One of Minnesota’s fastest-growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass.
Shooting league calls DFL bill an ‘attack on a school-approved activity they don’t like
Sen. Jen McEwen, DFL-Duluth, says SF3792 is focused on keeping youth shooting athletes and the environment safe from lead-based ammunition. One of Minnesota’s fastest growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass. That’s according to organizers for the USA Clay Target League who say a proposal sponsored by a handful of DFL legislators that would ban lead-based ammunition would “more than double” the costs of ammunition for trap shooting athletes and result in many no longer being able to afford the sport. READ MORE
It is now abundantly clear that the Democrats and Biden are using lawfare to remove their political opposition, mainly Trump and his supporters. All the indictments are from hardcore leftists within the justice system.
LAWFARE: Trump Posts $91.6 Million Bond to Appeal E. Jean Carroll Defamation Judgment
By Cristina Laila – March , 2024
President Trump on Friday posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the E. Jean Carroll judgment. The money will be returned to Trump if he wins his appeal. Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee on Thursday denied Trump’s second request to delay paying Carroll.
In January, a 9-person jury ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for statements he made defending himself against false rape accusations. The Trump team argued that the evidence Carroll deleted proves that she was receiving threats before President Trump ever commented on her allegations. Judge Kaplan defended Carroll and said Trump offered no evidence that he ever attempted to recover the deleted messages. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Joe Biden Promoted Abortions Up to Birth, But lgnored How Abortion Hurts Women • Thousands Demand University Take Down Satanic Abortion Statue • Hey Joe Biden. I’m Disabled But I Shouldn’t Have Been Killed in an Abortion • Abortion Businesses Masquerade as Health Centers in K-12 Schools to Prey on Kids
More Pro-Life News • Premature Baby Born at 22 Weeks is a “Little Fighter” Who Beat the Odds • The Abortion Drug is Killing and Injuring Women, Where are the Feminists? • Abortion Pills in Our Water Are Polluting Our Nation Worse Than Gas Stoves • Virginia Democrats Kill Women’s Health Care Because They Care More About Abortion • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.
Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.
Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.
He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.
Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.
Cheney frequently points skeptics of her investigation to the Government Publishing Office website that posted, she said, “transcripts, documents, exhibits & our meticulously sourced 800+ page final report.” That website provides “supporting documents” to the claims made by Cheney and fellow anti-Trump enthusiasts.
However, transcripts of fewer than half of the 1,000 interviews the committee claims it conducted are posted on that site. It is unclear how many of the hidden transcripts include exonerating information suppressed by the committee.
Those documents support the committee’s narrative rather than the truth of the events leading up to January 6, 2021, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight.
“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative. Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down,” said the Georgia Republican.
His subcommittee is reviewing the work of the January 6 committee, which has been accused of other unethical behavior at the expense of accuracy, as well as collusion with other Democrat efforts to prosecute political opponents.
“This is just one example of important information the former Select Committee hid from the public because it contradicted what they wanted the American people to believe,” Loudermilk said. “And this is exactly why my investigation is committed to uncovering all the facts, no matter the outcome.”
Early Corroboration For Contested Claim
A January 6 committee staffer asked Ornato, “When it comes to the National Guard statement about having 10,000 troops or any other number of troops, do you recall any discussion prior to the 6th about whether and how many National Guard troops to deploy on January 6th?” Ornato surprised the committee by noting he did recall a conversation between Meadows and Bowser: “He was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed,” Ornato told investigators.
Ornato said White House concerns about January 6 were related to fears that left-wing groups would clash with Trump protesters and that no one in the White House anticipated a riot at the Capitol. Antifa and other left-wing groups were planning protests for the same day. Left-wing groups had been involved in violent assaults on Trump supporters following public protests.
Meadows “wanted to know if she need any more guardsmen,” Ornato testified. “And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.”
“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” Bowser wrote in her letter requesting the D.C. National Guard. Bowser had been a strenuous critic of Republican efforts to limit rioting from leftwing political activists in U.S. cities during 2020’s summer of violence.
Bowser’s decision to decline help from the White House did not end the Trump team’s efforts to secure troops ahead of the protest. When the D.C. mayor declined Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops, Ornato said the White House requested a “quick reaction force” out of the Defense Department in case it was needed.
“The only thing I remember with DOD and the National Guard was even though the mayor didn’t want any more National Guard in D.C., that a request was made to have kind of a, lack of better term, a quick reaction force out at Joint Base Andrews being that it was a military installation,” Ornato told investigators in the previously concealed interview. “I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe. I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”
Meadows was concerned that D.C. would be unprepared for the size of the crowd coming to protest the controversial 2020 election in which hundreds of laws and processes were changed to enable tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots to flood the country. The January 6 Committee prevented an investigation into Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s preparation — or lack thereof — for Capitol security ahead of the event, so it is unclear if she was as concerned about keeping the peace as Meadows and the Trump White House were.
“And, again, the crowd sizes were, you know, the organizers were saying, you know, there may be 50,000 here. So that’s where it started, I think, to scare the chief a little bit of how many people were coming in for this event, and wanted to make sure that they would be able to bring in National Guard if needed for this size of this many people inside D.C.,” Ornato said.
Once the Capitol was breached, the Trump White House pushed for immediate help from Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and grew frustrated at the slow deployment of that help, according to the testimony.
“So, then I remember the chief saying, ‘Hey, I’m calling secretary of defense to get that [quick reaction force] in here,” Ornato said. Later he said, “And then I remember the chief telling Miller, ‘Get them in here, get them in here to secure the Capitol now.’”
Still later, he said, “[T]he constant was, you know, where is the National Guard? Why isn’t — you know, we’ve got to get control of this.” And again, “But, you know, [Meadows] understood the urgency, that’s for sure. And he kept, you know, getting Miller on the phone, wanting to know where they were, why aren’t they there yet.”
Days prior, Cheney had “secretly orchestrated” a pressure campaign to prevent the Defense Department from deploying resources on January 6, 2021. She organized an op-ed for the Washington Post from her father and other former secretaries of defense specifically to discourage Miller from taking action.
Ornato described Meadows’ strenuous efforts to quicken the Defense Department’s deployment of the National Guard: “Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So, there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”
Cheney hid this testimony and instead asserted in her report that President Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”
Her report noted that the secretary of defense “ultimately did deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the Committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”
Cheney has never addressed the effects of her secretly orchestrated campaign to prevent Miller from acting ahead of the January 6, 2021 protest. A new book confirms prior reporting that Cheney secretly conspired with District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County’s prosecution of Republicans and that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”
Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice. The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s “testimony regarding Trump authorizing” at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was “illogical” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.” Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.
‘I Never Heard Anything Like That’
Cheney and her committee did devote 2,000 words in their final report to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that President Trump had physically overcome a Secret Service agent in his zeal to join protesters at the Capitol. That story had been told by Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney’s friend and star witness, along with other stories that eyewitnesses disputed. (Disclosure: Hutchinson falsely claimed this reporter received classified information from a Secret Service handler in a clandestine Georgetown meeting. She has thus far refused formal requests to correct her theatrical claim.) While the story of Trump overcoming a Secret Service agent would not be told for months, Ornato pre-rebutted it in his testimony.
Asked if he ever heard anything about Trump deciding to go to the Capitol that day, Ornato said he hadn’t. Ornato said Trump had driven by a previous rally, had flown over another, and that handlers had previously decided against him joining the day’s events.
“No. I did not know that. I mean, I don’t think — that couldn’t have happened. Nobody had — nobody would be prepared for that. There would be no security to do that. There would be no — I mean, that was like I said, talked about a couple of days, whenever it was prior, and it was scoffed at and moved on, and I never heard about it again,” Ornato said, adding that he never heard anything about Trump wanting to go to the Capitol that day. “Usually somebody would, you know, report it up or report over, like, ‘Hey, this is what I overheard’ or something, but I never heard anything like that.”
Later, Hutchinson would claim Ornato had been the source of her dramatic tale that Trump had commandeered the presidential vehicle and demanded to be taken to the Capitol. Other Secret Service sources also strongly repudiated the outlandish claim.
Should individuals who immigrate here in pursuit of economic prosperity gain the right to vote? Eventually, but only after they go through the lengthy process to become legally naturalized citizens and do so without jumping the line. (Photo: Shironosov/iStock/Getty Images)
The New York City Legislature, following in the footsteps of Washington, D.C., passed a groundbreaking bill into law in 2022. The law would have allowed any lawful permanent resident or green card holder to vote in a New York City election. That law was met with legal challenges as quickly as it was passed, which was to be expected, given that it flagrantly infringed upon the state’s constitution.
The Constitution of New York states unequivocally, “every citizen shall be entitled to vote … .” This provision’s meaning is so obvious that it has been painful to see the far-left liberal New York City Council pass a law that violates it. It is evident that the New York City Legislature misplaced its reading glasses, as it would not have enacted a law that contradicts the New York Constitution in such a bizarre way.
The majority opinion, authored by appellate Judge Paul Wooten, stated, “The plain language of this provision provides that the right to vote in ‘every election for all officers elected by the people’ is available exclusively to citizens.”
Unsurprisingly, pro-immigrant organizations denounced the decision, calling it “shameful” and saying it “disenfranchise[s] residents.” Disenfranchises? Really? This remark is as illogical as it is absurd. The only people disenfranchised by this law are United States citizens.
Voter disenfranchisement entails impeding an individual’s ability to exercise his or her right to vote or diminishing the value of his or her vote. The reason the Electoral College is reviled by the Left is because, according to its worldview, it confers greater value on specific votes than others, especially in smaller states.
The right to vote is sacred. However, the Left has forgotten that it must be earned, not given. Not earned in the conventional sense of passing a test to acquire, like the racist literacy tests of the past; rather, acquired through enduring the complexities and challenges associated with being a citizen. Becoming a citizen is not a simple task. Individuals must either be so lucky as to be born in the United States or endure a laborious and sometimes yearslong application process. There are discernible indicators in both processes that demonstrate an individual is prepared and deserving of the right to vote.
A person born in the United States has lived and grown in that country. He or she has gone through the government-mandated educational system and complied with the laws of this country for his or her entire lives. They have fulfilled their responsibilities through compliance and, in the case of some, hardship brought upon by our laws.
Individuals who obtain citizenship have demonstrated their readiness to undertake substantial obligations and sacrifices to integrate into a foreign nation. They have sworn allegiance to a new nation after navigating a complex legal system, and many have become proficient in a foreign language.
Nothing of the sort applies to noncitizens. There are undoubtedly many noncitizens loyal to this country, but they, like everyone else, must undergo the same process to demonstrate that they have earned the right to vote. It is inequitable to accord equal weight to the votes of transient individuals who enter the country for economic purposes, return their funds to their country of origin, or who are mere public charges, in comparison to those who have sworn allegiance to the United States and who have gone through the process to become a citizen.
Through the news, we tragically witness the disloyal individuals who come here and commit heinous acts daily. Migrants assaulting police officers, MS-13 gangs wreaking havoc on the population, migrants stabbing innocent people in Georgia. These tragedies have become routine occurrences. Should these individuals, whose sole intention is to cause harm or act selfishly, be permitted to vote? Undoubtedly not.
Should individuals who immigrate in pursuit of economic prosperity gain the right to vote? Eventually, but only after enduring the same trials and tribulations that each and every American has also endured.
The foundation of the United States is immigration. Each of us is an immigrant in some capacity. Our right to vote has been acquired through either our unwavering allegiance to the United States or our successful completion of the trials and systems established by the country. If an individual claims your vote lacks significance, you should explain the arduous journey you undertook to earn that privilege and the actions you undertook as a citizen. It just might persuade someone to reconsider their position.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has a right to be a tad confused. The senator noted the matter-of-fact coverage by The New York Times of Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to send troops to New York City to crack down on crime. Cotton posted a “hmmm” note that simply read: “Sending in the troops to help restore law and order…” His point was that, roughly four years ago, the newspaper publicly denounced him after running his opinion piece calling for the use of national guard troops to quell violent riots in Washington.
The Cotton column led to editors being forced out after public confessions and recriminations. Now, after Democratic politicians actually ordered such a deployment, the Times has offered little more than a journalistic shrug.
Hochul announced she will be deploying 750 members of the National Guard to New York City’s subway system to assist the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the crackdown on crime, including bag searches at the entrances of busy train stations.
Mara Gay of the New York Times then ran a story titled “The National Guard May Make Riders Feel Safer.” This is the same Mara Gay who was part of the campaign against Cotton and posted a tweet saying “Running this puts black people in danger. And other Americans standing up for our humanity and democracy.”
I have previously written on the hypocrisy of the Times in how it has handled the Cotton affair. The column itself was historically accurate. Indeed, critics never explained what was historically false (or outside the range of permissible interpretation) in the column. Moreover, writers Taylor Lorenz, Caity Weaver, Sheera Frankel, Jacey Fortin, and others said that such columns put black reporters in danger and condemned publishing Cotton’s viewpoint.
In a breathtaking surrender, the newspaper apologized and not only promised an investigation in how such an opposing view could find itself on its pages but promised to reduce the number of editorials in the future:
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reduction the number of op-eds we publish.”
The sacking of Bennet had its intended effect. Writers and columnists with opposing or critical views were soon forced off newspapers around the country, including at the New York Times.
Editor Adam Rubenstein was also forced out at the paper and recently wrote a scathing account of the bizarre environment within the paper. The writers have condemned the “both sideism” of allowing conservative viewpoints in the newspaper and insisted that Cotton and others must be banned as favoring potential violent actions against protesters. Yet, the newspaper has published people with anti-free speech and violent viewpoints in the last year. While the New York Times stands by its declaration that Cotton should never have been published, it had no problem in publishing “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong as Regina Ip mocked freedom protesters who were being beaten and arrested by the government.
Indeed, just before the anniversary of the Cotton controversy, the New York Times published a column by University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who brushed off the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. Loomis’ article on “Why The Amazon Workers Never Stood A Chance” did not include his earlier violent rationalization. It was in my view a worthy and interesting column for publication. So was Cotton’s column.
While many today still claim that the protests around the White House were “entirely peaceful” and there was no “attack on the White House,” that claim is demonstrably false. As I discussed in my testimony to Congress, there was in fact an exceptionally high number of officers injured over the course of days of protests around the White House. In addition to a reported 150 officers injured (including at least 49 Park Police officers around the White House), protesters caused extensive property damage including the torching of a historic structure and the attempted arson of St. John’s. The threat was so great that Trump had to be moved into the bunker because the Secret Service feared a breach of security around the White House.
Notably, later during the January 6th riot, there were no recriminations for the use of the same fencing and national guard troops to protect the Capitol, albeit too late to have prevented the initial riot.
So now it is a Democratic leader who is not just calling for the use of troops but actually deploying them in New York City. It is part of an effort by many Democrats to change course on crime and immigration before the 2024 election after years of criminal law reforms and sanctuary city policies.
What is clear from the Times coverage is that there is still no sense of compulsion at the newsroom to be consistent or even self-aware. Outrage remains entirely selective and political. There is no hashtag campaign by writers or repeating the same line that “running this put Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
The selective outrage directed at Sen. Cotton and the termination of editors at the newspaper were troubling enough. However, what is even more troubling is the unwillingness of the paper to apologize to Sen. Cotton for this hypocritical and unfair treatment.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is expected to visit former President Donald Trump at his Florida home of Mar-a-Lago on Friday but is not scheduled to meet with President Biden or visit the White House during his trip courting potential foreign policy in the U.S. The visit was first reported last week by The New York Times.
Orbán’s trip to the U.S. comes without an invitation from the White House, according to The Guardian. The Hungarian prime minister is expected to speak at a panel with the leader of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation on Thursday before heading to Trump’s West Palm Beach estate. Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, has promoted what he calls “illiberal democracy” and has been criticized by international observers, including the U.S. State Department, for leading an increasingly autocratic system in Hungary, including allegations that he has rolled back minority rights, seized control of the judiciary and media and manipulated the country’s election system to remain in power, according to The Associated Press.
A Trump campaign spokesman responded to criticism about Orbán’s visit in a statement to Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“There’s only one candidate in the race who has been endorsed by Vladimir Putin– Crooked Joe Biden. That’s because he knows a Biden presidency will make America weak and jeopardize our standing on the world stage,” the spokesman said.
President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, at the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2019. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez questioned in a 2023 op-ed, “Why is the Biden administration funding agitation against Hungary, a NATO ally with a pro-American population?” As he put it, “Hungary may sit strategically at the crossroads of Europe, but what irritates the liberals in the White House is that its government stands up for Western values.”
Some American conservative commentators have championed Orbán for standing against the European Union on mass migration and vowing border security. In what some on the right celebrate as protecting family values, Orbán exempted women with four children from paying income tax for life in 2019, the BBC reported.
Orbán and Trump have long been allies, and Trump regularly praises the right-wing populist politician in his campaign speeches. The two met in August 2022 at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club when Orbán traveled to the U.S. to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Texas.
President Donald Trump, right, speaks to the media during a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In April 2023, when charges were filed in the first of Trump’s four criminal cases, Orbán posted a message of support for Trump urging him to “keep on fighting.” Trump said in early 2022 that he was giving his “complete support and endorsement” to Orbán’s re-election campaign that year.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, right, attends the annual Economic Season opening event in Budapest, Hungary on Monday. (Arpad Kurucz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Amid some concern that Orbán is lobbying the U.S. on behalf of Russia, Katalin Cseh, a member of the European Parliament representing Hungary’s opposition Momentum party, told The Guardian, “If Trump really was the China hawk he claims to be, he would be grilling Orbán about cozying up to Beijing.”
“But it seems Trump is more interested in cozying up to authoritarians himself,” she said, according to the outlet, adding that “they could even be swapping notes on how to undermine NATO to suit Putin’s interests.”
The trip comes as Sweden on Thursday formally joined NATO, ending decades of post-World War II neutrality following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine despite objections from NATO members Turkey and Hungary. Orbán earlier this year said in a speech that he would welcome a Trump return to the White House to “make peace here in the eastern half of Europe.”
The U.S. ambassador in Budapest, David Pressman, however, surmised in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year that the Hungarian government was pursuing a “fantasy” foreign policy.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
Biden’s State of the Union address, filled with lies and gaslighting, was no surprise to people paying attention. How many people will ignore the truth right in front of them and buy into his political rhetoric? In truth, Biden and the Democrats are the real threat to our Constitutional Republic that oversees our democracy.
President Trump RIPS Old Joe at SOTU: He Looks So Angry when He’s Talking, Which Is a Trait of People Who Know They Are “Losing It”
By Jim Hoft March 7, 2024
play-by-playcomment tonight during Joe Biden’s SOTU Address. TGP’s Jordan Conradson is posting Trump’s comments tonight here. Trump called out the angry old man speaking tonight.
President Trump: He looks so angry when he’s talking, which is a trait of people who know they are “losing it.” The anger and shouting is not helpful to bringing our Country back together! Read More
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
With so many homeless veterans, Biden and the Democrats are focusing millions in tax dollars on the healthcare, feeding, and housing of the illegal immigrants coming across Bidens open borders.
Report: Biden Administration Considering Pulling Health Care from Veterans to Treat Illegal Aliens
By Richard Moorhead
Did you, or a family member, serve your country with the expectation of receiving the health care benefits you were promised? Sorry, illegal aliens apparently come first in President Joe Biden’s America. The Biden administration reportedly is considering diverting doctors from the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat the massive inflow of illegal aliens expected at the southern border this spring and summer. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Donald Trump Will Take on Pro-Abortion Radical Joe Biden • Nikki Haley Suspends Her Campaign After Super Tuesday Losses • Joe Biden Will Lie About Abortion in His State of the Union • Planned Parenthood Sold Aborted Baby Parts in Exchange for Intellectual Property
More Pro-Life News • Hundreds of Pro-Life People Protest University’s Satanic Abortion Statue • Who Knows How Many Women Will be Injured or Killed Now That Walgreens and CVS Sell Abortion Drugs • Other Nations May Follow France, Make Killing Babies in Abortions a Constitutional Right • Killing Unborn Human Beings is Wrong, Whether It’s Abortion or IVF • 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.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.
Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.
No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.
Consider a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Michael R. Ulrich, a Boston University professor of law and public health who is also affiliated with Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Antiracist Research. Ulrich argues that restrictions on transitioning children are part of a broader right-wing culture war restricting and regulating medicine. There is a lot wrong with this assertion, but the fundamental problem is that so-called gender-affirming care is not medicine.
From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.
Ulrich tries to assuage concerns over these procedures by comparing them to “Pediatric chemotherapy and radiation,” which also “have lasting effects on growth development and reproductive capabilities.” Well, yes, but cancer kills people, which is why we are willing to accept serious side effects to treat it — and even then, doctors and patients have to balance the risks of the disease against the risks of treatment. In contrast, there is no physical risk from not receiving “gender-affirming care,” whereas, as the WPATH files show, there is significant, potentially lethal, risks from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition surgeries.
This is why the argument for transition always comes down to encouraging people, especially children, to take themselves hostage by threatening suicide. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. And so, Ulrich deploys the suicide threats early and often, writing that “it is not hyperbole to say that lives are at risk in states pursuing these bans on needed care.” Ulrich offers no real evidence to back this claim up. He simply presumes that the “high rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among transgender young people” would be reduced with affirmation and medical transition.
Ulrich cites just one study as “evidence showing the effectiveness of gender-affirming care in reducing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts.” But, despite hype to the contrary, that study showed no such thing. Rather, as Jesse Singal explained after it was published in 2022, “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false” (emphasis in original).
No Evidence Regarding Suicide
There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide, especially for children. Those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide (though this tends to be exaggerated by activists), but this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body.
This extraordinary claim — that some children are born into the wrong bodies, and therefore must be chemically and surgically reshaped into a facsimile of the opposite sex — is medically unsupported. It is ideological and sexual fantasy masquerading as medicine. There is no good evidence to support transitioning children because gender ideology is just that, an ideology masquerading as medicine. The reality of human nature does not change, even though much of the medical establishment, such as the NEJM, was shamefully eager to capitulate to a small number of aggressive activists.
Rein in the Industry
Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.
This does not mean the fight is over. Indeed, we should expect gender ideologues to become more aggressive as their losses pile up. They thought time would be on their side, and that new research would vindicate them. But their time is running out, and the continued lack of evidence for “gender-affirming care” is pushing them to increasingly brazen lies and distortions as they attempt to justify their collapsing position. And they are also becoming more authoritarian in the places and institutions they do control, as they attempt to impose transgender dogma on the rest of us.
Thus, those opposed to gender ideology must not get cocky. Trans activists and their allies will keep fighting to the bitter end, especially those who have staked their reputations, livelihoods, and self-respect on radical gender ideology. Nonetheless, the end can now be envisioned, even if much work remains to achieve it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
President Joe Biden won most of the delegates up for grabs in the Democrat presidential primaries on Super Tuesday, but the sizable number of votes cast against him in favor of an “uncommitted” option confirm how much sway the loudest, most radical wings of the party have.
Anti-Israel Democrats launched a campaign to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” (casting a vote for no candidate) out of frustration that Biden’s position toward Israel is insufficiently supportive of Hamas-run Gaza. After gaining traction in Michigan last week, the protest vote — which seeks to use “uncommitted” Democrat votes to call for Biden to oppose Israel’s military response following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — won close to 19 percent of Democrat primary voters in Minnesota and 12.7 percent in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press. The campaign pulled single-digit percentages of voters in states including Alabama, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are really frustrated,” said Jaylani Hussein, co-chair of Uncommitted Vote Minnesota, on ABC News. “Now it’s starting to cost him immensely.”
“The policy of this war is untenable and it will have consequences, not only for down-ballots but hopefully also in the upcoming election,” he added. “We understand the consequences of leaving the party that we voted for, or the president that we voted for.”
Groups like Abandon Biden, formed by Muslim Americans calling Israel’s response against Hamas a “genocide,” and Our Revolution, which sprung up from Bernie Sanders’ failed 2016 presidential campaign, are supporting the effort. Last Tuesday, “uncommitted” won more than 13 percent of Michigan Democrats.
“The ‘Vote Uncommitted’ movement is growing, and voters continue to make themselves heard,” Our Revolution Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday. “There is no unconditional support for President Biden, not without an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed the “uncommitted” effort March 3. The group is planning phone banks in support and posted Tuesday night that they have “big pushes coming up in WA, WI and beyond.”
Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ceasefire Sunday, but this was apparently not enough to win over the anti-Israel groups. Meanwhile Democrat and known antisemite Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota where the movement gained the most, has been attacking Biden’s policy on the conflict.
Biden’s unpopularity Super Tuesday went even beyond the mainland. He lost the primary in American Samoa to self-described entrepreneur Jason Palmer, who won with 56 percent, according to CNN.
“We are not supporting Donald Trump,” Hussein said. “As far as the consequences of having President Trump, that’s a reality that we’re willing to accept.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He serves as associate editor for the school paper, The Collegian, served as editorial assistant for Christopher Rufo, and has bylines in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller.
Rep. Adam Schiff, whom colleagues censured for fomenting the Russia hoax, practically won Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat Tuesday night. Schiff captured the Democrat nomination in the deep-blue state and will face Republican baseball star Steve Garvey in the fall general.
Corporate media coverage of Schiff’s part in the years-long effort to impeach former President Donald Trump over deep-state conspiracies ignored his repeat abuses of power. They also ignored Schiff’s use of his intelligence committee chairmanship to peddle lies about Democrats’ political opponents.
To the New York Times, Schiff is “the chief tormentor of former President Donald J. Trump.” To Politico, Schiff is “a scourge of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.” To Axios, Schiff is simply a “Top Trump foe.”
Schiff is the Democrat conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed he had evidence of treasonous Russia collusion when he did not. Democrat voters in California expected to reward the conspiracy theorist with a Senate seat. https://t.co/95Zob52kw1
Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, on the other hand, may have grounds to sue MSNBC and Slate for defamation over calling him a “Holocaust denier.”
The network’s Joy Reid tossed out the moniker following Robinson’s Tuesday night win in his state’s GOP gubernatorial primary when she introduced North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for an interview. Slate went with the headline — now apparently altered — “Mark Robinson: North Carolina Republican primary for governor goes to a Holocaust denier.”
Below is all the evidence the Slate article presents to frame the gubernatorial nominee as a denier of the Holocaust:
The Holocaust “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered. There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”
(He also, in a 2014 post, quoted Hitler without context.)
The quote from Adolf Hitler comes from The New Republic, which linked two Facebookposts to claim Robinson “has minimized the horrors of the Holocaust.” Neither, however, comes anywhere close to Holocaust denial.
“We often speak of the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler,” Robinson wrote in one. “But the biggest ‘appeasement’ of ALL TIME is how we turned a blind eye to the clear and present danger of MARXISM.”
“It is EXTREMELY distressing that many well meaning and intelligent people are so focused on long dead Hitler while the living political dissidents of Stalin are currently fighting to destroy our REPUBLIC,” Robinson wrote in the other.
The press can have their opinions about Robinson’s eccentricity, but to call him a Holocaust denier is exceedingly dishonest.
In high contrast, Rachel Maddow positively described conspiracy theorist Schiff as a “major, major player in Trump impeachments and investigations” when MSNBC called the Senate primary for the California congressman.
BREAKING: NBC News projects Democratic congressman Adam Schiff will advance to the general election in the hotly contested California Senate race pic.twitter.com/T4aD6J1Jdd
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
By a strange process of transformation, Joe Biden has become Jimmy Carter. Everything he touches turns into a crisis. Like Carter, Biden has presided over an inflationary economy, spiking interest rates, shortages of essential goods, and danger and disaster abroad.
Carter offered the world Christian meekness and no “inordinate fear of communism.” The world responded with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the agonizing hostage crisis in Iran.
Biden’s self-inflicted rout from Afghanistan was followed by the release of $6 billion to the religious mafia that rules Iran. In return, the Iranian regime has encouraged its proxies to kill American soldiers and attack American warships.
The most important way in which Biden resembles Carter is this: Voters have made up their minds about him. They think he’s a loser, and they want him gone. That’s true even of Democrats, a majority of whom think he’s too old and dotty to stick around for a second term. Biden is a loser.
If 2024 were a normal presidential election, Donald Trump would beat him like a drum. Nikki Haley would beat him. Spongebob Squarepants would beat him.
Yet these are not normal times, and there’s a high degree of probability that Biden will be re-elected. Unlike Carter, who really was the Democratic front man, Biden is a sock puppet for an institutional conglomerate that exercises enormous influence over our national politics, our government, and our culture.
The elites who inhabit these institutions like to speak of the arrangement as “Our Democracy,” which roughly translates into “given our obvious moral and intellectual superiority, we must be allowed to govern in perpetuity.” They have the tools to make it happen, too — wearing the appropriate masks and disguises, they often impersonate the popular will.
I’m not talking about Trump’s complaint that he was robbed at the polls in 2020, a sterile controversy best passed over in silence. The options available to Our Democracy are, in reality, far more tentacular and oppressive than crude ballot-stuffing. It can, for example, take a lie and make it echo and thunder for years, like the half-million news articles published about Trump’s supposed criminal collusion with Russia. Or it can take the truth and bury it so deep that it has suffocated to death by the time some determined soul unearths it — think Hunter Biden.
Well, here is a partial roster of the institutions Our Democracy controls at the moment: the White House, half of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the scientific establishment and expert class in general, the old prestige media, the new digital media (minus Twitter/X), the universities, the arts and entertainment world, and famous corporations from Coca-Cola to Nike. When these gigantic entities synchronize their voices, the chorus is so deafening little else can be heard within the information sphere. And when they withdraw their attention — as they have from Americans left behind in Afghanistan or taken hostage by Hamas — it’s as if it never happened.
What does Our Democracy want? Its representatives spout magnificent nonsense about justice, diversity, and inclusion. They comprise the college of cardinals of the church of identity and ecology, and are therefore authorized to smite you, as an infidel, with their righteous condemnations.
But the soul of Our Democracy is will to power. The point of control is control. The measure of success is the number of Americans placed in a position of dependence to the elite class. More immediately, the objective is the permanent dominance of the Democratic Party, political home and bastion of that class.
Thus when Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, abandoned a laptop crammed with all sorts of scandalous material, Our Democracy conscripted 51 intelligence executives, who surely knew better, to dismiss it all as a Russian “hack.” And behold, there was no laptop.
And when Trump, a Republican president, speculated about COVID-19 having started with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, Our Democracy dragooned five scientists, several of whom had speculated along the same lines as Trump, to author a “study” contradicting him and themselves. Suddenly, blaming China betrayed a racist predisposition. Opposition to Our Democracy can never be legitimate. Consequently, Trump, the likely Republican candidate, must always be a moral impossibility — a “dictator,” an “authoritarian,” a Mussolini from the fascist heartland of Queens.
Listen to The New York Times, Atlantic, Politico: Trump isn’t merely a bad candidate — he’s beyond the pale. The harsher the attacks, however, the higher Trump seems to climb: to the horror of the elites, he’s presently trouncing Biden in most opinion polls.
So he must be disposed of somehow. He must be prosecuted in heavily Democratic venues and indicted, not once or twice but 91 times. And just in case, his name must be removed from the ballot: the ideal election under Our Democracy is a choice of one.
Fear and loathing of Trump is a defining feature of elite sensibility, but any politician who threatens Biden’s re-election will get the same treatment. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is making a third-party bid, has been called “vile” and “racist.” The No Labels group, which is considering fielding a candidate, has been accused of “brain-breaking logic” that promotes “less democracy.”
Nikki Haley has so far been spared because she is thought to weaken Trump. The moment she endangers Biden, we can be sure that The New York Times will reveal her participation in a sex trafficking ring or possibly ritual cannibalism.
Nobody is so insignificant as to avoid the tentacles of the conglomerate.
Only in this sense is Our Democracy truly democratic: all of us, high and low, are given our marching orders, which we defy at our peril. Parents of schoolchildren who dissented from the identity creed have been treated like domestic terrorists. Participants at the pro-Trump Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building were prosecuted as subversives and punished with long prison sentences. Other critics have been subjected to harassment from federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI. A convoluted censorship apparatus was erected at the start of the pandemic, eventually giving the White House control over what was allowed to be said on all the major digital platforms.
President Biden appears in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28. Biden took credit for declining crime rates in parts of the U.S. as he seeks to reverse potentially damaging public perceptions that violence and lawlessness are on the rise. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The FBI, faithful servant of the system, stood guard over forbidden speech: unorthodox opinions about the virus at first, but soon, inevitably, the ban spread to topics that favored Trump and the Republicans, identity heresy, Ukraine war criticism, mockery of the Biden administration — pretty much everything the First Amendment was enacted to protect.
Censorship bureaucrats devised a bizarre jargon of control: “misinformation” meant error, “disinformation” meant deliberate falsehood, and “malinformation” was truth Our Democracy found unacceptable.
Without warrant or warning, millions of posts by ordinary Americans were taken down. Some of those posters were permanently silenced. Trumpist websites were arbitrarily “deplatformed.” Nothing like it had been seen in our country since John Adams rubbed his hands with glee over the Alien and Sedition Acts.
One might have expected members of the entity formerly known as “the press” to investigate the abuses and raise the alarm. That idea is too retro for words, literally.
Today, the great organs of the news media are happy to serve as attack dogs of the elite class and obedient apologists of institutional power. Our Democracy aims to dominate the information sphere — as things now stand, it can speak loudly to everyone, while its opponents, shoved into an informational ghetto, speak mostly to themselves.
This is the array of forces standing behind the doddering, stupefied figure of Joe Biden, eager to foist him on American voters. Our Democracy is the true candidate and ultimate question to be settled by the 2024 election. It is battling mightily, with every weapon available, to destroy Trump and other obstacles to its continued rule. Sooner or later, I imagine, it will succeed.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes tells us that the fight does not go to the strong — but a political analyst would be crazy to bet any other way. Is it possible to identify a glimmer of optimism somewhere in this bleak landscape?
I can think of two strategic vulnerabilities that should trouble Our Democracy. One is the massive unpopularity of its policy positions. Large majorities of Americans of all races and political leanings question the sanity of open borders, for example, and believe that merit rather than grievance should determine outcomes.
If the 2024 election is fought on the merits of the case, the Democrats lose big. The second vulnerability is Biden’s obvious and extraordinary unfitness to stay on as president. The report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, which characterized the president as “an elderly man with poor memory,” was official confirmation of what we can plainly see with our own eyes. Old age is terminal: there’s no fixing Biden, and there’s no clear way out of this mess for the Democrats. If he clings to power, he will continue to decline physically and politically, opening the door to a Republican victory in 2024 — in the person, it may be, of the dreaded Trump.
If Biden turns down a second term at this late hour, his vice president, Kamala Harris, would be the natural heir to the party leadership, but she’s even more unpopular than he is. With Harris as candidate, defeat would be virtually certain. If a free-for-all erupts over the top spot, either because Biden has offered to abdicate or because the paladins of Our Democracy wish to shove him aside, the internal trauma to the Democratic Party would probably prove fatal, regardless of who the winner might be.
The Democratic establishment is solid but brittle. Once it crumbles, the agents of chaos will be in command, as they have been for some time in the Republican Party.
To my mind, these are low-probability events, as the elites realize how much they stand to lose and will huddle in a conformist herd for protection. Fortunately, however, history is not a mathematical proposition — and one can always hope.
Progressive groups are renewing calls to expand the number of seats on the U.S. Supreme Court after the court’s ruling to prevent Colorado from removing former President Donald Trump from the ballot. The justices unanimously ruled to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that barred Trump from the Republican primary ballot and cited the Constitution’s anti-insurrectionist clause.
The progressive judicial groups Demand Justice and Women’s March posted calls on X to “expand the court” after the ruling. Carrie Severino, president of the conservative group JCN, criticized the calls in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“Right on cue, left-wing dark money groups are calling for court-packing when they get a decision they don’t like (including one that was unanimous on the judgment),” Severino said.
“It’s telling that, to change this decision, they would have to add ten Justices, and it suggests they do not think that even Justices [Sonia] Sotomayor, [Elana] Kagan, and [Ketanji Brown] Jackson are liberal enough for them. It shows how radical and out of touch these groups are and how reflexively partisan a judge would have to be to meet their standards.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans Wednesday to send the National Guard to the New York City subway system to help police search passengers’ bags for weapons, following a series of high-profile crimes on city trains. Hochul, a Democrat, said she will deploy 750 members of the National Guard to the subways to assist the New York Police Department with bag searches at entrances to busy train stations. Her move comes a day after NYC Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat, announced plans Tuesday to resume random bag searches among commuters and to deploy more police officers on the city’s trains and station platforms.
“For people who are thinking about bringing a gun or knife on the subway, at least this creates a deterrent effect. They might be thinking, ‘You know what, it just may just not be worth it because I listened to the mayor and I listened to the governor and they have a lot more people who are going to be checking my bags,'” Hochul said at a news conference in New York City.
“They might be thinking??????”
The move came as part of a larger effort from the governor’s office to address crime in the subway, which included a legislative proposal to ban people from trains if they are convicted of assaulting a subway passenger and the installation of cameras in conductor cabins to protect transit workers.
The deployment of the National Guard would bolster an enhanced presence of NYPD officers in the subway system. The governor said she will also send 250 state troopers and police officers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that oversees the city’s transit system, to help with the bag searches.
Overall, crime has dropped in New York City since a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, and killings are down on the subway system. But rare fatal shootings and shovings on the subway can put residents on edge. Just last week, a passenger slashed a subway conductor in the neck, delaying trains.
Police in New York have long conducted random bag checks at subway entrances, though passengers are free to refuse and leave the station, raising questions of whether the searches are an effective policing tactic in a subway system that serves over 3 million riders per day.
“We know people feel unsafe,” the mayor said at his Tuesday press conference. “I’m on the subway system and I speak with riders. They say, ‘Eric, nothing makes us feel safer than seeing that officer at the token booth, walking through the system, walking through the trains,’ and that is what we want our officers to do.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Critics of “book bans” tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids. That’s preposterous on its face. (Photo: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc./Digital Vision/Getty Images)
Our English teachers taught us to use extreme caution before writing a word such as “always” or “never.”
Such totalizing words are rarely accurate, since most principles have exceptions. But you won’t see this advice applied by critics of “book bans,” who tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids.
My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation found that about three-fourths of books on lists of “banned books” are actually still in the libraries where the books were challenged. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Many of the rest are indeed inappropriate for children. They contain “images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.” The material is so graphic, in fact, that it’s censored on broadcasts to avoid Federal Communications Commission fines. Moreover, movies and TV shows have ratings. Anyway, none of the books is “banned.” Kids generally can bring their own copies to school or buy them at a bookstore.
Since 1982, the Supreme Court has made it clear that while books may not be removed from school libraries to suppress ideas, there are legitimate reasons to remove books. Those reasons include when a book is obscene in general or is obscene as to minors, and when a book is inappropriate for the age, grade, or developmental level of students. When a book is inappropriate for the curriculum, it also can be removed from classrooms.
That point should be obvious. After all, the Supreme Court also has permitted censorship of school newspapers. The high court also has permitted punishment of students who held a banner reading “bong hits for Jesus.” In that case, the school argued successfully that it could in fact suppress an idea if that idea were about promoting the use of illegal drugs.
And the court has permitted punishment of a student who used pervasively vulgar language at a school assembly.
Adults really do, it turns out, have a role in determining what expression is acceptable for kids at school. And some of the same schools that resist book challenges have speech codes. They unconstitutionally ban “hate speech” and “misgendering,” but if the same language is in a book, they think nobody ought to challenge it.
Next week, I will be making these points at a private school, where “book banning” is the conference topic. I will note that the school’s libraries use the term “age-appropriate” to describe their book curation. Do librarians never make mistakes?
I also will tell the students that a complete opposition to book challenges is unlikely to express their true position.
Do the kids really think they were ready for the sexual, violent, gory, or scary content of any book when they were in the first grade? Do they think their younger siblings should be able to access all of that at school?
Do the kids really think it would be appropriate for the school librarian to advertise to first graders a book making the case against the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy?
More likely, kids still believe that preserving innocence is one of their values. That argument should hold for most adults, too.
Probably no one is arguing that every challenged book is inappropriate for kids. Just as librarians can err in adding a book to the library, schools can err in removing them. The key is to develop a review process that puts the most knowledgeable people in charge—parents and, secondarily, teachers know the kids best—and makes the fewest mistakes.
For those critics of “book bans” who are unwilling to admit that even one book could ever be bad enough to remove from a school library, it’s time to mature and acknowledge that unlike the printed page, life is not black and white. Then we can have the important discussion of how to properly protect kids.
Below is my column in USA Today on the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court to reject the disqualification of former president Donald Trump from the 2024 election. Some Democrats are now seeking to resume the effort through Congress to prevent voters from being able to vote for the leading candidate for the presidency.
Here is the column:
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election. The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.
During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.
After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.” Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.
Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”
Well, the court rejected that “unassailable” theory in a unanimous decision. While Tribe’s view was repeated with little contradiction on many networks and newspapers for months, it failed to garner a single vote from either the left or the right of the court.
Things are not going well for those seeking to remake the nation. In 2020, Harvard professor Michael Klarman warned that all of the plans to change the country were ultimately dependent on packing the court. With the 2020 election, he stated that Democrats could change the election system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.”
However, Klarman conceded that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described,” so the court itself had to be changed.
Now that the three progressive justices have joined their conservative colleagues in ruling for Trump, they apparently also will have to go. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
The problem for many on the left is that the unanimous decision shattered the narrative repeated for months that Colorado would be reversed because the conservative justices would robotically protect Trump (despite the fact that they have repeatedly ruled against Trump and his policies). Now, by Rep. Raskin’s measure, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor are no longer acting as “real Supreme Court justices.”
Supreme Court transcended ideological divisions
The fact is that the Supreme Court justices have proved, again, that they are precisely the “real Supreme Court justices” that the Founding Fathers envisioned. The court was created to be able to transcend our divisions and politics. On Monday, a court sharply divided along ideological grounds showed the nation that it could speak with one voice. In doing so, it spoke to the things that bind us to each other, including an article of faith in our Constitution that defines us all.
In the news media and in universities, there is a persistent message that the court and the Constitution are the problem. In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically” altered to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks previously went on MSNBC to warn citizens not to become “slaves” to the Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.
Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin even called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.”
The lumberjack school of constitutional law is the rage on our campuses. Free from the obstructions of constitutional demands, activists (and a newly constituted court) could set about pursuing the devil as a nation of Ropers.
Supreme Court ruling provides moment of clarity
Despite the push of court packing and extreme interpretations of the law, most Americans continue to cling to America’s core institutions and constitutional values. For those reasons, this opinion could be one of the most significant in the court’s history, not because of what it did but what it would not allow to be done. It is a moment of clarity for a nation mired in rage politics. It was not just the opinion that brought that clarity but what followed the opinion.
A day after the unanimous ruling, millions of citizens will line up at polling places around the country to vote for their preferred candidates. It is their choice and privilege as citizens. They are also speaking with one voice. Not for a particular party or person, but as free people claiming their right to choose their own leaders.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @JonathanTurley
Below is my column in the New York Post on the expanding controversy surrounding the disqualification of Fani Willis and Nathan Wade. In today’s legislative hearing in Atlanta, counsel Ashleigh Merchant testified that cellphone records on one occasion show “pings” on Wade’s cellphone from his home to the vicinity of Willis’s home followed by a call to Willis and then hours of silence. The next morning, she claims, the data shows him going back to his home and texting Willis. It is only the latest example of how evidence against the two prosecutors is growing and possible explanations are dwindling in the case. The greatest problem is how these allegations are beginning to mirror those against the defendants being prosecuted by Willis and Wade.
Here is the column:
When Fani Willis ran against her former boss Paul Howard in 2020, she highlighted the experience that she would bring to the position.
Howard was embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal involving his relationship with women in his office.
Willis offered both experience and ethical leadership, including pledging repeatedly that “I will certainly not be choosing to date people that work under me.”
Willis is now accused of the wrong type of relevant experience.
She and her lead prosecutor are not just accused of having an intimate relationship, but they are accused of some of the same underlying conduct that they are prosecuting in the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and other defendants. That includes allegations of filing false statements with courts and even influencing witnesses.
This week, another witness came forward with an explosive new allegation against Willis. In the prior hearings in Atlanta, Nathan Wade was confronted with what appears to be false statements made to the court in his divorce case, false statements that he repeated under oath in disqualification testimony. For example, Wade was asked about his denial of “a sexual relationship during the time of his marriage and separation” up to and including May 30, 2023.
That would obviously include the sexual relationship with Willis in 2022 and possibly earlier. Wade, however, denied any such sexual relationship and said he confined the question to sexual relations meaning an affair “in the course of my marriage.” Of course, his marriage was ongoing even during the divorce and the question asked about any relationship up to May 2023.
Wade and Willis have also been contradicted in their testimony by various witnesses who said they lied about their intimate relationship starting after he was hired in 2022. That includes prior text messages in which Wade’s former partner and lawyer Terrence Bradley repeatedly told opposing counsel that he was “absolutely” sure that the relationship began much earlier.
A former close friend of Willis also said they were lying.
Now another prosecutor has come forward to say that Bradley also told her repeatedly and with complete clarity and certainty that Wade and Willis were involved long before his hiring. Those conversations allegedly occurred as late as January 2024 with Cindi Lee Yeager, a co-chief deputy district attorney for Cobb County.
What is even more alarming is Yeager’s account that she overheard Willis tell Bradley on the telephone that “they are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us.” If true, that call could raise questions of influencing potential witnesses.
Willis can legitimately point out that the calls was allegedly in September 2023, before Bradley was called as a witness and the current proceedings had started. However, it would indicate that Willis was aware that Bradley would be asked questions about past payments and relationships with him and his partner Wade.
If that seems loose, you should take a look at the case Willis brought against these defendants. Many of us have been critical of the overarching racketeering conspiracy alleged by Willis among the 18 defendants.
The false statement charges often dismiss plausible alternative interpretations or the paucity of evidence of intent.
The question is whether Willis or Wade had other communications indirectly or directly with Bradley.
His testimony was widely panned and he showed all of the spontaneity and comfort of a hostage video.
Willis is a powerful political figure in Atlanta and Bradley did everything short of faking his death to avoid assisting in her disqualification.
The odds are that Judge Scott McAfee is not inclined to hold additional hearings. He is ready to rule.
It is hard to imagine these two prosecutors continuing with so many allegations hanging over the case. They have placed their personal interests before their office and their case.
However, the standard for disqualification is murky. For Willis, the case has become a modern political tragedy a la movie classic “All the King’s Men,” about a reformer who became everything that he once denounced in the corruption of powerful figures.
In her combative testimony, Willis attacked the media, opposing counsel and the public for questioning her actions. She declared, “You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you put me on trial.”
The question is whether the courts, prosecutors or bar officials will show the same vigor in pursuing these allegations against Wade and Willis that they have shown against their own defendants. If so, she could well find herself “on trial” as the allegations mount against her and her lead prosecutor.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
Who says we can’t fix stupid? Now that Trump has pretty much clinched the GOP primary, many feel it’s time to move on against Biden in the General Election and then on to the White House so Trump can fix the problems caused by Biden and the Democrat’s stupid policies. Maybe we can “fix stupid”.
Trump Super Tuesday Victory Speech: Joe Biden Is the Worst President in the History of Our Country (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – March 5 2024
President Trump delivered a victory speech tonight at his Mar-a-Lago home after winning 15 of the Super Tuesday states. Nikki Haley squeaked off a victory in Vermont where they held an open primary in a far left socialist state. President Trump focused on the complete devastation of the Biden regime in his Mar-a-Lago speech. Read More…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Joe Biden’s State of the Union Will Exploit Disabled Babies to Promote Abortions Up to Birth • Indiana Abortions Drop to Near 0 as Abortion Ban Saves Thousands of Babies • Catholic Bishops Call for Prayer After France Makes Killing Babies in Abortions a “Right” • Biden Turned VA Clinics Into Abortion Centers, Now He’s Making the Policy Permanent
More Pro-Life News • New Documents Show Planned Parenthood Breaking Law to Sell Aborted Baby Parts to a University • I Was Told Abortion Drugs Wouldn’t Hurt Me. It Was a Lie • Pharmacists are Supposed to Sell Drugs That Heal Us, Not Abortion Pills That Kill Babies • Virginia Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide Dies, Democrats Don’t Have Enough Votes • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states.
The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’
Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime.
CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient.
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.
Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.” CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit.
“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,” The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May.
‘Only a Matter of Time’
Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role.
As the congressional report notes:
CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States.
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’
Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.”
But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats.
CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”
Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong.
A Warning
It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign.
“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”
Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.
“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote.
“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added.
They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.”
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.
Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Hot on the heels of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states have “no power” to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, Democrats and their lackeys in the corporate press denounced the court for supposedly meddling or interfering in the election.
“Not since Bush v. Gore have we seen a court that’s had this many opportunities to interfere in the election,”said former Rep. Donna Edwards on MSNBC. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian mused that the 9-0 ruling would “be seen by many people as the court essentially interfering in some sense in the election.”
Got that? When Democrats interfere in a presidential election and launch what amounts to an insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court steps in and unanimously puts a stop to it, it’s the court, not Democrat activists, who are interfering in the election.
The hypocrisy here is breathtaking but not unexpected. Democrats engage in this kind of projection constantly, taking an extreme position and then decrying any dissent or resistance to it as extremist.
In the Colorado case, two well-funded leftist groups with anodyne names — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Free Speech for People — waged a lawfare campaign with a far-fetched reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause,” managing to get Colorado’s Democrat-dominated Supreme Court to rule in December that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot. The plan was to do this in numerous states, foreclosing the possibility of Trump’s reelection.
From the outset, it should have been obvious that the legal argument was bogus, a cynical and clumsy ploy to prop up President Biden’s reelection bid by robbing voters of the chance to cast ballots for Trump. It’s hard to imagine anything getting a unanimous ruling on our deeply divided Supreme Court, but these bozos managed to do it — and in the process embarrassed the many corporate media commentators who twisted themselves into pretzels arguing that the Colorado case was strong.
But if we step back a bit and consider all this in the context of nearly every other scheme Democrats have hatched in recent years, it’s possible to see why they thought it was worth a shot. Time and again, Democrats take unprecedented steps and trample every conceivable norm to advance their agenda, and when anyone objects, they label them an extremist or insurrectionist or Christian nationalist (whatever that means). They project onto their opponents, and especially onto Trump, the very things they are actively engaged in doing.
An obvious example of this is when Democrats warn that if Trump is reelected, he’ll use the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his political rivals. Oh really? This is exactly what the Biden administration has been doing for the past three years to Trump, his lawyers, and his supporters. The criminal cases against Trump are nothing if not the weaponization of the DOJ to crush an unpopular sitting president’s chief political rival. This weaponization began even before Trump won the White House in 2016. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Democrats used the FBI and the intelligence community to go after the Trump campaign — and continued going after Trump after he won the presidency, perpetuating the Russia-collusion hoax for years with the assistance of a complicit corporate press. If anyone is using the levers of government power to go after their enemies, it’s Democrats, not Trump.
Other examples of Democrat projection abound. After months of letting our cities burn in Black Lives Matter riots, excusing them as “mostly peaceful,” Democrats threw the book at anyone who wandered into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, arresting, jailing, and prosecuting more than a thousand Americans to date, often on flimsy charges that otherwise would hardly merit a fine. Just last week, the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker for his coverage of Jan. 6, marching him out of Blaze’s Dallas office in handcuffs. Democrats feign outrage at the arrest of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia, but they gloat, as NBC News did, when the Biden administration does the same to right-of-center journalists here in America.
Pick almost any controversial issue, and you’ll find the same pattern at work. Democrats flood the internet with disinformation and propaganda about Covid, and then decry dissenting voices (and accompanying data) as agents of disinformation who must be censored and banned by Big Tech. Same thing for what they call “election disinformation,” which merely refers to opinions and data that run counter to their preferred narrative.
Democrats do this with everything.
On abortion, they take the extreme position that it should be allowed up until the moment of birth, then denounce Republican-led states that impose restrictions that are the norm across the Western world.
On transgenderism, they insist children can consent to genital mutilation and sterilization, then condemn modest efforts to ban or limit these practices as child abuse.
On immigration, they throw open the southern border and let 10 million illegal immigrants flood into the country, then attack anyone who suggests we have a crisis at the border and need to secure it.
On crime, they defund the police and decriminalize a host of antisocial, destructive behavior in our cities, precipitating a crime wave of robbery and assault, then denounce as racist any arguments for law and order.
On racism itself, they tar everyone on the right with the label but look the other way when the racists on their side call for the genocide of the Jews and defend (even celebrate) Hamas terrorist attacks on civilians.
On nearly every major issue today, Democrats are the extremists. Their denunciations of Trump and his supporters rise in direct proportion to their own extremist agenda. The projection is a tactic, a crude rhetorical ruse. Don’t fall for it.
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.
By Brian Freeman | Tuesday, 05 March 2024 10:03 AM EST
An Iranian intelligence officer is wanted in connection with planning to assassinate former and current U.S. officials in revenge for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force Cmdr. Qassem Soleimani, the FBI posted on X.
The FBI field office in Miami shared a wanted notice for Majid Dastjani Farahani in connection with the recruitment of individuals for various operations in the U.S., including for surveillance activities focused on religious sites, businesses, and other facilities in the U.S., according to Newsweek. The announcement by the FBI, which said Farahani is working directly or indirectly for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, comes amid heightened tensions with Tehran as Iranian proxies inflame hostilities connected to the war in Gaza by attacking Israeli and American targets.
Although Tehran has denied its involvement in recent attacks against U.S. targets, two years ago Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi blamed former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for Soleimani’s killing and threatened that Muslims will take out martyr’s revenge against them, Newsweek reported.
In addition, Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, was indicted in 2022 for an alleged revenge plot to kill former national security adviser John Bolton, according to the New York Post.
After news of the latest threat, Pompeo and Brian Hook, former President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Iran, were given around-the-clock security, Semafor reported.
The U.S. Treasury Department in December announced sanctions against Farahani and another Iranian intelligence officer Mohammad Mahdi Khanpour Ardestani.
Soleimani oversaw a number of militias that targeted U.S. troops in Iraq, and had more “American blood on his hands” than any terrorist since Osama Bin Laden, according to a 2021 Department of Justice report on the Baghdad airstrike that killed him, the New York Post reported.
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.
Does your children’s school take tips on hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center? The SPLC frames all responses to the border crisis as rooted in hate. (Photo: Getty Images)
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”
There are 8,859 pages of emails sent by my school district to Southern Poverty Law Center, who thinks moms are "hate groups."
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) March 1, 2024
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.” The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegals are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America. PLEASE SEE https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/88628
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that President Joe Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.
Chloe Cole speaks as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., looks on during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sept. 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Detransitioners have been trying to warn the public that so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers—is both experimental and dangerous, especially for minors. Now, thanks to the efforts of journalist Michael Shellenberger, we know that World Professional Association for Transgender Health doctors and medical experts pushing these practices were well aware of the experimental and lasting nature of the procedures they were recommending. Yet these so-called health professionals pushed forward, despite alarming awareness of tumors developing from hormones, reduced sexual function, lack of proper informed consent for minors, and more, according to Shellenberger’s reporting.
“Let the reckoning begin,” says Luka Hein, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old, believing that she would be happier if she could become a boy. “Because of organizations like WPATH I’m missing body parts and struggle with pain.”
The WPATH medical professionals acknowledge in the messages that some of the minors who are being given puberty blockers have no idea that they will be sterilized. Other messages reveal WPATH doctors saying they went ahead with performing surgery on patients with severe mental health problems, even though they were worried the patients couldn’t give full informed consent.
“I’m relieved the files are out in the world for everyone to read,” Shellenberger told my colleague Tyler O’Neil, sharing that the files reveal WPATH’s “whole paradigm falling apart over the last three years.”
The news prompted a number of detransitioners to speak up, sharing the mental and physical anguish that they have gone through as a result of this ideology.
“I was a scared kid who thought doctors were going to help me…and look at how these butchers talk about what happened to those like me behind closed doors,” Hein added in another X post.
On a more positive note, since I reposted the scar picture, I want to put it side by side with a more recent picture. I am determined to thrive, in spite of what has happened. #detrans#detransitionpic.twitter.com/ua0Yfi3MaX
A detransitioner is someone who attempted to transition to another gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “de-transitioned.” Many of these individuals, like Hein, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignored biological realities in favor of ideology.
I document numerous stories of these transitioners in my upcoming book, “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
“WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body,” said Abel Garcia, a young man who attempted to transition to become a girl by taking hormone and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. “The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.”
“These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth,” he added. “Let the truth prevail.”
WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body. The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.
These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth. Let the truth prevail https://t.co/DTpy5bz9PO
Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy as part of her teenaged gender transition, specifically addressed WPATH conversations reported by Shellenberger about developmentally delayed 13 year olds attempting transition.
“There is no ethical approach to taking an already developmentally delayed child and preventing them from going on the only path they have towards growing into an adult,” she said. “We are leaving vulnerable children stunted for life.”
“This is unimaginable levels of cruelty,” added Cole.
Laura Becker, another female detransitioner who has become an outspoken advocate against gender ideology, commented on Shellenberger’s revelation that doctors asked permission of all the “alters,” or alternative identities, of one client who had dissociative identity disorder (DID).
“I can’t believe this,” she wrote. “WPATH doctors got ‘consent’ from all a patient’s ‘alter’ personalities before doing surgery… instead of you know, treating the DID symptoms. Absolutely unethical.”
Some detransitioners called for punishments for the medical professionals who led them down this path.
“Justice for all victims,” wrote Richie, a man who attempted to transition to become a woman. “Jail time for the surgeons that held the scalpel, and the therapists that signed off the surgery. If I took everything from them, we still wouldn’t be even.”
“I didn’t think anyone should be jailed when I first ‘came to’ post-transition,” chimed in Michelle, another detransitioned woman, on X. “Changed my mind now. Probably would’ve still had some mercy in me if we hadn’t been gaslit so badly.”
Prisha Mosley, a young woman who has detransitioned and travels the country testifying in defense of biological sex, emotionally shared on Monday evening that she could not yet bring herself to read “The WPATH Files”: “No one deserves this monstrous form of irreversible medical harm…”
WPATH standardized blackmail and abusive medical experimentation and exploitation.
Detransitioners have been saying it for a while now: Doctors have forgotten their oath to Do No Harm. #WPATHFileshttps://t.co/wRs8evulsH
Calling it “one on a huge list of priorities,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) announced that he will be reintroducing a prior bill with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell to disqualify not just Trump but a large number of Republicans from taking office. The alternative, it appears, is unthinkable: allowing the public to choose their next president and representatives in Congress. It appears that the last thing Democrats want is for the unanimous decision to actually lead to an outbreak of democracy. Where the Court expressly warned of “chaos” in elections, Raskin and others appear eager to be agents of chaos in Congress.
Soon after the decision, Raskin went on the air at CNN to assure people that he and his colleagues would not stand by and allow the right to vote be restored to citizens in the upcoming election. He pledged to offer a prior bill that would declare Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and that those involved “engaged in insurrection.”
I previously wrote about these “ballot cleansing” efforts because it would not just disqualify Trump but potentially dozens of sitting Republican members of Congress. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory. Similar legislation offered by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats.
Raskin’s participation in this effort is crushingly ironic. In 2016, he sought to block certification of the 2016 election under the very same law as violent protests were occurring before the inauguration. The prior bills were sweeping and included members who did not engage in any violent acts (no member has been charged with such violence or even incitement) but merely opposed certification.
Raskin recently offered a particularly Orwellian argument for the disqualification of Trump and his colleagues in Congress: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.” In other words, preventing voters from voting is “the most democratic” because these people choose to oppose certification . . . as he did in 2016.
After the ruling, Raskin added the curious claim that the justices “didn’t exactly disagree with [the disqualification theory]. They just said that they’re not the ones to figure it out. It’s not going to be a matter for judicial resolution under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it’s up to Congress to enforce it.”
That was sharply different from the pre-decision Raskin who insisted that there was no real question legally and that the case before the justices was “their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”
Well, they did act as “real Supreme Court justices” by unanimously opposing what the Court described as the “chaos” that would unfold with such state disqualification efforts. Raskin, however, is seeking a new avenue for chaos through Congress.
Raskin’s statement is also bizarre in claiming that somehow the justices agreed with him and the others pushing disqualification. No one, not even the Trump team, questioned that Congress could act to bar people from office. It is expressly stated in the Constitution. It is not an “argument” but a fact.
Of course, the Democrats would need to craft the legislation correctly to satisfy the standard and secure the support of both houses. Neither appears likely at this point.
However, Raskin is succeeding in one respect. He and his colleagues have bulldozed any moral high ground after January 6th. Most of us condemned the riot on that day as a desecration of our constitutional process. Yet, the Democrats have responded with the most anti-democratic efforts to prevent voters from exercising their rights in the upcoming election. For these members, citizens cannot be trusted with this power as Trump tops national polls as the leading choice for the presidency. It is the political version of the Big Gulp law, voters like consumers have to be protected against their own unhealthy choices.
Raskin has continued to accuse the nine justices of being cowards in not supporting ballot cleansing. He told CNN that the court “doesn’t like the ultimate and inescapable implications of just enforcing the Constitution, as written.” In other words, all nine justices, including the three liberals justices, are disregarding clear constitutional mandates to protect Trump. It is the same delusional view echoed by other liberals who were enraged by the decision. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
After all, nothing says democracy like ballot cleansing and dissolving courts before a national election.
With the resumption of efforts to disqualify Republicans from running on ballots, Raskin and his colleagues seem to be channeling the spirit of former Mayor Dick Daley in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
With allegations of abuse by the police in cracking down on protests, Daley declared “the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” With Democrats preparing to return to Chicago for their convention this year, Raskin and others appear to be responding to the Court that “the party isn’t there to create chaos, the party is there to preserve chaos.”
SCOTUS Rules in Trump favor. It is unconstitutional for states to kick a presidential candidate off the ballot based on the 14th Amendment.
Supreme Court Puts Trump Back on Colorado Ballot – UNANIMOUS DECISION – Trump Responds
By Cristina Laila
The US Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled Trump can stay on the Colorado primary 2024 ballot. The Supreme Court said the states lack the power to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution against Presidential candidates. “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand,” the high court’s ruling said. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • France Becomes First Country in the World to Make Killing Babies in Abortions a Constitutional Right • Joe Biden Will Honor Woman Who Had Her Baby Killed in Abortion • Jill Biden Celebrates Abortion, Calling Killing Babies a “Right” • 25 States Tells Supreme Court to Stop Mail-Order Abortions, Protect Women’s Health
More Pro-Life News • Supreme Court Rules Colorado Can’t Remove Trump From Ballot • “Lawless Cult of Death” Planned Parenthood Covers Up Sex Abuse of Minors • Joe Biden Will Promote Abortions Up to Birth at the State of the Union • 16 AGs Order YouTube to Remove “Misleading” Pro-Abortion Notices on Abortion Videos • 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.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
An appeals court on Saturday reversed a lower court’s decision to block Texas from enforcing a new state law that would make illegal immigration a state crime. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals went against U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra’s order to block Texas’ Senate Bill 4 but also put its own ruling on hold for seven days should the Biden administration want to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The new law allows state authorities to arrest and jail illegal immigrants and would give state judges the power to order deportations. The law was initially set to go into effect on March 5 but will now be put on hold until March 9 unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
Under Texas’ Senate Bill 4, state authorities could arrest and jail illegal immigrants and allow state judges to order deportations. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Ezra, who presides in the Western District of Texas, ruled last week that states “may not exercise immigration enforcement power except as authorized by the federal government.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, maintained that the state “has the right to defend itself” from the invasion at our southern border.”
“Texas will immediately appeal this decision, and we will not back down in our fight to protect our state – and our nation – from President Biden’s border crisis,” Abbott said in a statement at the time.
Asylum seekers cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States on Sept. 30, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The law was one of several moves by Texas to curb the flow of migrants into the state. Abbott has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of failing to enforce immigration laws amid record numbers of migrant entries and encounters at the southern border.
Fox News’ Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s Republican primary challenger in California’s Senate race warned voters in the Golden State have been “suppressed” by the Democrats as he remains in a “statistical tie” to fill the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.
Steve Garvey, a former 10-time MLB All-Star, joined “Fox & Friends” to discuss his candidacy and why he believes Californians are “mad” about the state’s Democratic leadership.
“The people of California, who have been suppressed by one party, are saying they’re mad,” Garvey told Brian Kilmeade on Monday.
“They’re not going to take it anymore,” said the longtime Dodgers first baseman, adding that voters in the state know “his heart” and believe that he’ll represent their best interests.
“These are career politicians who have failed the people, and it’s time for change, a fresh young face, with new ideas… Somebody that knows that he can make a difference, and I think people believe that I can.”
Garvey is in a “statistical tie” against opponent Adam Schiff, according to a poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. The data indicates 27% of voters would back Garvey compared to Schiff’s 25%, which is a steep increase from data back in January.
Garvey emphasized the importance of the border crisis, arguing the issue is top of mind for voters as cartels continue to wage “war against America.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources told Fox that in just the last 72 hours, there have been more than 21,000 migrant encounters and 3,600 in the San Diego border sector alone.
“Once I started running, they started listening to my common sense, compassionate, consensus-building plea to them,” Garvey said. “And I said, ‘Well, let me fight crime in the streets for you. Let me try to get the homeless off the streets and get care for them. Let me help fight the border.’ By the way, the cartels are the true terrorists. They’re the ones that infiltrate. They organize. … It’s the true war against America.”
On March 5, California voters will head to the ballot box to fill the late senator’s seat, which is currently being filled temporarily by Laphonza Butler. Four candidates are in the running for her seat – Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee alongside Garvey, who is the only Republican in the race.
From left to right: Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Katie Porter, Republican Candidate Steve Garvey, and Rep. Adam Schiff. (Getty Images)
Whichever two of the four candidates receives the highest number of votes in the March primary will advance to the November general election, no matter which party each candidate represents.
“I’ll meet with all 99 senators. I’ll stick out my hand, and I’ll tell them I want to work with them,” Garvey said.
“But it’s the people that I serve, people of California, people of this country. They know where my heart is. It’s a campaign of grace and civility, and people are standing up and answering with their votes.”
Far left commentator Keith Olbermann vitriolically condemned the Supreme Court on Monday after the justices unanimously ruled individual states could not decide whether Donald Trump could be on their presidential ballots this fall. Pictured: Olbermann hosts a Trump impersonator on Comedy Central’s “The President Show” on April 27, 2017, in New York City. (Photo: Brad Barket/Getty Images)
Liberals on Monday bemoaned the Supreme Court overturning a state supreme court’s ruling tossing former President Donald Trump off the state’s ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court said that Congress alone had the power to enforce the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment in a 9-0 ruling that was unsigned. The Colorado Supreme Court had decided that Trump was disqualified under the provisions of the 14th Amendment in a 4-3 ruling Dec. 19.
“The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy,” former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann posted on X. “Its members including [Ketanji Brown] Jackson, [Elena] Kagan, and [Sonia] Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the "court" has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate.
“Supreme Court rules that an adjudicated insurrection can still be president, unless Congress acts,” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner posted. “Not unexpected, but more proof that our institutions of government are not up to the task of saving American democracy. Once again, it’s up to We The People. #VoteLikeHell”
Supreme Court rules that an adjudicated insurrection can still be president, unless Congress acts. Not unexpected, but more proof that our institutions of government are not up to the task of saving American democracy. Once again, it’s up to We The People. #VoteLikeHellpic.twitter.com/mK8kAe3TPE
MSNBC contributor Anand Giridharadas called the decision “another corrupt Supreme Court ruling” while linking to an article offering what he put forth as a course of action to counteract what he called “another round of despair bait.”
Another day, another corrupt Supreme Court ruling, another round of despair bait in the news.
The Ink is trying to do something different: offering tangible actions you can take today to help save and more fully realize democracy.
“The Supreme Court has decided to keep Donald Trump on the Presidential ballot. We knew this was coming,” Democratic congressional candidate Eugene Vindman posted. “Today’s Supreme Court decision won’t impact what will happen in November. We are going to defeat Donald Trump and take back the House from MAGA extremists.”
The Supreme Court has decided to keep Donald Trump on the Presidential ballot. We knew this was coming.
Today's Supreme Court decision won't impact what will happen in November.
We are going to defeat Donald Trump and take back the House from MAGA extremists.
Also on MSNBC, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal tried to spin the ruling.
“What it doesn’t put aside is the 14th Amendment, Section 3, is not just about courts, it’s not just about—you know, about ballot—you election officials disqualifying someone. It’s also a rule of thumb for you and me,” Katyal told MSNBC host Ana Cabrera. “I mean, one of the most important moments in our history after the Civil War, our nation came together and said, ‘Look, insurrectionists should not be on the ballot.’ The court today is not saying that Donald Trump is free of the charges of being an insurrectionist.”
“It may be that Congress hasn’t implemented legislation to enforce it, but you and I enforce the 14th Amendment, too, by what we do at the ballot box,” Katyal added.
Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold of Colorado expressed disappointment in the ruling on X.
“I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates,” Griswold posted. “Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrectionists from our ballot.”
I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.
In its affidavit supporting criminal charges, the Justice Department showed Air Force lieutenant colonel Larry Rendall Brock on the Senate floor on January 6, 2021 in a helmet and combat gear. That outfit only magnified the anger of many of us over the riot and the interruption of our constitutional process of certification. However, while there was little question of the validity of the charges against him, U.S. District Judge John Bates in March 2023 imposed a two year sentence based on a common enhancing factor cited by the government in many of these cases for the “substantial interference with the administration of justice.” A panel on the D.C. Circuit has now ruled against the use of that enhancer in a decision that could compel the resentencing of dozens of defendants from the January 6th riot.
The Justice Department has long been accused of excessive charging and abusive detention conditions for January 6th defendants. The heavy-handed treatment was apparently by design. In a controversial television interview, Justice official Michael Sherwin proudly declared that “our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe … it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re, like, ‘If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.’ … We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.”
District court judges just went along with the use of the enhancement, even though it was based on a highly attenuated claim. As the D.C. Circuit found, “Congress’s certification of electoral college votes does not fit the ‘administration of justice’ mold.” It then noted:
“Considered in context, Congress’s counting and certification of electoral votes is but the last step in a lengthy electoral certification process involving state legislatures and officials as well as Congress. Taken as a whole, the multi-step process of certifying electoral college votes—as important to our democratic system of government as it is—bears little resemblance to the traditional understanding of the administration of justice as the judicial or quasi-judicial investigation or determination of individual rights.”
The argument of the Biden Administration always seemed curious to me given the claims of former President Donald Trump that Vice President Michael Pence had the authority to reject state certifications. I disagreed with that view. However, arguing that this is a type of judicial proceeding would seem to enhance the Trump argument. Yet, that is what the Justice Department did in many of these cases to enhance sentencing.
Ultimately, Judge Bates’ sentencing was not as high as what the Justice Department wanted. Judge Bates detailed the considerable evidence against Brock in his preparation for violence. He wrote before the riot “Do not kill LEO [law enforcement officers] unless necessary… Gas would assist in this if we can get it.” It was also short of the maximum under the guidelines of 30 months. The sentence may have been reduced by as much as nine months without the enhancer.
There could also be substantial reductions for a couple of hundred of other defendants who were sentenced with the enhancer. It is not clear if the government will appeal the ruling.
We are also waiting for the oral argument in Fischer v. United States, which will consider the use of the felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding against defendants tied to the January 6th riot. Trump is also being prosecuted in part for that crime.
Brock is currently serving his two-year prison term at MCFP Springfield in Missouri.
Below is my column in the Hill on a controversial criminal case involving a conservative journalist who was arrested after the January 6th riot. The prosecution of Steven Baker exposes the growing tensions in the media over the role of reporters as advocates.
Here is the column:
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones declared recently that “all journalism is activism.” Advocacy journalism is all the rage in journalism schools and on major media platforms. Given that shift in journalism, one would think that these editors and journalists would love Steven Baker.
Baker was arrested for covering what he viewed as a citizen protest defying the government and demanding justice. He did not hide his support for their cause as he reported on what became a riot. Baker, however, is a conservative journalist and the protest that he was covering became the Jan. 6th riot. Now, the Biden administration has arrested Baker on four misdemeanor charges linked to his entry into the Capitol on that day.
Baker would later not only supply stories to his main media outlet, Blaze News, but also sell videos to The New York Times and HBO.
Journalists often accompany protesters and even mobs as stories unfold. Indeed, there were many reporters in the crowd that entered the Capitol. But Baker, the conservative journalist, was charged while others were not. The response from most media figures and groups has been crickets.
The Justice Department leaves little doubt why they pursued Baker. The criminal complaint and an FBI agent’s affidavit repeatedly reference Baker’s support for those who stormed the Capitol. Entering through a broken door like hundreds of others, he walked past Capitol police, who stood by and even directed some protesters. Baker was in the building for only approximately 37 minutes before police led him out.
The government claims that the Texas-based writer “antagonized” police officers when they blocked his effort to get through a door. They quote him as asking “Are you going to use that (gun) on us?” They also quote him as later stating, in an interview with a local television station, that he was “quite excited to see this going on. Do I approve of what happened today? I approve 100 percent.”
He also pointed out his image in footage while emphasizing that his red hat was not a MAGA hat but a Yorktown, Virginia hat. He would joke about what a shame it was that he did not get his hands on Nancy Pelosi’s computer, given what he might have found.
In any other context, Baker might be the poster boy for the new journalism. “J-schools” now encourage students to leave “neutrality behind” and push “solidarity [as] ‘a commitment to social justice that translates into action.’”
A recent series of interviews with over 75 media leaders by Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.” But that advocacy seems to depend heavily upon what ideology you are advocating.
For example, NPR employees objected to efforts to maintain a neutral tone in reporting and declared that “civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.” The NPR leadership went even further to unleash the advocates within journalists, by allowing them to cross over from covering to participating in protests. The public-subsidized NPR declared that reporters could join political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”
Something tells me that NPR editors would not have found Baker’s brand of advocacy to be “dignified.”
NPR recently hired a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who has declared that “white silence is complicity” and has publicly denounced Trump and his supporters. The message seems clear about what kind of protests would be considered advancements of freedom.
Would the government have charged an NPR reporter who accompanied Black Lives Matter rioters in the police station they occupied in Seattle? If not, then what exactly is the dividing line between crime and advocacy journalism? Is it an ideological line?
In the George Floyd riots, at least 126 journalists were arrested or detained in 2020. Virtually all of the charges against them were dropped. Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri was tried on simple misdemeanors for failure to disperse and interference with official acts. She was acquitted. The difference is that a long list of journalistic organizations came to her aid. That is not the case for Baker.
Before Baker’s arrest, Washington media was already facing criticisms over double standards. Recently, CBS was embroiled in a controversy after it fired acclaimed investigative journalist Cathrine Herridge, who had clashed with the liberal network over her work on stories unpopular with the Biden White House and many Democratic establishment figures. Not only did they lay Herridge off, but CBS brass even seized her files and forced her union to take legal action before giving them back. The files contained confidential source information. While this was unfolding, Herridge was in court, fighting to protect her confidential sources. After CBS fired her, she was held in contempt this week for refusing to violate journalistic confidentiality. The same week, despite firing Herridge and seizing her files, CBS President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews was honored at the 33rd annual First Amendment Awards.
Likewise, this week, Julian Assange is facing deportation and prosecution for publishing the Wikileaks files, exposing abuses in the U.S. government. Although legacy media routinely publish classified material from whistleblowers, Assange has embarrassed many in Washington and will have to pay for it.
That brings us back to Baker. He is not charged with property damage or violence. The question is whether, on that day, he was an advocate, a journalist or an advocate journalist.
So, what exactly is journalism? Major media figures have actively erased the distinction between advocates and journalists. It is now subject to the same test that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once used to identify pornography in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964): “I shall not today attempt further to define [it]…But I know it when I see it.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
Democrats in the Minnesota House of Representatives advanced two gun control bills on Thursday that have Republicans, gun groups, and private citizens concerned. HF 4300 Gun Bill.
Democrats advance two gun control bills in Minnesota House.
By Luke Sprinkel – March 1, 2024
Democrats in the Minnesota House of Representatives advanced two gun control bills on Thursday that have Republicans, gun groups, and private citizens concerned.
HF 4300, authored by Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn, D-Roseville, would set new laws for how firearms must be stored. Under the proposed law, gun owners must either leave their firearms unloaded with a locking device, or store their firearms in a legitimate “firearm storage unit” such as a safe. Citizens who fail to do so will face legal consequences ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, depending on the offense. READ MORE…
My cartoons may seem redundant at times, still at this time in our history, I feel it’s necessary to keep driving the prominent point home that the disastrous invasion at our southern border is 100% Joe Biden ending Trump’s executive orders at the urging of Democrats and RINOs. There is a reason the left is against voter ID and signature verification – and that explains OPEN BORDERS!
MUST SEE: The Democrats’ Nine Step Plan to Gaslight America and Blame Donald Trump for Joe Biden’s Border Crisis
By Jim Hoft, Feb 8th, 2024
Western Lensman: The Democrat election playbook explained a nine step plan to blame Donald Trump for the border crisis.
Step one, flood the country for three years with millions of illegal aliens. Step two, watch approval numbers on the border drop below 20%. Step three, election year is here. Decide you need to act now that you’ve let millions of illegals into the country and the American people are pissed. Step four, line up some rhinos in the Senate to assist with the next phase of the plan. Step five, work with the RINOs on a bipartisan basis to devise a garbage piece of legislation that would make the crisis considerably worse. REED MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Walgreens and CVS Will Start Selling Abortion Pills That Kill Babies • Joe Biden Celebrates More Abortions, Praises CVS and Walgreens for Selling Abortion Drugs • Pro-Life Groups Slam CVS and Walgreens for Selling Abortion Pills That Kill Babies • Four Studies Show Pro-Life Laws are Saving Thousands of Babies From Abortion
More Pro-Life News • Missouri AG Launches Investigation of Planned Parenthood for Trafficking Minors in Out-of-State Abortions • Pro-Abortion Mob Threatens to Rape and Kill Pro-Life Students • Pfizer is Donating to Canada’s Euthanasia Group That Wants to Kill More People • Killing Babies in Abortions is Wrong Medically, Ethically and Biblically • 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.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.
“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”
Just caught up with journalist Steve Baker just moments after being released from federal custody.@TPC4USA details what he’s had to endure at the hands of the corrupt DOJ.
As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.
While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”
After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist @TPC4USA has now been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting
While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.
Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.
.@TPC4USA's first interview since being taken in by federal authorities with @SteveDeaceShow: "All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed." pic.twitter.com/kl12Ol7zPN
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
“You have my answer under oath and under the penalty of perjury,” Hunter Biden declared a half-dozen times during closed-door questioning by the joint House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday, a transcript of which was released Thursday. His protestations of truth-telling lacked conviction, though, because the facts and logic proclaimed a different reality.
Here are the highlights of Hunter Biden’s most unbelievable testimony.
1. It’s All a MAGA-Orchestrated Conspiracy Theory
Hunter Biden opened by claiming the committees had “hunted” him as part of a “partisan political pursuit” of his father.
“You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies,” he continued before claiming the only basis for the claims of Biden family corruption came from criminals, fugitives, or other liars.
But no matter how many times Hunter evoked the name of Alexander Smirnov — the recently indicted FBI confidential human source who allegedly lied about Burisma paying the Bidens bribes, as memorialized in the FD-1023 — bank records and the testimony of Biden-friendly witnesses negate Hunter’s claims of a conspiracy theory.
There are only so many coincidences the American public will buy before realizing they’re being sold a bag of malarkey. Evidence of large deposits to Hunter Biden-connected businesses from foreigners in Joe Biden’s wake leaves Hunter’s claim of a conspiracy unbelievable.
2. I Called Upon the Wrong Guy
Probably the most incredible area of Hunter’s testimony was his explanation for a text he sent to Raymond Zhao, asking him to have the director of CEFC call him. “I’m sitting here with my father,” Hunter texted Zhao, “and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I’m very concerned that the chairman has either changed his mind or broken our deal without telling me or that he’s unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.”
“Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Hunter continued, adding that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness, and all too often I’m standing over the top of them saying, I warned you.”
“I will call you on WhatsApp,” Zhao replied.
This text exchange was incredibly damning because the players involved were connected to the communist Chinese energy company CEFC, which later transferred $5 million in capital to a company Hunter Biden created only a few days after the above text exchange.
But don’t worry, Hunter assured the committee. His text went to the wrong guy because he was “so out of his mind” from his addiction, he had accidentally sent the threat to “Henry Zhao,” who was not connected to CEFC.
“And I, like an idiot, directed it towards Henry Zhao who had no involvement, who had no understanding or even remotely knew what the hell I was even Godd-mn talking about. Excuse my language,” Hunter told the committee.
First, given the quick response to Hunter’s text from CEFC, it is unbelievable that the text didn’t go to the CEFC-connected Zhao. Second, even if Hunter basically drunk-dialed the wrong mark, that doesn’t exonerate him or his father — the latter of whom, the evidence establishes, helped Hunter by showcasing his accessibility to his son’s business partners.
In short, the text shows Hunter intended to shakedown CEFC, and the $5 million suggests he succeeded.
3. Burisma Wanted Me to Call My… Teen Daughters?
A close second for the most outrageous storyline concerned the call to D.C. that Hunter Biden’s business partner and friend Devon Archer claims Hunter made at the request of Burisma executives.
Archer, a Biden-friendly witness, had previously testified to the House Judiciary Committee that in early December 2015, after a Burisma board meeting, the founder of the Ukrainian energy company had asked Hunter to call D.C. because of pressure being placed on the company. In a follow-up question, Archer confirmed the Burisma request was for “help from the United States Government to deal with the pressure they were under from their prosecutor, and that entailed the freezing of assets at the London bank and other things that were going on in Ukraine.”
According to Hunter’s friend and former business partner, Hunter stepped away with the Burisma executives to make the call to D.C. But when asked about the call on Wednesday, Hunter testified, “I never would have called, and never did my father on behalf of Burisma.”
So, whom did he call?
Hunter didn’t remember but suggested it was his wife or his high school-aged daughters.
Sure, Jan.
4. The Big Guy = The Big Lie?
Revisiting Archer’s testimony from last year added another improbability to Hunter Biden’s testimony — this one concerning “the big guy” moniker.
When questioned about the reference to 10 percent being “held by H for the big guy,” Hunter claimed not to know what that meant. And when questioned by Democrats on the committee about Joe Biden’s nicknames, Hunter denied his family referred to Joe as “the big guy.”
Tony Bobulinski, however, testified previously that “the big guy” was Joe Biden’s nickname. And while Hunter Biden claimed Bobulinski was a liar and not to be believed, Archer also used that nickname in an apparent reference to Joe Biden in his testimony, saying Burisma wasn’t “specific, you know, can the big guy help? It was — it’s always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?”
5. ‘My Chairman’ is Absolutely, Positively Not Daddy
Also ringing hollow was Hunter Biden’s assertion that “my chairman” was not his father. House investigators asked Hunter about a text he had sent to Bobulinski, in which he said, “In light of the fact that we are at an impasse of sorts, and both James’ lawyers and my chairman gave an emphatic no — I think we should all meet in Romania on Tuesday next week.”
Hunter went on to say that “my chairman” was Chairman Ye of the Chinese company CEFC. Hunter then testified that he didn’t ever refer to his father as “my chairman,” calling the suggestion “laughable.”
The Republican committee members confronted Hunter with a text his business partner Rob Walker had sent to Bobulinski that said, “When he said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.”
Hunter sought to negate Walker’s testimony by claiming it was merely one “third party that was talking with another third party” who was “making a judgment about what I was talking about.”
Hunter then reverted to, “[Y]ou have my answer under oath that I did not refer and never have referred to my father as chairman.”
His “under oath” guarantee isn’t very assuring, however, given that Hunter had earlier stressed his long-standing relationship with Rob Walker — the third party who identified “my chairman” as Joe Biden.” “Rob Walker has known me since 1998,” Hunter testified. In fact, Hunter claimed Walker would have told their other business partners they were “way out of bounds” if Walker knew they were suggesting getting Joe Biden involved in their business deals.
So it sure seems like Walker would know whether Hunter would refer to his father as “my chairman.”
6. The Laptop Was a Plant
While many of Hunter’s explanations were unbelievable, his claims about the laptop the FBI seized from a Delaware repair shop were surreal.
When asked about his laptop from hell, Hunter claimed first not to remember dropping one off at a repair store in 2019. Then, when asked if he ever dropped off a laptop at a repair shop, Hunter spoke of dropping one off at a place three blocks from his D.C. office and at an Apple store in Georgetown. When pushed on whether he had ever left a laptop for repair in Delaware, Hunter replied that “the largest Apple store in America is at the Christiana Mall,” and that if he were “to drop off a laptop” — not that he “ever remember[ed] doing that, but if [he] was going to drop off a laptop” — he “would have gone to the Apple store, which was 7 minutes from [his] parents’ home there.”
In other words, Hunter is claiming he wouldn’t have dropped his laptop off at Mac Isaac’s store to suggest he didn’t. This outrageous assertion is part of a conspiracy theory that suggests the laptop abandoned at the Delaware repair shop was a plant.
Hunter also pushed another false narrative by suggesting much of the evidence recovered from the laptop was fake.
“Many different things” on the laptop were “either fabricated, hacked, stolen, or manipulated.” “100 percent,” Hunter testified on Wednesday.
Of course, when it came to identifying which ones, Hunter insisted, “I can’t go through them all right now.”
7. My Resume Is Real — And It’s Spectacular
Throughout the transcribed interview, Hunter also attempted to deflect questions about his lucrative service on Burisma’s board of directors by touting his resume. But when pushed on what he actually did for Burisma for a million-dollar paycheck, Hunter’s explanation of attending board meetings and “providing the best advice that I could give” convinced no one.
That was especially true given that the one thing Hunter should have been giving advice about — Burisma’s various legal problems — the president’s son claimed to know nothing about. Specifically, according to his Wednesday testimony, he did not know Burisma was under investigation in the U.K. for money laundering and had $23 million of assets frozen until “it became public.”
One would think a board member bearing the impressive resume of Hunter Biden and charged with overseeing corporate governance would know about an investigation and frozen assets before “it became public.”
8. That’s Not My Money… Until It Is My Money
Another eyebrow-raising refrain from Hunter Biden concerned payments into accounts held in the name of Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Rosemont Seneca Thornton. Those entities were Devon Archer’s, and as such, the money deposited into those accounts from foreigners wasn’t Hunter’s, the president’s son suggested.
“I have no authority over those accounts, and I have no view inside of it,” he testified.
Never mind that Archer transferred large sums from those accounts to Hunter Biden-connected accounts or, in one case, used the $142,300 a Kazakhstani oligarch deposited into the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account to pay for a car for Hunter Biden. While Hunter tried to downplay the shifting of funds from one business to another, at the end of the day, it was all unbelievable.
The totality of Hunter Biden’s testimony also rendered his opening line unbelievable. That line—“I did not involve my father in my business” — seems false at every angle.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The decision of the Supreme Court to review the immunity question in the Trump prosecution has brought forth the usual (and a couple not so usual) attacks on the integrity of the Court. While some are calling the justices now part of the “insurrection,” others are accusing them of “slow-walking” the appeal to push any trial past the election. MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin added that, due to the delay for a review of the matter, she was “beyond terrified for our country.”
In reality, the claim that the Court is moving slowly is factually and historically untrue. Indeed, in comparison to most cases, this is a NASCAR pace for an institution that is more focused on issuing right rather rapid decisions.
Some of the usual voices immediately came forward to declare that, once again, the justices are exposing themselves as raw partisans. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow was declared the review of the matter as “BS” and exposes “the cravenness of the court.” She further declared, again, that the action undermined “legitimacy of the court.”
Mary Trump, the niece of the former president, went further and declared that “the Supreme Court of the United States just reminded us with this corrupt decision that the insurrection did not fail–it never ended.”
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, R., Wyo., said that the review effectively “suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear.”
Regular MSNBC guest Elie Mystal (who previously called the Constitution “trash”) had a more novel take. With MSNBC host Alex Wagner nodding in apparent agreement, Mystal explained to viewers that this was just an effort of Justice Clarence Thomas (and possibly Samuel Alito) to retire. The theory goes something like this: Thomas does not want to have a Democrat fill his seat, so he is going to postpone the appeal, which will delay a trial for Trump, which will allow Trump to be elected, which will permit Trump to appoint his successor, which will allow Thomas to drive off in his RV for an unending retiree roadtrip. See, it’s that simple.
There is, of course, another possible explanation. Some justices have serious concerns about the lower court decision. At the outset, there are a couple of glaring problems with the claim of “slow-walking” to push the trial past the election.
First, the Court did not create this collision with the election. Both state and federal prosecutors have waited until shortly before the election to bring charges for actions taken almost four years ago. They are now demanding expedited and in some cases abridged reviews due to an urgency that they created.
Second, this matter has already been curtailed and expedited. Special Counsel Jack Smith has repeatedly pushed to deny Trump standard appellate options and time to present his case. After the Supreme Court refused to effectively cut off his right to an appellate review, the D.C. Circuit did so by pressuring Trump to file directly with the Supreme Court rather than seeking the review of the entire court in an en banc appeal. That standard en banc option was all but eliminated by an order that would have returned the mandate to the district court within days — forcing Trump to argue an appeal while being forced into the resumption of pre-trial proceedings.
Third, the Court has expedited the matter. The fact is that this is a much shorter schedule and the Court is fitting the case in the middle of a long scheduled and crowded calendar. It allowed the parties a few weeks to fully brief a question with major implications for our constitutional system.
It ordinarily takes months for the Court to even accept a case. The Court has set this matter for argument in April to allow the parties to fully brief the issue and will likely rule by June.
Some have pointed out that there are cases where the Court moved more swiftly. However, those cases have important distinctions.
For example, Michael Waldman, president of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, noted that in 1974 the Court considered United States v. Nixon “in a matter of weeks.” That is a valid point, but there are a couple of missing relevant facts.
The district court issued the subpoena to Nixon to turn over the famous White House tapes in April 1974. He then ordered compliance in May 1974 when Nixon refused. In allowing a direct appeal, the Court then held oral argument on July 8, 1975. It issued its unanimous decision on July 24, 2975. That was roughly two months after the initial appeal.
That is certainly a faster track by a few weeks. However, the Court was unanimous and this was not an appeal by a criminal defendant. While there was always the chance of an indictment of Nixon (until his pardon by Gerald Ford after he left office), the case concerned the access to evidence in the Watergate investigation. Criminal defendants are afforded the highest level of protection and review in cases.
Critics also cite the Bush v. Gore decision where the Supreme Court decided the matter in days. Once again, that is true. I covered that decision for CBS News as a legal analyst and it was a rocket pace. However, the Court was not looking at an approaching election but an approaching inauguration of the next president. The case was decided on December 12, 2000 — roughly three weeks away from the certification of the election by Congress.
This case is not going to decide whether an election can be held or whether a candidate can be certified. The original March trial date has already been discarded. It is not clear if a trial will occur before the election. It could still theoretically occur even with a June decision of the Court, though it is admittedly less likely with every delay.
That trial could cut both ways. Trump could be acquitted or convicted or it could result in a hung jury. The Court, however, rarely engages in such political calculations. Indeed, some justices may not agree with the exceptional treatment given this case by the appellate panel and may be resent the pressure to dispatch these claims to allow for a trial that may influence an election.
Notably, the Court has previously rejected expedited appeal requests from Trump, including some issues related to the last presidential election. This appeal is not dependent on the election or tied to its certification.
It is clear that, unlike the Nixon case, the court is not likely to be unanimous on this question. I have previously expressed doubt over the sweeping claim of immunity presented by the Trump team. However, justices may have good-faith concerns over the implications of the lower court decision as well.
Some justices have long supported a robust view of executive privilege and power. They may want to delineate the scope of this privilege with greater precision. In that sense, the Court could uphold the result of the D.C. Circuit while offering a different or more nuanced view of the immunity.
Of course, none of that is nearly as captivating as calling the justices “insurrectionists” or spinning tales of some retirement conspiracy with the RNC and the AARP.
Jonathan Turley teaches a course on the Supreme Court at George Washington University.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Dozens of conservative leaders demand that House Republicans adopt Rep. Chip Roy’s amendment protecting Americans who support traditional marriage. (Photo illustration: Image Source/Getty Images)
Dozens of leaders of conservative organizations planned to send a letter Friday to members of Congress demanding that the lawmakers adopt protections for religious Americans who support the traditional idea of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The signees urged House Republicans to protect religious freedom by prioritizing passage of the so-called Roy Marriage Amendment, named after Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Advancing American Freedom, a conservative policy organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, spearheaded the letter. It also includes signatures, among others, of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Joe Waresak, president of the James Dobson Family Institute; and Tom McClusky, director of government affairs for Catholic Vote.
If adopted, the Roy amendment would prohibit the government from engaging in “any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction” regarding marriage between a man and a woman, according to the text. The amendment also would prevent the federal government from eliminating a religious group’s tax exemption status for their beliefs on marriage.
Roy submitted the amendment to the House in 2022 in an attempt to include it with the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states and was passed in December of that same year.
The House has been attempting to avoid a partial government shutdown after failing to pass a new budget for fiscal year 2024 in September. Members voted Thursday to extend the deadline to March 8, prompting Advancing American Freedom to encourage lawmakers to push the Roy amendment through before a potential shutdown.
“This provision is needed now more than ever, for no one should ever fear government punishment for holding to traditional marriage as the unique blessing that it is for all. We strongly encourage you to once again include the Roy ‘Marriage Amendment’ in upcoming appropriations bills,” the conservative leaders’ letter concludes.
The real National threat to America? Joe Biden, Obama, and the Democrats. Their open-border policies have endangered American citizens more so than at any time in recent history. Rape, Murder, Fentanyl deaths, disease, Terrorists, MS-13 gangs, Human Trafficking, and assorted high rise in crime. Trump fixed this problem through executive orders that Biden ended when he came into office. This is not a Congress problem; this is a Biden problem, and he and the Democrats have blood all over their hands.
Joe Biden Is America’s Biggest National Security Threat
By New American Prophet
At the end of President Donald Trump’s administration, there was peace abroad and prosperity at home. After three years of President Joe Biden, Americans no longer enjoy economic prosperity, but face inflation and high interest rates. Also, there are major wars raging in Ukraine and in Gaza, while additional wars may be started by the brutal dictators in China and Venezuela. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Joe Biden Says He Disagrees With Catholic Church on Protecting Unborn Children • Missouri AG Sues Planned Parenthood for Taking Teens Out of State for Secret Abortions • Pro-Life Senator Stops Democrat IVF Bill That Allows Killing Unborn Children • Pro-Life Senator Katie Britt Will Give Republican Response To State Of The Union
More Pro-Life News • 22 States Support Idaho’s Abortion Ban That Protects Unborn Children • Pro-Life Group Files Brief to Strike Down Biden’s Abortion Mandate in Hospital Emergency Rooms • OBGYN Confirms Human Life Begins at Fertilization: “It’s a Matter of Simple Biology” • Unborn Children are Human Beings With a Right to Life – Even When it Comes to IVF • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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