Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority leadership has revoked the membership of two prominent alumnae this week, after more than 50 years of sisterhood and service. Their crime? Standing up for women — specifically the young women in KKG’s University of Wyoming chapter who are suing to keep biological males out of their sorority.
Patsy Levang and Cheryl Tuck-Smith got kicked out of KKG for advocating that the sorority hold to its own bylaws, which limit membership to “women.” Sadly, KKG is suffering from the broader cultural confusion around sex and gender — confusion that will harm women and rob the next generation of the benefits of single-sex organizations and environments.
Personally, I never planned to become a “sorority girl,” and didn’t initially see the value of Greek Life. But in my case, I started to open my mind when, after my freshman year, I still felt lost in a proverbial “big pond” after growing up in a small town.
I suspected that joining a sorority — and particularly living in a sorority house — would help me find a close-knit community. My university offered precious few single-sex housing options, meaning that when I lived on campus I was surrounded by both women and men.
A Facebook picture of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Wyoming includes a biological male, which is why some in the sorority sued. (Fox News)
The guys in my dorm buildings were respectful enough, but I could tell that 18-year-old men and women living in close quarters was a recipe for disaster. Although this went unspoken, the students in coed housing felt pressure to act a certain way to impress members of the opposite sex. We kept our doors closed a lot of the time, for privacy, which didn’t foster a friendly vibe.
Incredibly, I lucked into the re-launch of a new chapter of Phi Mu sorority on my campus. Our charter chapter attracted a lot of girls like me: Greek-skeptical but desiring to “make campus smaller.”
As I got to know more sorority women from my chapter and across campus, I learned that many of them shared my motivation for membership: community with other women. I also learned that sorority membership was more diverse than stereotypes depict.
Sororities include women of various races, sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds. The only things that all sorority members had in common were that we were all students at the same university, and we were all women.
I moved into the Phi Mu house as quickly as I could, and spent two years living there. We had our own dining room and meal plan, and various common spaces in the house both downstairs (where visitors were always welcome) and upstairs (sisters only).
We could only bring a male guest upstairs on moving day. Even then we had to shout “Man on the floor!” — which was kind of comical for us, but also practical… it was a warning to cover up if you happened to be “indecent.”
Of course, the prohibition on men upstairs was not followed 100% of the time, but it was truly taboo for a man to be upstairs in the bedroom/bathroom areas.
This female-only environment was very freeing. I could be myself at our sorority house, without any pretense. My sisters and I bonded during chapter meetings, study hours, social events and charitable fundraising events.
As I got to know more sorority women from my chapter and across campus, I learned that many of them shared my motivation for membership: community with other women. I also learned that sorority membership was more diverse than stereotypes depict.
Four of my bridesmaids were Phi Mu sisters. To this day, they are some of my best friends.
I can’t imagine what my sorority experience would have been like if my chapter had been open to men, even those who identify as women. There’s no question about it: Including men inevitably and fundamentally changes the mission and experience of sorority life.
Sororities were founded during a time — the 1800s — when women were excluded from many opportunities. Our founders understood that our shared biological sex and experiences as women serve as a starting point for sorority sisterhood. Although much has changed for women in our society, the reality of biological sex differences has not.
Sorority women, and all women, deserve the basic right to safety and privacy, and the presence of males can threaten that right. But female-only environments are about more. They’re about the communities and bonds that women form when it’s “just us girls.” Similarly, men and boys should be free to join all-male organizations if they choose, and can reap similar benefits.
The Kappa plaintiffs deserve the same opportunities I had — the opportunities they were promised — to participate in a women-only community. Patsy Levang and Cheryl Tuck-Smith rightly stood up for them. In ousting these alumnae, KKG leadership has broken faith with more than the word “woman,” but with sisterhood itself.
Hadley Heath Manning is the vice president for policy at Independent Women’s Forum.
The Hamas tunnel that the Israeli army revealed under Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital is one of many in the terrorist organization’s vast network, said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an IDF spokesman.
“This is just one of the many, many long kilometers of tunnels that Hamas has invested in over the course of the last 16 years,” Lerner said on Newmax’s“National Report.”
Lerner said that in the very poor conditions in which the Palestinians live, the terror tunnels built by Hamas, which is the ruling authority there, are the “most expensive construction project ever to exist in the Gaza Strip, all at the expense of the people of Gaza.”
BREAKING:
The Israeli Army took control of the Rantisi children’s hospital in Gaza & found a secret tunnel leading 20 m below ground to a Hamas command & control center.
Weapons, baby bottles & motorcycles in the tunnel indicate hostages were held there pic.twitter.com/ArFWOqfkgl
After describing the details of the sophisticated tunnel, including that it is some 10 meters deep under ground, Lerner said “this is how they have built extensively their tools of death and terror throughout the Gaza Strip, and we have been finding it everywhere we proceed, everywhere we advance.”
Lerner also noted the reality that the Israeli army faces is that hospitals are “being used as a base of operations for terrorist activities.”
Lerner said the Israeli army found weapons and other military equipment in the tunnel, even though Hamas knew the IDF was on its way and almost assuredly tried to cover its tracks, leading the army to believe that as it presses its attack forward it will discover more evidence of weapons in other tunnels.
Lerner also said that while negotiations over the fate of the hostages are being handled on the diplomatic front, Israel remains steadfast.
EXPOSED: In the Shifa Hospital complex, IDF troops found a hidden booby-trapped vehicle containing a large number of weapons, including: · AK-47s · RPGs · sniper rifles · grenades · other explosives
“The army is very, very much focused on advancing our military activities in order to achieve our objectives of dismantling and destroying Hamas to make sure that they can never do this again,” he said.
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
In a potential foreshadowing of blocking responses to House Oversight Committee subpoenas, Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., took to X to call out President Joe Biden’s vow to be the most “transparent” president.
“The White House is withholding over 82,000 pages of Joe Biden’s pseudonym emails, refuses to provide proof that Joe loaned his brother money, and now seeks to block the Bidens and former staff from testifying before Congress,” Comer wrote Monday on X, sharing a video from his Newsmax appearance last week.
“@POTUS’s pledge to be transparent was just hot air.”
In that “Wake Up America” appearance, Comer announced Hunter Biden is expected to testify before House investigators before Dec. 4 under the orders of the subpoena. Though Hunter Biden’s lawyers had expressed an eagerness for Hunter Biden to testify, Comer said he has not gotten a reply on his subpoena.
“If President Biden has nothing to hide, then he should make his current and former staff available to testify before Congress about his mishandling of classified documents,” Comer wrote in a statement Friday after receiving a letter from the special counsel to the president that told the committee, in its words: “The White House intends to continue obstructing our investigation.”
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.
Regulations created in a time of energy scarcity aren’t applicable to a time of energy abundance and decrease innovation in energy efficiency, yet the Biden administration is abusing those regulations to fight so-called climate change. Pictured: President Joe Biden speaks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Week on Nov. 16 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Americans have experienced appliance inflation over the past few years, and it could be about to get worse as the Biden administration continues its onslaught of appliance regulations. While blaming Washington bureaucrats is always a reasonable response, in this case, any problems that they are causing is a result of them exercising the authority granted to them by legislation passed at the height of the 1970’s energy crisis—the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
The act gives the Department of Energy authority to regulate nearly everything in a household that uses energy. While it doesn’t require the Department of Energy to continuously impose ever stricter standards, the reality is this is precisely what it does. Worse, this trend has worsened in recent years as the Biden administration freely uses the act to advance its extreme agenda with ever stricter government standards, using climate change as a primary justification.
While the Energy Policy and Conservation Act does grant the secretary of energy broad authority, current law also requires that certain factors, like the effect on cost and competition, the amount of energy saved, and the need for energy conservation in general be taken into account. Unfortunately, Washington bureaucrats not only routinely ignore these requirements in any meaningful way but choose instead to focus on extraneous alleged benefits like climate change.
This could be expected, perhaps, because the underlying justification for the efficiency regime established by the act has largely dissipated over time. The act was born out of a time of perceived energy scarcity. But today, America has hundreds of years of known energy reserves, and new technology is allowing for new discoveries and more efficient use of existing reserves all the time. In justifying the policies that act ultimately set in place, President Gerald Ford laid out three broad policy objectives. These included reducing oil imports, ending American vulnerability to economic disruption by foreign suppliers, and developing energy technology and resources to supply a significant share of the free world’s energy needs.
In each case, America has achieved Ford’s objectives.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act Has Lost Relevancy
In 1975, net imports of crude oil were close to 6 million barrels per day. By 2020, the United States had become a net exporter. Geopolitical shocks and cartels, specifically the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, which produces about 40% of the world’s crude oil, can still have a near-term impact on American energy prices. However, due to the large amount of energy on global markets, energy disruptions do not present the sort of systemic threat that policymakers feared in the 1970’s.
The extent to which the United States economy remains vulnerable is purely a function of energy restriction policies—like Biden’s recent decision to ban energy development in parts of Alaska—and have nothing to do with energy efficiency. Further, American technologies like fracking, the nation’s vast coal resources, and commercial nuclear reactors not only can keep America energy independent but also grow its role as a global supplier of energy.
Further, appliances of all sorts are becoming more efficient because that is what people want. While the consuming public considers many attributes of the purchases they make, including capability and upfront cost, efficiency is clearly something Americans value. The government does not need to compel efficiency; the market demands it.
America Is in an Era of Energy Abundance, Not Scarcity
America has ample energy reserves. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, in 2020, the United States held over 373 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude oil reserves, which would provide the U.S. with over 50 years of supply. The same is true for natural gas. The agency estimated in 2020 that the U.S. held 2,925.8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas. At current consumption levels, that equates to nearly 100 years of supply.
Further, new discoveries are always occurring that would expand this supply over time, which is demonstrated by the growing availability of unconventional sources like oil shale. According to Energy Information Agency, the U.S. currently holds 195.5 billion barrels of crude oil and 1,712.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in unconventional reserves.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, conventional and unconventional reserves combine to provide nearly 300 years of energy supply at current consumption levels. These energy resources do not even account for uranium deposits, which are widely spread throughout the U.S., nor for advancements in other energy generating technologies.
Any regulatory regime promulgated out of fears regarding energy scarcity simply can no longer be justified.
Compelled Efficiency Standards Reduce Competition
Energy efficiency regulations do not simply alter standards; they can effectively remove products and technology from the marketplace and reduce competition. This is antithetical to Congress’ wishes as evidenced by Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which makes clear that maintaining a competitive market for the covered products is an essential element of the cost-benefit calculation. Yet ultimately, most rules have a tremendous effect on the market. Whether it’s gasoline engines, light bulbs, furnaces, or showerheads, every American will ultimately experience less choice in terms of price, availability, and capability. In some cases, such as with incandescent light bulbs and some refrigerants, this is already the case.
What DOE does not appreciate is the positive benefit that technological competition and product variation has on long-term market health, something even the White House has acknowledged. According to a White House memo published on July 9, 2021, “Healthy market competition is fundamental to a well-functioning U.S. economy.” It goes on to point out that insufficient competition will lead to higher prices and lower quality.
By removing entire classes of technology and product lines from the market, efficiency standards limit incentives to lower prices, or even to increase efficiency further, because the regulation will have captured a substantial portion of the market for the preferred technology. Further, the efficiency standards eliminate opportunities for firms to specialize in specific offerings to gain market share. While some firms may retool to compete, it is unlikely that the market will support the same number of firms when they all must adhere to strict regulatory standards. This will almost necessarily lead to fewer firms offering fewer choices.
Fewer firms and less technological competition will be bad for consumers and is antithetical to Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Having a lower-priced option that may be less efficient competing against a more efficient higher-priced option will engender competition to develop technologies that move prices lower and efficiency higher overall. By eliminating half of the equation, these compelled standards eliminate an essential force to move technology forward.
Congress, right or wrong, sought to improve consumer product efficiency when it passed the act, but it was not seeking to empower the DOE to, in effect, ban products.
Empower Americans, Not Washington
None of this is to argue that energy efficiency does not have value. It obviously does. However, that value is best determined by American consumers and businesses calculating the value of long-term savings against the near-term costs.
The flexibility to assess economic tradeoffs is even more important to low-income Americans. According to the United States Office of Management and Budget, “some research indicates that energy efficiency regulations adversely affect lower-income consumers more than those who earn a higher income.” Scholarly research shows further that energy efficiency regulation hits lower-income Americans harder than energy taxes, which are recognized as being generally regressive.
Indeed, marketplace choice provides the precise sort of flexibility that American consumers depend on to manage home economic challenges.
The DOE often attempts to justify increased near-term costs with alleged savings. Unfortunately, these savings are generally averages for an entire market and often do not account for variability for costs like installation fees and retrofits. The fact is that some families will necessarily incur much greater costs than others, and DOE rarely reflects this reality.
This is a critical point when assessing how a proposed standard will affect individual Americans—especially those facing economic challenges. Each individual American is perfectly capable of weighing for himself the value of additional efficiency against the additional costs associated with most compelled efficiency upgrades. Indeed, Americans are making those decisions, and many are opting for greater efficiency, which makes imposing these costs on everyone even less rational and justified.
Conclusion
Given America’s energy abundance, the value of efficiency to consumers, and the importance of consumer choice, the president, be it President Joe Biden or a future president, should direct the secretary of energy to cease all efficiency-related actions pending a review and certification that those actions are consistent with the word and spirit of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Simultaneously, Congress should begin work to significantly curtail, if not completely repeal, the act’s energy efficiency provisions.
The conditions that gave rise to the act in 1975 are clearly no longer in place. Further, like most regulations, federal bureaucrats have taken the authorities granted them by Congress to expand their power far beyond what anyone intended. The time has come for policymakers to stop complaining about ridiculous efficiency regulations and finally do something about it.
Siblings Ido (left) and Yonatan (right) Lulu-Shamriz say they have not been able to find any peace since Hamas took their little brother hostage on Oct. 7. (Photo: Philip Reynolds/The Daily Signal)
Yonatan Lulu-Shamriz’s daughter was celebrating her 2nd birthday on Oct. 7 in Israel. Inside the safe room of their home one mile from the border of Gaza, Lulu-Shamriz’s little girl was delighted that she was allowed to eat her birthday cake with her fingers as her parents had not had time to grab forks as they fled into the safe room. The child was unaware of the Hamas terrorists outside, and her parents did everything they could to ensure it stayed that way.
“I told her that we were going to play a game,” Lulu-Shamriz said, “the whisper game, that if we whisper, we get the balloons after.”
For the 22 hours he, his 7-month pregnant wife, his daughter, and their two dogs were in the safe room, they tried to remain as silent as possible, and if his daughter started to sing or talk loudly, he reminded her of the game and the prize of balloons if she remained quiet. After being in the safe room for a few hours, Lulu-Shamriz, who is 33 and the oldest among three boys, received a text from his 26-year-old brother Alon Lulu-Shamriz telling the family he heard Hamas terrorists in his house.
“I wrote him that I love him, and he’s strong, and this is the last time we spoke,” Lulu-Shamriz told The Daily Signal during a recent interview.
Lulu-Shamriz’s youngest brother was taken hostage by Hamas during the attack in October. At first, the family thought he was among the 1,200 Israelis killed in the terrorist attack, but later, the Israel Defense Force confirmed that he was taken hostage.
Lulu-Shamriz and his brother Ido Lulu-Shamriz, 32, recently traveled from Israel to Washington, D.C., to share their story and advocate for their little brother and the release of about 240 hostages being held in Gaza.
The oldest Lulu-Shamriz said he and his family have not found any peace since his little brother was kidnapped, but instead said he feels “blame all the time.”
“You wear these clothes, you eat food, you go to bed, you brush your teeth in the morning, and you always ask yourself if Alon get the same conditions,” the oldest brother said. “When you put your blanket at night, you ask yourself, is Alon cold now?”
Alon Lulu-Shamriz was taken hostage by Hamas Oct. 7. Photo compliments of JDA Worldwide.
Ido Lulu-Shamriz, the middle brother, had a different experience on Oct. 7. The middle brother is part of the civilian emergency squad in his kibbutz near the Gaza border in Israel. Every kibbutz near the Gaza Strip has a civilian squad that can respond to threats until the Israel Defense Force arrives, Ido Lulu-Shamriz explained.
Around 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, Ido Lulu-Shamriz received a message from a squad member that someone had parachuted into his kibbutz with a gun. He then started to hear missiles go off and alarms sound and realized that “this is not just the missile attack.”
“This is something unique, something that never happened to us,” he said.
Ido Lulu-Shamriz and the members of his civilian emergency squad were instructed via a group WhatsApp message to go to the shelter in the kibbutz where their guns are stored. He reached the shelter and got his gun and he and the other squad members began to fight “dozens of terrorists around the shelter,” he recalled.
“Seven of my friends were killed,” Ido Lulu-Shamriz added. “Seven of them fought shoulder to shoulder with me, and the other seven guys survived.”
“At the beginning, we thought about attack,” he said, but “then you realize you need to defend because there are so many, they were everywhere. And then you realize it’s self-defense, you know, everyone needs to rescue himself before you’re going to be dead like your friends.”
Ido Lulu-Shamriz and his good friend retreated back to his house, but before they made it to safety, Ido Lulu-Shamriz saw that his neighbor’s door was open. His neighbors, a husband and wife, had two 10-month-old twins.
“When I saw the door open, I realized that they are not with us anymore,” he said, bluntly.
Ido Lulu-Shamriz entered the safe room in his home with his friend and initially believed that Hamas terrorists had killed the parents and their twin babies. Later, however, through the walls of the safe room, they heard the babies crying. “They didn’t stop for 12 hours,” the middle brother said.
He sent a message to Israel Defense Force soldiers alerting them to the twin babies, but “they didn’t reach them for 12 hours, 12 hours that I’m hearing those twins crying nonstop while their parents are dead between their beds.”
Reflecting on the events of Oct. 7, Ido Lulu-Shamriz added, “Nothing can prepare you for those moments, you know, for such a battle, such a sight to fight with your best friends that are now alive and a couple of minutes later, they are dead. It’s terrible. You can’t prepare for those moments in your life.”
When asked what message they have for President Joe Biden and America’s leaders, Yonatan Lulu-Shamriz, the eldest brother, said America needs to put “pressure on Qatar” because the nation has a “direct channel to Hamas” and Qatar could play a role in negotiating the release of the hostages.
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that “Qatar does have leverage with Hamas.” But Coates noted that the hostage negotiations are complex and that there is no simple answer to moving negotiations forward. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of Heritage.)
Yonatan Lulu-Shamriz said he hopes U.S. citizens understand that what “happened in Israel on the seventh of October, it’s not aimed only for Jews, for Israelis, and Zionists.”
“They killed everyone,” he said, referring to Hamas. “They kill Thai people, they kill Americans, they killed Russian, and Europe is next. America is next.”
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to supporters after the Thanksgiving Family Forum on Friday in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
DES MOINES, IOWA—National standards, including requiring an ID to vote and making Election Day a national holiday, are needed to ensure free and fair elections, says Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. While states typically run elections, the federal government has set minimum standards under the Help America Vote Act of 2001, and prior to that, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ensure election integrity.
“The federal government should set minimal standards. You have historical precedents for that, dating back 20 years. The federal government can set minimal standards,” Ramaswamy told The Daily Signal Friday after participating in the Thanksgiving Family Forum, an event hosting three Republican presidential contenders and staged by the Iowa-based Family Leader. The Daily Signal was the media sponsor.
The other GOP presidential contenders at the forum were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Former President Donald Trump did not accept an invitation to joint the forum.
“Making an election a national holiday is important, single-day voting on Election Day as a national holiday, with paper ballots and government-issued ID to match the voter file—that’s the standards I want to be done in national elections,” Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy, who founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, also staked out positions on abortion, Big Tech and border security.
Although voters in his home state of Ohio approved a state constitutional amendment for abortion without restrictions through the ninth month of pregnancy, he said that’s no reason for pro-lifers to back down.
He said if pro-life advocates had offered an alternative amendment, Ohio voters would have “flocked to it.”
“We need to offer an alternative of our own. I think that’s part of what was missing,” Ramaswamy said. “If there was a different amendment that was on the table in my home state of Ohio, people would have gone for it, flocked for it. The reality is that that didn’t exist. That’s why we lost.”
He added that should be seen as lessons learned for the movement.
“I don’t think the right answer is to compromise on our principles,” he said. “So, I think, stand for principles, but in a way that unites the country.”
During the forum, Ramaswamy, Haley and DeSantis all expressed their strong support for protecting life.
On the illegal immigration border crisis, Ramaswamy said the federal government should take a more aggressive approach.
“Use our military to secure the border,” Ramaswamy said. “Use aquatic barriers on the southern border. End federal funding for sanctuary cities and end any funding or foreign aid to Central American countries until they’ve dealt with their end of the problem. End birthright citizenship for illegal migrants, for whom the Constitution was never intended to apply.”
Sanctuary cities are jurisdictions that refuse, as a matter of public policy, to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Birthright citizenship occurs when illegal immigrants enter the United States and have children, who automatically become citizens under current law by virtue of being born in the country. The Supreme Court determined in an 1898 case that the 14th Amendment applied to anyone born on U.S. soil even though the language of the amendment doesn’t specify this.
Ramaswamy says the way to hold Big Tech companies accountable for censorship is to amend existing federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. which protects social media platforms from being held liable for the content users posts.
“My answer is, Section 230 should be an opt-in statute,” he said.
Social media platforms have favored some political and social content over others, acting as a publisher. Companies that opt in to the liability protections should be prohibited from censoring content, he said.
“If you opt in to it, then you are bound by the same constraints as the government itself, including the First Amendment,” If not, there is the free market. You’re free, and you don’t get special liability protection. If you want special liability protection, you are bound by the same standards as the government. That’s the First Amendment.”
In partnership withGood morning. It’s Monday, Nov. 20, and we’re covering a potential deal for Hamas to release some hostages, the passing of a former US first lady, and much more. First time reading? Sign up here. You share. We listen. As always, send us feedback at hello@join1440.com.
Need To Know Hostage Negotiations Israel and Hamas appear to be nearing an international-brokered deal for the release of some of the roughly 240 hostages the militant group captured from Israel and hid in Gaza after an Oct. 7 surprise attack. According to reports, under the latest proposal—led by Egypt, Qatar, and the US—Hamas would release a number of women and children hostages in exchange for the release of roughly the same number of Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons. A short pause in fighting is expected to be part of the deal, though the length of the potential pause is reportedly a sticking point in negotiations. Meanwhile, at least 31 premature babies and 2,500 civilians, patients, and staff were evacuated from northern Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, which Israeli forces raided last week and said they discovered the presence of a Hamas command center inside (see previous write-up). Separately, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels (see overview) seized an Israeli-linked cargo ship in the Red Sea, taking 25 crew members hostage. The militant group warned it will continue to target Israeli-linked ships until the Israel-Hamas war ends. See updates on the war here. Rosalynn Carter Dies Former US first lady Rosalynn Carter died Sunday at the age of 96 at her home in Plains, Georgia, due to complications from dementia. Her husband, former President Jimmy Carter, survives Rosalynn at the age of 99. The Georgia-born future first lady ran the office of her husband’s family peanut business before actively assisting him with campaigns for state senate, governor, and president. As first lady, Carter championed women’s rights and became the first to establish a policy office in the West Wing. Amid her broad advocacy, Carter took a special focus on mental health (see efforts) and later established the philanthropic Carter Center alongside her husband. In 1999, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2001. She became the second-longest living former first lady after Bess Truman (97), but the two Carters hold the record for the longest presidential marriage in US history. See her life in photos here. Starship Makes Progress SpaceX’s second test flight of its massive 400-feet-tall Starship vehicle hit new milestones Saturday before ending in a pair of unscheduled explosions after launching from Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. Starship, designed to carry NASA astronauts to the moon and Mars, is the world’s tallest and most powerful launch system. The uncrewed vehicle crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. See the video here. The test flight was considered a success by SpaceX as the vehicle traveled farther than and exhibited improvements from an initial attempt in April, which also ended in an explosion. The latest attempt lasted roughly eight minutes rather than four minutes. Unlike in the first flight, all of the 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines on the Super Heavy first-stage booster ignited, and the spacecraft successfully separated from the booster, achieving a goal for the second attempt and reaching an altitude of 92 miles. SpaceX said the booster and spacecraft likely self-destructed due to a midflight issue and it hopes to use data for future improvements. The Federal Aviation Administration will conduct a review before SpaceX can proceed with another launch. See a Starship overview here.
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Cartoon on the documentary that 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 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….
Barbara Streisand is among the many celebrities who claim they are leaving America if Donald Tromp is elected again. May I recommend they move to the GAZA strip war zone that her party, the Democrats, helped to create with all the money sent to the number one State sponsor of terrorism, Iran, by Obama and Biden?
It shows how little those celebrities care about the middle-class everyday folks whose life was much better under Trump with low fuel prices, lower food cost, cost of living, inflation, and no new wars. Some experts say that a dollar under Trump is now worth less than .85 cents under Biden exercising Democrat policies. But rich celebrities could care less about that; they rather bitterly cling to their fantasy land politics to the detriment of the rest of us Americans.
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 • Joe Biden Puts Elderly Pro-Life Woman in Prison for 11 Years for Protesting Abortion • Kamala Harris Calls Killing Babies in Abortions “Reproductive Freedom” • Joe Biden Wants to Force Every Hospital to Kill Babies in Abortions • Indiana Abortions Dropped to “Essentially Zero” as Abortion Ban Saves Babies
More Pro-Life News • Top OGBYN Confirms Abortion Pill is Dangerous: They’re Lying to Women • 27 Senators Slam Joe Biden’s Policy Making Americans Fund Military Abortion Travel • Doctor Confirms Abortion Pill Reversal is Safe for Women • Indi Gregory’s Deaths Reminds Us to Defend Parental Rights Over Government Power • 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.
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Abeloved religious leader was shot in the head Wednesday night while preaching the gospel in Glendale, Arizona.
Hans Schmidt, a young father and outreach director for the nondenominational Victory Chapel First Phoenix, was standing at the northwest corner of 51st and Peoria avenues with his megaphone, quoting scripture and preaching to passersby ahead of an evening service. Around 6 p.m., someone evidently pulled a gun on him, reported AZFamily.
It’s unclear whether the shooter attempted the apparent assassination on foot or from a car.
KNXV-TV indicated police initially were dispatched to a hospital following reports that someone had been assaulted, but they soon discovered the victim had been shot.
The Victory Chapel revealed in a statement Thursday, “Hans was taken to the ER where they discovered he had been shot after conducting a CT scan. He began seizing and was intubated. There has been some movement; however, physicians are uncertain how much is voluntary and began draining fluid from his brain. He remains in critical condition, please continue praying.”
Zulya Schmidt, the victim’s wife, noted in a Meta post, “Believing God has the final say. I love you so much babe.”
Henry Branch, a nearby resident, said, “Who knows why someone would want to take it out on a preacher like that because he’s speaking the gospel and good news to everybody. He’s out to help the community.”
KSAZ-TV indicated that following the shooting, police told nearby business owners to clear out, including the titular owner of Jesse James Comics.
“It’s something where they preach so much on this corner, and it’s such a congested area,” said James. “I always thought they might get hit by a car. I didn’t know they would be shot.”
Paul Sanchez works nearby and recalled occasionally seeing people drive by, cursing and screaming at Schmidt as he preached. However, Sanchez said the preacher never responded with hostility.
“There was a slurry of everything, really. I mean, hateful comments, people yelling at him, ‘Just get off the street.’ All sorts of mean things,” Sanchez told AZFamily.
Larry Dettman, a congregant who learned during a church service Wednesday night from Pastor Gary Marsh what had befallen Schmidt, said, “Out of nowhere, how does this happen? You know, there’s some evil people in this world that have got a bunch of human junk in their life and they take it out on somebody else.”
“People are following darkness instead of light,” continued Dettman.
As of Thursday, police were still investigating and had not yet arrested a suspect.
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Democrats are finally facing their day of reckoning with black voters, and their waning support for President Joe Biden is only half the story. A recent New York Times/Sienna poll reveals that Biden barely leads among nonwhite voters under 45 in a 2024 election matchup against former President Donald Trump. The same nonwhite voters reported backing Biden by almost 40 points in the 2020 election.
The hidden story is that Trump is capturing more than 22 percent support among black voters. The NYT article said a Republican winning over so many black voters “would be unprecedented in the post-Civil Rights Act era.”
Why Are Blacks Finally Breaking Ranks?
Black Americans are beginning to understand that the years of promises of better days have resulted in decades of broken promises. A recent Wall Street Journal article tells the story of Michelle Smith, who lives in North Philadelphia. She works two jobs as a black single mother with three teenage boys. She describes her disappointment in Biden, whom she supported strongly in 2020. Despite efforts by the Democrats to spend more money on advertising, voter canvassing, and educating voters in black communities, Smith said the Democrats might not be able to convince her to vote. “I think I’m not going to vote, period,” she said.
Smith is not alone. There is a growing recognition that Democrats have duped black Americans. And as they increasingly realize it, Democrats will be left saying, “Katy, bar the door,” because their party will begin to implode.
Ironically, the modern-day Democrat Party has essentially achieved the same objectives as the Civil War-era Democrat Party. It has unfortunately taken 60 years for black Americans to realize what has happened to them and their culture. It’s hard to keep blaming Republicans when Democrats run major cities, school systems, and police departments. In many cases, black Democrats run these institutions.
Black Decline After Civil Rights
The status of black Americans today in Democrat-controlled cities and states is essentially the worst it has been since before the Civil Rights era. For example, during slavery, Democrats restricted access to opportunities that allowed slaves to obtain an education. Today, in nearly every major city controlled by Democrats, literacy rates are abysmal. Local and national Democrat Party leaders have severely restricted access to private or charter schools.
Proponents of apartheid used segregation as a cruel psychological tool. Democrats, however, are bringing segregation back in style. In Democrat Party strongholds, such as American universities, the country is witnessing the practice of segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies.
One of the most devastating changes that the Democrat Party facilitated involves the destruction of the nuclear family in black communities. During the era of slavery, masters would break up families after wives bore children. After the Civil War and for 100 years afterward, most black children grew up in traditional two-parent families.
It wasn’t until Democrats introduced and heavily marketed social welfare programs to black Americans in the 1960s that two-parent families began to erode drastically. Those programs ushered in a cultural transformation. Over 50 years, black families fell from having two parents in 80 percent of homes. Today, approximately 80 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes.
Democrats Harm Black Americans
For the Democrats, family disruption and government dependency were the objectives from the beginning. If that wasn’t their intention, then why hasn’t there been one national initiative to reverse the trend?
In 1957, Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Texas, then the pro-segregationist Senate majority leader, knew blacks would eventually get the right to vote. When speaking to then-Sen. Richard Russell Jr., D-Ga., regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Johnson said, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Democrat Party leaders and their left-wing friends in academia and the media convinced blacks (and the general public) that Republicans were the racists. They were, according to the effective narrative, indifferent to poor people. They wanted to keep blacks as second-class citizens. Ironically, Republicans voted to support the Civil Rights Act in greater numbers than Democrats.
Their goal was to have black Americans switch their votes from Republicans to Democrats.
Black Americans Coming Home to the GOP
As we look forward to the 2024 election season, the NYT/Sienna poll is not the only one raising the alarm. A recent Fox News poll revealed that 26 percent of black Americans support Trump for president in 2024 over Biden. In the past 12 months, black elected officials switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party in southern states such as Georgia and Texas. For the first time in 140 years, Alabama voters elected a black man to the state House of Representatives as a Republican.
In statewide elections, voters in Virginia and North Carolina elected black Americans to the No. 2 leadership position as lieutenant governors. Although Daniel Cameron did not win his bid for Kentucky governor, we should expect to see more black Republicans running for statewide and federal offices.
Even the legacy media won’t be able to spin and hide this major political shift.
Kendall Qualls is an Executive Faculty-in-Residence at the Crown College School of Business and Founder/President of the non-profit foundation TakeCharge. Qualls was a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor of Minnesota in the 2022 election cycle.
After Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children in Israel last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that the terror group “and its allies” could inspire attacks on Americans “here on our own soil.” He also told the Senate that the FBI is conducting “multiple, ongoing investigations” into people affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
What Wray didn’t say is that the FBI has been investigating Hamas’ biggest ally in America for the past 30 years — without seeking any charges. Launched in 1994 as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has, in the decades since, become an accepted member of Washington’s lobbying community. The New York Times and other influential newspapers routinely describe CAIR as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”
Although it has not repudiated its support for Hamas — which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people — CAIR was enlisted by the Biden administration in May to take part in a White House initiative to fight antisemitism.
On Oct. 7, the day Hamas terrorists butchered 1,400 Jews, including 33 Americans — raping many and abducting some 240 others to Gaza from southern Israel — CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, delivered an anti-Israel message in Arabic which seemed to justify what Hamas did. Translated into English, it read: “All Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, Oct. 8 — and every day — in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime [Israel].”
On Saturday afternoon, CAIR helped rally more than 100,000 Muslims in D.C. to instead condemn Israel for supposedly carrying out “genocide” in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Multiple speakers called for the destruction of Israel — and, by implication, the Jewish people there — by demanding Palestinians take all the lands “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”
Awad was front and center, delivering a fiery speech bashing Israel and President Biden for not calling on Israel to stop bombing Hamas targets inside Gaza, which he called “genocidal attacks.” He threatened to hurt Biden at the ballot box in 2024 if he does not urge a ceasefire.
“We have discovered the language that President Biden understands: ‘No ceasefire, no votes,’” Awad bellowed to the crowd, which erupted into a chant repeating his words. “No votes in Michigan, no votes anywhere if you do not call for a ceasefire now. He then led a chant: “Free, free Palestine!”
Also, Awad promised to provide legal support to Muslim Americans who protest in support of Palestine. “We are with you,” he said. “The people of Gaza rely on your voices and activism.”
Protesters later marched on the White House, where they defaced the white brick gate of the Executive Mansion with red paint symbolizing the blood of Gazans who have died from the Israeli army’s counterstrikes. Awad is on record declaring his support for Hamas. At Barry University in 1994, for example, he said: “I am in support of the Hamas movement.”
CAIR did not respond to requests for comment, but without addressing specifics, it has previously argued it “is not a ‘front group for Hamas.’” The White House declined to comment, while the FBI claimed charging CAIR or its executives was outside its authority. “The FBI is an investigative agency and we don’t make the decisions about filing charges or prosecuting a case,” FBI spokeswoman Susan McKee said. “Prosecutors make those decisions.” The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
While CAIR is now a mainstay of American politics — headquartered just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol, with 35 offices across the country — its history reveals its close connections with terror groups such as Hamas, as detailed in the 2009 book this reporter co-authored with counterterrorism expert P. David Gaubatz, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America.
The story began in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan in the 1960s, where Awad and a co-founder of CAIR, Omar Ahmad, were born. Both men eventually came to the United States for university studies. By 1992, Awad was a key member of the so-called Palestine Committee in America, which helped finance Hamas. According to a 1992 letter from the Gaza Strip, Hamas asked the Committee for money to buy “weapons, weapons, our brothers.” The letter continued: “The meaning of killing a Jew for the liberation of Palestine cannot be compared to any jihad on earth.”
Around the same time, the FBI was eavesdropping on several Hamas leaders in connection with terrorist activities, which produced tapes documenting the incarnation of CAIR in 1993. At a secret meeting that October, Omar Ahmad called to order the Hamas summit in Philly at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel in Philadelphia to discuss the formation of a new front organization to support their “movement” in America. Awad also attended the meeting.
According to court testimony by FBI agent Lara Burns, who runs a major counterterrorism program for the bureau, Ahmad, Awad, and the other leaders who gathered there hatched a scheme to disguise overseas payments to Hamas terrorists and their families as charity. FBI wiretaps also recorded them stating the need to deceive Americans about the true aims of their planned American front group as Hamas launched a campaign of terror attacks on Israel known as the “Intifada.”
They compared the deception to the “head fake” in basketball, where a shooter tricks an opponent guarding him into moving in a different direction. The group, according to the wiretap transcripts, envisioned an “alternative” organization whose pro-Palestinian stripes were “not very conspicuous.” Burns testified CAIR was what they had in mind. During the talks, they tried to mislead any authorities who might be listening in by referring to Hamas as “Samah” — Hamas spelled backward.
Ahmad would co-found CAIR in 1994, hiring Awad as executive director that same year. Both men have expressed hatred toward Israel and resentment toward their adopted country for helping fund and arm the Jewish nation.
Burns testified during the 2008 terrorism trial of a charitable front for Hamas known as the Holy Land Foundation. It was the largest terror funding case in U.S. history. As part of the court filings, the Justice Department included CAIR on a list of co-conspirators underwriting Hamas terrorism — though CAIR and its founders were never indicted in the case. The HLF, busted up as the main fundraising arm of Hamas in America, commingled funds, assets, and personnel with CAIR, according to tax records and court documents.
“CAIR has been identified by the government as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization [Hamas] — a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew,” said former Assistant U.S. Attorney James Jacks, who was the lead prosecutor in the case.
A federal judge agreed. “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR with Hamas,” then-U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis wrote in a July 2009 ruling.
A number of FBI counterterrorism agents were frustrated that CAIR’s national office and executives were never charged in the conspiracy, although the founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter was sentenced to prison. They said politics intervened. After 9/11, they said FBI headquarters viewed CAIR as a link to the Muslim community through which they might obtain tips about terror threats to the homeland. Brass even invited CAIR officials up to the executive suites located on the seventh floor of the Hoover building to discuss outreach policy.
“We said, ‘These are the bad guys, this is Hamas. What are you doing?’” former FBI Special Agent John Guandolo said, describing how he and other agents protested the special treatment afforded CAIR.
After CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF’s criminal scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas terrorists, the FBI finally disengaged from the group. The agency stopped conducting formal outreach with CAIR’s national office until, it said, it could resolve issues with Awad and other worrisome leaders.
“Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and Hamas, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner,” then-Assistant FBI Director Richard Powers said in a 2009 letter to the Senate.
But some investigators say the FBI should have shut down the group, not just the outreach program, issuing search warrants and conducting more intrusive surveillance, which they say would have allowed the government to run the Hamas front out of business.
“CAIR is the leading Hamas entity inside the United States, and the FBI has taken no action to prosecute them,” said Guandolo, who helped lead several major counterterrorism probes at the Washington field office after 9/11. He explained that “politically correct” FBI leadership is hesitant to go after a minority religious group and is overly sensitive to charges of “Islamophobia” often leveled by CAIR against its critics.
The FBI’s reluctance to roll up the Hamas front has pushed private investigators to take matters into their own hands. In 2008, a counterterrorism specialist led a team of investigators in a daring undercover operation of CAIR that included infiltrating its national headquarters located on New Jersey Avenue in Washington, D.C., near the Capitol building. Working as interns, the investigators, who posed as recent converts to Islam wearing traditional Muslim garb, secretly video-recorded conversations with CAIR officials. During the six-month operation, they also intercepted more than 12,000 pages of documents CAIR intended to shred as trash. The evidence, which was turned over to the FBI, is documented in Muslim Mafia, which also features an appendix with several key internal CAIR documents reprinted.
Among other things, the book revealed that CAIR employed violent Islamic terrorists, and then supported the terrorists behind the scenes even after they were convicted. It also uncovered an influence operation against members of key homeland security committees in Congress that included planting CAIR operatives in congressional offices. Internal CAIR documents laid out a plan to elect dozens of pro-Hamas Muslims to Congress. CAIR even started holding Muslim prayer sessions each Friday in the basement of the Capitol.
Muslim Mafia also traced the deeper roots of Hamas back to the secretive Muslim Brotherhood, the pro-jihad group founded in Egypt that built a sophisticated network of Islamic nonprofits inside the U.S. several decades ago. The book documented how Muslim Brotherhood leaders wrote a secret blueprint for “destroying [America] from within … so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” FBI investigators discovered the manifesto stashed in a sub-basement of a Brotherhood leader’s home in Annandale, Virginia, after raiding his residence as part of a terrorism probe.
Several alarmed Republican members of Congress held a press conference about the book’s findings, warning a Hamas terror front group was infiltrating Congress.
Besides exposing Hamas’ political arm in America, the book exposed the inner workings of the broader anti-Israel lobby, which includes several left-wing groups aligned with CAIR. This lobby is now revealing itself in the wake of Israel’s own 9/11.
“The seeds for 9/11 were planted in 1948,” according to a draft of a “Proposed Muslim Platform” found at CAIR’s headquarters. “A resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be based on recognizing and correcting the harm that was done to the Palestinians since 1948,” when the United Nations partitioned land for Israel.
Guandolo said Hamas proved just how dangerous it is on Oct. 7. He warned that the terrorist group has already penetrated American society, and CAIR is the tip of the spear.
“Currently, CAIR is directing efforts at the ground level across the United States with organizations known for violent extremism,” he added in a recent interview with RealClearInvestigations. “Again, the FBI is doing nothing to adhere to their oaths of office and protect the American people.”
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Investigative journalist Paul Sperry is a regular contributor to RealClearInvestigations and has written news or op-ed pieces for the New York Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. His books include ‘The Great American Bank Robbery’ (2011), and ‘Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism’ (2003).
President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping met this week on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco. The Biden administration touted the meeting as a significant foreign policy achievement, even though it accomplished little but photo ops.
Leading up to the APEC meeting, Xi had a weak hand, while the leverage was on the U.S. side. China’s economic growth has slowed down significantly. Its once high-flying property sector crashed and exports dropped. The youth unemployment rate reached 22 percent in June 2023 before Beijing stopped publishing the data altogether out of fear of causing public panic. Foreign firms have pulled billions out of China, concerned over its weak economy, hostile regulatory environment, and geopolitical tensions with the U.S. China risks prolonged economic stagnation as consumers are unwilling to spend money due to financial and political uncertainty.
In contrast, the U.S. economy grew almost 5 percent in the third quarter despite facing its own
challenges, such as inflation and ballooning national debt. Since China needs American companies’ investments and technologies to revive its weak economy, Biden could have waited for Xi to plead for a summit and used it as leverage to demand some behavioral changes from China. Preconditions could have been that China’s military stops its harassment of Taiwan and the Philippines in the South China Sea, or no more funding Russia and Iran’s geopolitical aggressions by purchasing their oil.
Sadly, Biden and his foreign policy team are known to turn U.S. leverage into weakness by focusing on the wrong priorities. For example, they continue to believe that climate change is the world’s biggest challenge and that the U.S. needs China’s cooperation to save the planet, even though China remains the world’s biggest polluter after signing the Paris Climate Agreement.
Biden’s green initiatives have only deepened the U.S. economy’s dependency on China since the communist regime dominates the global supply chain for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries for electric vehicles due to its willingness to exploit slave laborers (most are ethnic minorities) and the nation’s abundant supply of coal.
Biden, led by misguided policies, sent several cabinet-level officials to China, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. They practically begged Xi for a meeting. Xi, of course, played hard to get. Rather than reciprocating senior U.S. government officials’ multiple visits, Xi waited until last month to send Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, to visit the U.S. and only recently agreed to a meeting with Biden.
A few days before the summit, China’s People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), faulted the U.S. for the deterioration of the Sino-U.S. relationship and demanded the U.S. “abandon its aggressive Cold War and aggressive mindset, fix the ‘action deficit’ with practical actions and concrete policies,” even though China is the one who has an action deficit as wide as the Grand Canyon. Remember when Xi promised President Barack Obama not to militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea and then armed those islands anyway and claimed 90 percent of the international waterway is Chinese territory?
Communist Party’s Playbook
What Xi has been doing is following the typical CCP playbook. Miles Yu, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, points out that CCP leaders, starting with Mao, love to “use international gatherings to lend legitimacy to [a] beleaguered regime at home.” By playing hard to get with the Biden administration, Xi hid his weakened hand behind a strongman image. He “seeks to send the message to his caged people — aided by the CCP’s relentless propaganda machine — that their supreme leader is respected, even revered, on the global stage,” according to Yu. Another CCP go-to tactic is to make vague and unenforceable pledges for the distant future in exchange for concessions from the other side now.
Unfortunately, the Biden team fell for the CCP’s trick. In a post-summit press conference, Biden put on a brave face and claimed the summit was “among the most constructive and productive we’ve had,” with three key agreements: to restart cooperation on controlling fentanyl, to resume direct (high-level) military-to-military contact, and to set up expert exchanges on risks and safety issues in artificial intelligence (AI).
But none of these represent any meaningful achievement, since the CCP is known for making empty promises, and the joke is on whoever believes them. On the fentanyl issue, many China observers, including Kelley Currie, a former diplomat, quickly pointed out on X, “Don’t forget that China agreed to do this exact thing in 2019 and dramatically reduced the flow of fentanyl out of China, only to switch tactics and instead supply mass amounts of precursor chemicals to Mexican cartels.”
On the AI issue, China promised nothing. Xi has made enhancing the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities through AI a national priority and has already committed plenty of resources for AI research and development. Xi will not change his course because of some experts’ exchanges on AI with Americans. If such a discussion occurs, China will exploit it to identify which American AI expert to poach and what latest AI technology China should steal.
Military Aggression
Biden clearly believes that resuming direct, high-level military-to-military contact between the U.S. and China was a significant accomplishment. He tweeted, “Clear and open communication between our defense establishments is vital to avoid miscalculation by either side and prevent conflict.” But it was Chinese military leaders who refused to pick up phone calls from the U.S. side, and they did so under Xi’s order.
Chinese pilots frequently made dangerous maneuvers near the U.S. and its allies’ military assets in the South China Sea, not because of a lack of communication but because of Xi’s deliberate policy decision: China regards the international water as its territory and tries to block the U.S. and its allies from accessing it through intimidation. According to Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, “China wants the United States and its partners to feel worried about rising military and security risks in East Asia.”
It’s unlikely the Chinese military’s aggressive behavior in and above the South China Sea will stop after the Biden-Xi summit. Furthermore, Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official, points out that military-to-military communication is “not vital. It’s not the key issue.” Responding to Biden’s self-congratulatory tweet, Colby wrote, “The key issue is China undertaking a historic military buildup and increasingly using that military to get ready for a war, as your own appointees and generals point out. Just really nowhere near the seriousness we need.”
President Biden and his foreign policy team want Americans to believe that his meeting with Xi in San Francisco was successful. But in truth, the U.S. gained nothing from the Biden-Xi summit. Don’t expect Xi to fulfill any promises or change his policies. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s recent 753-page report to Congress presented evidence that Xi is preparing his military forces and the rest of the country for war and treats diplomacy with the United States, such as the most recent Biden-Xi summit, “primarily as a tool for forestalling and delaying U.S. pressure over a period of years while China moves ever further down the path of developing its own economic, military, and technological capabilities.”
If anything, the world is becoming more dangerous after the Biden-Xi summit, and we are on Xi’s timeline.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released video on Friday showing what it says is a stash of mortar bombs hidden in the vicinity of a kindergarten classroom. The short video shows a damaged kindergarten classroom and then pans into a small storage area, revealing a pile of mortar shells.
An IDF spokesman said the mortar shells and other weapons were recovered by soldiers in schools inside the Gaza Strip.
A photo of mortar shells next to a school classroom. (IDF)
Additionally, IDF troops also found numerous Hamas weapons hidden in the Al-Karmel elementary school, the IDF said. Those weapons are understood to consist of rocket-propelled grenades and other military equipment.
U.S. and Israeli officials have said the Hamas terrorist organization uses civilian infrastructure like schools, homes and hospitals as cover for its military activities.
The IDF also released an image of a stockpile of weaponry and ammunition it says were seized from the Al-Quds Hospital, located in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. The IDF says terrorists are using tunnels beneath hospitals to conduct its operations.
The IDF also released an image of a stockpile of weaponry and ammunitions it says were seized from the Al-Quds Hospital, located in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. (IDF)
The IDF also announced on Friday that it had captured a post in Gaza belonging to the Palestine Islamic Jihad, a Sunni Islamist militant group, where they seized many rockets and other weapons.
The IDF post was a major asset for weapon production used to attack Israeli civilians and train terrorist fighters, the IDF said. It was located next to a courthouse and a Turkish hospital, according to the Israeli military.
“IDF troops searched the post and removed two trucks full of weapons, including Badr-3 rocket parts (a surface-to-surface rocket), UAV parts, and intelligence materials belonging to the [Palestinian Islamic Jihad],” an IDF spokesperson said.
The Israel Defense Forces seized a large weapons cache from a post belonging to the terrorist group, the Palestine Islamic Jihad. (Israel Defense Forces)
IDF troops also found a training tank used by terrorists to train fighters on how to capture an Israeli tank, the IDF said.
“During the operation, an anti-tank missile was launched at the troops from an adjacent building. The troops directed a helicopter to strike the terrorist cell that launched the missile,” the military said. “Furthermore, a terrorist cell fired additional shots at the troops from an adjacent courthouse and was struck by an IDF tank.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP)
The seizures come as the Israeli military continues to target Hamas leadership in northern Gaza and has captured several of the terrorist group’s key bases in the region.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
The war was sparked after Hamas launched a series of brutal terror attacks on Oct. 7.
Louis Casiano and Elizabeth Pritchett contributed to this report.
Michael Dorgan is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.
You can send tips to michael.dorgan@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @M_Dorgan.
City officials in the birthplace of Jesus Christ are tearing down Christmas decorations in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s continued invasion of Gaza. Bethlehem, an ancient city located in the West Bank, declared via social media and official spokespeople that decorations installed in previous years are being removed amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Bethlehem Municipality crews announced the dismantling of Christmas decorations installed several years ago in the city’s neighborhoods and removing all festive appearances in honor of the martyrs and in solidarity with our people in Gaza,” the city wrote on Facebook, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Please remember that Bethlehem is controlled by Palestinians, who Great Britton brought in to take over Israel’s land. These are NOT a people. They are Arabic, from Saudi Arabia, who kick them out of Saudi Arabia because they tried to kill the Royal Family to take over Saudi Arabia. No portion of Israel belongs to them. It has been Israels for over 3,000 years, given to them by God. God promised to bless those that bless Israel, and curse those that don’t. All fighting against Israel is fighting against God the Father.
People attend Christmas celebrations around the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, West Bank. Domestic and foreign visitors gather around the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus is believed to have been born, participate in a Christmas ceremony and the Mass. (Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
A city spokesperson also acknowledged the campaign to remove Christmas decorations in a statement to the Telegraph.
“The reason is the general situation in Palestine; people are not really into any celebration, they are sad, angry and upset; our people in Gaza are being massacred and killed in cold blood,” the spokesman said, according to the outlet.
They added, “Therefore, it is not appropriate at all to have such festivities while there is a massacre happening in Gaza and attacks in the West Bank.”
Armenian Orthodox arrive at the Church of Nativity in the West Bank city of Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas and the Epiphany. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Despite the significance of Bethlehem to Christians and its high religious tourism from the faithful during the Advent season, the city is majority Muslim. The Christian population of Bethlehem has been in steady decline since the mid-20th century. In 1950, Christians made up over 80% of the local population, but now hover around 10% in a Muslim-dominated region.
Christian communities celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem in the West Bank, where Christ is believed to have been born. (Photo by Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Many Christians have chosen to flee the area due to persecution and religious harassment. Additionally, low birth rates among Christian communities in Bethlehem have also contributed to the collapsing demographic in the West Bank. Approximately 185,000 Christians live in Israel, where they make up just under 2% of the population, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at timothy.nerozzi@fox.com
Seattle residents have once again voted to raise the cost of housing to lower housing costs. If it sounds contradictory, you must be new to the Emerald City. Here, a liberal ethos prevails, with a penchant for endorsing any proposal cloaked in the mantle of progressivism.
Consider the Seattle Housing Levy as a case in point: a colossal program nearing $1 billion, earmarked for the construction of affordable housing. This levy did not simply extend a pre-existing tax from 2016; it more than tripled the tax rate from 14 cents to 45 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value.
Predictably, the levy passed with early voting results showing a commanding 66% support. The only firm number the levy commits to is a mere 3,200 new rental home constructions.
While it helps build some affordable housing, it also increases the cost of housing. Homeowners will see their property tax bills surge by roughly $400 annually. Tenants won’t be spared either, as these tax hikes are passed along via increased rents.
Andrea Suarez, executive director of We Heart Seattle, a non-profit that stages trash cleanups across the city, dismantles a tent as garbage lies piled at a homeless encampment in Seattle on March 13, 2022. The accumulation of garbage at such sites has become a major issue as the city tries to move the unhoused out of shared public spaces. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Adding insult to injury, the levy allocates $30 million for rental assistance to 4,500 tenants, yet the administrative costs to implement it are twice as much. This is in a city where the median house price has soared to $800,000, and where record-high fatal overdoses and a surge in homicides have marred the previous year’s statistics.
This trend mirrors the distressing trajectory of other Democrat-run cities, where residents pay a premium to live in areas that are deteriorating thanks to extreme leftist policies.
Despite the clear evidence that increased regulations and taxes have propelled the cost of living to exorbitant heights, the radical left remains steadfast in their dogma demanding higher taxes, conveniently sidestepping the fact that all of us are already contributing more than our “fair share.”
Landlords, often misperceived as affluent, are merely striving to earn a respectable living while providing affordable housing. Yet, they find themselves beleaguered by a system that disproportionately favors tenants, including those who are clearly gaming the system.
Seattle Grassroots Landlords is a local group of about 600 that connect on social media “to support each other and to prevent the ongoing degradation of rental housing options in Seattle.” Independent landlord Charlotte Thistle told me on my Seattle-based radio show that 17 new laws implemented citywide and statewide over the last three years have made the job nearly impossible. She highlighted the bureaucratic labyrinth that can result in a yearlong process and $20,000 in legal fees to remove a disruptive occupant.
Jason Roth, another landlord, learned this the hard way. After his tenant allegedly stopped paying rent, sublet the property on Airbnb and flaunted his exploits on social media, Roth found himself homeless, with his court case to evict postponed for months due to the tenant invoking the claim of being low-income. It triggered the system to offer him even more benefits.
Thistle and Roth’s experiences have prompted them, along with many others, to pull their properties from the market. This landlord exodus, in a state that penalizes property ownership, only serves to inflate rental costs further.
Seattle continues to battle homelessness and crime as liberal solutions to its problems fail. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Democrats’ response is to pour tax dollars into affordable housing, but there’s a problem with relying on the wealthy to “pay their fair share” (whatever that is). They leave.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced this month that he’s leaving the Seattle area for Miami, to be closer to his parents and partner. It’s hard to ignore a striking difference between Washington and Florida.
Washington Democrats passed a statewide capital gains tax, managing to convince an eager state Supreme Court to redefine income taxes, which are unconstitutional here, so that they could get more tax dollars from the wealthy.
They bizarrely claimed it’s an excise tax, before justifying their position by arguing their new definition is necessary because the state’s “upside-down tax system perpetuates systemic racism by placing a disproportionate tax burden on BIPOC residents.”
This trend mirrors the distressing trajectory of other Democrat-run cities, where residents pay a premium to live in areas that are deteriorating thanks to extreme leftist policies.
Before the tax took effect, Bezos sold more than 1.3 million Amazon shares, sparing him about $1.1 billion in taxes. He won’t have to worry about this in Florida. Moreover, Seattle wants to implement an additional capital gains tax and Democrats in the legislature are eyeing a wealth tax.
Democrats believe the homelessness crisis is due to the high costs of homes. But they also believe housing developers and landlords are wealthy, privileged and greedy. This perspective has led to punitive regulations and a reliance on government agencies to manage housing “the right way.” Yet, there is scant evidence to suggest that these measures are making the housing market more accessible. On the contrary, the situation continues to deteriorate.
Maybe if they stopped “helping” so much, let the market operate with fewer impediments, we’d have housing for everyone. But Seattle voters seem eager to keep getting in the way of progress with more taxes.
Pictured: Mourners gather Oct. 29 at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul for a remembrance ceremony for the 18 slain by a gunman in in Lewiston, Maine. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The tragic mass shooting last month in Lewiston, Maine, sent gun control activists into their typical attacks on the right to keep and bear arms. Many defaulted to their standard narrative that the real “bad guy” wasn’t the murderer, but the Second Amendment and its supporters. Instead of demanding accountability from the government officials who failed to enforce existing criminal and mental health laws, they immediately demanded additional gun control measures that punish ordinary, peaceable Americans.
Even worse, some derided millions of law-abiding gun owners by asserting that the murderer was just another “good guy with a gun” up until the moment he started killing innocent people. Others mocked gun owners by asking where all the “good guys with guns” were to stop the slaughter.
Comments like these, of course, ignore reality. As is the case in so many mass public shootings, the Lewiston gunman was anything but a “good guy,” and he targeted victims in places where he was least likely to be met with armed resistance.
Meanwhile, the fact that the Lewiston shooter wasn’t stopped by an armed civilian doesn’t negate the many other instances last month in which Americans successfully used their firearms to defend themselves, their loved ones, and even complete strangers from criminal violence.
Such defensive gun uses are far from uncommon. Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accounts here from past months and years. You also may follow @DailyDGU on Twitter for daily highlights of defensive gun uses.)
The 12 examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in October. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news organization.)
Oct. 3, Chicago: In the aftermath of a multi-vehicle crash involving a city bus, police said, a gunman opened fire in the direction of bystanders, striking and wounding a Chicago Transit Authority bus supervisor. A tow truck driver with a concealed carry permit returned fire at the gunman, who fled.
Oct. 5, Phoenix: Police said an armed resident fatally shot a man who broke into a residence through a window while the family, including two young daughters, was home.
Oct. 6, Bismark, North Dakota: A couple woke up when a highly intoxicated and naked intruder broke into their home, police said. The man claimed he was there to “retrieve his clothing.” The husband held the intruder—a complete stranger—at gunpoint until police arrived.
Oct.11, Shreveport, Louisiana: After a woman’s ex-boyfriend broke into her home while armed with a knife and a bat, police said, a man inside shot him. The intruder, whose wounds weren’t life-threatening, was taken into police custody.
Oct. 13, Virginia Beach, Virginia: Police said a contractor for a flooring company was justified in shooting and wounding a man who, during a dispute over construction noise, brandished a gun and physically assaulted the contractor’s co-worker.
Oct. 15, Hollywood Hills, California: An award-winning Hollywood hair stylist fatally shot an intruder as he tried to force his way into her home through a window in the middle of the night, police said. The woman’s neighbors told reporters that this was not the first time she’d been the victim of burglars.
Oct. 16, Bellaire, Ohio: Police said a man shot and wounded an ax-wielding assailant who attacked him and another woman during a domestic dispute. The assailant was taken to jail on active warrants. Both his victims were hospitalized and treated for injuries.
Oct. 19, Auburn, Washington: During an attempted home invasion, police said, three armed and masked men tried to force their way inside while shouting, “Seattle police!” The homeowner fired several shots through the door, sending all three men fleeing.
Oct. 21, Wake Forest, North Carolina: An armed bystander with a concealed carry permit intervened during an altercation in a grocery store parking lot that was related to domestic violence, police said. The bystander returned fire when a man began shooting, causing him to flee. Police caught the assailant, who is charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, among other offenses.
Oct.22, Skokie, Illinois: A man attending a pro-Israel rally got out of his car, which was covered in Israeli flags, only to be surrounded by pro-Palestine demonstrators, some of whom physically attacked him, police said. The man, a concealed carry permit holder, drew his gun and fired into the air. Police later determined it was an act of lawful self-defense.
Oct.25, Philadelphia: A convenience store employee fatally shot an armed robber who threatened him with a gun and started taking cash from the register, police said. Other employees told reporters that their armed co-worker had gotten his concealed carry permit and sought out firearms training after surviving an earlier armed robbery at the store.
Oct.28, Atlanta: A man was doing construction work at a residence when he saw a juvenile breaking into his utility vehicle and confronted him, police said. The juvenile drew a gun and fired. The construction worker, also armed, returned fire, striking and wounding the would-be thief.
As these examples demonstrate, far more “good guys with guns” live in the United States than gun control advocates often care to admit. And they successfully protect themselves and others on a regular basis.
Don’t be misled: None of the gun control measures proposed in the wake of last month’s Lewiston shooting likely would have saved a single life. Those measures certainly wouldn’t have been more effective than merely using existing laws to disarm those who, like that mass killer, are mentally ill and dangerous.
The right to keep and bear arms won’t protect every innocent person from every evil, any more than seatbelts will protect every passenger in every car crash.
The Second Amendment does, however, give them a fighting chance.
These days, you’re not allowed to criticize George Soros for any of his evil anti-humanitarian deeds, or you’re automatically labeled as anti-semitic because he is supposably of Jewish descent. Many of my good Jewish friends say he’s done more harm to the Jewish community than anyone in America. He’s donated millions of dollars that have funneled their way into anti-semitic leftist groups such as BLM, Defund Police, and prosecutors that ignore actual crime while targeting political adversaries (conservatives), Making all communities less safe. He’s also supported left-wing groups and politicians that push for open borders, allowing Fentanyl, murder, child labor, and human trafficking.
Maybe Elon Musk was right. He “hates humanity,” and that has nothing to do with his Jewish heritage.
Eight teens have been arrested in connection with the beating death of 17-year-old Jonathan Lewis near his Las Vegas high school on Nov. 1. Undersheriff Andrew Walsh of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department revealed in a press conference Tuesday that the suspects will be charged with murder. Walsh further indicated that the investigation into Lewis’ slaying is far from over, calling on parents and students who may have seen the video to help identify others in the mob who mercilessly kicked, stomped, and punched Lewis as he tried to get away.
Lt. Jason Johansson of the LVMPD’s homicide section indicated that the fatal beating took place in an alley one block east of Rancho High School after classes let out. All involved in the incident were reportedly students from the school.
“As you know, the video that has been shared widely on social media … is very graphic and in my opinion is very void of humanity,” said Johansson. “What you see in the video though is approximately 10 subjects kicking, stomping, and punching our victim Jonathan as he’s on the ground, not defending himself, until the point at where he becomes unconscious.”
KVVU-TV previously reported that police found a student who was “battered and bleeding from the head.”
According to police, the fight was initially over a pair of stolen wireless headphones and possibly also over a stolen vape pen, apparently taken earlier in the week from the victim’s friend.
“After school let out, all parties then walked to that back alley where — as you see in the video — our victim removes his clothing, engages in a fight initially with one subject, and the minute the punch is thrown with that person, 10 subjects immediately swarm him,” said Johansson.
After the mob overtook Lewis and left him with “non-survivable head trauma,” Johansson said a concerned citizen found the victim’s crumpled and unresponsive body lying in the alley, began attending to him, then carried him back to the school. He was subsequently taken to University Medical Center, where days later he perished.
JUST IN: 8 teens have been arrested for the murder of Las Vegas teen Jonathan Lewis who was jumped & beaten to death.
The teens range in age from 13 years old to 17.
According to investigators, the fight broke out over headphones which were reportedly stolen from one of Lewis’… pic.twitter.com/g8dZRezdCe
Lewis’ cause of death was ruled a homicide. Police suggested there is presently no evidence to suggest that it was a hate crime.
The Clark County School District and the high school reportedly helped identify the eight suspects, who were taken into custody by law enforcement officials Tuesday morning. LVMPD also executed nine search warrants at various residences, obtaining clothing allegedly worn by the suspects during the attack.
The suspects range in age from 13 to 17. All were booked into Clark County Juvenile Hall on charges of murder.
“The case will now be turned over to the Clark County District Attorney’s Office, who we’ve been in close coordination with,” continued Johansson. “We’ll go through the normal steps … for them to be certified as an adult.”
Las Vegas has seen other teens charged as adults in recent weeks for ghastly murders.
Jzamir Keys, 16, and Jesus Ayala, 18, were both charged as adults in connection to the fatal rundown of 64-year-old retired police chief Andreas Probst. Ayala and Keys appear to have filmed parts of their rampage, including when they allegedly drove a white sedan off the road, then targeted Probst, the former police chief of Bell, California, for slaughter, giggling while doing so.
“I want to say just as a parent and as a member of this community, the video that’s out there and the videos that we have mentioned throughout this investigation and that you’ve seen reported in the media, they’re extremely disturbing,” said Undersheriff Walsh. “And this should be a reminder to all of us to have those difficult conversations with our children and remind them that their actions have consequences, their actions have lasting consequences, their actions have life-altering consequences.”
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These days, when she gets ready for school, the hair will be done. Perhaps it will be a braid of some sort, perhaps it will be curled. Earrings will be selected. A light and subtle application of age-appropriate makeup usually follows. The only constant is that she will always put on a skirt.
It didn’t used to be this way. When younger, she was quite the tomboy. There were the fights over getting her hair cut short, fights she lost not because we’re that controlling, but because short hair has to be cut more frequently and we didn’t want to add monthly visits to the stylist to the calendar. The uniform was shorts or pants and a polo for school, nicer pants and tops for dressier occasions, and athletic gear for casual moments. Jewelry was a no-go, even the pearls and things that grandmothers like to give to be worn at church.
She never suffered from dysphoria. She always knew she was a girl. It bothered her how often she was mistaken for a boy, not connecting the dots between her preferred functional form of attire and how it was virtually indistinguishable from the clothing sported by little boys. She was horrified when a classmate exhorted her to “just get the surgery.” That was reading too much into the truth, which was that she just wanted to play, to roughhouse, and to get outside. Dresses and skirts didn’t lend themselves to such things.
Once puberty arrived, the interests largely remained, but the video tutorials on how to do different braids and requests for new earrings joined them. It’s also when she looked at me earnestly in the car one evening and said, “I’m glad you and Mom aren’t liberals. You would’ve tried to turn me into a boy.”
While there are people across the political spectrum who recognize the realities of biology, statistically speaking, she wasn’t necessarily wrong in her proclamation. If she’d been born to this mom, this mom, or this mom, things could have turned out much differently. Thankfully, she was born to us, and we don’t hold retrograde opinions about the imaginary relationship between preferred clothing, toys, activities, and sex.
Not everyone is so enlightened, though, instead preferring to categorize children based on rigid stereotypes about how superficial things define us as boys and girls, men and women. Countless stories, like those linked above, of parents realizing their daughter was “transgender,” start with “I knew my son [sic] was trans when…” and revolve around such stereotypical markers. She didn’t like the color pink (once hated in our house, now one of her favorites), dresses, or games associated with little girls. Ergo, she must be a boy!
All one has to do to make such a logical leap is ignore the fact that prepubescent kids are, by definition, not sexual creatures and, as such, not much thinking in terms of true masculinity and femininity. They are just thinking about what interests them, not how those interests align with or diverge from their sex. It’s misguided parents who swoop in and make those assumptions.
This viewpoint is especially incomprehensible when one realizes that tomboys have long been with us. They were once staples of literature and other entertainment, from Laura Ingalls to Jo in Little Women to Pippi Longstocking. That they enjoyed clothing or activities more typical of boys wasn’t reason to attempt to muck around with their biology, and it still isn’t reason now.
If you have a daughter, you have a daughter. Her preferred clothing and activities do not define her, particularly when she’s young. Maybe she just finds pants more comfortable or likes playing in the dirt more than playing with a Barbie. If you let her grow up as a girl, those preferences may stick or they may, as in our case, shift in more traditionally feminine ways. In either case, it is not our job as parents to guide them toward self-destruction, but toward self-fulfillment and flourishing.
Let your tomboy be a tomboy. As a father, enjoy that you can get out and do more rough-and-tumble things with her. As a mother, enjoy that she isn’t raiding your closet or makeup tray. To do otherwise, to make the destructive assumption that because she doesn’t fit a stereotype she must have been “born in the wrong body,” is to abdicate your responsibility as a parent, to punish her with pseudoscience, and to saddle her with a lifetime of legitimate suffering, not the imaginary kind that arises from preferring blue to pink.
This author is a regular Federalist contributor.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
President Joe Biden met Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for high-level talks in California on Wednesday, marking the first time the two leaders have spoken face-to-face in a year. While specific details of the conversation will assuredly remain under wraps, a White House readout of the discussion indicates that Biden and Xi covered a variety of hot-button issues, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists in the Middle East, and Taiwan. The two leaders also agreed to revive communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.
Given Biden and his administration’s history of getting humiliated in talks with their Chinese counterparts, it wasn’t surprising that Wednesday’s meeting didn’t produce any headway on holding China accountable for its human rights violations, military aggression, or cover-up of Covid-19’s origins. But aside from Biden’s incompetence at juggling U.S. foreign policy, Wednesday’s U.S.-China talks raised a far more concerning question. How can Biden be trusted to manage U.S. relations with China when he and his family have received millions of dollars from Chinese entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party?
The Paper Trail
Despite Joe Biden claiming on national television that his son, Hunter, “has not made money” from Chinese entities, the New York Post published a bombshell story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, sourced to Hunter’s laptop, which called Biden’s assurances into question. Emails from the laptop showed Hunter had “pursued lucrative deals” with CEFC China Energy Co., a Chinese energy giant that operates as “an arm of the Chinese Government.”
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, one email obtained by the Post showed Hunter describing a business transaction as “interesting for me and my family.” Another listed the younger Biden as “‘Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC’ with pay at ‘850’ and could offer monetary compensation for six people.”
“Those involved in the email from James Gilliar of the international consulting firm J2cR, including Hunter, were allegedly part of the four people who created a ‘provisional agreement’ to split 80 percent of the ‘equity’ of the company equally with ’10 for Jim’ and ’10 held by H for the big guy,’” Boyd wrote. While “Jim” is in reference to Joe’s older brother James Biden, a highly credible confidential human source has since corroborated that “big guy” was a moniker used to refer to Joe Biden.
Hunter’s dealings with CEFC often involved Ye Jianming, the since-arrestedhead of CEFC who has ties to China’s military. In early 2017, Hunter worked for Ye “as a counselor and adviser” and was later hired by CEFC in September 2017 to serve as defense counsel for Chinese businessman Patrick Ho, “despite his little experience in criminal defense.” Ho — who served as Ye’s “top lieutenant” and whom Hunter referred to as “the f-cking spy chief of China” — was arrested and later convicted by the Justice Department for bribing the presidents of several African countries.
Bank records obtained by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office indicate that Hunter was paid $1 million for representing Ho. According to Yahoo News, however, “it is not clear what work, if any, [Hunter] did for Ho,” with court records of Ho’s case “show[ing] no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time … participated in Ho’s legal defense.”
A bevy of communication records released by the House Ways and Means Committee in September included a December 2018 WhatsApp text exchange between Hunter and Hallie Biden — who was the widow of Joe’s other son, Beau, and dated Hunter after Beau’s passing — lamenting Ho’s arrest and Ye’s disappearance. The records also showed how Hunter sold the Biden “brand” to overseas business associates to increase the family’s fortunes.
But as additional evidence released by House Republicans has shown, the Bidens’ financial connections with CEFC and its associates run deeper than previously known, and in several cases, further implicate Joe Biden. Despite the elder Biden repeatedly denying involvement in his family’s foreign business ventures, Hunter’s communication records indicate that Joe was keenly aware of his son’s overseas financial interests and served as a primary force behind the operation.
A series of July 2017 WhatsApp messages sent by Hunter to Chinese businessman Raymond Zhao show the younger Biden leveraging “his father’s name and threaten[ing] CEFC executives unless a lucrative deal was worked out with Ye.” In his messages, Hunter explicitly stated, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He further threatened to leverage “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” to punish Zhao should he fail to follow through on the arrangement.
Within 10 days of that conversation, a CEFC subsidiary poured roughly $5 million into a Biden-linked bank account. Bank records recently obtained by House Republicans show that on the same day, Hunter “transferred $400,000 out of [that account] and into his corporation, Owasco P.C.,” before wiring $150,000 of these CEFC-tied funds to a company owned by James and his wife, Sara, who withdrew $50,000 from said company and deposited the money into their personal checking account. Less than a month later, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara signed a $40,000 check to Joe, claiming it represented a “loan repayment.”
As noted by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, “the $40,000 Joe ‘the Big Guy’ Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.”
At a time when China is becoming increasingly aggressive towards the U.S. and its allies, Americans need leaders doing everything in their power to stand up for U.S. interests and limit threats to their security. But with Biden at the helm, that’s no longer a guarantee.
Lunch Bucket Joe and his family’s financial ties to individuals and entities connected to Beijing’s communist government make him a liability for the United States. Americans can’t — and shouldn’t — trust that Biden’s judgment over anything having to do with U.S.-China relations is fully within their best interests.
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
Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.
According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.
Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.
For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).
The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.
So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.
And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.
On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.
This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.
But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.
There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.
That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?
So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley weighs in on President Biden’s upcoming visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., not running for re-election.
A new national poll released Wednesday showed President Biden trailing all three lead GOP presidential candidates: former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
According to the survey, conducted this month by Marquette Law School, Trump has an advantage of 52% to 48% over Biden among registered voters, while DeSantis holds a 51% to 49% advantage in a head-to-head matchup with the president. And Haley, who also previously served as governor of South Carolina, holds a 55% to 45% edge over Biden, the largest lead among Republican candidates.
The survey showed that Trump’s edge over Biden has grown considerably since July, when Marquette’s poll showed the pair tied at 50%. It further showed DeSantis’ lead over Biden has remained consistent in that same time span.
And while all three of the top Republican candidates lead Biden, Trump is the only one who leads among Independent voters. Haley, meanwhile, has the largest support among Democrat voters compared to Trump and DeSantis.
At the same time, Haley draws the support of 15% of Democrat voters, while Trump gets 11% and DeSantis gets 8%.
In addition, the Marquette poll showed Trump, for the first time this year, has taken a lead among registered voters who report being reluctant to choose either him or Biden. Trump leads Biden in that category by a margin of 53% to 47%, a big shift from Biden’s 55% to 42% lead as recently as September.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley holds a 10-point lead over President Biden, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a two-point lead over the president, the Marquette poll showed. (Getty Images)
The most recent poll comes as the White House continues to claim it is not concerned about polling, which continues to show Biden’s approval rating falling and his 2024 prospects waning.
“I mean, look, I spoke to this yesterday,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters earlier this month. “And what I said is you have to take these polls… with a grain of salt, right? And I talked about 2020… and what we saw in 2020 and what was being reported then. And what we saw is a president that was… able to bring an incredibly strong, diverse coalition to win in 2020. We saw the same thing in 2022.”
“So, look, we don’t put much stock in… polls,” she continued. “The president is going to focus on delivering for the American people. He has an agenda that is incredibly popular, and that matters. And that’s going to be what the president is going to focus on: How do we continue to deliver for the American people? And that’s the focus.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this month that the White House doesn’t “put much stock” in polls. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
“I want [Biden] to consider what is best in terms of the goal that I know he is committed to, which is defeating Donald Trump,” David Axelrod, a former senior Obama campaign adviser, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Nov. 6.
“And if he believes, based on not just what [is] in his heart but what’s in the data and what he’s being told, that he has the best chance to do it, then he should run. But you know, the thing that irritates me a little bit, Wolf, is this notion that people who are concerned are ‘bedwetters.'”
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
The United Nations Security Council called for a days-long pause in fighting in Gaza on Thursday as Israeli forces continued to strike against Hamas leaders in Gaza City. Israeli forces took control of the Al-Shifa Hospital and are working to “destroy” Hamas in the region.
The Israeli military continues to target Hamas leadership in northern Gaza and has captured several the terrorist groups’ key bases in the region
There remain up to 238 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
After weeks of gridlock, the United Nations Security Council voted to call for a days-long humanitarian pause in fighting
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IDF soldiers recover body of Hamas hostage found near Al-Shifa Hospital
IDF soldiers recover body of Hamas hostage found near Al-Shifa Hospital
Israeli Defense Forces say they found the body of a hostage taken in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Thursday.
Israeli forces say they found Yehudit Weiss’ body in a building adjacent to the Al-Shifa Hospital, which Israel says Hamas had been using as a headquarters until early this week. The IDF did not offer any details about Weiss beyond her name, but noted that her family has been contacted.
Soldiers searching the building say they also found military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and RPG’s inside.
Weiss was one of roughly 240 people taken hostage by Hamas duirng its Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. She is now among a small number of hostages confirmed to have been killed since Israel’s war on Hamas began.
Israeli troops discovered a hidden booby-trapped vehicle inside the complex of a Hamas-run hospital in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said Thursday.
In a video posted to X, the IDF said the vehicle contained AK-47 rifles, grenades, RPGs, sniper rifles and other explosives.
“This is what Hamas is trying to hide from you,” an IDF spokesperson said in the footage.
Near the vehicle were weapons, ammunition and other items, including handcuffs and knives displayed on the ground, the IDF said.
“And where they’re hiding all this equipment is in the hospital,” the spokesperson said. “A place that’s supposed to be for humanitarian aid. They have all this evil hidden here.”
“This is where they choose to hide everything because they know the IDF won’t attack, the air force won’t attack here,” he added. “They use the hospital as human shields.”
Israel has long claimed tat Hamas has used hospitals and other sensitive locations as cover to conceal its military operations.
On Tuesday, John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said that intelligence supports Israel’s claims about Hamas activities in hospitals.
“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” Kirby told reporters on Air Force One.
IDF chief of staff says Israel close to ‘destroying’ Hamas’ military system in Gaza’s north
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi talks with troops Thursday in the Gaza Strip. (Israel Defense Forces)
The chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday credited his troops with moving closer to destroying Hamas’ “military system” amid its weeks-long campaign against the terror group.
Herzi Halevi visited soldiers on the ground inside the Gaza Strip, where he spoke of Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israeli border communities.
“As the campaign move forwards, with what you have done here with these battalions, Division 36 and 252, we are quite close to destroying the (Hamas) military system that existed in the north of the Gaza Strip,” he said, according to a press release. “We will complete it, we still have some things to do, but we are getting closer.”
He said the IDF will continue its military operations and that “as much as it depends on us, area after area, we’re going to kill the commanders and kill the operatives and destroy the infrastructure.”
“You have done it excellently so far, take what you’ve learned so far – for almost three weeks, and do it even better,” Halevi added.
Israel has battered Gaza with continuous airstrikes in the weeks since the attack, resulting in thousands dead and an escalating humanitarian crisis.
It’s highly unlikely that Israeli military operations will eliminate the ideology of Hamas, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby suggested Thursday.
Israel has pummeled the Gaza Strip for six weeks with airstrikes as Israeli leaders have vowed to eliminate the terror group.
“What we have learned through our own experiences … through military and other means, you can absolutely have a significant impact on [a] terrorist group’s ability to resource itself, to train fighters, to recruit fighters, to plan and to execute attacks,” Kirby said Thursday during a briefing.
He noted that Hamas leaders have repeatedly said they plan to attack Israel for the foreseeable future.
Military operations against a particular group, no matter how precise and targeted, cannot eliminate an idea, he said, citing the defeat of other terror groups in recent years.
“I mean, look at the shadow of itself that ISIS is right now, look at the shadow of itself that al Qaeda is right now. That doesn’t mean that the ideology also withers away and dies,” he said. “But you can absolutely have a practical, meaningful effect on a terrorist organization’s ability to conduct and execute its attacks.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.
Israel released video footage that purportedly shows part of a tunnel on the grounds of a hospital complex in Gaza.
The tunnel was near the Al-Shifa hospital, which Israel has said is used by Hamas to plan attacks and military operations.
On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces released footage showing weapons and military equipment inside the hospital, which has shelter thousands of civilians amid Israeli shelling.
Israeli officials claim that the facility is being used as cover by Hamas terrorists and that the group has set up its main command center underneath the building.
“A few of the most interesting things that we found totally confirms, without any doubt, that Hamas systematically uses hospitals in their military operations, in violation of international law,” IDF Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said as he walked through an MRI building at the hospital.
Shelling ramps up at Israel-Lebanon border with Hezbollah, IDF trading missile strikes: report
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike, left, and artillery shelling, right, on the outskirts of Aita al-Shaab, a Lebanese border village with Israel in south Lebanon on Monday. Israeli troops and Hezbollah militants and their allies have been clashing along the border since the Israel-Hamas war started five weeks ago with a bloody incursion into southern Israel by Hezbollah ally Hamas. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
The Israel Defense Forces and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have ramped up shelling against each other as both sides continue to trade airstrikes.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said it has struck eight targets so far in Israel on Thursday, including Israeli soldiers and a military barracks, “in support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” according to Reuters.
In response, the IDF said it hit a site in Lebanon that has tried launching anti-tank missiles toward its territory and that artillery strikes have been directed at other locations, the news agency adds.
Israel’s counterattack has impacted several villages along Lebanon’s southern border, a source told Reuters. There were no reported injuries. Both sides have repeatedly traded airstrikes since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israeli border communities.
Since Hamas launched its war on Israel, more than 70 Hezbollah fighters and 10 civilians have been killed in shelling in Lebanon, Reuters reports.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.
Pro-Palestinian protesters block bridges in Boston, San Francisco during rush hour
Pro-Palestinian protesters block bridges in Boston, San Francisco during rush hour
Pro-Palestinian protesters blocked traffic on bridges in Boston and San Francisco during rush hour Thursday morning to call for a cease-fire in Gaza as Israel continues to target Hamas leadership more than a month after the militant group’s deadly incursion into Israel.
On the Boston University bridge, the group IfNotNow, which says it represents members of Boston’s Jewish community, chanted “Cease-fire now!” and demanded that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., support an immediate cease-fire and use her influence to stop the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza.
The protest slowed traffic to a trickle on the bridge, which connects Boston and Cambridge, as the group held signs that said, “Let Gaza Live,” and unfurled a banner across the roadway that read, “Jews say: Ceasefire now.”
“We care about Palestinian lives, we only want to hurt Hamas,” one protester on the bridge told NBC Boston, while another said, “There can’t be peace for Jews unless there is peace for Palestinians.”
Meanwhile, Pro-Palestinian protesters also shut down the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, where President Biden was courting world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace contributed to this report
Republicans blast pro-Palestinian protests at DNC: ‘Nation’s capital is under siege’
I am on Capitol Hill right now and it’s on lockdown. No getting in or out of our offices. We have officers that were pepper sprayed by pro-Hamas protestors with a lot of people attempting to break into the Democratic HQ. Anyone else notice how violent the so-called “ceasefire”… pic.twitter.com/UbtMmLe7Ei
The Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., saw fireworks on Wednesday night when pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police in front of the DNC.
Republicans weighed in on the protests online, with Florida Rep. Kat Cammack posting a video of the protest while she was on Capitol Hill.
“I am on Capitol Hill right now and it’s on lockdown,” Cammack wrote. “No getting in or out of our offices.”
“We have officers that were pepper sprayed by pro-Hamas protestors with a lot of people attempting to break into the Democratic HQ,” she continued. “Anyone else notice how violent the so-called ‘ceasefire’ crowd is?”
Fox News’ Houston Keene contributed to this report
The Guardian removes Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ after TikTok unearths pro-terror screed
The Guardian removes Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ after TikTok unearths pro-terror screed
The Guardian removed Osama bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America” this week as the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, went viral after being unearthed by social media users.
The left-wing outlet had the anti-American and antisemitic letter published on its website since 2002 and was the first Google search result when searching for the document. But the publication deleted bin Laden’s letter amid a sudden spike in traffic.
A spokesperson for The Guardian told Fox News Digital, “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead.”
The Guardian declined additional comment.
The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, with many thousands more injured and suffering from long-term illnesses, after Islamic terrorists crashed four hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania; the latter was forced down by heroic passengers. In the letter to the American people translated in English, bin Laden justified al-Qaeda’s attacks against the U.S. because “you attacked us” and “you attacked us in Palestine.”
“Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation,” bin Laden alleged.
Suspect arrested in death of pro-Israel demonstrator Paul Kessler
Suspect arrested in death of pro-Israel demonstrator Paul Kessler
California police have arrested Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji, 50, in relation to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler at an Israel protest last week.
Alnaji has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and has a bail set at $1,000,000. The arrest comes roughly a week after Kessler, 69, died in the hospital after striking his head on the concrete during an altercation with Alnaji.
Footage showed Kessler bleeding on the ground following the incident. Alnaji, a pro-Palestinian protester had allegedly manhandled Kessler and caused him to fall.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department stated last week that they had identified a 50-year-old suspect in the case, but they had not yet identified him nor made an arrest.
AOC leads two dozen Democrats calling for Israel cease-fire over ‘violations against children’
AOC leads two dozen Democrats calling for Israel cease-fire over ‘violations against children’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is leading renewed calls for President Biden to support a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas over the “grave violations” being committed against children in the war.
“We write to you to express deep concern about the intensifying war in Gaza, particularly grave violations against children, and our fear that without an immediate cessation of hostilities and the establishment of a robust bilateral ceasefire, this war will lead to a further loss of civilian life and risk dragging the United States into dangerous and unwise conflict with armed groups across the Middle East,” the progressive lawmaker wrote.
She and 23 other progressives wrote to Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, asking for details on the U.S. plan to de-escalate tension in the region.
They cited figures from both Israel and the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza about how many children have been killed or abducted since Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing hundreds of civilians.
Israel has responded by bombarding Gaza with rocket fire and a ground invasion.
“We reaffirm our unequivocal condemnation of the Hamas attacks on Israel that took place on October 7th, in which Hamas killed over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, and captured over 200 hostages, who were subsequently taken to Gaza,” the Democrats wrote.
Massachusetts town flying Palestinian flag sparks backlash from residents, Jewish congregation
Massachusetts town flying Palestinian flag sparks backlash from residents, Jewish congregation
A local Jewish leader spoke out on “FOX & Friends” Thursday after his Massachusetts town approved a permit to allow a Palestinian flag to fly in town.
Marc Freedman, president of Congregation Ahavat Olam in North Andover, said the flag was now a “symbol of antisemitism” following the Oct. 7 attacks.
“It is a symbol to just eliminate the entire Jewish population,” he said.
Town officials approved a permit Monday allowing the Palestinian flag to be flown on the North Andover Town Common.
“I think they’re just a bunch of cowards. They took a legal initiative, a legal statement from council that said you need to follow specific guidelines and must raise this flag, when in their hearts, in their hearts, I know every single one of them did not want to raise their flag,” he said.
He said the council put personal concerns ahead of the town and added, “that’s not what leadership does.”
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report
IDF footage shows Hamas rockets stashed under child’s bed inside Gaza terrorist’s home
IDF footage shows Hamas rockets stashed under child’s bed inside Gaza terrorist’s home
Israeli Defense Forces released footage of troops searching the home of a Hamas terrorist in Gaza and uncovering a stash of rockets hidden under a young child’s bed on Thursday.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari says the rockets and other weapons found inside the home were destroyed soon afterward. Footage shows an Israeli soldier walking past a pink “baby girl” sign before revealing several rockets inside a compartment in the bed.
“Rockets were found inside a bed in the children’s bedroom inside the house of a Hamas terrorist during operational activity carried out by the troops of the 551st Brigade. The terrorist was a part of a Hamas terrorist cell in Beit Hanoun,” Hagari said in a statement.
“During the operational activity, the troops uncovered a significant amount of weapons including rockets, explosive devices, and dozens of kilos of explosives. The weapons were subsequently destroyed by the forces,” he added.
Rockets were found inside a bed in the children's bedroom inside the house of a Hamas terrorist during operational activity carried out by the troops of the 551st Brigade. The terrorist was a part of a Hamas terrorist cell in Beit Hanoun >> pic.twitter.com/25SneQfOkF
— דובר צה״ל דניאל הגרי – Daniel Hagari (@IDFSpokesperson) November 16, 2023
Information, photos about Hamas hostages found on laptop inside hospital: IDF
Information, photos about Hamas hostages found on laptop inside hospital: IDF
Israeli Defense Forces uncovered information about hostages taken by Hamas on a laptop found inside the Al-Shifa Hospital on Thursday.
Israel says the laptop had photos and videos taken of hostages after the Oct. 7th massacre in Israel. Israeli forces say evidence indicates Hamas was using Al-Shifa Hospital as a base of operations “within the last few days.”
“At the end of the day, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told the BBC. “Hamas aren’t here because they saw we were coming. This is probably what they were forced to leave behind. Our assessment is that there’s much more.”
Fox News’ foreign correspondent Trey Yings and cameraman Yaniv Turgeman visited the hospital with Israeli special forces early Thursday.
Israel says Hamas took some 239 hostages on Oct. 7, though the U.S. has said there is no way to know how many of those are still alive.
Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”
Her video received roughly 800,000 views and over 80,000 likes on TikTok.
Fox News Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst and cameraman Yaniv Turgeman went inside the Al-Shifa hospital with Israeli special forces on Thursday, sharing images of weapons found inside the complex.
Israeli forces say the weapons are evidence that Hamas had used the facility–and tunnel systems under it–as a base of operations.
Footage from Yingst and Turgeman’s visit showed rifles stashed behind an MRI machine as well as other supplies.
President Biden says he thinks Israel’s military operation in Gaza will stop when Hamas “no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse, and do horrific things to the Israelis.”
Speaking at a press conference after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden called on the Israeli military to exercise caution as they pursue Hamas military targets near civilian infrastructure. He said the Israel Defense Forces has “an obligation to use as much caution as they can in going after their targets.”
However, he added, “Hamas said they plan to attack Israelis again and this is terrible dilemma.”
Biden and his administration have remained steadfast in support for Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas. U.S. officials have strongly condemned the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, in which Hamas terrorists infiltrated the Jewish state and massacred as many as 1,200 people, taking some 240 back to Gaza as hostages. Other world leaders have condemned Israel’s military actions in Gaza, specifically attacks on hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, pointing to the staggering death toll figures released by the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry. Israel has said, and the White House confirmed, that Hamas uses Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza City, as a military base to store weapons and plan terrorist attacks.
The U.S. government has rejected calls for a cease-fire in the conflict, insisting that Israel has a right to defend itself. At the same time, the Biden administration has pressured Israel to allow short-term pauses in the fighting so humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, can be delivered to the Palestinians living in Gaza.
Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report
Israeli military gains ‘operational control’ over Gaza harbor used by Hamas
Israeli Defense Forces have gained “operational control” over the Harbor in Gaza city, previously a Hamas stronghold.
Israeli Defense Forces have gained “operational control” over the Harbor in Gaza city, previously a Hamas stronghold.
The IDF announced its successful oepration in the harbor on Thursday, saying Hamas had used the area to train maritime forces.
“The IDF has gained operational control over the Hamas-operated Gaza Harbor,” The IF wrote in a statement. “Disguised as a civilian area, the harbor was used by Hamas as a training facility for their naval commando forces to plan and execute terrorist attacks.”
“During the operation, conducted by soldiers of the 188th Armored Corps’ Brigade and Flotilla 13, numerous terrorist tunnel entrances and terrorist infrastructures were destroyed,” the statement continued.
Israel has conducted a relentless campaign against Hamas terrorists cells in Gaza City. The terrorist group has maintained a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the population center.
The IDF has gained operational control over the Hamas-operated Gaza Harbor.
Disguised as a civilian area, the harbor was used by Hamas as a training facility for their naval commando forces to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
Hamas has agreed to release dozens of hostages from Gaza under terms of a tentative deal that the Israeli government is now considering, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
While the exact terms of the deal remain unclear, it is believed to involve the release of some Palestinian prisoners held in Israel in addition to a multi-day pause in fighting in Gaza. The deal may already have been rejected, however.
Hamas terrorists took up to 240 hostages during their Oct. 7 massacre inside Israel. That number includes 10 Americans and many other foreign nationals who were in Israel.
UN rights chief calls for international investigation into alleged Israel-Hamas war crimes
UN rights chief calls for international investigation into alleged Israel-Hamas war crimes
UN human rights chief Volker Turk appeared to call for an international investigation into alleged war crimes commited by Israel in its war against Hamas on Thursday.
Turk made the comments after returning from a visit to the Middle East, though he was not allowed to access Israel or Gaza. The official condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and argued that some in Israel have no qualms about killing civilians.
“Extremely serious allegations of multiple and profound breaches of international humanitarian law, whoever commits them, demand rigorous investigation and full accountability,” he said during a U.N. briefing in Geneva, going on to decry the “intensification of violence and severe discrimination agaisnt Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
“It is apparent that on both sides, some view the killing of civilians as either acceptable or collateral, or a deliberate and useful weapon of war,” he continued.
Driver rams barrier at Israeli embassy in Tokyo, injures police officer
Driver rams barrier at Israeli embassy in Tokyo, injures police officer
Police in Tokyo arrested a lone driver who rammed his vehicle into a barrier outside the Israeli embassy on Thursday.
Israeli ambassador to Japan Gilad Cohen confirmed the incident in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Japanese police say they arrested the suspect, a 53-year-old man who was suspected to be a member of a “right-wing organization.”
A police officer outside the embassy received minor injuries in the incident.
“Shocked by the suspected vehicular ramming attack on a police officer on guard near the Israeli embassy in Tokyo. This matter is under investigation by the local police. I would like to express gratitude to the Japanese government and Tokyo Police for their commitment to ensuring our security. Wishing a speedy recovery to the injured police officer,” Cohen wrote on social media.
Top media outlet marred by string of retractions and apologies related to Israel-Hamas war
Top media outlet marred by recent string of retractions and apologies related to Israel-Hamas wa
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been blemished with a string of apologies and retractions related to stories detailing developments in the Israel-Hamas war.
England’s premiere outlet, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, is the oldest and largest local and global broadcaster and has been heralded as an integral source of worldwide news.
But the broadcaster’s reputation has been questioned in recent weeks after a series of inaccurate news reports led critics and social media users to wonder why the BBC’s mistakes erred on behalf of Hamas and Palestinians.
On Tuesday, BBC News Channel aired a report that claimed Israeli forces had descended on Al Shifa hospital in Gaza and targeted “medical teams and Arab speakers” inside.
While reports did indicate the IDF had entered the hospital, no reports corroborated the claim that soldiers had targeted those inside.
The error led the BBC to issue an on-air apology, retraction and a written statement.
“As BBC News covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that ‘medical teams and Arab speakers’ were being targeted. This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report,” the BBC said. “We should have said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. We apologize for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”
Fox News’ Nicholas Lanum contributed to this report
Chicago college professor justifies Hamas attack ‘after 75 years of Israeli white supremacy’
Chicago college professor justifies Hamas attack ‘after 75 years of Israeli white supremacy’
A Chicagoland sociology professor sent a mass email to her students and department colleagues attempting to rally support for Palestinians who she claims have faced “75 years of Israeli White supremacy.”
Brooke Johnson, an associate professor and sociology department coordinator at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), argued “As critical sociologists we are trained to analyze power and inequality in society” and that “this importantly comes with the responsibility to speak up when we witness harm, injustice, and violence,” stressing “What is currently happening in Palestine is one of those moments.”
“After 75 years of Israeli White supremacy, including displacement, human rights violations, and systemic violence, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th which resulted in 1400 deaths and 240 hostages,” Johnson wrote in a Nov. 8 email obtained by Fox News Digital. “Israel is now collectively punishing Palestinians. The Palestinian death toll from Israeli airstrikes exceeds 10,000, and almost half of these are children. This number increases daily as airstrikes continue; water, food and medical aid are cut off; and demands for a humanitarian cease-fire increase.”
One student who received the email was left “really upset” by what Johnson wrote, calling the accusations she made against Israel including being guilty of “White supremacy” as “just not true.”
“I called my mom and I started crying,” the student, who did not wish to be identified, told Fox News Digital.
The student accused Johnson of “justifying” the Oct. 7 attack.
Fox News Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report
Police in the nation’s capital responded to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters Wednesday evening as pro-Palestinian demonstrators grew violent while calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
About 150 people were “illegally and violently protesting” near the DNC headquarters building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., according to U.S. Capitol Police.
Six Capitol police officers were injured during the clash on Wednesday evening, according to the agency. Their injuries stemmed from minor cuts, pepper spray burns and punches thrown by protesters who turned violent alongside peaceful protesters.
Videos on social media showed protesters shoving police officers and trying to hold on to metal barricades at the DNC headquarters while officers attempted to remove them.
Capitol police and the Metropolitan Police Department, who also responded to the protest, did not immediately confirm to Fox News Digital how many arrests were made at the event.
Protesters included members of “If Not Now” and “Jewish Voice for Peace.” Both organizations have organized other demonstrations in Washington D.C. since Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Fox News Digital’s Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Adam Sabes, Kelley Kramer and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
Israeli Air Force strikes home of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ Political Bureau: IDF
The Israel Defense Forces said Thursday its air force conducted a strike on the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Haniyeh, who is the head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, is accused of using his residence in Gaza as terrorist infrastructure and a meeting point for Hamas’ senior leaders to direct attacks on Israel.
It’s not clear if anyone was killed in the strike as Haniyeh lives in Qatar, according to the Times of Israel.
Overnight, IDF fighter jets struck the residence of Ismail Haniyeh, the Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau.
The residence was used as terrorist infrastructure and a meeting point for Hamas’ senior leaders to direct terrorist attacks against Israel. pic.twitter.com/kljYYN6O0U
Pro-Palestinian protesters are acting more violently than Israel’s supporters due to “cultural Marxism,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Newsmax Thursday.
Cruz appeared on “Newsline” while pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the Bay Bridge leading into San Francisco during the APEC summit, calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. That followed U.S. Capitol Police officers in riot gear clashing with roughly 200 demonstrators who gathered outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night to demand a cease-fire.
“This week we had a peaceful protest on the mall, 300,000 people came out to stand for Israel,” Cruz told host Bianca de la Garza. “I took part in the March for Israel, and it was peaceful and calm and united.
“You contrast that to these violent protests and it is … these are dangerous, and we’re seeing them. We’ve seen violent attacks on the White House. We’ve seen violent protests at universities, and these are viciously antisemitic protests. We’re seeing Jewish students at universities across the country harassed and all of this is a manifestation of the cultural Marxism that has infused the institutions of our country.”
Supporters of Israel rallied by the tens of thousands on the National Mall under heavy security Tuesday, voicing bipartisan solidarity in the fight against Hamas and crying “never again.”
Cruz, while promoting his new book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” was also asked about a standalone Israeli aid bill that passed in the House but failed to pass in the Senate.
“Unfortunately, today’s Democrat Party has been radicalized,” Cruz told de la Garza. “And so what happened this week in the Senate is, I and several other Republican senators forced a vote on Israel military aid on the Senate.
“We used a procedural tool called a rogue closure petition, where basically we took control of the floor from the Senate majority leader and forced that vote. And Democrats were furious. But then, sadly, they … every single Democrat … all of them voted against providing emergency military aid to Israel.
“Israel is at war right now. They’re in a war for their very existence. They are fighting to eliminate Hamas. It is a battle between civilization and terror, and the Democrats, their view, they put partisan politics above everything. And so all of them voted no. I thought it was disgraceful.”
Cruz said Democrats can do what they want because the mainstream media provides them cover.
“Our corporate media has abandoned the role of actually reporting on news, and it is now simply a propagandist,” Cruz said. “And so the Democrats can all vote against military aid to Israel. Why? Because they all know it will not end up on the six o’clock news. They know that CNN will not report on it. They know The New York Times will not report on it, so their voters will never hear about it.
“And it’s why instead they’re more afraid of the radical antisemites on the left. They’re more afraid of the ‘Squad,’ and they also want to use Israel aid to leverage their other partisan objectives. And so it was a really sad moment to see every single Senate Democrat vote against Israel military aid.”
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The parental rights group Moms for Liberty reported more than 500% revenue growth in 2022, according to its form 990. Pictured: Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, speaks at the Florida Freedom Summit at the Gaylord Palms Resort on Nov. 4, in Kissimmee, Florida. (Photo: Paul Hennessy, Anadolu/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The parental rights group Moms for Liberty’s revenue has grown by more than 500% in its second year, according to the Form 990 it filed with the IRS.
According to the Form 990, exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, Moms for Liberty brought in $2.14 million in total revenue in 2022, while it brought in $370,029 in total revenue the year before. A significant majority of that money (92.3%) came from donations—contributions and grants. Expenses for 2021 totaled a mere $163,647, while in 2022 they rose to $1.7 million.
This represents a 579% growth in revenue and a 1,040% growth in expenses, a massive expansion.
🚨🚨🚨BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: @Moms4Liberty revenue skyrocketed📈 by more than 500% between 2021 and 2022 according to the IRS 990. Moms for Liberty exposed woke in schools & helped 365 parents and advocates take seats on school boards. Its leaders only take $50K and $44K salaries. pic.twitter.com/hzxl5dyzPn
The parental rights group held its first Joyful Warrior Summit in Tampa in 2022. It also formally adopted governance and financial policies, conducting its first audit. The group began a coordinated fundraising campaign, increasing its charitable solicitation filings to more than 30 states.
Moms for Liberty lists three officers on payroll: Tina Descovich, the executive director and co-founder, who made $50,140; Marie Rogerson, executive director of program development, who made $50,251; and Tiffany Justice, the director and co-founder, who made $44,250.
According to the form, Moms for Liberty’s mission is “to empower members through education, support, outreach, and advocacy to defend parental and constitutionally protected rights within their communities and throughout all levels of government.”
The mission statement continues, saying Moms for Liberty aims to “raise awareness of parental rights in the community and provide its members with the data and tools to protect their rights as parents to make important decisions and take actions on behalf of their children.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as schools started teaching kids remotely, parents could watch over the shoulders of their children, seeing what they were learning in school. This access, along with disagreements over COVID-19 restrictions such as the use of face masks, spurred parents to engage with local school boards, demanding answers about COVID-19 restrictions, critical race theory, and lessons with sexual or gender themes.
When parents raised their voices, teachers unions and school boards dismissed them, even occasionally demonizing them as equivalent to domestic terrorists.
Descovich and Justice founded Moms for Liberty to advocate for parents who felt disenfranchised in this way and to empower them to effect change.
Moms for Liberty trains parents to run for school board, and in the 2022 and 2023 elections, 365 of the candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won their races.
“Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago,” Justice told The Daily Signal last week. “For us to have now been able to elect in 2022 and 2023 365 school board members who are liberty-minded individuals standing up for parental rights, putting the focus back on the basics in American public education, stopping this woke indoctrination that we’ve been seeing—it’s very exciting.”
Want an example of the teachers some of our children find in their classrooms? Check out an example below.
LGBTQ education organization encourages teachers to be trans activists in their classrooms by using pronouns and removing gendered language pic.twitter.com/s7RcH54ul1
Critics have accused Moms for Liberty of aiming to ban books, when the group only opposes sexually explicit materials in school libraries. Similarly, some critics have accused Moms for Liberty leaders of harassment, though a Daily Signal analysis found the claims it reviewed were baseless.
In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center put Moms for Liberty, along with other parental rights groups such as Parents Defending Education, on its “hate map,” placing them alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC claims that Moms for Liberty is part of an “anti-student inclusion” movement, which it compares to “uptown Klans” of white southerners who supported segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education said that racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.
In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the organization’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Seven years earlier, in 2012, a terrorist with a gun used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the organization targeted by the gunman on its map.
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More Pro-Life News • Joe Biden is So Bad Some Democrats Think it Would be Better to Replace Him • 12,000 Babies are Killed in Late-Term Abortions Every Year, More Than All People Killed by Guns • Mother, Son Take Teen Girl Out of State for Secret Abortion After He Rapes Her • Pro-Life Attorneys Ask Iowa Supreme Court to Let Heartbeat Law Save Babies From Abortions • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Hillary and the left are calling Trump Hitler, saying that he is going to arrest his opponents if elected President again like the dictator, (although he could have done this while he was president but didn’t). You know, just exactly what they are doing to him right now, using law-fare to try and keep him off the 2024 ballot. The left are being anti-democratic while claiming to save democracy. This is a prime example of the left accusing their opposition of exactly what they are doing, right out of the Saul Alinsky/Stalin/Mao handbook.
Trump is the one who has been working within and abiding by the legal system under the Constitution while they weaponize the legal system and disregard all reasonable legal protocols to destroy him.
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.
Around 150 lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle attended a screening on Tuesday of footage from the heinous Hamas terror attacks perpetrated in Israel last month, according to the Washington Post.
Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland said in a statement that the footage “will forever haunt” him. “Every Member present was either in tears or sat stunned,” he noted. “The sheer carnage of the scenes I saw called to mind the darkest moments of the Holocaust, the pogroms, and thousands of years of antisemitic violence.”
“In one clip, two little boys watch a Hamas fighter kill their father right before their eyes. In another, a terrorist stands over the bodies of dead Jews as he brags to his parents over the phone about how he killed ten Jews with his bare hands. We saw images of mutilated infants, defiled corpses, and families burned alive in their homes,” Hoyer recalled.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland described it as “utterly chilling,” according to the Post. “Hamas is a terrorist death cult, and it would clearly kill every person in Israel if it could. Nor does it show any interest in the rights of the Palestinian people.”
“It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tx.) said in a tweet.
This morning I viewed footage of Hamas’ brutal October 7th attack against innocent Israelis. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen.
Israel went to war in the wake of the horrific Hamas attacks last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that the Jewish state is attempting to allow civilians to escape danger but that Hamas is blocking people from fleeing to safety.
“While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way. Israel provides civilians in Gaza humanitarian corridors and safe zones, Hamas prevents them from leaving at gunpoint,” Netanyahu asserted.
It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust.
While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing…
When regimes capture power, it’s often not in the dramatic fashion of the storming of the Bastille. Instead, it’s a bureaucratic takeover, hidden in jargon and filled with clichés, for the greater good. The Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote today on a sweeping set of new rules called the “Preventing Digital Discrimination Order.”
The 200-page report recommends implementing an exhaustive array of new restrictions that will alter the internet forever. It springs from section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021. This legislation was meant to infuse some federal dollars into America’s sagging internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, this vote will grant the FCC the power to control nearly every aspect of internet infrastructure in the name of our secular gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The TL;DR of the obtuse rules is the ability to censor, control, and regulate internet service providers based on vague laws around equity. Most disturbing is that it doesn’t have to be “discrimination” as it’s generally understood but rather “disparate outcomes,” meaning all internet infrastructure must produce perfect equity or face the wrath of the United States government.
The agency’s unelected officials will convene to deliberate on regulations to integrate the latest progressive ideals regarding race and identity into the internet landscape. It’s expected to pass 3-2. It will stifle innovation and impede internet access opportunities, all in pursuit of achieving equity.
If approved, this would mark the first time the FCC would gain the authority to oversee various aspects of every ISP’s service termination policies, including customer credit usage, account history, credit checks, and account termination, among other related matters.
Experts have been sounding the alarm about what this could mean for internet freedom.
The @FCC is claiming the power to control every aspect of broadband infrastructure and the industry itself.
To call it "extreme" or "radical" doesn't do this proposal justice.
It includes price controls, forced buildout of broadband regardless of ROI, and more. https://t.co/b7HMYW1sDD
Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has blasted the power-grab, calling it a free pass giving the “administrative state effective control of all internet services and infrastructure.”
“President Biden has called on the FCC to adopt new rules of breathtaking scope,” Carr noted on X, formerly Twitter. “Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
“The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both ‘actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.’ In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.”
Next week, the FCC will vote on President Biden’s plan to give the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure.
These regulators have established a framework that could penalize any organization seeking to enhance internet accessibility or provide internet services if the agency determines that it did so in a manner that facilitates discrimination. Whatever the regulators decide that means.
Congressional pushback
Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, along with 27 fellow senators, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw its preliminary proposal regarding “Digital Discrimination.” This proposal would grant the federal government significant influence over virtually every facet of the internet, potentially subjecting broadband providers to extensive, vague, and detrimental liability under a “disparate impact” standard.
In a letter to FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel, the senators wrote:
“Your Draft Order, which largely follows a Biden administration diktat, will create crippling uncertainty for the U.S. broadband industry, chill broadband investment, and undermine Congress’s objective of promoting broadband access for all Americans. We urge you to adhere to the will of Congress and conform to the plain meaning of [the bipartisan infrastructure bill] to avoid causing serious damage to the competitive and innovative U.S. broadband industry.”
Net neutrality back door
This power-grab is also a de facto attempt to bring back net neutrality. Net neutrality, with its burdensome and intrusive regulations, hinders the internet’s natural evolution. The internet has thrived remarkably well without the heavy hand of net neutrality oversight. Moreover, these regulations prevent internet service providers from rightfully charging substantial fees to content giants like video streaming platforms, which are voraciously consuming bandwidth. By prohibiting these fees, net neutrality shifts the responsibility of expanding network capacity entirely onto individuals and away from giant tech platforms.
This, in turn, is expected to result in higher costs for consumers, as they will be forced to bear the burden of more expensive internet packages, even if they don’t use these data-intensive streaming services. As it stands, net neutrality stifles innovation, undermines market forces, and ultimately harms consumers and the internet ecosystem. The idea that they would resurrect these onerous rules through the back door is no less worrying just because it isn’t surprising.
The one silver lining to this is that the disparate impact rules they cite to justify the power-grab have been struck down by the Supreme Court. There will no doubt be immediate lawsuits to try to fight these rules. Across varying industries and government entities, a concerted effort exists to curtail your freedom. From COVID lockdowns to tech censorship, expansive regulations, gun laws, and the jailing of political dissidents, the underlying result is curtailing your freedoms. The regime knows a free internet is one of the last tools the American people have left, which is why it tries to control it at every turn.
In the United States, global financial speculator George Soros has been the single-biggest financier of overtly political causes for decades. In 2022, he poured $178.8 million into federal campaigns, making him by far the biggest campaign contributor in that cycle. Then there are his hidden and comingled political contributions — a vast web of dark money — that are intentionally designed to influence elections and avoid public scrutiny.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a research organization that tracks money in politics (coincidentally funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations), Soros Fund Management was by far the largest single political contributor going into the 2022 midterm elections. The fund ranked first out of 31,955 contributor organizations with a known war chest of approximately $180 million. Not a single dollar went to a Republican candidate.
The political research group noted that organizations like Soros Fund Management cannot legally contribute directly to candidates or party committees. Instead, the fund funneled cash to political affiliates, the largest being an entity innocuously titled Democracy PAC II. The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission filing lists Michael Vachon as its treasurer. Vachon has served on boards of left-wing organizations tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, such as NYC Partners, Democracy Alliance, and Catalist. George Soros’ son, Alexander, runs the super PAC.
Notably, the first iteration of Democracy PAC funneled more than $80 million to Democratic groups and candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In a statement to Politico, Soros said the massive spend was necessary for “strengthening the infrastructure of American democracy: voting rights and civic participation, civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law.” Incidentally, the Soros-linked America Coming Together political action committee was slapped with what was, at the time, the third-largest fine in the Federal Election Commission’s history following the unsuccessful bid to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and install Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the White House.
The group’s $137 million election effort spanned 90 offices in 17 states and employed more than 25,000 neighborhood canvassers and election staff. The FEC unanimously approved a $775,000 fine for using unregulated “soft money” to elect Democrats. The penalty was a pittance of accountability compared to the amount spent, though America Coming Together shuttered operations in 2005.
Soros had also given millions to the leftist MoveOn.org Voter Fund, which the FEC fined $150,000, to run television ads attacking President Bush. The progressive megadonor was an early supporter of Barack Obama. In 2004, he held a fundraiser in New York City for the community organizer from Chicago and his successful U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. Soros — the so-called “smart money” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — would go on to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Soros would later say that Obama (whose 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, suggested was the most anti-American president in the nation’s history) was his “greatest disappointment.” Not because Obama’s leftward lurch didn’t go far enough, but because Obama, in Soros’ view, stabbed him in the back, politically, and left him to operate outside the inner White House circle.
In 2016, Soros threw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump by pouring millions into her presidential election run. FEC filings in the summer of 2016 showed Soros had committed or personally donated more than $25 million — mostly for her benefit.
Upon Trump’s election, the Soros mission turned to getting rid of the 45th duly elected president of the United States. How that jibed with any honest notion of democracy is anyone’s guess.
Framing President Trump as a Russian agent guilty of colluding with Vladimir Putin to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the White House was always a Clinton campaign smear. The associated Steele dossier, named for the former British intelligence officer and Fusion GPS opposition research operative Christopher Steele, was laundered through the law firm Perkins Coie.
According to The Washington Post, Perkins Coie represented “the national Democratic Party, its governors, almost all of its members of Congress, and its campaign and fundraising apparatus.” The firm’s “Democratic superlawyer,” Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias was not only involved in the Steele dossier fiasco, which the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the Trump campaign — and led to subsequent FISA warrant renewals to spy on the Trump presidency — but Elias was simultaneously paid by George Soros to knock down election integrity laws in swing states.
Flash-forward to the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, and Soros surfaced again through his Open Society Foundations’ ties to Ukraine and the so-called whistleblower at the center of the controversy, identified by independent media reports as Eric Ciaramella. Breitbart journalist Aaron Klein found that Ciaramella was reportedly receiving email communications from a top director at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Klein also noted that the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity was fueling the impeachment narrative that President Trump acted improperly with respect to the purported temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption.
Corporate media outlets with a collective loathing for President Trump used the Soros-backed group’s assertions to substantiate Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment effort. Trump was indeed impeached and acquitted by the Senate. Just as in previous elections, Soros reportedly told a group at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the 2020 election would determine the “fate of the world.” He said Trump was “a con man and a narcissist, who wants the world to revolve around him.” Previously at the World Economic Forum, Soros claimed Trump was “doing the work of ISIS.”
Soros spent $52 million in the 2020 presidential election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But there is no way to know how much money and influence originated from the billionaire activist, whether directly or indirectly via his Open Society Foundations.
One thing is certain: The 2020 presidential election, amid unprecedented Covid-era election changes and summer riots destabilizing dozens of American cities and the nation’s capital, was unlike any in American history. Soros-backed prosecutors are already swaying the 2024 presidential election via lawfare. Soros grant recipients are attempting to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.
And George and Alex Soros are only just getting started.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.
Israeli soldiers and tanks rolled into al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and location of a major Hamas terrorist compound, according to Israel. The military is conducting a “precise and targeted operation” inside the hospitals, where hundreds of medical patients and personnel remain. Hamas has denied Israeli accusations it uses the hospital as a shield.
The Israeli military captured Hamas government buildings in Gaza and has fought its way to the gates of the region’s largest medical facility, Al-Shifa Hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
There remain up to 238 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
Israel-Hamas war: IDF finds weapons inside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released video early Wednesday showing weapons found inside the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
“IDF troops are continuing the precise and targeted operation against Hamas in the Shifa Hospital complex, in which the troops are conducting searches for Hamas terrorist infrastructure and assets,” the IDF said in a statement.
“As the soldiers entered the hospital complex, they engaged with a number of terrorists and killed them,” the statement added. “Following this, during searches in one of the departments of the hospital, the troops located a room with technological assets, along with military and combat equipment used by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
The footage shows Israeli officers sorting through the firearms, ammunition and weapons reportedly left by Hamas fighters.
The IDF says that “technological assets and extensive intelligence information” found in the hospital are being reviewed by authorities.
Biden allies condemn far-left calls for cease-fire in Israel-Hamas war
U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
President Biden’s strong backing of Israel and his response to its war with terrorist organization Hamas speaks to the mainstream of the Democratic Party and the majority of Americans, according to supporters of the president, despite progressive Democrats publicly opposing the administration’s rejection of a cease-fire.
Multiple Biden allies told Fox News Digital that the administration’s stance against a cease-fire protects Americans and national security interests at home and abroad.
Nearly a dozen Biden allies defended the president’s policies in interviews with Fox News Digital after more than 400 government officials within the administration signed onto a letter opposing the president’s handling of the war, and demanding a cease-fire.
NYC Columbia University faculty and students protest suspension of 2 far-left groups
A protester holds a sign at a “All out for Gaza” protest at Columbia University in New York on November 15, 2023. (Photo by BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images)
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stood outside of Columbia University in New York City on Wednesday, holding signs while chanting and demanding the removal of Jewish people from Gaza, while others boycotted the suspension of two far-left student-led groups by the school’s administration.
The “emergency protest” was shared on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, by groups such as WOLPalestine (Within Our Lifetime) and CUNYPalestine, noting the event was scheduled for Nov. 15 at 2 p.m.
“All Out for Gaza at Columbia University,” the post read. “In solidarity with Columbia SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voices for Peace) who were recently unjustly suspended by the university administration.
NYU hit with lawsuit for fueling ‘virus of antisemitism,’ ‘abusing Jewish students with impunity’
A New York University (NYU) flag flies outside of the NYU business school on August 25, 2020. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
New York University was hit with a groundbreaking lawsuit, the first of what is expected to be a series against elite universities, for allegedly allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus and also “deliberately” seeking to “make the campus environment even more… frightening for Jewish students,” according to court documents.
“NYU is among the worst campuses for Jewish students, and NYU has long been aware of the festering Jewish hatred permeating the school,” the suit filed by Kasowitz Benson Torres, an influential firm based in New York City, said.
It alleged that NYU was aware of “ongoing and disgraceful acts of anti-Jewish bigotry,” and refused to act in violation of Jewish students’ Title VI civil rights and sought remedial measures and financial penalties. The suit made startling allegations, including that NYU’s administration’s actions, or lack thereof throughout the years, added fuel to antisemitism on campus.
The “Outnumbered” co-hosts reacted to the rise of antisemitism and Tuesday’s March for Israel rally, as the war between Hamas and Israel continues.
Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus, who is Jewish, thanked the show for lending her support amid rampant antisemitism.
“I’m so grateful to this show, to all of you, to the producers. I’ve never cried on air,” Ortagus explained. “And a couple of weeks ago, just seeing the images and the rampant anti-Semitism, having a daughter, it has been so hard to talk about it. But I’m so appreciative of you guys for for giving us the voice, giving us the opportunity.”
“I never have felt unsafe in this country for my daughter the way I do now,” she continued, adding that she was appreciated for the 300,000 people who showed up to the March for Israel rally.
“Between October 7th and November 7th, there have been 832 anti-Semitic attacks,” co-host Kayleigh McEnany said. “Do the math, that means 28 per day. That means more than one every hour.”
Comedian Jon Lovitz blasts HBO’s John Oliver for shaming U.S. over alliance with Israel
Jon Lovitz arrives at the Mike Tyson Cares and We2Matter’s 100 Women Matter Celebrity Fundraiser Gala on August 17, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Legendary comedian and actor Jon Lovitz blasted HBO host Jon Oliver this week after the British talk show host reprimanded the United States for supporting Israel and the “suffering” it has caused in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
Lovitz replied to a social media post from Oliver’s talk show with an X post noting how the U.S. would obviously support its “democratic ally” Israel over the radical terror group that killed 1400+ people in the country last month.
Pushing back against the British HBO host’s skepticism of America’s alliance with Israel, Lovitz declared, “God bless America. #IstandwithIsrael.”
Netanyahu’s wife writes Jill Biden a letter urging her to save ‘suffering’ Hamas child hostages
Former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu at an election-night event on November 1, 2022 in Jerusalem, Israel.
The wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has written a letter Wednesday to first lady Jill Biden, urging her to call for the “immediate release” of child hostages who are “suffering” in the captivity of Hamas terrorists.
Sara Netanyahu opened her plea by saying that “I’m writing to you not only as Bibi’s wife but first and foremost as a mother.”
“For over a month now, 32 children have been held kidnapped in Gaza, brutally torn from their parents and their homes,” Netanyahu said. “These children are surely suffering from untold trauma, not only by being kidnapped, but having witnessed the brutal murder of their parents and siblings on that horrific October 7th.”
Biden’s favorite columnist urges him to use Trump’s peace proposal for two-state solution
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman on February 26, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman, one of President Biden’s favorite writers, is urging him to follow in part former President Trump’s plan for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
After visiting Israel and the West Bank, Friedman came to the conclusion that America needed an active “vision for how the Gaza war must end” in a column published Tuesday.
“The Biden plan — are you sitting down? — could actually use as one of its starting points President Donald Trump’s proposal for a two-state solution,” Friedman wrote, “because [Benjamin] Netanyahu embraced that in 2020, when he had a different coalition. (Netanyahu and his ambassador in Washington practically wrote the Trump plan.)”
‘Will & Grace’ star Debra Messing blasted for speech at pro-Israel rally in DC
Debra Messing speaks during ‘March For Israel’ at the National Mall on November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Social media users criticized “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing after she gave a speech in defense of Israel during a pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., this week.
Users on both sides of the political spectrum slammed Messing for her impassioned speech condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, with pro-Israel conservatives hitting her for voting for Biden, who has given aid to Israel’s enemies, as well as pro-Palestinian leftists accusing her of defending “genocide” in Gaza.
Messing, a Jewish person and Hollywood liberal, gave the speech in front of thousands at the “March for Israel” in D.C. on Tuesday. The Jewish Federations of North America organized the event to support Israel amid its war with Hamas and to call out terror and hatred being shown towards the Jewish community.
Bipartisan lawmakers push Biden to investigate Hamas’ cryptocurrency financing
From left: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, President Biden and Rep. Ritchie Torres (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll, Ting Shen/Bloomberg, Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call)
Top House lawmakers are investigating the breadth and depth of the digital wealth owned by terror groups like Hamas just over a month after the Gaza-based organization’s surprise attack on Israel.
“Reports indicate that Hamas-linked digital wallets received about $41 million and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-linked digital wallets received about $93 million between August 2021 and June 2023. Yet, it remains unclear how much, if any, of the publicly identified digital assets are accessible to or remains in the possession of Hamas,” the lawmakers wrote to President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“According to reports, Hamas shut down its digital asset fundraising campaign in April 2023 citing the ability of government officials to identify and prosecute donors.”
The bipartisan letter is led by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., Digital Asset subcommittee Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., and Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.
“We request the White House and the Treasury to utilize the open blockchain ledger to assess the footprint of Hamas’ digital asset fundraising campaign. In doing this, Congress can better understand the United States’ available tools and capabilities to target bad actors on blockchain and support legitimate digital asset use and innovation,” Emmer told Fox News Digital.
A top United Nations humanitarian aid official is being ripped Wednesday by an Israeli ambassador after sharing an image on X showing him shaking hands with Iran’s foreign minister, who reportedly helped Hamas plan its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths posted that he held a meeting in Geneva with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian about the “devastating” situation unfolding in the Gaza Strip and the “critical” need to deliver aid to the area.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Amirabdollahian had taken part in at least two planning meetings in Lebanon with the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad ahead of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which launched the Middle East war.
“Tell me @UNReliefChief, what role do you see Iran playing in such regard?” Israeli Ambassador to Geneva Elion Shahar wrote in response to Griffiths’ post. “What role do you see for the prime sponsors of a terrorist organization who murdered, raped, and tortured over 1,200 Israelis?”
“Did you ask him about the weapons Iran has transferred to Hamas through aid shipments, which were used to kill Israelis on October 7th?” she continued. “Did you ask him about the money Iran has transferred to Hamas, which pays for its leaders’ 5-star hotels in Qatar where they cheered when young Israelis were murdered on TV?”
“Iran is part of the problem, not the solution,” she concluded. “It is about time the U.N. starts to understand this simple truth.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this update.
Destroyer USS Thomas Hudner shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea
BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 26: The USS Thomas Hudner, named after Concord’s Medal of Honor recipient Thomas Hudner, arrives in Boston for its commissioning ceremony later in the week on Nov. 26, 2018. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea, two U.S. defense officials confirm to Fox News.
A defense official said the drone was shot down in self-defense. “The drone was heading towards the Hudner,” the official said.
On Tuesday, during the Pentagon news briefing, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin asked Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh about the lack of U.S. military response to the Houthis in Yemen who downed the $32 million MQ-9 drone over the Red Sea last week.
“Isn’t the lack of response by the US military inviting more actions, aggressive actions by the Houthis?” Griffin asked.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s inviting more aggressive or further response from the Houthis,” Singh replied. “We’ve seen the Houthis do this before.”
“I’m not saying that we’re not going to respond. We always reserve the right to respond at a time and place of our choosing. But I just don’t have anything to forecast for you right now,” she added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops at the Zikim military base near north Gaza and said, “There is no place in Gaza that Israel will not reach.”
Netanyahu was briefed on the fighting that occurred on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and attacked residences and military posts in southern Israel. Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in the assault, mostly civilians, and took some 240 people hostage back to Gaza.
Standing next to soldiers at the base, Netanyahu said: “Do you remember when we were told that we would not break into Gaza? We broke through. We were told that we would not reach the outskirts of Gaza City – we arrived. We were told that we won’t enter Shifa – we entered.
“There is no hiding, no shelter, no refuge for the murderers of Hamas,” Netanyahu said. “We will arrive and eliminate Hamas and return our abductees – these are two sacred missions.”
Hundreds gathered Sunday at a Ventura County, California, intersection where a week earlier, a 69-year-old Jewish man struck his head on concrete and later died after a confrontation with an unnamed pro-Palestinian protester.
Flowers, wreaths, candles and letters surrounded the spot in front of the gas station at Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevards, where Paul Kessler sustained his fatal injuries.
One man held a sign that read, “We want justice for Paul,” per footage shared with Fox News Digital. Others bandied Israeli flags and sang “Oseh Shalom” — a Hebrew song praying for peace for the country, its people and the world.
Blood still marked the ground where Kessler’s head struck the sidewalk in widely-shared footage from around 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 showing medics attending to a bleeding but alert Kessler at the scene as police questioned onlookers.
Kessler was pronounced dead at nearby Los Robles Hospital about 10 hours after the incident. Per the Ventura County Medical Examiner during a press conference Tuesday, Kessler’s non-lethal injuries were noted on the left side of his face, while internal injuries included skull fractures, swelling and bruising to the brain.
Kessler’s manner of death was determined to be homicide, Medical Examiner Christopher Young said.
Fox News Digital’s Christina Coulter contributed to this update.
BBC News Channel has apologized for an inaccurate report that claimed Israeli forces were targeting “medical teams and Arab speakers” inside of Gaza’s main hospital.
On Tuesday, a BBC News program reported that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation against Hamas forces inside Al Shifa hospital.
The news anchor then claimed that the soldiers were targeting individuals, including hospital workers and Arab speakers, inside the hospital, which would constitute a war crime. The BBC News anchor cited Reuters as the source of their information. However, reporting from Reuters on Israeli troops entering the hospital contradicted the BBC.
“Israel said its troops uncovered unspecified weapons and “terror infrastructure” inside the hospital compound after killing fighters in a clash outside. Once inside, they said there had been no fighting and no friction with civilians, patients or staff,” an article from Reuters noted.
“Witnesses who spoke to Reuters from inside the compound on Wednesday described a situation that appeared calm, if tense, as the Israeli troops moved between buildings carrying out searches,” the outlet added.
One of the most influential news organizations in the world, BBC issued an on-air apology for its claims about the Al Shifa hospital the following morning.
“BBC News, as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted,” the anchor said. “This is incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report which said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. We apologize for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”
The anchor also noted that the correct version of events was broadcast “minutes later.”
Fox News Digital’s Nikolas Lanum contributed to this update.
Pro-Palestinian protesters marched in Staten Island on Tuesday, chanting anti-Israel slogans and burning the Israeli flag.
“From the river, to the sea,” hundreds of people shouted, a phrase that appears in the founding charter of the terrorist group in Hamas and calls for the destruction of Israel.
Protesters were also filmed burning an Israeli flag.
Police arrested six people, including at least one minor, in connection to the pro-Palestinian rally in St. George, SILive.com reported.
The rally was organized by the pro-Palestinian group WIthin Our Lifetime and held outside of Borough Hall. NYPD officers forced the demonstration to relocate onto Richmond Terrace, disrupting traffic, the report said.
Protesters also criticized President Bident and the U.S. government’s support for Israel in th ewar against Hamas. People chanted, “Israel bombs, USA pays. How many kids have you killed today?”
“What other words can be used for this besides ethnic cleansing? Besides genocide? Words that these mainstream media outlets still refuse to use,” Nerdeen Kiswani, founder and chair of Within Our Lifetime, told SILive.com.
“There are Palestinian men, women and children, every day, on our screens begging people to look at the world and tell the world to stop this genocide. But they are not stopping it. In fact, countries like the one we live in, like the United States, are funding it,” she said.
Israeli forces continue operations inside al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas official says
Israeli soldier stands near boxes labelled “Medical Supplies” at the Al Shifa hospital complex, amid their ground operation against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, during what they say is a delivery of humanitarian aid to the facility in Gaza City, November 15, 2023 in this handout image. Israeli Defence Forces/Handout via REUTERS
A senior official with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry told the Associated Press that Israeli forces are still operating inside al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the territory.
Speaking by phone from the hospital, Munir al-Boursh said Israeli soldiers ransacked the basement and other buildings, including those housing the emergency and surgery departments.
“They are still here … patients, women and children are terrified,” he said. He said doctors vowed to stay with their patients “till the end.”
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. The Israel Defense Forces said earlier Wednesday it is carrying out a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas” in a specific part of the hospital away from patients and medical staff. The IDF also said it delivered medical supplies.
Al-Boursh told the AP he spoke with an Israeli official by phone on Wednesday and asked him to join the forces searching the facility, but he refused.
The IDF says it recovered weapons from the basement of the hospital.
The mood in the nation’s capital ranged from somber to jubilant Tuesday, as tens of thousands of people rallied in support of Israel and the Jewish community.
“I feel like it’s my duty right now to be here, to be advocating for my people,” Tal told Fox News.
Demonstrators draped themselves in American and Israeli flags as they congregated at the National Mall for the “March for Israel.”
“We love America, and we’re so happy that America is standing behind Israel,” Elliot from New Jersey said. “It’s really great to all be here together, show support to each other and say thank you to the country.”
A coalition of Jewish organizations planned the march to show support for Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks in which Hamas killed around 1,200 people, primarily Israeli civilians. More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its counterattack, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
“I came to stand with Israel during this really crazy time … and stand up for the hostages to come home, and for peace, once and for all,” Cillia from Michigan said.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Ray Lambert and Jon Michael Raasch contributed to this update.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib is part of a secret social media group in which its members have glamorized Hamas in its war battle with Israel after the terror group attacked and killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians last month, Fox News Digital has found.
The Michigan Democrat is a member of the Palestinian American Congress group on Facebook. The group is hidden from non-members and does not appear on the platform’s search engine, though Fox News Digital was able to gain access to it.
The group’s founder, Maher Abdel-qader, who has extensive ties to Tlaib and has also been linked to other liberal politicians, has come under fire in the past for his antisemitic social media posts, including questioning if the Holocaust ever occurred.
The Palestinian American Congress group, of which Tlaib is a member, has featured pro-Hamas posts in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
On Oct. 12, one group member posted: “We don’t want to throw you in the sea…we want you to ride it back from where you came.” The message was accompanied by a picture of an elderly Israeli woman and a Hamas fighter holding her captive.
Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Peter Hasson contributed to this update.
UN official condemns Israeli raid on Gaza hospital, insists Hamas not use it as a ‘shield’
UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Martin Griffiths speaks during an international humanitary conference for civilians in Gaza, at the Elysee Presidential Palace, in Paris, on November 9, 2023. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The United Nations’ top emergency relief official on Wednesday condemned the Israeli military operation in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital and said Hamas must not use it as a ‘shield’ for their activities.
“Look, Hamas must not, should not, use a place like a hospital as a shield for their presence,” said Martin Griffiths in a video statement, adding that “hospitals should not become a place of – a war zone – of danger.”
Earlier on X, Griffiths said he was “appalled” by overnight reports of Israeli military operations inside the hospital.
The U.N. World Health Organization says Shifa patients have needs that are “well beyond basic care.” Images reportedly from the facility showed medics trying to keep newborns warm in blankets because power for incubators had failed.
“The babies have no incubators,” Griffiths said. “Some are dead already. We can’t move them out. It’s too dangerous.”
“I understand the Israelis’ concern for trying to find the leadership of Hamas, that’s not our problem,” he added. “Our problem is protecting the people of Gaza from what’s being visited upon them.”
Maryland middle school DEI teacher under investigation for Israel-Hamas comments
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over social media posts suggesting Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax. (Google Maps)
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over a social media posts suggesting the Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax and other posts about the war in the Middle East.
Sabrina Khan-Williams, a World Studies teacher and a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team leader at Tilden Middle School, made a series of posts doubting reports about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, according to Facebook screenshots obtained by The Daily Wire.
“Debunked!! No music festival attack. Babies were not burned. Women were not violated,” she wrote in one post.
More than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, prompting 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.
Kahn-Williams suggested in another post that Hamas did not start the war against Israel.
“Hamas did not start this. They were just the perfect vehicle for Zionists to continue its apartheid,” she wrote.
Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion contributed to this update.
Turkish President Erdogan labels Israel ‘terrorist state’
ANKARA, TURKIYE – NOVEMBER 15: Turkish President and the Leader of the Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes statements as he attends his party’s group meeting at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, Turkiye on November 15, 2023. (Photo by Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made incendiary anti-Israel comments on Wednesday, calling Israel a “terrorist state” intent on destroying Gaza and its residents.
In a speech to members of his own political party, Erdogan also vowed to bring Israeli political and military leaders before an international tribunal to be tried for war crimes.
“Israel is implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people,” Erdogan said. “I say openly that Israel is a terrorist state.”
In the same speech, Erdogan referred to Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” trying to protect their land and people.
Turkey recently normalized relations with Israel but its war with Hamas in Gaza has again strained their ties. Israel recalled its diplomats from Turkey last month after Erdogan accused Israel of committing war crimes. Turkey later also recalled its ambassador from Israel.
Turkey has found itself at odds with its NATO allies, most of whom have backed Israel’s right to defend itself following the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, while Turkey has echoed the stances of other Middle Eastern nations in questioning Israel and defending the Palestinians.
Fox News Digital’s Peter Aitken and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Reports of a potential hostage deal between Israel and Hamas is evidence that the terror group is reeling from the IDF’s barrage of Gaza, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told FOX News Tuesday.
Hamas and Israel are reportedly close to to a deal that would exchange as many as 70 women and children held hostage by Hamas in return for the release of female Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Mark Regev, who recently served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and is now a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said one aspect of the deal should underline how evil Hamas truly is.
He cited a figure of 240 people estimated to be held by Hamas, including 32 children and infants.
“I always ask us to remember what sort of people kidnap babies and infants, what sort of people can kidnap a 9-month-old baby. They really are sick. They really are depraved. What more could one say about Hamas?” Regev said.
“But if they are moving towards releasing hostages, it’s not because they have suddenly become humanitarians. It’s because they’ve been on the receiving end of the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) military might. And they are feeling the pain, feeling the pressure.”
Regev said he is hopeful for a deal soon, while reiterating the IDF’s pressure campaign must continue in order to expedite the possibility of future prisoner releases by a potentially teetering Hamas.
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
IDF emphasizes hospital operation targets Hamas, not civilians
An aerial view shows the compound of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on November 7, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The Israel Defense Forces emphasized Wednesday that its forces conducting a “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza are targeting Hamas.
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. Both Hamas and hospital officials have denied the allegation.
“Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the civilians in Gaza,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces. “The IDF has publicly warned time and again that Hamas’s continued military use of Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law.”
Hagari said Israeli forces in Gaza included medics and Arabic speakers to try and provide assistance in the “complex and sensitive environment.”
Israel continues to attack Hamas military targets in Gaza with a relentless campaign of airstrikes. Thousands of Palestinians have moved southward toward the Rafah border crossing into Egypt as the Israeli military has urged civilians to evacuate the warzone in the north.
Fox News Digital’s Brandon Gillespie and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
An Israeli practises using a newly acquired gun, at a weapons distribution point for people allowed to carry arms, at the Ayyelet HaShahar Kibbutz, in northern Israel, near the Lebanese border on October 12, 2023. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli citizens are rushing to arm themselves in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 terror attacks.
A news release from the Ministry of National Security said more than 236,000 new requests for gun permits have been filed since the attack – a figure equal to the number filed over 20 years, the ministry said.
Israelis feel uneased after Hamas terrorists caught the country off-guard, infiltrating through the south and slaughtering more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, at a music festival and in their homes.
Armed civilian security squads entered the breach in the army’s absence to fight off some of the attackers. Shortly after, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir said he would expand and arm such squads with 10,000 assault rifles that would be distributed particularly in border towns, mixed Jewish-Arab cities and West Bank settlements.
Some 1,700 permits are being issued daily after the Ministry of National Security eased restrictions, the report said. By comparison, an average of 94 were issued daily in November 2022, and an average of 42 a year earlier.
Israeli soldiers killed in war against Hamas rises to 49: IDF
Israel Defense Forces said captains Omri Yosef David(left) and Yedidya Asher Lev(right) were killed in Gaza on Tuesday. (Israel Defense Forces)
The Israel Defense Forces announced two more soldiers were killed on Tuesday as Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists continues.
The fallen have been identified as Omri Yosef David, 27, and Yedidya Asher Lev, 26, and their families have been notified. Both David and Lev were captains, according to the IDF’s memorial page.
As of Wednesday morning, there here have been 49 IDF soldiers killed since ground operations began in Gaza.
On Wednesday, the IDF said its forces have entered Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital after surrounding the facility earlier.
The army said its forces were carrying out “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area” at al-Shifa Hospital. It gave no further details but said it was taking steps to avoid harm to civilians.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it had warned “the relevant authorities in Gaza once again that all military activities within the hospital must cease within 12 hours. Unfortunately, it did not.”
Fox News’ Yonat Friling and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Israel ‘will not stop’ operations in Gaza until Hamas destroyed, hostages released: defense minister
ISRAEL – NOVEMBER 11: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visits the 91st Division’s base in northern Israel, November 11, 2023. (Photo by Israeli Defense Minister/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said the Jewish state “will not stop its operations in Gaza” until Hamas is obliterated and hostages are back home with their families during a Wednesday meeting with U.S. Special Coordinator Brett McGurk.
The meeting between Gallant and McGurk, U.S. Special Coordinator for the Middle East, took place at the Ministry of Defense’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. The two discussed operational developments in Israel’s war against Hamas and the complexity of fighting the terrorist group given that it operates in civilian buildings.
Intelligence and additional details related to the hostages being held by Hamas and efforts to bring them home were also discussed.
The two leaders spoke on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and how to overcome the challenges in facilitating aid to the civilian population, as well as the international community’s role in getting more urgent supplies delivered to the area.
Gallant also expressed his appreciation for America’s ongoing support and deep partnership, and the two agreed to remain in close contact.
Medical supplies provided by Israeli forces arrive at Gaza hospital
Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies provided by the force have arrived at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. (Israel Defense Forces/X)
The Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies, including baby food and incubators, have arrived at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza amid the targeted attack on Hamas terrorists inside the building.
“We can now confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies, provided by the IDF, have successfully reached the hospital,” the IDF wrote on X.
The supplies arrived Wednesday morning after Israeli soldiers began a “precise and targeted operation” against Hamas, which operates out of the hospital. The operation remains active, according to the IDF.
Arabic-speaking soldiers and the IDF’s medical team are reportedly at the hospital to ensure the supplies make it to those in need.
The Israeli army alleges the main command center for Hamas is hidden inside the hospital, in underground tunnels beneath the structures that house hundreds of patients and medical staff. Both Hamas and al-Shifa Hospital staff deny the allegations.
More than 11,200 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and minors — have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
The area of the hospital where the operation is taking place was decided upon by intelligence indicating Hamas activity was coming from the area, the IDF said.
Before entering, troops discovered explosive devices and terrorist cells, which prompted an “engagement” that left Hamas terrorists dead, according to the IDF.
A Hamas training camp containing terror tunnel shafts, classrooms, intelligence material and dozens of weapons, including rockets and loaded RPGs, was located in the area on Tuesday by Israeli forces.
In addition, the IDF said it struck two terrorists with a UAV after it identified a terrorist cell exiting a building with an anti-tank missile launching post in the northern Gaza Strip. The terrorists were carrying suspected IEDs, which were planted in the area.
Consider this – over the past year, the national debt increased by $2.5 trillion, which amounts to an eye-popping $78,401 every second. U.S. federal borrowing for Fiscal Year 2023 neared 9% of the entire economy. These numbers should terrify every American.
As vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, I feel compelled to address the alarming growth of our national debt. If we fail to confront this issue head-on, future generations will face the crushing prospect of a combined top marginal tax rate of 100% just to pay for existing government services.
We have an opportunity to come together to save our Republic by forming a bipartisan debt commission focused on finding innovative solutions to address this perilous threat and ensure our children and grandchildren have the same opportunities that we had. I commend Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for pledging to establish a debt commission in one of his first acts since his election.
Our primary fiscal challenges stem from demographics. The number of workers-to-retirees ratio has fallen from over 5-to-1 to under 3-to-1. At the same time, 1-in-9 prime age men are not showing up in the workforce. These trends put an immense strain on Social Security and Medicare, programs that American retirees rightfully rely upon. Simply put, we must fulfill our promises to them. At the same time, it is morally indefensible to ask Americans to incur a massive tax increase to keep these programs afloat.
So instead of focusing on the question of who should pay, I believe we should focus on why health care costs have grown so rapidly. Consider obesity, a key driver of health care spending that fuels a multitude of conditions from diabetes to heart disease. The 2023 Joint Economic Report put a price tag of $4.1 trillion on the cost of untreated obesity to taxpayers over the next decade.
There is hope in the emerging role of medications targeting severe obesity and its complications. By ensuring access to effective treatments, we can tackle the underlying causes of these health issues, easing the financial pressures on federal health care spending.
Investing in research and development is vital for continued medical breakthroughs that enhance quality of life, reduce costs and improve outcomes. Yet, even with a forward-looking approach to health care, we cannot disregard the imminent fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare. Without legislative intervention, these programs face automatic, draconian cuts that no American wants.
In just a decade, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money. When that happens, federal law mandates an automatic 25% cut in Social Security benefits along with a reduction in Medicare spending.
It is incumbent upon us, as a nation, to find a bipartisan solution that solidifies their financial stability. Another pressing concern is the historically low liquidity in the U.S. Treasury market. As the country prepares to issue $1.8 trillion in new debt in Fiscal Year 2024, we must recognize the risks posed by this illiquidity.
A slight drop in demand for U.S. debt can cause a significant increase in interest rates, as evidenced by the yield on the 10-year Treasury currently standing at 4.6%—nearly a full percentage point higher than the Congressional Budget Office’s projection at the year’s outset. Escalating interest rates have the potential to set off a perilous cycle of slower economic growth and higher federal budget deficits, which, taken together will exacerbate our debt crisis.
We must consider innovative approaches to financing our debt while addressing liquidity. One approach is for Treasury to issue perpetuities, as suggested by Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane. These instruments would be both highly liquid and lock in the government’s long-term financing costs, providing stability and predictability to the market.
The Federal Reserve could also improve Treasury market liquidity by adopting a rules-based monetary policy, thereby reducing interest rate volatility.
The dramatic rise in America’s national debt is a crisis that can no longer be ignored. It is a challenge that threatens our future prosperity, and one that Congress must rise to before it’s too late. By forming a bipartisan debt commission, we have a unique opportunity to come together and tackle this issue directly. It doesn’t matter what party one belongs to, we should all want a healthier population, strong and secure social safety net programs, and a strong and flourishing economy.
Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., was shut down Wednesday on pressing FBI Director Christopher Wray on purported evidence of “ghost buses” filled with alleged federal operatives before the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
“These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters and deployed onto our Capitol on Jan. 6,” Higgins said in closing of his five-minute questioning. “Your day is coming, Mr. Wray.”
Democrats sought to shut down Higgins’ line of questioning that had turned a bit contentious as Higgins asked Wray if the FBI had operatives “embedded” in the crowd on Jan. 6.
“Can you confirm that the FBI had that sort of engagement with your own agents embedded within to the crowd on Jan. 6,” Higgins asked.
Instead of a direct answer to that question, Wray deflected to suggest the Republican was asking whether the FBI was stoking violence, something Higgins did not ask, nor allude to.
“If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and or agents, the answer is emphatically not,” Wray shot back.
“You’re saying no?” Higgins asked again.
“No!” Wray said.
“Do you know what a ghost vehicle is, director?” Higgins continued. “You’re the director of the FBI, you certainly should. Do you know what a ghost bus is?”
“A ghost bus?” Wray replied. “I’m not sure I’ve used that term before.”
Higgins, a former Military Police Corps staff sergeant in the Louisiana National Guard said ghost buses are “common in law enforcement.”
“It’s a vehicle that’s used for secret purposes,” Higgins said. “It’s painted over.
“These two buses in the middle here, they were the first to arrive at Union Station on Jan. 6,” Higgins said, pointing to a photo. “I have all this evidence. I’m showing you a tip of this iceberg.”
That is when a Democrat in the hearing sought to stop Higgins’ questioning and the chairman forced him to yield. The chair did permit Higgins to briefly close with the “nefarious in nature” and “your day is coming, Mr. Wray” remarks.
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.
Israeli forces seized the Hamas terror organization’s military headquarters in Gaza this week. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces revealed new details about Hamas’ subterranean “pit” command center. Israeli soldiers were reportedly surprised by the level of sophistication of Hamas’ underground high command quarters, drawing comparisons to the IDF’s own “pit” beneath its Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The Hamas subterranean headquarters includes a special shaft with an elevator that can reportedly reach a depth of 30 meters (nearly 100 ft.) and fit seven people inside. The elevator descends to a specially- designed tunnel that is air conditioned and outfitted with oxygen. In addition, the tunnel includes advanced communication equipment, suggesting that top Hamas officials hide in there, including Gaza’s Hamas chief Yahiya Sinwar and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.
The Israeli military doctrine has traditionally focused on deterrence rather than dismantling the Hamas terror organizations. However, following the unprecedented Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 that claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, mostly civilians, Israel has vowed to dismantle Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
IDF Division 162 Commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen stressed that the Israeli military is currently implementing the goal of eliminating Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza City.
“We created conditions which could lead to taking apart the military and governance capabilities of Hamas in Gaza City,” Cohen explained.
“Since the start of the invasion, the IDF and Division 162 have been taking apart the centers of gravity of Hamas and the capabilities that it spent years building. Since the start of the invasion, divisional forces have killed over 1,000 Hamas terrorists and reduced rocket fire from northern Gaza at Israel by around 80%,” the IDF general added.
Earlier this week, Israeli forces from the Golani Brigade seized Hamas’ parliament building in Gaza City, an important symbol of the Iranian-backed terror organization’s political power in the coastal enclave.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired IDF general and former commando from the Shayetet 13 naval elite unit, recently said Hamas is unable to stop the Israeli advances throughout the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas isn’t capable of stopping the IDF. The IDF is advancing to every (necessary) location,” Gallant stated.
“The Hamas terrorist organization has lost control of Gaza, terrorists are fleeing south, civilians are looting Hamas bases, and they have no confidence in their government,” he assessed.
The Israeli army announced on Wednesday morning that it had launched “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas” in one part of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The medical center has emerged as a hub for Hamas activities, including its command centers below the hospital.
“The IDF is conducting a ground operation in Gaza to defeat Hamas and rescue our hostages. Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the civilians in Gaza,” the Israeli military confirmed in an official statement.
Hamas has systematically used hospitals, mosques, kindergartens, schools and private homes for storing weapons and hiding terrorist operatives. The IDF recently revealed that the Rantisi Children’s Hospital, named after Hamas founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was being used for weapons storage and has likely been the location where Hamas has been hiding hostages for more than five weeks.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed. pic.twitter.com/2bodbC4vcg
An American mom whose child is being held hostage in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists delivered the most caustic speech. It hurts but you need to put yourself through it.pic.twitter.com/NqWWSiHKAB
I’ve never in my life been in such a huge crowd. The #MarchForIsrael rally today was incredible. Singing. Dancing. Prayers. Inspiration. There was no violence. No vandalism. No destruction. Just a real, raw, peaceful, gathering. #BringThemHome ❤️🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/CiL36UDpZ2
🔥🚨HIDDEN HISTORY: On December 1, 1963 Malcolm X gave a speech called “God’s Judgement of White America.” where he identified the ‘White Liberal’ as the most ‘dangerous’ and ‘deceitful’ thing in the Western Hemisphere.
Top Stories • Court Dismisses Bogus “Hate Speech” Charges Against Pro-Life MP for Quoting Bible • 19 AGs Tell Supreme Court: Ban Mail-Order Abortions, Protect Women From Dangerous Abortion Pills • Republicans Stand Up for Tommy Tuberville, Slam Democrats’ Obsession With Abortion • Indi Gregory’s Death is a Reminder That We Must Restore Parental Rights
More Pro-Life News • March for Life Unveils 2024 Theme: “Pro-Life: With Every Woman, For Every Child” • Senate Republicans Demand Biden Rescind Policy Forcing Americans to Fund Military Abortions • Peru Congress Passes Law Affirming Unborn Babies Have a Right to Life • Doctors Asked Mom to Abort Baby with 7% Chance of Survival, Now Her Daughter is 2 Years Old • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Just more of the same upon Capitol Hill, a Continuing Resolution (CR) passes the House and on to the Senate, leaving many to ask the question, when are Republicans going to stand up and be the opposition party to the Marxist Democrats party hell-bent on destroying America?
It may be too early to tell if Speaker Johnson is going to be the Conservative savior, we were hoping for but so far, it’s not looking real good. We still remain hopeful.
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.
Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.
Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end.
Ali is right, of course, although the reasons she gives for her conversion might raise some eyebrows. “Part of the answer is global,” she writes. Ali says the West is under threat from three different but related forces: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about.
Still, Ali’s conversion is instructive in an important way. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour noted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Ali was “the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam.” There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.
According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.
But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”
Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.
In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.
There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue. What commitment do our elites really have to liberal totems like science and rationality, after all, when they insist that a man can become a woman, or that children can consent to castration and sterilization? When a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court insists she cannot define what a woman is because she is not a biologist, we’ve stepped firmly into what C.S. Lewis called the void, where nothing is objectively true and all that matters is will and power.
“Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue,” writes Ali. “And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.”
Indeed it does, and it has given us all that is good in our civilization. Having first rejected the Christian faith, however, our secular elites are now rejecting all those other good things that sprang from it, and positing a very different sort of society. Instead of a society that embraces rationality and freedom and human rights, they offer something from the pagan past: a society that embraces power and violence and domination. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can already see, on the streets of London and New York and Paris, what that society will look like.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Today a Helsinki appeals court acquitted two Christians of “hate crimes” charges with potential prison sentences for tweeting Bible verses and publishing a Christian booklet about sexual ethics. This unprecedented application of Finnish law has kept Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola in court for nearly five years.
Despite today’s unanimous ruling affirming a unanimous lower-court acquittal, those five years are likely to increase. The state prosecutor told media she will appeal to Finland’s Supreme Court, and the court is likely to take the case, said Rasanen and Pohjola’s lawyer, Matti Sankamo, in a press conference from Finland this morning. An adverse ruling could effectively outlaw Christianity in Finland and damage the fundamental human rights to free speech and religious exercise across the world.
“This is a significant win … for everyone concerned with the protection of fundamental freedoms,” Rasanen said in the press conference. “While I celebrate this victory wholeheartedly, I am also saddened at the thought of the enormous state resources expended over the last four years to prosecute us for nothing more than the peaceful expression of our Christian faith. The basic human right to free speech remains under serious threat in Finland and around the world.”
Rasenen and Pohjola said they immediately texted friends and family the news of the court decision this morning, with Pohjola reading Psalm 103’s words of praise to his family, he said. He also immediately shared the news with fellow pastors, and “I got an immediate reaction that ‘We are so happy our bishop is not labeled as a criminal,’” he said.
“This is not only a cultural or legal battle but also a spiritual battle,” Pohjola said, noting their prosecution raises the “question of [whether] pastor and church can teach publicly what we understand to be the word of God and the created order and the natural law. There have been difficult moments, but I understand this is my calling as a Christian and a pastor to guard the faith and teach it publicly and carry the cross.”
That cross, he said, is not a physical cross like the one he wears around his neck, “It’s to pay the price in this age to be a witness for Christ.”
The case began in 2019, when Rasanen argued on X (then Twitter) that Finland’s state church, in which her husband is a pastor, should not sponsor an LGBT parade. She tweeted a picture of Bible verses that say non-heterosexual acts are unnatural.
Finland’s top prosecutor investigated complaints filed over Rasanen’s tweet. This led to three days of police interrogating Rasanen and an investigation into Rasanen’s 25 years as a member of Parliament and former interior minister for the nation recently admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
That investigation unearthed a 2004 booklet Rasanen, a medical doctor, wrote and Pohjola published as part of a church catechism series. The booklet, titled “Male and Female He Created Them,” explains basic Christian doctrines about God’s design for marriage to comprise one man and one woman for life.
Helsinki prosecutor Anu Mantila argued Finnish courts should ban from the internet the booklet, Rasanen’s tweet, and an audio recording of Rasanen defending Christian views. Mantila also seeks punitive fines. “Male and Female He Created Them” was published in 2004, several years before Finland adopted the antiterrorism laws now being used to prosecute the two Christians for “hate speech.”
“With the right police and prosecutor, we could expect to see similar cases crop up across Europe and in fact around the world,” noted Alliance Defending Freedom International lawyer Paul Coleman, who is assisting the Christians’ legal defense. Hate crimes laws like Finland’s are on the books in many European nations and American states and cities.
Rasanen said the most difficult part of her prosecution has been the prosecutor’s false accusations against her, including that Rasanen considers homosexuals inferior. She said that is “against my conviction” as a Christian. Christianity teaches that every human is made in God’s image and so beloved by God that He sacrificed His own Son to wash away every sin ever committed.
“We represent the common traditional classical understanding of family and sexual ethics, and now this has been labeled widely in our society and also in the established Lutheran church as something which is … not only offending and extremist but it’s also criminal,” Pohjola said.
Pohjola is the bishop of a small non-state church body that adheres to the Bible’s teachings, which Finland’s state church has in large part abandoned. The Federalist interviewed Pohjola in person in 2021, and Rasanen in person in 2022.
In the press conference, Pohjola and Rasanen expressed gratitude for all the prayers and messages of support they’ve received from around the world, as well as their own families’ steadfast support during their trials. They both called it a “privilege” to defend Christianity and the basic human rights of free speech and freedom of religion in court and in numerous media appearances since their prosection began.
Rasanen, whose 11 grandchildren include a newborn, highlighted a message she’d received from a 16-year-old Finnish girl who said the prosecution has encouraged her to be more public about her faith at school.
“In a free society, faith is not meant to be hidden behind closed doors,” Rasanen said today. “This is what happens in dictatorships, not democracies.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Secret Service reportedly opened fire Sunday night on three suspects attempting to break into an unmarked government vehicle parked in front of the Georgetown home of Naomi Biden, President Joe Biden’s granddaughter. Reports allege that the three offenders fled the scene after the gunfire started.
These types of scenarios are exactly why Americans advocate for the Second Amendment, but unfortunately, not all citizens have the same protection the Biden family is afforded.
The average DC resident does not have protection from the Secret Service, as Naomi Biden does:
– 760 carjackings occurred in 2023
– 65% of those arrested for carjacking are juveniles
Residents of Washington, D.C., are forced to navigate an onslaught of regulation and red tape before they can use firearms for self-preservation. According to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, residents have the “authority to carry firearm[s]” only in “certain places and for certain purposes.” Concealed carry requires a variety of applications and training, while “open carry is prohibited.”
Meanwhile, crime in the District of Columbia is out of control. So far, violent crime is up almost 40 percent in 2023 over 2022, according to D.C.’s preliminary reports. Homicide and robbery are up 32 and 68 percent, respectively, while motor vehicle theft is up nearly 100 percent over last year. On Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency over the juvenile crime crisis.
Yet stringent gun laws are especially common in high-crime areas, making it even more difficult for citizens to protect themselves. And in the face of rampant crime, many law-abiding citizens are left defenseless at the direction of lawmakers and an executive branch that enjoys the protection of armed security details. The Council on Criminal Justice reports that across 37 U.S. cities, violent crime is up since 2019, with “24% more homicides during the first half of 2023” compared to the first half of 2019, and “motor vehicle thefts more than doubled (+104%).”
Naomi Biden isn’t the only one getting special treatment when it comes to firearms, however. Her dad, Hunter Biden allegedly lied about his drug use on a federal form to purchase a revolver in 2018 — a bombshell the public didn’t learn about until a few months after his father was safely installed in the White House in 2021. Later, Joe Biden’s DOJ struck a sweetheart plea deal with Hunter, which posited that if the Biden son pled guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges, he would get broad immunity for other crimes, including no prosecution for his illegal possession of a firearm. Luckily, that deal fell apart thanks to an astute federal judge.
Then last month, Hunter Biden pled not guilty to three federal firearms charges. And while his lawyers claim the underlying law is unconstitutional, even Politico recognizes that argument “stands in stark contrast to President Joe Biden’s advocacy for stricter gun laws.”
The double standard is clear: gun rights for the Biden family and their elite friends, not for everyone else. As Biden said of the Second Amendment last year, it’s “not absolute” — for you, at least.
Jesse Watters EXPOSES how Deep State is really PROTECTING Biden by charging Hunter with gun crime… pic.twitter.com/oQo3pECqG9
The firearm hierarchy is not unique to the Bidens. Political and cultural elites alike have benefitted from guns while simultaneously pushing anti-gun legislation. Along with the Bidens, other Democrat politicians are some of the worst offenders. For instance, the notoriously anti-gun former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had her own armed security detail to protect her home and office. Former New York City Mayor and Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg also demanded gun control while being protected by armed guards. Both lived comfortably under the protection of firearms while the citizens of their crime-ridden cities were left facing unmanageable gun regulations — and these politicos are just the tip of the iceberg.
This blatant hierarchy reveals the truth that Biden and other Democrats refuse to acknowledge: Guns can preserve life. And though Biden claims gun control is “about protecting children. It’s about protecting families. It’s about protecting whole communities,” his family’s own security details are proof that guns are actually the best way to protect yourself and your loved ones.
“Piers Morgan Uncensored” host Piers Morgan repeatedly pressed UK member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn to label Hamas a terrorist organization during a heated exchange on Monday.
“Are Hamas a terror group? Yes or no?” Morgan asked Corbyn in a verbal battle that has since gone viral online. “I’ve asked you two questions: should Hamas stay in power and are they a terror group. You’re refusing to answer either of them. That is very telling. And you wonder why people believe you had a problem with Jewish people.”
“That is not very telling at all!” Corbyn yelled back. “What is very telling is your inability to keep quiet for 30 seconds to allow anyone to answer a question.”
“Piers Morgan Uncensored” host Piers Morgan repeatedly asked UK member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn if Hamas was a terror group in a heated exchange on his show Monday. (Getty Images)
“On my show, I ask people questions,” Morgan responded. “Normally they answer them.”
“No, you don’t, you shout at people,” Corbyn said back.
“Only when they don’t answer the question,” Morgan said.
At one point, Corbyn repeatedly asked Morgan “are you done?”
Commentators online weighed in on the verbal battle between Morgan and Corbyn.
Journalist Yashar Ali wrote that the exchange was “extraordinary.”
“A reminder that Corbyn took payments from Press TV in the past. Press TV is funded and controlled by the Islamic Republic,” Ali told followers.
Author Hen Mazzig took Morgan’s side in the verbal battle. “I totally understand why Piers is aggravated, imagine speaking to a politician who cannot condemn a group which beheaded and burned babies alive, and violated little girls. For shame.”
Piers Morgan asks Jeremy Corbyn 15 times whether the former Labour leader thinks Hamas is a terror group.
Morgan referenced previous accusations of antisemitism against Corbyn, which have plagued him and his Labour Party for years. A 2019 poll showed that a whopping 87 percent of Jewish people in Great Britain believed Corbyn was antisemitic, pointing to many incidents and remarks, many of them involving his staunch support for Palestinians and a perceived hostility toward Israel. Recent reports also showed Jewish members of the Labour Party repeatedly expressing concerns of what they saw as growing anti-Semitism within the party.
Corbyn was eventually suspended from the Labour Party from the party over charges of antisemitism. He also once referred to “friends” from Hamas coming to address Parliament.
Corbyn did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
Since before its founding, our country has been blessed with extraordinary leaders who steeled our resolve for independence. They invented a new form of government by the people and for the people. Each brought different skills and talents to the cause of freedom. Those who followed guided us ably through more than two centuries of often treacherous challenges and grave threats. It is a story best told through the lens of historic documents that have been honored and preserved for our national heritage.
In this unique collector’s edition, the writings, speeches, and letters of our founders and their successors are carefully selected and explained. The important promises and navigating principles that shaped our great nation can be read in full. Over time, others helped transform public sentiment to advance equality and opportunity, empowering generations that followed. Their eloquent beliefs and convictions are also included.
The American experiment had its genesis in the power of words and ideas. We owe our unparalleled success to the exemplary statesmen – and women – who expressed them. Bold and transcendent figures defined what it is to be an American and to control our own destinies. Their dynamic opinions, steadfast faith, and inspiring arguments are revisited in this volume as a salute to our nation’s enduring triumph.
The durability of our constitutional republic and the rights we enjoy today also serve as a shining testimonial to the moral courage and intellectual brilliance of our forebearers. We are their grateful beneficiaries. Absorbing their wisdom enriches our appreciation for the lives we enjoy and our love of country.
Among the essential patriotic documents contained in the book, we revisit seminal moments in the American journey. For example…
*As Patrick Henry stirred the nation with his passionate vow, “Give me liberty or give me death,” it was the inexorable logic and “common sense” of Thomas Paine that galvanized Americans to declare their independence when he wrote, “Resolution is our inherent character, and courage hath never forsaken us.”
*John Adams cautioned that only the ballot box in a representative democracy would prevent men in power from becoming “ravenous beasts of prey.” He argued that “The happiness of society is the end (goal) of government.”
*While Ben Franklin expressed sober misgivings about the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison penned a brilliant set of essays known as The Federalist Papers that led to its adoption. Madison acknowledged the flaws of our system when he wrote, “That which is the least imperfect is therefore the best government.”
A statue of Benjamin Franklin, founder of the University of Pennsylvania, on the school’s campus in Philadelphia, March 15, 2007. (Mike Mergen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
*As he left office, a prescient George Washingtonwarned that divisive political parties would become “potent engines of unprincipled men” who would “undermine freedom and enfeeble good governance.” He vigorously counseled against them, to no avail.
*Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, abolitionist icon, and confidant of Lincoln delivered a powerful lament on the hypocrisy of American slavery by arguing that “We, the people” does not mean “We, the white people.” In plain language he deplored the cruelty and depravation that rendered “four million of our fellow countrymen in chains…and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine.”
*In one of the greatest acts of moral courage Abraham Lincoln proclaimed “that all persons held as slaves shall be forever free.” At Gettysburg, he reminded Americans that “all men are created equal.” In his Second Inaugural he sought to salve the wounds of war by uttering the words, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Abraham Lincoln (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs)
*As the suffrage movement gained momentum, Elizabeth Cady Stanton condemned the tyranny of sexism, leaving “women to feel aggrieved, oppressed, and deprived of their most sacred rights.” Victoria C. Woodhull correctly argued that “the Constitution makes no distinction of sex” and “women are the equals of men.” In a much acclaimed speech, Susan B. Anthony, who was indicted for casting a ballot, posed the vexing question, “Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?”
*At the dawn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt shattered the Gilded Age of ruthless monopolists and robber barons with his promise of a “square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor.” Drawing from the principles of Lincoln, Roosevelt moved aggressively and successfully against corporate corruption and what he called “the sinister influence or control of special interests” in government.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States (The Associated Press)
*His relative, Franklin Roosevelt, saw the nation through immense suffering in the Great Depression by reassuring Americans, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” His innovative fireside chats buoyed the spirits of a nation in despair. When the U.S. was attacked by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, Roosevelt delivered his famous “a date which will live in infamy” address before Congress. He vowed that “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
*As Germany initiated World War II in Europe, the renowned theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, sent a secret letter to Roosevelt warning him that the Nazis were attempting to develop a new and frighteningly powerful weapon —an atomic bomb. Einstein’s alarming missive triggered the covert operation by the U.S. to build its own weapon in the highly classified Manhattan Project.
Albert Einstein takes his oath of allegiance upon becoming a U.S. citizen in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1940, alongside his daughter Margot, right, and his secretary, Helene Dukas. (Getty Images)
*When Harry S. Truman ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan he revealed to the nation that “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
*In the face of Soviet aggression, Dwight D. Eisenhower sought peace through strength by urging a halt to nuclear proliferation as he warned, “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
*Ronald Reagan became the unabashed voice of conservatism and opened his presidency with a masterful address declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He precipitated the end of the Cold War when he challenged the Soviets to remove the physical barrier in Berlin. “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall,” Reagan demanded. Two years later, the wall came tumbling down. And so did the communist empire.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States (1981-1989) and 33rd governor of California (1967-1975). (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The common denominator among all these exceptional men and women was their abiding faith in our country’s greatness fortified by a devotion to patriotism. In their memorable words, Americans found both solace and inspiration. We still can.
The virtues, aspirations, and ideals they so elegantly expressed are rediscovered in my new book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents.” It is a living testimonial for American patriots who are immensely proud of our foundational desire for a unified nation dedicated to freedom, prosperity, and justice for all. We continue to seek ways to improve the human experience and strive for “a more perfect union.”
In an era when too many have forgotten our country’s remarkable past, the noble ideas and uplifting words of these exceptional leaders are needed now more than ever to rekindle the indomitable American spirit.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.”
Evidence showing how Hamas terrorists used Gaza’s Rantisi Hospital for Children as a terror base was revealed by the Israeli army on Monday.
“Hamas hides in hospitals. Today, we will expose this to the world,” IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Daniel Hagari said as he presented the evidence at a press conference.
Atypically, Hagari, himself was featured in the video footage, as he accompanied the Israeli Navy commando Shayetet 13, the unit he once commanded, on a raid deep inside the Gaza Strip, Hagari, at first, showed evidence of a weapons depot under the Rantisi Hospital that included suicide bombs, AK-47 rifles, grenades, RPGs and more.
BREAKING:
The Israeli Army took control of the Rantisi children’s hospital in Gaza & found a secret tunnel leading 20 m below ground to a Hamas command & control center.
Weapons, baby bottles & motorcycles in the tunnel indicate hostages were held there pic.twitter.com/ArFWOqfkgl
On Sunday, the IDF presented footage showing terrorists firing RPGs from the entrance of al-Quds Hospital.
“Hamas uses hospitals as an instrument of war,” Hagari confirmed while standing in front of the displayed weapons. He was standing in a room painted with trees and other children’s drawings above the weapons displayed on the floor.
Hagari then went to another room, showing motorcycles that were used by terrorists during the Oct. 7 massacre of Israel’s Gaza border communities, suggesting that the terrorists likely brought some of the Israeli hostages to Rantisi Hospital.
More evidence of this was found in the room next door, where a woman’s clothing lay on a chair with pieces of rope attached to it. Above the chair, a baby’s bottle was found and diapers lay on the floor nearby.
The IDF suspects that Israeli hostages, including small children and their mothers, were held in the complex and is analyzing the evidence to gain more clues as to the identity and the whereabouts of the hostages, Hagari said.
Army Radio later reported that a bloody knife found in the basement was also being analyzed.
This area of the hospital basement was closed off from the rest of the hospital and contained improvised sanitary installations, including toilets, showers and a kitchen, and had its own ventilation system.
Hagari also showed a list of guard shifts hanging on the wall of a room decorated like a living room, with the title “Al-Aqsa flood” (the Hamas name for the war) and began with Oct. 7.
“Our war is against Hamas, not against the people in Gaza. Especially not the sick, the women, or the children,” Hagari reiterated at the press conference. “Our war is against Hamas who uses them as human shields.”
Rantisi Hospital as well as other hospitals in northern Gaza were evacuated with the help of Israeli forces, Hagari added.
Two Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee issued a criminal referral letter to the Justice Department recommending charges against Michael Cohen for his contradictory testimony in court last month. Cohen, former attorney to former President Donald Trump, testified under cross-examination last month that he lied under oath before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019 when asked in a deposition about Trump’s personal financial statements.
House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Republican Caucus, sent the letter accusing Cohen of committing perjury and of having” knowingly made false statements” before Congress four years ago.
“That Mr. Cohen was willing to openly and brazenly state at trial that he lied to Congress on this specific issue is startling,” the letter reads, according to The Hill. “His willingness to make such a statement alone should necessitate an investigation.”
In 2019, Cohen told a House panel that Trump did not direct him to inflate financial statements for Trump Organization assets. He testified in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial last month that he lied under oath in 2019, claiming that Trump “speaks like a mob boss” and gives directions “without specifically telling you” what to do.
Migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border on Nov. 12, 2023, in Jacumba, California. (Photo: Nick Ut/Getty Images)
Federal authorities recorded 240,988 migrant encounters at the southern border in October, sustaining record highs seen under the Biden administration, according to Customs and Border Protection data released Tuesday. The number of encounters along the southern border in September totaled 269,735, marking the highest month on record. CBP recorded 232,963 and 183,479 encounters in August and July, respectively, according to agency data.
“In conjunction with our resumption of removal flights to Venezuela consistent with delivering consequences for those who cross the border unlawfully, CBP saw a 65 percent decrease in southwest border encounters of Venezuelans in the second half of October, compared to the second half of September,” Troy A. Miller, senior official performing the duties of the commissioner, said in a statement regarding the new data.
“In October, CBP also saw an overall decrease of 14 percent between ports of entry, as well as an overall decrease of family units. We continue to enhance our border security posture and remain vigilant,” Miller added.
The number of encounters of illegal migrants exceeded 188,000 at the southern border in October, while the number of migrants encountered at ports of entry surpassed 52,000, according to CBP data. Of those processed at ports of entry, 44,000 used CBP One, a phone application the Biden administration allows migrants to use to book appointments to enter the U.S.
“CBP’s narcotics seizures in October highlight our work on the frontline in the fight against fentanyl and other dangerous substances entering the United States—but we need more resources to sustain and increase these efforts. The President’s supplemental budget request is critical to funding the frontline, and would provide much-needed personnel, resources, and technology to go after transnational criminal organizations, enhance border security—including the enforcement of consequences for those who break the law—and support state and local partners, all to keep Americans safe,” Miller added.
Top Stories • Indi Gregory Dies After Hospital Yanks Life Support Over Parents’ Objections • Catholic Bishop: Pope Francis Ousted Me Because I Spoke Truth to Power • Pro-Life Republican Tim Scott Ends His Presidential Campaign • American Medical Association Rejects Proposal to Support Assisted Suicide
More Pro-Life News • Bishop Strickland Calls for Prayers for Pope Francis, Warns of Forces Corrupting Catholic Church • Teen Girl Charged With Murder After Stabbing Her Newborn Baby to Death • Baby Indi Gregory Couldn’t Even Die at Home Because Her Life Support Was Forcibly Removed • Catholic Bishops Mourn Indi Gregory’s Death, Call for Greater Parental Rights • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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After years of California taxpayers begging, Gavin Newsom has finally put his foot down and decided to clean up San Francisco of the Human Facies, needles, and the homeless, but not for the local communities’ benefit. He’s doing this to appease the communist dictator Xi of China.
It seems like it was only a few days ago Newsom was in China licking that genocidal regime’s boots. Oh wait, it was only a few days ago. They must have a lot in common in how to move forward in how to lead their countries.
As a Transplant from California, it breaks my heart to see what Governor Newsom and the Democrats have done to that beautiful state.
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.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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