in our country’s history will make political prosecutions the new norm in America.
While only the grand jury and prosecutors know for certain what charges against Trump, if any, are being considered, the consensus is that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, is pursuing a criminal case against Trump for allegedly falsifying business records, in violation of Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York Penal Code.
Section 175.05 provides “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Falsifying business records in the second degree is a misdemeanor, subject to a two-year statute of limitations.
A violation of Section 175.10, however, is a felony, subject to a five-year statute of limitations. That section defines the offense of falsifying business records in the first degree and provides that if a person falsifies business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime, the offense is one in the first degree.
The underlying factual theory for charging the former president rests on Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as “legal expenses,” when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the pornography performer from publicly claiming she had sex with Trump a decade earlier. In total, the Trump Organization reported legal expenses of $420,000 paid to Cohen in 2017, at a monthly rate of $35,000. Cohen, however, had provided no legal services for the Trump Organization that year.
To bump what would be a misdemeanor under New York law to a felony, pundits are suggesting the D.A. will argue Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records to conceal the commission of one or more federal election crimes. The Manhattan prosecutor, however, might also advance the theory that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsely report the payments with the intent of committing tax fraud.
Even before reaching the merits of the legal theories being bandied about to charge Trump criminally, a public suspicious of the Get-Trump attitude seen over the last seven years will notice the statute of limitations seems to bar Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. But Bragg has two ways to sidestep the two- and five-year statutory time limits.
First, if Bragg charges Trump with a felony, the longer five-year period applies. While more than five years have passed since the Trump Organization last recorded a “legal expense” to Cohen, New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, by executive order extended the statute of limitations for one year (or thereabouts) due to Covid-19. That tolling would make a felony indictment against Trump timely.
Alternatively, because New York law provides that any time a defendant remains “continuously outside” of the state is excluded from the statutory period, an indictment against Trump would be timely. From late January 2017 on, Trump was “continuously outside” New York, first in D.C. and then in Florida, meaning the statute of limitations only ran those few times Trump was in New York. That isn’t even close to the two years necessary for the misdemeanor statute of limitations to expire, much less the five-year period applicable to felony offenses.
So, the statute of limitations won’t likely bar one or more falsifying business records counts. But what about the merits?
Cohen already pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his payments to Stormy Daniels. But to convict Trump on the anticipated state charges, the Manhattan prosecutor would need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump (1) caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records (2) “with the intent to defraud.”
From public reporting, it appears Cohen is a star witness for the prosecution, likely testifying Trump directed him to make the payments to silence Daniels and promising reimbursement from the Trump Organization. Whether a paper trail supports Cohen’s testimony is unclear, but without one, it will be Cohen’s word—the word of a convicted felon—crucial to establish the crime.
Cohen’s testimony also already appears under fire. A “former legal advisor to Cohen,” Robert Costello, reportedly testified before the grand jury on Monday, “solely to undermine” Cohen’s credibility.
But prosecutors will need to prove more than that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records. They will need to establish he also had the “intent to defraud.” Here, the defense can easily counter that Trump’s intent was to avoid embarrassment to his family caused by what he claims is a lie, rather than to “defraud” anyone.
Should prosecutors nonetheless prove their case, it is only a misdemeanor, unless they can further establish Trump intended “to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime. Proving either will be even more challenging.
First, to establish Trump intended to conceal a violation of federal election law, the Manhattan D.A. would need to prove Trump had committed an election-law crime. While Cohen alleged paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, Trump has another justification, namely avoiding any embarrassment for himself and his family, that does not run afoul of federal election law.
Proving Trump intended to commit tax fraud would likely be a difficult case to prove as well, with prosecutors needing to establish Trump’s knowledge of the intricacies of the corporation’s tax filings to show he held the requisite intent.
This inside-the-law analysis reveals an exceedingly weak case, but that is only a fraction of what the public will care about. On top of the questionable charges, the general public will see a man hounded for seven years with false claims of Russia collusion and other supposed crimes. They will see a statute of limitations that on its face appears to have run. And they will see a local prosecutor pushing charges previously rejected by a federal U.S. attorney.
Then there was the public pressure placed on Bragg to indict Trump, best exemplified by the backlash he faced after he apparently backed off charging the former president for crimes supposedly connected to the Trump Organization’s finances. At the time, “two prosecutors quit his office,” and “one of the prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, wrote a highly critical book that the media has celebrated.”
In short, the public will see a vindictive political prosecution of Trump.
Maybe there will be a time to charge a president or a former president with a crime, but the facts here do not support making that leap. While D.A. Bragg and those pushing for Trump’s indictment may seek cover behind the well-worn American proposition that “no one is above the law,” the corollary is equally important: Our political enemies are not targeted for prosecution.
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.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has issued a statement after top House Republicans demanded that Bragg testify to Congress on a possible indictment of former President Donald Trump.
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law,” a spokesperson for Bragg’s office told Fox News Digital.
“In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work,” the spokesperson added.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the other top Republicans on the Administration and Oversight committees on Monday sent a letter to Bragg to demand that he turn over documents related to his Trump investigation and testify before Congress after reports said that Trump could face an indictment this week.
(Christopher Goodney / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File | Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File)
“You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former president of the United States and current declared candidate for that office,” the letter said.
Republicans warned that an indictment of Trump over alleged hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 would “erode confidence in the evenhanded application of justice and unalterably interfere in the court of the 2024 presidential election.”
“In light of the serious consequences of your actions, we expect that you will testify about what plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.
The letter was signed by Jordan, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis.
Former President Donald Trump has denied allegations that he had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and paid her hush money to cover it up in 2016, calling Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation a “witch hunt.” (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images / File)
It marked the first official attempt by these Republican-controlled committees in the new Congress to conduct oversight of the law enforcement officials who have been investigating Trump.
The potential charges stem from the $130,000 hush-money payment that then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019, even as Cohen implicated him as part of his plea deal. The Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.
However, Bragg’s office is reportedly considering whether to bring charges against Trump by elevating misdemeanor charges for falsifying business records, for which the statute of limitations has expired, to a felony charge of falsifying those records to conceal alleged campaign finance violations — an accusation levied at Trump that the Justice Department has already declined to prosecute.
The New York Young Republicans Club held a rally in front of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in Manhattan, New York, on March 20, 2023. (Fatih Aktas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Republicans called this a “novel and untested legal theory” and insisted that Bragg was “motivated by political calculations.”
Bragg’s spokesperson pushed back against the accusation by insisting that the DA’s office follows the facts.
Are you angry yet? You should be. Our economy is slowing, banks are reeling, inflation remains scorching-high, real incomes are dropping, home prices are falling and Americans everywhere are becoming poorer by the minute. On top of everything else, now we have the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, infuriating bailouts and the resulting panic over banks. As with nearly everything that has gone wrong on their watch, including the inexcusable border chaos, the catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan and harmful inflation, the go-to response by the White House has been to blame President Trump.
Specifically, to blame Trump for signing legislation that loosened regulations on regional banks in 2018.That was Joe Biden’s message in the pitiful 5-minute address in which he tried but utterly failed to reassure the nation that our banking system is sound.
Here’s what Biden didn’t say: they knew. Regulators knew that Silicon Valley Bank was on the brink of failure. Supervisors spotted fatal weaknesses at the tech lender last summer, including some deemed “matters requiring immediate attention”; they told SVB management last fall that its model was flawed and could result in a run on deposits.
Despite the grave warning, the New York Times reports, management failed to change course and supervisors failed to act. By early this spring, SVB was in yet another review, this one on its risk management practices. Bottom line: there were none.
In other words, there were plenty of regulations and processes in place to prevent the catastrophe that occurred at SVB. Critics have assailed the San Francisco Fed, the supervisory authority, and its chief Mary Daly, for negligence. Some have rightly said that having SVB CEO Greg Becker on the overseer Fed board posed an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest.
It is hard to dismiss those who assert that the eagerness with which the Fed, the Treasury and the White House stepped in to bail out SVB and Signature Bank, caught in SVB’s backdraft, stemmed from the cozy relationships and giant political donations that Democrats receive from the tech community. It is, indeed, one big Happy Valley.
After all, the bailouts (which must not be called bailouts) infuriated our European allies, and are a great embarrassment to our globalist Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who surely resisted the rescue. Yellen has spent much of her tenure atop our financial edifice working to cede U.S. tax policy to international organizations. To that end she has lobbied financial regulators around the world promising, among other things, that the U.S. would never again bail out banks.
The Financial Times reports that Europe’s “top policymakers are seething” over the decision to cover all SVB’s depositors, “fearing it will undermine a globally agreed regime.” Those critics are reportedly shocked at the “total and utter incompetence” of U.S. authorities.
It did not have to be this way. Do not forget who brought us to this sorry state. Do not be fooled. There is one and only one reason that Americans are struggling, that we are heading into a recession, and our banks are on thin ice.
President Biden, Democrats in Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jay Powell have orchestrated a reckless trashing of our economy. In a shameless bid to buy votes, Biden and the Democrat majority in Congress spent trillions of unneeded dollars, mainly aimed at politically favored groups like the teachers’ unions and the climate lobby, driving the economy into warp speed and igniting inflation.
Jay Powell, hoping to be reappointed Fed Chair, ignored rising prices for months, continuing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds and mortgage-backed securities even as inflation topped 6%, aware that his only competition for the job was Lael Brainard, an avowed “dove.” Moving faster to tackle inflation might have cost Powell his job.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Yellen became a cheerleader for blowing up the country’s deficits, all the while dismissing inflation as “small” and “manageable”; it wasn’t until the end of 2021 that she admitted it was not, after all, “transitory”. Once a respected economist, Yellen has become a political hack.
Joe Biden and Janet Yellen lie when they say the economy was “reeling” when he became president; it was actually growing at 6% and recovering nicely from the once-in-a-lifetime shutdown caused by COVID-19. Thanks to bipartisan efforts to prop up stalled businesses and consumers who had lost their jobs, the slump occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic was sharp but mercifully short-lived. The government expanded relief programs, the Fed lowered interest rates; the system was working as planned.
Jobs were coming back, inflation was only 1.4%, and consumer sentiment, key to spending, had rebounded sharply from the low of 72 on April 2020 to 79. (Last month, even before the bank problems, it stood at 67; in February 2020, before COVID hit, it stood at 101. Bravo Biden!)
Joe Biden took office and within weeks rushed to pass the American Rescue Act, throwing $1.9 trillion onto an economy plagued with supply chain problems. The bill passed with Democrat-only support, in part because Republicans recognized that it could prove inflationary (as even Democrat Larry Summers predicted.) Inflation indeed began to climb, to 4.2% in April 2021, and to a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
The banking sector will likely calm, and inflation has dropped, but we are not out of the woods. There are recession signs aplenty and Biden has offered up a ludicrous and wasteful budget that Republicans must oppose. There will be a fight over raising the debt ceiling as the GOP pushes for needed spending restraint, which could get ugly.
But voters need to remember as the next election nears: it did not have to be this way. This was not an act of God; this was a reckless hijacking of our economy that put the entire country at risk. Voters must fire those responsible.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
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 those of y’all that don’t know what the f**k is going on in the state of Mississippi; they are trying to pass a law to reinstate the Jim Crow laws.”
Recently I was talking with a co-worker, and he mentioned that something going on in Mississippi. “You know what’s going on over there, don’t you?” he said. “I don’t,” I replied. His next statement was completely unexpected. “They are tryin’ to bring back Jim Crow laws down there.”
Right then, I knew something was off. After all, if that were true it would be worldwide news. I mean, the world would literally be on fire. I remembered how the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis had in turn sparked riots in some parts here in Arizona- this would certainly be worse. Next, he shows me a video of a random, unnamed black woman on Facebook, declaring the “news” quoted above. “For all of you who are young,” she continues, “and don’t know what the Jim Crow laws are-look up the story of Emmett Till.”
Alright, that’s enough of that.
Of all the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ floating around in the ‘metaverse,’ this should have been flagged immediately. That’s what they profess to do, right? Of course, this was a lie the left didn’t care about. This particular story is so full of mistruths, misinterpretations and revisionist history, it is a challenge just to know where to begin- so let’s start with Jim Crow and Emmett Till.
The term ‘Jim Crow’ was a societal elbow-in-the-ribs to the black populace, reminding them that their “place” as 2nd-class citizens would never change as far as some were concerned. In order to devalue the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Jim Crow laws were created to enforce racial segregation and the beratement of freed blacks, beginning in the late 1800’s, and ending with the start of the civil rights movement.
As for the Emmett Till reference, there is literally no connection between the two. Fourteen-year-old Emmett was lynched, murdered, and nearly beaten beyond recognition for the crime of flirting with a white woman. Though this horrific incident was one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement- it had nothing to do with Jim Crow.
Aside from the rhetoric and despite what has been said, at the heart of the concerns is not Mississippi itself, but rather the town of Jackson; or more specifically- House Bill 1020.
HB 1020 was designed to control Jackson’s crime rate by changing the way it has been managed. One of the ways it would accomplish this, was by adding new judges and removing the sole power to elect those magistrates from the hands of the people. With Jackson being more than 80% black, Democrats and their voters had all they needed to cry, you guessed it- racism.
Truth be told, Jacksonians had bigger fish to fry.
According to WLBT news in Jackson, this report, just two short years ago, reveals much about life in this city of 436,000:
“People are being killed at a higher rate per capita in the Capital City than any other major city in the U.S., according to a 3 On Your Side analysis of more than fifty municipalities across the country. With 153 killings thus far in 2021, the homicide rate for Jackson is 99.5 per 100,000 residents, a rate that blazes past Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore.
For this analysis, 3 On Your Side calculated per capita rates of killings for cities with a population of at least 130,000, including major ones like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and cities that had previously been ranked for high homicide rates, such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge.”
With this information in mind, Jackson’s leaders set out to change its quickly deteriorating status.
The purpose of HB 1020 was to ensure safety in ways current leadership had failed to accomplish. However, despite addendums made to the bill to appease concerns of overreach, Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba refused to admit that HB 1020 would succeed in either of its forms in areas where he himself had failed:
“The recent amendment to HB1020 still exists as an attack against black leadership. It is an effort
to strip one of the largest black communities in the nation of its voting rights, pick its leadership and deny the right to vote,” Lumumba continues. “This bill would make Mississippi a model for red states with blue capital cities. At its core, this bill is about lawmakers giving themselves the ability to outmaneuver the federal government. So, by policy or through actually preventing people to vote, it still reflects the poorest version of Mississippi. Lastly, the portion of the bill that suggests that the City of Jackson sign an MOU (memorandum of understanding) in ‘agreement’ with the CCID merely suggests legislators realize this bill is fraught with constitutional issues. Therefore, they want it cloaked as an agreement between the city and the state – as opposed to what it really is – a seizure of power over our City.”
Once again, those that seek to gain and/or hold on to power are willing to do so by any means necessary. As such, those feigning concern over racist policies and platforms employ the same in order to maintain control-even fearmongering.
Much like the early days of the KKK (and Jim Crow) when violent power grabs no longer achieved the goals, scare tactics like this video/narrative are used as a last resort. Both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X understood better than most that the greatest challenges that faced the black community, even in their time, were those within the community itself.
No group in history has done more to ensure its own genocide than black people.
Though more than 100 years have passed, the adage still applies: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat.” Clearly Black America still has a lot to learn.
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A children’s book event hosted by Chaya Raichik, a conservative author who runs the @LibsOfTikTok account, has been canceled over threats.
“We have received threats of potentially inappropriate and unsafe behavior at the NYC story hour with Chaya Raichik on Sunday,” Raichik’s publisher tweeted Friday.
“[We] have advised Chaya we cancel the event. With children involved, we don’t want to take any chances.”
The publisher also vowed to “find a way to combat this moving forward” and advised people to “stay tuned for an announcement in the coming days.”
We have received threats of potentially inappropriate and unsafe behavior at the NYC story hour with Chaya Raichik on Sunday and have advised Chaya we cancel the event. With children being involved, we don’t want to take any chances.
The event, which was to be held Sunday, was billed as a rival event to a drag queen story hour hosted by New York Attorney General Letitia James on the same day, Fox News Digital reported. Raichik’s now-canceled event was sponsored by the publisher and the New York Young Republican Club, according to its EventBrite listing.
Christian actor and author Kirk Cameron’s Freedom Island Tour book event with Brave Books was crashed by protesters at a public library in Fayetteville, Arkansas Friday, the publisher and the Post Millennial reported.
“This hateful group, dressed to disturb children, were angry when Kirk Cameron brought up God and faith with the children and parents during our BRAVE story hour,” the publisher tweeted.
The tweet includes a video where one of the costumed protesters appears to say he stepped on a “poor tiny blonde white girl.” The video cuts away to a woman confirming the person stepped on her twice and hit her with a cane.
A black drag queen nun in whiteface brags about stepping on “poor tiny blonde white girl.”
He is a part of “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence of the Arkansas Chapter of Hillbilly Harlots”.
This hateful group, dressed to disturb children, were angry when Kirk Cameron brought… pic.twitter.com/NB1jv8Xouw
Brave Books is not alone among publishers whose conservative authors have been heckled, threatened, or assaulted.
“I understand their hesitation and decision to cancel,” Bethany Mandel, co-author of “Stolen Youth,” told TheBlaze Sunday morning.
“It’s one thing to assume risk as an adult, but the equation changes when there are young children involved,” Mandel also said.
Mandel and co-author New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz had protesters at their New York City book party March 8. Mandel, who had her 2-month-old infant with her at the party, tells TheBlaze protesters violently threw glasses and screamed at attendees.
“There’s an element of danger to just putting out a conservative book,” Mandel said. “Now, the situation is that children can attend drag queen story hours in bars, but not a party for an orthodox Jewish author for a wholesome book about safety.”
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Ohio and Iowa are the latest states to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an interstate voter list maintenance group controlled by Democratic operatives, after a meeting of its board failed to deliver the aforementioned states’ requested reforms.
The two midwestern states follow in the steps of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, which withdrew from the alliance in early March over ERIC’s failure to remove its founder, Democrat operative David Becker, from its board, and its requirement that member states conduct voter registration outreach to eligible but unregistered residents in their states. Louisiana and Alabama withdrew last year.
In response to Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia’s withdrawal from the group, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent a letter to ERIC threatening Ohio’s departure if the board did not remove Becker — or “ex-officio members” — from its bylaws and cut the requirement for states to conduct partisan voter registration outreach. Instead, states should utilize ERIC’s data-sharing services “in the manner which they believe best serves their local interests,” LaRose argued.
While Becker seemingly complied with one of LaRose’s demands by tweeting that he would not seek renomination to ERIC’s board, ERIC refused to execute LaRose’s other reforms during a March 17 board meeting.
At the meeting, two proposals were put to a vote: changing ERIC’s bylaws to allow states to choose how they utilize ERIC’s data, and pairing the voter registration outreach requirement to a report that helps states catch double voting. Both proposals failed to pass because ERIC’s bylaws require an 80 percent majority before making a change.
“ERIC has chosen repeatedly to ignore demands to embrace reforms that would bolster confidence in its performance, encourage growth in its membership, and ensure not only its present stability but also its durability,” LaRose wrote in a letter announcing Ohio’s withdrawal on March 17. “Rather, you have chosen to double-down on poor strategic decisions, which have only resulted in the transformation of a previously bipartisan organization to one that appears to favor only the interests of one political party.”
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate told Politico that the failed votes prevent ERIC members from doing what’s best for their states.
“Ultimately, the departure of several key states and today’s vote is going to impact the ability for ERIC to be an effective tool for the State of Iowa,” Pate said. “My office will be recommending resigning our membership from ERIC.”
As previously reported by The Federalist, ERIC is a voter roll management system used by nearly 30 states and the District of Columbia. It was created under the guise of helping states clean their rolls — i.e., remove dead and duplicate registrants — but does more to inflate them.
As a part of the alliance, member states are required to contact eligible but unregistered residents to register to vote. ERIC creates these lists of unregistered residents and sends them to member states to contact themselves. Given ERIC’s partisan origins and alliance with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) — one of two groups that funneled $419 million in grants from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to mostly-blue areas of swing states during the 2020 election — it’s likely ERIC targets Democrat-leaning residents to register.
Despite ERIC’s obvious ties to the left, corporate media outlets are characterizing states that have withdrawn from the organization and its critics as “conspiracy theorists” who are peddling disinformation. Thankfully, states like Ohio and Iowa have ignored this intimidation campaign.
“I cannot justify the use of Ohio’s tax dollars for an organization that seems intent on rejecting meaningful accountability, publicly maligning my motives, and waging a relentless campaign of misinformation about this effort,” LaRose wrote. “Additionally, I cannot accept the board’s refusal – for a third time – to adopt basic reforms to the use of ERIC’s data-sharing services.”
Alaska and Texas are two more member states considering withdrawing from ERIC.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public.
To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:
Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video.
Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend.
Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.
In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.
Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.
Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between.
Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting.
Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.
The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.
We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.
But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth.
A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.
The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.
Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so.
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.
Even if Democrats really were concerned about our convoluted election regulations, no serious person thinks New York’s district attorney has a case against Trump.
As the saying goes: If even Never Trump Jonah Goldbergdoubts your wisdom in bringing criminal charges against the former president, then you know it’s a stupid case.
Nobody actually says that, but it’s one of many indicators that the indictment potentially coming this week from Democrat New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (yes, that’s his actual name) is so absurd as to make anyone wonder if our justice system really is a joke.
Trump on Saturday announced that he expected to be arrested soon in relation to the very old, very stale, very tiresome allegation that he violated campaign finance laws when he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment made to a porn actress in order to supposedly cover up a past affair. The accusation is that Trump did it to protect his campaign and intentionally neglected to publicly disclose the payment, as would be required by law.
I think Democrats have no interest whatsoever in campaign finance violations and really just enjoy thinking about Trump’s sex life. But even if they really were concerned with the integrity of our convoluted election money regulations, no serious person thinks Bragg has a case. That’s evidenced no less than by the fact that the people who considered pursuing this charge previously eventually dropped it— including Bragg!
While Trump was in office and Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, his office looked at this very case and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. It’s a horse that has been beaten to death, resuscitated, and beaten again. Then smacked on the rear one more time.
But persecuting Trump has no downside for Democrats chasing fame. And now is as good a time as any. The historic nature of putting a former president in handcuffs as he campaigns for another term is too good for a low-rent prosecutor to pass up.
Not so good for a republic that wants to last another year, let alone 200, but that’s never top of mind for people like Bragg.
Try to wrap your mind around it. The former president, the likely Republican presidential nominee in 2024, might be seen on live national television cuffed, placed in the back of a squad car, and taken to a police station for his mug shot. All this over campaign paperwork that would any other time be resolved with a corrected filing and, perhaps, a penalty fee.
And that’s only if you presume Trump is guilty. Rational people think he might have tried hiding an affair, but that it’s absolutely possible it was for other reasons. (I wonder if anyone has ever in American history tried hiding an affair for reasons outside of protecting his prospects to be elected U.S. president. Interesting question, but far from settled!)
If Bragg brings an indictment, that’s one up for him and another one down for faith in America.
With word from former President Donald Trump that he will “be arrested” on a criminal indictment engineered by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign, it is essential to examine what motivated the charges.
At its core, the case represents an egregious abuse of power and the corrupt weaponization of the law for political gain. Bereft of any credible evidence, Bragg is contorting the law in a brazen attempt to inflate his case. His actions constitute serious prosecutorial misconduct. It is the culmination of a years-long effort by the District Attorney’s Office to target Trump for something – anything.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the progressive DA that his case against the former president is the definition of flimsy and stale as month-old bread. Bragg is determined to hack off the mold and sell it as something fresh and new.
Former President Trump said he will “be arrested” on a criminal indictment engineered by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, (Associated Press)
Forget about the statute of limitations that expired years ago. Or that his predecessor declined prosecution because the law does not support a criminal charge. Or that the feds who investigated the case determined that the evidence just wasn’t there. Never mind that Bragg’s legal theory is novel, if not bizarre. Or that his star witness, Michael Cohen, is a confessed liar who went to prison and whose name is synonymous with sleaze and dishonesty.
In a sensible world, all of that should matter. But it doesn’t because Trump is the Democrats’ eternal boogeyman. Since he’s running again for president, he has to be stopped – by hook or by crook.
So, Bragg exhumed a seven-year-old corpse of a case and appears to have snookered a grand jury into indicting the former president. The end justifies any malevolent means.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg during a press conference in New York on Sept. 8, 2022. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In Bragg’s twisted book, Donald Trump should be treated like a hardcore criminal because money was given to porn star, Stormy Daniels, in exchange for keeping her mouth shut in the run-up to the 2016 election. Bear in mind, such agreements are legally permissible. Silence that is conditional upon payment is not against the law. Non-disclosure agreements with pecuniary benefits attached are a common method of maintaining confidentiality. Even if it involves consensual sex, which Trump vigorously denies.
The DA’s only impediment was the law and how to circumvent its narrowly defined language to trump up a case against Trump. That’s when Bragg was forced to get creative. He dreamed up a legally cockamamie plan to supercharge a misdemeanor into a felony by bootstrapping a supposed secondary crime to it.
Here’s how it works, at least in Bragg’s brain. It is a mere misdemeanor under New York law to falsify business records. But by claiming that the Stormy payment was somehow calculated to violate arcane campaign reporting laws, viola! A second crime that elevates it to a felony.
Michael Cohen leaves his apartment to report to prison in Manhattan on May 6, 2019. (Reuters/Jeenah Moon TPX Images of the Day/File Photo)
Bragg’s scrutiny of campaign laws must have been cursory. In his zeal to nail Trump, he apparently skipped over the part about “dual purpose” contributions. That is, if money paid serves a double or ancillary function then it is not a reportable expense or donation to the campaign. Hence, no crime was committed. This has been Trump’s argument all along. He did it primarily for personal and commercial reasons.
There are a few other pesky problems with Bragg’s strategy. First, it would have to be shown that Trump himself was involved in falsifying records. Second, Bragg would have to prove that Trump not only understood the complex and convoluted campaign laws that few people comprehend, but that he intended to violate them. Third, which set of campaign laws applies? There’s the rub.
It’s been reported that Bragg is considering citing New York’s campaign statutes as the “second crime.” But wait, the presidential contest was a federal election. Moreover, state campaign laws are preempted by federal campaign laws. So, that’s a stretch. What about using those same federal laws as the second crime? Can someone be charged under state law for violating a federal law? Not likely. Prosecutors would be exceeding their jurisdictional authority. The DA can only charge under state statutes.
It is obvious that Bragg doesn’t give a hoot about the law. He’s banking on the likelihood that a liberal New York judge will let the case go to a Manhattan jury stacked with biased Trump-haters anxious to ignore all the legal constraints and convict the former president despite the paucity of incriminating evidence. However, I wouldn’t bet on any conviction being upheld on appeal.
Also, don’t be fooled by the theatrics of an expected grand jury indictment. That was a cinch. There are rarely any enforceable rules of evidence because the proceedings are secret and lopsided. Double hearsay, unauthenticated documents, and all kinds of sketchy stuff that is otherwise inadmissible at trial can be introduced without objection.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels (AP)
No one from the defense is present to contest the purported evidence or to challenge the witnesses. Jurors tend to accept as gospel the pablum prosecutors spoon-feed them. It’s the equivalent of a turkey shoot. And a charade. Hence the old saying, “You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
The tortured history of trying to criminalize the Stormy episode undermines Bragg’s entire rationale. The Justice Department, as well as the Federal Elections Commission, long ago examined whether Trump violated election laws. They summarily dropped the matter after concluding there was no viable case. But Bragg won’t let a dead horse remain unbeaten. He is resolved to resurrect a feckless and moribund case.
As the chief prosecutor in a city reeling from rampant crime, you would assume that Bragg is preoccupied with public safety instead of pursuing a politically motivated case. Wrong assumption. The lawlessness that plagues New York City doesn’t seem to interest him in the least.
The great irony is that Bragg has spent most of his tenure in office downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. But now he wants to upgrade a misdemeanor to a felony because his target’s name is Trump. His selective prosecution is an affront to the principle of equal justice under the law.
I suspect that the district attorney’s real goal is to interfere in the upcoming presidential election by knocking out Trump. In a democracy, that important decision should be left up to voters, not a local prosecutor doing the bidding of his political party. Fortunately, most Americans are smart enough to see through the veneer of a sham case.
Indeed, Bragg’s actions may well have the unintended consequence of rallying even more support for Donald Trump.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His latest book is the New York Times bestseller “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History”
The United Nations (UN) published its latest climate change report Monday which doubled down on global warming-related risks and which the intergovernmental organization dubbed a “survival guide for humanity.”
The synthesis report, assembled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), represents the UN’s latest attempt to sound the alarm on the risks posed by climate change and not taking aggressive actions to halt global warming. According to the document, “unsustainable energy and land use” has caused the world to warm 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, close to the 1.5-degree emergency threshold.
“The rate of temperature rise in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Monday. “Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least two million years. The climate time-bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.”
Do you still need proof that these High Priests of Climate Change Religion thinks everyone but them are as stupid as a stump? Well, ask yourself some questions. #1) Has mankind kept climate records over the last two million years? NO? Then how could they make such an asinine statement?
#2) Is man really capable of changing the climate temperature of the EARTH? According to one source (was not able to find any other definitive answers) the total cubic feet of air space around the Earth is approximately 512,222, 461, 000, 000(?) cubic feet. Really???? By making the Draconian changes these self appointed High Priests have planned, is it going to change ANYTHING more that our freedom?
When is “ENOUGH, ENOUGH?
“As it shows, the 1.5-degree limit is achievable. But it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” he continued. “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, on April 26, 2022. (Vladimir Astapkovich, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
The report stated that every additional increment of warming that occurs will result in “rapidly escalating hazards” for humanity.
For example, it warned that climate change will spur more intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other extreme risks to human health and ecosystems. And food insecurity will increase while additional conflicts and pandemics will be harder to manage, the report said.
“Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said in a statement. “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”
“Transformational changes are more likely to succeed where there is trust, where everyone works together to prioritise risk reduction, and where benefits and burdens are shared equitably,” Lee added. “We live in a diverse world in which everyone has different responsibilities and different opportunities to bring about change. Some can do a lot while others will need support to help them manage the change.”
The IPCC report further called for a massive investment in clean energy and an immediate phasing out of fossil fuels across the world. The UN also called on Western nations to boost the amount of capital and financing they devote to climate investments.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry attends a UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 12, 2021. (REUTERS/Yves Herman)
During the most recent UN climate conference in November, nations committed to billions of dollars worth of climate finance for developing countries and rallied to call on private investors to boost climate financing.
However, fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas still account for the vast majority of worldwide energy consumption, according to the latest International Energy Agency data. The three sources produce nearly 70% of all global energy and a large majority of electricity generation which accounts for another 17% of energy produced.
“Every country must be part of the solution,” Guterres added Monday. “Demanding others move first only ensures humanity comes last. The Acceleration Agenda calls for a number of other actions. Specifically: No new coal and the phasing out of coal by 2030 in OECD countries and 2040 in all other countries. Ending all international public and private funding of coal.”
“Ceasing all licensing or funding of new oil and gas – consistent with the findings of the International Energy Agency,” he continued. “Stopping any expansion of existing oil and gas reserves. Shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to a just energy transition. Establishing a global phase down of existing oil and gas production compatible with the 2050 global net-zero target.”
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Monday as a “Soros-funded prosecutor” who is “pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office” as he reportedly considers indicting former President Donald Trump on charges related to alleged hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
“I’ve seen rumors swirl, I have not seen any facts yet, and so I don’t know what’s going to happen,” DeSantis said in Florida when asked about the potential indictment of the former president.
“But I do know this,” he said. “The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor, and so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.”
Eyes are on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, left, and former President Donald Trump when thinking about the 2024 presidential election. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File)
The potential charges against Trump stem from the $130,000 hush-money payment that then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorneys office for the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019, even as Cohen implicated him as part of his plea deal. The Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.
Stormy Daniels (AP Photo / Markus Schreiber / File)
“And so, you’re talking about this situation with, and like, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair — I just I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said.
“But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments, you know, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office,” DeSantis said. “And I think that that’s fundamentally wrong.”
DeSantis said “Soros-funded prosecutors” may carry out “a high-profile politicized prosecution, and that’s bad.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a press conference in New York on Sept. 8, 2022. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“But the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans and all these different jurisdictions that they get victimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that the Soros DAs bring to their job,” DeSantis said. “They ignore crime and they empower criminals, and that hurts people, hurts a lot of people every single day.”
In 2022, during Bragg’s first year as Manhattan’s top prosecutor, he downgraded more than half of felony cases to misdemeanors. He campaigned on criminal justice reform and sent a “Day One” memo to staff upon taking office to downgrade certain felonies, such as armed robberies of commercial businesses. The move came at a time when crimes were up 27.6% in New York City, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Bragg declined to prosecute 35% more felony cases than in 2019.
George Soros (Reuters / Lisi Niesner / File)
“These Soros district attorneys are a menace to society,” DeSantis said. “And I’m just glad that I’m the only governor in the country that’s actually removed one from office during my tenure.”
Last year, DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democratic prosecutor backed by liberal billionaire George Soros, for “neglecting his duties.” Warren had pledged not to bring charges against anyone who violates state abortion restrictions or bans on gender-transition procedures for minors. Warren is currently suing DeSantis.
As for a potential Trump indictment, DeSantis said, “We are not involved in this and won’t be involved in this.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gives a victory speech after defeating Democrat gubernatorial candidate Rep. Charlie Crist during his election night watch party at the Tampa Convention Center on Nov. 8, 2022, in Tampa, Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty Images)
“I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA,” he said. “He’s trying to do a political spectacle. He’s trying to virtue signal for his base. I’ve got real issues I got to deal with here in the state of Florida.”
DeSantis said there are “so many things pending” in front of the Florida state legislature.
“I’ve got to spend my time on issues that actually matter to people,” he said. “I can’t spend my time worrying about things of that nature.”
Trump, on Monday afternoon, responded to DeSantis on his TRUTH Social.
“Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!),” Trump posted, seemingly referring to an unsubstantiated claim about DeSantis that has circulated in left-wing blogs.
Trump added: “I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”
DeSantis’ team declined to comment on the former president’s post.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
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.
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Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine told a crowd of pediatric health care providers last month that he is “optimistic” that genital mutilation and chemical transmogrification of children — euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care” — will soon be fully embraced. The Biden nominee spoke at a “Pediatric Grand Rounds” session hosted in February by Connecticut Children’s, an expansive health system catering to kids. Levine, the highest-ranking transsexual official in U.S. history, discussed “gender-affirming care,” the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and mental health problems suffered by American youths.
“By proactively engaging with the social and environmental world that defines our patients’ lives, we can help them in terms of preventative care, acute care, chronic care, and other very impactful issues that affect our children and their families,” said Levine.
Levine intimated that the failure by “the social and environmental world” to fully embrace the transsexual agenda has resulted in mentally ill youths attempting suicide.
A Pew Research Center national survey published in June found that 46% of U.S. adults polled favored making it illegal for health care professionals to “help” someone under the age of 18 with medical care for gender transition. 72% of Republican or Republican-leaning respondents supported the statement. 58% of all respondents agreed that transsexual athletes should have to compete on sports teams that match their biological sex.
“Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex Americans, especially our youth, are very challenged at this time and are attempting suicide at an alarming rate,” claimed the health secretary.
“Gender-affirming care is medical care. Gender-affirming care is mental health care. And literally, gender-affirming care is suicide prevention care,” said the health secretary.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb of the anti-woke medical group Do No Harm told Fox News Digital that contrary to Levine’s claims, there is “no good evidence that children treated with gender-altering hormones or puberty blockers improved mental health assessments.”
“Levine’s appearance at Connecticut Children’s Hospital praising ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors and claiming it will be fully embraced is wrong and must be countered,” added Goldfarb. “A recent study from the University of Washington showed that there was absolutely no change in the psychological well-being of children with gender dysphoria treated with these medications. …There can be irrevocable harm being done to children by those pushing for these radical, ideologically driven treatments.”
TheBlaze previously reported on a study published September 19 in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy that explained how the puberty blockers foisted on children as part of the “gender-affirming care” regimen are also known as luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists or GnRHa drugs. These drugs, used also to “chemically castrate men,” are not just creating sexless adults, but depleting victims’ bone density, hampering their cognitive development, and producing a myriad of harmful emotional effects.
The American College of Pediatricians reportedly indicated that GnRHa drugs “arrest bone growth, decrease bone accretion, prevent the sex-steroid dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and inhibit fertility by preventing the development of gonadal tissue and mature gametes for the duration of treatment.”
Per Goldfarb’s suggestion that irrevocable damage is being done to minors, a host of so-called de-transitioners such as Chloe Cole and Michelle Zacchigna have recently begun speaking out about how “gender-affirming care” inevitably amounts to irreversible damage.
Levine told Connecticut Children’s that the Biden administration will “try everything we can legally” to circumnavigate the democratic will of Americans in states that have enacted prohibitions on the mutilation of children.
After all, said Levine, transsexual medical procedures on minors have the Biden administration’s “highest support.”
In an interview Monday with “The Daily Show,” President Joe Biden singled out Florida’s laws barring chemical and surgical transsexual “treatment” for kids, suggesting they are “cruel.” Biden’s comments, further evidence of the “highest support” Levine mentioned in Connecticut, took on a quasi-religious dimension: “What’s going on in Florida, as my mother would say, is close to sinful. It’s just terrible what they’re doing,” said Biden.
Levine suggested that the Biden’s administration’s support will soon become the norm.
“I think that it’s not going to be politically advantageous. It wasn’t particularly in 2022. And so I think that as we look to all the different elections in 2024, I think the next two years are going to be challenging,”said the health secretary. “But I’m a positive and optimistic person, and I choose to be positive, optimistic. And I think that the wheels will turn on this.”
Levine claimed that criticism of the “gender-affirming care” he intends to help normalize tends to be “ideologically and politically motivated” and is “unconscionable,”reported the New York Post.
In April 2022, Levine told NPR that for some critics, “these issues of gender identity are beyond their experience. They don’t understand it, and so they fear it, and that fear can lead to negative feelings and emotions.”
Levine had also claimed that “there is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
Rep. Andy Harris, a member of the House Doctors Caucus and co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, told Fox News Digital that it was “reprehensible for a government official — let alone the Assistant U.S. Secretary of HHS — to promote the genital mutilation of minors as becoming a standard practice.”
“Many pediatricians, particularly pediatric endocrinologists, have expressed serious concerns about the use of puberty blockers, hormone blockers, and sex transition surgeries in minors,” said Harris. “These doctors know that these medications and procedures can impact children’s bone growth, fertility, and risk of breast and prostate cancer. Meanwhile, HHS has pressured providers to provide this care or else face discrimination lawsuits. We must protect our children.”
This week, a law went into effect allowing foreign nationals — here legally or illegally — to vote in D.C. municipal elections. The only requirement other than age to vote in D.C. elections now is living in the District of Columbia for 30 days.
Most alarming about this new law is the foreign interference this law invites into the elections in our nation’s capital. Now, foreign nationals working at Russian, Chinese, and other embassies can vote in American elections. So much for concerns about foreign influence in American elections that was so en vogue in 2016.
Worse, this expansion of the right to vote to people who aren’t United States citizens undermines the very notion of citizenship. With citizenship comes loyalty to America and a shared interest in the future of the country. These foreign nationals living in D.C. have no investment in the future of America. No doubt some are in this country to spy on it.
Opposition to the proposal is bipartisan, with 42 Democrats opposing it in the House. The resolution was introduced in the Senate, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to allow a vote.
Don’t think this law is a fluke. New York City passed a law allowing foreign nationals to vote in municipal elections, and we are challenging it in federal court because it was enacted with a racial motivation. San Francisco also passed a law allowing foreign nationals to vote in school board elections.
The D.C. Council didn’t appear to act with an illegal motivation, so the prospects of overturning the law in court are slim, at best. It’s up to Congress to undo this growing threat to American sovereignty.
Citizenship should mean something. Many foreigners spent years coming to our country and achieving citizenship status. Along with citizenship came responsibilities and the cherished right to vote. These laws allowing foreign nationals to vote are a slap in the face to people who came here legally and worked hard to gain citizenship status.
It also diminishes the century-long struggle of black Americans to gain the right to vote. From Reconstruction to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, black Americans fought hard to secure the ability to vote. Now black Americans are having to fight again to stop foreign nationals from diluting their votes.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is fighting these foreign citizen voting laws. In New York City, PILF filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of four black New York City voters to have the city’s foreign voting bill declared unconstitutional for violating the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. And in San Francisco, PILF filed an amicus curiae brief to support the striking down of San Francisco’s law allowing foreigners to vote.
Only Americans should be voting in our elections. This is an issue with strong bipartisan support. The real foreign interference in our elections happens when we allow foreign nationals to vote in them. We need to stop allowing people who can leave our country at any moment to have a say in its future.
We must protect the cherished right to vote and stop letting American citizens’ votes be diluted by foreign nationals.
J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
When was the last time you were called racist? When was the last time you actually cared about being called racist? Odds are you get called it quite often and care (or should care) about being called it very little.
That’s because lobbing accusations of racial bigotry at anyone who gets in their way is second nature for the left. So when people stopped taking these accusations seriously — realizing it is simply impossible for everything to be racist — the left began decrying “white supremacy,” semantically invoking Nazism.
When accusations of racism failed to coerce enough action, the left moved on to a pejorative with far worse aesthetics while maintaining the same message. Accusing people and institutions of “racism” had lost its utility due to rhetorical inflation, and the era of “systemic white supremacy” had begun.
According to some, the conservative movement and the American right writ large are experiencing a similar ongoing dilemma with the word “woke.” Many suggest the word has come to mean nothing due to right-wing over-saturation, while others insist it has taken on a far more nefarious tone.
White liberals are the most woke group in America, but for the Reddit-tier race hustlers "woke" now means "the n-word." pic.twitter.com/fNCgTUYxl3
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 15, 2023
Nevertheless, the question remains: Why has the word “woke” become so problematic?
Bad Faith
On Tuesday, Bethany Mandel, co-author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” appeared on The Hill’s “Rising” to discuss leftism’s role in damaging American families.
During the discussion, Briahna Joy Gray, co-host of the “Bad Faith” podcast, inquired if Mandel would “mind defining ‘woke,’ ’cause it’s come up a couple [of] times, and I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.” What followed was a brief moment of self-consciousness in which the author stumbled over her words before offering a generally accepted definition of the term.
Despite this, the moment was clipped, and the author was lambasted as both a bigot and buffoon across the web.
The whole point of this exercise was to humiliate someone offering a coherent definition of woke-ism that was insufficiently deferential to the whims of leftist ideologues. However, this attempt was unsuccessful.
So, everybody's seen my viral brain fart from "Rising" this morning. I can see why it went viral, of course. For those who haven't, here it is: https://t.co/4rgFBy9SGB
Dragging Mandel through the digital public square did not result in the typical groveling struggle session that has come to be expected whenever people explain their opinions in public, but it did inspire many to inquire about the nature of the term “woke.”
The term started to increase in prevalence in the early-to-mid-2010s back when “Black Lives Matter” referred to a hashtag, not an organization, and when the hot-button social issue du jour was the legalization of homosexual marriage. Despite its original meaning, used in common parlance simply to refer to personal vigilance, “woke” quickly took on social and political meanings. Like how every other community uses specific language to signify in-group allegiance, “woke” was used to inculcate oneself among the broader cause of the burgeoning leftist cultural hegemony and, by extension, the Democrat Party.
But as the term became more and more associated with the party, it became less specifically connected with racial protest movements and more so a shibboleth for supporting the party platform — “stay woke,” the slogan went.
If we don't vote, we tell the world that the future of our communities and our country doesn't concern us. Exercise your right to vote TODAY to make sure your voice is heard. #OH11Votes#BeAVoterpic.twitter.com/BA0jracEa7
— Former Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (@RepMarciaFudge) November 6, 2018
It is undeniable that woke-ism and the people who get protective of the identifying label “woke” have an influential presence on the political and cultural left. There was even a short-lived Hulu series titled “Woke” that chronicled a previously apolitical black cartoonist’s journey through the intersectional landscape of identity politics. And in 2018, “Saturday Night Live” poked fun at the concept of corporate fashion brands using woke-ism to market schlock to well-intentioned hipsters.
Woke-ism came to define a movement so insurgent among the institutionalized powers of the left that even its vanguards like former President Barack Obama and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who undeniably had a role ushering it in, bemoaned its rancorous presence and how it distracts from the Democrat Party’s larger goals.
This was something the Democrats fully embraced until they could no longer fully control the semantics around it.
It’s a Good Bad Word
Woke-ism is simultaneously a persistent ideological framework and a general inclination — it depends on the person or institution in question at the time. But both rely upon a consistent smorgasbord of Marxian dialectics and ideological accouterment — gender theory, critical race theory, et al. — that seeks to usurp the ideals of the American founding and impose contemporary whims.
The word has become as commonplace among the current-day conservative movement as MAGA hats and “lock her up” chants were at 2016 Trump rallies. And this is, to be fair, totally warranted; what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?
Sure, it would help if the right had a more tactical approach to diagnosing and labeling each and every radical change introduced to our society at breakneck speed, but that’s not how people work. The right can and should identify the unique threats of identitarian Marxism, managerialism, and contemporary Lysenkoism, but is labeling all of these things useful?
Using “woke” as a catch-all label for radical leftism is effective. That’s one of the major reasons why the left hates it. They lost complete control of the English language, and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.
Woke-ism is an intentionally ambiguous framework that is meant to keep out interlopers and reward its advocates. Therefore, simply describing it as what it is, is anathema to those who wish for its intentions to remain ambiguous.
Simply saying “woke” works.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
This verse came up in my devotions this morning. I was prompted by The Holy Spirit to make this image and publish it. False prophets have always been a problem with numerous cultures, and dealing with them varies with severity. Knowing who are the “false” prophets has always been the rub. God’s answer? If their prophecy does not come true, then they’re false.
Above are some of the High Priests of the Climate Change Religious Cult. They also clam to be prophets, though they do not use that term. They claim science is behind their forecasts, when in reality they are tyrannical prophecies that have never come true.
Name any other discipline, and any of them had the same record of false claims of catastrophes that never happen, and they would be derided is all the main stream press, and the political elite would make their lives a living hell.
For 40 plus these false prophets have forecasted disasters that never happened. Using terms that gender fear, they prey on the weak minded. Fear is their only tool, because science is NOT with them, neither is their forecasts. Running their climate change religion as any typical tyrannical organization, they have amassed a large portion of the wealthiest people and organizations, they seek to amass more wealth, and more control. Working with the World Economic Forum, they quest for “One World Government” proceeds with freighting results.
When you consider the number of nations that have been dupped into acting on the “Green New Deal”, and have failed miserably, you’d think that the entire World would rise up and deal appropriately with these false prophets of climate change.
All prophecies have failed. All scientific claims have proven false. All attempts to apply their demented Green New Deal has proven disastrous. Their quest for One World Government is becoming more obvious. The false masks they wear to decieve are beginning to slip, revealing who they really are.
When is enough? How much more are we suppose to take?
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.
Any candidate who is playing footsie with the propaganda press, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
On Saturday night, former Vice President Mike Pence addressed the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie gathering of Beltway media and political insiders. He took the opportunity to praise the D.C. media, attack Tucker Carlson, and condemn Donald Trump.
“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence said. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” Pence said of Tucker Carlson’s journalism, which is at odds with the official narrative.
Pence praised the corporate media as well, saying, “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post. The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”
As if Pence’s views on the virtues of the propaganda press weren’t disappointing enough, his handlers bragged to the same media that he had lavished them with praise and attacked Trump and Carlson as part of his long-shot campaign to win the Republican nomination for president.
Really. According to a new Politico article, the Pence team intentionally crafted their remarks because they “believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists.”
No offense, but how are these people political professionals? How many decades of political history have taught everyone with a pulse that Republican pandering to the media is a fool’s errand? In what world does this strategy make sense?
The strategy has never worked and will never work.
Consider the media’s most beloved Republican presidential contender, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain. The Arizona senator was treated so well by the media for his self-styled “straight-talk” and attacks on fellow Republicans that he used to refer to them jokingly as his “base.” It’s true that their support of him did help him obtain the nomination. But the moment he posed even a tiny threat to Sen. Barack Obama, the true object of their devotion and affection, they turned on him in a heartbeat. He might as well have been Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney.
Nothing about Pence suggests he would receive even a short honeymoon of the type McCain benefited from. He should have learned this lesson when, as governor of Indiana, he caved to media demands that he decrease religious freedom in his state. His cowardice did not result in favorable media coverage then or while he was vice president. They loathe every single thing about him. They even mock him for how he and his wife protect their marriage!
It’s true that attacking fellow conservatives or Republicans will always generate some favorable media coverage. It’s the only way a non-leftist can be published in The New York Times, for instance. It’s the primary way to get airtime on NBC or CNN. It’s self-abasing and a dereliction of duty to your voters, but, hey, a fleeting moment of non-hostility from the corporate press is worth it, right?
Contrast Pence’s effort with how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis handles corporate media. He treats them as if he understands they are Republicans’ most steadfast political opponents. In press conferences, he points out the flaws in their assumptions and lies in their questions. He does not give them breaking news in the futile hope that they will be nicer to him later. He treats non-leftist press the same as or better than he treats the corrupt propaganda press. His communications team publicly posts the ridiculous questions they’re asked, and how they answer those questions. He refuses to treat requests as legitimate if they come from media who have lied about him.
The only thing worse than a Republican who impotently complains about “media bias” instead of understanding that the country is in the midst of an all-out information war is a Republican who actually praises the press for its war on Republican voters.
Substantively Wrong
The other main problem with Pence’s pandering to the corporate press is that it was substantively in error. It rewrites his own history in the chaos and drama of the 2020 election. Here is Mike Pence in December of 2020, for example:
And as our election contest continues, I’ll make you a promise: We are going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We are going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out! We are going to win Georgia, we are going to save America, and we will never stop fighting to Make America Great Again!
And here is Mike Pence on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days prior to the big rally and subsequent riot at the Capitol:
I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities. I promise you, come this Wednesday, we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the objections, we’ll hear the evidence!
Moments before that “day in Congress” began, Pence issued his letter to Congress saying he believed his role that day would be only ceremonial. However justified, it was something of a shock to the voters who had supported him and the president in their battle over election irregularities. If he wants to blame third parties for riling up the masses, he may want to consider his own role.
Pence is also wrong to attack Carlson for showing video footage of the riot at odds with the official narrative put forth by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies in the press. Tucker’s footage did not deny the violence that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats showed day after day for years for partisan gain. But it did show that Jacob Chansley was given something of a tour of the Capitol that day and was not viewed as violent by any of the many police officers he encountered. It showed that mysterious witness Ray Epps gave testimony about his whereabouts that contrasted with video evidence. And it showed that the Jan. 6 Committee’s show-trial had lied by omission when it falsely conveyed Sen. Josh Hawley’s behavior as the riot unfolded.
Calling these journalistic revelations a “disgrace” to reporters who lack Carlson’s independence and courage is shameful and reprehensible.
Finally, Pence was wrong to effusively praise the corporate press for its behavior in the aftermath of Jan. 6. The media never “reported” or covered the event or its circumstances so much as it exploited them for political purposes. The very same media that excused and vociferously defended the violent and deadly Black Lives Matter riots that besieged the White House, a federal courthouse, and police precincts, turned on a dime to treat the Jan. 6 riot as a literal insurrection, an absolutely absurd claim. The same media that reacted with abject horror and hysteria to the suggestion that order should be restored in cities across America as violent rioters terrified the citizens suddenly decided in the case of Trump supporters that First Amendment protections of speech, press, and assembly were negotiable, constitutional rights to a defense were unimportant, and certain citizens didn’t deserve speedy trials or due process.
No American should praise such behavior from the propaganda press. And no man seeking the votes of Republicans should pander to the propaganda press for political reasons, even if it weren’t delusional to think it would work.
The country is in the midst of an information war. The corporate media are a more formidable political opponent of Republicans than any Democrat running for office. Any candidate for the Republican nomination had better have a plan to protect and defend Republican voters and their goals. And any candidate who is playing footsie with these political opponents, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
Apologies in advance for making you consider something uttered by David French and Jennifer Rubin, but the two work for prominent news publications that unfortunately shape our national dialogue, so bear with me.
“DeSantis actually called Russia’s grotesque, aggressive invasion of a sovereign country a ‘territorial dispute.’ … Astonishing. Dangerous.”—French, New York Times columnist
“[DeSantis] has decided that if you can’t beat the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party, then join them. He declared that Russia’s brutal and unjustified war of aggression against a sovereign Ukraine is actually ‘a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia…’”—Rubin, Washington Post columnist
The “territorial dispute” quote is from Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recently released statement about the ongoing war in Ukraine (a place our elected leaders in Washington sometimes refer to as “Our Last Great Hope.”) What he said more fully is that “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” is not a “vital interest” to the United States.
That’s a view shared by anyone who thinks yet another foreign war without clear and substantial strategic benefit to America is not something we should busy ourselves with. (It’s not like we have any pressing problems here!) But French, Rubin and the rest of the national media really hate that view. It’s “pro-Putin”! It’s “astonishing” and “dangerous”!
DeSantis should say it one more time for the people in the back. The war is literally a dispute over territory. Russian leadership claims Ukraine as its own and the Kremlin’s settlement offers are based almost solely on territory concessions (with some details related to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
“I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people … one nation, in fact,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2019. In some parts of Ukraine, even Ukrainians claim that. “Many In Eastern Ukraine Want To Join Russia,” read a NPR headline in 2017.
The Washington Post last year found at least 15 percent of residents of Ukraine’s Donbas region said they wanted to join Russia. Maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with Russia and Ukraine being literally part of the same nation for more than half a century.
I know that’s not very sexy for the nerds in the media who prefer to think of the war like a Marvel movie where a corny villain can be overpowered by a united and freedom-loving Justice League, but that’s not the case.
Democracy is at stake!
*Cue Max Boot solemnly removing his little hat in reverence.*
It turns out that discussing the conflict doesn’t first require the speakers to confess their love for Ukraine and hatred for Putin while shedding a tear. It’s not the romantic affair that Rubin, French, et al. want it to be.
The sudden rise of well-funded election activist nonprofits represents a paradigm shift away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process to benefit Democrats.
Over the last several months, a growing number of Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, seem to be having a change of heart about universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.
While few Republicans are ready to completely abandon policies that support election integrity and transparency, more and more seem willing to follow the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” and suggest that Republicans become significantly more reliant on universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting to win elections. There is no worse idea in politics today.
Conservatives do not have the institutional or financial support to match Democrats in election activism and ballot harvesting, nor are they likely to be able to any time in the near future. The advantages Democrats have accrued over the last 20 years in election manipulation and “lawfare” are nearly insurmountable.
But this is not necessarily a portent of gloom and doom. The growing number of ultra-left Democratic candidates are deeply unpopular and would be unelectable outside deep-blue areas under the election norms that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats’ performance in 2020 and 2022 would almost certainly have been far worse under conditions that involved persuading voters to go to the polls on Election Day, rather than relying on a complex web of wealthy nonprofits and armies of election activists to churn out mountains of mail-in ballots, submitted by indifferent voters, during greatly extended early voting periods.
Raw Institutional Power
Republicans need to better understand the vast institutional power that is arrayed against them on the left in the form of lavishly funded 501(c)(3) nonprofits and charitable foundations, along with legions of election lawyers, data analysts, and election activists.
Consider the shadowy Arabella Advisors, a nonprofit consulting company that guides the strategy, advocacy, impact investing, and management for high-dollar, left-leaning nonprofits and individuals. Arabella provides these clients a number of services that enable them to enact policies focused on left-of-center issues such as election administration and “voting rights.”
Arabella Advisors also manages five nonprofits that serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, and the North Fund. The New Venture Fund was the second-largest contributor, behind Mark Zuckerberg, to the Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $410 million during the 2020 election cycle, which was more than the Democratic National Committee spent.
These nonprofits have collectively supported hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations since the network’s creation. In 2020, Arabella’s nonprofit network boasted total revenues exceeding $1.67 billion and total expenditures of $1.26 billion and paid out $896 million in grants largely to other left-leaning and politically active nonprofits.
There is no comparable organization with anything close to this level of financial clout in the Republican world.
Beneath philanthropic foundations and holding companies such as Arabella, there is a world of left-of-center 501(c)(3) nonprofits focused on elections. The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute has identified at least ten 501(c)(3) nonprofits that we believe played key roles in the 2020 election on behalf of the Democrat Party.
These groups were already in place and ready to implement strategies calculated to give Democrats an electoral advantage long before state-by-state legal barnstorming transformed the norms of American voting systems in the name of Covid-19.
Some of these groups are mainly policy-oriented, focused on increasing Democrat votes by promoting vote-by-mail, ballot drop box initiatives, extended early voting periods, and the relaxation of voting standards such as voter ID. These organizations ranged from local efforts such as the New Georgia Project to national projects like Democracy Works, The Voter Project, and the National Vote at Home Institute.
Another group of nonprofits sprang into action in 2020 to finance the implementation of the Democrats’ election agenda, including hiring new personnel, voter canvassing, ballot harvesting, new election infrastructure such as ballot drop boxes, targeted public relations campaigns, and expensive ballot “curing” efforts.
These organizations, which ended up spending well more than $400 million in 2020, include the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME), and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), among others. Once again, there is no similar complex of election-oriented institutions in the Republican world.
Democrats’ ‘Election-Industrial Complex’
These organizations are not arms of political campaigns nor “dark money” partisan advocacy groups, both of which are normal parts of the traditional electoral process. They have nothing to do with persuading voters or “getting out the vote” in the traditional sense, but are instead devoted to gaining an advantage for Democrat candidates by changing election laws, manipulating the election process, and promoting new voting technologies.
This complex web of lavishly funded nonprofits and foundations is not just large and extremely powerful: It is without comparison on the right.
The institutions that support the left’s election activism are so large and so powerful, one might refer to them as an “election-industrial complex.” Election activism is a multi-billion-dollar per year business in the world of Democratic Party politics.
“ELECTION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX“
The Democrats’ election-industrial complex burst into full view in 2020 with CTCL’s $332 million Covid-19 Response Grant Project, funded almost entirely by Facebook founder Zuckerberg, which was aimed at gaining control of election offices in areas that were critical to Democrat campaigns in 2020 through large, “strings attached” grants.
The bulk of that money was spent in a sophisticated effort to increase turnout among a specific profile of voter in order to benefit Democrat candidates. All large CTCL grant recipients were required to “encourage and increase absentee voting” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes, and to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
It has yet to sink in among many Republicans that the CTCL, and the myriad other election activist nonprofits they partnered with in 2020 to carry out their plans, represent a substantively different challenge than Democrats outspending Republicans in conventional election spending.
The sudden rise to prominence of these institutions represents a paradigm shift in the way elections are organized, away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process, introducing new voting rules, and supporting voting technologies that benefit Democrats and handicap Republicans.
This is the paradigm that many Republicans now propose to embrace, with virtually no institutional or financial support.
Conservatives Must Rebuild Classic Electoral Norms
Conservatives are supposed to be involved in conserving things, and there are few things more worth conserving than the U.S. election system as it has existed throughout most of American history. U.S. elections used to be the envy of the world even 10 years ago, but since then have deteriorated to the point where a large and growing proportion of the population views election results with deep skepticism.
Viewing the grotesque Covid-19 era distortions in the present electoral landscape as an unalterable fait accompli means abandoning our election system to a vast institutional complex that seeks to make the voting booth a relic and Election Day an anachronism.
Even worse, the left’s election-industrial complex seeks to reshape voting into a private activity, to be undertaken at home at the initiative of community organizers and activists, as opposed to a public activity that takes place in a neutral public square, and which relies on the initiative of the voters. In the liberal election utopia, the sanctity of the voting booth and the secret ballot must give way to the collective intimacy of the kitchen table and the oversight of neighborhood political bosses.
For Republican activists to commit to a long-term strategy of universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting would not only be a losing proposition from a practical standpoint, it would also contribute even further toward the transformation of our political system away from the control of civically engaged voters, and toward the consolidation of control in the hands of a small cadre of partisan activists and community organizers, as well as their numerous partners in the nonprofit world and administrative state.
There is a larger argument to be made, that universal absentee ballots and ballot harvesting must be opposed, not just from a practical standpoint, but also from a moral and philosophical point of view. We will have much more to say in the future about how universal mail-in ballots represent an objectively disordered way of deciding elections, which must therefore be unconditionally opposed.
Joseph Arlinghaus is the president and founder of Valor America, a conservative federal election SuperPAC founded in 2016 to use the latest social science research and randomized controlled election experiments that revolutionized the Democratic election world after 2005. He serves on the advisory board to the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections.
The failure of three banks in the last two weeks, including Silicon Valley Bank on Friday and Signature Bank on Sunday, is a saga of utter government incompetence. Call these bank collapses Biden’s Banking Busts. The Biden administration has been obsessing on woke causes while banks teeter toward insolvency.
Three days before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cautioned that climate change puts the banking industry at risk. Yellen was in la-la land, speculating that future storms and tornadoes could diminish the value of banks’ assets.
Weather is a risk, but she was oblivious to the much more immediate problem facing banks — the plummeting value of the bonds they own. She was heedless to the impending downfall of SVB and possibly several other small banks that had purchased long-term bonds when interest rates were near zero.
In 2022, after doing nothing to tame inflation the previous year, the Federal Reserve hiked rates repeatedly to make up for their previous inaction. Those rapid rate hikes, the most drastic in decades, made the banks’ bonds lose value.
A week before Yellen’s climate change harangue, Moody’s Investors Service already had delivered bad news to SVB that it was about to be downgraded several notches because its inventory of bonds was not worth enough to repay depositors. A day before Yellen’s loony speech, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg also cautioned that the diminishing value of the bonds held by banks meant a $620 billion problem ahead.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a part of Yellen’s Treasury, is responsible for examining the financial condition of national banks. It failed to avert the SVB collapse.
Yellen has been an outspoken activist for climate change, women’s rights and diversity, including appointing the Treasury’s first ever racial equity officer. Apparently, the hordes of bureaucrats working under her are also too busy with diversity, equity, and inclusion seminars to prevent banks from failing.
As the SVB crisis unfolded, Yellen was MIA. Now she says she’s monitoring several banks “struggling with the whiplash in prices” of their bonds.
Financial experts warn smaller banks are in for a rough ride, though the big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and others are not apt to be in trouble.
Admittedly, SVB’s managers made mistakes. Banking’s first rule is that assets should match deposits. If depositors can demand their money back anytime, then using their money to buy long-term bonds is risky. SVB had to sell $21 billion worth of bonds at a fire sale, taking a $1.8 billion loss.
Trading was suspended Friday in the stocks of several small banks whose share prices plunged on fears they were in the same situation. On Sunday, New York bank regulators shut Signature Bank.
President Joe Biden created the perfect storm for what may become a string of banking busts. In 2021, he lied about inflation, saying it was temporary and “no serious economist” considered it a threat. Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose first term was about to expire, went along with Biden and did nothing to bring down prices. It was the single biggest monetary policy mistake in half a century.
Then in March 2022, newly reappointed Powell launched aggressive rate hiking to cure what the Wall Street Journal called “a mess largely of the Fed’s own making.” As rates rose fast, startup companies could no longer afford to borrow, and instead started withdrawing their bank deposits. Without regulatory intervention, the downfall of SVB was almost a foregone conclusion.
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on February 27, 2023. ((Photo by Genya SAVILOV / AFP) (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images))
On March 7, Powell predicted that the Fed will likely “increase the pace of rate hikes” to continue bringing down inflation. A task made more difficult by our spendaholic president’s budget proposal, which is an inflation accelerator.
As rates rise, more banks could be in trouble. Continued government incompetence is not an option.
Mr. President, get rid of your woke minions and appoint competent people. Our money and jobs are at stake.
On Sunday night, Biden said he’s “firmly committed to holding those responsible for this mess fully accountable.” Look in the mirror, Mr. President.
Instead, he’s looking at the list of Democratic campaign donors and scurrying to bail them out. Ninety-eight percent of all political contributions from people who worked at internet companies went to Democrats in 2020. Silicon Valley residents coughed up nearly $200 million for Democrats. No surprise that the Treasury and the Fed are offering bailouts, whether they use that word or not.
Biden’s reckless spending and incompetent monetary policy are causing this string of banking busts. And John Q. Public will end up paying one way or another.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
Members of the Biden family received more than $1 million in payments from accounts related to Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker and their Chinese business ventures in 2017, subpoenaed financial records obtained by the House Oversight Committee reveal.
Walker worked with Hunter Biden, President Biden’s brother Jim, their business associate James Gilliar and Tony Bobulinksi in a joint-venture called Sinohawk Holdings, which was meant to be a partnership with Chinese energy firm CEFC.
Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., obtained the records after subpoenaing Bank of America, which revealed that “at least three family members” received lucrative payments from a bank account belonging to Walker. That account is labeled as “Robinson Walker, LLC,” and one of the family members is Hallie Biden, the widow of President Biden’s son Beau.
The records revealed that on March 1, 2017, less than two months after then-Vice President Joe Biden left office, State Energy HK Limited, a separate Chinese company, wired $3 million to Robinson Walker, LLC.
President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023, at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“The next day, Robinson Walker, LLC wired $1,065,000 to European Energy and Infrastructure Group in Abu Dhabi, a company associated with James Gilliar,” a memo from the committee states.
Gilliar was a business partner of Hunter Biden involved in his foreign business ventures.
“After the Robinson Walker, LLC account received $3 million from State Energy HK Limited, Biden family members and their companies began receiving incremental payments over a period of approximately three months,” the memo states. “The recipients of the money included Hallie Biden, companies associated with Hunter Biden and James Biden, and an unknown bank account identified as ‘Biden.’”
According to the committee, President Biden’s daughter-in-law, Hallie Biden, the widow of President Biden’s son Beau who later was romantically involved with Hunter, received two separate payments from Walker’s account — Robinson Walker, LLC — in March 2017 totaling $35,000.
A bank account identified as an unknown “Biden” also received $70,000 from Robinson Walker, LLC between March and May of 2017.
An account labeled “Owasco P.C.,” which belonged to Hunter Biden, received $500,000 between March and May 2017.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., says Biden family members received money linked to Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
An account labeled “JBBSR INC,” which belonged to James Biden, received $360,000 between March and May 2017.
An account labeled “First Clearing, LLC” also received $100,000. It is unclear who owned that account, but committee sources told Fox News Digital that it is believed to belong to Hunter Biden.
In a statement Thursday, Comer said “it is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money.”
“The Oversight Committee is concerned about the national security implications resulting from President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals,” Comer said. “We will continue to follow the money trail and facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business schemes and if there is a national security threat.”
When asked for comment on the financial records revealing the more than $1 million to members of the Biden family, the White House did not deny the findings, but instead slammed Comer and the committee’s investigation into the Biden family.
“After a disgusting attack lamenting that the President’s deceased son Beau was never prosecuted while he was alive, Congressman Comer has now decided to go after Beau’s widow,” said White House spokesman Ian Sams said, referring to comments Comer made earlier this month about the late Beau Biden’s campaign contributions.
FILE: July 4, 2012: Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, right, takes a walk with his father, Vice President Joe Biden, to the Green Ridge Little Baseball Field in Scranton, Pa. (AP)
“Instead of bizarrely attacking the President’s family, perhaps House Republicans should focus on working with the President to deliver results for American families on important priorities like lowering costs and strengthening health care,” Sams said.
Hallie Biden did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
A House Oversight Committee spokesperson responded to the White House, though, telling Fox News Digital that the panel is “investigating how the Biden family benefited from influence peddling and if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business transactions with foreign adversaries.”
“Bank records reveal that James Biden, Hunter Biden, Hallie Biden, and an unknown ‘Biden’ received money from Rob Walker’s company after it received a $3 million wire from a Chinese energy company,” the spokesperson said. “The White House should answer questions about why the Biden family received an exorbitant amount of money from China rather than attempt to distract from the facts contained in these bank records.”
The records came after Comer subpoenaed Bank of America. The committee told Fox News Digital that the records have helped to open “new avenues of investigation about the Biden family’s business schemes.”
This week, the Treasury Department notified Comer that it will give the committee “in camera access” to suspicious activity reports (SARs) related to Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s foreign business deals.
Comer vowed to “continue to use bank documents and suspicious activity reports to follow the money trail to determine the extent of the Biden family’s business schemes, if Joe Biden is compromised by these deals, and if there is a national security threat.”
“If Treasury tries to stonewall our investigation again, we will continue to use tools at our disposal to compel compliance,” Comer warned.
In November 2020, the Media Research Center reported that 36% of Biden voters were unaware of the “evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter.” (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Fox News first reported in 2020 that the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s “tax affairs” began amid the discovery of SARs regarding funds from “China and other foreign nations.”
At the time, a Treasury Department official, who did not comment on the investigation, told Fox News that SARs are filed by financial institutions “if there is something out of the ordinary about a particular transaction.”
Fox News first reported the existence of some type of investigation involving Hunter Biden in October 2020, ahead of the last presidential election. It became known then that the FBI had subpoenaed the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden in the course of an existing money laundering investigation.
A Canadian pastor was arrested for the second time in weeks after protesting drag queen storytime for children at public libraries. Pastor Derek Reimer, 36, was arrested and charged Wednesday with one count of breaching a release order that prohibited him from being within 200 meters of events involving the LGBTQ community, a spokesperson for Calgary Police Service told Fox News Digital.
Reimer had been previously arrested on March 2 following a Feb. 25 incident during which three men physically tossed him out of Seton Library for protesting a Reading with Royalty event that was put on by the Calgary Public Library and featured local drag performers reading to children.
Reimer was charged with one count of causing a disturbance and one count of mischief, and also faces six counts of harassment under the city’s bylaw governing public behavior. Each charge carries a penalty of up to $10,000 and up to six months imprisonment if payment cannot be made, according to Livewire Calgary.
Pastor Derek Reimer, 36, was arrested and charged Wednesday with one count of breaching a release order that prohibited him from being within 200 meters of events involving the LGBTQ community. (Courtesy Nathaniel Pawlowski)
Footage of Reimer’s most recent arrest in a parking lot outside the Signal Hill Library in Calgary shows police cuffing him and dragging him across the asphalt before hauling him away in a police vehicle. Bystanders protested his treatment and questioned whether he had gotten within 200 meters of the event. He remains in prison and awaits a court appearance Friday.
The Calgary City Council on Tuesday revised a bylaw and introduced a new one in response to increased protests at drag events, according to the CBC.
The Calgary City Council passed a bylaw Tuesday prohibiting protests within 100 meters of a recreation facility or library entrance. (miroslav_1 via Getty Images)
The modifications included adding the term “intimidation” to the current public behavior bylaw, and the new Safe and Inclusive Access Bylaw prohibits protests within 100 meters of a recreation facility or library entrance. Some councilors reportedly raised concerns about the speed with which the new bylaw was passed.
Earlier this week, Reimer was also issued a 30-day trespass notice following a silent prayer session in the Municipal Building in protest of the new bylaw.
“Mr. Reimer was warned on a previous occasion that he could not hold a religious event inside the Municipal Building unless he has a permit,” a city spokesperson told the CBC.
BREAKING: Pastor Derek Reimer has been issued a trespass notice for holding a silent prayer inside of Calgary's city hall.
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who knows Reimer and made international headlines himself when he was repeatedly arrested for keeping his Calgary church open during the pandemic, told Fox News Digital that Reimer’s arrests indicate the government’s “open hatred toward Christianity.”
“Everyone who is visible, everyone in Canada who is boldly proclaiming Christianity, has become an open target,” he said.
“Calgary was immune for a little bit from the drag queen perversion — because that’s what it is: it’s a sick, twisted perversion, and you can quote me on that,” he said. “An adult man who dresses as a woman in a sexual manner and has the urge to do that in front of little children is a pervert, end of story.”
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who is friends with Pastor Derek Reimer, faced multiple dramatic arrests for keeping his church open during the pandemic. (Artur Pawlowski)
Since drag events involving children have begun proliferating in Calgary, Pawlowski said that Reimer “decided he felt that God is calling him to expose that, to stand against that.” He noted that Reimer has communicated with him from prison, and that he is calling on Christians to rise up and vocally oppose what he described as perversion while they still can.
“I’ve warned Canadians for a very long time — and I’m warning Americans, as well — that you will be ruled by what you tolerate,” Pawlowski said, noting how the way authorities enforced COVID-19 protocols in Canada is now being used to enforce ideology.
From time to time, my readers email me asking for my take on issues of the day. (This has happened twice.)
I feel more obliged than usual to respond, now that we know that the rest of the media cannot state an opinion on anything until they figure out which side Trump is on.
MSNBC: Trump is against men in women’s sports? … Children will DIE if men cannot compete in women’s sports!
Fox News: Trump says he built the wall? … Go Trump! He’s built 0.2% of the wall! ONLY 1,305 MILES TO GO!
I may be cruel, brusque or impatient, but I don’t lie. When I say something, it’s because I think it’s true, not because I’m angling to get a show on MSNBC or a call from President Trump.
So here are my answers to readers’ fictional questions.
QUESTION: Are books like David Cole’s “Republican Party Animal,” Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” and Jared Taylor’s “A Race Against Time,” “White Identity,” “Face to Face With Race” and “If We Do Nothing” still banned from Amazon?
Why yes they are! But please tell me more about how Gov. Ron DeSantis is Hitler for removing pornography from Florida schools.
Liberal brainteaser: What’s the difference between a book in a public school and a book that is simply available for purchase on Amazon? Think hard. You only have three hours.
BREAKING NEWS! Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints” is now available from Amazon on Kindle!!!
Other News In Book Banning: Barnes & Noble — unlike Amazon — sells “When Harry Became Sally,” “Camp of the Saints” — albeit in French only — and all of Taylor’s books,
Takeaways:
1) Maybe Jeff Bezos should spend less time on his rockets and more time overseeing Amazon’s censorship department.
2) “Republican Party Animal” is the hottest book on Earth.
QUESTION:What was the best use of “In Other Words” this week?
Thank you for asking. For the uninformed, the “In Other Words” technique is how liberals insert crackpot words in a conservative’s mouth, by saying or implying, in other words …
This week’s winner is MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid for describing Republicans’ response to Donald Trump in 2016 as: “Shit, I wanna grab ’em by the pussy, too.”
It’s like she can read our minds!
QUESTION: What did you think of Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon being dropped from newspapers for his “racist rant”?
To refresh your recollection, Adams misread a meaningless, click-bait poll, claiming it showed that a majority of black people disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.” (In fact, the poll showed the opposite.) He then concluded that blacks hate whites, so whites should — here’s the part that got played on a loop — “get the hell away from black people.”
At that point, everyone on TV expressed utter shock at his advice. (For a day or two, Adams’s remarks even pushed aside Jan. 6 coverage!)
I happened to notice something about the indignant.
— MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: “It’s just flat-out racism. … This would have been racist in 1955! If somebody had gone on ‘The Steve Allen Show’ and said, ‘My best advice would be to stay away from black people,’ that person in 1955 would have been in trouble.”
Scarborough lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is 0.7% black.
— CNN’s Alisyn Camerota: “Scott Adams went on a racist rant in which he said — and I’m quoting — ‘the advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.’”
Camerota lives in Westport, Connecticut, 1% black.
— CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Blatant racist remarks. A fairly racist statement, as blatant as it gets.”
Tapper lives in a $3.7 million dollar home in Northwest Washington, D.C., an overwhelmingly white area of a city that is majority black.
Shall I go on? I think not.
I don’t begrudge anyone for living in a “low crime” neighborhood with “good schools,” but it’s striking how the very people loudest in their condemnation of Adams seem to have arranged their own lives in strict accordance with his “racist” advice.
Maybe sit this one out.
QUESTION: I like Gov. Ron DeSantis for keeping Florida open, opposing pointless wars, sending illegals to Martha’s Vineyard and a million other things. But isn’t he going to be another Scott Walker, a widely admired governor who fizzled the moment he announced for president?
Highly unlikely. I couldn’t remember why I dumped Walker mere seconds after watching his presidential announcement speech, so I looked it up.
Walker began, “As kids, my brother David and I enjoyed going over to the home of a neighbor by the name of Claire Congdon.”
We then heard a lot about the Congdons: Mr. Congdon’s manning the concession stand at baseball games, his work with the Boy Scouts, his help in getting Walker into “Badger Boys State” as well as “a program called Boys Nation.” It was, Walker told the surely rivetted audience, “my honor to be chosen to represent Wisconsin” at Boys Nation.
At one point, Walker spent a solid minute describing how he buys shirts at Kohl’s department store. (Interested? He goes to the sale rack, uses coupons from the Sunday paper as well as the flyer giving him 15 or 20% off — “or even 30% if we are really lucky” — and presents the cashier with “Kohl’s cash.”)
Apparently, this was supposed to be a metaphor for supply side economics, but it seemed more like an ad for Kohl’s, using ordinary people instead of actors.
Anyway, Walker went on to win the student council election that year, and the rest is history.
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.
Every time Brandon Showalter checks his inbox or listens to his voicemails, he’s dismayed by what he sees and hears. Since he began covering the battle over transgender ideology in 2016, he’s received countless messages from parents grieving over the mutilation of their daughters and the castration of their sons, photos from detransitioners regretting their irreversible surgeries, and firsthand accounts from families shattered by the medical scandal of transgenderism.
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
“Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many moms and dads have called me absolutely devastated, at the end of their rope, because … within 30 minutes of a telehealth consultation, their daughters and sons are given drugs that could render them sterile” or they’re encouraged to have surgeries that will leave their bodies disfigured. “They’re living in a world of confusion,” said Showalter, a writer and social commentator for The Christian Post.
“They sent them off to a university and they became indoctrinated. I’ve had some of them in my home for dinner to try and console them as they’re just grieving. This has just devoured and shattered their families, and that’s not being hyperbolic.”
As a journalist and Bible-believing Christian, Showalter knew he couldn’t just look away when faced with the horrors of the transgender movement. Over the years, he’s written countless articles and even launched a podcast raising awareness about the topic, and this month, releasedExposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens from the Transgender Industry. Showalter penned the free e-book with Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries.
“We wanted to be able to equip pastors and lay leaders, youth and youth ministers to be able to have the philosophical tools to understand this ideology. And most importantly, protect children and teenagers and young adults from its destruction,” Showalter shared.
“The book will show you the various ways in which this ideology has molded our understanding of what sex and gender is, how language is warped, and it’ll clue you in as to how pervasive this is.”
According to Showalter, most people are unaware of just how insidious the transgender movement truly is — or how much it is fueled by the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Terms like “gender-affirming” care and politically-correct euphemisms popularized by many in the media, he said, are both dangerous and misleading. He slammed the idea that children experiencing gender dysphoria frequently die by suicide as “manipulative,” adding: “Suicide is a very complicated phenomenon. You cannot reduce it down to just one cause.”
Showalter detailed how, after a prepubescent child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they are prescribed puberty blockers such as Lupron, a drug that has been used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis and women and has been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
“There’s never been an FDA stamp of approval for that use,” he said. “Even the FDA just last year slapped a warning label that this drug causes vision loss and brain swelling. There are disastrous side effects. It impedes brain development. It basically freezes your endocrine system from allowing the pubertal signaling in the brain to happen.”
Children are given cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone for girls and estrogen for boys, and then undergo surgery to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex. Showalter described this process as “grotesque,” involving the removal of healthy breasts and creating flaccid penises out of skin from another part of the body, such as the forearm or leg.
“These are highly complex, body-disfiguring surgeries with extremely high complication rates, and it’s in service to a material falsehood. You can’t change sex. Your sex is stamped in the nucleus of every single cell. All you’re doing is altering the body in a way that it was not designed to function,” he said. “Biomedical ethics seems to have just completely died with the incursion of this movement.”
Since speaking out about the horrors of the transgender movement, Showalter has experienced a good amount of pushback. He’s been called a “bigot” and a “hater” — but the insults and attacks seem insignificant when he grapples with what he sees as a “demonic” attack on God’s creation of male and female and, thus, on children.
“I don’t know exactly what might cause this ideology to end,” he said. “But I do hope and pray that God, in His infinite mercy, will bring it down. There are days when I just think the solution has to be supernatural because it’s just so wicked. It’s evil. And you don’t have to be a Christian to perceive that.”
Trans ideology has seen increasing visibility in the media, even in children’s programming. For example, an animated pride parade from the Nick Jr. show “Blue’s Clues and You!” featured a cartoon beaver wearing a pink and blue transgender armband and bearing chest scars from a mastectomy. The target demographic for “Blue’s Clues” is preschoolers, children ages 3 to 5.
“PRESCHOOLERS. CHILDREN 3 TO 5 YEARS OLD”
“They are marketing this by way of all media: TikTok, media programming, social media, YouTube, Tumblr, you name it, to get children to believe that somehow their bodies are not fine the way they are,” he said, challenging parents to pray tirelessly over their children and monitor their media consumption.
But despite the narrative pushed by many media outlets, it’s not just conservatives or people of faith opposed to the trans movement, he said. Working at CP, Showalter has heard from countless atheists, those who identify as gay and lesbian and even political leftists who share his and other Christians’ concerns for the next generation.
“The media continues to frame this as a right versus left kind of dynamic, when in fact, the polling indicates that many people across the political spectrum, left and right alike, do not want this done to children,” he said.
“The vast majority of doctors, I’m convinced, do not [support this], but far too few of them are actually being brave and speaking up about it. Many of them are keeping their head down because of this culture of fear we live in,” he added.
Showalter challenged other believers to stand up and declare a biblical worldview regarding sex and gender and urged churches to reach out to families hurt by the transgender movement and de-transitioners in need of recovery care.
“We need to understand the wickedness, the depravity that this is. And we need to be bold,” he stressed. “Now’s the time to show great courage and to be relentlessly honest about what’s happening. We can’t cover our eyes or cover our ears anymore. We have to ask God to give us His heart for hurting families and for children, and to stand up and be counted.”
He added, “I hope and pray that the day is coming soon when this great evil that has overtaken so much of our society will be brought to an end. But until then, and not one moment sooner, we have to keep pushing and keep declaring the truth with as much enthusiasm and boldness as we can possibly muster.”
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
‘Do NOT separate children from their families’- they said. ‘It doesn’t matter if they are criminals’- they said. ‘It’s not fair to cause stress on the family unit’- they said.
In fact, leftists said a lot of things about trying to save children from possible sex traffickers by temporarily separating children from adults. Barbaric, unacceptable, downright cruel. At least that’s their story when conservatives want to vett the illegal migrants crossing our border every day.
But guess what happens when the tables are turned?
For those of you waiting for me to spell it out specifically, it’s okay to separate children from their families, just as long as conservative Americans are suffering.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene retweeted a short video of two disappointed young children after they were denied visitation with their father, Kyle J. Young this past Sunday. The tweet from Kyle Young’s wife states the family drove over 12 hours in hopes of seeing her husband and the father of the two children.
Jack, age 3, excited to see his daddy after a 12 hour drive!
The federal prison in Arkansas that Kyle is held at permits visitation on both Saturday and Sunday. The family was allowed some visitation on Saturday, but on Sunday, they were turned away. No reason was given by the prison officials.
Kyle’s wife and two of their four children (the oldest is grown and living on their own) have only been able to visit him one other time previously, in January of 2022, since his incarceration. His son Jack, aged 3, was only 15 months old when Kyle was arrested and held in a maximum security side of the Warsaw Prison in Virginia. Kyle’s wife told The Gateway Pundit that he is the only J6 prisoner she knows of that was held in the maximum security wing of the prison. This is of course a much more difficult section of the prison to be living in and Young, who had not been convicted of anything at this time, was constantly in fear for his life.
These poor children and their mother! This is only one example of many of the heartbreaking circumstances these families are going through because of the two-tiered justice system and the political persecution of their loved ones.@GOPoversight has sent a letter to Mayor Muriel… https://t.co/0VK8kb3zRi
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 13, 2023
According to AmericanGulag.org and confirmed by his wife, Young was charged with 13 separate charges relating to the questionable claims of Officer Michael Fanone, but pleaded guilty to just one charge in a plea deal: “Assaulting, Resisting, or Impeding Certain Officers”. Young was subsequently sentenced to 86 months of prison, or a little over 7 years, and 3 years of probation upon release. At first, it was unclear if Young would be eligible for early release under the First Steps Act, however, his wife informed us he is now signed up for the First Steps Act and taking classes for his recidivism.
Once Kyle took the plea deal, he was conveniently transferred out of maximum security and integrated into the same facility that housed other J6 political prisoners. It is believed that the maximum security holding may have been an effort to coerce Young into a plea deal rather than waiting for a trial date which would have taken substantially longer.
Deal or No Deal?
I’m not sure if the rules are universal, but where I come from, if you accept a plea deal, you are forbidden to ever appeal the decision. So, no matter what evidence comes out now, Young is stuck with this ridiculous criminal record AND jail time. Unless of course Congress decides to address the J6 prisoners with legislation that would right this magnanimous wrong. But even that wouldn’t restore the time, money, or the fundamental faith in America these patriots lost by simply exercising their constitutional right to protest.
Forget due process or equal protection of the law. These people are locked in solitary confinement, denied bail, and cheated out of legal discovery evidence that could effectively win their cases in court. Do you think these leftists care if Americans are incurring legal fees that will put them out of house and home? Of course not. They’re too busy making concessions for illegal immigrants here to drain the system, break our laws, milk our government, and leave this country looking exactly like the shithole they ran away from. That, my friends, is what happens when you trust a leftist to be in charge.
** If you would like to support Kyle Young and his wife and children, please consider giving at GiveSendGo.com/FreeKyle.
“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson
As a society, we understand very well the term, “free speech isn’t free.” This double-entendre statement has arguably been more applicable in the past several years than in any other time in history. That all freedoms come at a cost, most understand, but the freedom to say what you believe or think, is literally under siege these days.
In such cases, due to terms like, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ it need not even be a lie; an imagined slight is all it takes. This quote from “The Simpson’s movie” back in 2007 references an ideology that at the time, seemed far-fetched. However, as life imitates art in 2023, simply laughing at something funny or speaking unpopular truths can end a career.
During the last weekend of February 2023, the popular comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by nearly 80 newspaper outlets across the country after what many considered a ‘racist rant’ by its creator, Scott Adams.
According to News One, “It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a recent survey by Rasmussen Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams remarked, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away because there is no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”
According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:
February 22: Adams spends several profanity-laden minutes telling white people to “get away” from Black people after reading a Rasmussen poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”
February 24: Some newspapers and publishing groups, including the USA TODAY Network and Advance Local Group, decide to stop publishing Dilbert, removing the cartoon from over 200 papers across the country.
February 25: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Antonio Express-News, among others, drop Dilbert.
February 25: Adams expands on his remarks in an almost two-hour interview with online personality Hotep Jesus.
February 26: Adams links to Saturday’s interview and tweets he’s only accepting criticism from people who know the full context, claiming that much of the coverage against him is “fake news.”
February 26: Elon Musk tweets support of Adams, claiming: “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.
February 26: The National Cartoonists Society disavows “all forms of racism and discrimination” (Dilbert won the Society’s highest honor, the Reuben Award, in 1998).
February 27: Adams is dropped by publishing company Andrews McMeel Universal, whose chairman and CEO tweeted that the company supports free speech but not “commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”
February 28: Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, cancels the September release of Adams’ Reframe Your Brain, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cancel Culture Gone Crazy
Though Adams has been derided for his outspokenness before, this was something new. In a matter of only four days, an iconic comic strip with millions of devoted readers is erased from newspapers all over America. Amazing how damaging thinking aloud can be.
Whether audiences of media, social and otherwise realize it, we are at an inflection point. While it may appear hyperbolic, unless you’ve been sleeping- we should all be concerned. One of the best things that Americans and those seeking to be citizens of this country once appreciated was our Constitution.
Within that document sits a list of Amendments, and these contained rights that bestowed freedoms on every American. Among those are rights against illegal search and seizure, the right to bear arms, and of course- the freedom of speech.
No doubt most of us have watched over time as those rights (mentioned and not mentioned) have not just eroded, but rather, simply been taken away. If the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” tells us anything, our Constitution, as is, may have a shelf life, with a looming expiration date.
Weighing In
While this writer does not agree entirely with Scott Adams’ feelings or assessment, he has every right to say it, much like a Klansman in full-hooded garb, can, and has the right to walk into an all-black-neighborhood and yell, “I HATE NIGGERS!” from the top of his lungs- at his own peril. And while “The Simpsons” is not anyone’s paragon of virtue, hope or even familial example, Homer’s words still ring no less true.
As we watch black-and-white films of civil rights attacks from the 60’s, and cringe at the Holocaust atrocities of the 40’s, we dare not be so naïve to miss the fact that history is repeating herself. However, don’t be fooled. It isn’t through angry words and rhetoric that this is occurring, and not even because of those colleges and venues that boycott and allow the shouting down of speakers.
It won’t be due to judges being mocked and bullied from outside their own homes, or pro-lifers being accosted because of praying in front of abortion clinics. No, it will be because of those that knew it happened, those that heard it happened, those that saw it happen, and those sat by as it happened-and did nothing.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened; stay tuned.
Since Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s recent withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a widely used voter-roll management group with ties to left-wing activists — last week, America’s legacy media have been in freak-out mode. In uniform fashion, leftist outlets have labeled the legitimate concerns raised by the aforementioned states as “conspiracy theories” promoted by “election deniers” and “right-wing media.”
While painted as a nonpartisan venture by corporate media, ERIC is a voter-roll management system founded by far-left activist David Becker that was sold to states as a “quick and easy way” to administer their voter rolls. When states become ERIC members, they give voter data to the group — including the records of unregistered voters. Currently, ERIC has control of voter-roll data in more than half of states and the District of Columbia.
In addition to founding ERIC, Becker is also notable for launching the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of the major groups that received millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Such grants were then poured into local election offices throughout the country to push Democrat-backed voting policies. Analyses have shown these “Zuckbucks” were heavily skewed toward Democrat municipalities, especially in swing states, effectively making it a giant Democrat “get out the vote” operation.
As The Federalist reported, ERIC transmits the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR, which “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.”
While currently a non-voting member of ERIC’s board, Becker announced on Tuesday he “will not accept renomination” to the board “when [his] term expires this week,” citing Republican criticisms of the group.
Despite these alarming ties, there are still several leading GOP state election officials who continue to participate in ERIC. In light of Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s collective withdrawal from the coalition, The Federalist reached out to these officials to inquire whether they’re reconsidering their state’s ERIC membership.
Alaska
While speaking with state lawmakers last week, Alaska’s Division of Elections director Carol Beecher revealed she was reconsidering the state’s partnership with ERIC, citing membership costs as the primary reason. A spokeswoman from the Alaska lieutenant governor’s office confirmed this assertion but noted the state “has not decided on whether to continue” as an ERIC member.
“List maintenance is an essential process to ensure our voter list is as accurate and current as possible, and ERIC is one of the tools that Alaska uses to assist in this process,” spokeswoman Tiffany Montemayor told The Federalist. Montemayor did not, however, address whether Alaska shares the concerns about ERIC raised by Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia.
Georgia
When pressed by The Federalist on whether Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was reconsidering his state’s ERIC membership and if he shared the concerns espoused by the three aforementioned states, Raffensberger spokesman Mike Hassinger declined to answer, instead replying, “If you really believe that ERIC is ‘an interstate alliance controlled by Democrat operatives that encourages partisan outreach efforts under the guise of simple voter roll maintenance,’ you’re an idiot.”
Ohio
While once describing ERIC as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has reversed course and is threatening to withdraw his state from the organization. In a letter sent to ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin last week, LaRose demanded the group comply with his proposed reforms in its Friday meeting.
“I will not accept the status quo as an outcome of the next meeting,” LaRose wrote. “Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to an[d] including our withdrawal from membership.”
As The Federalist reported, “LaRose’s proposed reforms include removing ‘ex-officio membership positions’ from ERIC’s bylaws so as to cut left-wing activist David Becker from its board, as well as no longer requiring states to send out voter registration mailers to unregistered residents.”
Iowa
According to the Associated Press, Iowa GOP Secretary of State Paul Pate is among the nation’s leading Republican election officials “who said they [have] no intention” of leaving ERIC and who have “signaled strong support for the effort.”
“ERIC is an effective tool for ensuring the integrity of Iowa’s voter rolls,” Pate told the outlet.
Texas
In Texas, state lawmakers have introduced legislation that, according to The Texas Tribune, would end the state’s participation in ERIC. Under HB 2809, the Texas secretary of state would be required to “cooperate with other states and jurisdictions to develop systems to compare voters, voter history, and voter registration lists to identify voters: whose addresses have changed,” “who have been convicted of a felony,” or “who are registered to vote in more than one state.”
A companion bill (SB 1070) has also been introduced in the state Senate.
Virginia
Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, Virginia doesn’t have a secretary of state, meaning the state’s elections department is tasked with overseeing election administration. When pressed on whether the department is reconsidering its participation in ERIC in light of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia’s decision to withdraw, an agency spokeswoman didn’t provide a definitive answer on the matter.
“The Department of Elections engages in ongoing and extensive list file maintenance processes,” she said. “If there are any changes made to any of these processes, they will be announced publicly.”
South Carolina
In a statement provided to The Federalist, South Carolina State Election Commission spokesman John Catalano said that while the commission has “many sources of information to remove unqualified voters for a variety of reasons,” ERIC is currently their “only source for access to critical sets of data,” including the Social Security Administration’s death files and the “list of South Carolina voters who have registered in other states.”
“While our state’s health department provides us with reports of people who have died in South Carolina, these reports do not include South Carolinians who die outside the state’s borders. The Social Security Administration death data we receive through ERIC allows us to identify these voters and make them inactive,” Catalano said. “The State Election Commission’s view is that ERIC is a valuable and currently irreplaceable tool that allows us to remove unqualified voters from the voter registration rolls.”
Leading GOP state election officials from Kentucky, Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Utah did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
This article has been updated to include a statement from South Carolina’s state election commission.
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
It’s painful for me to watch so many smart pundits and politicians on both the right and the left buy into a media narrative that seeks to blame “wealthy speculators” or “tech bros” or venture capitalists for a banking crisis that ultimately started in Washington. Let me explain.
If you want to understand the context for the crisis, look at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair’s March 6 testimony — a week before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse — where he explains that banks were sitting on $620 billion of unrealized losses from long-dated bonds. This provided the tinder for the crisis.
The match was lit when SVB announced on Wednesday, March 9, that it had effectively sold all of its available-for-sale securities and needed to raise fresh capital because of large unrealized losses from its mortgage bond portfolio.
Screenshot: Wall Street Journal
On Thursday morning, the financial press widely reported SVB’s need for new capital, and short sellers were all over the stock. The CEO’s disastrous “don’t panic” call later that morning only heightened fears and undermined confidence in the bank.
The idea that one needed “non-public information” to understand that SVB was at risk is drivel being peddled by populist demagogues. Any depositor who could read The Wall Street Journal or watch the stock ticker could understand there was no upside in waiting to see what would happen next.
By Friday, the run on other banks had begun. This became abundantly clear when regulators placed Signature Bank in receivership, announced a backstop facility for First Republic, and temporarily halted trading of regional bank stocks on Monday. Even trading of Schwab was halted.
Some unscrupulous reporters and political types have even claimed that I somehow caused this through my tweeting. Dang, they must think I’m Superman! Or maybe E.F. Hutton. But the timing doesn’t line up at all, as I already explained.
In the never-ending quest for scapegoats, some reporters and political types are asking if @theallinpod could have influenced the bank run. We didn't publish until Saturday morning when banks were already closed! I also never tweeted about SVB until it was already in receivership…
Once the run on the bank started, decisive action by the Fed was imperative. This meant protecting deposits (uninsured are 50 percent) and backstopping regional banks. No matter how distasteful you may find those things to be, preventing a greater economic calamity was necessary.
But back to SVB: Its collapse was first and foremost a result of its own poor risk management and communications. It should have hedged its interest rate risk. And it should have raised the necessary capital months ago through an offering that didn’t spook the street.
SVB doesn’t deserve a bailout and isn’t getting one. SVB’s stockholders, bondholders, and stock options are getting wiped out. The executives will spend years in litigation and may have stock sales clawed back. Anyone who thinks there’s a “moral hazard” isn’t paying attention.
But it’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things. It arose from SVB’s over-exposure to boring old mortgage bonds, which were considered safe at the time SVB bought them. Perhaps this is why SVB had an “A” rating from Moody’s and had passed all of its regulatory exams.
What turned the mortgage bonds toxic? The most rapid rate-tightening cycle we’ve seen in decades. You can see the connection here between rapid rate hikes and unrealized losses in the banking system.
So, what caused the rapid rate hikes? The worst inflation in 40 years. And what caused that? Profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington — all while Joe Biden, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell assured us inflation was “transitory.”
I warned two years ago that pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into an already hot economy was an unprecedented and likely dangerous experiment. But this was Bidenomics.
Bidenomics = pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into a rip-roaring economy. I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen next. AFAIK we’ve never tried this before.
So, when Joe Biden says he’s going to hold those responsible for this mess fully accountable, he ought to start by looking in the mirror. But I’m sure that’s not going to happen, just as I’m sure the hunt for scapegoats is just beginning.
David Sacks is an entrepreneur and author who specializes in digital technology firms. He is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital fund Craft Ventures and was the founding COO of PayPal.
Reports of book banning have proliferated throughout the media. Understandably, such claims should raise concern among free speech advocates. The ability to freely disseminate knowledge and challenge the status quo is a fundamental pillar of a free society. An illiberal act such as a book ban should be met with scorn by those who truly care about advancing society. However, behind claims of rampantly spreading censorship, a key question has been left unanswered. What’s a book ban?
The word ban is generally understood to mean a prohibition of a certain behavior, substance, or object. However, due to First Amendment constitutional protections and corresponding case law, it’s illegal for any government entity to outlaw the possession of a book. With very rare exceptions, there are no penalties for owning, buying, and selling books in America.
Yet media reports claim book bans are spreading like wildfires in states such as Florida and Texas. So how can that be?
Which Books Are Banned?
The issue is primarily a cultural tug-of-war taking place in public school libraries. The discovery of sexually explicit books on school bookshelves nationwide has sparked controversy.
Pen America is easily the most cited organization when it comes to book bans. The self-proclaimed “free speech” advocacy group is mentioned in almost every media report on the subject. Yet few Americans understand the very expansive definition of a “book ban” utilized by the organization. Pen America considers books “challenged for review,” but still available for student use, as “banned” even if the books haven’t been removed from the library. Pen America considers any book that’s available but age-restricted as “banned.” Moreover, several school districts have refuted the popular book ban list produced by Pen America, claiming the list contained books that were never removed from circulation in their respective libraries.
An expansive view of “book bans” creates a few problems. There’s an assumption that the government has a responsibility to produce and distribute every book in existence to school children free of charge. This may sound great until you consider that books often contain inaccurate, poorly sourced, or controversial information. I doubt anyone of reason would consider the exclusion of books such as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (a Nazi manifesto), “The Anarchist Cookbook” (a bomb-building guide), and “The Turner Diaries” (a white supremacy recruitment novel) from our public K-12 libraries to be an illiberal attempt to suppress free speech.
Does Ideology Influence Book Selection?
Nonetheless, there’s reason to believe some librarians have injected their own bias into the procurement process. Writer Kirk Cameron has had his Christian children’s books rejected by publicly funded libraries that openly embrace drag queen story hours featuring pro-transgender book titles. At the time of writing, Pen America’s website produced nothing on the aforementioned controversies surrounding the rejection of conservative-themed books.
Additionally, the American Association of School Librarians grants an annual “Social Justice” award of $2,000 to librarians and $5,000 for new books to school librarians for devising a “program, unit, or event in support of social justice using resources of the school library.” Although one may agree with the decisions of a publicly funded library to promote or demote a certain viewpoint, it requires a substantial degree of denialism to pretend viewpoint discrimination isn’t happening.
Who Should Pick the Books?
A 5-4 Supreme Court Decision in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) restricts school boards from removing books on the basis of subject matter, recognizing school libraries as special free speech zones. However, the dissenting justices argued that, because books can be obtained outside the school library and school board officials are democratically elected to handle affairs related to the management of the school, there are no First Amendment implications concerning the exclusion of certain materials. Furthermore, the view of school libraries as being crucial free speech zones seems antiquated in the age of social media and smartphones.
Maybe it’s time to question the idea that a government agency refusing to disseminate a book constitutes a ban of any sort. Public school libraries are taxpayer-funded entities. In our democratic society, we vote for policies that reflect our values and preferences. These voter preferences should manifest as we set priorities in public school education.
Just as many jurisdictions may refuse to provide bomb-building instruction, gunsmithing guides, and white supremacy manifestos to their students, school boards everywhere should be allowed to make reasonable value judgments concerning objectionable content.
Educators and librarians are humans with biases and policy preferences just like the rest of us. Deferring to them with no community oversight doesn’t prevent viewpoint discrimination; it just ensures it goes unchallenged.
Raheem Williams is a policy analyst at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE). He has worked for several liberty-based academic research centers and think tanks. He received his B.A. in economics from Florida International University and his M.A. in financial economics from the University of Detroit Mercy.
Tennessee Senate Republicans passed a bill Monday that could block transgender people from changing their listed sex on government-issued documents including driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The proposed legislation, known as House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440, defines the term “sex” for use in the Tennessee Code as a “person’s immutable biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth and evidence of a person’s biological sex.” It also clarifies that “evidence of a person’s biological sex” includes, but is not limited to, “a government-issued identification document that accurately reflects a person’s sex listed on the person’s original birth certificate.”
While it cleared the state Senate, the bill stalled in the state House due to potential budgetary impacts. In a floor speech Monday, its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Kerry Roberts, argued the legislation promotes “consistency” in the state code, rejecting concerns brought in a fiscal note, Axios reported. Krista Lee Carsner, executive director of the Tennessee General Assembly’s fiscal review committee, noted the proposed language “may result in increases to state and local expenditures associated with compliance measures, potential civil litigation and could jeopardize federal funding; however, due to multiple unknown factors, a precise fiscal impact cannot be determined.”
Tennessee Senate Republicans approved a bill defining “biological sex.” (David Underwood/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In the fiscal note, Carsner says the state Department of Education asserts that the legislation could risk federal funding awards for several programs amounting to nearly $1.3 billion in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. The state Department of Health, which receives more than $750 million in federal grant funding, notes Title X; Women, Infants, and Children; and various other federal grants specify an alternate definition of “sex.” The state could lose funding if found out of compliance with federal requirements.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently approved legislation restricting drag shows, gender reassignment surgeries for minors. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
In a statement Monday, Human Rights Campaign condemned the Tennessee Senate for passing the bill.
“Extremist Tennessee Senators are continuing their assault on LGBTQ+ Tennesseans’ ability to live their lives openly and honestly,” the advocacy group’s legal director, Sarah Warbelow, said. “This is their latest cruel attempt to stigmatize, marginalize and erase the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender Tennesseans. Let’s be clear: the goal of this bill is to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from nondiscrimination protections in the state of Tennessee and to perpetuate a false narrative of who transgender people are.”
Transgender advocates have condemned the Tennessee bill defining sex. (Getty)
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has not said publicly whether he supports the bill. However, earlier this month, Lee did sign legislation banning healthcare providers in the state from legally prescribing puberty blockers or hormones for minors and performing gender transition surgeries for minors.
He also signed off on a law that prohibits drag shows from public property within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks or places of worship and limits them to age-restricted venues. The law includes criminal provisions for “adult cabaret performances” held in public areas where they could be seen by children. Both laws take effect on July 1.
Fox News Digital reached out to Lee’s office Wednesday for comment regarding House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
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.
Several Republican-controlled state legislatures have begun to push for expanded protections for mothers and children in low-income households, particularly in areas where abortion is now illegal or severely restricted after the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.
Following the overturn of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide last summer, an analysis by FiveThirtyEight shows that at least six of the 14 states where abortion is completely or almost entirely illegal have enacted or are considering various measures that would increase support for pregnant women, mothers or young children.
Meanwhile, seven other Republican-controlled states with less-restrictive abortion laws are considering similar measures.
For example, the Republican-controlled Mississippi state legislature passed Senate Bill 2212, with the lower chamber passing the bill last week. The bill awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
The measure would extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers from 60 days to a year. Following the court’s ruling last June, a trigger law went into effect in the Magnolia State outlawing all abortions, with exceptions for cases of rape or incest or if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.
In Wyoming, a law completely banning abortion went into effect in July and is currently being challenged by the courts. Last week, the state’s Republican Gov. Mark Gordon signed House Bill 4, extending Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers from 90 days to 12 months.
The legislation is expected to help between 1,000 and 2,000 low-income Wyoming mothers, according to a statement on the governor’s website. During a public signing ceremony for the bill, Gordon called the Medicaid expansion a “signature piece of pro-life legislation.”
Other Republican-controlled states, including Montana and Tennessee, have considered some additional benefits for women and families, though some have faced opposition.
Montana has weighed a permanent, refundable $1,200 per-child tax credit for working families that make $56,000 per year or less proposed by Gov. Greg Gianforte. The governor also proposed a $7,500 adoption tax credit. The proposed child tax credit was tabled in the House Appropriations Committee committee, although it initially passed the House Taxation Committee with bipartisan support.
According to Montana Public Radio, some Republican lawmakers would rather focus efforts on broader tax relief instead, as Gianforte’s proposed budget impacting low-to-middle-income residents that would more than double the state’s earned income tax credit has advanced in Senate Bill 121.
In Tennessee, where performing abortions is a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, Gov. Bill Lee has proposed adding a diaper benefit to the state’s Medicaid program so that the cost of diapers would be covered during the first two years of a child’s life for mothers eligible for Medicaid. Tennessee would become the first Medicaid program in the United States to enact such a measure, Lee said in his February State of the State address.
Lee also wants to create a $100 million grant program for nonprofit crisis pregnancy centers that assist women facing unplanned pregnancies, encouraging them not to abort their unborn children. He also seeks $18.7 million to increase the income threshold for pregnant women and caregivers to expand access to the state’s Medicaid services and $4.7 million to extend postpartum health coverage under TennCare. Lee seeks $10.25 million for grant funding to expand adoption and foster care services.
“Pro-life is much more than defending the lives of the unborn,” Lee said in his speech. “This is not a matter of politics. This is about human dignity.”
Regarding Republican support for spending plans aimed at women and families, polling shows that the political party remains divided about using government funds to fund social benefits for women and children.
According to an Institute for Family Studies survey conducted by YouGov of 2,557 American adults between Oct. 20 to Nov. 3, 2022, 41% of Republican parents said they’d support a plan to “increase state spending on low-income pregnant and new mothers, including expanded Medicaid coverage of prenatal and postnatal health care.” Thirty-eight percent opposed these measures.
Regarding paid family leave, 71% of all parents assessed in the survey and 54% of Republican parents somewhat or strongly supported a federal program to provide new moms six weeks of paid parental leave.
The study’s results were weighed based on age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education and region.
After Roe‘s reversal, Republican Mississippi State Rep. Becky Currie, who authored the state’s 15-week abortion ban that ultimately led to the Supreme Court taking up the case that overturned the 1973 decision, emphasized that legislators have a responsibility to enact pro-family policies.
Currie, who raised two daughters as a single mom throughout most of her working life, told The Christian Post in an August interview that she can empathize with women struggling to make ends meet without help from their baby’s father.
Currie called for lawmakers to ensure that pregnant women can access healthcare services, make adoption more affordable, and enforce child support laws, so men are held accountable for the children they help create.
During the interview, Currie advocated for extending Mississippi’s Medicaid for postpartum mothers from 60 days to a year, a proposal the legislature has now embraced.
“You know, when you have a baby, your life is turned upside down,” she said. “So we want that mother to get back to the doctor and get the care that she needs. She may have postpartum depression. These are just things that we need to be supportive of our moms more than we are.”
Maxine Waters, Mitt Romney, President Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and most other Washington politicians agree on one thing: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) executives should lose their jobs and equity holders should lose everything, but SVB depositors should get made whole.
“Failing to intervene and make sure depositors get all their money back will hurt normal people and destabilize the entire U.S. banking system,” they say. Not only that, but they’re assuring us this definitely isn’t a bailout! Even many on the nationalistright echoed these talking points.
Except they are wrong. At best, they don’t understand the banking system, banking regulations, and the incentives being created here. At worst, they are — as is certainly the case for Democrats like Eric Swalwell — arguing solely for the interests of large and wealthy investment firms that had money at SVB without regard for the interests of normal working Americans.
To understand why, we need to examine what happened with SVB in the run-up to the crisis.
Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse
SVB has had tremendous growth over the last 10 years as the Federal Reserve’s easy money programs flooded the tech industry with cheap capital.
Banks are tasked with managing assets and liabilities. Liabilities include deposits and debt, and assets include government securities and loans. SVB’s business revolved around serving Silicon Valley’s startups and the wealthy investment funds buying and selling these startups. That meant taking in an explosion of deposits from these investment funds as cheap money from the Fed flooded in — a liability — and making loans to startups and venture capital funds with those deposits — an asset.
But unlike most banks, where about 75 percent of the deposits are used for loans, SVB used its explosive deposit growth to plow nearly 60 percent of its assets into government securities — some treasuries but mostly mortgage-backed securities. While these securities are “safe,” meaning there is little to no default risk, these securities do move in price as interest rates change. So, most banks will hedge, or pay to remove, this interest rate risk.
The thing is, SVB’s massive bond portfolio wasn’t hedged. Put more plainly, SVB was using customer deposits to make a massive bet on lower rates. Obviously, that didn’t work out, as rates increased all of 2022. Once depositors figured out that any selling of the unhedged bond portfolio to meet depositor withdrawals would lead to big losses and be unable to cover all withdrawals, there was a rush to the exits — a bank run.
All of this has been covered by the financial media, but two things have been left out. First, nobody knows how solid the other 40 percent of SVB’s assets, given out as loans, are. At least some of these loans were given to now-failing speculative tech or cryptocurrency firms.
Second, SVB’s bank run wasn’t the type you see in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” SVB’s depositors aren’t small business owners — who are covered up to $250,000 by the FDIC — they are some of the most sophisticated and wealthy financiers in the world. They benefited heavily during the Fed’s easy money policies over the last 10 years, and now the reverse of these easy money policies is hurting them.
This is why the cast of characters above isn’t arguing for the FDIC-insured amounts to be met. They are specifically arguing that those with far more than the FDIC-insured amount be fully made whole.
Not only were these depositors sophisticated, but they were also purposefully taking a risk to get a higher interest rate on their deposits at SVB. They also had every reason to know that SVB was a risky bet, as publications like Grant’s Interest Rate Observer have been warning about SVB’s portfolio of bonds for some time. It just so happens that the vast majority of these depositors are also wealthy donors to the Democrat Party and other leftist causes, increasing the political expediency of the government’s action.
Yes, It Is a Bailout
When the Biden administration or the rest of the cast of characters insists this isn’t a bailout, they are playing word games. When they insist the taxpayer isn’t “on the hook,” that is a lie. The “taxpayer” isn’t paying, but “bank customers” across the country are. An FDIC fund that essentially taxes banks — including the small bank in your hometown — is being used. At the end of last year, the Deposit Insurance Fund had $128 billion.
But 89 percent of SVB’s $175 billion in deposits, or $156 billion, was uninsured because it was above the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit. Depending on how bad the SVB asset write-downs are, which is yet to be determined, the insurance fund could get completely overwhelmed. Again, “bank customers” would then make up the difference. So, the fact of the matter is that working Americans are once again subsidizing a bailout of the coastal oligarchs.
This creates a terrible incentive or moral hazard, where now large, deep-pocketed entities can search out the bank with the highest return on their deposits, no matter how irresponsible that bank’s behavior, and believe they will receive their money back in the event of failure. This is also why arguing that SVB depositors suffering a small reduction in their accounts with deposits above $250,000 would lead to a banking collapse is disingenuous. The fear is that because the Democrats’ 2011 Dodd-Frank legislation created a handful of large banks that were essentially deemed “too big to fail,” then money will flow out of deposits at banks like SVB or smaller regional banks and into the too-big-to-fail banks.
But the risks taken by SVB and its unhedged bond portfolio are extremely out of step with the rest of the U.S. banking system. If this is a risk, it could be combated in a number of ways that actually fix the fundamental problem without bailing out the rich and politically connected SVB depositors.
One solution could involve raising the amounts covered by FDIC insurance. Another solution could involve the government pledging to intervene if a run on a bank with sound financials occurred. Either way, pretending the world stops if rich SVB depositors weren’t made completely whole is not a serious position.
Any further market mayhem only serves to prove the point. For one, the U.S. is going into a large slowdown, more is at play than the banking system, and much of the stress on the banking system is because Fed easy money policies created excess (and inequality). This will continue to be exposed in the slowdown.
The government did the exact opposite of what it should have done. Going forward, they haven’t come out with a large enough program to solidify the system’s stability and protect responsible banks, but SVB depositors received immediate relief.
Throw the Bums Out
Said differently, the politically connected just received immediate relief from Washington, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the potential incoming wave of unemployment, market stresses, and other banking issues because none of the fundamental problems are being addressed here.
Politically, the problem is twofold. Despite being completely oligarchic, the Democrats still control much of the country’s underclass. The other junior party in this arrangement, the Republicans, practice buffet line-style libertarianism. Republicans like Romney pretend to believe in markets but always clamor to intervene when they or their friends are affected — even while they couldn’t care less about the economic problems facing their actual voting base.
The political system of the United States is then ripe for a crackup. The solution is a radical populism that makes Donald Trump look tame by comparison. Of course, any more bank bailouts should be paid for by taxes on the rich — they are the ones who benefit, after all. And, of course, we should let SVB fail, and its depositors take a loss, even while we rush to reintroduce manufacturing jobs into the heartland.
The government will always pick winners and losers. It’s time the roles were reversed.
Democratic activist Kal Penn interviewed Joe Biden for The Daily Show this week. Penn begins one of his questions by pointing out that the president had “codified” both gay marriage and interracial marriage — as if either was in any danger whatsoever — and asks him what his philosophical evolution on “marriage equality” looks like. After all, Penn notes, now that trans kids are dealing with “regressive” state laws (banning surgical and pharmaceutical mutilation), it’s important to know.
“I can remember exactly when my epiphany was,” the president says. And though Biden admits he hadn’t thought much about gay marriage as a senior in high school in 1960, one time, “my dad was dropping me off, and I remember I am about to get out of the car and looked to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other.” Biden goes on to say: “And I’ll never forget it; I turned and looked at my dad. And he said: ‘Joey, it’s simple; they love each other.’”
This, of course, never happened. As I’ve noted before, Biden is a practitioner of the George Costanza school of “it’s not a lie if you believe it.” Other people’s lives are passing before his eyes. We’re probably about a year away from Biden telling media about the time he dated a drag queen named Hedda Hair in college because his dad had told him, “Joey, gender is just a social construct.”
The story of a gay couple kissing on the streets of 1960 Wilmington has become a Biden standard in recent years. He probably invented it sometime in 2015 and then used it regularly at gay rights speeches. Though in other iterations, it is a bit more cinematic and detailed. Here it is in 2020:
And I was being dropped off to get an application in the center of our city; Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate capital of the world at the time. And these two men, I’m getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African American community because there was a big swimming pool complex.
And these two men, well dressed, leaned up and hugged one another and kissed one another. And I’m getting out of the car at the light and I turn to my dad. My dad looked at me and said, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”
Even if he believed this story, it would only mean that Biden had spent over 50 years ignoring his dad’s progressive outlook. In 1973, more than a decade after his epiphany, Biden said that his gut reaction to allowing gays to work in the federal government was that they were “security risks” — though he hadn’t “given it much thought.” More than 30 years after his Catholic working-class dad told him that love was love, Joey voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
Joseph R. Biden Sr. was probably devastated by this betrayal. In 2006, Biden was still defending the law, telling Tim Russert that “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that.” Asked if he would support gay marriage during the 2008 vice presidential debate, Biden answered, “No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.” The Reuters piece detailing the debate is headlined: “Palin, Biden agree on gay rights at debate.”
In 2019, Biden alleged that, unlike Obama, he “didn’t have to evolve at all” on gay marriage. It is weird that the first time Biden is on the record publicly supporting gay marriage was on Meet the Press on May 4, 2012, two years after Barack Obama said his views on gay marriage were “evolving” and 52 years after his alleged epiphany. In truth, as with virtually every issue in his 50-year political life, Joey takes whatever position makes him popular in the Democratic Party.
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.
Parents — not the government — are responsible for teaching morals and fundamental values to their children. School administrators seem to have forgotten this. Throughout our commonwealth and country, local school districts are attempting to supplant parents with government officials, who they believe know what is best for our children.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
Parents are responsible for instilling moral, religious, personal, cultural and other values that they deem appropriate in order to prepare their children for success and happiness in life. Some parents, like us, believe this should be rooted in our Christian faith. No matter the source, we believe that parents are foremost responsible for establishing a moral foundation in their children.
With a strong moral foundation being built at home, parents then entrust their local school districts with educating their child in reading, writing and arithmetic. Parents do not, however, expect government bureaucrats to infiltrate their child’s classroom and teach them their own concept of morality.
In our own community, the West Shore School district has engaged with “CharacterStrong” to teach “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) to our children. This curriculum is aligned with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) whose chief priority is to implement SEL with “equity and excellence” in mind. This may sound relatively harmless to the untrained listener, until you find out more about these organizations and their disturbing goals.
CharacterStrong states that their goal is to “partner” with parents in teaching moral and fundamental values to their children. The organization’s overt goal is to co-parent children by helping them to identify their own “values and virtues” and to reflect on those values to “help guide their decisions.”
We, like the majority of parents across the country, are not interested in coparenting with a government contractor. The government is not the parent of my child. We raise our children consistent with the values of our Christian faith and expect those values not to be meddled with.
The West Shore School District should be focused on teaching rigorous academics and training our children to think critically. It should be focused on preparing our children for the academic rigors of high school, college, and the real world. Instead, it is focused on promoting the CharacterStrong curriculum which, through CASEL, has made “equity” essential to the SEL curriculum.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
My child’s school should not be focused on gender ideology, race, or undermining the core values I teach my children. Unfortunately, the school district has decided to continue to push this dangerous ideology and indoctrination scheme.
Thankfully, parents have strong parental rights here in Pennsylvania. Chapter four of the Pennsylvania School Code authorizes parents or guardians to “have their children excused from specific instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs.”
My fellow district parents recently exercised their rights under this provision but were met with denials. Worse, West Shore School District repeatedly demanded that our friends justify their religious objections to the chosen religion of the West Shore School District.
The school district has no discretion. It must grant the parents’ request and properly accommodate their children. Notably, the district did in fact permit some exemptions to the curriculum but denied others.
Parents who have decided to exercise their rights under both our state and federal constitutions should not be vilified. These parents should be praised for paying close attention to their children’s curriculum and ensuring that no one — especially the government — gets between parents and their children, before it’s too late.
Allison Shipp is the leader of the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Chapter of Moms for Liberty.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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