According to the corporate media, hundreds of high schoolers are taking it upon themselves to walk out of school to protest Israel’s right to defend itself. In New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and more, the nation’s budding humanitarians are banding together with the hope of ushering in a new era of peace, the stories say. As is the case with so many stories surrounding Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s response, the prevailing narrative is wrong.
These walkouts are not the result of well-meaning teenagers choosing to take a stand. These protests are being conceived of and then planned and executed by radical left-wing groups using children as political props.
The largest of these was the “#schools4Palestine” walkout, which disrupted learning in an estimated 100 New York City public schools on Nov. 9. A coalition of far-left groups, including New York Collective of Radical Educators, NYC Educators for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Teachers Unite, authored a “toolkit” — a handbook aimed mainly at adults to show them how to turn students into pro-Hamas activists. The document purports to be for “students, teachers, and parents,” but its content is less relevant for students than for teachers who seek to influence them. Another far-left group in the San Francisco Bay Area created a toolkit of its own, full of the same hateful lies about Israel.
Though the New York City toolkit’s writers claimed, “High school students are organizing walkouts,” they don’t seem to believe their own words. The document, created by left-wing adults, provides a ready-made plan for students, with poster templates, instructions for identifying chant leaders, and even a sample schedule. The students are being organized by adults.
NYC high school students walking out from across the city in the hundreds today to demand a #CeasefireNow in Gaza!
They were showing up, at the behest of their teachers, to support a cause probably very few of them understand. The toolkit contained a sample script for teachers to encourage their students to participate, and it notes that teachers may “show support for their students … canceling tests or major paper deadlines or making the lesson more flexible to accommodate students who walk out.” Teachers who followed this advice placed their own radical politics ahead of learning and committed a major violation of professional ethics. They abused their positions of responsibility for the sake of their own agenda.
The toolkit put words in the mouths of children with a recommended chants list, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here.” When they took to the streets, some of the students chanted, “F-ck the Jews,” thus flaunting their hatred and abandoning the façade that this protest was ever about peace.
Students Aren’t Being Taught the Truth
Students are being taught that it is good and noble to walk out in support of Hamas. What they are not being taught is that there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and it did not stop Hamas from slaughtering Israelis and taking hostages. They’re not teaching students that so many Palestinians live in poverty, not because of Israel, but because Hamas would rather spend money on rockets and tunnels and their own plush hideaways in Qatar than on basic infrastructure. They’re not teaching that supporting the Palestinian people means opposing Hamas, an enemy of peace and prosperity and the reason that Gazans are suffering today.
Some meager accountability for this indoctrination has come from parents who are angered about what their children are being taught. A principal in Montgomery County, Maryland, emailed the entire school community to “make them aware” of a walkout, noting that all absences due to the protest would be excused. Backlash was so swift and severe that the principal has since resigned.
These protests do not happen in a vacuum. In many schools, Jewish students are seeing their peers cheerlead for terrorism with their teachers’ encouragement. No student should be forced to face this kind of hostility and harassment. No parent should be forced to send his or her child to a school where this sort of teacher-sponsored bullying is allowed or encouraged.
As Hamas tightens its death grip on Gaza, pro-Hamas protesters will desperately attempt to appear thoughtful and mainstream. But not unlike the group these protesters are supporting, they’re experts at using children as pawns.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on Wednesday. He was 100.
The German-born American served as a diplomat, academic and presidential adviser, and continued to impact American politics in the private sector after leaving office. His stamp on U.S. foreign policy spanned decades and he was responsible – for better or worse – for systematically changing the standing of the U.S., China, Russia and others.
After the news of his death broke, dignitaries from around the world commented on his life and legacy, including current and former secretaries of states, presidents and foreign diplomats.
Henry Kissinger holds the Bavarian Order of Maximilian during celebrations marking his 100th birthday. The highest honor in the Free State was presented to him earlier by Bavaria’s Minister President Söder. Fürth. Kissinger’s birthplace held the celebration to mark the 100th birthday of its honorary citizen. (Daniel Vogl/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the man currently in the position that Kissinger held across two presidencies, said Kissinger “set the standard” for being the senior U.S. diplomat.
“Secretary Kissinger really set the standard for everyone involved in this job,” Blinken said in Israel, during a meeting with Israel President Isaac Herzog. “I was very privileged to get his counsel many times, including as recently as about a month ago. He was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice. Few people were better students of history. Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly said Kissinger “left an incredible mark on America’s history and the world.”
“Henry Kissinger was a model of service and a great American,” Pompeo said. “From the day he came to the United States as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger dedicated his life to serving this great country and keeping America safe.”
He added: “He left an indelible mark on America’s history and the world. I will always be grateful for his gracious advice and help during my own time as Secretary. Always supportive and always informed, his wisdom made me better and more prepared after every one of our conversations.”
Henry Kissinger was a model of service and a great American.
From the day he came to the United States as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger dedicated his life to serving this great country and keeping America safe.
Former President George W. Bush also commented on Kissinger: “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices of Henry Kissinger. He worked in the Administrations of two Presidents and counseled many more.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement after the death of Kissinger, who he called “a great statesman, scholar, and friend.”
“Dr. Kissinger’s departure marks the end of an era, one in which his formidable intellect and diplomatic prowess shaped not only the course of American foreign policy but also had a profound impact on the global stage,” Netanyahu wrote.
It is with a heavy heart that I mourn the passing of a great statesman, scholar, and friend, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who left us at the age of 100.
Dr. Kissinger's departure marks the end of an era, one in which his formidable intellect and diplomatic prowess shaped not only the… pic.twitter.com/JdUEoHbA6e
The Israeli leader also described meeting with Kissinger just months ago in New York.
“I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Kissinger on numerous occasions, the most recent being just two months ago in New York. Each meeting with him was not just a lesson in diplomacy but also a masterclass in statesmanship,” Netanyahu said. “His understanding of the complexities of international relations and his unique insights into the challenges facing our world were unparalleled.”
He continued: “Henry Kissinger was not just a diplomat; he was a thinker who believed in the power of ideas and the importance of intellectual capital in public life. His contributions to the field of international relations and his efforts in navigating some of the most challenging diplomatic terrains are a testament to his extraordinary capabilities.”
“His legacy will continue to inspire and guide future generations of leaders and diplomats,” Netanyahu concluded.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People, Nov. 8, 2018 in Beijing. (Thomas Peter – Pool/Getty Images)
Chinese President Xi Jinping and senior Chinese officials commented on Kissinger’s death and sent messages of condolence to President Biden and others after his passing, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Thursday, Reuters reported.
Kissinger visited China more than 100 times, most recently meeting with Xi during a surprise trip to Beijing in July.
“During his lifetime, Dr. Kissinger attached great importance to Sino-US relations and believed that Sino-US relations were crucial to the peace and prosperity of China, the United States and the world,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin. “China and the United States must inherit and carry forward Dr. Kissinger’s strategic vision, political courage, and diplomatic wisdom, adhere to the important consensus reached by the Chinese and American presidents at their meeting in San Francisco, adhere to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, and promote the sound, stable and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations.”
During a news conference, the spokesperson said Kissinger made “historic” contributions to the legacy of early China-U.S. relations. He said China would remember him for his “sincere devotion and important contribution.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People, Nov. 8, 2018, in Beijing, China. (Thomas Peter – Pool/Getty Images)
Kissinger’s impact across the globe is evident decades after he left office and his foreign policies continue to shape global relations.
Hungarian President Katalin Novák described Kissinger, after his death, as “one of those who shaped international politics and so, history, in the second half of the 20th century.”
She added: “A great life, a great legacy. His call to end the war in Ukraine through a peace deal crafted in negotiations remains pertinent even today. Rest in peace.”
CEO Elon Musk unveiled the long-awaited Tesla Cybertruck at a live event at its Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. The futuristic-looking Cybertruck is the first electric vehicle Tesla offers that isn’t a sedan marks the company’s entry into the growing EV pickup market, joining rivals like Ford and Rivian. One advantage Elon Musk promises the Cybertruck has over the competition? It is bullet proof.
Tesla shareholders of record were invited to apply to attend and then were selected via a drawing. Prices were revealed and are much higher than original estimates.
Cybertruck Pricing
Rear-wheel drive variant: $66,990
All-wheel drive variant: $76,990
Cyberbeast variant: $99,990
Pricing range from $60,990 to $99,900, higher than the rumored $50,000 range predicted by industry and Wall Street analysts. Potential Cybertruck buyers were initially able to place a reservation for a refundable $100 deposit.
For comparison, the starting price for the Ford F-150 Lightning currently starts at $52,000 while Rivian raised prices for its quad-motor R1T pickup last year from $67,500 to $79,500.
Two days ago Musk said the highest end one would have a range of 500 miles and it’s actually 320.
Tesla completed its first production candidate Cybertruck in July, roughly four years after it was first announced and two years after production was initially planned to begin. Last year, Musk cited supply chain shortages affecting the sourcing of components as a factor in pushing back Cybertruck production to 2023.
At the Cybertruck’s unveiling in 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said it would cost roughly $40,000 – though the company hasn’t indicated its price ahead of Thursday’s launch. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via / Getty Images)
Tesla had previously touted the stainless steel exterior as being resistant to dents and corrosion, while Musk said the Cybertruck is bulletproof. It also has “armor glass” that was famously broken on a prototype Cybertruck at its November 2019 announcement event during a demonstration gone awry.
Musk has said Tesla aims to make 200,000 units of its Cybertruck per year. He had previously said it has the capacity to make over 125,000 Cybertrucks annually and that there is the potential to lift that total to 250,000 in 2025. It’s unclear how many Cybertrucks will be part of the first batch delivered or subsequent deliveries into early 2024.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk verbally reacts as the demonstration of Cybertruck’s armor glass went awry at its 2019 unveiling. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via / Getty Images)
During a Tesla earnings call in October, Musk said he wants to “temper expectations” around the Cybertruck even as he thinks it’s “our best product ever.”
“I do want to emphasize that there will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with the Cybertruck and then in making a Cybertruck cash flow positive,” Musk said. “This is simply normal when you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology, or for any new vehicle program but especially for one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale.”
“It’s a great product, but financially it will take – I don’t know – a year to 18 months before it is a significant positive cash flow contributor. I wish there was some way for that to be different, but that’s my best guess,” he explained. “The demand is off the charts, we have over a million people who have reserved the car. So it’s not a demand issue, but we have to make it, and we need to make it at a price people can afford. Insanely difficult things.”
A formal vote by the full House to authorize an impeachment inquiry will make “for a stronger case” against President Joe Biden for peddling influence through his family’s foreign business dealings, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Thursday. Jordan chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which is helping the Oversight and Accountability Committee probe the Bidens’ business dealings.
It was reported Wednesday that House Republicans are considering holding a formal vote next month to authorize the impeachment inquiry as the party looks to legitimize its investigation into wrongdoing.
“We would like to go to a formal vote for an impeachment inquiry. You don’t have to do that. We’re in an impeachment inquiry,” Jordan told “Wake Up America” co-host Rob Finnerty. “
“The speaker of the House said that there’s no requirement, but it’s a stronger case if you have to go to court to fight these things.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed some caution about the impeachment push, warning against a rush to judgment. But he says the evidence already uncovered by Republican chairmen is “alarming.”
Jordan told Finnerty that work remained before the House could consider an impeachment vote.
“We learned so much when we actually had Devon Archer, one of his [Hunter Biden’s] business partners, under oath in a deposition earlier this year … there’s a handful of key people that I think we do need to talk to, and then we make a decision based on all the facts, and what we may learn from those individuals, and how that squares with other testimony we’ve received and the documents.”
Jordan stressed that getting to a vote on impeachment “depends on the facts” and must be done properly.
“I do think this impeachment inquiry vote that we want to take in the House, and I think we’re gonna have the votes for it,” he said, “I think will be helpful when we inevitably have to go to court to get documents and to get these depositions done in the sequence that they need to be done,” the chair said.
Before his appearance concluded, Jordan was asked whether embattled Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., should be expelled from the House. The chamber is expected to vote Friday on whether to expel Santos, who faces criminal corruption charges and new accusations that he misspent campaign money.
“I’m against it,” Jordan said. “I think that’s always a decision between the person in office and the voters back in his or her district. That’s how our system works, and we have due process. I’m against it.”
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A temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war has been extended another day, according to mediator Qatar. The announcement Thursday morning came minutes before the cease-fire was set to expire. Hamas released two Israeli women from captivity several hours later, Israel’s military said.
Israel had agreed to extend the truce by one day for every 10 militant-held hostages who are freed. The cease-fire, which began Nov. 24 and was originally set to expire on Monday, has paused the deadliest fighting between Israel and Palestinians in decades.
Israel has vowed to resume the war in an effort to end Hamas’ 16-year rule of Gaza, but it’s facing mounting international pressure to spare southern Gaza a devastating ground offensive like the one that has demolished much of the north.
Roughly 240 hostages were captured by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that ignited the war. More than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. About 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, mostly during the initial incursion by Hamas.
— Truce in Israel-Hamas war is extended by a day, minutes before it was set to expire.
— Jake Sullivan says the White House is not seeking conditions on military aid to Israel, despite Biden’s comment.
— Israel compares Hamas to the Islamic State group. But the comparison misses the mark in key ways.
— U.S. Senate Majority Leader Schumer warns that antisemitism is on the rise as he pushes for Israel aid.
— A friendship forged over 7 weeks of captivity lives on.
Here’s what’s happening in the war:
The Israeli military said Thursday that two Israeli hostages were released from captivity in the Gaza Strip. In a statement, the army said the Red Cross had transferred the two women to Israeli forces. They were to be taken to an Israeli military base. The two hostages are among a larger group of Israelis expected to be released Thursday as part of the latest extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Israel was to free some 30 Palestinian prisoners later Thursday.
TEL AVIV, Israel — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reminding Israeli leaders of the need for Israel to comply with international law as it prosecutes its war against Hamas in Gaza. Blinken also said it is imperative that Israel take great care to avoid civilian casualties if it starts major military operations in southern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought shelter after fleeing their homes in the northern part of the territory. He said the U.S. places great importance on the resumption of a peace process that would eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes.
Speaking Thursday just hours after Israel and Hamas agreed at the last minute to a third extension of their cease-fire agreement, Blinken told Netanyahu that the U.S. will continue “support for Israel’s right to protect itself from terrorist violence in compliance with international humanitarian law and urged Israel to take every possible measure to avoid civilian harm,” the State Department said.
The message aligned with the Biden administration’s shifting rhetoric on the war, which began as a full-throated embrace of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks but gradually tempered as the number of Palestinian civilian casualties began to rise, prompting widespread international criticism. To prevent a further exponential increase in civilian casualties, Blinken “stressed the imperative of accounting for humanitarian and civilian protection needs in southern Gaza before any military operations there and urged immediate steps to hold settler extremists accountable for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank,” the State Department said Blinken told Netanyahu.
Blinken met with Netanyahu and his war Cabinet in Jerusalem before traveling to the occupied West Bank for talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The Israeli army has confirmed that Ofir Tzarfati, an Israeli believed to be held hostage in Gaza, is dead. Tzarfati was thought to be among the approximately 240 people taken hostage by Hamas on October 7. He had been celebrating his 27th birthday at a music festival with his girlfriend when Hamas militants stormed into Israel and killed at least 364 people at the festival and kidnapped many others. Tzarfati’s family was originally unclear what happened to him, but a few weeks later, the army notified the family that they believed that Tzarfati was being held in Gaza, according to media reports.
The army did not specify where Tzarfati’s body was identified
TEL AVIV, Israel — Two gunman opened fire on a crowded bus station at the entrance of Jerusalem, killing at least three people and wounding several others, according to Jerusalem police.
Another blatant violation of the ceasefire. A terrorist attack, murdering people waiting for the bus. https://t.co/0Vtbse4CMB
“The bus station was very crowded, which is why so many people were wounded,” said Magen David Adom spokesperson Zaki Heller told Army Radio. According to police, the two gunmen drove toward the bus stop armed with a handgun and an M16 rifle and opened fire. Both were killed at the scene by two soldiers who were near the bus stop.
Jerusalem police chief Doron Turgeman said police believe both attackers were from east Jerusalem. It was unclear if the attack was carried out by a Palestinian militant group or individuals acting on their own, or if it would have any impact on the truce in Gaza.
One 24-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene and another man died later at the hospital.
A year ago, a bomb exploded at the same bus stop, killing a 16-year-old boy and wounding 18.
JERUSALEM — Israel and Hamas agreed to extend a temporary truce by another day just minutes before it was set to expire, said Qatar, which has been mediating between the two sides. The truce was set to expire Thursday morning. Negotiations on extending it came down to the wire, with last-minute disagreements over the hostages to be freed by Hamas in exchange for another day of a halt in fighting.
The Qatari Foreign Ministry said the truce was being extended under the same terms as in the past, under which Hamas has released 10 Israeli hostages per day in exchange for 30 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel released another group of Palestinian prisoners early Thursday in exchange for 16 hostages freed hours earlier by the Islamic militant group Hamas in Gaza. A bus carrying some of the Palestinian detainees arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah before dawn. The releases came on the sixth day of a temporary truce in the Israel-Hamas war.
Most prominent among those freed was 22-year-old Ahed Tamimi, an activist who gained worldwide fame in 2017 after a video of her slapping an Israeli soldier went viral on social media. Israeli troops arrested her at her West Bank home on Nov. 6 for “inciting to terrorism” on her Instagram account. Her mother said Tamimi’s account had been hacked.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
“We’re talking about the Seventh Amendment and the right to a jury trial, and that—that is an important and ancient right, too,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said Wednesday during oral arguments in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy. (Photo: Rich Legg/E+/Getty Images)
Jack Fitzhenry is a senior legal policy analyst in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies of The Heritage Foundation.
Will ill-advised precedent or fundamental constitutional principles prevail when the right to a jury trial is at stake?
After two hours of oral argument Wednesday morning in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, that was the important issue confronting the Supreme Court. That, and whether the modern desire to empower the administrative state overcomes yet another constitutional check on the growth of an invasive central government. That’s because, as Alexis de Tocqueville aptly said, “The institution of the jury … places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed … and not in that of the government.”
The case arises from the SEC’s efforts to prosecute hedge fund manager George Jarkesy. The SEC alleges that he overestimated the value of his assets and made false claims to investors.
Tort of Fraud Under Common Law
The wrongs Jarkesy allegedly committed are strikingly similar to the centuries-old tort of fraud under common law. Had the commission or anyone else sued Jarkesy for his misrepresentations in court, the Seventh Amendment would have guaranteed Jarkesy the right to have a jury decide his case. Yet, the SEC chose not to go to court. Instead, it pursued its enforcement action under federal law through an in-house proceeding, in which an administrative law judge appointed by the commission would decide all questions, including whether Jarkesy was guilty of securities fraud.
To no one’s surprise, the commission enjoys a decidedly better win rate when one of its own is deciding the dispute.
Jarkesy challenged the commission’s decisions in court, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor on three grounds: First, the agency proceeding violated Jarkesy’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial; second, Congress had impermissibly delegated lawmaking authority to the commission; and third, the SEC’s administrative law judges were unconstitutionally protected from removal by the president.
The government appealed all three rulings to the Supreme Court, but it was the jury question that dominated nearly the entire oral argument.
‘Public Right’
Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher of the U.S. Department of Justice, representing the commission, maintained that the Seventh Amendment imposes no restriction on the executive branch’s ability to enforce federal law through administrative tribunals so long as the executive is enforcing a “public right,” one created by Congress and integrated within a federal regulatory scheme.
Here, Fletcher argued, federal law doesn’t protect the right of an individual to recover for losses caused by fraud, but rather, the public’s right to securities markets free from deception.
If the distinction sounds too fine, Fletcher at least had solid support in the Supreme Court’s past decisions; specifically, the 1977 decision in Atlas Roofing v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
There, the justices blessed both Congress’ creation of statutory rights closely related to the common law tort of negligence and the decision to have these new federal rights adjudicated in juryless administrative courts.
Yet the availability of that precedent did little to assuage the justices’ concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts posed hypotheticals searching for some limit on the government’s ability to create public rights and thereby avoid the Seventh Amendment’s jury right.
What About Car Crashes, Medical Malpractice?
Would the government’s interest in the interstate highway system allow it to implement legislation requiring all cases arising from vehicle accidents to be adjudicated in an administrative court? Would the government’s interest in regulating health care permit Congress to send all medical malpractice cases to a juryless tribunal?
Fletcher conceded that under Atlas Roofing, those scenarios were constitutionally permissible if Congress decided that the traditional tort claims covering accidents and medical injuries did not adequately protect the public.
Justice Neil Gorsuch took the theme further. In his hypothetical, the government had revived the long-reviled Sedition Act, a 1798 statute that criminalized criticism of the government and was enacted by the Federalist-controlled Congress to target members of the opposing Democratic-Republican Party.
The hypothetical Congress had assigned all defamation claims under the new Sedition Act to an administrative judge, who would decide them without a jury. Gorsuch asked Fletcher whether the lack of a jury for persons accused of defaming the government raised a constitutional problem.
Answering by Evasion
Palpably uncomfortable with the question, Fletcher sought to evade it by insisting that the First Amendment would prevent the hypothetical. But an audibly frustrated Gorsuch would not permit that evasion: “Forget about the First Amendment … too easy. We’re talking about the Seventh Amendment and the right to a jury trial, and that—that is an important and ancient right, too.”
Lacking further avenues for retreat, Fletcher fell back on Atlas Roofing and insisted that the Sedition Act scenario raised no Seventh Amendment problems because the jury right applies only in courts, not in administrative tribunals.
In answering one question, Fletcher raised another, however.
Justice Samuel Alito asked:
Doesn’t that seem like a pretty patent evasion of the Seventh Amendment to say this protection, which was regarded at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights as sufficiently important to merit inclusion in the Constitution, can be nullified simply by changing the label that is attached to a tribunal?
Fletcher resisted Alito’s concern, noting that Article III of the Constitution as well as the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment set some (indeterminate) limit on Congress’ ability to consign claims to juryless forums.
But Alito commented that whatever protections Article III and the Due Process Clause provide, the Constitution’s ratifiers found them inadequate because they insisted on adding the Seventh Amendment’s jury requirement.
Arguments Unmade Are Forfeited
The questions Fletcher fielded from the bench indicated a broad skepticism about the correctness of Atlas Roofing, but Jarkesy had not asked the court to overrule that case.
Arguments not made in the lower courts are typically forfeited. Constrained by that omission, Michael McColloch, counsel for Jarkesy, had to argue that Jarkesy could win even under Atlas Roofing.
McColloch maintained that Atlas Roofing permitted juryless decisions of new federal rights, whereas in this case, Congress simply codified a right closely analogous to common law fraud.
He argued further that the court had undermined Atlas Roofing in subsequent decisions, leaving Congress less leeway to avoid jury trials by creating public rights.
Two possible answers arose from McColloch’s colloquy with the court.
The first is that securities law allows the federal government to pursue conduct that would not meet the definition of fraud, but the specific conduct for which it pursued Jarkesy was quintessential fraud. Therefore, the commission could pursue non-fraudulent misrepresentations internally, but it must bring traditional fraud claims in courts, where jury rights attach.
The second possibility was posited by Alito, who mused that the elements of the federal cause of action may be a logical subset of the common law claim. If so, the logical connection between the federal right and the common law would be close enough to require the protection of the Seventh Amendment.
Questions Not Always Indicative of Votes
The court is still months away from a decision in this case, and the tenor of questions are not always reliable indicators of a justice’s vote. Roberts and Alito, as well as Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas, sounded consistently skeptical of the government’s arguments. Jarkesy’s failure to ask for the overruling of Atlas Roofing, however, may leave them without an avenue for channeling those frustrations into doctrinal change.
Meanwhile, questions from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated an inclination to hold that Atlas Roofing resolves Jarkesy’s case in the commission’s favor.
Several justices, including Kagan, were concerned by the apparent ease with which the federal government can avoid the right to a jury trial. Still, it’s uncertain that Jarkesy has distinguished his case from Atlas Roofing, and it is unlikely the court will risk overruling that case when it was not asked to do so.
But counterbalancing the regard for precedent is the regard for the judiciary’s traditional role as defender of the guarantees integral to American liberty. The founding generation placed the utmost importance on the guarantee of jury rights even in civil cases. That the federal government can so easily render that right nugatory would surely have dismayed them.
Perhaps the current court, sharing that dismay, will reconsider its approach in Atlas Roofing and ensure that the Seventh Amendment cannot be so easily evaded.
Supermodel Gigi Hadid—seen here in New York City on Oct. 25, 2022, at the WWD Honors—posted false information about Israel, but later apologized. (Photo: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)
Gigi Hadid, an American fashion model of Palestinian descent, has apologized for sparking outrage last week for making numerous false claims against Israel amid its war with Hamas, claiming Israel abducts, rapes and tortures children.
“Israel is the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war. Abduction, rape, humiliation, torture, murder of Palestinians years and years and years before Oct. 7, 2023,” Hadid claimed in a since-deleted Instagram story to her 79 million followers.
The post included a picture of Ahmad Manasra, a Palestinian who stabbed two Israelis with his cousin in 2015 when he was 13 years old and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, falsely portraying Manasra as a “child prisoner of war.”
But on Tuesday, Hadid posted on Instagram apologizing for this mistake. “I used the wrong example to make that point, and I regret that,” she wrote.
Hadid, 28, faced backlash across the internet, with many claiming her post was spreading false information and was antisemitic.
“Gigi Hadid isn’t shy about spreading lies to the world! … And she writes this while Hamas still holds … children that they kidnapped, including a baby only 10 months [old]!! The Hadid family is a family of liars that instigate hatred!” Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Hadid’s anti-Israel posts came amid a deal between Israel and Hamas to release 50 Israeli hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinians detained in Israeli jails and prisons. Israel said there would be one additional day of cease-fire for every 10 additional hostages Hamas released. Hamas has released about 100 hostages as of this writing.
Hadid’s father, Mohamed Hadid, was born into a Palestinian Muslim family in Nazareth, Israel. However, Gigi Hadid was born in Los Angeles. Her sister, Bella Hadid, also a fashion model, likewise supports the Palestinians.
The state of Israel has previously responded to Hadid’s allegations against the country by writing in an infographic, “There is nothing valiant about Hamas’ massacre of Israelis. Condemning Hamas for what it is (ISIS) is not anti-Palestine, and supporting Israelis in their right against barbaric terrorists is the right thing to do.”
Hadid also reposted an Instagram Reel about Israel supposedly harvesting Palestinians’ organs on Sunday. The video was originally published by a user named Umme Murtaza, on which Murtaza said, “Watch this disturbing video, where health officials admitted that Israeli authorities had harvested the organs of dead Palestinians for years without their consent.” Hadid did not apologize for sharing that Reel.
“Gigi Hadid is the only major supermodel that keeps spreading blood libels about Jews harvesting organs,” Tamar Schwarzbard, the head of digital operations at the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on X.
Bidenomics is a colossal disaster, yet the Democrats continue to try and pull the wool over Americans’ eyes, but it’s hard to hide the high cost of living. The average family has to come up with an additional $11,400 a year to have the same standard of living they had in January 2021. Biden brags about job growth but fails to reveal that many folks have to work 2 to 3 jobs to keep up in his economy.
Like in this cartoon, Biden’s Christmas tree falling over is symbolic of his entire presidency.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • 49 Abortion Centers Closed This Year, Now 14 States are Abortion-Free • Joe Biden is Trying to Push Christian Groups Out of Foster Care • Catholic Cardinal Raymond Burke Said Joe Biden Shouldn’t Receive Communion Because He’s Pro-Abortion • Unmarried Women Have 87% of Abortions, 10X Higher Abortion Rate Than Married Women
More Pro-Life News • New Argentina Vice President Wants to Pass Law Protecting Babies From Abortion • Births Have Increased 2.3% in Pro-Life States as Abortion Bans Save Babies • They Want to Legalize Abortions Up to Birth Nationwide, We Must Stand Up and Fight for the Babies • Radical Abortion Activists Firebomb Pro-Life Office in Rome • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Not a week goes by in which America’s ethically bankrupt media aren’t pushing lies about the state of the country’s elections, and their latest attack on Republican voters is no different.
On Wednesday, Stateline joined its fellow leftist “news” outlets in fomenting a Democrat-manufactured conspiracy theory that U.S. election workers everywhere are facing constant harassment from constituents. The insinuation, of course, is that these threats are coming from conservative voters who dared to raise questions about the conduct of the 2020 election.
At the center of Stateline’s hit piece is the recent spate of letters filled with fentanyl and other substances sent to local election offices in states such as Washington, Nevada, and Oregon. Instead of disclosing to its readers the evidence indicating the letters were potentially sent by far-left radicals tied to Antifa, Stateline immediately pivoted from reporting on the issue to advancing the left’s “election workers are under attack” narrative and pinning the blame on former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“Since the 2020 presidential election, state and local election officials nationwide have been bombarded with threats, as lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies around ‘rigged’ elections have fueled conspiracy theories and inspired violent reactions to the bureaucrats and temporary workers who run the United States’ democratic process,” the outlet claimed in hyperbolic fashion.
JUST IN: Video emerges of woman testifying that multiple absentee ballots we’re being received in sequential order with the date of November 0, 2020..
As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. In November 2022, for example, The Washington Post published an article containing assertions by Colorado Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office that it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” Unsurprisingly, the Post gave no indication that it bothered to fact-check these claims.
Just like the Post, however, Stateline was forced to include data from President Biden’s own Department of Justice showing that Democrats’ sky-is-falling elections narrative is total bunk.
In its article, the outlet discloses that, “As of late August, the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 people with making threats to election workers and political candidates since the task force was created in 2021, so far leading to nine convictions that came with yearslong criminal sentences.” August 2022 testimony from a DOJ official and a subsequent agency press release further revealed that out of roughly 1,000 communications directed toward election officials that were deemed “threatening and harassing” by the Election Threats Task Force since the force’s inception, only about 11 percent of those contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.”
Got that? In a country with a population of more than 335 million people, only about 100 individuals have been investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them have been officially charged. That doesn’t exactly sound like a widespread crisis.
For a corporate press that loves to toss around the term “conspiracy theory” whenever reporting on legitimate Republican concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections, leftist media outlets such as the Post and Stateline are perfectly fine with fomenting their own conspiracy theories to dishonestly smear their political opponents. In reality, Democrats couldn’t care less about the “security” of American elections. All they care about is acquiring and maintaining power.
The media-wide effort to cast Republicans as threats to “democracy” isn’t just designed to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. It’s to disincentivize conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.
From elections to lawfare, Democrats have no interest in playing by the same rules as everyone else. And if that means they have to recruit their media allies to push debunked propaganda about Republicans, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday.
According to the heavily redacted document issued to then-Twitter in January, the court ordered the social media giant to forfeit a bevy of information regarding Trump’s account, including “advertising information, including advertising IDs, ad activity, and ad topic preferences,” as well as IP addresses “used to create, login, and use the account” and privacy and account settings.
The warrant also demanded information such as Trump’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.
Though the warrant was first covered in August, it was again released as part of a court order after numerous media organizations filed to obtain the document to shed light on the Smith-led special counsel’s “investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol,” according to the New York Post. Smith previously indicted Trump in August on several bogus charges related to the former president’s challenging of the 2020 election results in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021.
But it wasn’t just Trump’s Twitter account that Smith and his cronies were targeting. The special counsel’s warrant also sought data on Twitter users who interacted with the former president’s account. Among the information Smith sought was a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” during the aforementioned timeframe. Smith similarly demanded that Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, fork over a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account.
Smith and his team went even further, seeking to acquire data on Twitter users who engaged with Trump’s tweets in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. This included “all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump], as well as all tweets that include the username associated with [Trump’s account] (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”
According to the Post, Smith’s warrant was issued to then-Twitter “along with a nondisclosure order, instructing the company not to notify Trump about the search.” Twitter initially bucked Smith’s demand, arguing that to forfeit such information to the government constituted a violation of the First Amendment. The social media giant ultimately complied with the warrant but was fined $350,000 for failing to meet the special counsel’s demands by deadline.
In the heavily redacted court filing opposing Twitter’s legal attempts to notify Trump of the search, Smith baselessly claimed that telling the former president about the unprecedented seizure “would result in a statutorily cognizable harm,” as Trump is “a sophisticated actor with an expansive platform.”
“The [Non-Disclosure Order] was granted based on facts showing that notifying the former president would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial,” said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Nearly every other word listed under “The Non-Disclosure Order” section of the filing is redacted.
Smith’s seizure of Trump’s personal social media information and those who engaged with the then-president’s posts isn’t all that surprising given the special counsel’s weaponization of the government against Trump thus far. In addition to indicting Trump, Smith filed a motion in September to institute a gag order on the 45th president, effectively stifling his First Amendment right to criticize the very government attempting to silence him. That gag order was ultimately approved by D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, a left-wing Obama appointee with a track record of highly partisan court rulings.
Trump’s legal team has since appealed the order to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and has threatened to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court given the “unconstitutional” nature of the mandate.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. (Photo Illustration: Paul Bradbury/Getty Images)
Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called academic achievement gap by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.
As Evanston, Illinois, School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.”
Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, it offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.
Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.
Of course, federal nondiscrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.
“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”
Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about 1 in 9 black students and 1 in 7 Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.
Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.
“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand.
In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights nondiscrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.
“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”
Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the City Council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past … ”
Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists—the backbone of the abolition movement—and incorporated in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.
Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”
Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”
Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students—white, black, and Latino—who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.
“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”
“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”
“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told The Washington Stand. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years.
“Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”
“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”
America’s educational establishment—such as national teachers unions and education training programs—is pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. It instructs students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.
Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.
Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”
This article is part one of Crisis in New York, a series examining the effects public policies have on the city’s already strained housing, law enforcement and drug services.
NEW YORK CITY — Frank Tammaro, a 94-year-old Army veteran, loved the senior center he’d called home for five years until he was told to find somewhere new to live.
“I felt horrible,” Tammaro told Fox News. “It’s no joke getting thrown out of a house.”
Months later, after two moves and an injury that put him in the hospital, the senior was living with his daughter when he learned migrants were moving into his old residence, free of charge.
A lifelong New Yorker, Tammaro says he grew up in the “slums” of the Lower East Side during the ‘30s and ’40s. “I do get upset when I see them handing out all this money and all these things, and I’m paying taxes and getting kicked out,” he said. “I’ve never got anything from the city. Or the state.”
Tammaro planned to live out his years at the Island Shores Senior Residence when notices went up in September 2022 informing residents the facility was shutting down and they needed to pack up and leave by March. Many of the 53 seniors living there, including Tammaro, ignored the letters for months until it was brought to their attention that they only had weeks to find somewhere else to live.
“It was scary,” Tammaro recalled. “Very scary. Especially when I don’t get around like I used to. I didn’t know where I was going.”
The facility’s owner, a New York City nonprofit called Homes for the Homeless, said in a statement that it intended to sell Island Shores “to focus on its core mission of serving homeless families” and the preferred buyer “would be another senior operator.”
Staff assured the upset seniors that Island Shores would likely be sold and reopened. However, Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, was skeptical of the claim and reached out to the building’s management for answers.
Frank Tammaro lived in Island Shores Senior Residence for five years before he was told he and all the other residents needed to move out by March 1. (Fox News/Megan Myers)
“We knew something was going to go in there,” Annunziata said. “They kept saying, ‘oh, they’re going to sell it. They’re going to sell it.’ That’s what they kept telling me.”
During the Korean War, Tammaro served stateside for two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps fixing telephone lines and improving communication between military camps. He was one of eight veterans who lived in Island Shores before it shut down.
“I was not in combat,” Tammaro said. “But these boys that went over and went into combat — and now they’re all settled in there with their lives and everything else — and they’re all disrupted, it isn’t fair.”
When he was evicted from Island Shores, the 94-year-old had difficulty finding a new assisted living facility that suited his needs.
“I was pretty slow getting out,” Tammaro said. “I figured they were gonna have my luggage on the curb.”
The 94-year-old veteran was living with his daughter just a few minutes from Island Shores when he learned the senior center was being converted into a temporary shelter for migrants. (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers )
Shortly after moving to another senior residence, Tammaro had a fall that landed him in the hospital. He told his daughter he didn’t want to return to the new facility.
“He hated it there,” Annunziata said. “And for somebody his age, why should he live the rest of his life someplace he didn’t like?”
In the end, Annunziata moved her father into her home in Midland Beach, New York, where she cares for him around the clock.
“I can’t leave him home alone. … I raised my kids already. They’re all grown up,” she said. “I mean, he’s a piece of cake, but still he’s 94 years old.”
In August, Tammaro found out along with the rest of the community that Homes for the Homeless had made an arrangement with city hall to move migrants into Island Shores.
The facility was one of 200 buildings converted into emergency shelters to house some of the 130,000 migrants that landed in New York City after crossing the southern border since October 2022. The influx of asylum seekers has stretched the city’s budget and many of its services to their limits, with Mayor Eric Adams saying they are in “a desperate environment” during his trip to Mexico in October. And with 10,000 new refugees entering the city each month, he said there is “no end” in sight.
In September, 15 asylum-seeking families moved into the Island Shores. As the news spread, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the facility, and 10 people were arrested for trying to block a bus with migrants from reaching the building, according to law enforcement.
Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, is still angry that her father was kicked out of his home and said the situation is “not fair to anybody.” (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers)
“I don’t understand it at all. It’s not fair to anybody,” Annunziata said. “These migrants, they’re getting everything. They’re getting everything and I can’t get nothing for [Tammaro]. It angers me.”
She said she’s struggled to get help for her father. His insurance rejected any long-term request for care.
“I can’t even get him an aide. I only could get him an aide for 30 days and then they cancel it,” Annunziata told Fox News. “So what, he has to pay for it then?”
“Meanwhile, [migrants] get everything. And he’s not entitled to anything,” she added
After the “horrible experience,” Tammaro has settled in with his daughter, only a few minutes away from his old home, which is now called the Midland Beach Migrant Center.
“I felt bitter at the beginning,” Tammaro told Fox News. “But I’m satisfied where I am now.”
“I was satisfied where I was until they threw me out,” he added. “But making the best of a bad situation, that’s what we’re doing.”
Annunziata remains angry about how her father was treated.
“They’re worried about the migrants more than they’re worried about the U.S. citizens,” she said.
Homes for the Homeless declined to comment.
Megan Myers is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals.
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Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Democrats and Biden are in a bit of a panic as more Black votes are shifting to Trump, according to the latest polls. Some, because of Biden’s mental deterioration and his age, but also because of how badly Biden has handled his job with the economy, crime, foreign affairs, and the border. One mantra expressed by some in the black community is “the more they Indict, the more we unite,” which could also explain their shift toward Trump.
The Left labeled Larry Elder “the Black face of white supremacy. but how will they label whole communities, that have left the Democrat party?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Even as social media addiction accelerated under Covid lockdowns, Meta jettisoned internal alarms about mental health dangers. Following Frances Haugen’s 2021 whistleblower testimony, attorneys general from 42 states filed consumer protection lawsuits against Meta.
The “Facebook Files,” a Wall Street Journal investigation based on Meta’s internal documents, showed that the social media company “ignored their own studies revealing Instagram’s photo-sharing and editing app harms girls.” Capitalizing on the need to connect during lockdown, Meta helped propel young women into gender facilities.
When you set up a social media profile, you begin a process of virtualized identity that makes you a target for ad campaigns. Bots track people exploring “gender issues.” As Michelle Santiago Cortés’ observed, “Our algorithmically orchestrated encounters with people … on social media start to feel preordained, as if the fact that the algorithm put something on our path Means Something™.” Meta hid the many adverse effects — including anxiety and body-image dysmorphia — tied to compulsive online behavior such as infinite scrolling.
The “Facebook Files” disclosed built-in Instagram features that made it more harmful than similar youth-targeting apps. In particular, according to internal documents, “Social comparison is worse on Instagram.” Social comparisons on visual platforms, such as Instagram, resemble past research on body image. That research showed that young girls’ body image worsened when they compared themselves to images of cover girls.
The Self as an Object to Edit
What’s worse now is that, according to JAMA Plastic Facial Surgery, selfies and photo editing detach users from their own bodies, “making us lose touch with reality.” A dangerous object orientation toward the body occurs.
Creativity and intelligence cannot withstand making comparisons and spiraling into envy. Even a sophisticated awareness of the objectifying effect of social media will not protect young people from it. A study of youth reactions to their own untouched versus filtered photos showed that their resulting critical awareness is insufficient to avoid social comparisons: “Although the majority of the teens said they actually preferred their original, unretouched photos, every single one chose to digitally alter their image for social media.”
Cell phone users occasionally walk into traffic. Why wouldn’t preoccupation with an unfolding digital presentation lend to disembodied living in your head and ensuing self-estrangement?
The face app visually re-aligns the facial contour, such as the jawline, to achieve a more masculine appearance. While the initial experience is euphoric, the emotional high is not lasting. One Reddit thread makes this clear: “So I just got face app to see what the hype was all about. And let me just say its [sic] pretty awesome, but as soon as I finished one picture I was washed over with so much dysphoria and just felt sad that that wasn’t me.”
Depersonalization Through Photo Editing
Meta relies on AI to filter content. This includes machine learning and rule-based character pattern-matching algorithms, including liking and contextual cues to identify and capitalize on curiosity about gender issues. The best AI in the world cannot filter out image comparisons that undermine an individual’s mood and self-esteem. This is especially true with face apps, which invite the user to dwell in a detached way on her own physical appearance. Moreover, these apps allow users to swap in a dramatically altered appearance of themselves as the opposite sex.
It’s easy to recognize the excessive focus on body image in those who begin to experience appearance incongruence — the feeling that one’s actual appearance does not match one’s true appearance. If it overshadows real life, the “trans alter,” as Eliza Mondegreen calls the virtual performance of self, becomes discordant with embodied existence. In this context, photo editing can take on outsized significance. Psychologists note that “photo-editing may exacerbate disordered body image in vulnerable individuals.” According to its own science, Meta knew its Instagram photo-sharing app “was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls.”
The use of social media, especially Instagram, is as addictive as drug use. Instagram incorporates short, exciting videos to trigger infinite scrolling. “Meta did not disclose that its algorithms were designed to capitalize on young users’ dopamine responses and create an addictive cycle of engagement,” according to a report. The more preoccupied a person becomes, the more likely she is to experience mental health issues such as dissociation.
Transgenderism, the New Aspiration
Even a brief amount of time spent filtering photos leads to an increase in girls’ anxiety, according to researchers. This is because Instagram and other platforms introduce an emotional feedback loop, in which waves of dysphoria are punctuated by spikes of euphoria. In the online world, where bots are ubiquitous, every female who doesn’t accept her sex has access to a virtual trans surgeon. Social media feeds a dynamic of nonstop clicking for more hits of dopamine.
Although they are aware of digital distortion online, teens looking at face apps see plastic surgery results and aspire to physically embody their own retouched images. Dr. Helen Egger, a child psychiatrist, notes that “it’s a dopamine hit, it’s like ‘woah I’m popular, I like this feeling, I want to do it again,’ it can feed on itself.” Social affirmation of face swaps, within a cycle of addictive feedback loops, validates the urgent demand for medical intervention.
The trouble for social media users involves its capacity not only to reflect reality but to project a desired or imagined reality. Sociologist Charles Cooley coined a theory of the looking-glass self to explain how we develop our self-concept through interaction, especially when noticing how we’re perceived by others. In this way, social media is particularly addictive in promising to show us to ourselves in more complete ways than even a mirror can.
At the same time, social media is not a mirror held up to reality at all. It’s an unreal screen for public consumption that spreads acceptance of transgender surgeries. Social media in this sense is not the playful leisure activity it appears to be. Staring into the mirror-like cell phone screen can deepen an out-of-body experience and a preoccupation with one’s sex.
A Trans ‘Rite of Passage’
For girls who deny their sex, Instagram’s face-swapping filters have been attributed to “finally ‘cracking their egg’ — a rite of passage” when a trans identity is apparently firmly established in the mind as a visually concrete identity: “The Snapchat girl filter was the final straw in dropping a decade’s worth of repression,” said Josie, an early-30s man from Cincinnati who claims to be a woman. “[I] saw something that looked more ‘me’ than anything in a mirror, and I couldn’t go back.”
In the past, the young were tricked into altering their aspirational goals by mimicking airbrushed models. Today, teens fixate on their own filtered image and dream about cosmetic surgery.
In May, an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general warned of social media’s negative effect on anxiety and body-image disorders. In this Meta face-changing ecology, every confused girl on Instagram can instantly see a tougher image of herself, able to withstand the worries that assail her. Something, she feels, has suddenly jelled.
Dr. Faith Kuzma is a retired Assistant Professor of English. Kuzma has written for Salvo, The Canadian Patriot, American Spectator, Psych Reg, and Mercator Net, among others.
Terrorist sympathizers are out in full force spreading fake news about Israel’s treatment of its prisoners, as the country executes a swap with Hamas for hostages taken by the terrorist group on Oct. 7. Here are four of the most outrageous lies circulating on social media.
1. Israel Is ‘Only Country That Keeps Children As Prisoners’
This week, American supermodel Gigi Hadid shared a post to her more than 79 million Instagram followers condemning Israel as “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war.” The post, which has been deleted, claimed Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Mansara was “abducted” by Israeli officials at 12 years old and “has endured solitary confinement despite his severe health condition.”
According to the New York Post, Mansara went on a “stabbing rampage” in East Jerusalem with his 15-year-old cousin in 2015 that left a 20-year-old security guard and a 13-year-old boy with critical injuries. Mansara was convicted of two counts of attempted murder after his cousin was killed in the attack by a police officer.
“He initially received a sentence of 12 years in prison, which was later reduced” to nine and a half years, the Post reported. “During his incarceration, Mansara has repeatedly attempted to harm himself and others. He has been in and out of solitary confinement, drawing the ire of Amnesty International, a nongovernmental human rights advocacy group.”
Terrorist sympathizing aside, Hadid’s post claiming Israel is “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war” is fake news on its face. Roughly 30 children — some of whom still remain in captivity nearly two months later — were taken hostage by Hamas, after the terrorist group slaughtered Israeli women and children in the Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200.
Unsurprisingly, child hostages held by Hamas have been subject to physical and emotional abuse. A 12-year-old was even reportedly placed in solitary confinement for more than two weeks.
🚨 Hamas forced hostages to watch videos of the 7/10 atrocities.
This is Eitan (13), He spent 51 as a hostage of Hamas. terrorists killed his father in front of him and took him to Gaza.
While held hostage, Hamas forced him to view videos of the 7/10 Atrocities.
2. Israel at Fault for Injuries Sustained by Suicide Bomb
In another episode of terrorist-sympathizing disinformation, anti-Israel pundits spread false narratives online about Israa Jaabis, who was released from Israeli custody in a prisoner swap on Monday. They claimed Jaabis’s disfigured condition was a result of Israeli brutality after nearly a decade of incarceration.
“For those of you who don’t know who Israa is, this is a photo before and after what the [Israel Defense Forces] has done to her,”wrote one user on X. The side-by-side images show Jaabis with a permanently scarred face from severe burns. But the IDF didn’t do that to her; she did it to herself in 2015 when she attempted to kill scores of civilians by detonating a suicide bomb.
3. Hamas Held Hostages in ‘Reasonable Conditions’
Dominic Waghorn, the international affairs editor for Sky News, wrote on X that hostages held by Hamas were “held in reasonable conditions.”
“Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar met with the Israeli hostages a day after they were taken in tunnels under Gaza and told them they would not be harmed and would be returned as part of a hostage deal,” Waghorn wrote. “Undermines the Israeli Hamas = ISIS storyline.”
Testimony from released prisoners, however, has revealed “horrors” endured by those held captive. Hostages were reportedly forced to use plastic chairs for beds and were given irregular meals. One 84-year-old hostage was even hospitalized in critical condition upon being released.
4. Israeli Hostage Looks ‘Thankful’ For Captivity
Maree Campbell, who claims in her bio on X to be an international relations analyst and “journalist,” contended that a released Israeli hostage looked appreciative to her captors.
“I’m not a facial expression expert,” Campbell professed on X, “but judging by the look in her eyes and the expression on her face, I’d say that is a look of appreciation and thanks.”
“Might it be that she is saying thanks for being treated unexpectedly well whilst in captivity?” Campbell asked.
A community note on the platform clarifies that the hostage in the photo, Mia Regev, was shot by Palestinian terrorists before her abduction.
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.
Israel confirms release of 5th hostage group by Hamas as final day of cease-fire nears
Israel confirmed a list of 50 female Palestinian prisoners it is willing to release in exchange for 20 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza over the next two days. Israel and Hamas agreed to a two-day extension to their cease-fire. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Tony Blinken is set to return to the Middle East to negotiate the flow of aid into Gaza.
Israel and Hamas entered the first day of a two-day extension to their cease-fire agreement on Tuesday as Israel continues to stay its hand in exchange for hostages.
Israel secured the release of at least 69 hostages since the cease-fire began on Friday, exchanging them for 150 Palestinian criminals held in Israeli prisons
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Israel-Hamas war: IDF announces custody of 12 newly-released hostages
Members of the Red Cross prepare to transport hostages released by Hamas in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on November 28, 2023. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced on Tuesday night that the 12 newly-released hostages are currently inside Israeli territory.
In a statement, the IDF said that their special forces division is “currently with the 12 released hostages.”
“After an initial medical assessment, the released hostages will continue to be accompanied by IDF soldiers as they make their way to Israeli hospitals, where they will be reunited with their families,” the press release added. “The Israel Defense Forces salutes and embraces the released hostages upon their return home.”
The Israeli military said that they remain determined to bring home all of the hostages that were kidnapped by Hamas from Israel.
“The IDF, together with the entire Israeli security establishment, will continue to operate to bring home all the hostages,” the press release continued. “The IDF Spokesperson reiterates the importance of demonstrating patience and sensitivity during this time out of respect for the released hostages and their families.”
Israel-Hamas war: Mother of hostage says she is concerned for son but ‘thrilled’ at captive releases
The mother of a hostage who was taken captive by Hamas terrorists says that she is overjoyed to see hostages being released during the Israel-Hamas cease-fire.
Rachel Goldberg, whose son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was kidnapped on October 7, appeared on “America Reports” Tuesday to talk about the latest developments with the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
“I am actually thrilled with the how the progression of these hostages being returned…I just saw that a dear friend of ours, wife and daughter, were released tonight,” Goldberg explained. “I can’t describe how happy these last few nights of seeing these children going back to their families [make me].”
The mother said that while she feels hopeful, she also remains concerned for her son. Goldberg-Polin was reportedly injured by terrorists and lost a limb.
“I worry about my son, who I know was in critical condition…and will now permanently live the rest of his life without a limb,” she explained. “I’m concerned for his health. I don’t know if he’s getting the antibiotics that he needs. I’m hoping that he got the surgery that he needed.”
“But I am thrilled with the releases of all of these hostages,” Goldberg added.
Israel-Hamas war: Iranian drone flies close to USS Eisenhower in Persian Gulf
U.S. maritime posture in Middle East as of November 28, 2023.
A U.S. official told Fox News that an Iranian drone flew near a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East on Tuesday.
The drone allegedly flew near the USS Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf. The ship was in international waters at the time.
The Iranian drone reportedly ignored multiple warnings, according to the U.S. official. The U.S. military is considering the incident unsafe and unprofessional on Iran’s part.
Fox News Digital’s Liz Friden contributed to this report.
Jewish students at Indiana University denounce antisemitism on campus
Entrance sign into campus at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. (Photo by: Don & Melinda Crawford/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Jewish student organizations at Indiana University (IU) issued a statement Tuesday denouncing antisemitism on their campus amid the Israel-Hamas war
IU student Ethan Fine posted the statement on X, in response to allegedly antisemitic remarks made by IU’s student government president.
“The Jewish groups who signed onto the letter represent the vast majority of the estimated 4,500 Jewish students at IU,” Fine wrote on X. “After a meeting with the student body president, it was clear to us that she is no longer fit to serve.”
“We are calling on [the student body president] to resign and for the members of her executive branch to be replaced,” Fine added. “We stand together. We stand united against antisemitism.”
Israel-Hamas war: Senator Chuck Schumer to give speech about antisemitism tomorrow
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a news conference following a closed-door lunch meeting with Senate Democrats at the U.S. Capitol November 28, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Senator Chuck Schumer announced on Tuesday that he will be making a “major address” about antisemitism on Wednesday, as the Israel-Hamas war continues.
Schumer, who serves as the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senator, called hatred against Jews “a crisis” in the United States.
“Antisemitism is a crisis in the country,” Schumer wrote on X. “As the highest-ranking Jewish elected official, I feel compelled to speak out about it.”
“I’ll be giving a major address on it tomorrow,” the senator added.
The U.S. military on Tuesday delivered its first of three rounds of humanitarian aid intended for the people of Gaza, according to the Pentagon.
Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Ryder told reporters that the U.S. airlifted 24.5 metric tons of U.N. humanitarian supplies to provide “vitally needed medical supplies, warm clothing, and food and nutrition assistance to the people of Gaza.”
USAID requested that the supplies be transported via a US Air Force C-17 cargo plane, Ryder said. The aircraft arrived earlier Tuesday in Egypt where it was to be transported into Gaza and distributed by U.N. agencies.
Israel-Hamas war: Senator Thom Tillis recalls watching ‘horrific’ video of Hamas attack
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) arrives to the U.S. Capitol Building on September 26, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced on X that he and other Senators watched graphic footage related to Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Tuesday.
“Today, my Senate colleagues and I watched footage of the devastation caused by Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack against Israel,” Tillis wrote on X. “What we saw was not for the not for the faint-hearted. “
The North Carolina Republican then said that Hamas was “pure evil and must be destroyed.”
“Hamas has made it clear that they will stop at nothing to eliminate Israel and its people,” the senator added. “As Israel’s longtime ally and friend, we must do everything we can to support its efforts to defend itself and destroy Hamas.”
DOD says US Navy, Israeli-owned ship not intended target of Houthi missiles
In an undated photo released by Zodiac Maritime, the tanker Central Park is seen. Attackers seized the tanker linked to Israel off the coast of Aden, Yemen, on Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023, authorities said. (Zodiac Maritime via AP)
The Pentagon said Tuesday that the USS Mason and Central Park, an Israeli-owned tanker, were not the intended target of Houthi missiles that fired from Yemen over the weekend.
The missiles came after five armed assailants attempted to seize the MV Central Park, an Israeli-owned tanker operated by Zodiac Maritime, in the Gulf of Aden on Sunday. The vessel sent out a distress call and forces from the USS Mason, an American destroyer, responded.
The five assailants attempted to flee in their small boats, but the U.S. forces pursued them and fired warning shots, resulting in their eventual surrender, according to Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder.
Israel-Hamas war: 4-year-old hostage Avigail Idan discharged from hospital
Avigail Idan was held in captivity by Hamas.
Avigail Idan, the 4-year-old girl who was released by Hamas captors on Sunday evening, was discharged from Schneider Children’s Medical Center on Tuesday.
“Avigail aged 4, was discharged from hospital earlier today,” Schneider Children’s Medical Center announced in a statement. “The staff at Schneider Children’s Medical Center were excited alongside her at this achievement.”
“Avigail was discharged today following treatment from the moment of her return to Israel on Sunday, November 26, 2023, in the specially assigned department at Schneider Children’s Medical Center,” the statement continued.
The hospital said that Idan was treated by “psychosocial” providers after being held in captivity for nearly two months. Her parents were killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 before she was kidnapped.
“Since her arrival, the medical and psychosocial team at Schneider accorded her all-embracing medical and emotional care,” the press release added.
US Dept of Education opens investigation of Harvard over antisemitism on campus
Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 14, 2023. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is opening an investigation into Harvard University following antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, Fox News has learned.
In a letter obtained by Fox News Digital dated Tuesday, Kristi R. Harris, Chief Attorney for the OCR Boston Office said that the OCR will be opening an investigation into whether Harvard “failed to respond to alleged harassment of students based on their national origin (shared Jewish ancestry and/or Israeli) in a manner consistent with the requirements of Title VI.”
“Please note that opening the complaint for investigation in no way implies that OCR has made a determination on the merits of the complaint. During the investigation, OCR is a neutral factfinder, collecting and analyzing relevant evidence from you, the University, and other sources, as appropriate,” the letter says.
Israeli doctor gives update on 84-year-old hostage Elma Avraham’s condition: ‘She is conscious’
A Red Cross vehicle carrying newly released hostages drives towards the Rafah border point with Egypt, in the southern Gaza Strip on November 28, 2023. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)
An Israeli doctor says that 84-year-old hostage Elma Avraham is in better condition after she was rushed to a hospital upon being released from Hamas.
Avraham “suffered from many underlying illnesses and received medication essential to her life on a regular basis before she was kidnapped,” according to Soroka Medical Center director Moti Klein.
“Elma was evacuated in a very difficult condition when all vitals, all her vital signs, level of consciousness, pulse, blood pressure, blood, body temperature and blood sugar were extremely, extremely low,” Klein explained. “This is the reason for the definition of immediate danger to her life.”
Klein added that her condition was “most likely caused by not receiving those essential medications.” He reported that upon arrival, she was “unconscious in a very difficult situation while she was breathing and receiving support for her collapsed buddy system.”
“I am happy to inform that in the last few hours there has been improvement in her condition,” the doctor continued. “She is conscious, she is breathing on her own and does not need the same level of support she needed upon arrival. She was responding well to the treatment given to her and is receiving and still receiving.”
Hamas’ youngest hostage, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas, has been handed over to another terrorist group in Gaza along with his family, according to the IDF, and the news is leaving a distraught relative to plead for her loved ones’ safe return.
“I can’t say we are surprised about the level of cruelty and inhumane behavior from Hamas in this deal, in this cease-fire,” Yifat Zailer, cousin of Kfir’s mother Shiri, told “FOX & Friends” on Tuesday.
“They signed an agreement to release all women and children. Tomorrow is the last day supposedly of this cease-fire, of this agreement as it was signed. And there is still no news about my family, if they’ll be returned or not.”
10 Israelis, 2 others held by Hamas are freed, IDF says
10 Israelis, 2 others held by Hamas are freed, IDF says
The International Red Cross has taken custody of 12 hostages released by Hamas on Tuesday, Israel says.
Israeli Defense Forces say 10 of the hostages are Israeli citizens and two more are foreigners. It did not clarify the nationality of the non-israelis, however.
The announcement marks the 5th group of hostages to be released by Hamas since Israel agreed to a cease-fire with the terrorist group on Friday. The cease-fire is expected to continue through Wednesday.
“A short while ago, Red Cross representatives transferred the 12 hostages to Egypt,” the IDF said in a statement. “The released hostages’ convoy is currently making its way through Egypt to the meeting point with our soldiers at Kerem Shalom. Security representatives will verify the identity of the released hostages at the meeting point. The families of the hostages are being updated by IDF representatives with the latest available information.”
The Israeli hostages released Tuesday have been identified as Ditza Heiman, 84; Tamar Metzger, 78; Ada Sagi, 75; Merav Tal, 53; Rimon Kirsht, 36; Ofelia Roitman, 77; Gabriela Leimberg, 59; Mia Leimberg 17;.Noralin Agojo Babadilla, 60 and Clara Marman, 62.
Jewish groups sue University of California over ‘unchecked spread’ of antisemitism
The Sather Tower on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California, U.S., on Friday, June 4, 2021. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
A coalition of Jewish groups filed a lawsuit agains the University of California on Tuesday, alleging the institution is allowing the “unchecked spread” of antismeitism across its campuses.
The Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, filed the lawsuit in California early Tuesday. The lawsuit comes as antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed across the country and the globe, especially on college campuses.
The lawsuit points to 23 student groups at UC Berkeley Law School that require new members of guest speakers to disavow Israel, according to Politico.
“Conditioning a Jew’s ability to participate in a student group on his or her renunciation of a core component of Jewish identity is no less pernicious than demanding the renunciation of some other core element of a student’s identity — whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity,” the lawsuit says. “No such imposition is required — or would be remotely tolerated — of other students.”
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are facing a closing window to approve new funding for Israel and Ukaine as the two countries continue their war efforts.
President Biden’s administration has called on Congress to fund both Israel and Ukraine in a single bill, but many Republicans oppose such an idea. While Republicans overwhelmingly support funding for Israel’s war agaisnt Hamas, the party’s opposition to funding for Ukraine’s military has slowly grown since Russia’s invasion.
UN ‘downplayed’ Hamas violence to perpetuate image of Israel as ‘the aggressor’: Israeli professor
UN ‘downplayed’ Hamas violence to perpetuate image of Israel as ‘the aggressor’: Israeli professor
Israel is attempting to get the United Nations to recognize and condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes against Israeli women and girls, allegedly perpetrated during the Hamas-led terror attack on Oct. 7.
During a meeting at the U.N. in Geneva on Monday, Israeli officials attempted to raise awareness of the alleged sexual violence against women and urged the international body – which often condemns global injustices and human rights violations – not to keep quiet about the issue.
Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, an associate professor at the Bar-Ilan University, who spoke at the event, told Reuters that the U.N. rights bodies have “downplayed” and “minimized” sexual violence to perpetuate Israel as “the aggressor” in the current conflict.
“Among the war crimes and the crimes against humanity that Hamas committed on October 7th were also sexual crimes, sexual assaults, rapes, that were part, that were a systematic part of their attack, of the massacre and we are expecting a strong condemnation,” she said. “We expected recognition of that. We expected a clear and loud statement that says that there is no justification for using the bodies of women as a weapon of war. None of this came until now.”
The professor said she was “deeply concerned, because of the complete lack of acknowledgment, of recognition by United Nations bodies and entities and by the international human rights world, lack of recognition that indeed Hamas committed horrific sexual crimes against women, against women and girls, on October 7th in Israel.”
Israeli hostage briefly escaped Hamas before locals handed him to terrorists
Israeli hostage briefly escaped Hamas before locals handed him to terrorists
One of the recently released Hamas hostages had previously escaped imprisonment and survived for days in the rubble of Gaza before locals recaptured him, according to a report.
“He tried getting to the border. But he didn’t have the capacity to understand where he was or where he needed to go, so he couldn’t navigate through the open field,” Ron Krivoi’s aunt, who spoke about his struggle during an appearance on KAN’s Reshet Bet radio on Monday morning.
Russian-Israeli Krivoi departed Gaza as part of the third group released as part of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas brokered through Qatar. Both parties agreed Tuesday to extend the cease-fire by two days, conditional on the release of more hostages.
The 25-year-old was working at the Supernova festival on Oct. 7 as a sound technician when Hamas terrorists attacked, according to The Times of Israel. Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally requested Hamas include Krivoi in the second wave of released hostages as part of a separate deal.
Krivoi’s aunt claimed that he had not remained imprisoned the entire time, having briefly escaped and survived for four days in the ruins of the Gaza Strip, The Jerusalem Post reported.
She explained that Hamas had kept him in a residential building during his imprisonment, but then the Israel Defense Force’s bombing had collapsed part of the building and allowed him to escape.
The exchange comes following a tumultuous morning in which both Israel and Hamas accused one another of breaching the cease-fire agreement. Multiple Israeli soldiers were lightly injured when three separate explosions went off in northern Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the cease-fire through Wednesday.
Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst explained Israel’s claim that Hamas violated the temporary cease-fire agreement with three explosions in Northern Gaza that injured a number of IDF troops on Tuesday.
Both Israel and Hamas accused one another of breaching the cease-fire, which has so far held for five days. Israel says the three explosions occurred in close proximitty to IDF soldiers, lightly injuring a number of them.
Both parties say the other instigated a fire-fight that took place at the site of one of the detonations. Neither party has indicated plans to call off the cease-fire, however.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., accused the Biden administration of enabling “gross human rights violations” in Gaza by sending military aid to Israel as it seeks to eradicate Hamas.
The progressive lawmaker held a tele-town hall on Monday evening where she fielded multiple questions on the Middle Eastern conflict, including a constituent who said the U.S. should “just defund Israel and send funding and aid to Gaza.”
She also encouraged pro-Palestinian activists to keep putting pressure on Democratic lawmakers to support a cease-fire, even as heightened tensions around the issue have led to instances of vandalism and threatening behavior.
“Forces that are recipients of U.S. military aid cannot be engaging in gross human rights violations,” Ocasio-Cortez said, citing a set of statutes known as the Leahy law. “And if they are engaged in gross human rights violations, then that aid must be either pulled, reconsidered, conditioned, etc.”
The Leahy law stops the government “from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights,” according to the State Department.
“What we are witnessing is the gross violation of human rights in Gaza, and that is being done with U.S. military assistance,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I don’t think that the American people want to see our public resources going to finance gross human rights violations.”
Israel urges UN to highlight Hamas’ sexual crimes against women on Oct. 7
Israeli diplomats held a meeting at the United Nations in Geneva calling attention to the sexual violence committeed by Hamas during its Oct. 7 massacre in Israel on Tuesday.
Israel has widely documented rape, murder, and other crimes against women committed by Hamas during the attack. While the U.N. has already condmened the Oct. 7 massacre, experts who spoke at Israel’s Tuesday event say U.N. rights bodies “downplayed” and “minimised” the sexual violence.
“We expected a clear and loud statement that says that there is no justification for using the bodies of women as a weapon of war. None of this came up until now,” said Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, an Associate Professor at the Bar-Ilan University. “It turns around the conventional framing of viewing Israel as the aggressor, and Palestinians as the ultimate victim.”
Meanwhile, the U.N. Human rights office says it has not been granted access to visit Israel to investigate the crimes committed on Oct. 7.
“The Office is attempting to carry out remote monitoring of these and other human rights violations reported in Israel and the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories). Lack of direct access to Israel and the OPT has hampered the work,” U.N. spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told Reuters. “We have repeatedly stressed the need for rigorous investigations and accountability for all serious breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law, irrespective of the identity of the alleged perpetrators,” she added.
Top Israeli commander says IDF is ‘prepared’ to continue war on Hamas after cease-fire
Top Israeli commander says IDF is ‘prepared’ to continue war on Hamas after cease-fire
A top Israeli military official delivered an update on the conflict with Hamas and the progress in rescuing hostages in Gaza on Tuesday.
Chief of the General Staff, LTG Herzi Halevi says Hamas has so far released 76 hostages. Herzi said Israel will not be satisfied untill every hostage has returned home, however.
“Each one who is released brings great relief, but there is no ounce of relief in the fact that more remain. We will operate to bring them all back,” Herzi said.
“The IDF is prepared to continue fighting. We are using the days of the pause as part of the framework to learn, strengthen our readiness and approve future operational plans,” he added.
Israel’s cease-fire agreement with Hamas began Friday, and the groups agreed on a two-day extension on Monday. It is unclear whether Israel will agree to further extensions later this week.
Herzi went on to assure Israeli citizens that there will be thorough investigations into how the IDF and Israel’s intelligence community failed to prevent Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
NYC chancellor denies students who stormed halls demanding Jewish teacher’s ouster are ‘radical’
NYC chancellor denies students who stormed halls demanding Jewish teacher’s ouster are ‘radical’
New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks on Monday staunchly denied allegations that the approximately 400 students who swarmed the halls of Hillcrest High School last week demanding the ouster of a Jewish teacher who supports Israel had been in any way “radicalized.”
“This is a really good school with wonderful young people. And I’m so taken aback by this notion that these kids are terrorists … or radicalized. Even that kind of language is just terrible, and it’s irresponsible,” Banks said at a press conference, confirming that some students had been suspended or faced disciplinary action after the incident. Viral video showed students acting out after the teacher’s social media profile showed she attended an off-campus rally in support of Israel.
Citing privacy and confidentiality laws, Banks declined to say how many students were disciplined or provide more details but said he did not suspend all the hundreds in the hallway.
On November 20, a teacher at Hillcrest High School “was targeted based on her support for Israel expressed in a permissible way outside of school hours and her Jewish identity,” Banks said, outlining how the “safety of multiple of our staff and students were put at risk after approximately 400 students acted disruptively during class changing time, roving the school and calling for the removal of a Jewish educator.” Officials said the Jewish teacher was on a different floor at the time the crowd of students stormed the halls.
Israel has identified 300 Palestinian prisoners who it says are elligible to be released under the current cease-fire exchange agreement with Hamas. Roughly 80% of those prisoners are listed only as “detained,” meaning they have not faced formal charges, according to a report from CNN.
So far, Hamas has released 69 hostages from Gaza and Israel has in turn released 150 Palestinian prisoners. Of those prisoners, 98 were being detained without charges, according to CNN.
Israel says cease-fire terms violated by 3 detonations, gunfire; IDF soldiers injured
Israel accuses Hamas of breaching cease-fire following after explosions, gunfire in northern Gaza
Israeli Defense Forces accused Hamas violating the cease-fire agreement after a trio of explosions and an exchange of gunfire in northern Gaza on Tuesday.
The IDF says the three explosives were detonated in close proximity to Israeli troops, causing some light injuries. While Israel stated that the explosives violated the cease-fire, it did not indicate plans to withdraw from the deal as of early Tuesday morning.
“Over the last hour, three explosive devices were detonated adjacent to IDF troops in two different locations in the northern Gaza Strip, violating the framework of the operational pause. In one of the locations, terrorists also opened fire at the troops, who responded with fire,” the IDF said in a statement.
“A number of soldiers were lightly injured during the incidents,” the statement continued. “In both incidents, the troops were located in positions as per the framework of the operational pause.”
Hamas released a statement saying it remains committed to the terms of the cease-fire, and it in turn accused Israel of violations.
“As a result of a clear violation by the enemy of the truce agreement in the northern Gaza Strip today, field friction occurred and our mujahideen dealt with this violation. We are committed to the truce as long as the enemy has committed to it, and we call on the mediators to pressure the occupation to adhere to all the terms of the truce on the ground and in the air,” Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades wrote in a statement.
Large plumes of smoke could be seen rising over the Gaza skyline on Tuesday, but Israel says they are not the result of airstrikes or any other offensive action.
IDF spokesman Peter Lerner joined Fox News on Tuesday to discuss the issue. He said ISrael has yet to determine a cause for the pillars of smoke. Israel and Hamas are in the first day of their newly-extended cease-fire, with Hamas expected to release 10 additional Israeli hostages later in the day.
Hamas officials accused Israel of a “clear violation” of the cease-fire agreement, claiming an Israeli aristrike occurred.
Mother of Vermont shooting victim says son ‘may have to be in a wheelchair’
The mother of one of the three Palestinian students shot in Vermont over the weekend says her son has a bullet lodged in his spine and doctors overseeing his recovery aren’t sure if he will be able to walk again, according to a report.
Elizabeth Price, whose 20-year-old son Hisham Awartani attends Brown University, told ABC News, “I’m shaking. I’m hollow inside. I’m aching to be with my son” following the incident that happened Saturday night in Burlington.
“He’s lying immobilized in a bed, but he had very high spirits in the beginning. And I think now it’s beginning to sink into him the extent of — the enormity of — the challenge that faces him,” Price reportedly said. “He may have to be in a wheelchair. … I believe that he’ll be able to walk, but his life has been taken away from him as it is, and he’s gonna have to recreate this new life.”
“Justice to me means making sure that the man who shot my son is behind bars,” Price also told ABC News. “Justice to me is making sure that crimes like this don’t happen again. Justice to me is also about my son finding a way to rebuild his life.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday morning said that federal authorities are probing whether the shooting was a hate crime.
Israeli journalists are blasting tech billionaire Elon Musk’s visit to Israel this week as the X owner is facing accusations of antisemitism.
On Monday, Musk met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog as well as the families of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. He also toured an Israeli kibbutz where civilians were murdered on Oct. 7 during terrorist attacks.
But his trip wasn’t welcomed by everyone in Israel, particularly members of the media.
“Blatant antisemite & publisher of antisemitism Elon Musk should be persona non grata in Israel,” Haaretz editor in chief Esther Solomon posted on X. “Instead, Netanyahu – plumbing new depths of amoral sycophancy – gifts him a PR visit to the kibbutzim devastated by Hamas. Profane, venal, bilious, both of them.”
“Hard to stomach welcoming someone who just days ago endorsed a virulently antisemitic trope, has dabbled for years in antisemitism and has turned this platform into a cesspool of hate. It’s quite frankly gross,” Times of Israel reporter Amy Spiro similarly wrote.
Israel-Hamas war: US looks to increase aid into Gaza through Egypt, includes warning for Israel
Israel-Hamas war: US looks to increase aid into Gaza through Egypt, includes warning for Israel
The United States will accelerate its humanitarian assistance into Gaza, including food, fuel and medical supplies, with the first of three relief flights beginning this week, Fox News has learned.
The U.S. military will be sending a series of items, which also include supplies to help Palestinians survive the upcoming winter conditions, to North Sinai and Egypt on Tuesday, according to senior administration officials. Additional plane loads of supplies and aid will then be sent in the coming days, the officials said.
Additional talks are in the works with the Israeli government on how to allow even more assistance to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom have been displaced from their homes and face unsustainable living conditions in south and central Gaza, where about 80% of the Gaza Strip population now lives.
These supplies and fuel are not linked to the release of hostages, the officials said. As of Tuesday, Hamas has released at least 69 hostages, 51 of them Israeli, while Israel has released roughly 150 Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas is expected to release 10 more Israeli hostages Tuesday as the extended cease-fire between the two sides holds.
Fox News Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst reported on the latest developments as the first day of the extended cease-fire began. Yingst said the majority of the hostages released so far have been women and children. Each of the hostages released on Monday still have fathers and husbands in Hamas custody.
Hamas transfers 10-month-old Israeli hostage, family to separate Palestinian terror group in Gaza
Hamas transfers 10-month-old Israeli hostage, family to separate Palestinian terror group in Gaza
Hamas transfered custody of a 10-month-old Israeli hostage and his family to another terrorist group in southern Gaza, Israeli Defense Forces said Tuesday.
The IDF’s Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee announced the transfer late Monday night. The family consists of the infant, Kfir; his 4-year-old brother Ariel, and their parents. The IDF did not specify precisely which organization they have been transfered to.
“In Hamas prison, infants under one year old who have not seen the light of day for more than 50 days are detained. Hamas treats them as if they were spoils and sometimes hands them over to other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip,” Adraee wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“For example, the Bibas family, the two red-haired children “The Reds,” who were kidnapped from their home in Nir Oz by a member of the Hamas terrorist organization (pictured) and are being held in the Khan Yunis area by one of the Palestinian factions.”
Israel-Hamas war: U.S. Navy says Houthis fired 2 ballistic missiles toward Israel-linked ship
Israel-Hamas war: U.S. Navy says Houthis fired 2 ballistic missiles toward Israel-linked ship
U.S. intelligence officials told Fox News on Monday that the Iran-backed Houthis are the group that fired two ballistic missiles toward the USS Mason.
The assessment was done by the U.S. Navy. Officials believe that the Yemeni Houthis more likely wanted to target the MV Central Park, a vessel linked to Israel, based on the missiles’ trajectory.
One of the two missiles splashed in the ocean, five nautical miles from the MV Central Park and 10 nautical miles from the USS Mason.
Two U.S. officials told Fox News that the second missile exploded midair.
Fox News Digital’s Jennifer Griffin and Andrea Vacchiano contributed to this report.
Video shows Eitan Yahalomi and his mother BatSheva greeting each other.
The temporary cease-fire agreement includes the swap of hostages taken by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack against Israel for Palestinian prisoners held in the Jewish State.
More than 15,000 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, leading to a military response from Israeli forces.
Thousands more have been wounded, and many others have been taken hostage by Hamas and raped, tortured and murdered.
California GOP Rep. David Valadao’s office vandalized by anti-Israel protestors
California GOP Rep. David Valadao’s office vandalized by anti-Israel protestors
A California congressman is the latest victim of antisemitism attacks happening across the country as Rep. David Valadao’s (R-Calif.) Hanford office was vandalized Monday morning, according to a post on X from Rep. Valadao.
Rep. Valadao posted a photo of his Hanford office Monday afternoon covered in “Murdered by Israel” posters and fake blood.
“This morning, my Hanford office was vandalized by anti-Israel protestors. I strongly support the right to peaceful protest, but violence and vandalism are never acceptable. In a democracy, harassment and intimidation is not how you make your voice heard,” Rep. Valadao posted.
Hamas has reportedly handed over a fifth group of hostages to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to Egyptian officials, with the report coming after Israel reported the deaths of three soldiers captured during the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
The group of 10 hostages was turned over to the Red Cross in Gaza, with Israeli officials expecting them to arrive in the country shortly thereafter, according to The Wall Street Journal, quoting the unnamed Egyptian sources.
Video from southern Gaza on Tuesday showed trucks and vans driving through the streets that were believed to contain some of the hostages, according to Hebrew-language media reports, noted The Times of Israel. Some of the vehicles in the video, which the site said has not been independently confirmed, had multiple gunmen hanging from their sides.
The hostages’ release comes after Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the four-day cease in hostilities for two more days while more hostages are released.
The military Tuesday declared three soldiers as being dead, identifying them as Sgt. Shaked Dahan, 19; Staff Sgt. Tomer Yaakov Ahimas, 20; and Sgt. Kiril Brodski, 19, reported The Times of Israel. They were described as being “fallen soldiers held hostage by a terror group” who were earlier reported as being abducted during the Hamas raids.
The military’s chief rabbi declared their deaths based on various findings obtained by the IDF, but reportedly, only Ahimas and Brodski can be buried according to Jewish law.
Dahan’s mother, Sigalit Gal, said on Facebook on Tuesday that she is not going to observe the traditional seven-day Jewish mourning period until her son’s body is returned to her from Gaza.
“I did for you what I needed to as a mother. I managed to keep you safe and protect you in many situations,” she said. “You’ve been taken from me forever. They took you and didn’t bother to return you, not even your body.”
Meanwhile, The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club on Tuesday published the names of 30 people to be released from Israeli prisons as part of the ongoing hostage release deal, reports Israeli newspaper Haaretz. One of those is Marwat al-Azza, a journalist living in East Jerusalem, who was indicted Monday for statements made on social media including one that mocked an elderly woman abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Al-Azza, a freelancer for NBC News, has been accused of incitement to terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization.
The latest release of hostages taken by Hamas comes after the Israeli government accused the organization of breaking the cease-fire agreement Tuesday. Several members of the Israel Defense Forces were injured when three explosive devices and gunfire targeted forces in northern Gaza.
“Over the last hour, three explosive devices were detonated adjacent to IDF troops in two different locations in northern Gaza, violating the framework of the operational pause,” said the military, according to the Jewish News Syndicate.
Earlier Tuesday, Israel received a list of 10 hostages that were to be released, with the list being reviewed and the captives’ families being notified, according to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, reported the Jewish News Syndicate.
So far, 50 Israeli women and children, plus one Israeli man, have been freed since the initial four-day cease-fire started on Friday morning, along with 17 Thais, one Filipino, and one American, a child.
Meanwhile, Israel has vowed to resume the war with the “full force” needed to destroy Hamas once the prisoner releases stop, and the Biden administration has told Israel it must avoid “significant further displacement” and mass casualties among Palestinian civilians if it resumes the offensive.
The administration has also insisted that Israel must operate with more precision in southern Gaza than it has used in its strikes in the north, according to U.S. officials.
Since 2021, the Biden Department of Homeland Security has abandoned efforts to deter, detain, and deport illegal aliens in favor of letting in as many as possible. This continues to cost America, from our border towns to our biggest cities. Pictured: Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., speaks at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol to call for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Feb. 1. (Photo: Tom Williams, CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)
Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
———————————————————
The Biden administration would have you believe that its purportedly “safe, orderly, and humane” immigration policy comes at no cost to you, the American citizen. But the truth is just another casualty of its open border agenda.
Joe Biden has presided over an unprecedented degradation of U.S. sovereignty, as our laws no longer determine who gets in. Instead, aliens do—just by showing up. This loss of sovereignty at the border can literally apply to territory as well: Recently, the Texas Department of Public Safety had to move Mexican cartel gunmen off Fronton Island in the middle of the Rio Grande.
Since January 2021, the Biden Department of Homeland Security has abandoned the effort to deter, detain, and deport illegal aliens in favor of letting in as many as Congress will fund. This “Mayorkas Migration Machine” (I named it after our feckless secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas) grinds away nationally and locally, from the border town of McAllen, Texas (which I just visited), to up north and our failing big cities. And the bills are coming due.
In New York, the homeless shelters are full and city officials are running out of makeshift places to put the relentless stream of illegal aliens. Mayor Eric Adams has announced cuts to city services on which citizens rely—including police, education, and libraries—to pay to feed and house them, and the City Council seems likely to approve them.
Chicago plans to build a giant tent camp to hold 2,000 of the illegal aliens waiting for free housing. This will cost over $30 million, on top of the $250 million the city already spent this year on illegal aliens, such as those who are housed in a K-12 school.
Locals are outraged—maybe because, according to Fox News, other migrant shelters in the city have been prone to “loitering, engaging in late-night partying, prostitution, littering, and even fighting with community members.” Chicago’s budget for 2024 is already half a billion in the red, but taxpayers, not illegal aliens, will pay this cost. When the city says “equity,” it means treating newly arrived aliens who’ve never paid taxes better than Chicagoans.
Massachusetts, a “sanctuary” state nicknamed “Taxachussetts” for its historically high taxes, finally capped its free housing of illegal aliens at 7,500 people. But they keep coming. Boston’s Logan Airport has been informally housing families flown from the border for months.
The airport’s manager gave the excuse that “they’re paying passengers”—but who’s paying? All of us are, through FEMA and numerous other government grants paid to nongovernmental organizations that transport, shelter, feed, advise, and provide other “wrap-around” services to illegal aliens coming to the U.S.
Local Texans used to swim, boat, and recreate on the Rio Grande near McAllen. No longer. On a recent fact-finding mission, I visited the Hidalgo County water pumping station, which owns property on the river. Its employees have been shot at by cartel thugs on the other side.
The river was devoid of civilian traffic. Cartels battle each other for control of the Mexican side and the lucrative payoffs from illegal aliens crossing through their turf. Dead bodies—executed victims of the narco-traffic wars—regularly wash up on the banks. The water authority had to install a screen to keep the corpses out of their pumps.
Drug cartels have sabotaged Border Patrol boats by stringing cables underwater to destroy outboard engines and at head height to kill or injure American officers. The Border Patrol boats now use water-jet engines and are equipped with twin wires from the bow to the top of the command box to divert strung cables.
At the airport in McAllen, I saw several families who appeared to be from Haiti camped out on the floor, waiting for their free flight north. Sources at the airport told me that 100 such people go through security and board flights every day with nothing more than their Notice to Appear—a letter from DHS telling them to go to immigration court at some point in the future—as identification. The Transportation Security Administration is required to accept this worthless document from foreigners, although you and I need a “Real ID” such as a state driver’s license or passport to board a plane.
An airline employee told me that her early morning flight to Dallas is usually half full of women and children from the border. That plane holds about 160 people. That’s just for one flight, one airline, one border airport, one day.
On my early afternoon flight to Dallas, I sat across from two young men with neat clothes, Puma sneakers, and fashionable haircuts, both incessantly on their late-model phones. They had Haitian passports and the telltale folders of travel itineraries and documents given by nongovernmental organizations to released illegal aliens for their onward journeys further into the U.S.
Who were they? What did they do back in Haiti?
I have no idea, and neither does DHS. Haiti’s government is feckless, and civil order has given way to high levels of murder, theft, and kidnapping. But although many poor Haitians are victims of all this, someone is doing the murdering, too. So how does DHS know the two guys on my plane and thousands more like them who they let in each week are average citizens or victims and not the perpetrators fleeing the consequences of their own crimes?
They don’t.
Lacking any way to verify identities and check foreign criminal records in most cases, DHS is forced to trust the information provided by people who have everything to gain and nothing to lose by lying. It is a statistical certainty that some of the millions paroled in or released at the border will have committed acts at home that render them legally ineligible to be admitted into the United States. The high risk of this percentage of aliens re-offending is now borne by the American communities into which DHS is sending them.
To take but one example, in July 2023, Border Patrol caught a 25-year old man entering the U.S. illegally in Hidalgo, gave him his Notice to Appear, and let him go. Three months later, Boston police arrested him for assaulting a member of his family—probably before he even made his first immigration court appearance. Did he have a criminal record in Haiti that could have warned DHS or Boston police that he had a history of violence? It’s too late to ask now.
In recent testimony before the Senate, Mayorkas claimed that he had paroled into the U.S. over 240,000 aliens on a “case-by-case” rather than blanket basis. This is simply not credible. He’s just rolling the dice on the safety of the American people.
The cold hard truth is Biden’s policies have surrendered control of our borders to Mexican cartels and illegal aliens and foisted all the ensuing costs and risks onto our taxpayers.
Maryland’s attorney general suspends Zainab Chaudry from the state’s hate crimes commission after she compareds Israel to Nazi Germany in Facebook posts. Pictured: Chaudry, center, joins others from the Council on American-Islamic Relations for a press conference outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 25, 2015. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Maryland’s new commission to “prevent and respond to hate crime activity” has met only once, but one member already has been suspended—for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. This incident seems to echo a trend: Many of those on the Left who rush to police “hate” often spread their own kind of hate.
Zainab Chaudry, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Maryland chapter and one of the commission’s first 10 members, described the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7 as an “uprising” and condemned the state of Israel as oppressive and worse.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, last week suspended Chaudry from the newly launched Commission on Hate Crimes Response and Prevention.
The Maryland Legislature passed HB 1066 in April and Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, signed it into law in May. The law established the Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention to prevent and respond to hate crimes and “evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.”
“The commission has only met once, with its inaugural meeting on Sept. 6, 2023,” Brown noted in a Nov. 21 press release. “Ms. Chaudry’s posts on her personal social media since Oct. 7, in these very early days of the commission, have challenged the commission’s ability to do its work.”
Brown said he determined that Chaudry’s “social media posts risk disrupting the work and mission of the Commission,” so he temporarily suspended her, assigned staff to write a values statement to protect the commission from similar scandals, and urged members of the panel to “exercise great care in their communications and conduct.”
What led Brown to this conclusion?
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists slaughtered about 1,200 Israelis, including women and children, and took more than 240 hostages. Horrific videos of terrorists bragging about killing Jews hit social media. Hamas terrorists slaughtered parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They raped women before killing them and mutilating their bodies. Terrorists bragged about this in horrifying detail when questioned after the fact by Israel Defense Forces.
On social media, Chaudry described these horrific events as “the uprising in Palestine,” urging readers to “keep in mind that they are a people who are illegally occupied.” She added that “the thirst for freedom is an innate instinct we’re born with.”
“Resistance is a reminder that it can’t be quenched through might and force,” she wrote.
Chaudry did not condemn the Hamas terrorists or lament the Israeli dead. Rather, she apparently praised the attacks in Israel as an “uprising” of freedom.
Chaudry’s later posts echoed the same ideas.
On Oct. 9, she compared “Palestinian freedom fighters” to “Ukrainian freedom fighters.”
She also suggested that a focus on the Israeli victims of the terrorists amounted to centering “white pain” in “global consciences.”
After appearing to celebrate the terrorist attacks that killed the most Jews in one day since the Holocaust in the 1940s, Chaudry compared the Jewish state to Germany’s Nazi regime during World War II that sought to eradicate Jews from the face of the Earth.
She shared two photos of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany: a 1936 photo of a Nazi parade and a 2023 photo of the gate lit up in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.
Chaudry posted the photos with the message: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”
Chaudry has not shown remorse for these posts, which remain public on her Facebook page. The Council on American Islamic Relations has not condemned them either. Instead, it mobilized nearly 4,000 petitioners to demand Chaudry’s reinstatement to Maryland’s hate crimes commission.
“There is no conflict between condemning the Israeli government’s war crimes overseas and standing up against all forms of hate here at home, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism,” Chaudry said in a formal statement after her suspension by Brown, the Free State’s attorney general. “False smears from anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim extremists will not stop me from standing up for justice here and abroad.”
Supporters wrote in a Nov. 22 letter to Brown that they “completely agree” with Chaudry’s quote.
“As the only American Muslim on the Attorney General’s Hate Crimes Commission, Zainab Chaudry’s voice was critical in representing our community’s concerns to your office,” the petitioners wrote. “Even a temporary suspension of her role is harmful and completely unjustified. Like Zainab, many members of the Maryland community have been critical of the Israel government’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Since last night, dozens of Maryland Muslim organizations and over 3,800 petitioners have called on @OAGMaryland Anthony Brown to reverse his decision to temporarily suspend our MD director Dr. Zainab Chaudry from the Hate Crimes Commission under pressure from anti-Muslim &… pic.twitter.com/eob0t9FFSL
Chaudry may disagree with Israel and condemn its actions, but in what world is it acceptable to compare the world’s only Jewish state with the genocidal regime that sought to eliminate all Jews?
Rather than condemning Hamas for slaughtering women and children, she blamed Israel. She did not even acknowledge that Israel’s military takes key steps to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas deliberately stages terrorist activities in civilian buildings such as hospitals to use civilians as human shields.
Israel’s military objective, stated from the beginning, has been the eradication of Hamas’ military capabilities, to prevent another Oct. 7 pogrom. A Hamas terrorist infamously called his parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed 10 Jews!” Israelis do not call their parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed Palestinians.”
Although Chaudry is correct that criticizing Israel is not ipso facto a form of antisemitism, this blatant double standard, and the extreme hyperbole of comparing Israel to the Nazis, is absolutely antisemitic. Yet the Left’s intersectional ideology gives Chaudry a smokescreen for her hatred.
As Chaudry’s statement about “white pain” reveals, she considers Israelis part of the “white” oppressor class, putting the Jews—the No. 1 example of an oppressed people group throughout history—in the same category as the Nazis. The Marxist lens of analyzing every conflict along oppressor-versus-oppressed lines leads her to moral insanity, a moral insanity that inspires hatred.
This moral insanity reminds me of the perverse accusations of the Southern Poverty Law Center. As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC began as a noble civil rights nonprofit, helping poor people in the South. It later expanded its operations to suing truly hateful groups such as the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, and then expanded that effort to “monitor” conservative groups as if they were themselves hateful.
Now, religious freedom groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Freedom Law Center, and the Family Research Council find themselves on the SPLC’s “hate group” list alongside Klan chapters and plotted on a map with neo-Nazis. Groups that call for the enforcement of immigration law, such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Dustin Inman Society, find themselves on the same map. So do parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
In the name of fighting hate, the SPLC has inspired hate—and even terrorism. In 2012, a man used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Family Research Council for a mass shooting. After a brave security guard foiled his plan, the gunman confessed to the FBI that he planned to slaughter everyone in the building.
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former SPLC employee revealed that the organization’s “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam,” but that hasn’t stopped government agencies from relying upon those accusations.
The FBI infamously used the SPLC to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in a since-rescinded January memo. In 2019, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced a hate crimes unit “to fight against hate crimes and the many hate groups … in our state.” Her announcement cited the SPLC hate map and highlighted an area of the state that includes the headquarters of the Judeo-Christian group American Freedom Law Center.
The American Freedom Law Center sued Nessel, arguing that the announcement violated the group’s rights to free speech under the First Amendment. The center, a nonprofit public interest law firm, principally defends the First Amendment rights of conservative Christians and Jews.
Robert Muise, the center’s co-founder, recounted how the SPLC attacked him.
“I was on active duty in the Marine Corps for 13 years as an officer. I’m a father of 12 and a devout Catholic,” Muise told me in 2019. “They had me listed as an antisemite when my co-founder is a yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew!”
Much of the Left’s “hate” monitoring boils down to an excuse to demonize conservatives and exclude them from the conversation. This ideological policing often seems to miss antisemitism when it doesn’t outright enable it.
Many civil rights commissions and hate crimes commissions are slanted heavily to the Left, leading to perverse outcomes. Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who refused to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding, found himself prosecuted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Phillips won his case because members of that commission had demonstrated hostility toward Phillips’ faith.
The Maryland hate crimes commission shows a clear leftward tilt. It includes left-leaning organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Pride Coalition of Maryland, but not any right-leaning organization.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, Chaudry’s organization, has worked with the SPLC to urge charitable institutions to blacklist “Anti-Muslim hate groups,” including the American Freedom Law Center.
Until hate crime commissions start including conservative members, conservatives rightly will view these efforts with skepticism. Brown not only should refuse to reinstate Chaudry, but also take the opportunity of the vacancy to find a conservative voice for the commission.
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The Hamas mantra is “from the river to the sea” to the Jews in Israel, but with Biden and the Democrat’s open border policies, how long before it comes to America? Many people on the terrorist watch list have already been apprehended at the border, and they suspect many more than that have escaped into the country. So, more than likely, it isn’t a matter of if it is a matter of when the mantra will be “from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” with terrorist attacks happening on a grander scale than what happened on 9-11
Biden and the Democrats seem to be so blinded by their Globalist Leftist ideology they don’t care or can’t see the danger.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A teacher allegedly attended a pro-Israel rally in Queens on Oct. 9. Students at the Hillcrest High School in Jamaica – where the teacher is employed – reportedly found out that the instructor participated in the pro-Israel demonstration. Someone purportedly found the teacher’s Facebook profile that had a photo of the instructor at a pro-Israel rally in Queens holding a sign that read: “I stand with Israel.”
Just after 11 a.m. on Monday, the students reportedly stormed the hallways of the school to protest the teacher having a pro-Israel viewpoint. The pre-planned protest allegedly deteriorated into a riot. The pro-Palestinian students reportedly attempted to barge into the teacher’s classroom despite school staffers guarding the room.
The New York Post reported, “School administrators and the NYPD, which responded to the school at about 11:20 a.m., got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door, another educator said.”
A senior told the outlet, “Everyone was yelling ‘Free Palestine!'”
A ninth-grader said, “Everyone was screaming ‘(The teacher) needs to go!’ They want her fired.”
A student said that teens had found out where the teacher lives, her phone number, and other personal information.
A video of the unrest at the school was posted on social media.
One comment on a TikTok video called the teacher “cracker ass bitch.”
The NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau was reportedly asked to investigate possible threats against the school.
City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Queens) said, “Whether it was one student or multiple students who did or said something, whatever the trigger was, something happened. And I know from my many years on the City Council that the counterterrorism task force is not engaged unless they believe it is potentially a serious situation.”
The teacher – who didn’t want to be identified for her own safety – told the New York Post, “I have been a teacher for 23 years in the New York City public school system — for the last seven at Hillcrest High School. I have worked hard to be supportive of our entire student body and an advocate for our community, and was shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week.”
The teacher added, “No one should ever feel unsafe at school — students and teachers alike.”
“It’s my hope in the days ahead we can find a way to have meaningful discussions about challenging topics with respect for each other’s diverse perspectives and shared humanity,” she continued. “Unless we can learn to see each other as people we will never be able to create a safe learning community.”
New York City Mayor reacted to the anti-Semitic unrest by saying:
The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated in any of our schools, let alone anywhere else in our city. We are better than this. NYC Schools is already conducting a full investigation into how this incident took place, and, this week, Project Pivot teams will begin outreach with students at Hillcrest to ensure they understand why this behavior was unacceptable. No student, teacher, or staff member should fear for their safety in our schools.
Democratic Councilman Robert Holden said, “I don’t know why these students are so misinformed, so intolerant and so radicalized. They don’t even know the history of the Middle East. They haven’t been taught that.”
(WARNING: Explicit language)
The scene at Hillcrest High School in Queens as a Jewish teacher hid in her locked office for hours while students demanded she be fired for attending a pro-Israel rally. pic.twitter.com/jzVCEofvJS
As Americans celebrate the holidays with their families, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork to destroy families by taking children away from their parents in order to sterilize and sexually mutilate them.
The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser. The public comment deadline is today, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a bureaucratic middle finger to the public it is supposed to serve. The proposed regulations state that “to be considered a safe and appropriate placement, a provider is expected to utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.” In short, those who don’t believe the superstition that a child can somehow be born into the wrong body are, per the Biden administration, unfit to be foster parents.
This won’t stop with foster parents.
Cutting Christians and other dissenters from the sexual revolution out of the foster care system is only the start. Given the government control of the foster care system, this is a convenient place for the left to establish the precedent that rejecting gender ideology and the rest of the LGBT movement’s dogmas is abusive and harmful to children and that those who do so are unfit parents. Once they have set this point, they’ll expand it to everyone else — after all, if it’s abuse for foster parents, it’s abuse for biological parents as well.
This should not be a surprise. Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from “non-affirming” parents for years now, but they have thus far been too scared to go through with it. But the folks in Biden’s administration — led by Babylon Bee “Man of the Year” Rachel Levine — are going to see if they can get the ball rolling this time.
The justification for these new rules is based on the usual junkscience, created and pushed by activist organizations and those whose reputations and livelihoods depend upon validating transitioning children. For example, the Biden administration repeatedly cites a survey by the activists at The Trevor Project. This survey consisted of a self-selected online sample. The Biden administration wants to keep kids away from loving homes because the science told them to — the science of a self-selected online survey created by an activist group.
These sorts of garbage studies are necessary for the LGBT movement to justify itself, especially as it has shifted to an obsession with “LGBT youth.” They long ago dropped the pretense that this is about consenting adults, or that they seek some sort of live-and-let-live settlement. Rather, they are determined to claim other people’s children for themselves and their movement.
Trying to take children away from “non-affirming” parents is the predictable result of the lies that children are born LGBT, and that sexual and gender identities are the essential core of our being. The belief that nothing is more authentic or important than sexual desire and “gender identity” is what lies behind the LGBT movement’s fanatical drive to groom other people’s children. It is why educators are eager to push sexually explicit material onto even very young children. It is why schools fill kids’ minds with gender ideology, and then encourage them to transition without telling their parents. And it is why the left has wholeheartedly embraced medically “transitioning” children, sometimes starting before they are even teenagers.
This wrongly termed “gender-affirming care” is incredibly abnormal medicine. It attempts to treat psychological distress by radically remaking the patient’s body in a way that is completely medically unnecessary, indeed, medically harmful. As the proposed Biden administration rules make clear, there is no objective physical or psychological diagnosis for being transgender; rather, it is a purely subjective, self-diagnosed identity — a “self-identified gender identity and expression.” And there is never any medical need to transition.
When someone who identifies as transgender does not chemically and surgically transition, his or her body continues its natural, healthy development and functioning. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm, which is why the transgender movement has become totally reliant on threats of suicide. This suicide narrative is used to rush children into transition, with almost all the power centers of our nation pushing them on. But studies show that children overwhelmingly desist from transgender identification if given time and counseling. The Biden administration nonetheless relies on threats of self-harm in making its case for the proposed rules for foster care. It is pure hostage-taking, done to enable the sterilization and sexual mutilation of children on the superstition that they are being born into the wrong bodies.
In short, the Biden administration plans to treat parents who object to this grotesque medical malpractice as child abuse. They are coming for your children, and they aren’t bothering to hide it anymore.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Shooting sports are gaining popularity among high schoolers across the United States, despite conflicting attitudes toward guns. Maryland State Police will continue enforcing the state’s handgun law for now, despite a federal appeals court ruling that the licensing requirement is unconstitutional.
“At this time, the HQL law remains in effect and there are no immediate changes in the process to purchase a firearm in Maryland,” the department wrote in an agency-wide advisory after last week’s ruling.
A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Maryland’s handgun licensing requirement is unconstitutional and overly “burdensome.” (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Maryland’s Handgun Qualification License (HQL) requires applicants to submit fingerprints for a background check, take a four-hour firearm safety course with a live fire component, and wait up to 30 days for approval before purchasing a handgun, which then requires another application and seven-day waiting period.
Last Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the law is overly “burdensome” and cannot stand under the 2022 landmark Supreme Court decision that a firearm regulation is unconstitutional unless the government can prove it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition.
“The challenged law restricts the ability of law-abiding adult citizens to possess handguns, and the state has not presented a historical analogue that justifies its restriction; indeed, it has seemingly admitted that it couldn’t find one,” Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee, wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
But the Maryland State Police’s licensing division said it will continue enforcing the law until the federal court issues a mandate.
Gun control advocacy groups rally with Democratic members of Congress outside the U.S. Capitol on May 26, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Maryland officials have 14 days to file for a rehearing before the full appeals court. If the state does not file within that window, the court will issue a mandate seven days later, which means the final court ruling would be Dec. 11, Fox45 News reported.
Officials have not yet confirmed whether they plan to file for a rehearing or, alternatively, seek a review before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement that he would “continue to fight for this law” and that his administration was evaluating its options.
Similarly, a spokesperson for Attorney General Anthony Brown told Fox45 News that they were “weighing options for next steps.”
Under Maryland’s HQL law, prospective handgun owners had to take a firearm safety class, submit fingerprints for a background check, and wait up to 30 days for processing before then being able to start the application to purchase a firearm. (Getty Images)
The NRA previously described Maryland’s HQL as a “draconian process” and praised the Fourth Circuit ruling as a “significant victory, for the Second Amendment and Americans who value constitutional freedoms.”
“Striking down Maryland’s oppressive Handgun Qualification License requirement affirms that the burdensome process infringes on the rights of the law-abiding,” the NRA’s lobbying arm executive director Randy Kozuch told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital’s Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.
Hannah Ray Lambert is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals.
The Israeli military says 11 hostages have been released from Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip and returned to Israeli territory. Military officials said late Monday that the hostages were on Israeli soil and undergoing initial medical checks before being reunited with their families.
It is the fourth such release under a cease-fire deal with the Hamas military group. Israel is to free 33 Palestinian prisoners later Monday. The cease-fire had been set to expire early Tuesday. But Qatar, which has been mediating between the sides, said they agreed to extend the truce by two more days.
The war broke out Oct. 7 when Hamas militants burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 240 others captive. Israel declared war, and over 13,000 Palestinians have been killed in weeks of Israeli strikes, according to health authorities in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israeli media said the hostages included two women and nine children. Two of the children are 3 years old.
The release of 11 Israeli hostages and 33 Palestinians under the original ceasefire agreement, which had been due to end Monday night, dominated the day’s flurry of truce activity. According to a Reuters report, the Israeli hostages released from Gaza on Monday include three French citizens, two Germans and six Argentinians. The news service cited a Qatari foreign ministry spokesman on social media platform X.
The White House said U.S. officials had hoped two American women would be among the latest group to be freed from Gaza, where it believes eight or nine U.S. citizens are being held.
Hamas said it had received a list of Palestinians to be released from Israeli jails. It said these included three female prisoners and 30 minors.
A voter arrives at a polling place on March 3, 2020, in Minneapolis for that year’s presidential primary. Legitimate voters shouldn’t have to worry about whether their votes are canceled out by fraudulent ones. (Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
You can see it with your own eyes. But Democrats and their left-wing media allies call it a “fantasy.” What is it?
A Lawrence, Massachusetts, voter who had been turned away from the polls on Election Day and told he had already voted found out he was the victim of fraud. He checked the footage on the video camera outside his front door and saw that a woman had removed mail-in ballots from his mailbox. He called police.
It’s happening in many places. On Tuesday, Fight Voter Fraud Inc., a nonprofit voter rights group, appeared in Connecticut Superior Court to demand the arrest of a woman alleged to have been caught on video committing mail-in ballot fraud in the 2019 Bridgeport Democratic mayoral primary and again in the 2023 primary. The group, protesting that city officials pretend there’s no problem, also called on the Connecticut legislature to appoint a special prosecutor.
A staggering 60% of likely voters nationwide consider election cheating a problem, according to Rasmussen Reports. Yet the Left denies it’s happening. The Washington Post calls it a “myth” and a “fantasy offense.” Worst of all, the federal government is suppressing the evidence and censoring anyone who complains about election cheating.
Never-before-seen emails released by the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 6 reveal that a government-sponsored task force is muzzling public figures, thousands of ordinary Americans, and media outlets like Newsmax and The Babylon Bee when they report election irregularities. The emails show that officials within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department—”the deep state”—organized the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, recruiting academics at Stanford University and the University of Washington to question election honesty and then instruct social media companies such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube to label the postings as “misinformation” or take them down entirely.
Don’t be fooled by the name Election Integrity Partnership. This task force does the opposite, silencing concerns about election integrity.
In 2020, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich objected when the state of Pennsylvania adopted new election rules during the COVID-19 pandemic that, in his view, invited cheating. He tweeted, “Pennsylvania Democrats are methodically changing the rules so they can steal the election.”
When Nicole Malliotakis was running for Congress in 2020 from Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, N.Y., she posted on Facebook: “Be sure to vote tomorrow because we’re not only taking on Max Rose, Nancy Pelosi & Bill de Blasio. We’re taking on Dead Democrats, too!”
The Election Integrity Partnership disagreed and instructed Facebook to remove Malliotakis’ post, which it did. Even if Malliotakis were wrong about dead people voting, she has a right to raise the issue. In fact, Malliotakis was correct. A Staten Island grand jury subsequently identified numerous instances of fraud in the race for City Council there, including a ballot submitted on behalf of a dead person.
The emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud just when Democrats were pushing many states to adopt new election rules in the face of COVID-19. Americans were entitled to hear the pros and cons of those rules. They still are.
The First Amendment bars government from censoring. So, what did the government do? It outsourced the censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership. All the same, it was government calling the shots, telling third parties to censor on its behalf. Louisiana and Missouri are suing to stop the federal government’s censorship scheme, and that case is now in the Supreme Court.
Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, told NPR she regrets the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, and the lawsuit will dampen the Election Integrity Partnership’s future censorship operations.
No worries. Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to be running for reelection in March 2024. Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, and other dictators who don’t tolerate complaints about election rigging will find the Election Integrity Partnership very handy.
It has no place in America.
Tell our leaders to crack down on election fraud, instead of censoring its critics.
Flag redesign commission member blasts process as ‘absurd’ and a ‘colossal waste of time’
Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds. A lengthy deliberation Tuesday among 13 Minnesotans tasked with selecting a new state flag and seal at times devolved into argument and confusion among some, with one member of the State Emblems Redesign Commission calling it “a colossal waste of time” for those who submitted the designs.
Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds. Read More…
The film is based on Liz Collin’s Amazon bestseller, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd,” which exposes the holes in the prevailing narrative surrounding George Floyd’s death, the trial of Derek Chauvin, and the fallout the city of Minneapolis has suffered ever since.
The documentary features more than a dozen interviews with the people directly involved, including exclusive interviews with former officers Derek Chauvin and Alexander Kueng who spoke to Liz Collin from prison. The families of Chauvin and Kueng also speak out publicly for the first time.
The film also features current and former Minneapolis police officers who tell their harrowing stories from the riots, recount the planned surrender of the Third Precinct, and explain why so many of them left the job. Read More…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Javier Milei, Argentina’s newly elected president, is making headlines everywhere. He’s anti-establishment, he’s anti-woke, and he’s absolutely fearless when it comes to speaking his mind.
Dave Rubin explains how Milei is a breath of fresh air, considering Argentina has seen “massive government growth, complete devaluation of their currency … creeping socialism for a long time, [and] craziness with gender stuff and all of the woke stuff.”
Luckily, Milei “has come in to absolutely obliterate it.”
In a recent interview, Tucker Carlson asked the Argentine if he had advice for Donald Trump, who many hope will do the same thing for the United States.
“Donald Trump is running for president again in the United States, as you know,” said Tucker. “What advice would you give him?”
“He should continue his fight against socialism because he is one of the few who truly understood that we are fighting socialism, that we are fighting the statists. He understood perfectly that the generation of wealth comes from the private sector. The state does not create wealth; the state destroys it. The state can give you nothing because it produces nothing, and when it attempts it, it does so poorly,” Milei answered.
“So I’d say, if I could humbly offer advice, all I could say would be to double down on his efforts in the same direction: defending the ideals of freedom and refusing to give an inch to the socialists.”
*Insert applause*
“Argentina, after 20 years of this nonsense, is pushing back,” says Dave. “Donald Trump was pushing back; there are pockets — places like Florida — that are pushing back. You should be pushing back, and might I suggest that we all go a bit more on offense?”
Want more from Dave Rubin?
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Individuals who have undergone “any form of male puberty” will not qualify to compete in international women’s cricket, the International Cricket Council has announced.
“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority), protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC noted.
The ICC noted that “gender eligibility at domestic level is a matter for each individual Member Board, which may be impacted by local legislation.” It also noted, “The regulations will be reviewed within two years.”
The issue of whether men who identify as women should be permitted to compete in women’s athletics remains an ongoing point of significant debate between those who advocate radical leftist gender ideology and those who oppose it. Cricket player Danielle McGahey, who apparently identifies as a transgender woman, responded to the news.
“Following the ICC’s decision this morning, it is with a very heavy heart that I must say that my international cricketing career is over. As quickly as it begun, it must now end,” McGahey wrote on social media.
“While I hold my opinions on the ICC’s decision, they are irrelevant. What matters is the message being sent to millions of trans women today, a messaging say that we don’t belong. I promise I will not stop fighting for equality for us in our sport, we deserve the right to play cricket at the highest level, we are not a threat to the integrity or safety of the sport,” McGahey wrote. “Never stop fighting!”
The Israel Defense Forces shared a video of a mosque, alleging that Hamas had been using the
facility to make and store weapons.
“Hamas used this mosque as a weapons storage facility and a laboratory for Hamas’ rockets. Finding dozens of mortars, warhead missiles, thermobaric weapons, RPGs and a tunnel shaft,” the IDF tweet about the facility declared.
The post included a video with English captions as someone walked into the mosque and showed footage of it.
“In the mosque’s basement, there is a weapon storage facility, a Hamas rocket manufacturing lab, and lots and lots of explosive devices as well as explosive materials,” the captions on the video read. “Hamas built entire walls to hide the lab” the captions continued, “we had to destroy them in order to expose the lab.”
Holy places, such as mosques, should not be used as fronts for terrorism.
Hamas used this mosque as a weapons storage facility and a laboratory for Hamas’ rockets. Finding dozens of mortars, warhead missiles, thermobaric weapons, RPGs and a tunnel shaft.
The Jewish state went to war last month after Hamas perpetrated atrocities in Israel, including murders, rapes, and kidnappings. Israel has approved a temporary ceasefire with Hamas that will involve the release of some of the hostages.
“The Government of Israel is obligated to return home all of the hostages,” the Israeli government noted in a statement. “Tonight, the Government has approved the outline of the first stage of achieving this goal, according to which at least 50 hostages – women and children – will be released over four days, during which a pause in the fighting will be held,” the statement added. “The release of every additional ten hostages will result in one additional day in the pause.”
“The Government of Israel, the IDF and the security services will continue the war in order to return home all of the hostages, complete the elimination of Hamas and ensure that there will be no new threat to the State of Israel from Gaza,” the statement concluded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this evening, at the start of the Government meeting:
While this meeting is to discuss the return of our hostages, I would like to start with something that should be self-evident: We are at war – and will continue the war. pic.twitter.com/YaICV89yEU
Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded city streets across Spain since October in sustained demonstrations opposing a socialist takeover of the Spanish government. Protesters are showing their opposition toward an amnesty deal between Spain’s socialist President Pedro Sánchez and treasonous Catalan separatists, who violated the Spanish constitution in 2017 by attempting to secede from Spain. By striking a deal to free incarcerated and exiled Spanish criminals, Sánchez was able to secure a third term in power.
The protests are organized by Spain’s conservative People’s Party and Vox, its further right, populist party. In an interview between Vox President Santiago Abascal and Tucker Carlson last week, Abascal explained that the amnesty deal is a crime “against the constitution” and “national unity.”
Ep. 40 Spain’s descent into tyranny seems eerily familiar. Opposition leader Santiago Abascal is one of the few people standing up to it. We traveled to Madrid to talk to him.
TIMESTAMPS: 1:11 Santiago Abascal 2:23 The end of democracy in Spain 8:43 “Are you ready to go to jail… pic.twitter.com/fE4zrYrqAC
But the massive demonstrations are not just in defense of the Spanish Constitution, Abascal explained; they’re about what an illegal third Sánchez term means for Spain, namely a failing Spanish economy, two-tier justice, mass illegal immigration from Muslim countries, speech policing, globalism, the demonization of Spanish history, and loss of Spanish identity.
Where Are the American Demonstrations?
The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.
The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.
All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?
Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.
Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media.
Conservatives aren’t just afraid — they’re also hopeless.After witnessing the Marxist race riots of 2020 and the erasure of their civil liberties during Covid, many Americans no longer recognize their homeland. A recent Harvard Harris poll shows that 80 percent of GOP voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, a July 2023 poll reported that 86.92 million Americans find “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay their household expenses, with the middle class being the most affected income bracket.
How many times have we heard friends and family members say, “The country is lost?” This fear and despair are understandable, but the stakes have never been higher. Bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary to defend a nation against forces wishing to destroy it. As Abascal explained to Tucker:
“The nation isn’t just made up of all the Spaniards here today, it’s not just the people you can see walking down the street. Our nation is our history. It’s in the cemeteries where our forebears rest. The nation is the sum of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born… I think that what we do today, even if we aren’t victorious as we hope, can make it so that others in the future, our children, future generations, can achieve that victory. [Then] it will have all been worthwhile.”
Spain Understands The Stakes
Spain has first-hand experience with communism. When communists controlled Spain, both in the lead-up to and during the civil war in the 1930s, it resulted in the persecution of Spanish intellectuals, clerics, and Christian laypeople. Spanish communists began their anti-Christian hate by banning all religious schools, removing crucifixes from classrooms, and deeming all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state. Eventually, they started burning Catholic Churches and mass executing Catholic religious and laypeople. Property rights were thrown out, and conservatives were unjustly convicted in kangaroo courts and executed. By the end of the war, a reported “13 bishops, 4,172 priests, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns and sisters,” and an unknown number of laypeople were killed.
The wounds inflicted by Spanish communists are still raw. The memory has not died. So, in 2022, Spain implemented its “Democratic Memory” law, an Orwellian piece of legislation that mandates a pro-leftist view of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. Through “criminal and economic sanctions for dissidents,” the law effectively eradicates “academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of education,” writes Hermann Tertsch, a Vox Member of the European Parliament.
Like in America, Spanish leftists brand anyone who contradicts their history narratives as thought criminals. According to Abascal, leftists have also created a two-tier justice system and “are now arresting young people for protest[ing] … saying they don’t have permits.” Unfortunately for the left, these fear tactics have not been entirely effective, as the ongoing protests demonstrate, perhaps because too many Spaniards know what communist control looks like.
In America, we are blessed not to know. However, that blessing is also a curse. We don’t appreciate how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny. Unable to oppose or even recognize tyranny, younger generations have lost touch with the American revolutionary spirit after sending generations of Americans to spend their formative years in reeducation camps run by cultural Marxists (aka public school and the university system).
Perhaps a way to regain America’s lost fortitude is by watching conservative freedom fighters in Spain. We may not have the national memory of communists burying priests alive or defiling and decapitating nuns, but we can look to Spain for motivation.
Indeed, the Spanish protests should inspire Americans, and Spanish history should be a warning.If we resign ourselves to failure or allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence, the consequences will be nothing short of complete national destruction.
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.
Many Americans have seen the footage of 77-year-old American lawyer Kenneth Darlington approaching and engaging a group of demonstrators blocking the Pan-American Highway in Panama before firing his handgun. Darlington is currently in Panamanian custody for killing two people during the incident. But what most Americans don’t know is what is going on in Panama, and what has been going on here for more than a month. Yet they should, because the unrest in this Central American country — home to a canal through which 40 percent of all U.S. container traffic travels — should serve as a warning as to what might await our own nation.
Holding a Nation Hostage
Since late October, protests have roiled Panama because of a government contract with Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals, which would grant the company rights to mine massive deposits of copper for years. The Cobre Panama mine already contributes almost 5 percent of the nation’s GDP. However, many Panamanians view the contract as unfair, too favorable to the Canadian company, and an ecological threat, especially given that almost 9 percent of national GDP comes from the tourism industry and the country’s many celebrated nature reserves. Thus the contract has united labor unions and environmental activists against the Panamanian government for negotiating the contract under what they perceive as poor terms.
These protesters are highly organized and have been quite efficient at bringing Panama’s society and economy to its knees. Major roads across the country have been routinely blocked, as have various ports. Roadblocks in certain parts of the country have prevented fresh produce grown in the agricultural region of Chiriqui from reaching the capital, where more than a third of all citizens live. Many fruits and vegetables, including bananas, have been unavailable for weeks. Thousands of Panamanians who live outside the city have been unable to commute to their jobs. Major tourist attractions — such as the World Heritage Site Casco Viejo, the historic section of the city — have often been inaccessible, affecting the hundreds of businesses located there. United Airlines even canceled flights into the city because the roads to and from Tocumen International Airport were blocked.
The alleged murder of two Panamanians by a U.S. citizen has provoked international headlines, but there has been extensive other violence and crime. Clashes have resulted in several other deaths, many stores have been vandalized, and enterprising demonstrators have established checkpoints at major thoroughfares where they shake down passersby for money.
Multiple American friends of mine have been robbed at these checkpoints, and one of them was pulled out of his car and beaten so badly he required more than a dozen stitches, including to his skull. In that example, Panamanian police stood nearby and did nothing until after the criminals had robbed my friend and left him lying on the road. (It was, if you can believe it, the second time he had been attacked and almost killed by criminals in Panama).
Panamanian police have engaged with demonstrators when they’ve congregated en masse and threatened government buildings or the financial district but have been notably absent elsewhere in the capital or broader country. Why, I’ve wondered, do the police not simply clear these roadblocks and tell protesters that even if they have the right to demonstrate, they are not free to cripple the country?
“They aren’t paid enough for that,” was the response from one American expat I asked who has lived in Panama for more than two decades. The typical response from the government and security forces to these kinds of protests, which happen fairly regularly, including last year, is to give demonstrators extensive latitude to express their frustrations. It is, authorities believe, a sort of “release valve” that will eventually lose steam.
Does Any of This Sound Familiar?
I hope I have provided enough details for readers to recognize the similarities between what is happening in Panama in the past two months and what happened in the United States more than three years ago. Between May 26 and June 8, rioters caused between $1-2 billion worth of damage in about 20 states, making it the costliest example of civil disorder in U.S. history. An estimated 25 people died in the riots. In some cities, such as Minneapolis and Chicago, police were ordered to stand down from intervening while rioters looted or destroyed businesses and even police stations.
In Panama, popular frustrations over the roadblocks are growing. Working-class Panamanians are increasingly vocal in their anger toward road closures that have lost them as much as one month’s pay — when you’re already poor, that kind of financial loss is more than an annoyance, it’s debilitating. Some clashes have already occurred between laborers and protesters, and if this crisis isn’t resolved soon, there’s likely to be more protests, and they’ll probably be more violent.
Panama’s elite, who live in tony districts such as Costa del Este — which could easily pass for downtown Miami or San Diego — have been thus far largely insulated from the damage caused by more than a month of protests. They may not have butterhead lettuce for their salads or bananas for their smoothies, but they’ll make do, much as the American elite class did in 2020. Yet, also like America, the continued wealth and success of the elite class and their neighborhoods can distract from decaying infrastructure, a massive divide between rich and poor, and systemic corruption.
How long, one wonders, will everyday citizens put up with a system so obviously biased toward those wealthy and powerful enough to shield themselves from increasingly common criminality and violence on their streets? How long will the police protect those who view them as expendable, and even as a politically expedient scapegoat? In Panama, we may learn the answer soon. Perhaps Americans should be pursuing policy options with regard to public safety and police forces that ensure we won’t have to ask that question ourselves.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
Non-“affirming” adults would be barred from becoming foster parents under the Biden administration’s proposed rule. Pictured: Thousands of New Yorkers take to the streets of Manhattan on June 25 for the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s fifth annual Queer Liberation March. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Transgender orthodoxy may soon become a litmus test for parenthood, according to the logic of a new policy working its way through the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden.
A new rule in HHS’ Administration for Children and Families would apply the idea that any lack of “affirmation” constitutes a form of child abuse to foster care placements. Once that idea takes root in foster care, child protective services agencies might start applying it more broadly.
The rule would reinterpret the Social Security Act, which requires agencies to ensure that each child in foster care receives “safe and proper” care. The rule would lay out steps agencies must take to meet that requirement for “LGBTQI+ children,” defined as kids who “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, as well as children who are non-binary, or have non-conforming gender identity or expression.”
Why is our government so interested in grooming America’s children to become homosexual? Are these efforts Gestapo in function? Why? Is it Eugenics? Are the disciples of Margarett Sanger that powerful in America’s Deep State?
Before agencies place a child with a foster parent, known as a “provider,” that person must “establish an environment free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status;” receive training “to be prepared with the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression;” and must be able to “facilitate the child’s access to age-appropriate resources, services, and activities that support their health and well-being.”
As the Federalist Society’s Rachel Morrison pointed out, the rule does not define “hostility,” “mistreatment,” or “abuse.” However, it does clarify that “a provider who attempted to undermine, suppress, or change the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression of a child, including through the use of so-called ‘conversion therapy,’ would not be a safe and appropriate placement.”
The proposed rule cites medical associations such as the American Psychological Association to claim that efforts to “undermine, suppress, or change” sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression “are not supported by evidence and have been rejected as harmful.”
The rule does not acknowledge that gender ideology has infiltrated these medical associations and that many doctors—including those who once embraced gender ideology—have warned against confusing children on their gender and putting them on a path to mutilating their own bodies.
Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist and early proponent of transgender medical interventions, joined and briefly helped lead the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the central medical group that organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association rely upon.
A member from 1974 to 2001, Levine served as chairman of the eight-member International Standards of Care Committee that issued the fifth version of the standards. He ultimately resigned his membership in 2002 upon concluding that the organization “had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific progress.”
In a document opposing the use of Medicaid funding for experimental transgender medical interventions for children, Levine explains that “there is no consensus or agreed ‘standard of care’ concerning therapeutic approaches to child or adolescent gender dysphoria.” He notes that gender identity “is not biologically based” and “empirically not fixed for many individuals.” Levine also warns that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes” and makes it far less likely that young children will “desist” from a transgender identity.
Contrary to the transgender activists’ claims, many doctors have raised serious concerns about the long-term effects of “gender-affirming care.” Cross-sex hormones can weaken children’s bones and make them more prone to heart disease. So-called puberty blockers, often billed as fully reversible, involve introducing a disease into a child’s body and make puberty harder to start again, should the child change his or her mind.
European countries, long considered more “progressive” than the U.S., have found a lack of evidence for medical interventions on children and are recommending a “watchful waiting” approach for minors.
Ultimately, gender ideology rests on the claim that a nebulous gender identity is more important than an individual’s biological sex. If a biological male claims to identify as female, society must consider him a woman and allow him to enter women’s restrooms, prisons, and sports teams, even though some men pose a threat to women in intimate situations and enjoy biological advantages in many sports. Similarly, this ideology encourages bodily alterations to make a male appear female and vice versa, despite the lack of evidence that such interventions actually improve well-being over the long haul.
This idea is particularly harmful for children who are just learning what it means to be male or female. If a boy likes to play with Barbie dolls, that does not mean he is really a girl. If a girl likes to play with G.I. Joes, that does not mean she is really a boy. Yet the ideology behind transgender identity urges parents to abandon all sanity and declare that such kids are transgender.
Before you object, think about how nebulous “gender identity” actually is. It doesn’t rely on a specific set of standards that may be verified objectively. Instead, it relies on an individual’s claim that he or she experiences painful and persistent dissonance between an “identity” and his or her biology. Any attempt to resolve this dissonance through mainstream talk therapy is ipso facto a form of “conversion therapy” to be condemned as “harmful.”
Yet Levine argues that “affirming” a transgender identity is a “powerful psychotherapeutic intervention” that will set kids on the path to mutilation and sterilization—long before they have any concept about what their own fertility means.
Under Biden’s proposed new rule, any potential foster parent who aims to protect a child from this confusion and damage may soon face expulsion from the program. That means the process will be designed to weed out guardians who actually would take good care of the kids and enable guardians who would assist in harming them.
In this topsy-turvy world, biology takes a back seat to a child’s insistence that he or she is really the opposite sex, even if the child might just as well identify as Queen Elsa of Arendelle or a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The rule justifies this by claiming that kids in the foster care system are more likely to identify as LGBTQI+, i.e. to face gender confusion. This means they are more vulnerable to the damage of gender ideology, not less. They need someone to protect them from “gender-affirming care,” and Biden seems dead set on preventing that.
Sadly, the HHS rule is not the first time Americans have faced this type of policy. In my home state of Virginia, state Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a Democrat, supports a bill to expand the definition of “child abuse” to include disagreement with gender ideology.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill turning California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care,” which the law defines as an absolute right. The law gives California courts the ability to award custody over a child if someone removes the child from his or her parents in another state in order to obtain such “care” for that child despite the parents’ disagreement.
Ultimately, Americans cannot have it both ways. Either it is child abuse to deny a child’s transgender identity, or it is child abuse to encourage experimental medical alterations that will leave that child stunted, scarred, and infertile.
Those on the Left seem hell-bent on forcing gender ideology in the name of safety, and Americans need to stand up and say, “No.”
Thankfully, HHS’ Administration for Children and Families must read every single written comment that concerned Americans send in on the rule. Americans may make their voices heard by submitting comments at this link.
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It is hard not to see the difference between Thanksgiving in 2019 with low inflation, cheap gas, no new wars, low food costs, and an excellent overall economy compared to Thanksgiving 2023. Trump’s Horn-of-Plenty vs. Biden’s Horn of Disaster.
This Thanksgiving, I’m giving thanks that Trump has a good chance of being elected back into the White House to clean up Biden and the Democrats’ mess they have perpetrated on the American people. But, having pointed out the obvious, I hope we can ignore the Biden/Democrat disaster for one day and focus on what’s really important: God, Family, and Friends.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
U.S. senators led by John Fetterman, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders would turn unemployment insurance into something closer to a universal basic income program — with predictably awful results.
Hard work has always defined our nation, fueling our rise as a global economic superpower. The American workforce used to be synonymous with American greatness.
But our workforce was devasted in 2020, when even the casual observer came to understand that the federal government couldn’t pay people to stay idle and out of work forever.
So why are Democrats in Congress so eager to repeat the one of the most glaring pandemic-era policy blunders?
With a breathtaking disregard for lessons learned, Senators John Fetterman (D-Penn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and others are seeking to expand state-run unemployment insurance programs, transitioning them into something more closely resembling a federally mandated universal basic income scheme than an emergency safety net program. Their new plan would replace up to 100% of workers’ wages for more than a year. That’s not insurance — that’s a new entitlement paid for by the employers taxed to fund the program.
Senate Bill 3140, the Unemployment Insurance Modernization and Recession Readiness Act, could be forgiven as merely naïve if it hadn’t arrived so soon after pandemic policies cost taxpayers billions of dollars and encouraged millions of able-bodied Americans to exit the workforce even as employers struggled to find workers. With the COVID experience so recent, the senators’ plan is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the moral and economic dignity afforded by a job. It represents a final neutralizing of the once-great American work ethic and, with it, the civic virtues of independence, individual responsibility, and self-government.
It’s clear that big-government types like Sanders and Warren find work antithetical to their aims of cradle-to-grave dependency. They’ve been trying to mainstream socialism for decades. Now they’ve turned their sights on the worker safety net program as a vehicle to destroy work itself. Unemployment insurance has always been about providing limited, temporary assistance to workers who lose a job through no fault of their own. Funded by employer taxes, the largely state-run program has served as a rapid on-ramp to the workforce, ensuring the unemployed have some immediate support as they look for their next job. The arrangement has worked well, allowing states to devise innovations that result in higher rates of re-employment, shorter periods of unemployment, and lower taxes on employers. But all of that would change under this new proposal. In place of state innovation would come federal standardization — and not in a good way, either.
In 2020, Democrats pushed successfully for an expansion of unemployment benefits as part of federal pandemic relief spending. Stopping just short of a federal takeover of the unemployment program, Congress increased weekly benefit levels up to $600 per week above existing limits, expanded benefits to individuals whose employers (if they had one) did not pay into the program, and paid benefits for more than a year and a half. The results were disastrous.
Billions of additional dollars flooding the system became a magnet for fraudsters. The Department of Labor’s inspector general estimates at least $35 billion in unemployment benefits was lost to fraud. State programs took a hit as well, losing more than $12 billion to fraudulent and ineligible claims. Perhaps worst of all, the fact that an unemployment claimant could replace most — if not all — of his income by remaining unemployed slowed the pace of the post-pandemic recovery. While tens of millions of hardworking Americans returned to work as quickly as possible, millions of others stayed on unemployment. It wasn’t until a year after the federal benefit expansion ended that U.S. employment returned to its pre-pandemic level.
So, what do Democrats want to do now? Their new bill would force states to pay unemployment claims for up to six months and make an additional federally funded year of benefits available after that. Those benefits would be expensive, replacing 75% of a worker’s salary at minimum. But under certain circumstances, a worker could receive up to 100% of his former wages.
And, naturally, labor unions and nongovernmental organizations are thrilled at the prospect of compelling employers to pay striking workers — an idea so ludicrous that even California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar proposal in the Golden State.
Substituting government dependency for the dignity and upward mobility work provides is not a formula for American prosperity and success. For American greatness to endure, let’s hope Congress never takes this plan seriously.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is calling on “intelligent speed assistance technology” (ISA) to be mandatory “in all new cars” after a fatal accident in Nevada killed nine people.
In a press release last week, the federal agency outlined how ISA “uses a car’s GPS location compared with a database of posted speed limits and its onboard cameras to help ensure safe and legal speeds.”
“Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through visual, sound, or haptic alerts, and the driver is responsible for slowing the car,” the agency explained. “Active systems include mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit and those that electronically limit the speed of the vehicle to fully prevent drivers from exceeding the speed limit.”
The NTSB board issued the recommendations last week after a 2018 Dodge Challenger rammed into a minivan at 103 mph in North Las Vegas in January 2022. The driver, however, was high on cocaine and PCP.
“This crash is the latest in a long line of tragedies we’ve investigated where speeding and impairment led to catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in last week’s press release. “We know the key to saving lives is redundancy, which can protect all of us from human error that occurs on our roads. What we lack is the collective will to act on NTSB safety recommendations.”
While legal speed limits are capped at 85 mph in the U.S., vehicles are designed to go far faster to allow safe passing and escape in emergency situations. The capacity to go faster also puts less strain on vehicles at lower speeds.
The NTSB released the proposal weeks after the Republican House majority helped Democrats preserve their “kill switch” mandate for new vehicles earlier this month. All cars produced in 2026 and onward will be required to implement technology that can automatically disable the vehicle “if impairment is detected” after 19 Republicans joined Democrats to kill an amendment defunding the mandate.
During debate last night on my amendment to defund the 2026 kill-switch mandate for cars, some Democrats claimed the technology wouldn’t monitor or disable cars. Here’s the actual law I had to read to them:
The NTSB’s ISA mandate, combined with the “kill switch” requirement embedded in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, lays the groundwork for corporate and government access to monitor and interfere with personal movement.
In California, activists have cited climate change as justification for new standards limiting transit. The California Air Resources Board released new regulations last summer banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The following week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom begged residents not to charge electric vehicles during a heat wave so the power grid would not become overwhelmed.
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.
Last week, newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly released 90 hours of Jan. 6, 2021, security footage featuring protesters peacefully walking through the Capitol, often with the encouragement or indifference of Capitol Police officers.
The footage further delegitimizes the Biden administration, corporate media, and Jan. 6 Committee’s insistence that the 2021 Capitol protest was on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It also exonerates countless peaceful protesters who have been slandered by the media and J6 Committee, harassed by Biden’s Department of Justice, and held in solitary confinement without due process.
Many protesters were severely punished because federal courts stressed a “need to deter others, especially in cases of domestic terrorism.” In other words, they made examples out of Jan. 6 protesters for daring to question the results of the rigged 2020 election. Some Jan. 6 protesters crumbled under the Biden DOJ’s political persecution. Four of them took their own lives. Here’s what we know about those victims.
Matthew Perna
According to journalist Julie Kelly, Matthew Perna reportedly “graduated at the top of his class at Penn State University and traveled the world teaching children in southeast Asia how to speak English.” Perna had become interested in holistic medicine after his mother’s death and worked as a CBD distributor.
Surveillance video shows Perna entered the Capitol through an open door and peacefully walked through the building for about 20 minutes. Perna “did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property,” Kelly reported.
NEW JAN. 6 FOOTAGE: Matthew Perna (seen in red sweatshirt) committed suicide after being targeted by the DOJ for going into the Capitol.
Video shows him calmly walking through, guided by police.
Perna initially plead guilty to charges believing he would only be facing up to one… pic.twitter.com/iCONNjLEDs
Nonetheless, after getting in touch with his local FBI and “voluntarily submitt[ing] to questioning,” he was arrested by six FBI agents at his home and was “indicted by a grand jury on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors.”
Perna pleaded guilty to all four counts, and given his previously clean record, he expected a prison sentence of less than a year.
In a letter to the judge, Perna’s father begged him to be lenient, writing, “This past year cost Matthew his income, the love of his life, his friendships, and his standing in the community. He will never be the same, and I ask that you take all of this into consideration before sentencing him.”
However, “Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling every January 6 prosecution, intervened and asked the court to delay Perna’s sentencing,” wrote Kelly. This was devastating news, as Graves’ office is famous for throwing the book at J6 defendants in order to “deter others in cases involving domestic terrorism.”
Before he could receive his sentencing, Perna took his own life at 37 years old. In his obituary, his family wrote:
Matthew Lawrence Perna died on February 25, 2022 of a broken heart. His community (which he loved), his country, and the justice system killed his spirit and his zest for life. He attended the rally on January 6, 2021 to peacefully stand up for his beliefs. He entered the Capitol through a previously opened door (he did not break in as was reported) where he was ushered in by police. He didn’t break, touch, or steal anything. He did not harm anyone, as he stayed within the velvet ropes taking pictures. For this act he has been persecuted by many members of his community, friends, relatives, and people who had never met him. Many people were quietly supportive, and Matt was truly grateful for them. The constant delays in hearings, and postponements dragged out for over a year. Because of this, Matt’s heart broke and his spirit died, and many people are responsible for the pain he endured.
Jord Meacham
According to his obituary, Nejourde “Jord” Meacham “worked on the family’s ranch, and enjoyed riding horses, hunting, fishing, and doing anything outdoors. He was a big history buff and was a good cook — soup being his specialty.” Kelly reported that Meacham was one of 10 children and came from an apparently “tight-knit family.”
At 19 years old, he attended the Jan. 6 protest with his uncle. Meacham did not appear to be violent nor destructive. Surveillance footage shows him simply walking through the Capitol with a Trump flag. Yet the Biden DOJ charged Meacham with disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.
On Aug. 28, 2021, just hours after a judge scheduled his arraignment, Meacham died from “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” at just 22 years old.
Mark Aungst
Mark Aungst was a gas field well service technician, practicing Lutheran, father, and soon-to-be grandfather. “A loyal and dedicated man, Mark showed tremendous pride for God and his country,” stated his obituary. “Above all else, Mark loved his daughter and any time they spent together, as she was truly his world.”
Aungst traveled to Washington, D.C., on a chartered bus from Pennsylvania for the protest on Jan. 6, 2021. He was initially in the Capitol for only 30 seconds. Then, 20 minutes later, he reentered the Capitol, spending 10 minutes inside taking pictures and video.
Aungst was arrested in February of 2021 and reportedly pleaded guilty to a charge of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. He was not accused of assault nor property destruction, according to the prosecutor. His sentencing was set for Sept. 27, where he reportedly could have faced “up to six months in prison and [been] fined $5,000.” But he took his own life on July 20, 2022, at 47 years old.
Christopher Georgia
According to Christopher Georgia’s LinkedIn profile, he was a regional portfolio manager at a bank holding company. Georgia’s neighbor reportedly told The Sun that Georgia was a “loving father” and someone “who always had a smile and loved cutting his own grass.”
According to court documents, Georgia was accused of violating the city curfew and trying to “enter certain property, that is, the United States Capitol Grounds, against the will of the United States Capitol Police.” He was arrested on the day of the J6 protest. Three days later, on Jan. 9, he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at 53 years old.
The DailyMail reported that Georgia’s wife called 911 that Saturday morning, saying there was “blood everywhere.” The police reportedly described Georgia’s family as “extremely distressed” when officers arrived.
Aftermath
The hopelessness, demonization, and fear felt by Georgia, Aungst, Perna, and Meacham are not isolated. More than 1,100 people present in our nation’s capital on Jan. 6 are targets of Biden’s Justice Department.
The Jan. 6 footage should have been released immediately for the benefit of J6 defendants and clarity for the American people. Since it wasn’t, Democrats have been able to destroy lives and freely lie for nearly three years about what truly transpired.
Biden and the corporate media claim that these protesters, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, are domestic terrorists and a threat to the nation. But these four men who felt hopeless and took their own lives weren’t terrorists; they were regular citizens who just wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights by protesting what they believed was a stolen election.
Questioning Democrats and their blatant election-rigging tactics, such as mass mail-in balloting or Big Tech censorship in favor of their preferred candidates, was deemed unacceptable by the tyrannical Biden administration. The feds made examples out of J6 defendants like Georgia, Aungst, Perna, and Meacham as part of their crusade to paint all conservatives as domestic terrorists and to instill fear in the hearts of all Americans. Now there’s blood on their hands.
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.
The wheels are starting to fall off the green energy bandwagon. The rose-colored glasses are clearing up and reality is sinking in.
The giant push toward a net zero utopia is not practical and has been a complete disservice to the American consumer. Components of the green movement are experiencing major setbacks, namely offshore wind, electric vehicles (EVs), and investments.
Offshore wind projects are struggling to secure financing and stay on track. The biggest blow came last month, when the world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted canceled two major projects off the New Jersey coastline, taking the wind right out of Gov. Phil Murphy’s green energy sails. Ørsted is also suspending work on offshore projects in Maryland and Delaware.
The EV market is also losing steam. Sales are slumping and manufacturers are scaling back on production. (Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images | Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Among the wave of cancellations are projects in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut. Several other projects are on the ropes and a host of companies are paying millions to break their contracts.
The industry hit another snag recently when Germany-based Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy pulled the plug on its wind turbine blade facility in Portsmouth, Virginia. Siemens Gamesa, one of the world’s leading suppliers, says, “development milestones to establish the facility could not be met.”
According to BloombergNEF, at least half of U.S. wind contracts have or are at risk of being terminated. The causes are typically due to skyrocketing inflation, high interest rates, choked supply chains and financial troubles.
Ford Motor Company stands to lose $4.5 billion on its EV business for 2023 and will be delaying many of their EV investments.
General Motors said it was restructuring EV goals, Honda shelved plans to develop affordable EVs with GM, and Hertz said it will slow their rate of purchasing them due to high repair costs. Elon Musk is even considering putting off plans for a $1 billion plant in Mexico.
Most, if not all, manufacturers are reporting major losses per EV sold. Ford lost $62,000 per vehicle in the third quarter; one luxury electric vehicle company lost an astounding $430,000. Countless others are losing tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle, quarter after quarter.
Car dealers are slashing EV prices. EVs sit on lots nearly twice as long as internal combustion engines. Even industry-leader Tesla has been shaving thousands off their retail prices due to unmet sales expectations.
This kind of loss is not sustainable for any company.
The EV market is niche. Those who want one have one. But the rest of America is not convinced they would be better off with an EV on account of a multitude of reliability factors. Nor can they afford the steep price tag.
Consequently, the last few months have seen stock prices drastically dropping in companies across the green spectrum. From wind to solar to EVs to fuel cells, investors are abandoning the “green” energy ship in droves. It might be sinking.
Siemens Energy stock is down 45%; Ørsted, 67%; Power Inc., a hydrogen fuel cell producer, 71%; Charge Point Holdings Inc., an EV charging company, 70%; Blink Charging Co., another EV charging company, 72%; and Nikola Corp., maker of heavy-duty EVs, has gone from $65 a share in mid-2020 to the current price of less than $1 per share.
A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that such companies are “finding it more difficult to secure financing than at any time in the past decade.”
We need to read between the lines here. The green energy revolution is not working, nor is central planning. You cannot force Americans to buy cars they don’t want any more than you can force energy transitions that aren’t viable.
Green energy is wholly inadequate to meet the needs of all Americans, and turns out, is insanely expensive.
The World Economic Forum says that getting to net zero by 2050 will cost an extra $3.5 trillion a year. The U.S. has already poured hundreds of billions into the effort and continues to keep shoveling. All on the backs of the American taxpayer, to save a mere fraction of temperature. Maybe.
Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician estimates that even if all fossil fuels were eliminated from the United States, not even 0.2 degrees Celsius would be salvaged.
Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal.
Two journalists working for a Lebanon-based TV channel and a third person were killed by a rocket strike near Lebanon’s border with Israel on Tuesday, the Lebanese state news agency reported. The agency said the incident took place near the town of Tir Harfa, about a mile from the Israeli frontier. The strike came less than a day after Hezbollah hit Israeli Defense Forces’ military positions near the border, according to reports.
“According to Israeli Media, Hezbollah has launched upwards of 40 Rockets and 3 Attack Drones against IDF Positions in Northern Israel this morning causing Significant Damage to at least 1 Military Outpost along the Border, with this being seen as a Serious Escalation,” an open-source intelligence monitor posted Monday on X.
Israeli aircraft Tuesday struck three-armed terror cells in Lebanese territory close to the border, as well as a number of Hezbollah targets, the army said, according to Jewish News Syndicate. Sirens sounded in northern Israel on Tuesday morning due to a potential hostile aircraft intrusion from Lebanon, with the IDF later giving the all-clear.
Three anti-tank missile launches from Lebanon toward the area of Metula near the Israel-Lebanon border were identified by the IDF on Tuesday morning. No injuries were reported, and the IDF struck the source of the launches. Later on Tuesday morning, the IDF reported that terrorists fired mortar shells at a military post in northern Israel.
Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV, which the two killed reporters were working for, said Israel had carried out the attack and deliberately targeted the journalists. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah broke out after Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Oct. 7. The border violence has escalated, raising Western fears of a widening war in the Middle East that could draw in both the United States and Iran.
It is the worst violence at the border since Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006 and has so far killed more than 70 Hezbollah fighters, 13 Lebanese civilians, seven Israeli troops and three Israeli civilians.
Newsmax writer Eric Mack and JNS.org contributed to this report.
Democrats’ opposition to voter identification requirements was called out Tuesday by former President Donald Trump as “the biggest giveaway” of their alleged intention to stuff ballot boxes.
“No radical left Democrat politician has ever been able to explain why their party is so rabidly opposed to Voter ID — and that’s the biggest giveaway of all that they are cheating on a monumental scale,” Trump said Tuesday in one in a series of video statements posted to Truth Social. “They don’t want voter ID, because they want to cheat.”
Trump denounced Democrats’ past arguments that “voter ID is racist,” calling it “offensive” that Democrats attempted to suggest voters are incapable of getting a photo ID.
“What century are these radical Democrats living in?” Trump said. “Americans of all colors and creeds are fully capable of obtaining identification, which is required to drive a car, buy a beer, see an R-rated movie, get on an airplane, get a bank account, check into a hotel, and even to get cold medicine at a pharmacy.”
Trump cited polls showing “over 80% of Americans” supporting voter ID requirements.
“Yet in the last Congress every single Democrat in the House of Representatives voted to ban voter ID nationwide,” Trump said. “That because they cheat, and their policies which are so bad and so destructive — especially to our cities or inner-cities — no wonder they have to cheat, because nobody could get elected with those policies.”
Trump added only “two things are scared” in the anti-democracy party: “Open borders and no voter ID,” two policies he said are tied to stuff ballots for Democrats’ agenda.
“When I am reelected we will secure our borders and we will launch a nationwide campaign to get voter ID in every federal, state, and local election,” Trump’s video statement concluded. “What we really want to do is get down to paper ballots, one-day voting, and voter ID, and we’re going to have safe elections again.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Ensuring fair elections should be a top priority for federal, state, and local lawmakers. Pictured: An employee at the Utah County election office puts mail-in ballots into a container to register the vote in the midterm elections on Nov. 6, 2018, in Provo, Utah. (Photo: George Frey/Getty Images)
The American public wants and deserves an election system in which the candidates who get the most legitimate votes of eligible voters are declared the winners, and elections are not marred by errors, fraud, and other serious issues and misbehavior that make voters and candidates question the legitimacy of election outcomes.
Anyone who doubts the need for reform should take a look at The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which is constantly being updated with new cases of and convictions for fraud from across the country.
In an era of razor-thin elections, guarding against this type of illegal behavior, as well as errors made by election officials, is especially important. In 2024, it could prove critical.
The good news is that there is still time to implement the kind of reforms needed to help secure elections and maintain the public’s confidence in them. Although most states have part-time legislatures, most of those legislative sessions occur in the first quarter of each year, giving state legislators the ability to make final improvements—at least for the general election in November—starting in January.
States with full-time legislatures, such as California and Michigan, can pass such improvements immediately.
So, what can be done? For starters, states should ensure that election officials maintain current, accurate voter rolls. They should require photo identification to vote, both in person and absentee. For registered voters who don’t already have a photo ID, states should provide one free of charge.
States should also ban funding of state and local election offices by partisan private donors and organizations. This sort of shady funding occurred in the 2020 election and created clear and obvious conflicts of interest.
States should also prohibit ballot trafficking. Allowing third-party strangers such as candidates, campaign staffers, party activists, and political guns-for-hire, all of whom have a stake in the outcome of an election, to handle a voter’s ballot is an invitation to fraud and coercion.
Finally, transparency is fundamental for states seeking to conduct honest elections and maintain public confidence in their credibility. With that in mind, states should reject calls to restrict the access of election observers and ensure that observers have complete and unfettered access to every aspect of our elections, from the processing of voter-registration applications to the casting of votes and the counting of ballots.
The best and easiest toolkit that legislators and citizens can use to determine how to improve their elections is the Election Integrity Scorecard, which The Heritage Foundation launched in December 2021. The scorecard analyzes the election laws, regulations, and procedures of all 50 states and the District of Columbia by comparing them with a list of 47 best-practices recommendations. These recommendations outline the best ways for election officials to ensure the integrity of their state elections.
Each state is scored based on its implementation of these best practices. No state in the country has a perfect score of 100, which means everyone has some work to do. Tennessee and Georgia are at the top of the ranking, with scores of 84 and 83, respectively. Nevada and Hawaii find themselves at the bottom, with abysmally failing marks of only 28 and 26, respectively.
Heritage’s scorecard also includes a detailed analysis for each state (plus the District), informing legislators and election officials what they need to fix. The scorecard even offers model legislation on absentee ballots, accurate voter rolls, election observers, private funding of election offices, vote trafficking, and other important reforms.
Less than one year away from Election Day 2024, the time for the public, local, and state election officials and state legislators to ensure the integrity of our elections and protect the franchise for voters is now.
Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, and former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a member of the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Gender dysphoria is a disability that requires accommodation, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services says, based on one court ruling. (Photo illustration: SB Arts Media/Getty Images)
The Biden administration has been known to stretch the law beyond a plain reading to support a desired policy outcome. Take the longstanding federal law that criminalizes the shipment of abortion drugs, for example. The Justice Department argues that the law doesn’t mean what it says. Wrong.
Or how about Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—crafted to guarantee sex equality in education—which the Department of Education argues permits biological boys to compete on female athletic teams? Wrong again.
Now, the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing that gender dysphoria is a disability under federal law. And that disability, HHS argues, requires accommodation. How does HHS reach that conclusion? By relying on one decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, a decision not followed by any other federal appellate court. It’s also a decision about which certain justices of the U.S. Supreme Court expressed significant concern.
On Sept. 14, the Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule to amend section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which is the federal law that prohibits disability discrimination in any program conducted by federal agencies or receiving federal funding.
There is much good in the proposed rule to be sure, including updates on obligations concerning web and mobile accessibility, service animals, facilities, and medical care. But the proposed rule also adopts the rationale of the 4th Circuit in Williams v. Kincaid to justify extending the definition of disability to include gender dysphoria.
The Department agrees that restrictions that prevent, limit, or interfere with otherwise qualified individuals’ access to care due to their gender dysphoria, gender dysphoria diagnosis, or perception of gender dysphoria may violate section 504.
There’s just one problem: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act excludes the exact disorder HHS is trying to shoehorn into its interpretation. That law reads:
For the purposes of sections 791, 793, and 794 of this title, the term ‘individual with a disability’ does not include an individual on the basis of—(i) transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders.
Happily for the Biden administration, the appeals court in Williams held (inexplicably) that “gender dysphoria” and “gender identity disorder” were two different things.
In the case, inmate Kesha Williams, who was born a male but “identifies” as a transgender woman, sued Sheriff Stacey Kincaid of Fairfax County, Virginia, based on alleged mistreatment at the county jail.
Williams sued under both the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act (or ADA), a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including employment, education, transportation, and places open to the general public. The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act contain identical, exclusionary language on “gender identity disorders.” The two laws often appear together when a claimant alleges discrimination based on disability.
Williams’ contention was that as Fairfax County sheriff, Kincaid violated both laws by refusing to accommodate Williams’ “gender dysphoria.” Williams argued that the sheriff did so by assigning the inmate to men’s housing, failing to offer hormone therapy, and permitting “persistent and intentional misgendering and harassment.”
Because the ADA clearly doesn’t provide disability protections for “gender identity disorder,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the 2-1 majority, engaged in a contorted legal analysis before concluding that gender dysphoria wasn’t actually a gender identity disorder. To reach that conclusion, Motz didn’t look to the statute’s plain language at the time of its enactment. Instead, she focused on a much more recent change by the American Psychiatric Association on gender-related psychiatric diagnoses—one not envisioned, anticipated, or incorporated by the original drafters of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.
This change first appeared in 2013 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). This manual is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States. At that time, the American Psychiatric Association replaced the term “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria.” The change focused the diagnosis on the distress that some people who consider themselves transgender experience (and for which they may seek psychiatric, medical, and surgical treatments) instead of on an individual’s desire to be a gender other than the one he or she was born as. Motz determined that this change was good enough to stretch the Americans With Disabilities Act well beyond the limits of what Congress determined the law ought to bear originally.
In sum, the APA’s removal of the ‘gender identity disorder’ diagnosis and the addition of the ‘gender dysphoria’ diagnosis to the DSM-5 reflected a significant shift in medical understanding. The obsolete diagnosis focused solely on cross-gender identification; the modern one on clinically significant distress … Put simply, while the older DSM pathologized the very existence of transgender people, the recent DSM-5’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria takes as a given that being transgender is not a disability and affirms that a transgender person’s medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone else’s.
Motz and the other judge in the majority argued that the concept of “gender identity disorder” as used in the statute encompassed all “cross-gender identification,” but the current American Psychiatric Association-defined concept of “gender dysphoria” is defined by stress that goes beyond “being trans alone.” So, Motz concluded in her opinion, “gender identity disorder” as a category “no longer exists,” thereby rendering the statutory exclusion without any effect.
In his dissent, Judge Marvin Quattlebaum argued that the majority’s focus on this linguistic change ignored the plain text of the Americans With Disabilities Act at the time of its enactment in 1990. And that plain text explicitly excluded “gender identity disorders.” In Quattlebaum’s view, Motz was incorrect to focus on an apparent shift in medical understanding, something she argued had rendered the exclusion of “gender identity disorder” as obsolete.
The Supreme Court denied review in Williams on June 30, but Justice Samuel Alito was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in strenuously dissenting from this denial. Alito wrote that the case presented a question of “great national importance” that required prompt review. He added:
The Fourth Circuit’s decision makes an important provision of a federal law inoperative and, given the broad reach of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act, will have far-reaching and important effects across much of civil society in that Circuit. Voters in the affected States and the legislators they elect will lose the authority to decide how best to address the needs of transgender persons in single-sex facilities, dormitory housing, college sports, and the like.
As seems typical for the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services relied on a single, problematic ruling—one based on faulty reasoning and subject to withering criticism—for the purpose of advancing its preferred social policy interests. HHS intends that all entities covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act now must make accommodations for any feelings of stress or discomfort that result from a person’s “assigned” (i.e., birth) sex.
If the proposed HHS rule is finalized, it would open the door for those who consider themselves transgender and feel clinically distressed to receive requested accommodations in bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, same-sex housing, preferred pronouns, and more.
The public comment period on the proposed HHS rule closed Nov. 13, and the Biden administration now must wade through over 5,200 comments received before drafting and issuing a final rule.
The administration shouldn’t rely on another faulty interpretation of federal law. Instead, it should rescind the proposed HHS rule immediately.
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Today, as I’m drawing this cartoon (November 20th, 2023), Joe Biden is celebrating his 81st birthday, so obviously, many are bringing up the question, “How old is too old to be president? But is age really the issue? There are many his age and older, much more mentally fit to be President than he is.
Trump, 77, is still cognitively vibrant, shows no sign of letting up, and is a stark contrast to stumbling bumbling Joe. In my opinion, Joe Biden has never been mentally fit to be president. So, I don’t think age is the issue, but instead of judging by age, maybe a mental test of some sort that I’m sure Biden wouldn’t be able to pass today.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
More footage from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, further contradicts the left-wing narrative that the day’s events constituted a “violent insurrection” wherein democracy itself was placed in jeopardy at the hands of virulent demonstrators.
Last week, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana began releasing tapes containing more than 40,000 hours of footage from the Capitol, which were buried for three years while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and lawmakers on the partisan Jan. 6 Committee worked to dramatize the riot with prime-time show trials.
“When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make accessible to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021. Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement. “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
With a bulk of the footage made available by Friday, the rest of the tapes will be made public on a rolling basis. Cameras captured demonstrators peacefully marching through the halls of the Capitol while police officers stood by.
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful
In another clip, a Capitol police officer is seen removing restraints on one demonstrator after walking him down a hallway out of sight from the crowd — before another officer bizarrely congratulates him with a fist bump.
I don’t think Capitol Police would take restraints off of a protester, FIST BUMP him, and then let him go if this were an actual “insurrection”
The footage corroborates what was shared by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in March before his abrupt exit from the network. Johnson’s Republican predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, gave Carlson’s producers access to the footage that had been kept under seal by the Democrat majority.
“That video,” Carlson said, “tells a very different story about what happened on Jan. 6.”
The tapes aired by Carlson showed Jacob Chansley, the infamous “QAnon Shaman,” being escorted by police around the complex; revealed deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick “healthy and vigorous” after allegedly being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher; and unearthed new contradictions in Ray Epps’ testimony. The tapes also exposed outright fabrications by the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which was established by House Speaker Pelosi ostensibly to probe the Capitol turmoil while concealing her own failures.
Democrat Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the partisan Select Committee, bizarrely conceded that over the course of the panel’s two-year investigation, lawmakers never reviewed the blockbuster footage that was later published by Fox News.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, who was vice chair of the Select Committee before an overwhelming primary defeat by Rep. Harriet Hageman, tried to downplay Friday’s release by resharing some of the panel’s carefully selected footage of the mob.
“Here’s some January 6th video for you,” she wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, whom Cheney’s Soviet-style committee sought to frame as a collaborator in an apparent insurrection, pushed back on Cheney’s narrative.
“Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote on X. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting.”
Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times.
You made sure we saw that—and nothing else.
It’s the other stuff—what you deliberately hid from us—that we find so upsetting.
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.
Corporate media have gotten every single major story of the last decade wrong, in big and little ways. Whether it’s the 2016 election, the Russia-collusion scam, the threats posed by Covid and response to the same, the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life and family, accurate discussion of the Biden family business, immigration, abortion, crime, racism, guns, hate crime hoaxes, the economy, inflation, education, the relationship between the sexes, the radical trans agenda, or a thousand other stories, the media haven’t just been bad. They have been absolutely irredeemably awful.
A record-high percentage of Americans (39 percent) have literally no — as in none, zilch, nada — trust in corporate media to “report the news in a full, fair and accurate way,” according to Gallup. Another large percentage (29 percent) has “not very much” trust in the media to get the story right. Only 11 percent of Republicans trust the media, compared to nearly 60 percent of Democrats. The gap between the parties is because corporate media overwhelmingly shape news and information to support Democrats and their policy goals.
If The Washington Post were doing journalism instead of propaganda, its reporter who covers the news media might be focused nonstop on the fact that trust in the media is extremely low. But Paul Farhi thinks there are more important problems. Namely, he’s worried that some unwashed masses might be practicing their First Amendment right to do journalism without a license.
“Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney’ or ‘citizen soldier,’” he wrote on social media.
First off, and definitely most importantly, someone needs to take Farhi aside and gently explain to him the meaning of “citizen soldier.” Our armed services were created around the idea of a broad swath of citizens working together to defend the nation’s values. The notion is fundamental to Western civilization and has routinely been shown to achieve better results than armies made up of professionals.
Even now, “citizen soldier” is how military reserve and National Guard members throughout the country think of themselves. In fact, the National Guard’s publication is called “Citizen-Soldier.” There is no need for Farhi to disparage these citizen soldiers or the many successful citizen-soldier armies throughout time and history.
Heck, while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and note that it was a “citizen attorney” with an eighth-grade education who wrote a handwritten appeal to the United States Supreme Court in the case that found that the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires states to provide attorneys for criminal defendants who are impoverished. But of the three groups he mentions, attorneys are the best for his case for professionalism on account of the intense education top lawyers receive.
But journalism? Journalism needs credentialing? Really? Farhi has been on this kick about the need to keep the lower castes out of journalism for a while now. Seven years ago he wrote, “Is there any other profession in which more people think they can do the job better than the pros than journalism? Medicine? Teaching?”
Again, one of these things is not like the others. There is a reason why people generally respect surgeons and don’t try to do their jobs. And there is a reason why people have taken to reporting real news and information since those at corporate media outlets such as The Washington Post are so bad at doing actual journalism.
The Washington Post, we might recall, launched the Russia-collusion scam by having one of its longtime journalists launder an information operation against the American people. The criminal leak against the Trump administration remains one of the great uninvestigated and unsolved crimes of recent memory. That the Post gleefully and willingly took part in an information operation against the country is reprehensible. The paper perpetuated the Russia-collusion hoax with hundreds of stories based on anonymous sources from the intelligence bureaucracy. This scam was no minor thing. It was the lie that Donald Trump was a traitor who had stolen the 2016 presidential election by colluding with Russia. It caused massive amounts of damage to the republic.
Farhi, for his part, seemed to think that many things in the invented “Steele dossier” were true. Falling for a completely false and unsubstantiated claim from fellow Russia hoax outlet McClatchy, Farhi wrote, “If this is accurate, put another check mark next to the Steele Dossier.” Another? ANOTHER? Way to showcase the bare minimum of skepticism and do real professional journalism there, guy.
After finding out the absolutely jaw-dropping news that the Steele dossier was an information operation, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Farhi wrote, “Most surprising thing abt Clinton’s involvemnt w/Steele Dossier (aside from paying for it) is why her campaign didn’t make more of it.” Citizen journalists knew enough to be even more suspicious about the quality of the shoddy product after realizing its provenance, but not the “professionals” at The Washington Post! In fact, Farhi seemed to be bitterly clinging to the Russia-collusion scam as of a month ago, even after the Post begrudgingly corrected some of its fake news on the matter.
One citizen on social media replied to Farhi’s smug arrogance about the superiority of professional journalists, “The media’s track record in the last 5 years is like a prostitute’s track record on being a virgin.” A bit too kind, but the point is made.
As one of the exceedingly few “professionals” — to use Farhi’s parlance — to do actual journalism on this story and thereby debunk the information operation the Post pushed relentlessly for years, I have nothing but respect for the many “citizen journalists” who did the work corporate media refused to do. I frequently relied on them and their detailed research in the Herculean task of taking on the Post, The New York Times, CNN, and every other media outlet that participated in the intelligence agencies’ information operation against Americans.
In addition to the many articles the full-time professional team at The Federalist researched, reported, and published, we also published many articles from some of these citizen journalists who researched details far better than the entire “professional” journalism class combined.
The Federalist and citizen journalists may not have the corporate sponsorship that Farhi and his cohorts have, but we are wealthy in something few if any at The Washington Post have: a desire to find the truth and share it with others.
Pure Propaganda
The same goes for another information operation run by The Washington Post. In 2018, that paper ran the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s family and life by publishing an absolutely disgusting and unsubstantiated series of stories alleging he was secretly a serial gang rapist roaming the streets of suburban Maryland. This was a redo of a playbook The Washington Post and other Democrats had used in 1991 in an attempt to derail Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ nomination.
While the Post carefully edited out exonerating details, shaded information to help the Democrat operation, and amplified some of the flimsiest claims on record, The Federalist got to work reporting the real story. We were aided in this effort by tips from community members who were aghast at what The Washington Post was willing to do in pursuit of its political goals. Some of them gave us information they said they tried to share with The Washington Post but were shut down over.
Farhi, for his part, wrote a tendentious article asserting that the obvious collusion between Democrats in and out of the media was a “conspiracy theory.” Quoting — and I’m not joking here — Jane Mayer (yes, really, Jane Mayer), he said there was absolutely no coordinated effort to run the smear operation everyone witnessed against Kavanaugh. (For an alternate fact-based and fact-filled perspective, feel free to read the best-selling book I co-authored with Carrie Severino on the matter.)
A few years later, when The Washington Post was brutally deriding Sen. Tom Cotton for suggesting the U.S. government should look into the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a potential source of the Covid-19 pandemic (the Post called it a “debunked conspiracy theory”), The Federalist was publishing citizen experts who were arguing that maybe the paper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos didn’t have the story right.
At every step of the way, the Post didn’t do journalism so much as uncritically regurgitate claims from “experts,” about the pandemic and the response to it. Because we at The Federalist published truthful information and hosted debates from citizen experts about the proper response to a global pandemic, we were throttled by the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Those who misled the public as The Washington Post did on the Wuhan Institute of Virology were rewarded with awards and algorithmic amplification.
The “professionals” of The Washington Post continue to republish every unsubstantiated claim coming out of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. For example, a disinformation group called “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” which attempts to get governments and Big Tech to shut down political speech it dislikes, is routinely quoted by the “professionals” over at The Washington Post. So are many other groups that work to censor political speech. Few “citizen journalists” are as gullible as the average Washington Post reporter when it comes to such mindless participation in disinformation operations.
Real Journalism
We could go on and on and on. Who did better on the stories involving Jussie Smollett, Covington’s Nick Sandmann (for which the Post settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit), or the Biden family business? No, citizen journalists probably wouldn’t describe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar,” as The Washington Post did.
The Washington Post and other media outlets aren’t “failing” to get the story right. They are doing exactly what they set out to do: frame news and information in a way that advantages their political allies.
They have massive corporate backing and establishment support in their efforts. Stop thinking that they’re salvageable. That was silly thinking decades ago. By now, it’s suicidal. Start shunning them for their propaganda and thinking instead about how to support and amplify journalism that cares about the truth.
Vice President Harris reacted to a number of polls showing Donald Trump was ahead of President Biden in hypothetical election match-ups, as well as in battleground states during an interview with CNN and said that they were going to have to earn their re-election.
“We’re going to have to earn our re-elect, there’s no doubt about it,” she said to CNN in a phone interview Sunday, replying to a question about the recent surveys.
Multiple recent polls have shown Biden trailing Trump in hypothetical 2024 match-ups, including a new NBC News poll that showed Trump with a slight advantage, although within the margin of error.
“It is absolutely right in a democracy with free and fair elections that the candidates, the people who want to continue in leadership have to make their case, and have to make it effectively,”Harris told CNN. “And that means communicating in such a way that the message is received about the accomplishments and what we care about.”
Vice President Kamala Harris said on “60 Minutes” that she had no doubt the Biden-Harris ticket would win in 2024. (Screenshot/CBS/60Minutes)
“I have a great sense of duty and responsibility to do as much as I can, to be where the people are and to not only speak with them but listen to them and let them know what we’ve accomplished,” she added.
After noting Harris’ plans to engage with TikTok influencers and pick up the slack on the campaign trail, CNN reported that Harris has struggled with communication and messaging.
“This is a politician, after all, whose staff the night before a scheduled speech to the most core party members at the Democratic National Committee meeting last month in St. Louis replaced it with a ‘fireside chat’ moderated by her outside adviser and former DNC chair Donna Brazile, worried that otherwise she would struggle to come across,” the report said, citing people involved in the decision.
Harris, citing the campaign’s effort to reach Black voters, suggested their list of accomplishments was “too long.”
President Joe Biden speaks during a press conference after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ week in Woodside, California on November 15, 2023. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
“Actually, probably there’s a hindrance, in that the list is really long, and we have to triage around what we repeat over and over again to make sure that it resonates, and it’s actually heard,” she said.
CNN also asked Harris why younger people should “see themselves in a president who is old enough to be older than many of their grandparents.”
“It is they,” Harris said, “who are going to either benefit from or pay the price.”
Former President Donald Trump leaves the courtroom for a lunch break during his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on November 06, 2023 in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Harris said in early November that she and Biden had a lot of work to do.
“The president and I obviously have a lot of work to do to earn our re-election. But I am confident we’re going to win,” she said.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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