Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) outraged a congressional witness on Wednesday with a simple question about her perspective on abortion.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about “the assault on reproductive rights in a post-Dobbs America,” Kennedy asked University of California-Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of Law Michele Goodwin whether she supports unfettered abortion.
“I think this a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. Do you support it being legal to abort an unborn child up to the moment of birth?” Kennedy asked.
Goodwin, however, seemed uninterested in answering the question. She told Kennedy the question is more complicated than he believes, to which he said he simply wants her personal perspective.
“I’m just trying to understand your perspective, and I’m not accusing you of this. But, you know, people sort of talk around this issue,” he responded, before asking his question again: “If there were a bill that said that a woman has an unfettered right to abort an unborn baby for any reason up to the moment of birth, would you vote yes or would you vote no?”
“Senator Kennedy, I refuse to be shackled by your question,” Goodwin shot back.
Democrat witnesses refuse to answer Kennedy: “Do you support abortion up to the moment of birth?”www.youtube.com
After several moments of back-and-forth in which Goodwin and Kennedy talked over one another, Kennedy asked, “You’re advocating a law that says that an unborn baby can be aborted up to the moment of birth for any reason, are you not?”
“Let me clarify what the 14th Amendment says in the first sentence that citizens of the United States are individuals that are ‘born.’ That is what our Constitution says,” she responded. “Do you support our Constitution?”
It’s not exactly clear what Goodwin was trying to say with her reference to the Constitution. Either she was suggesting that the 14th Amendment does not apply to unborn children because they are not yet born, or she was making a reference to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The exchange ended when Kennedy reassured Goodwin that he didn’t want to argue with her, opining that he believed Goodwin was “afraid” to admit her support for “unfettered” abortion.
“You’re not going to answer it and that’s your right,” he said. “But I would respect you more if you would just say, ‘Here is my answer.'”
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When he could have stayed on script and let his popularity carry him along, he instead continued taking ever-larger risks and angering powerful people.
Whatever the reason, most people agree that Fox lost more than Carlson. While he can take his massive following and start fresh, Fox can hardly avoid looking like a domesticated conservative media company.
For many, Carlson was the only reason to watch cable television, let alone Fox. He was the one authentic person who challenged the Democrat and Republican party lines. As Daily Wire host Matt Walsh recently noted on his show, Carlson’s monologues were news events in themselves because they resonated so well with many Americans. Besides making him popular, Carlson’s authenticity and independence made him unique and likely irreplaceable.
Some people have compared his departure to that of Bill O’Reilly, who also commanded large audiences, but O’Reilly was a pundit for a different time. His brand differed entirely from Carlson’s. He cheered for the right’s old priorities: fighting terrorists, expanding global trade, and lowering the corporate tax rate. By contrast, Carlson voiced populist, anti-establishment, and non-interventionist opinions.
While O’Reilly is a relic of “Conservatism Inc.,” Carlson is emblematic of what conservative media has become: a wide diversity of voices on a variety of platforms that all oppose the leftist narrative propagated by legacy media outlets. By dumping Carlson, Fox’s leaders are deciding to return to the good ol’ days of Conservative Inc. From now on, news and opinion broadcasts will be safe, filtered, and milquetoast.
In the short term, this might protect Fox from more lawsuits and harassment, but in the long term, this assures that Fox will fade into oblivion along with the rest of cable television as alternative online media takes over.
Rather than treating this as a loss, conservatives should welcome the change. This might push more people, especially older generations, to abandon cable news altogether. Conservatives can leave the insipid programming of cable news for the leftist midwits who pride themselves on being (mis)informed.
Frankly, Carlson could not stay at Fox forever. Though he excelled as a cable broadcaster, his commentary, intelligence, and willingness to explore controversies fit new styles of conservative media too. When he could have stayed on script and let his popularity carry him along, he instead continued taking ever-larger risks and angering powerful people. In many ways, he had a stronger counter-cultural and anti-establishment bent than the typical punk rocker, which admittedly is not saying much these days.
As such, it is fitting that he can move into a medium that allows him to work on his own terms. Not only will this allow him more freedom to express himself and to amplify important voices and arguments, but it will also be more profoundly American.
Whereas state-run media controls information and thought in some foreign nations, Americans can listen to different voices all arguing and competing with one another to grow their audiences. Doubtless, American leftists hope to follow suit and destroy all alternative media and abolish free speech. Quite understandably, they see that only gadflies like Carlson, who dissent from their agenda, hold them back from complete cultural, political, and economic supremacy. This is why they devote extensive energy and resources to controlling all social media and cable media platforms. And it looks like they finally succeeded in taking down Fox.
Fortunately, leftist attempts to censor and control online public discourse have mostly played out like a clumsy game of whack-a-mole. They will silence one dissenter only to have 10 more pop up and say something even more “dangerous.”
Moreover, they cannot help but look like fascists and hypocrites every time they play this game, even angering those in the old guard like Bill Maher who at least try to be principled.
That does not mean their failures should make anyone comfortable with the assault on free speech and alternative media in America. People who are committed to the truth and a marketplace of ideas should continue to call out censorship and corporate monopolies.
Even if Carlson rebounds and Fox collapses, it is still outrageous that he was ousted in the first place. To turn this setback into a win, conservatives must see the intentions behind his exit, support alternative media, and (as Tucker Carlson said in a video after his termination) speak out against the falsehoods as confidently and frequently as possible.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Like just about anything else that undermines the Democrats’ preferred narratives, the Getty Images photo that revealed that President Joe Biden’s responses to questions at his joint press conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol earlier this week were scripted went mostly unreported throughout the corporate press. And, compared to the damage done by the out-of-control spending and woke policies at home and incoherent foreign policy abroad pursued by Biden, perhaps it isn’t earth-shaking that he needs cheat sheets on those rare occasions when his handlers allow him to field live questions from the press.
We’ve already seen plenty of evidence that the 80-year-old commander-in-chief requires printed cards with detailed instructions to navigate public events. He spent most of the 2020 presidential campaign doing virtual events; the press and public were given little or no access to him. That’s continued since he entered the White House.
Starting from his first meeting with his first formal press conference in March 2021, he has been carrying such cards with him in such settings. In March 2022, he was caught holding a card with answers to possible questions about the war in Ukraine. And in both a June 2022 event with wind industry executives and then a November 2022 summit in Indonesia, the cameras were able to see the cue cards he carried that told him precisely what to do, with phrases like “You enter,” “You take your seat,” “You thank participants,” and “You depart.” And to the consternation of his handlers, sometimes he reads the stage instructions aloud.
But this week’s cheat sheet goes beyond the usual embarrassment about an octogenarian president who is unable to perform without a script and often incapable of following the instructions he’s given.
It’s one thing for the White House staff to tell the president what to do or even to supply him with answers to possible questions that he can’t be relied upon to remember without a script in front of him. It’s quite another when members of the White House press corps are actively colluding in the charade. And that is what the photo of his presser cheat sheet revealed.
The card labeled “Question #1” in the “Reporter Q & A” showed a picture of Los Angeles Times White House correspondent Courtney Subramanian (followed by the phonetic guide to pronouncing her name) and then the text of a question about semiconductor manufacturing.
Biden duly called upon Subramanian, who then did ask a question about semiconductors, though not the exact same question that was on his card. In any event, Biden followed the script and gave her the answer to the question he thought he was getting rather than the one she posed.
It’s generally no secret what questions reporters are liable to ask, since most follow the dictates of the news cycle. And while the tradition of White House pressers has generally called for senior reporters for major outlets to be given priority to ask questions, other presidents have been comfortable enough in public to be able to choose for themselves and to be able to answer without scripts or notes.
A New Low for the Press
But the question this incident poses is far more serious than the fact that Biden can’t maneuver through a public event without minute instructions.
The card shows that Subramanian is submitting her questions in advance of the presser. And it is likely that others who are called upon are required to do the same. That means that even when his staff allows Biden to face the press in live events — and he has held fewer press conferences than any president in the last 30 years — what we are seeing is something along the lines of a Kabuki play and not anything that previous generations would have recognized as an actual opportunity for the press to get real answers about the issues of the day.
This is appalling not just because it shows Biden is incapable of behaving as all of his predecessors have done and submit regularly to unscripted grilling from an often-adversarial press corps. Given his age and his inability to get through public appearances without all manners of gaffes and evidence of confusion, what the cheat sheets demonstrate is that the corporate media considers itself obligated to assist the White House in a deceitful show aimed at demonstrating Biden is capable of governing, when that is not the case.
That goes beyond the unwillingness of virtually any member of the current White House press corps other than Fox News’ Peter Doocy to pose tough questions. It means they have abandoned even the pretense that they are there to hold the administration accountable and are instead merely the media auxiliaries of the Democratic Party.
Even more than just this disinterest in basic journalistic ethics, this kind of cooperation shows the lengths to which some reporters and their bosses are willing to go to cover up Biden’s incapacity to serve.
Part of a Pattern
The willingness of the press to go into the tank for Democrats is nothing new.
Last fall, legacy media journalists covered up the extent of Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s incapacity in the wake of a massive stroke. Their lies were only revealed when, in the sole debate of that race, Fetterman demonstrated that, even with electronic aids, he had trouble comprehending questions and answering them in a coherent fashion. His recent return to the Senate after spending several weeks in a hospital to be treated for severe depression showed that there was little improvement, but even now the corporate media treat any mention of his problems as evidence of bad manners or prejudice against the disabled rather than a justified concern about a senator who cannot fulfill his duties.
Biden’s announcement of his intention to run for re-election next year puts this problem in clear focus. It’s impossible for citizens to judge whether it is wise to elect a man already clearly in decline to serve until he is 86 when the people whose job it is to tell the truth about the government are reduced to supporting actors in a show aimed at covering up the truth.
This transcends the longstanding problem of liberal media bias. Like the press’s conniving to spread the Russia-collusion hoax and their assistance in the silencing of the Hunter Biden laptop story, playing along with the Biden show is clear evidence of corruption. It means it is impossible to believe anything that reporters who play this game write or say. It also means that, in the absence of objective medical tests that are made public and which the White House has shown no interest in conducting, no serious person can possibly accept the assurances about Biden’s mental acuity that we are being asked to believe.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 31 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes who were serving time in home confinement, the White House announced Friday. Many would have gotten a lower sentence if they were charged today with the same offense because of changes in the laws. A commuted sentence means they’ll spend less time in home confinement.
The commutations came as the White House announced a set of policy actions across 20 different agencies meant to improve the criminal justice system, which disproportionately affects Black and other non-white communities. The president announced his reelection campaign this week, and must keep Black voters in his coalition if he wants to win in 2024.
The plan is an effort to expand health care access, affordable housing and education, and make it easier for those who have been mixed up in the system to get jobs, higher education and vote. The effort includes a plan to make more grants available for people who need funding for education, and small business loans.
Those whose sentences were commuted included men and women convicted of drug possession in Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas, and they will all finish serving time June 30. If any are in prison, they will finish out their terms in home confinement, and won’t have to pay the rest of their fines which range from $5,000 to $20,000.
Roughly 600,000 U.S. residents leave prison each year, and another 9 million cycle in and out of jail. As many as one in three Americans has a criminal record. That stigma can make it hard to get a job, go back to school or start a business.
“Far too many of them face steep barriers to getting a job or a home, obtaining health care, or finding the capital to start a business,” said outgoing domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, the first person to hold both national security and domestic policy adviser positions in the White House. She is leaving her post after two years and her last day is May 26.
“By investing in crime prevention and a fairer criminal justice system, we can tackle the root causes of crime, improve individual and community outcomes, and ease the burden on police,” she said.
The Democratic president has commuted the sentences of 75 other people so far. He also pardoned thousands who were convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law, and others who have long since served out their sentences.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The terms “far left” and “far right” have historically been used by social scientists to refer to communists and fascists, respectively. Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler epitomize the labels. But in today’s polarized society, the mainstream media — which is left-of-center — is dubbing Tucker Carlson “far right.” Which means he allegedly has more in common with Nazis than conservatives.
This is a bastardization of the terms.
During the French Revolution, the National Assembly organized to write a new constitution. Those who wanted the king to hold power sat to the right of the president of the assembly; those who wanted a revolution sat to the left. Hence, the terms right and left refer to traditionalists and radicals.
Today, these terms have lost their meaning. The lead story in today’s New York Times is: “Fox News Ousts Carlson, a Voice Of the Far Right.” What did Carlson do to merit this invidious tag? The news story says he took “far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations.”
Carlson believes that people who break the law by crashing our border and entering the country illegally should be prosecuted. The surveys show so do most Americans.
Carlson also believes that critical race theory, which teaches that every white person is a racist, is irresponsible. The surveys show most Americans agree with him. In other words, according to the New York Times, most Americans are Nazi-like creatures.
Most fair-minded observers would say that Carlson is to the right of center the way Don Lemon is to the left of center. Accordingly, if The New York Times were fair, it would brand Lemon “far left.” But that is not what they called him recently: He is called a “fiery political commentator.”
This could also be said of Carlson, but that is not what they say about him. He is an extremist.
The New York Times is not alone in its biased reporting.
We did a study earlier this week about how the media are responding to the ousters of Carlson and Lemon. We found over 200 examples of Carlson being called “far right,” but only a few instances of Lemon being called “far left.” PBS, NBC and MSNBC referred to Carlson as “far right” but none referred to Lemon as “far left.”
No media outlet we checked was more unprofessional than The New York Times. It recently had a news story on Dong Yuyu, the “longtime writer and editor at a top Chinese Communist Party newspaper.” If anyone merits being called “far left” it would be him. But, no, he is said to have written “liberal-leaning commentaries.”
In other words, Communist Party leaders are not even “liberals,” never mind “left-wingers” — and they most certainly are not “far-left wingers.” They just “lean” to the liberal side.
To top things off, The New York Times issued an obituary on Harry Belafonte; the entertainer died at age 96. In a lengthy account, the only reference to his politics was that as a noble civil rights crusader. The paper lied.
Belafonte loved Stalin. According to Ronald Radosh, who spent his academic life writing about communists, Belafonte was an “unreconstructed Stalinist.” Mr. “Calypso” was very upset with whites who discriminated against Blacks in the United States, yet he never had anything bad to say about Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime.
Worse, Belafonte went to the wall defending, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia, the communist who instituted the “Red Terror.”
None of this was reported by The New York Times. According to “the newspaper of record,” Belafonte, like Dong, was a liberal, not a communist. But Tucker is akin to the Nazis. Got that?
Dr. Bill Donohue is president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. A former Heritage Foundation Bradley Resident Scholar, he has authored 10 books on civil liberties, social issues and religion. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. Read Bill Donohue’s Reports — More Here.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is more popular than the network that fired him, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey. Of likely U.S. voters surveyed, 59% surveyed said they had a favorable view of Carlson compared with 52% for Fox. More believe Carlson’s departure will make Fox worse, not better (32%-19%). Among Republicans, 47% said letting Carlson go would make Fox News worse, compared with 13% who said otherwise.
Fox News on Monday said it had “agreed to part ways” with Carlson less than a week after settling a lawsuit over the network’s 2020 election reporting. The network said in a press release that the last program of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired Friday.
“We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” the press release from the network said.
“Not surprisingly, Carlson is most popular among Republican voters and self-identified conservatives. Carlson is viewed at least somewhat favorably by 71% of Republicans, 48% of Democrats, and 55% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
“Fifty-five percent (55%) of conservatives have a very favorable impression of Carlson, but only 18% of liberal and moderate voters share that opinion. Forty-eight percent (48%) of liberals have a very unfavorable view of Carlson,” Rasmussen said.
The survey of 945 U.S. likely voters was conducted on April 25-27 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research.
Former Fox News Channel show host Megyn Kelly told her podcast audience on Thursday that FNC’s decision to fire prime time anchor Tucker Carlson is driving its viewers to Newsmax. The statement during her Thursday program, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” came in a conversation with Melissa Francis, another a former Fox News and Fox Business anchor and host who left News Corp.
“What if Tucker actually went to 8 p.m. on Newsmax – our friend Eric Bolling is there now, who we both love — and I’m just saying what if he moved to 8 and Eric moved to 9?” Kelly asked rhetorically. “Just this past week, during the 8 p.m. hour, Eric averaged 562,000 viewers. Last Tuesday he averaged 122,000.
“So, the Fox News audience is going ‘click’ and moving over to Newsmax right now. Imagine if it were Tucker in that spot.”
Kelly preceded her remarks by saying that Newsmax was in 20 million fewer homes than Fox, which made its jump in numbers even more impressive. The actual number is 24 million fewer homes, Newsmax said.
Kelly’s comment came after Fox News ended Carlson’s show after his April 21 broadcast and announced the change Monday. Fox News Channel has since seen its audience during the Carlson hour plummet, with 2.6 million tuning in Monday to watch, a figure that dropped to 1.7 million on Tuesday and only 1.3 million on Wednesday — a 59% drop from Carlson’s average rating.
Fox has not announced a new host for the slot and appears to be rotating popular network figures like Brian Kilmeade.
As Kelly noted, Newsmax, conversely, has seen its average audience at 8 p.m. with “Eric Bolling The Balance” soar by 261% to an average 534,000 viewers. Nielsen data indicates that Newsmax was drawing 57% of Fox’s audience on a proportional basis Wednesday at 8 p.m.
After Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News this past Monday, the network has witnessed a collapse in ratings — especially in its 8 p.m. ET prime-time slot. For years Tucker Carlson owned this prime time for Fox, drawing an average 3.2 million viewers a night.
Not anymore.
This week, Fox News Channel saw its audience during the Carlson hour plummet, with 2.6 million tuning in Monday to watch. Things got even worse for Fox on Tuesday, with 1.7 million viewers tuning in. But Wednesday, Fox saw a catastrophic drop to just 1.3 million viewers — a 59% drop from Carlson’s average rating.
Fox has not announced a new host for the slot and appears to be rotating popular network figures such as Brian Kilmeade.
While Fox is hemorrhaging viewers, Newsmax is the primary beneficiary. Within the cable universe, Newsmax saw its average audience at 8 p.m. with “Eric Bolling The Balance” soar by 261% to an average 534,000 viewers. But Newsmax notes that it’s available in 24 million fewer cable homes than Fox, making its viewership even more impressive for its cable distribution.
Nielsen data indicates that Newsmax was drawing 57% of Fox’s audience on a proportional basis Wednesday at 8 p.m. And Newsmax is free currently on most major OTT (over the top) platforms, giving it a boost of 400,000 additional viewers at the 8 p.m. hour not counted by Nielsen. Newsmax even beat CNN based on proportional viewership with a .43 share against “Anderson Cooper 360” at just .37.
MSNBC, however, was also a winner Wednesday, with “All in With Chris Hayes” topping Fox with close to 1.34 million viewers.
Fox’s decision to remove Carlson appears to have been shortsighted, with little planning for a replacement. Carlson’s departure came after Fox’s startling $787 million settlement made two weeks ago with Dominion Voting Systems. While some have pointed to Carlson’s involvement in the case, neither Fox nor Carlson has disclosed the reason for his dismissal.
On Wednesday, Fox’s sister company, SkyNews Australia, offered a lengthy editorial slamming the former host claiming he was “sacked essentially for thinking that he was bigger than Fox News.”
Carlson himself has not criticized Fox, but in a Twitter video released earlier this week he decried woke culture and said, “At the same time the liars, who are trying to silence them, honest people, shrink. They become weaker.”
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 Presiden
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
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.
Indiana’s GOP legislature is poised to increase funding 2,000 percent for an agency that oversaw abortion businesses after whose services three women died in 2022.
Indiana abortion records The Federalist obtained this week indicate that in 2022 three women died after abortion procedures and two babies were born alive after chemical abortions. They also suggest Indiana abortionists failed to report four abortions on girls aged 15 and younger, as legally required. One of the minors not referred for a state abuse investigation after her abortion, a violation of state law, was just 13 years old, the records say.
The Indiana Department of Health receives legally mandated Terminated Pregnancy Reports on each abortion committed in the state. More than 100 of these from January to November 2022 indicate that abortion facilities in the state may have committed crimes and health violations, according to recordkeeping from Voices for Life, a Hoosier pro-life organization.
IDH has shut down no abortion facilities since January 2022, however, even facilities where records show women died after abortions. As for the 22 abortionists named in these numerous recent reports indicating potential medical malfeasance, “I am not aware of any doctors who have lost their licenses,” Voices for Life Executive Director Melanie Garcia Lyon told The Federalist Wednesday.
IDH communications personnel did not respond to any questions about these records from The Federalist.
GOP to Reward Incompetent Health Agency
Indiana’s Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are poised to increase taxpayer funding for the health department by 2,000 percent this week, from $7 million a year to more than $150 million. IDH also pushed Indiana families into lockdown and covid testing chaos across two school years despite early-available evidence children were at low risk from Covid-19 exposure.
Gov. Eric Holcomb is now using the damage his lengthy Covid shutdowns caused, including mental distress, obesity, and academic catastrophe, to amp up funding for the shutdowns’ top enabler and enforcer in Indiana. That enforcer also happens to be low-energy in investigating abortion businesses whose services have resulted in Hoosier women’s deaths.
Voices for Life and their national partner Students for Life collect these records and file complaints about apparent violations with IDH and the state attorney general’s office, Garcia Lyon told The Federalist. Forty percent of the potential violations the group found from January to November 2022, Garcia Lyon said, were from Planned Parenthood locations.
After receiving such complaints, the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita investigates, then submits a summary or a complaint to Indiana’s medical licensing board, said Rokita Press Secretary Kelly Stevenson. The board hears complaints and decides whether to sanction the investigated abortionist or facility. Indiana’s governor oversees that board and appoints its seven members.
On Saturday in Indianapolis, Students for Life and Voices for Life will highlight the state-reported health and safety violations related to an abortion facility that may move across the border to Illinois. That’s the Clinic for Women, currently in Indianapolis.
In September, Indiana banned abortions, except for very small babies who are the claimed results of rape and incest. The law is currently suspended by two injunctions pending litigation. Garcia Lyon noted that the law “still allows for abortion at hospitals. And the same people making these violations often do abortions in hospitals already. [So] code violations will still be relevant once the law goes into place, because it’s still the same people, just moving places.”
Records: 15-Year-Old Girl’s Womb Evacuated By Infamous Abortionist
One of the abortion reports, dated April 21, 2022, shows a chemical abortion on a 15-year-old girl performed by abortionist Deborah Nucatola in Bloomington, Ind. at a Planned Parenthood. Nucatola was infamously recorded on a 2015 undercover video discussing how to “crush” a child to death during an abortion to leave his organs intact for sale.
The state report suggests this abortion was not reported, as legally required, to the state Department of Child Services for investigation as the potential result of child rape. The space on the form for the date of reporting this abortion to IDH is blank. Legally, the form states, the abortion should have been disclosed to DCS within three days of the child’s death.
One of the four underage girls whose 2022 abortions weren’t reported to child services, as legally required, was 13 years old when her child was aborted, according to state records. That surgical abortion on a seven-week-old baby was performed at a Planned Parenthood branch in Indianapolis by abortionist Cassandra Cashman, the record states.
DCS also failed to answer any Federalist questions about these reports.
Records: 3 Women Died After Indiana Abortions in 2022
According to three TPRs from 2022, three women died in Indiana after abortions at facilities overseen by the Indiana Department of Health. At the Indianapolis Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital, a 31-year-old married woman died after an abortion on June 25, 2022, says one TPR.
The record says she was given abortion pills when her baby was 21 weeks of gestation, an age at which babies can survive outside the womb in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The baby was diagnosed via ultrasound with a chromosomal anomaly, says the record, which IDH received on July 22, 2022. The physician committing this abortion was listed as Amy Caldwell in the report.
Caldwell was also the abortionist listed on the April 24, 2022 report of another Hoosier woman who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood-Georgetown in Indianapolis. The 29-year-old unmarried woman was given abortion drugs to kill a 7-week-old baby, say the state records.
The third Hoosier woman to die after an abortion in 2022 undertook a surgical abortion in Bloomington, Indiana, by abortionist Rhiannon Amodeo, says another state record. The baby cut to pieces inside her was an estimated eight weeks old. His mother was 31 years old. The Indiana Department of Health received the report of this double death on November 23, 2022.
Caldwell is also listed as the physician on a January 7, 2022 report that says she delivered a baby alive during an abortion procedure. That baby was also potentially viable in a NICU: she was listed on the report as 20 weeks old when her mother and an abortionist ended her life.
Indiana Department of Health Blaming Data ‘Errors’ Since 2018
In March 2022, Hoosier pro-lifers said the Indiana Department of Health stopped releasing Terminated Pregnancy Reports for a South Bend facility after local conservative news highlighted TPRs indicating multiple illegal abortions at the Whole Women’s Health facility.
“Over the past four years, IDOH has taken zero action on reported abortions that indicate they were illegally performed,” wrote state Rep. Jake Teshka in a March 2022 letter to the agency about the incident.
More than 50 Indiana lawmakers wrote to Holcomb in 2021 complaining about the IDH’s history of alleged data errors and lackluster follow-up on abortion reports that indicate potential crimes. The letter noted that since at least 2018 the department has claimed several abortion reports that indicate criminal or health-violating activity were false, due to “computer error.”
“We submit complaints all the time about things that are reported on Terminated Pregnancy Reports, and the excuse nearly every time is, ‘Oh, it was an error. Oh, it was an error,’” Jackie Appleman, a Voices for Life board member, told a local newspaper in February after the department used the excuse again over reports of unlicensed abortions occurring in Indiana. “We’ve been getting this excuse back from the (Indiana) health department for the last, I don’t know, three or four years.”
The December 2021 letter from elected officials notes that despite multiple postabortion deaths of women and abortions performed at unlicensed facilities, Indiana abortionists have failed to lose their medical licenses and IDOH has failed to resolve investigations into such cases. The officials asked Holcomb to update them on “on all open cases relating to abortion clinics” and to investigate why complaints “are not examined and resolved.”
Holcomb responded in January 2022, providing no update on IDH investigations of abortion facilities nor announcing any investigation into why IDH fails to secure penalties for abortionists after procedures that lead to women’s deaths. One year later, he moved to reward the badly discredited IDH with hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars. Holcomb’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Instead of demanding that IDH prove competence at stopping criminal and human rights violations under its purview before any expansion of its duties, the Indiana legislature is cooperating with Holcomb in rewarding IDH with a 2,000 percent increase in taxpayer funding.
Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler was met by dozens of protesters Wednesday evening when she arrived to a Virginia college to deliver remarks about “transgenderism” and its impact in America.
The protest kicked off ahead of Wheeler’s arrival on the campus of James Madison University, where she delievered a speech, “The Ideology of Transgenderism,” and was challenged by a number of her detractors in attendance.
Wheeler, a podcast host who often sounds off on topics critical to the conservative agenda, was invited to speak at the event by the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter.
The demonstrators, all of whom appeared to protest peacefully against Wheeler’s appearance on campus, were captured on video gathering outside and inside the venue as they displayed signs and chanted ahead of the event.
Liz Wheeler, a podcast host who often sounds off on topics critical to the conservative agenda, was invited to speak by the JMU Young Americans for Freedom chapter. (Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images, Liz Wheeler)
Wheeler responded to footage of the protesters prior to taking the stage, writing in a tweet: “Queer Theorists are lying to you. They don’t care about you. They’re using you to push their Marxist political agenda, and when they’re done abusing you, they’ll throw you away. You deserve more.”
Queer Theorists are lying to you. They don’t care about you. They’re using you to push their Marxist political agenda, and when they’re done abusing you, they’ll throw you away. You deserve more. https://t.co/S1wSSt3GDu
While several protesters gathered outside the venue, others gathered inside, just outside the room where Wheeler was slated to speak. Those demonstrators also displayed signs that featured messages protesting Wheeler’s appearance on campus and in defense of transgender people.
“Love and kindness are my family values! Moms for Trans rights,” one handcrafted poster stated. “Dukes against bigotry,” another sign said, making reference to the school’s nickname.
Wheeler took aim at “queer theory” during her speech, concluding it allows people to “choose your identity” and forgo your “evil identity” of being a certain race because it’s a “marginalized identity.”
“You can choose a marginalized LGBTQIA identity that will become your primary identity over the color of your skin,” Wheeler said. “The only thing that the queer theorists demand in return is that you surrender to them your identity, your body, your mind, your spirit, your soul, your family, your religion and your country. If this gives you the chills, it should. Because this is what’s happening across our country.”
Wheeler was also challenged by those who had opposing views about transgenderism at the event after she finished speaking. (Young Americans for Freedom)
Inside the event, Wheeler was also challenged by those who had opposing views about transgenderism after she finished speaking.
“Because you said the left is basically trying to fearmonger a lot of people, couldn’t people argue that you’re doing the same by claiming that people are trying to destroy the family and like mutilate people’s genitals and stuff,” one individual in attendance for the event asked.
“Well, is it or is it not true that children’s genitals are being mutilated in the name of transgender ideology,” Wheeler said in response.
“Do you have proof of that,” the individual responded.
“Oh, I’ve Googled plenty, yes,” the attendee said.
Responding to the initial question, Wheeler said “there’s a difference between warning people about the reality of what’s happening” and “pretending that someone’s words” are hurtful.
Wheeler went on to describe to the individual how sex change surgeries are performed on young males in America and how some sex change surgeries have resulted in death because they are “so dangerous.”
A Fox News Poll released this week found that 48% of respondents believe overly accommodating transgender policies are a major problem for public schools.
The lawmakers are introducing a bill Thursday to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Act that created the agency and restore federal laws “as if the act had not been enacted,” according to a copy of the bill obtained by Fox News Digital. Since it was established in 2010, Republican lawmakers and financial groups have criticized the CFPB as an unnecessary agency.
“The CFPB is an utter and complete waste of government spending and should be eliminated,” Cruz, who is the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, told Fox News Digital in a statement. “It is entirely ineffective and does very little to protect consumers.”
“The only purpose of this sham, Obama-mandated organization is to stifle economic growth by enforcing burdensome, unnecessary economic regulations,” he continued. “The last thing our economy needs under Bidenflation is further hindrance by government bureaucrats. Ending the CFPB will spur economic growth at a time when Texans and Americans sorely need it.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on March 1, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The CFPB was founded after the Great Recession of 2008 and designed to serve as a financial sector watchdog. According to its website, the CFPB was created, in part, to “increase accountability in government by consolidating consumer financial protection authorities that had existed across seven different federal agencies into one.”
“Consumer financial protection had not been the primary focus of any federal agency, and no agency had effective tools to set the rules for and oversee the whole market,” the CFPB states. “The result was a system without effective rules or consistent enforcement. The results can be seen, both in the 2008 financial crisis and in its aftermath.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is often credited with establishing the agency. She first proposed it in 2007 when she was a Harvard Law School professor, and former President Barack Obama later appointed her to serve as a White House adviser with the task of overseeing the CFPB’s formation in late 2010.
Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined Cruz in introducing the Repeal CFPB Act on Thursday.
Cruz first attempted to repeal the CFPB in 2015 and has since led several similar efforts.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., introduced companion legislation of Cruz’s Repeal CFPB Act in the House. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Look no further than the CFPB for the epitome of the Washington Swamp: an unconstitutional, unaccountable, and overreaching government agency with no Congressional oversight,” Donalds told Fox News Digital in a statement. “In addition to the drain of federal resources, the CFPB hinders economic prosperity by imposing burdensome and unnecessary regulations on American consumers.
“It’s high time to eliminate the CFPB once and for all and ease the overarching financial restraints established by Dodd-Frank that permitted unfettered power to unelected activists and the obstruction of fiscal ingenuity and growth.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court agreed in February to hear arguments in a case involving the constitutionality of the CFPB. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the agency’s funding structure was unconstitutional since Congress delegates its appropriations power to the CFPB, thereby violating the Constitution’s separation of powers clause.
Oral arguments for the case are expected to take place in the fall and a decision is expected in 2024.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: You can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead.
Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.
They’re also going to get a lot more adults killed when those same Democratic supermajorities pass laws taking our guns, defunding the police and packing the court, among other great Democratic ideas.
We’ve been rolling our eyes at pro-choicers forever, telling them to calm down, that overturning Roe would just return the issue to the states. Blue states would make abortion legal until the kid turns 14. A few states, like Louisiana, would impose tough restrictions, but most states would come out in the middle — allowing abortions in the first trimester, plus parental notification laws, and exceptions for rape and incest.
Instead, the moment Dobbs was released, pro-life nuts rushed to the mics, saying, This is gonna be great! We’re going to ban abortion from the moment of conception and prosecute the mothers for murder!
The Democratic Party has been using abortion to scare suburban women in every election cycle for 50 years. Now, Republicans are finally giving them something to be scared about.
In Michigan, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, said she opposed abortion for 14-year-old girls who’d been raped because giving birth to her rapist’s baby could be “healing.”
Does the name Todd Akin mean anything to you? Anything at all? Richard Mourdock?
Dixon lost by 11 points.
Pennsylvania responded, Watch this! Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor, called abortion the “number one” issue of his campaign and said he looked forward to signing a six-week abortion ban. In 2019, he’d called for criminally prosecuting women who got abortions and doctors who performed them.
Mastriano lost by 15 points, taking the Republican Senate candidate down with him.
If we don’t bind and gag these pro-life militants, in about two more election cycles, we’ll have no Republicans in office anywhere. Good luck saving babies then!
Of course, it’s possible that there were other things voters didn’t like about Dixon and Mastriano.
Ah, but we also have pure test cases. Since Dobbs, there have been a total of six statewide ballot initiatives exclusively about abortion. The pro-life side lost every single time. They lost in blue states, in purple states and in red states. They were not outspent. These were direct-to-the-people votes. The tiniest restriction on abortion failed — even wholly theoretical restrictions! Every expansion of abortion rights won.
Army of Todd Akins: I don’t care! They’re wrong! They’re evil! What about the babies??? [Please give me a standing ovation now.]
In Montana, a proposal merely to require doctors to give life-saving treatment to babies born alive after a botched abortion lost 53% to 47%. Trump won Montana by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
In Kansas, pro-lifers wrote a ballot initiative that would have amended the constitution to clarify that it said nothing at all about abortion. The initiative placed no new restrictions on abortion, but simply moved the issue from the courts to the legislature.
It failed by 18 points, 59-41, losing in every congressional district in the state. Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
Kentucky voted on a similar initiative, proposing to amend the state constitution to say: “… nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
That initiative lost 52-48. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky by a whopping 30 points, and in 2020 by 25 points.
In three other states, Michigan, Vermont and California, voters put a right to abortion in their state constitutions.
Six ballot initiatives expressly on abortion, and the pro-life side lost ’em all.
We’ve been waiting half a century to get Roe overruled so Americans could finally vote on the issue. Well, guess what? They’ve voted! In the privacy of the voting booth, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said is: We don’t want the stupid and incompetent having any more babies.
The fanatics cite three Republican governors who won reelection after signing six-week abortion bans as proof that a certain miracle governor in Florida hasn’t just nuked his own presidential chances by approving such a law. All three governors signed their six-week bans when Roe was still the law of the land. All three bans were tied up in litigation on Election Day.
But more important, in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter. Thirty-six governors up for reelection; 35 won.
The only flipped governorship was in Nevada, where the winning Republican, Joe Lombardo, said he opposed a national abortion ban. Luckily, abortion was a complete nonissue because state law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks and can only be changed by a vote of the people. (Lombardo also said there was no fraud in the 2020 election, for any Republicans who care about winning.)
But even in the face of a brutal 6-0 losing record, there are still pro-lifers who will say, I’m proud and I’d do it again! (Did you see my write-up in Catholic Insights magazine?)
This is our “DEFUND THE POLICE” faction — people whose ideological zealotry outruns their rationality.
Fine, be a showoff. Just understand, you’re going to get a lot more babies killed. I hope that’s worth your moral preening.
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 Presiden
Image source: YouTube video, The Heritage Foundation – Screenshot
Tucker Carlson may have been given the boot at Fox News over his emphasis on the importance of prayer and his suggestion that America is not presently afflicted by bad politics, but rather by the forces of evil.
Carlson gave a keynote speech Friday at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala in Maryland wherein he stressed that the old political binary fails to account for the division presently afflicting America. Instead, it can be better understood in theological or spiritual terms as a battle of good versus evil, suggested the 53-year-old.
An unnamed source reportedly briefed on Fox Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch’s decision-making told Vanity Fair that Carlson was ousted largely over the speech on account of its religious overtones.
“That stuff freaks Rupert out,” said the insider. “He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk.”
The offending speech
Carlson, whose journalism career started at the Heritage Foundation, told a crowd of around 2,000 that recent trends — such as the DEI and ESG initiatives that have swept big business or the medical tyranny that swept the nation along with COVID-19 — exposed not just cowardice but the strength of the herd instinct.
“The herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct,” said Carlson. “It may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts, actually. The instinct, which again is inherent, to be like everybody else and not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned — that’s a very strong impulse in all of us from birth. And it takes over, unfortunately, in moments like this, and it’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.”
The former Fox News host cited the LGBT movement’s incoherent speech codes and the efforts by many to contort to satisfy them as an example of herd instinct trumping rational and independent thinking.
Many Americans have surmounted this instinct, however, argued Carlson.
“There is a countervailing force at work always. There is a counterbalance to the badness. It’s called goodness. And you see it in people,” he said. “So for every ten people who are putting ‘he and him’ in their electronic JPMorgan email signatures, there’s one person who’s like, ‘No, I’m not doing that. Sorry, I don’t want to fight but I’m not, like, doing that. That’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy – I am not a slave, I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing that you can do to me to make me do it. And I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am.Here I am. It’s Paul on trial. Here I am.’”
Carlson noted that during COVID and in the face of other recent “herd” events, there was no predicting who would ultimately stand up, but sure enough, people of various makeups and political persuasions ultimately did. When they did stand up to defend one truth, Carlson suggested the defiant frequently found themselves aggregating and defending additional truths.
“The truth is contagious,” said Carlson. “And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this – I don’t want to get supernatural on you – but you are filled with this power from somewhere else. Try it. Tell the truth about something. … The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become.”
He added that the reverse is also true: “The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.”
Carlson took a more explicit theological view toward the end of his speech, when he suggested that whatever coherent binary that may have existed that was centered on a common vision of America is far gone, rendering useless the analytical framework that many still use to try to make sense of it.
“There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea: Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate … but the weight of the government [and] a lot of corporate interests are behind that.”
Carlson intimated that the irrationality of leftist politics puts it outside the realm of politics and into the realm of spiritual warfare.
“If you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice, obviously. … When the treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.’ Well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually.”
Carlson stressed that abortion zealotry, like the transgenderist movement, is a theological phenomenon.
Tucker Carlson’s speech over the weekend was powerful. Too powerful apparently. pic.twitter.com/sxncP26Tda
“None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people or crowds of people … decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake – hey, let’s tear it down – what you’re watching is not a political movement; it’s evil.”
“I’m merely calling for an acknowledgment of what we’re watching,” said Carlson.
The former Fox News host ended the speech the way he began: imploring his audience to pray: “Maybe we should all take just like ten minutes a day to say a prayer about it … and I hope you will.”
The offended sensibilities
The insider suggested that Murdoch “was perhaps unnerved by Carlson’s messianism because it echoed the end-times worldview of Murdoch’s ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith.”
Vanity Fair previously reported that Murdoch and Smith, originally slated to marry this summer, allegedly called it off because the 92-year-old had grown “increasingly uncomfortable with Smith’s outspoken evangelical views.”
In March, Murdoch, Smith, and Carlson reportedly had dinner together, during which Smith and Carlson discussed religion. At one point, Murdoch’s then-fiancée opened the Bible and read passages from the book of Exodus.
A source close to the Fox Corp. chair said, “Rupert just sat there and stared.”
According the source, Smith “said Tucker Carlson is a messenger from God, and [Murdoch] said nope.”
Just days after the dinner with Carlson, Murdoch kicked Smith to the curb.
Gabriel Sherman, writing for Vanity Fair, noted that this was just one of many “erratic decisions [Murdoch] has made of late that raises questions about Murdoch’s leadership of his media empire.”
Claremont fellow Megan Basham responded to the allegation that Carlson’s religious overtones had something to do with his firing, writing, “The world is fine with talk of faith when it is soft and toothless. It is the faith that recognizes acts of good and evil that offends them.”
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh tweeted, “Fox hired Caitlyn Jenner because he’s trans and fired Tucker Carlson because he’s religious. That’s your ‘conservative’ news network.”
FULL SPEECH: Tucker Carlson’s Last Address Before Leaving Fox News at #Heritage50 youtu.be
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A letter from a Vermont school district to parents expressed a policy change to use “gender inclusive phrases” in place of words like “boy” and “girl” in a curriculum unit about human reproduction. The letter appeared on social media and went viral.
“It is time for our science/health unit about the human body focused on puberty and the human reproductive systems. This unit will take place during the last few months of school,” read the letter from Founders Memorial School Principal Sara Jablonski.
“In an effort to align our curriculum with our equity policy, teachers will be using gender inclusive language throughout this unit. With any differences, we strive to use ‘person-first’ language as best practice,” she added.
The letter outlined some examples of the new politically correct language.
“Person who produces sperm in place of boy, male, and assigned male at birth,” the letter explained.
“Person who produces eggs in place of girl, female and assigned female at birth,” she added.
The letter said the curriculum was going to “focus on the physical and emotional changes that occur during puberty” and also introduce the “basic structure and function of human reproductive systems.”
Many were extremely critical of the new policy and called on parents to pull their kids from schools and homeschool instead.
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Stop it. Stop focusing on sex and gender and focus on EDUCATION. No wonder kids are confused. No wonder they lack grammar skills. No wonder they are lost. They go to school to learn. You can’t learn in that word salad environment. Homeschool your kids in VT,” read one response on Twitter.
The letter was widely circulated and garnered almost 60k views in less than one day.
Here’s more about the transgender school agenda:
Megyn Kelly: Why I Took My Son Out of His School www.youtube.com
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Screenshot taken from video on the Joe Biden YouTube channel
President Joe Biden officially announced on Tuesday that he will seek re-election, releasing a video in which he trumpets the importance of freedom.
“Every generation has a moment where they have had to stand up for democracy. To stand up for their fundamental freedoms. I believe this is ours. That’s why I’m running for reelection as President of the United States. Join us. Let’s finish the job,” Biden tweeted.
Some people pounced on the “finish the job” language.
“Finish the job? Based on Biden’s record, this sounds like a threat,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted.
“40-year inflation, a stagnating economy, turning over Afghanistan to the Taliban, China flexing its muscles over Taiwan, chaos in the Middle East. Give him four more years, and he’ll finish the job, all right,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted.
“What Joe Biden means by ‘Let’s finish the job’: Worsening crime rates. More economic struggles. Higher inflation. Exacerbated border crisis. America’s enemies further emboldened. Increased attacks on religious liberty and our Constitutional rights. Hell no,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted.
“Yes, Joe stands up for fundamental freedoms unless it involves the 1st or 2nd Amendment, search and seizure or the ability to exercise bodily autonomy when it comes to rejecting a dangerous and feckless vaccine. Other than that, he’s ALL about freedom,” country music star John Rich tweeted.
Left-wing figures, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, expressed their support for Biden’s re-election bid.
“Proud of all that @JoeBiden and his administration have accomplished these last few years. He’s delivered for the American people — and he’ll continue to do so once he’s re-elected,” Obama tweeted.
“Joe and Kamala are the best people for the job of defending our democracy, fighting for our rights, and making sure everyone has a fair shot. Join me in becoming a part of their re-election campaign, starting today,”tweeted Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump.
Joe and Kamala are the best people for the job of defending our democracy, fighting for our rights, and making sure everyone has a fair shot.
If Biden secures the Democratic presidential nomination and former President Donald Trump manages to win the GOP presidential nomination, Americans could face a rematch of the 2020 presidential election during the 2024 contest.
Biden, who is currently 80, would be 86 by the end of a second term in office if he were to win the 2024 contest. Trump, who is currently 76, would be 82 by the end of a second term.
Joe Biden Launches His Campaign For President: Let’s Finish the Job www.youtube.com
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Lia Thomas suggested on a recent podcast that women whose support for so-called “trans women” is conditional are “fake feminists” and cast his critics as bigots. He further stressed that real feminists should be interested in breaking down “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is,” especially if those ideals link womanhood to biology.
Schuyler Bailar, the transvestite athlete who hosted the podcast on which Thomas appeared, raised the matter of a February 2022 letter written by Olympic champion Nancy Hogshead-Makar to the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League on behalf of 16 members of the school’s female swim team.
The letter asked that the school not challenge the NCAA’s new transgender athlete participation policies, as they would exclude men who experienced puberty, such as Lia Thomas, from competing against women in the March NCAA championships, reported CNN.
“We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” said the letter.
It went on to say, “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.”
Thomas spoke on “Dear Schuyler” to the letter, saying it is “frustrating in the regard that
they’re like, ‘oh we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman, whatever, we respect her identity, we just don’t think it’s fair.’ And I think you can’t really have that sort of half support where you’re like ‘oh, I respect you as a woman here but not here.'”
“You can’t do that, you can’t sort of break down me as a person into little pieces,” added the former male athlete.
Bailar noted that the fight to protect women’s sports has become a big movement, executed “under the guise of feminism. Oh, we’re just feminists. We’re just fighting for women.”
Thomas agreed, later saying, “They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs. I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people, but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half-support.”
After arguing that feminists who sought to keep men out of women’s sports were ideologically incoherent, Bailar likened the corresponding claim of seeking fairness on the basis of sex to the ambivalence of racists about black women competing in sports.
“Please tell me why are all these women, you know, in tears? Why are they crying? What is
the pain that trans women are causing them? And the answer was something about opportunities being taken away,” said Bailar, adding, “It was the same exact arguments that came up when black women began to be in sports. … You don’t want a woman who doesn’t look like you, perhaps, or who is fitting your version of womanhood to win.”
Thomas, having ostensibly agreed with Bailar’s remarks, suggested that “transphobia in sports” should be contextualized more broadly in “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman.”
The Independent Council on Women’s Sports responded to the podcast, tweeting, “We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: ‘You can’t really have that sort of half-support.’ We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in.”
We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: “You can’t really have that sort of half-support”
We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in. pic.twitter.com/zprRMq5sA4
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) wrote, “There is nothing anti-feminist about saying that Lia Thomas, a man, should not be participating in sports with women. Feminists, and all women, should be outraged that a MAN has the nerve to tell them how they should feel about him invading their spaces and sports competitions.”
“What a joke,” wrote Piers Morgan. “There’s nothing more ‘anti-feminist’ than trans athletes like Lia Thomas using the massive advantages of their male biology to beat women at sport.”
TheBlaze previously reported Thomas was a middling performer on the University of Pennsylvania men’s swimming team until he starting taking hormones in 2019 and competing against women. He went onto crush records set by females in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships and tie with All-American all-female swim star Riley Gaines for fifth last April in the women’s 200-meter. According to Gaines, it was around that time Thomas exposed his male genitalia in a women’s locker room.
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One of the most understated yet important aspects of Tucker Carlson’s tenure at Fox News was his unique ability to bridge a seemingly unbridgeable generational divide. Whether he was exploring more complicated topics via long-form documentaries, interviewing the world’s wealthiest man, or simply telling the Republican Party to get its act together, people of all ages tuned in. Grandparents and grandkids alike genuinely love him.
And perhaps this, in part, is why he was able to so easily mainstream the thoughts, theories, and brands of pseudonymous Twitter users who historically have been relegated to the dark corners of the internet with the rest of the weirdos. If a voice has utility, he gives it a platform; people trust him to discern who is worth listening to.
Tucker routinely used his platform to amplify people like Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), which undeniably helped her gain traction and expose more people to the insanity of leftism. And to be sure, this was great, but people would likely be able to understand that sort of thing for themselves, even if they hadn’t encountered LibsofTikTok. We instinctively know when something is out of sync with the natural law and metaphysically disordered, as leftism inherently is.
Arguably some of his finest moments as a communicator were when he embraced the more esoteric, if you will, thoughts being grappled with in the nuanced essays of people like Peachy Keenan and translated them into modern English so the masses, who likely don’t have time to ponder these things on a regular basis, can also participate in the intellectual exercise.
Take, for instance, Tucker’s opening monologue from three weeks ago, in which he described the state of New York as existing in a state of anarcho-tyranny. He explained how this is a framework of “state-sponsored anarchy accompanied by political tyranny” and described how Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump and general apathy toward crime embodies it. Anarcho-tyranny, being introduced into the lexicon of paleoconservatives several decades ago, is not a term many people would be familiar with despite being uncomfortably familiar with the concept. Nevertheless, Tucker brought them up to speed.
Or take an example from July 2021, when he read a tweet thread from Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) providing great insight and clarity as to why conservatives remain skeptical about the outcome of the 2020 election and no longer have faith in institutions like the corporate media or national intelligence apparatus.
But he didn’t only highlight academics. Sometimes he highlighted skeptics for the sake of highlighting skepticism and to prove to us that the “experts” are idiots — as was the case in this past fall’s “The End of Men.” The documentary takes the food and health industries to task and explores the, frankly, dual existential crisis of plummeting male fertility and lack of nutritional sustenance. The documentary features a man by the name of “Raw Egg Nationalist” — a sworn enemy of soy globalism and an advocate for maximizing nutritional intake by slonking raw eggs — and another individual who goes by “Benjamin Braddock” and who believes the key to boosting testosterone is exposing his crotch to redlight.
Similar to how Rush Limbaugh mainstreamed Michael Anton’s “Flight 93” essay by reading it in its entirety on air, Tucker made a lot more voices — who really ought to be heard — and a lot more content accessible by providing a platform that wouldn’t otherwise have been available purely because of unsavory optics.
The conservative movement needs someone like Tucker, who is willing to push the limit and unwilling to pull his punches.
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 @smlenett.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed in a floor speech on Tuesday that material reviewed by his investigative staff supported whistleblower allegations that the FBI falsely labeled evidence of potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family “Russian disinformation.” While Grassley had previously discussed the whistleblower allegations, he now confirmed for the first time that an independent review of the pertinent records supported the accusations.
In response to last week’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he planned to offer a resolution denouncing former President Donald Trump’s call to defund the FBI, Grassley excoriated Democrats for remaining silent while the country faced an uptick in violence against law enforcement officers and the radical left pushed to defund the police. The Iowa senator then chastised Democrats for offering a political resolution that ignored the weaponization of the FBI, proceeding then to catalog the DOJ and FBI’s many abuses.
Here, Grassley stressed that protected whistleblower disclosures made“clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, very impactful, and very voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family.”
“I know the FBI falsely labeled that evidence as Russian disinformation to bury it,” Grassley continued, revealing that his staff had “independently reviewed records” that support the whistleblower allegations.
Tuesday’s comments came some six months after Grassley revealed that the FBI had possession of “a series of documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations with Hunter Biden.” According to an October 2022 news release and an accompanying letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley said:
The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.
At the time, Grassley noted it was “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election…” The senator also expressed concern over whether Weiss had independently evaluated the evidence.
Grassley concluded his October 2022 letter by requesting from the DOJ and FBI all records from Jan. 1, 2014, forward “that reference Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.” While his letter sought “all records,” Grassley explicitly highlighted several forms including, among others, FD-209a, which is used to record an “asset contract”; FD-794b, which is used to request a payment; FD-1023, which is used for a source report; and FD-1040a, which is used to close a source.
The specific documents requested suggest the whistleblower had claimed the FBI had a source that provided information on the Burisma owner and the Biden family.
While it is unclear whether the DOJ and FBI provided the documents, Grassley’s floor statement on Tuesday shows his office had access to records corroborating the whistleblower claims that the FBI buried evidence derogatory to the Biden family by framing it as Russian disinformation.
This latest revelation follows last week’s news that an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower claimed FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declined to file tax charges against the president’s son, against the recommendation of career prosecutors.
Yet Garland and Wray remain silent. If it weren’t for Grassley’s various letters and floor statements, Americans would know little about the FBI’s political favoritism and the “get out of jail free card” they seem to be handing out to Hunter Biden at every opportunity.
But now that we know that evidence, likely including a confidential human source, was buried under the guise that it was Russian disinformation, will anything change?
Sadly, for all of Grassley’s efforts to expose the scandal, the last seven years suggest not.
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.
I recently wrote about an extraordinarily misleading Kaiser Family study that claimed “1 in 5” Americans have a family member who has been killed by a gun. Kaiser’s inflated findings were based on a small sample size of self-reported answers to questions that offered no useful limiting parameters. In many ways, another endlessly repeated contention of gun controllers suffers from the same problem: Gun violence is the number one cause of death of children in America. Virtuallyeverymediaoutlet and Democrat repeats this contention — including, recently, the vice president. The claim is meant to conjure up distressing images of frolicking kids in parks and schools being gunned down by assault weapons.
And horrific events certainly happen in the country. We need not gloss over the evil of mass school shootings, even if they’re rarer than gun-control types would have you believe. But that does not give people license to make things up.
We don’t really know which study Harris based her comments on, if any. And different sources come to different conclusions. None of them, however, are grounded in our familiar understanding of “children.” These studies count adults who are 18 and 19, and sometimes up to 25, years of age. Americans under 18 can’t purchase guns legally. That age seems, at the very least, the most obvious divide between adults and children. Because when you take 18- and 19-year-old adults out of the equation, the number of gun-related deaths among kids plummets considerably.
According to the CDC, the number one killer of children between 1-14 are accidents — vehicular, suffocation, and drowning. Twice as many kids under 12 died in cars than from guns. Also, if these studies began at birth rather than starting at one, the leading killer of all children would be diseases and genetic abnormalities. Surely a one-year-old is as much a “kid” as a 19-year-old. (And if you begin at fetal viability, by far the leading killer of young people would be late-term abortions — more than 8,000 viable unborn, and probably more than 50,000 performed after 15 weeks.)
No doubt, after many years of decline, there has been a rise in juvenile criminality. And 19 and 18-year-olds are far more likely to engage in criminality than 14 and 15-year-olds. There has also been a rise in juvenile suicides over the last several years. It’s a mental-health crisis. None of the “reasonable gun safety laws” Harris is pushing address those problems.
Perhaps one day, with the advances in car safety technology and medicine, her claim about guns and kids will be true. Today it’s not.
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.
The ire of conservative consumers has now focused on makeup brand Maybelline for partnering with trans woman and biological male Dylan Mulvaney for a recent makeup ad. To celebrate Mulvaney’s gender transition and to promote Maybelline makeup, the brand collaborated with the TikTok star on a video featuring the trans woman applying several Maybelline products.
Mulvaney posted the ad to her TikTok account last month.
Trans woman Dylan Mulvaney models Maybelline Makeup products in a TikTok video from March. (Screenshot/Oli Londons Twitter account)
The Maybelline ad represented just one of several brand partnerships the transgender influencer and activist has taken on recently, including a highly controversial partnership with Bud Light that sparked major backlash from conservative consumers. The boycott of the beer company in response to the Mulvaney promotion has resulted in Bud Light’s sales plunging 17%. The trans woman also generated outrage for modeling sports bras for Nike.
Now conservatives are looking to protest Maybelline for the same thing.
At the start of the TikTok video, Mulvaney appeared with no makeup while wearing a bathrobe. She began applying her Maybelline products and quickly obscured herself from the camera with her makeup brush, a popular TikTok technique done to transition to the next shot.
When she pulled the brush back from blocking the camera, she was revealed to be in a dress, her hair and makeup done, and fully ready for a night out. Before the short clip ended, Mulvaney applied some Maybelline lip gloss and smiled for viewers.
Some people in Nashville said they stopped drinking Bud Light after the brand partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. (Instagram)
The caption for the video stated, “Getting glam for my Day 365 show with @maybelline #maybellinepartner #dylanmulvaney #shorts.” At the top right of the clip, text indicated that Mulvaney is a “Maybelline Partner.”
Conservative viewers and makeup users were not ecstatic about Mulvaney’s latest stunt, however. British detransition activist Oli London shared the video to Twitter and mocked it using Maybelline’s famous slogan. He tweeted, “Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline. The new face of Maybelline, ladies!”
Influencer and commentator “Conservative Momma” ripped the partnership, tweeting, “So no more @Maybelline. Supporting womanface, is degrading and offensive to real women.”
No way. I will have to throw out my 2 Maybelline products. Shame.
Canadian conservative activist Liz Churchill denounced her Maybelline products, declaring, “No way. I will have to throw out my 2 Maybelline products. Shame.”
User Claire Hunt tweeted, “The entire feminist movement just rolled over in its grave, as this saccharine display pretends to be an Exemplar of ‘Womanhood.’”
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 Presiden
The matriarchy can fly the “mission accomplished” flag across America. It toppled the man-made meritocracy that imperfectly defined American culture for 200+ years.
The fall of Tucker Carlson at Fox News symbolizes the matriarchy’s prioritizing of message over merit. Performance could not shield Carlson from the consequence of America’s adoption of a feminized culture that levels the playing field by castrating men, reimagining traditional standards, and embracing a false reality.
Monday morning, Fox News cut ties with the most popular host on cable television. According to the Los Angeles Times and other so-called news outlets, Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News, decided to oust Carlson partially because of a discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, a former talent booker on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Grossberg claims she was bullied and subjected to anti-Semitic remarks while working for Carlson.
It’s a familiar pattern at Fox News and across corporate media and America. From Roger Ailes to Tavis Smiley to Bill O’Reilly, the misbehavior of men and/or allegations of disgruntled female employees are used to dislodge men from positions of influence.
Let me state this for clarity and transparency. I was a frequent guest on Carlson’s program. I consider Carlson a friend. I find him smart, authentic, and reasonable. I have not spoken to him since he and Fox News parted ways. Nor have I spoken with Bryan Freedman, the brilliant lawyer reportedly representing Carlson in his dispute with Fox. Freedman previously negotiated my settlement with a media outlet.
Now, I don’t buy the allegations against Carlson. According to the L.A. Times, Grossberg worked on Carlson’s show for a short time after being reassigned from a different Fox News show. She was fired.
It’s difficult to fire any employee. Many of them – man or woman – claim they were harassed, bullied, treated unfairly. They’re always reluctant to admit their shortcomings. You catch an employee stealing, and he will instantly claim you overlooked a co-worker committing murder.
Firing a woman is more difficult than open heart surgery. Every communication can be reformulated into an example of sexual harassment or misogyny.
I’m aloof, distant, and measured with all co-workers. It’s the only way I know to protect myself. Media workplaces are minefields. Super attractive women form an obstacle course a Navy SEAL would find difficult to navigate without detonating a blonde, brunette, or red-headed bombshell. For white men, they face the added threat of being charged with racism or anti-Semitism.
The workplace playing field isn’t level. Women have outsized power and control. So do the LGBTQ and people of color who see themselves as perpetual victims of white supremacy. These special-interest groups have used their power and leverage to remake workplace culture. They’ve turned human resources departments into the most powerful force within any company. Managing easily triggered sensibilities takes precedence over maximizing production. Workplaces are day-cares filled with crying babies masquerading as employees.
Over the last 20 years, diversity, inclusion, equity, and other subjective standards unseated performance as king of the workforce. MSNBC’s ratings-deficient Joy Reid has every bit as much job security as Carlson, the highest-rated cable host. So does CNN’s Anderson Cooper. And the ensemble of dimwits hosting ABC’s “The View.”
Reid is black. Cooper is gay. Whoopi (Caryn Elaine Johnson) is black and “identifies” as Jewish. Sunny Hostin is Puerto-Halfrican American. Joy Behar wants to be Bette Midler.
Tucker Carlson is a white man who used his platform to promote Judeo-Christian culture and the patriarchy. There was a time when his dominant ratings would have protected him from the special-interest groups. Ratings used to be the box hosts were required to check.
That time has passed. Message is king. Drawing an audience is optional in the matriarchy matrix. What a host tells his or her audience matters far more than the size of it.
Comedian Steve Harvey is the gold standard for heterosexual Christian men on TV. I like Steve Harvey. He’s funny. He’s likable. He’s also harmless. He bows to the matriarchy. He preaches a homespun prosperity gospel.
He has his own daily talk show. He hosts “Family Feud.” He’s the star of “Judge Steve Harvey.” Corporate America is pouring millions of dollars into Steve Harvey to set him up as the role model for all Christian male influencers.
Be harmless. Bow to the matriarchy. Stay on message.
And the message is simple: The key to improving America is emasculating men and eliminating merit.
You earn only what the prevailing power grants you for your service to the prevailing power.
Tucker Carlson challenged the prevailing power, the matriarchal ideology promoted by leftists. He platformed pundits and experts who challenged Big Pharma on the COVID vaccine, Democrats on the laughable January 6 insurrection narrative, the Alphabet Mafia on transgenderism and drag queens, and the military-industrial complex on the war in Ukraine.
His courageous, afflict-the-powerful, populist style attracted a massive audience. His competitors lack his talent or courage. They conspired to bring him down. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for the government to censor Carlson. Chuck Schumer demanded that Rupert Murdoch stop Carlson from showing the January 6 tapes. The ladies on “The View” celebrated his demise.
Women and emasculated men rule. The matriarchy has taken over the patriarchy. Merit has no place here. The order spelled out in the Bible carries no weight in America.
In pursuit of power and influence, the biblically described “weaker vessel” eradicated competition and emphasized a handful of identities. Diversity, inclusion, and equity killed performance, merit, and Christianity.
Jeff Myers, Ph.D., the president of Summit Ministries and co-author of the e-book with The Christian Post’s Brandon Showalter (right), titled “Exposing The Gender Lie,” speaks at an event held at First Baptist Dallas titled, “Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism” alongside counselor Julia Jeffress Sadler (left), on March 23, 2023. | The Christian Post
DALLAS — “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire’s famous quote is centuries old, but for Jeff Myers, author and president of Summit Ministries, it’s a warning that is as timely as ever when it comes to the debate over transgenderism.
Speaking at last month’s panel discussion on “Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism” at First Baptist Dallas, Myers said he sees the issue as the “breakdown of language as a way of understanding reality.” Myers compared the path toward human atrocities committed in Nazi Germany and against the Hutu in Rwanda and ongoing efforts to curtail speech as related to the trans movement.
“In those cases, the very first thing that happened is the people in charge dehumanized the vulnerable, stopped calling them human,” he said. “You dehumanize them, and then you can destroy them.”
This tactic has been used multiple times since, most recently by the pro-abortion crowd. Remember the terms they used to describe the baby in the womb? “Lump of tissue”, “Mass of cells”, “Globulin mass”. By “dehumanizing ” the baby, their conscious was seared. Now they are using unhuman terms to describe anyone that doesn’t go along with their terms, definitions and speech.
That same strategy, said Myers, is being used against those who refuse to conform their speech to trans ideology.
“You’ll find that the very people who insist you use language in a particular way, that you use their chosen pronouns, you refer to them using the language that they insist on, if you don’t do it, you will be called all kinds of names — evil, bigoted, transphobic and so forth,” he added.
Myers also disagreed with the suggestion that the debate over trans identity and language is simply partisan politics.
“This is not a left versus right issue,” he said. “The vast majority of Americans, Republican, Independent, Democrat, believe that what is happening through transgenderism is wrong.”
He pointed to a recent poll that found only 9% of Americans believe gender transition procedures on young children are acceptable.
“Yet somehow the nine percent control the agenda for everyone else,” he said
So how can the Church respond in a way that’s both truthful and helpful?
Myers, who co-authored a recent e-book with CP, Exposing The Gender Lie, said Christians must first acknowledge the urgency of the issue and the threat it poses.
“We realized we can’t be silent on the issue of gender ideology because it is an attack on the very idea of truth itself,” said Myers.
He said he’s “very concerned” about transgenderism and pointed to the some 6,500 catalogued biological differences between males and females.
“The idea that you can be a boy and become a girl is a lie, it is a lie about biology and it is a lie about personhood,” he said.
Myers pointed to the teaching of the postmodern view that words are reality — a teaching that stretches back nearly three decades when university students were being taught that no objective reality exists, only “knowable perceptions.”
“So instead of saying people should seek the truth, now people say you should ‘speak your truth,” he explained. “So if words have no relation to reality, then words like ‘male’ and ‘female’ don’t matter anymore.”
That application, said Myers, underpins the entire ideology of transgenderism, which “twists language” to threaten the livelihoods of those whose very job is to communicate facts and data.
“You’re a journalist, you’ll get fired if you don’t do this,” he said. “If you refer to biological men who identify as women as transgender women, you must use that terminology.
“If you’re in the corporate world and don’t do it, you’ll be fired.”
The Montana House of Representatives came to a halt Monday after a crowd of transgender activists flooded the public gallery and shouted down the speaker. Demonstrators chanted “let her speak” after lawmakers refused to lift a censure on Democrat Rep. Zooey Zephyr over spewing hate-filled comments on the House floor last week. Zephyr, a first-term representative from Missoula and the first transgender-identified member of the lower chamber, mocked Republican prayers during debate on a bill to ban medical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria.
“The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill, and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr said.
Rep Zooey Zephyr of Missoula said the following when debating SB99 Amendments.
“The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” pic.twitter.com/wuhlympbLq
— Montana Freedom Caucus (@MTFreedomCaucus) April 18, 2023
The bill in question ultimately cleared the chamber.
Republicans revoked Zephyr’s ability to speak on the House floor until issuing an apology.
“It is up to me to maintain decorum here on the House floor, to protect the dignity and integrity,” said House Speaker Matt Regier last week, according to the Associated Press. “Any representative that I don’t feel can do that will not be recognized.”
“Hate-filled testimony has no place on the House floor,” said Republican Rep. Caleb Hinkle, who serves on the House Freedom Caucus, which introduced the measure to censure Zephyr.
Mob demonstrators descended on the Capitol Monday to demand the lower chamber reinstate debate privileges. The crowd erupted after lawmakers voted again to keep Zephyr quiet when the freshman representative tried to speak on a bill restricting child pronoun changes in K-12 classrooms. Speaker Regier refused to acknowledge the chamber’s censured colleague igniting a roar of interruption from the gallery. Lawmakers were forced to pause proceedings as police in riot gear arrested disruptors, according to Montana Public Radio.
BREAKING: The Montana House of Reps has been shut down by left-wing protesters who are there protesting the censure of transgender Democrat Rep. Zooey Zephyr, that was led by the @MTFreedomCaucus, for telling his Republican colleagues they have "blood on their hands" for passing… pic.twitter.com/MnOyO4FhlN
Riot Police clear the Montana Capital making 5 arrests after a mob of Trans Activists stormed in demanding ‘trans rights’ and ‘her her speak’ in reference de to a Transgender legislator who had been silenced by the House Speaker for his violent rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/UijIeCd41t
Zephyr defended those arrested outside the statehouse.
“My constituents and community came up and shouted ‘let her speak’ — I felt pride in them,” Zephyr said. “Because when they stood up, they are standing on behalf of democracy.”
The scenes on day three of the saga at the Montana Capitol come weeks after transgender activists stormed the Tennessee statehouse at Nashville over similar legislation. The “insurrection,” as defined by an assault on a Capitol building, was led by a trio of Democrat lawmakers who were stripped of their committee assignments. Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were temporarily expelled from the legislature for using a bullhorn amid the demonstrations. Both were reinstated by local officials.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Moments after Fox News abruptly announced that it “mutually agreed to part ways” with the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday, leftists and their allies in the corporate media began gloating about the ousting of one of the nation’s most influential critics of the corrupt ruling class.
While some, like former CNN talking head Brian Stelter, penned “fan fiction” gleefully theorizing about the reason for the split, others joined the hundreds of Twitter trolls celebrating Carlson’s exit as a win for their political agendas.
Democrats
Mere weeks after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demanded Fox News silence hosts like Carlson who discuss election inconsistencies, congressional Democrats cheered at their political enemy’s downfall.
Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it." pic.twitter.com/uld6eaCl3C
“Don’t know for sure if the firing of Tucker Carlson is connected to the lies & accusations of voter fraud perpetrated by Fox News, Trump, & his sycophants against you, Dominion Voting Systems,” Rep. Maxine Waters tweeted. “Thank you for your fight and your lawsuit, you beat the hell out of them, bye-bye.”
“Glad to hear that one of the most divisive, racist and destructive forces on television is off his prime time show. Tucker Carlson will not be missed,” Rep. Robert Garcia wrote.
Leftist Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram and Facebook followers that Carlson’s departure is proof that “Deplatforming works and it is important.” She also used the news to fundraise.
AOC on Tucker “Deplatforming works and it is important.”
The harpies-er-ladies at ABC’s “The View” paused their regularly scheduled programming on Monday to triumphantly recognize Tucker’s exit. Host Whoopi Goldberg started a wave in the audience that was closely followed by an Ana Navarro-led acapella chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”
“He is responsible for the degradation that we see somewhat of our democracy in this country,” co-host Sunny Hostin said.
The View celebrates Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News. The cast does the wave and Ana Navarro leads the audience in singing "Hey, hey, they Goodbye!" Sunny Says he's responsible for the "degradation" of our "democracy." pic.twitter.com/uaY0l2COck
The View women previously called on the Biden administration to investigate and potentially arrest Carlson for “shilling for [Vladimir] Putin.”
The Daily Show
Desi Lydic said she’s “glad” Carlson is gone after trying to “topple America’s democracy.”
“You know that stupid look that’s always on Tucker Carlson’s face?” The Daily Show correspondent quipped on Monday night. “Today, he has a good reason for it. I can’t believe that a network that is so opposed to gender-affirming surgery just cut off their own d-ck.”
Maren Morris
The female country singer and drag queen enthusiast, who called Jason Aldean’s wife an “Insurrection Barbie” after she criticized the mutilation of children, also celebrated the personality’s unemployment.
“Happy Monday, MotherTucker,” Morris wrote in her Instagram story on Monday.
The story features a picture of Morris with a chyron from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” labeling her a “lunatic country music person.”
Some Guy Named Steve
Facebook Censorship partner Stephen Hayes, who took a contributor role with NBC after leaving Fox News to protest Carlson’s programming, told the New York Times on Monday that he hopes Carlson’s leave “signals some kind of broader institutional change” at the right-leaning network.
“On a lot of the mainstream channels, there was a race to be first to condemn Trump to celebrate his problems,” Hayes said. “And on Fox, in prime time especially, there was this over-the-top effort to defend him and amplify his lies.”
A Star Trek Actor
“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, you horrid, soulless man. #TuckerCarlson,” raging leftist activist George Takei tweeted.
Fox News Staffers
“Fox News Staffers Celebrate Tucker Carlson’s Departure: ‘Pure Joy,’” a Rolling Stone headline excitedly blared on Monday night.
The article lists several unnamed “staffers” who were apparently overjoyed that the biggest source of their employer’s views was finally gone.
“Pure joy. No one is untouchable. It’s a great day for America, and for the real journalists who work hard every day to deliver the news at Fox,” one of the sources allegedly said.
“These are the consequences that Carlson’s own actions inspired, and they are owed only to best business practices,” National Review’s senior writer Noah Rothman claimed in an article, completely ignoring the fact that Fox News is on track to lose the audience of its most popular show.
Washington Examiner Editor
“RIP to a fashy, sh-tty show no more than one percent of Americans watched on a good night, including more Democrats than MSNBC, thus making it hard to argue it had a large influence on American electoral politics except in driving loud people nuts,” Nick Clairmont, the Washington Examiner’s life and arts editor tweeted on Monday.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
AU.S. district court judge ordered University of Wyoming sorority sister plaintiffs to reveal their names in a lawsuit against Kappa Kappa Gamma’s University of Wyoming chapter for allowing a transgender-identifying man to be inducted.
According to local news, “The six sorority sisters sued the Kappa Kappa Gamma’s parent organization, its president and the school’s first transgender sorority member late last month in a closely watched case. They alleged that the sorority did not follow its bylaws and rules, failed to uphold its mission, breached its housing contract with members, and misled them by admitting a transgender student.” The plaintiffs filed the suit anonymously as “Jane Does” and assigned the pseudonym “Terry Smith” to the trans-identifying sorority member.
Patsy Levang, a member of Independent Women’s Network’s North Dakota Chapter and former Kappa Kappa Gamma National Foundation president, told The Federalist that the plaintiffs asked for anonymity twice out of fear of “retribution,” but the judge denied their requests. Concerns for the women’s safety have become extra heightened after college swim athlete Riley Gaines was attacked by transgender radicals at San Francisco State University. According to Levang, one of the original seven plaintiffs left the case after the judge’s decision.
“These are young, young women — between 18 and 21, and we want to do nothing to jeopardize their safety,” said Levang, who added that the girls will have “guaranteed” security at all times during public appearances.
‘An Erection Visible Through His Leggings’
If the lawsuit is unsuccessful, transgender-identifying man Artemis Langford, who was admitted into the sorority in 2022, will move into the Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter house in the fall of 2023.
The lawsuit states that Langford is 6’2’’ tall, weighs 260 pounds, has not undergone any apparent chemical or surgical trans medical interventions, and rarely attempts to look like a female. It also reveals that the female plaintiffs feel extremely uncomfortable around Langford, who has allegedly engaged in bizarre and even “threatening” behavior, such as staring at the women without talking for hours, asking inappropriate questions, and at one point having “an erection visible through his leggings.”
During the recruitment process, Langford “avoided answering questions about his hobbies, passions, or involvement in other organizations,” according to the lawsuit. Instead, it says, he inquired about whether he could live in the sorority house and “talked about his desire to be near cadavers and to touch dead bodies.”
“One sorority member walked down the hall to take a shower, wearing only a towel. She felt an unsettling presence, turned, and saw Mr. Smith watching her silently,” the lawsuit reads. The suit also alleges that Langford “repeatedly questioned the women about what vaginas look like, breast cup size, whether women were considering breast reductions and birth control.”
During a yoga class sponsored by the Panhellenic Union for sorority members at the University of Wyoming, Langford allegedly “sat in the back of the room for an hour and watched the assembled women flex their bodies.” The suit also alleges that Langford has repeatedly used his phone to covertly take pictures of the women in the sorority house without their consent.
When one plaintiff raised her concerns about Langford, chapter officials — under the direction of national leadership — gave her materials so she could “educate” herself. And a witness in the case was allegedly “threatened with discipline if she does not agree that [Langford] is a woman.”
‘Intimidated’ into Inducting a Man
The plaintiffs said they were “intimidated” into inducting Langford into the sorority, and according to reports about the lawsuit, officers and employees from the national organization “actively pressured members of the chapter to support [Langford’s] admission to the sorority, ignoring bylaws and standing rules that would have foreclosed his initiation.” The voting process was also allegedly altered for Langford, and he was not admitted via secret ballots, as is standard practice.
The lawsuit contends that instead of following official bylaws, Kappa Kappa Gamma admitted Langford based on a 2018 “Guide for Supporting Our LGBTQIA+ Members,” which says the sorority accepts both “women” and “individuals who identify as women.” After the lawsuit was filed, Kappa Kappa Gamma Executive Director Kari Kittrell Poole reiterated the sentiments within the guide, telling the Associated Press that the sorority does not discriminate based on so-called gender identity.
However, the collegiate plaintiffs disagree with Poole on what it fundamentally means to be a woman. “An adult human male does not become a woman just because he tells others that he has a female ‘gender identity’ and behaves in what he believes to be a stereotypically female manner,” they said.
“[Kappa Kappa Gamma] has been a place that values the good, the true, the beautiful, the leadership growth in women,” Levang told The Federalist. Levang made it clear she doesn’t oppose Langford’s decision to identify as a woman. She does, however, oppose the destruction of female-only organizations, the integrity and politicization of her former sorority, and the safety of the University of Wyoming Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters.
“I look at those young women, and I think they deserve at least what I was afforded,” said Levang. “This whole thing takes single-sex organizations and just throws it out the door. It’ll literally destroy [women’s spaces]. But then I think the overall plan is to destroy the level that women have gained.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Imagine arriving at the gates of Heaven and being asked to choose between one of three chairs. Everyone who chooses the correct chair is welcomed into Heaven.
The chair on the right represents a person who is relying 100% upon his noble deeds to get into Heaven.
The chair on the left represents a person who has done just as many noble deeds but is relying 50% on his deeds to gain entrance into Heaven, and 50% on the cross where Jesus died for our sins.
The middle chair represents a person who has done just as many noble deeds as the other two, but who nevertheless places “all of his eggs in the basket” of the Savior’s atoning death. He is relying 100% upon the sacrifice Jesus provided on the cross, and 0% upon his noble deeds. He is trusting in Christ alone to get into Paradise.
The middle chair represents saving faith in Jesus Christ, whereas the other two chairs represent works righteousness.
Scripture declares: “Whoever keeps the whole Law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10). This is why God cannot and will not allow people in the outer two chairs into Heaven.
Why? Because like each one of us, they are lawbreakers. They hope in vain that their noble deeds will wash away some of their sins. Nothing but the blood of Jesus has that kind of power, and Christ’s blood only gets applied to your sins when you trust in Christ alone for salvation.
“Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). Your good works only please God after you have been converted. Spiritual conversion occurs when you repent of your sins and place your full confidence in the cross rather than in your noble efforts and religious acts (Mark 1:15; Luke 24:47; Galatians 2:16).
The good works done by those in the outer two chairs are not able to wash away even one sin. And this of course is why the faith represented by the outer two chairs is incapable of giving a person the assurance of salvation. After all, how could a person ever know for sure that he has done enough to earn eternal life in Heaven? If some or all of your confidence for going to Heaven is in your own efforts and deeds, your confidence is terribly misplaced.
“All who rely on observing the Law are under a curse” (Galatians 3:10). In other words, the people who are sitting in the outer two chairs are under a curse because they assume their righteous deeds make them worthy to enter Heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Do you honestly think God would have sent his only Son to suffer crucifixion if you and I could gain entrance into Heaven by obeying the Law? After all, how good is good enough? God’s Law demands perfection, and you and I fall far short of perfection. Therefore, our only hope is Christ, who provided the perfect sacrifice for our sins (Hebrews 10:1-18).
Remember, we are talking about what you are relyingupon to enter Heaven. The three chairs represent three people who have done the same amount of noble deeds, but whose faith is very different from one another.
Faulty thinking leads a person to ask, “Have I done enough to enter Heaven?” The real issue is this: “What am I relying upon to enter Heaven?” Your answer to this most important question can help you to see whether or not you currently believe the Gospel, and are therefore saved, redeemed, forgiven, born again and justified (Romans 3:21-28; Galatians 2:15-16).
Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). This is the good news of the Gospel, and it is represented by the faith of the middle chair. The One who suffered and died on the middle cross provides the only path to Paradise (Acts 4:12).
The Scottish evangelist and teacher Oswald Chambers wrote, “The center of salvation is the cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it cost God so much.”
While it is not easy to live the Christian life, it is relatively easy to be born again. This new birth (1 Peter 1:3,23) occurs supernaturally on the front end of your relationship with God (John 3:6). The challenging part comes into play when you discover from firsthand experience that following Christ involves denying yourself and “saying ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions” (Titus 2:12).
Just because “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26) does not mean that our works wash away any of our sins. Good works are simply the fruit of saving faith, (John 15:5) just like apples are the fruit of a healthy apple tree. A person with the faith of the middle chair does good works that God finds acceptable and pleasing in his sight.
You must first enter God’s family through faith in Jesus. After all, apart from Christ, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) in God’s sight. These rags of self-righteousness are what God sees when he looks at the ethical deeds done by those in the outer two chairs. Millions of people seek to justify themselves before God as they sincerely attempt to earn their way into Heaven.
Picture yourself standing at the gates of Heaven and the Lord inviting you to sit down in one of the three chairs. The middle chair is for believers who will be welcomed into Paradise, whereas the two outer chairs are for those who are trying to earn eternal life in Heaven. Sadly, they will be sent to Hell to pay the eternal penalty for breaking God’s commands (Matthew 25:41,46).
So, which chair would you choose?
Dan Delzell is the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska.
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 Presiden
NBC News’ Chuck Todd has been pilloried by Democrats online for daring to confront viewers with the reality of President Joe Biden’s unpopularity. Todd, the host of “Meet the Press,” detailed the findings of a recent NBC News survey of 1,000 adults, conducted April 14-18. The survey found that 54% of respondents disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president, up from 50% in January.
When asked to rank their feelings of Biden, 38% of respondents indicated that they had a “very negative” impression and another 10% said they had a “somewhat negative” impression. Only 17% of respondents said they had a “very positive” feelings about the Democratic president.
NBC POLL, among Democrats:
☝️ "53% of 2020 Biden voters say he shouldn’t run"
☝️ "64% of Democrats who voted for Sanders or Warren in the 2020 primaries think he shouldn’t run"
Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research told NBC News, “President Biden’s numbers are not where they need to be at this stage.”
Todd zeroed in on how 70% of respondents, including 51% of Democrats, said that Biden — the oldest president ever to take office — should not run for re-election in 2024. By way of comparison, 60% of prospective voters, including roughly 33% of Republicans, said that former President Donald Trump should not run again for office. Roughly half of those who don’t want Biden to run again suggested age was a “major” factor behind their reasoning.
In addition to his routine gaffes, missteps, and tumbles, Biden has explicitly invited scrutiny over his waning vitality. Biden told MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show” in October, “I could drop dead tomorrow.”
“In terms of my energy level, in terms of how much I am able to do, I think people should look and say, ‘Is he still have the same passion for what he’s doing?’ And if they think I do and I can do it, then that’s fine,” he said. “If they don’t, they should vote against me.”
The new NBC News poll indicated that many voters might do just that. When asked who they would vote for if Biden ultimately ran for re-election — an announcement expected later this week — 21% of respondents suggested they would “definitely vote for Biden,” 20% said they might vote for Biden, and 47% of respondents indicated they would vote for the Republican candidate.
Todd told NBC’s “Sunday Today” that Biden’s flagging support and apparent undesirability among voters, including Democrats, is “not because of his policies, it’s simply because of questions about his physical ability to do it and his current age.”
The “Meet the Press” host noted that “the thing that is most striking in our poll is how much Republicans are rallying around Donald Trump. … You have 70% of Republican primary voters tell us, basically, that these charges against Donald Trump mean that it’s more important to rally around Donald Trump rather than giving them a choice that says, you know, he was a good president but these could be distractions in defeating Joe Biden. Only one in four Republican primary voters believe that.”
After Todd suggested that America wasn’t keen on maintaining a gerontocracy helmed by one of two relatively unpopular candidates, leftist Twitter directed its collective anger his way.
The Wrap reported that various Biden supporters and other Democrats accused Todd of spreading ageism, Republican propaganda, and fake news. One user tangled up in a thread questioning Todd’s credibility wrote, “Chuck Todd should be fired! I do not believe this poll. I do believe his age might be an issue for some. I think he’s accomplished so much for this country.” For having reported on the survey results, one user called for Todd to be muzzled.
Howard Altman, a Twitter user who peddles foul screeds about Trump, wrote, “Screw you, Chuck Todd, and screw you Me-lennials. The people who vote, the people you deride as ‘the establishment’ I want Biden/Harris, and they will win.”
"There are only 6% of Americans that would like to see both Trump and Biden run." – @ChuckTodd on a new @NBCNews poll. “It looks like both parties are about to nominate two people that the country doesn’t want to have, and there are going to be unintended consequences to that.” pic.twitter.com/PmJLBnlEGt
While immensely unpopular, recent polls suggest Biden remains the Democratic front-runner.
The latest Harvard-Harris poll has Biden up 27 points over Vice President Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders is a distant third, neck-and-neck with Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Elizabeth Warren are even further behind.
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Legacy media claim so-called ‘election deniers’ are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. But the facts say otherwise.
It didn’t take long after the 2020 election for legacy media to conjure up a new smear to use against conservatives. For two years, leftists have employed the malicious term “election denier” to silence any American with legitimate concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections.
But in the lead-up to and following the 2022 midterms, media began incorporating this smear into their next phony narrative, which is that these so-called Republican “election deniers” are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. Prior to the Nov. 8 election, for example, left-wing outlets ran hit piece after hit piece warning that Republicans were secretly plotting to disrupt local precincts on Election Day.
And while their doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to convince the public there’s a widespread conspiracy of Trump supporters threatening local election officials. Within the past several weeks, NBC News and The New York Times have run exposés highlighting election officials in Virginia and Texas, respectively, who recently resigned amid confrontations with fellow Republican officials.
When it comes to the Times’ reporting, however, the article’s headline distorts the reasoning behind the Texas official’s resignation. While the headline reads, “After Threats and Clashes With Republicans, Another Texas Election Official Quits,” the article tacitly admits that Heider Garcia, the elections director for Tarrant County, resigned due to the county’s “creation of an election integrity task force” — not because of the alleged threats against him.
Other outlets to publish similar articles in recent weeks include The Hill and USA Today.
The Facts Tell a Different Story
While there are certainly cases of threats being made against election workers, the relentless narrative pushed by the corporate press that it’s a widespread problem is not true. But you don’t have to take The Federalist’s word for it. President Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) has all but admitted so.
Back in July 2021, the DOJ launched a task force designed to address this alleged “rise in threats against election workers, administrators, officials, and others associated with the electoral process.” According to an agency press release, the task force would “receive and assess allegations and reports of threats against election workers” and work with U.S. attorneys’ offices and the FBI “to investigate and prosecute these offenses where appropriate.” As part of the initiative, the DOJ also launched an election worker hotline, where individuals can report “suspected threats or acts of violence against election workers” to the agency for review and potential investigation.
Predictably, the DOJ did not include any data to justify its claim that there was a “rise in threats against election workers.”
On Aug. 3, the Democrat-controlled Senate held a hearing, titled “Protecting Our Democracy’s Frontline Workers,” in which Judiciary Committee members heard testimony from various federal, state, and local election officials about their experiences working in recent elections. Testifying in the hearing’s first panel was Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice.
In his opening statement, Polite Jr. claimed the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials, including one incident of physical violence against an election worker. Two days prior, however, the DOJ issued a press release revealing that only about 11 percent of those 1,000 contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for such an inquiry.
“In investigations where the source of a reported contact was identified, in 50% of the matters the source contacted the victim on multiple occasions,” the press release reads. “These investigations accordingly encompassed multiple contacts. The number of individual investigations is less than 5% of the total number of reported contacts.”
The DOJ also claimed the task force had charged five individuals at the time, a number Polite Jr. confirmed during his Aug. 3 Senate testimony.
So, to recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation. On top of that, only five individuals had been charged with any type of crime as of the DOJ’s August 2022 press release.
The Verdict
So why are legacy media continuing to push the lie that election workers everywhere are under constant attack, despite publicly available data showing otherwise? And why are Democrats in states such as Nevada and New Mexico advancing legislation based upon this lie, even when there are federal statutes prohibiting the harassment of election workers?
For Democrats, the strategy is two-fold. The first reason is to further the narrative perpetuated by Biden that “MAGA Republicans” represent an existential threat to democracy and Democrats are the party of virtue, “voting rights,” and normalcy. The left hopes that by painting their political opponents as extremists, they’ll be able to sway moderates and independents to their side, even as their political allies use the justice system to target former presidents, chemically castrate children, and collude with Big Tech to censor dissenting voices online.
The second reason is to discourage conservatives with legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for instance, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.” And of course, Democrats went ballistic, parroting the same “threat to democracy” talking point.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans actually welcome transparency in the electoral process. The attempt by legacy media and leftist politicos to spin a false narrative about conservatives threatening election workers on a grand scale is an attempt to avoid accountability at the ballot box and cast their political opponents as enemies of democracy. It’s a strategy steeped in falsehoods and smears, which for Democrats is nothing new.
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
An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower hinted to congressional leaders last week that the FBI improperly blocked aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation and that Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys blocked an indictment against the president’s son on tax charges. The carefully worded letter also indicated Attorney General Merrick Garland had testified inaccurately when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney had the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions.
Here are six reasons this whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.
1. Whistleblower Has Corroborating Evidence
While Wednesday’s letter from the whistleblower’s attorney to the congressional oversight chairs spoke only in cryptic terms, as I detailed on Friday, individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” revealed the whistleblower had accused two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys of refusing “to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.”
The sources also claimed the whistleblower’s disclosures establish that Garland refused Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s request for special counsel protection and that Garland testified inaccurately when he represented to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had full authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.”
It isn’t merely the seriousness of the whistleblower’s accusations that should shake those sheltering Hunter Biden, however, but the promise of corroborating evidence.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, reportedly maintains his client can “identify contemporaneous witnesses to corroborate his claims of political interference.” The whistleblower will “be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors … and how he summarized those meetings and put it in writing and distributed those to folks within the IRS and sometimes other agents,” Lytle claims, adding that those contemporaneous memoranda and emails will “end up corroborating his credibility.”
Sources also maintain DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has already begun reviewing documents that purportedly corroborate the whistleblower’s claims. They say he has sought out both IRS and FBI witnesses, indicating several paths exist to confirm the accusations of political bias.
2. IRS Agent Is Nonpartisan and Credentialed
The whistleblower’s apparent nonpartisan pedigree is another reason for participants in the Biden protection racket to be afraid. The whistleblower is “not a political person” and does not have a “political agenda,” Lytle told Fox News last week. He “is a career law enforcement official who hasn’t made any political donations and doesn’t even use social media,” the IRS agent’s attorney told Just the News.
“He is just a guy who likes his job as a law enforcement officer, as an investigator, and he takes it seriously, and he’s dedicated,” Lytle explained, adding, “And when he sees something that is not routine and doesn’t follow the rules, or … something maybe is affected by politics — that’s what made him come forward.”
“My client wrestled with whether or not to come forward,” the whistleblower’s attorney told Fox News. He had “sleepless nights. He decided he could not live with himself if he stayed quiet and said nothing.”
Also strengthening the whistleblower’s claims of a nonpartisan motivation is his insistence that “when he comes forward, this is not to talk to just one party or the other party.” Lytle stressed his client wants both sides of the political aisle to “ask him questions and cross-examine him.”
That Lytle is one of the whistleblower’s attorneys will also negate concerns of partisanship, given the attorney previously represented Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, during the heated Republican-controlled weaponization hearings. Lytle is also “currently defending a former FBI supervisor named Timothy Thibault who has been accused of pro-Biden political bias.” Before retaining Lytle, the whistleblower hired “prominent Democrat lawyer Mark Zaid, who previously represented clients whose allegations about a call with the Ukrainian president led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.”
His dedicated service at the IRS will likewise bolster the whistleblower’s credibility. As an IRS special agent for more than 10 years, the whistleblower reportedly has been “trusted with international investigations,” received several commendations, and taught “other agents how to properly do investigations.” His lengthy experience will strengthen his claims that “protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances” were not followed in the case of the politically connected Hunter Biden.
3. Dual Authorization Was Required
The IRS whistleblower’s claims that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys inappropriately, and for political reasons, “declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden” carry more weight given the dual-authorization procedures required by the DOJ for criminal tax cases.
The Department of Justice Manual provides that the tax division oversees federal criminal tax enforcement. Thus, while a grand jury is empowered to investigate tax crimes, “the Tax Division must first approve and authorize the United States Attorney’s Office’s use of a grand jury to investigate criminal tax violations.” Accordingly, in tax cases, prosecutions generally require two independent assessments that criminal prosecution is appropriate.
In the case of Hunter Biden, both career investigators and career prosecutors in the DOJ tax division signed off on the recommended charges, the whistleblower maintains. That dual approval suggests the evidence underlying the proposed charges was strong. It also pits the two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, who allegedly declined to seek charges against the president’s son, against the recommendations of two distinct sets of career employees.
4. Criminal Violations Seem Obvious
“Of course, Biden officials are interfering in his son’s case — why else has Hunter skated for five years?”
That title from former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s Friday New York Post article capsulizes perfectly another reason those running the Biden family protection racket should be shaking: The political favoritism shown Hunter Biden is obvious.
Who else could lie on a federal firearm form to purchase a handgun — only to lose physical possession of the gun and have it turn up across the street from a school — without getting charged with a federal crime?
As McCarthy wrote, “The gun offenses are so straightforward that they’d take a competent investigator five days, not five years, to wrap into a prosecutable case.” Likewise, “[s]ome of the tax offenses, which stretch back seven years or more, are so undeniable that liens were placed on Hunter’s properties…”
A public that for years has witnessed the president’s son escape any consequence for his clearly criminal conduct will easily nod along to the whistleblower’s claims of political favoritism: The IRS agent’s accusations aren’t just believable — they are self-evident.
5. The Timing Is Suspect
The timing also renders the whistleblower’s claims believable. Recall that in March of 2022, The New York Times began prepping the country for an indictment of Hunter Biden by soft-peddling his criminal conduct. The Times even previewed several potential defenses the president’s son could assert to counter the series of predicted criminal charges.
The Times article was a transparent attempt to get ahead of an anticipated story, namely that a grand jury had indicted Hunter Biden. But a grand jury indictment never dropped. Instead, about six months later, the whistleblower reportedly filed complaints related to the investigation with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General. The whistleblower’s complaints indicated charges had been recommended and approved by the tax division but never materialized because the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys did not seek grand jury indictments as recommended.
The New York Times’ efforts to groom Americans to discount the seriousness of the expected criminal charges wasn’t needed because the DOJ and FBI already had the president’s son covered.
6. The Scandal Reaches the FBI and POTUS
The Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys who allegedly declined to seek grand jury indictments against the president’s son are not the only ones implicated, however. The whistleblower’s allegations reportedly also reach FBI headquarters, although that does not necessarily mean Director Christopher Wray.
The unnamed sources further maintain the whistleblower’s disclosures claim that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” This accusation suggests political corruption beyond the refusal of the DOJ to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes.
Whether the “specific DOJ employees” refers to individuals working at FBI headquarters or elsewhere with the DOJ is unclear. Either way, the whistleblower’s claim conflicts with Garland’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had left the matter of Hunter Biden to the Delaware “U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI squad working with him.”
Garland’s testimony suggests that whoever instituted those “strictures” acted without the authority to do so. That is bad enough, but the implication is worse: namely that either FBI headquarters or other DOJ employees have kept the president from being incriminated during the multi-year unraveling of Hunter Biden’s complicated “business” ventures.
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.
An LGBT activist recently took to Tiktok to threaten anyone who would bar him or other male transvestites from entering women’s washrooms, daring concerned parents to try to protect their children. Despite these and other threats made both before and after the Nashville massacre, when six Christians were murdered by a transgender extremist, Thomas Jay White‘s account remains active on the platform.
Reduxx reported that White, who calls himself “Tara” and identifies as “Poly Trans Lesbian,” is a “baby fetishist” into “ageplay” and “diapers.” He indicated on his Twitter account that he is into various other deviant behaviors including “bloodletting.”
In a now-deleted video, White said, “If you back a wild animal into a corner, they are going to become a dangerous animal. So if you want to die on that hill of yours — of righteousness and moral majority — then you go right ahead.”
“I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make. I dare you to try to stop a transgender woman in my presence from using the bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make,” he continued.
The radical transvestite clarified that this was indeed “a call to action and a call to arms to everybody within the United States” and told others within the so-called LGBT community to “arm up, plain and simple.”
“Go out and buy a gun. Learn how to use it efficiently, through and through, because the time to act is now,” White added, indicating he had done likewise.
“There are lots of people like me who are not afraid to die,” he said, adding sardonically, “So you go ahead, you protect your kids.”
According to the Daily Mail, White recorded the video after the March 27 Covenant School massacre in Nashville.
‘Tara’ who identifies as a lesbian issues threatening message to women:
“If you back a wild animal into a corner, they are going to become a dangerous animal…I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom”
This was not the first time that White intimated LGBT radicals should use violent means to get what they want. In a video posted Feb. 15 framed by rainbow #ForYourPride captions, the transvestite radical railed against Tennessee’s Senate Bill 3, the Republican legislation since ratified that protects children from sexually graphic drag shows. Alluding to similar bills in his home state of Kansas, White said, “I am not going to go down without a fight and I call upon everyone in this country … do not sit back and just take this.”
“If it means me going to jail or prison or worse, I’m going to do everything in my power to fight,” he added.
White noted in a subsequent video that he would be migrating his channel to the social media site Clapper, where he could better “tackle and defeat and shred all of these Christians and evangelicals that love to cherry-pick Bible verses to justify their bigoted behavior and bull****.”
Oli London, a critic of the transgender movement who announced he was converting to Christianity and de-transitioning last year, told Fox News Digital, “This is just another example of a biological man feeling emboldened to invade women’s spaces in the name of ‘self-identity’ and threatening women’s safety without any fear of repercussions.”
“In today’s America, people like this man, who identifies as a Poly Trans Lesbian, are encouraged to do this and praised as ‘stunning and brave’ for entering women’s spaces. Anyone that calls out men like this are immediately deemed ‘transphobic’ and ‘hateful bigots,'” added London. “This is a harmful narrative, but sadly has become all too common across society.”
While White’s Tiktok and Twitter accounts remain active, his Instagram page appears to have been shut down.
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Ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, said that other liberal mayors have to be honest about violent crime that is terrifying residents. Lightfoot made the comments while speaking on a panel at the African American Mayors Association Conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
“As Democrats, if we do not speak the truth about violent crime in our cities, we will be the worse for it,” Lightfoot said.
“I come to this conversation as a former federal prosecutor. I come to this as a former defense attorney, I am the sister of a returning resident. But I know that there are people in my city that are wreaking havoc every day and need to be off the streets. That’s reality,” she added.
Lightfoot appeared to argue for harsher punishment to deter crime, a talking point common among Republicans but not Democrats.
“What do we say to, not only the victims of crime, but the people who are terrified about crimes in their neighborhood, most of whom look like us. If we say, ‘yeah, the police department is spending all this time and resources to arrest, put a case on,’ and the judges and the prosecutors say, ‘you know what? We’re going to let you out on electronic monitoring to wreak havoc again,'” she continued.
She went on to ask what kind of message they are sending to someone who courageously steps up to volunteer information about shootings in their neighborhood only to see “Pookie walking bold as day back on the street two days later.”
“You’re telling them that the criminal justice system doesn’t care about victims and witnesses,” Lightfoot said.
“And if we don’t call that out every single day with these prosecutors and with these judges, many of whom don’t live in our cities and don’t care about what’s happening, then we are going to lose an opportunity to advocate for the victims and the witnesses and the residents who just want and deserve peace,” she added.
“We gotta say it,” Lightfoot concluded. “We gotta say it.”
Many on the left have been accusing conservatives of anti-Semitism for criticizing lenient prosecutors who have been put into office with the help of left-wing billionaire financier George Soros, a Jewish man.
Lightfoot lost her re-election campaign in February and became the first Chicago mayor to do so in four decades. She had been the first female black mayor of Chicago.
Here’s more about violence in Chicago:
After teens cause chaos, Chicago mayor-elect Johnson says ‘Not constructive to demonize youth starve www.youtube.com
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Tucker Carlson told attendees at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th-anniversary gala that the biggest variable changing everyday Americans’ lives in recent years is the ruling class’ monopoly on information.
“What do you think over the last 10 or 20 years — whatever timeline you think is appropriate —has changed the most?” Roberts asked. “I mean that socially and culturally, I don’t mean that politically, although you can go there if you want, that has affected everyday Americans’ lives?”
“The lack of information,” Carlson quickly replied.
Despite living in a digital world where data and details are available to everyone with access to the internet, Carlson said normal Americans’ access to the information pipeline is significantly hampered.
“The core promise of the internet was as much information as we’ve ever had at your fingertips, and the result has been a centralization of information. This is deliberate, needless to say, but unnoticed by most people. That results in more controlled information than we could even have imagined more than 20 years ago,” he said. “A lot of information just is not available because it’s digital and it’s controlled by a small number of companies.”
Carlson said “hundreds of millions” of Americans “have no idea what’s going on” because the ruling class does not want them to know the facts.
“It’s not just because they’re dumb or they’re distracted on their iPhones. The whole point of the iPhone was to inform you, and the net effect has been to make people completely ignorant of the core, the actual facts, like the non-disputed facts about a lot of different things. And you saw this, certainly, during covid,” Carlson remarked.
Keeping Americans clueless, Carlson said, is advantageous to those who control information pipelines because it “challenges the idea of democracy, which rests on the notion of an informed voting public, of a citizenry.”
“We don’t have that, and that really, I never would have expected that at all,” Carlson said.
Next, Carlson warned listeners not to throw away hardcopy books and to consider buying “gold and ammo.”
“Definitely don’t throw away your books because they can’t be disappeared, because they exist physically,” Carlson repeated.
Similarly, Carlson said Americans should be keen not to throw away “relationships with other people because they can’t be disappeared either.”
“The material, the physical, things that you can smell, those are the things that you can trust,” Carlson said between a smattering of applause. “Your spouse, your dogs, your children, especially your dogs, but your actual friendships, your college roommates, people in person. As the world becomes more digitized and people live in this kind of this realm that’s disconnected from physical reality, I think the only way to stay sane is to cling more tightly to the things that you can smell.”
Carlson said that he’s “gotten to the point where if I can’t smell it, I’m not dealing with it.”
“Books, relationships, and ammo: Tucker Carlson’s guide to the universe,” Roberts remarked.
“Yes!” Tucker replied.
During the more lighthearted portion of the q-and-a session, Roberts joked that “if things go south for you at Fox News, there’s always a job for your Heritage.”
Mere days after the event and Roberts’ teasing, Fox News abruptly announced that it “mutually agreed to part ways” with the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which is consistentlyranked the highest-rated cable news show. Carlson has yet to announce his plans for the future.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Harris Faulkner announces Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News. FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways, the network announced on Monday.
“We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” a FOX News Media spokesperson said in a statement.
An interim program, “Fox News Tonight,” will air at 8 p.m. ET until a permanent replacement for Carlson is named. “Fox News Tonight” will be hosted by a rotation of various Fox News personalities.
The last edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired on Friday, April 21. The show began airing in 2016.
FOX News media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways, the network announced on Monday. (Fox News)
Before the launch of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson was co-host of “FOX & Friends Weekend” from 2012 through 2016.
Carlson previously served as an MSNBC host from 2005-2008 and also appeared on CNN earlier in his career. He founded The Daily Caller in 2010, but sold his stake in the political news website in 2020.
Brian Flood is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to brian.flood@fox.com and on Twitter: @briansflood.
Given the recent stupidity on the view regarding Christianity vs Taliban – Joy Behar enjoying Sharia Law.
Actress and singer Patti LuPone recently appeared on The View, saying that she does not know the difference between the “religious right” in the US and the Taliban. The Taliban has been constantly monitored by human rights organizations for extrajudicial murder, public executions, torture, and floggings.
Whoopi Goldberg chimed in: “You’re not the only person who has said that.” – Full story at Human Events
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 Presiden
If American society ever descends into open racial conflict, the corporate press will have played a large part in getting us there. President Trump was right: The media are the enemy of the people.
Journalists often leave the public less informed about important stories, especially when race is involved. One example is how the trial and acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse were so poorly reported that many public figures spoke as if he shot three black people.
The nation experienced something similar this week with several high-profile shooting incidents across the country that involved homeowners.
The first involved Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, Missouri, who was shot after going to the wrong home to pick up his sibling. The shooter was Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old homeowner. Yarl, who survived the shooting, is black and Lester is white, so it goes without saying that the media immediately made this a case about racial bias and the ubiquitous, unrelenting threats to black life in this country. The Yarl family attorney, Lee Merritt, made that point crystal clear when he claimed, “Ralph Yarl was shot because he was armed with nothing but other than his Black skin.”
The media’s ability to claim incidents like this only occur because of race didn’t last long.
A 20-year-old woman named Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed while she sat in the passenger side of a car that turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York. The homeowner, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The case received coverage from the New York Times, but the racial dynamics – both the suspect and victim are white – were not a part of the reporting.
The race-crime dynamic really got complicated after reports emerged that a six-year-old and her parents in North Carolina were shot after her basketball rolled into the yard of a neighbor. Everyone survived, but the suspect – Robert Louis Singletary – was apprehended two days later in Florida. The media’s reporting on this case has been noteworthy considering the racial angle. The victims are white, and the suspect is black, but race has not been included in any of the headlines. In fact, a search of the shooter’s name on CNN returns one story.
“Suspect who allegedly shot 6-year-old neighbor and her parents in North Carolina has been apprehended in Florida.”
Compare that to how CNN has covered Ralph Yarl’s shooting:
“White homeowner accused of shooting Black teen who went to the wrong house in Kansas City will face 2 felony charges, officials announce”
“Recovery of Black teen allegedly shot by White homeowner after ringing wrong doorbell is a miracle, attorney says”
“The White homeowner accused of shooting a Black teen who rang his doorbell turns himself in and is released on bail”
The message here is crystal clear: Race only matters to the corporate press when it supports a certain color-coded worldview. For CNN, that typically translates into using racial descriptors when a suspect is white and his victims are not. But even people who claim to abhor race politics can find themselves entranced by the siren song of tribalism.
One of Tucker Carlson’s monologues earlier this week included a rebuke of the left’s assumption that Yarl’s shooting was racially motivated. The tendency to jump to conclusions about motive without evidence is common on CNN, on MSNBC, and at the New York Times. Then Carlson proceeded to do the exact same thing he criticized when he imputed racist intent to the violent assault of a white woman in Chicago over the past weekend. The woman appeared on a different Fox News show along with her boyfriend – who was there at the time – and stated the attack was random and not a targeted act of racial violence.
This is why journalists, politicians, and pundits need to resist the impulse to ascribe motive to violent crime based solely on the fact that the criminal and perpetrator have different skin tones. Acts of violence should be universally condemned, regardless of the color combinations of victim and suspect that are involved. But media crime reporting is always done through race-colored lenses.
Incidents in which both the suspects and victims are black expose the media’s dirty little secret. The progressive press – including “pro-black” platforms – only care about black lives when they are threatened by white people. That explains why the recent mass shooting in Alabama that ended with 20 people shot and four dead has not generated nearly as much coverage or outrage as what happened to Ralph Yarl.
When they do choose to cover these stories, what’s absent is any mention of “root causes” other than guns. Stories involving white shooters give them an opportunity to criticize “white supremacy” and racism. But incidents involving black shooters don’t come with the same type of analysis. There is no mention of racial self-hatred, fatherlessness and family structure, media and hip-hop culture, or any other factor that would speak to motive.
America is a nation of more than 330 million people spread across 3.5 million square miles. In other words, this is a big country with a large and diverse population that exists in a fallen world. If you can think of it, there is a good chance someone in this country has done it in the past, is doing it now, or will do it in the future. For example, a woman was recently arrested on allegations of bestiality. I did a Google search for “bestiality arrest” to find details and was shocked by how many different cases came back, including ones involving men, women, and couples.
The media can’t possibly cover every crime story. But what it can do is provide facts in an objective fashion on a consistent basis regardless of the identities involved. This doesn’t mean intent can’t be part of crime stories. It just means the media should resist the temptation to assign motives based on skin color, especially when they see the world through the lens of white “oppressors” and “oppressed” minorities. Outlets like the Root that cater to a black audience should be leading the charge to turn down the racial rhetoric. A small minority group whose leaders advocate killing its future soldiers and disarming its current ones should be the last people stoking racial conflict.
This week, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., went back to work after spending several weeks away from Congress due to being hospitalized for severe depression. But while Democrats, who were sorely pressed to maintain their narrow majority in his absence, celebrated his return, C-Span video of him chairing a Senate subcommittee provided sobering evidence of the recovering stroke victim’s limitations. Much like his disastrous election debate last October, at the hearing, Fetterman’s halting speech, barely understandable comments, and inability to communicate without electronic aid illustrated his incapacity.
But while Democrats are quick to slam as bigots anyone who had the temerity to notice Fetterman’s problems, they are not feeling quite so generous about another member of their Senate caucus. The double standard creates an ominous precedent that ought to hang over the 2024 presidential election.
While they’ve been circling the wagons around Fetterman, Democrats have been pressuring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to resign due to the perception that she lacks the physical energy or the mental acuity to do her job. But unfortunately for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the California Democrats who want to replace her, the ailing 89-year-old has refused to step down, though she has already announced she won’t run for re-election next year.
Feinstein vs. Fetterman
Feinstein was hospitalized for shingles in February and has remained absent since then. With no date set for her return, the vacancy on the Judiciary Committee, where her absence leaves the Democrats without a majority, has created a serious problem for the efforts of the Biden administration and Schumer to confirm federal judges. The duel between the ailing Feinstein and her party has, at least for the moment, benefited Republicans. But the implications of the controversy go beyond its impact on her desire to stay on until her term expires in January 2025.
There are currently four senators who are over 80, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who returned this week from an extended medical absence after a fall. Thirty senators are in their 70s. Whatever one thinks about the question of elderly senators serving, the campaign to push Feinstein out of her seat sets an interesting precedent.
Democrats have reacted to questions posed by Fetterman’s obvious limitations as a senator with both denial and an attempt to shame skeptics with pious rhetoric about ableism. They have attempted to depict him as a poster child for tolerance for those who suffer from mental health issues.
But they are indifferent to criticisms of their effort to push Feinstein out of her seat on the grounds of ageism, which have just as much validity as their defense of Fetterman.
Feinstein vs. Biden
Even worse, their belief that Feinstein’s diminishing capacities render her ineligible for a seat in the Senate stands in even starker contrast to the position President Joe Biden’s mental state has placed Democrats in.
Ever since Biden became their presumptive presidential nominee in March of 2020, ignoring his decline has become a political necessity for Democrats, and even more so with each passing month. At the very least, his never-ending stream of gaffes, frequent confusion in public, and erratic behavior raises questions about his mental acuity. Yet the corporate media treat questions about his health as off limits and proof of the bad morals of conservatives.
Still, as was the case with Feinstein until recently, the 80-year-old Biden remains fit enough to silence inquiries from Democrats. As president, it’s far easier to shield him from public scrutiny. More importantly, most in the party are coming to terms with the fact that they may be stuck with him for the 2024 election.
No matter his mental state, having spent his entire life working to become president, Biden clearly has no intention of giving up after only one term. He will have to be dragged from the White House kicking and screaming. The obvious alternatives — Vice President Kamala Harris or California Gov. Gavin Newsom — lack much appeal for the party’s grassroots or its donor class. So, many on the left are convinced Biden may be their best bet for victory next year, especially if the election is a rematch of the 2020 race against former President Donald Trump.
Double Standard
Yet whether you think Democrats’ decision to get rid of someone who can’t do her job is sensible or insensitive and nasty, it does raise questions about the same standard not being applied to Fetterman and most especially to Biden.
Feinstein has met her Democratic colleagues halfway by asking to be replaced on the Judiciary Committee so they can continue confirming leftist judges at an even faster pace than McConnell confirmed conservatives during the Trump administration. But replacing her on the committee requires GOP acquiescence and, for understandable reasons, Republicans are only too happy to let the current stalemate created by her absence continue. That’s led to mounting anger from Democrats, who think Feinstein is being selfish.
The empty seat on the Judiciary Committee has turned the issue into a crisis for Democrats, but many of them have been pushing for her resignation for years. Feinstein’s voting record can’t be criticized by the left, but she has at times engaged in collegial or commonsensical behavior that they regard as insufficiently woke.
Feinstein Too Reasonable for Some
In 2019, she enraged global warming extremists when she brusquely lectured a group of visiting schoolchildren about the importance of compromise when they began to virtue signal to her about not supporting the most alarmist environmental measures.
Just as bad from their point of view were allegations that she behaved decently toward conservative judicial nominees such as Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which some characterized as treating her with “kid gloves.” That’s despite the fact that Feinstein had intolerantly targeted her for her Catholic faith, saying that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
That goes a long way toward explaining why Feinstein’s incapacity has been an issue for left-wingers who have no problem tolerating a leftist like Fetterman, who, leaving aside his hospitalization for depression, also still needs special equipment to be able to understand his colleagues and who appears to converse only with difficulty.
But there’s more at stake in this discussion than the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the question of fitness for office.
What if Biden’s Health Can’t Be Hid?
Democrats appear to be serious about asking the American people to re-elect an already diminished man who will be 82 in January 2025 and presumably serve until he’s 86. So, the idea that the questions they are currently raising about Feinstein can’t be raised about Biden ought to be a bridge too far even for inveterate Trump haters.
Just as important, they need to ask themselves in the coming year what they will do if Biden’s health continues to decline and ultimately puts him in the same position as Feinstein, where the problems can no longer be concealed. By declaring that questions about Biden’s mental acuity are off-limits or in bad taste, they are essentially setting up a situation where Harris being forced to step in and govern is a realistic possibility sometime in the next five years.
The only realistic alternative to simply hoping and praying Biden will continue to decline at a slow enough rate that his problems can continue to be concealed or smoothed over without political consequences is to begin asking the same hard questions about his health that they are currently posing to Feinstein. It remains to be seen whether anyone of consequence in the party has the guts or the wisdom to point this out before it is too late.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?
Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.
A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.
In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.
First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”
Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.
The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.
During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.
Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.
It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”
Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.
Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.
Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.
Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.
The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.
Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.
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 Presiden
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told Congress on Wednesday that taxpayer dollars are flowing into the Taliban’s pockets. The shocking admission was made during a House Oversight Committee hearing about the Biden administration’s disastrous and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
“Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban,” Sopko said. “Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.”
🔥🔥🔥
“The lack of cooperation by @StateDept…is unprecedented in the nearly 12 years that I have been the SIGAR.”
Inspector General John Sopko CONDEMNS the Biden Administration for not cooperating with Afghanistan oversight. pic.twitter.com/00pa8w5umY
Sopko explained that obstruction from the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development in the Biden administration has been “unprecedented.” He said both agencies have demonstrated an “abject refusal to allow oversight” of the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been sent to Afghanistan.
“I don’t trust the Taliban as far as you can throw them,” Sopko later said. “The information we’re getting — again, not from the State Department, who isn’t talking to us, or USAID — is the Taliban is already diverting funds.”
“I would just say: I haven’t seen a starving Taliban fighter on TV, they all seem to be fat, dumb, and happy,” he added. “I see a lot of starving Afghan children on TV, so I’m wondering where all this funding is going.”
According to his testimony, the U.S. has “made available” to Afghanistan more than $8 billion since the withdrawal less than two years ago.
Throughout his testimony, Sopko repeatedly returned to the Biden administration’s obstruction. In fact, he said SIGAR has not heard from “anybody in the administration, really,” and said that routine meetings with top government and military leaders that happened in previous administration have ceased under Biden. Now, it’s just “radio silence,” he said.
Sopko’s eye-opening testimony came about two weeks after the Biden administration released its after-action report about the Afghanistan withdrawal. The report blamed former President Donald Trump for what happened under Biden’s watch, completely absolving Biden and his administration.
That blame-game continued on Wednesday prior to the hearing, CNN reported. The White House, moreover, is denying they are obstructing Sopko’s oversight efforts.
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Thelma Dephas of Shiloh Baptist Church in Landover, Maryland, seen taking part in the 20th annual U.S. Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, a 90-hour front to back oral reading of the bible on May 6, 2009, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. | TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images
The 34th annual National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon will kick off on Saturday, marking the first time the event has taken place at the U.S. Capitol complex since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spearheaded by the Indiana-based ministry group Seedline International, the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon will take place on the West Terrace of the Capitol starting at 2 p.m. Eastern time Saturday (April 22) through 10 a.m. April 26. A rotating group of volunteers will take turns reading every word of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, in 15-minute slots.
Those hoping to participate can sign up for a time slot online. The National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon’s website outlines the requirements for those hoping to read from Scripture as part of the event, specifically that a volunteer reader “must be a born again Christian, must provide personal transportation” and “must arrive 5 minutes before [their] scheduled reading time.”
While most of the readings will be done by “scheduled volunteer readers,” those “walking by who want to read” will have the opportunity to participate as well. About 98% of the reading slots will be filled in advance.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Keith Davidson, founder and director of Seedline International, said he hopes the event will “draw attention back to the Bible” and remind Americans that “our founding fathers and founding principles of our country were for expressing our First Amendment rights and the freedom of speech.” He expressed gratitude that the event was taking place at the Capitol this year, as the restrictions imposed by the pandemic lockdowns had forced the event to move the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon to the nearby Faith and Liberty Headquarters for the past three years.
“For us, it’s a privilege to be back outside facing west, viewing the Washington Monument in the background, and just being out on the Capitol steps and on Capitol grounds is just … a good thing; we’re excited about that,” he added.
Davidson told CP that the event “doesn’t stop” in inclement weather unless there is “danger” posed by severe weather. In such cases, participants “move inside the building and continue to read.”
While the Bible Reading Marathon will be streamed on Seedline International’s YouTube channel, there will not be an option for people to read from Scripture virtually as there was last year.
Members of Congress who want to participate in the event might have the opportunity to read from the Capitol, as lawmakers will be in session during part of this year’s event, he told CP.
Davidson said several members of Congress had made an “interested commitment” to reading Scripture as part of the annual event that will also be attended by Christian schools and church groups.
Although Davidson is leading the event, he is depending on a team of “about 35” volunteers to help pull it off. He remarked that “there will be someone there from Seedline around the clock,” meaning that the volunteers will take turns so as not to force one person to remain there for nearly four straight days.
Davidson estimated that “there will be approximately 50” people on Capitol grounds at the opening event, adding, “I would anticipate around 300 or so that would attend at some point but not all at the same time.”
In addition to the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, Davidson also helps to organize Bible Reading Marathons at state Capitols nationwide. When asked about his progress in setting up Bible Reading Marathons at state Capitols, Davidson said, “It’s going well.”
“We’ve been in Tennessee, Indiana [and] Pennsylvania. We’re also going to West Virginia, then Louisiana, North Carolina [and] South Carolina is coming on board, and we’ve got some interest in Colorado and possibly Texas,” he noted. “Because of previous riots and so forth, it’s become a little bit difficult to get on Capitol grounds, but we seem to be making good progress on that.”
What’s behind California’s shift to paying for electricity based on income? In a few words, it’s the consequence of California’s futile fight against climate change.
California’s quixotic pursuit to save the planet by reducing greenhouse emissions has had three broad and irrefutable consequences. It has made energy more expensive; costlier energy has accelerated the deindustrialization of the state; and, the best irony of all, the offshored manufacturing has increased greenhouse gas emissions by pushing production to dirty, coal-fired China, with goods then shipped back to California for consumption.
The latest twist in California’s arrogant tale of energy virtue signaling is playing out with a major restructuring in how Californians are charged for their electricity. For decades, consumers paid for electricity — as well as other utilities such as water and natural gas — with a tiered system that charged more for resources used above a baseline amount. For electricity, the baseline was determined by three things: the consumer’s use of electricity, the region, and the season.
This system meant consumers who used a lot of electricity would pay far more for each kilowatt hour of that additional electricity than they would for their baseline allocation.
This tended to hit lower-income consumers who ran their air conditioning too much, though the Golden State also has a separate program to reduce costs for low-income residents known as California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE).
Thus, the California legislature last year passed Assembly Bill 205, which mandated an end to the tiered system of electric rates and instituted in its place a system where each would pay according to his ability to help those in need. (Of course, it sounds better in the original German, “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen.”) The bill goes into effect no later than July 1, 2024, with the stated aim that “low-income ratepayers in each baseline territory would realize a lower average monthly bill without making any changes in usage.”
One unintended consequence of ditching the old baseline allocation scheme is all ratepayers, regardless of income, will now have far less incentive to conserve electricity, since each additional unit of electricity used will be priced the same, with overall prices reduced.
Higher Income Will Pay More
In preparation for the rollout of the new electric charges, California’s big, regulated utilities have proposed their new rate plans to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Depending on the provider, ratepayers would pay a fixed fee based on three household income tiers, plus charges for electricity use. Household income would be validated by a third party, likely the agency that collects the state income tax, the California Franchise Tax Board. The three proposed household income tiers and their fixed rates are: $28,000 to $69,000 — $20 to $34 a month, depending on the provider; $69,000 to $180,000 — $51 to $73 a month; and more than $180,000 — $85 to $128 a month.
Median household income in California in the years 2017-2021 was $84,097, meaning that an average California family could, under the proposed rate structure, pay a flat fee of $876 per year for their electricity while charges for kilowatt hours used would decline by 33-42 percent depending on the provider. The net effect would be an increase of about $90 a year for the average household and up to $750 more annually for higher-income households. Ironically, households living in homes with rooftop solar would see some of the highest increases in electrical costs under the new rate structure. Lower-income households are expected to see savings of up to $300 per year.
Increasing Fees Rather Than Taxes
One big advantage to California policymakers of heavily regulating public utilities is the ability to use these energy and water corporations as de facto arms of the welfare state.
California’s Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to increase taxes, but a simple majority to increase fees. The CPUC’s total control over California’s utilities means state lawmakers can direct the CPUC to change its rate structures to take more from those earning more and give to those earning less — all without a penny flowing into or out of the state treasury — something that’s particularly attractive today in a state that went from an almost $100 billion surplus last year to an expected $30 billion deficit this year.
And in that, the CPUC commissioners, appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, are willing accomplices in the class struggle for fair electricity bills and energy justice. Of the five commissioners, four are attorneys, with backgrounds in “environmental justice,” air quality, low-income assistance, and climate change — electricity generation, not so much. Though the CPUC’s mission is to ensure “that consumers have safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates, protecting against fraud, and promoting the health of California’s economy,” it’s clear now that all that really matters is figuring out how to shield low-income voters from the costly consequences of California’s green energy crusade.
Moreover, while the electrical pricing scheme may work as income redistribution social policy, it fails the test of reducing energy consumption — laying bare the fact that California policymakers care more about control than they do the climate.
Chuck DeVore is chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, vice chairman of the Golden State Policy Council, a former California legislator, and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He’s the author of “The Crisis of the House Never United—A Novel of Early America.”
A federal judge on Wednesday denied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request for a court order to prevent the House Judiciary Committee from questioning a former prosecutor involved in the investigation of Donald Trump. Bragg, however, didn’t just lose on the merits. The court’s 25-page order eviscerated the Manhattan D.A. — and his former prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz.
Two weeks ago, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued a subpoena directing Pomerantz to appear before the House Judiciary Committee at 10:00 on April 20, 2023. Pomerantz was previously a special assistant district attorney before abruptly resigning because Bragg had allegedly decided not to seek criminal charges against Trump.
Bragg responded to news of the subpoena by directing Pomerantz not to provide any information about his prior work to the Judiciary Committee. He also filed a complaint in federal court against Jordan and the committee, seeking an order declaring the Pomerantz subpoena invalid. Bragg simultaneously sought entry of a temporary restraining order to freeze the subpoena pending resolution of his lawsuit.
On Wednesday, federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil denied Bragg’s request to stop the Judiciary Committee from questioning Pomerantz. “Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Vyskocil wrote in a transparent swipe at the New York prosecutor who hung his pathetic indictment on that platitude.
While Bragg posited that the Judiciary Committee lacked a valid legislative purpose to issue the subpoena, Vyskocil rejected that argument. Congressional committees have the constitutional authority to conduct investigations and issue subpoenas, the court explained, and the court’s role is “strictly limited to determining only whether the subpoena is ‘plainly incompetent or irrelevant’” to any legitimate committee purpose. Because Jordan and the committee identified several valid legislative purposes underlying the subpoena, the court held Bragg could not quash it.
The court also held that the “speech or debate clause,” which provides that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” Senators and Representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place,” likely would prevent Bragg from suing Jordan and the committee.
Vyskocil also rejected Bragg’s argument that requiring Pomerantz to submit to questioning would infringe on the attorney-client and work-product privilege the Manhattan D.A.’s office held regarding communications Pomerantz was privy to. Here, the court stressed that the indictment of Trump occurred long after Pomerantz had resigned and that any privilege that may have existed was likely waived by Pomerantz publishing his book, “People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.”
“As its subtitle indicates, the book recounts Pomerantz’s insider insights, mental impressions, and his front row seat to the investigation and deliberative process leading up to” the Trump indictment, the court wrote. Yet Bragg did next to nothing to stop the publication of the book. Under these circumstances, “Bragg cannot seriously claim that any information already published in Pomerantz’s book and discussed on prime-time television in front of millions of people is protected from disclosure,” the court concluded.
It Gets Better
The court’s conclusion, however, wasn’t the highlight of the decision. Rather it was Vyskocil’s summary of how the country arrived at a place where it sees a state prosecutor filing a complaint in federal court against the House Judiciary Committee that includes 35 pages and a vast majority of exhibits that “are nothing short of a public relations tirade against former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
That descriptor alone should give pause to anyone still believing Bragg’s indictment of Trump was righteous. But the opinion highlighted many more facts that confirm the targeting of Trump was a witch hunt.
For instance, it included many excerpts from Pomerantz’s book showing the criminal charges against Trump were ridiculous. So-called “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels “did not amount to much in legal terms,” Pomerantz wrote. “Paying hush money is not a crime under New York State law, even if the payment was made to help an electoral candidate.”
The book excerpts quoted by the court included numerous additional problems Pomerantz saw with the legal theory Bragg eventually relied upon in charging Trump. Trump and his legal team have been highlighting these same many flaws. And now a federal judge just told the country that the “very experienced, sophisticated, and extremely capable attorney” Pomerantz — who had wanted to charge Trump — agreed with all (or most) of Trump’s legal arguments.
The court also noted that Pomerantz was a “pro bono” attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. This should strike the public as strange, especially in light of the well-heeled credentials the opinion highlighted: his clerkship at the Supreme Court, his work as a federal prosecutor, and his many years as a criminal defense attorney and partner at the prominent New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
While the court omitted any mention of Paul, Weiss’ connections to the Biden administration and Democrats, referring to Pomerantz’s “pro bono” status should raise some red flags.
If not, Vyskocil was more explicit elsewhere in the opinion, such as when she said she was “unmoved by Bragg’s purported concern at the prospect of ‘inject[ing] partisan passions into a forum where they do not belong.’”
“By bringing this action, Bragg is engaging in precisely the type of political theater he claims to fear,” the court wrote.
Beyond chastising Bragg for playing politics, Vyskocil rebuked him for his legal arguments, most devastatingly when Bragg argued the court should quash the subpoena of Pomerantz to ensure the grand jury’s secrecy.
“The secrecy of the grand jury proceedings in the pending criminal case was compromised before the indictment was even announced,” Vyskocil countered, citing CNN’s coverage of the charges against Trump based on leaks.
The court also unleashed a few zingers on Pomerantz. While Pomerantz complains he is in a “legally untenable position” because he will be forced to make a choice between “legal or ethical consequences” or “potential criminal and disciplinary exposure,” the court “notes that Pomerantz is in this situation because he decided to inject himself into the public debate by authoring a book that he has described as ‘appropriate and in the public interest.’”
And in response to Pomerantz making “it abundantly clear that he will seek to comply with Bragg’s instructions” not to respond to the subpoena, the court remarked that Pomerantz “claimed deference to the District Attorney’s command is a surprising about-face, particularly given that Pomerantz previously declined the District Attorney’s request to review his book manuscript before publication.”
What Next?
Those already well-versed in the outrageousness of the indictment will take delight in the court’s ripostes. The question remains, however, whether the opinion’s detailed summary of the flaws in Bragg’s legal theory — as identified by Pomerantz himself — will convince the remainder of the country that the indictment is a sham. Or will they discard Vyskocil’s decision as a Trump-appointee diatribe?
Maybe it will take the Judiciary Committee questioning Pomerantz on those precise weaknesses for the unconvinced to realize that once again Trump is right — it is a witch hunt.
We should know soon whether the questioning will go forward and whether Pomerantz will respond to the questions or follow Bragg’s directive. But if the latter, both Bragg and Pomerantz will find themselves back in front of Vyskocil because the Trump appointee wisely ruled that any future disputes related to the Pomerantz subpoena or other subpoenas related to the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry must be filed in the same case mater.
Vyskocil’s devastating conclusion likely caused Bragg as much heartache as her denial of his motion to declare the subpoena of Pomerantz invalid. For Bragg knows that absent reversal by the Second Circuit, the same outcome awaits further challenges of the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena power.
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.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is asking lawmakers to support “new legislation that would temporarily block someone who is deemed a threat to themselves or to others from having guns,”writes Axios.
That’s one way of putting it.
Another, more precise, way would be to say Lee supports a law that forces people accused of a precrime to sit down with state-appointed psychiatrists and lawyers and prove their innocence before the government decides if they can keep their guns. If that person says the wrong things, cops can show up at his home, search it, demand the accused hand over his property — not just any property, but property explicitly protected by the Constitution — without offering any evidence that he’s committed, or ever planned to commit, a crime.
In selling his bill, Lee claims that guns can be taken from those accused of having a “psychiatric disorder, alcohol dependence, or drug dependence.” But federal law already prohibits the sale of a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective.” And most people who drink or take drugs don’t have a propensity towards violence. Excessive drinking might be bad for you, but it’s legal. As is grumbling about chemtrails, pondering how to overthrow the government, and hating your neighbors.
Incidentally, if an alcoholic is found guilty of a precrime, Lee’s bill only affords him a single hearing to rectify the situation for each act of suspension, which can be in effect for up to 180 days — even if he pulls his life together, repents, and becomes a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. The state can keep asking for extensions in perpetuity.
Of course, even those with persistent depression, an emotional disorder, aren’t often would-be killers. One in eight Americans takes antidepressants. Yet, one suspects laws like this will only stigmatize depression and make gun owners less inclined to seek help.
More importantly, though, Lee fails to mention in his factsheets that the bill allows the state to take firearms on the basis of a “serious behavioral condition,” which includes “functional impairment that substantially interferes with or limits the person’s role or functioning in family, school, occupational, or community activities.” The incredulous italics are mine, because Lee’s standard, despite his contention that there is a high burden of proof, could include basically anyone who’s met the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for depression and stopped going to a weekly softball game.
Sure, the law includes penalties for false and bad-faith statements by cops and third parties, but those would be all but impossible to prove or prosecute because the basis for the state issuing a “temporary mental health order of protection” is extraordinarily broad.
If someone is threatening others with violence, Tennessee already has numerous laws on the books that allow for arrest. It already has a law that allows for the immediate detention of people deemed dangerous to themselves or others. Every state does. And yet, in numerous recent mass shootings, the perpetrator has been known to the police, and they did nothing.
The Covenant School shooting, Lee maintains, makes it impossible not to act. But it’s important to remember that, as far as we know, nothing in Lee’s proposal would have stopped that shooter. The mother, who never appears to have reported her daughter for mental illness, probably wasn’t even aware that her adult child still owned guns. As far as we know, the killer never threatened anyone publicly before the shooting, nor did she pose a danger to herself. For all we know, the shooting was an act of terrorism or conducted over some personal grudge. We won’t know until, or if, the sheriff in Nashville releases her manifesto.
One suspects that gun controllers will soon cook up studies to tell us red flag laws are amazing, but to this point no major study — including a meta-analysis conducted by RAND Corporation — has conclusively found them to be effective. Many of these state laws are even worse than Lee’s proposal as they are permitted ex parte orders. But even if these laws were useful on the margins, they are a serious attack on the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Red flag laws just give authorities power to work around normal evidentiary standards. Perhaps we should try upholding the tens of thousands of laws that already govern gun ownership before passing new ones.
In his platitude-laden Twitter video, Lee frames himself as a courageous nonpartisan, accusing anyone who opposes his proposal of being blinded by politics. The truth is, the governor’s do-something-ism is about the laziest, most politically motivated breed of leadership imaginable.
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.
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By Bill Donohue | Wednesday, 26 April 2023
What Did You Say? 
Virginia college students get heated protesting Liz Wheeler’s ‘Ideology of Transgenderism’ speech
By Kyle Morris | Fox News | Published April 27, 2023 4:27pm EDT
Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-college-students-get-heated-protesting-liz-wheelers-ideology-transgenderism-speech
Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler was met by dozens of protesters Wednesday evening when she arrived to a Virginia college to deliver remarks about “transgenderism” and its impact in America.
The protest kicked off ahead of Wheeler’s arrival on the campus of James Madison University, where she delievered a speech, “The Ideology of Transgenderism,” and was challenged by a number of her detractors in attendance.
Wheeler, a podcast host who often sounds off on topics critical to the conservative agenda, was invited to speak at the event by the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter.
The demonstrators, all of whom appeared to protest peacefully against Wheeler’s appearance on campus, were captured on video gathering outside and inside the venue as they displayed signs and chanted ahead of the event.
FOX NEWS POLL: BOOK BANNING, TRANSGENDER ISSUES SEEN AS PROBLEMATIC
While several protesters gathered outside the venue, others gathered inside, just outside the room where Wheeler was slated to speak. Those demonstrators also displayed signs that featured messages protesting Wheeler’s appearance on campus and in defense of transgender people.
KANSAS BOARD SETS NEW TRANSGENDER ATHLETE RULE FOR STUDENTS
Wheeler took aim at “queer theory” during her speech, concluding it allows people to “choose your identity” and forgo your “evil identity” of being a certain race because it’s a “marginalized identity.”
Inside the event, Wheeler was also challenged by those who had opposing views about transgenderism after she finished speaking.
Wheeler went on to describe to the individual how sex change surgeries are performed on young males in America and how some sex change surgeries have resulted in death because they are “so dangerous.”
A Fox News Poll released this week found that 48% of respondents believe overly accommodating transgender policies are a major problem for public schools.
Kyle Morris covers politics for Fox News. Story tips can be sent to kyle.morris@fox.com and on Twitter: @RealKyleMorris.
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