If you need further proof that Democrats will go to extreme lengths to rig elections in their favor, look no further than the silent coup that occurred Sunday, when it was announced that Joe Biden would not seek reelection this November.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” read a letter posted by Biden’s X account. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
The whole episode resembles a storyline from a dystopian horror film. For years, Democrats and their legacy media allies pushed endless propaganda claiming a mentally declining Biden possessed the rigorous stamina required to be president. Just last month, media hacks were parroting debunked talking points put out by the White House claiming videos showcasing Biden’s frailty were “cheap fakes.”
And then the June 27 debate against Donald Trump happened. Realizing they could no longer hide Sleepy Joe’s mental decline and worrying that his cratering approval rating could cost them the 2024 election, the Democrat political machine jumped into action.
These political forces suddenly acknowledged what the general public has known since before the Delaware Democrat assumed the presidency. In a seemingly coordinated campaign, left-wing media acolytes, Democrat politicos, and Hollywood snobs spent the following weeks feigning a newfound concern about Biden’s ailing health and demanding he drop his reelection bid to “protect democracy.”
While Biden initially resisted calls to step aside, the Democrat-led pressure campaign was too big to overcome. Biden — or whoever is running things in the White House — dropped his reelection bid, tossing the 2024 nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris (or whoever the leftist oligarchy controlling the nomination process ultimately decides is the candidate). Like clockwork, these same forces are now praising him for the decision. For the party of “democracy,” it doesn’t matter that millions of Democrat primary voters are now disenfranchised. The machine got what it wanted.
A Repeat of Democrat Election Rigging
Much like their concentrated bid to remove Biden from the 2024 ticket, Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2020 contest involved participation from a variety of left-wing actors, both public and private. Under the guise of Covid, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which then siphoned the funds into local election offices. These “Zuckbucks” — which were heavily directed toward “blue” municipalities — were used to advance Democrat-backed voting policies, amounting to what was effectively a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
Around the same time, leftist election officials in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin circumvented their states’ respective legislatures by unilaterally changing election procedures regarding unsupervised practices such as mail-in balloting and the use of ballot drop boxes. Several of these actions were later determined to be illegal by state courts.
Democrats’ election rigging got even worse leading up to the November 2020 election. The New York Post’s release of a bombshell report revealing potentially incriminating information about Joe Biden found on Hunter Biden’s laptop prompted one of the largest censorship campaigns in modern American history. Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story with encouragement from the FBI, which had authenticated the laptop a year before the Post published its story.
Equally alarming were the efforts by 51 former intel officials to squash the laptop story by baselessly claiming it bore all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” The CIA reportedly solicited signatures for the letter, which Biden used during a debate with Trump to dismiss criticisms about the laptop’s contents, which detailed the Biden family business. One of the letter’s signatories claimed under oath that a phone call he had with then-Biden campaign official Antony Blinken in the weeks before the election prompted the letter’s creation.
These actions don’t even include the Justice Department’s reported bid to delay an investigation into Hunter over concerns that it could impact the 2020 election.
Expect Nothing Less This November
Democrats’ 2020 and 2024 election-rigging schemes are two sides of the same coin. Both cases show that there is no task the party of “democracy” won’t undertake to ensure its hold on state power. (In fact, Democrat efforts to rig the 2024 general election have been underway since Biden took office.)
Leftists’ success in removing Biden from the 2024 ballot should serve as a wake-up call to normie America about the security of our elections. The Democrat Party is a political force seeking total control over every facet of our government and society. Hoping they’ll play fair this November is a fool’s errand.
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
The American people are more than a week out from the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pa. We have few – if any – answers as to why it was allowed to occur. As a former Secret Service agent, I have three crucial questions that we need answers to right away.
1. Who Was Responsible for Securing the Building?
There was catastrophic failure in defining and communicating who was responsible for posting and holding the building where the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, accessed the rooftop and fired at President Trump and rally attendees from on Saturday, July 13th.
The way the Secret Service primarily defines and designates responsibility is through a series of events commonly known as the “7 Phases of Site Advance.” All agents are trained in this process prior to graduating from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.
We assess potential weaknesses and points of interest where a threat could emerge. We need to ask how the information or specific assignments regarding the duties of the Butler Township Police Department became unclear.
Simply put, the United States Secret Service is a Dual Mission Agency. It’s both investigative and protective. Though the Investigative Mission was the original purpose of the agency’s formation in 1865, in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, the United States Secret Service began protecting America’s presidents, vice presidents and other heads of state.
Over the last decade, the United States Secret Service (USSS) has been under a tremendous manpower strain due to limited resources. Numerous appeals to increase the budget for recruitment and to advance the agency’s technological capabilities have not been fruitful.
Many of these requests have been denied by the Department of Homeland Security and Congress. If granted, an increase was minimal to an already anemic budget. Combined with the high demand for additional details to be stood up at the request of current and past administrations, it has wreaked havoc on the agency and put additional strain on the obligation to keep protectees safe.
The last three administrations have all added additional protectees to the responsibility of the agency and the men and women of the United States Secret Service. Yet, there remains a tremendous strain on manpower, hence the need for the agency to rely so heavily on the local authorities to fill the gaps.
I am confident what the American people will see as the investigation unfolds is that the “rooftop” in question was addressed as a concern by the Counter Sniper & Counter Assault Team who are responsible for the tactical advance. With that said, due to manpower restraints, the outer perimeter posts are primarily manned by local counterparts. Though the agency cannot function without their cooperation, the reality is that policing and security are not the same – one is primarily reactive and the other proactive and preventative.
By using primarily reactive local counterpart units, there has always been a disconnect about why we in the security industry, especially the United States Secret Service, do things which those in the reactive industry normally carry out. For instance, standing on the roof of a building in the hot sun for hours to ensure the integrity of the site before, during and shortly after one of the agency’s protective visits.
For the shooter in Butler, Pa. to fall through the cracks is beyond me. We need to know who made the call for the local counterparts to remain inside the building rather than on top of the roof. If the directive to be on top of the building was given by the agency, then why, prior to taking the stage or arriving at the site once the site posts were manned and the site was secured, was a correction not made?
2) Why was President Trump allowed to take the stage at the time he did?
We must not assume, based on media reports, that the Secret Service and Butler Township police had information prior to President Trump taking the stage in Pennsylvania that Crooks was a person of interest, based upon media reports.
Based upon the writing captured in the online gaming platform he used to describe his “premiere” being on July 13, we can’t assume that anyone would know what his intentions were due to the vagueness of his post.
We must ask how the information was processed by local authorities within his parents’ jurisdiction and if that information was relayed to Butler Township and subsequently to the Secret Service.
Based upon my knowledge, skills, training, and professional experience, that statement alone from the parents would not constitute a threat. We must wait until there is a full investigation to be able to determine if the communications sequence of events is thoroughly examined to determine where the failure was and who is responsible.
Crooks appears to have impulsively put together a hasty plan within the 24–36 hours prior to the event. The USSS, for almost 3 decades, has conducted extensive research on these events and commonly refer to this as “pre-attack planning.” According to reports, his parents notified authorities he was missing and potentially had ill intentions towards former President Trump. This is what we commonly refer to as leakage.
There are now videos that have surfaced showing Crooks conducting what appears to be a site survey or reconnaissance. My question is: If the parents reported him to authorities and expressed his potential target as being President Trump, was that information relayed from the receiving agency to the Butler Township Police and further the protective detail?
Speaking from experience, it is common to have reports of an unknown suspicious person at protective sites. All efforts are made to locate the individual by the designated Counter Surveillance Team. If located, those individuals will be interviewed by the designated Protective Intelligence Team to determine their intentions. However, if the information were relayed and the authorities had an unknown suspicious person on the ground and there was an imminent threat, I believe the following questions would be appropriate to ask those in charge:
* Why the rush to get the president on stage?
* Why not delay?
Protective assignments 101 would dictate that you would hold off on having the person you are assigned to protect with protecting be put in a potentially life-threatening position.
The truth is that it would have taken little effort to take a tactical pause, assess the situation, locate the person of interest and prevent what the American people haven’t seen in 43 years – an assassination attempt on a president.
3. When will USSS Chief Kimberly Cheatle speak to the American people?
According to reports, the United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle will provide testimony before a Senate Panel this coming week to answer these questions.
As a former agent, I know the agency has a “One Voice Policy,” which I agree with. However, this is a historic event. I, former colleagues, and others currently serving in the agency feel her lack of transparency and decision not to speak to the American people was a failure. We deserve better.
To the men and women of the United States Secret Service, keep doing what you are doing. This is not a reflection of you but instead a reflection of failed policies, failed leadership, divisive politics, failed political appointments on numerous levels and those within the agency in higher leadership roles.
Some may have forgotten that it is you who breathe that breathes life into the agency. It is you that makes it happen on a day-to-day basis. Stay strong, lean on each other, band together and keep your head on a swivel.
This country needs you, the silent protectors, the ones who sacrifice births, first steps, weekends, holidays and other precious moments that we, as Americans, take for granted daily. You are the men and women in the arena.
We need answers as to who knew what and when. My hope is that Director Cheatle can provide some insights for the American people and the men and women of the Secret Service.
Michael Matranga is a former United States Secret Service Agent assigned to the Special Operations Division, Counter Assault Team & Presidential Protective Division. He currently serves as the owner & CEO of M6 Global Defense, a consulting firm dedicated to protecting America’s children and workplaces.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said Monday that her agency failed in its mission to protect former President Donald Trump during a highly contentious congressional hearing with lawmakers of both major political parties demanding she resign over security failures that allowed a gunman to scale a roof and open fire at a campaign rally.
In her first congressional hearing over the July 13 assassination attempt, Cheatle repeatedly angered lawmakers by evading questions, citing ongoing investigations. She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades. Cheatle acknowledged that the Secret Service was told about a suspicious person “between two and five times” before the shooting.
Yet, Cheatle gave no indication she intends to resign even as she said she takes “full responsibility” for any security lapses at the Pennsylvania rally. Cheatle vowed to “move heaven and earth” to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.
“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13th, we failed,” Cheatle said.
Lawmakers peppered Cheatle with questions about how the gunman could get so close to the Republican presidential nominee when he was supposed to be carefully guarded and about why Trump was allowed to take the stage after local law enforcement had identified Thomas Matthew Crooks as suspicious.
Cheatle acknowledged that Crooks had been seen by local law enforcement before the shooting with a rangefinder, a small device resembling binoculars that hunters use to measure distance from a target. She said the Secret Service would have paused the rally if agents had been told there was an “actual threat,” but she said there’s a difference between someone identified as suspicious and someone identified as a true threat.
Asked about why there were no agents on the roof where the shooter was located or if the Secret Service used drones to monitor the area, Cheatle said she is still waiting for the investigation to play out, prompting groans and outbursts from members on the committee.
“Director Cheatle, because Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is, you look incompetent,” said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio. “If he were killed you would look culpable.”
Cheatle, who has spent nearly three decades at the agency, remained defiant that she was the “right person” to lead the Secret Service despite the failures. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., noted that the Secret Service director who presided over the agency when there was an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan later stepped down.
“The one thing we have to have in this country are agencies that transcend politics and have the confidence of independents, Democrats, Republicans, progressives and conservatives,” Khanna said, adding that the Secret Service was no longer one of those agencies.
Trump was wounded in the ear, one rally attendee was killed, and two other attendees were injured after Crooks climbed atop the roof of a nearby building and opened fire with an AR-style rifle shortly after Trump started speaking at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The Secret Service has acknowledged it denied some requests by Trump’s campaign for increased security at his events in the years before the assassination attempt. But Cheatle said that there were “no assets denied” for the rally.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has called what happened a “failure” while several lawmakers have called on Cheatle to resign or for President Joe Biden to fire her. The Secret Service has said Cheatle does not intend to step down. So far, she retains the support of Biden, a Democrat, and Mayorkas.
Before the shooting, local law enforcement had noticed Crooks pacing around the edges of the rally, peering into the lens of a rangefinder toward the rooftops behind the stage where the president later stood, officials have told The Associated Press. An image of Crooks was circulated by officers stationed outside the security perimeter.
Witnesses later saw him climbing up the side of a squat manufacturing building that was within 135 meters (157 yards) of the stage. He then set up his rifle and lay on the rooftop, a detonator in his pocket to set off crude explosive devices that were stashed in his car parked nearby.
The attack on Trump was the most serious attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since Reagan was shot in 1981. It was the latest in a series of security lapses by the agency that has drawn investigations and public scrutiny over the years.
Authorities have been hunting for clues into what motivated Crooks but have not found any ideological bent that could help explain his actions. Investigators who searched his phone found photos of Trump, Biden and other senior government officials and found that he had looked up the dates for the Democratic National Conventional as well as Trump’s appearances. He also searched for information about major depressive order.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Below is my Hill column on President Joe Biden shifting his position on the Supreme Court and agreeing to “limits” on the Supreme Court. This ran before President Biden finally consented to withdraw from the race. It makes this last-ditch effort even more tragic for his legacy. He resisted these calls for 50 years, including roughly four years of his presidency. He only succumbed in the final six months as he struggled to save his candidacy. It did not work, but his pledge will outlast his presidency.
As I mentioned in the column, the ploy might not work, and Biden might not make it past the convention. The pledge, however, will remain and now Biden is committed to the ill-conceived legislation. After what I called “succession by defenestration” in yesterday’s column, Vice President Kamala Harris will likely want to show continuity in fulfilling this pledge. Indeed, judging from her past statements, she may double down on pushing for new limits. The irony is that his offer did not close the deal with the party for Biden, but he will now likely seek to fulfill the deal in limiting the Court.
Here is the earlier column (without changes due to the announcement):
This week, President Joe Biden finally named a price. As a growing number of panicked Democrats moved to force him off the ticket before the convention, Biden has offered something that the far left has demanded for years: limiting the Supreme Court. It was another defining moment for Biden, and it was far from complimentary.
Winston Churchill once purportedly asked an English socialite at a dinner if her principles would prevent her from sleeping with him for 5 million pounds. The socialite admitted that it would be hard to turn down such a fortune. Churchill then offered five pounds. When his aghast antagonist asked, “What type of woman do you think I am?” Churchill replied “We’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.”
This week, Biden finally stopped haggling and set his price.
According to the Washington Post, the president held a Zoom call with the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus, chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D.-Wash.) and co-chaired by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). He thrilled them by agreeing to “come out with a major initiative on limiting the court.” He added that he was looking to them for support because “I need some help.” Even the New York Times noted the timing as a shift in his position that would appeal to the far left of his party.
It was another reversal for the president prompted by political expediency like his flipping on the filibuster rule and, years ago, on abortion.
In the 2020 election, many of us were highly critical of Biden for refusing to reveal his position on packing the Supreme Court and other so-called reform proposals. It was one of the major issues in the election, but Biden refused to tell voters where he stood to avoid alienating both moderates and the far left. Liberal professors, pundits and politicians, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), continued to demand that the court be packed with an instant liberal majority.
During his administration, Biden sought to appease his base by establishing a commission that explored absurd, radical proposals for changing the court. As many of us predicted, Biden waited years and later admitted that he had no intention to pack the court. He then decided to run for reelection and faced a revolt in his party, including hysteria over his dismal polling numbers.
If those numbers were 10 points higher, the Supreme Court might be safe for another 10 years. However, it is now just another price for power.
In decades of public service, Biden has shown an impressive moral and political flexibility. He has shifted on almost every major issue as polls made his earlier positions unpopular, or when trying to appeal to a larger Democratic constituency. From abortion to gun rights to criminal justice, Biden does not allow principle to stand in the way of politics, and the politics today could not be more dire.
What is most striking about a term limits proposal is that it is completely removed from the substance of the left’s complaints. Ironically, while many believe that President Biden is too enfeebled to serve as president, no one has credibly made that claim about the older justices.
Oral arguments show that members such as Justice Clarence Thomas are active and impressive in questioning counsel in oral argument. One can certainly disagree with Thomas’s jurisprudential views, but there is no basis to question his mental acuity. The irony is crushing. Faced with calls for him to step aside due to his own cognitive decline, Biden is seeking to win reelection by pushing aside justices who are clearly more mentally fit for their own positions.
Term limits would hit conservatives harder than liberals on the court. It is reminiscent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s transparent and nonsensical 1937 effort to appoint a new justice for any justice who reaches the age of 70 and refuses to resign.
It just so happened that the age rule would negate the elderly “Four Horsemen” who were standing in the way of his New Deal legislation and allow him to instantly pack the court with six new Democratically selected members. When the court suddenly began to approve his programs in what was called “the switch in time that saved nine,” Democrats dropped the scheme.
Biden appears set to try to limit the court through legislation rather than a constitutional amendment since he knows that he could never get an amendment through Congress or the requisite three-quarters of state legislatures. It is not clear whether the new scheme would pass constitutional muster. Ultimately, it would have to be reviewed by . . . you guessed it . . . the Supreme Court.
The Biden legislation will likely be no more consequential than his Supreme Court commission. But it will be a cathartic moment for the far left, and it dangles the prospect of other changes, including court packing, if Democrats can secure both houses of Congress.
Those calls will only increase as advocates call for changing the court “by any means necessary.” We have already seen protesters harass justices at their homes and law professors encouraging the mob to get “more aggressive” in targeting individual justices.
The saddest aspect of this announcement is not what it says about the Supreme Court. The court was designed by the Framers to withstand such attacks. It was designed for this very moment.
The saddest aspect is what it says about a president who is done haggling. With a mutiny building in his party, President Biden is signaling that everything must go in a political Black Friday clearance. The Supreme Court is just the latest political commodity. But Biden has to wonder if this is all worth the prize even if he is able to make it beyond the Democratic National Convention.
Tell us this, Mr. President: When the haggling is over, what will be left of your legacy beyond your final asking price?
Below is my column in the Hill on the withdrawal of President Joe Biden from the 2024 election. After weeks of Democrats and the media raising the alarm of his mental capacity, Biden finally gave up his public refusal to step aside. Harris will now be the nominee through succession by defenestration or being tossed from a window. Yet, there remains a lingering question of Biden’s capacity to serve for another six months as president.
Here is the column:
President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw as the Democratic Party’s nominee solved an immediate problem for his party. Biden has plummeted in the polls as the vast majority of voters concluded that he is too diminished by age to serve another term. Yet, it has now created several new problems, including the obvious problem of a president who is viewed as incapable of running for an office that he continues to hold.
The Democratic Party essentially created its own political version of the 25th Amendment in forcing Biden off the ticket. This decision was about as voluntary as leaving a building by way of a window on the 46th floor. That is particularly the case when you are thrown out of the window by your closest friends.
The unseemly image of succession by defenestration will soon be whitewashed by a media that will praise Biden after weeks of declaring him incompetent and enfeebled.
That, however, leaves the lingering question after the fall. How can Biden remain in office when he is incapable of running for the office? Biden is notably vague about the reason for his withdrawal after maintaining for days that he will be the party’s nominee. He simply says that it is in the best interests of the country.
The Democratic establishment has two equally unappealing options.
First, it could argue that Biden was withdrawing out of recognition that he is no longer politically viable. But that makes a mockery out of the democratic process. Millions of people went through the primary elections to select him as their nominee. Now he would be set aside and replaced by a vote of the party establishment like a shift in the Russian politburo.
Second, it could admit that Biden was, as stated for weeks in the media and by figures like Special Counsel Robert Hur, greatly diminished both mentally and physically. However, that makes this withdrawal an admission that could trigger a fight under the 25th Amendment. The development could create a new constitutional controversy. The 25th Amendment was written with largely physical disabilities in mind. If a president is comatose, the incapacity is obvious and Section 4 allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to sign a declaration to Congress that a president is incapable of holding office.
However, Harris is eager to avoid the image of Brutus in the dispatching of the president. To support such a declaration would risk Biden proclaiming “Et tu, Kamala?” to the nation. The key to succession by defenestration is not to be seen as the hand that pushes the president out the window. Politics follows the same rules as the mafia for capo di tutti i capi: Kill a don, never be a don. While sometimes honored in the breach in the mob, it is hardly an auspicious path for a politician.
There is, however, another intriguing possibility.
Section 4 provides that a president’s fitness can be put before Congress when the “Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may by law provide.”
Previously Democrats have cited that language to suggest that they could create their own body to force former President Donald Trump out of office. Indeed, Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-Md.) sponsored legislation called the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act to create a commission empowered to examine a president to Congress on the president’s capacity. It would circumvent the necessity of getting Harris to be the primary hand that dispatched a president.
The question is whether Congress will now make this decision to warrant an investigation or even a Raskin-like bill. This is different than President Lyndon Johnson’s decision on March 31, 1968, that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” That was before any primaries. In this case, Biden won a primary in which the Democratic Party obstructed anyone who would challenge him and barred any debate.
Millions voted for him, and tens of millions of dollars were contributed to his campaign. He is now withdrawing weeks before accepting the nomination. That unprecedented decision alone would warrant a House investigation into Biden’s continuing capacity to serve in an office that he no longer believes he can run to occupy after January 2025.
Before this decision, a special counsel cited President Biden’s diminished faculties as a reason not to indict him for unlawfully retaining and handling classified material. Now, the president is effectively saying that, in addition to being allegedly too diminished to be prosecuted, he is too diminished to run for the office that he currently holds.
The question is whether Biden has ended the fight to retain his nomination only to trigger a fight to retain his office.
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Whistleblowers inside the Department of Homeland Security have alleged that the majority of the security detail for former President Donald Trump were “not even Secret Service,” according to a Republican lawmaker. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri relayed these claims in a public letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Friday outlining a series of security failures at Trump’s fateful Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office. According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event,” Hawley wrote in the letter. “For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., (left) and Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas (right). (Getty Images)
Other lapses in security protocol allegedly included a lack of personnel stationed around the security perimeter and an inadequately enforced buffer zone around the podium.
Among the most troubling is the claim that the majority of personnel protecting the former president were not U.S. Secret Service (USSS) agents.
“Whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” Hawley wrote. “This is especially concerning given that HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations.”
🚨🚨 Whistleblowers tell me that MOST of Trump’s security detail working the event last Saturday were not even Secret Service. DHS assigned unprepared and inexperienced personnel 👇 pic.twitter.com/eo4jNmJWFT
The Missouri senator criticized the DHS for failing to provide information about the incident to Congress and “abruptly ending the only call with USSSS before most senators could even ask a question.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., previously detailed the Secret Service briefing given to senators on Wednesday about the recent assassination attempt against former President Trump, saying there had been “virtually no information” provided.
“The director of the Secret Service did admit there were mistakes and gaffes,” Johnson said, referring to Kimberly Cheatle. But the briefing, which was given by a separate official, “was largely irrelevant,” according to Johnson. Only four senators were allowed to ask questions and there were no follow-ups, he said.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by security personnel after being shot in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Hawley’s letter demands answers to a series of questions relevant to the claims made by the whistleblowers, including the ratio of USSS to HSI agents and pre-rally security investigations.
Fox News Digital’s Julia Johnson contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at timothy.nerozzi@fox.com
President Joe Biden vowed on Friday to continue his campaign for reelection even as eight more fellow Democrats in Congress urged him to end his floundering campaign, fearing that it could cost the party dearly in the Nov. 5 election. Biden remained defiant, saying he would resume campaigning soon.
“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America,” he said in a statement, referring to a policy plan developed by Trump’s conservative allies.
The divide among Democrats stood in sharp contrast to the scenes that played out his week at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where former party rivals united around Trump, who accepted the Republican nomination in a rambling speech that featured his familiar mix of grievance and bombast.
So far, 31 of the 264 Democrats in Congress have openly called for Biden to end his campaign, while other senior Democratic leaders have pushed him behind the scenes to do so, according to sources and media reports. Democrats are increasingly worried about a Republican sweep in the Nov. 5 election that could leave Trump and his allies not only in charge of the White House but also with majorities in both chambers of Congress.
“Your candidacy is on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races down ballot. It is for these reasons that I urge you to step aside,” wrote Representative Zoe Lofgren, one of eight Democratic lawmakers to call on Biden to drop out on Friday.
Lofgren is a close ally of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the most influential Democrats. Pelosi has not publicly called on Biden to drop out but has privately told him he cannot win, according to a White House source speaking on condition of anonymity.
After weeks of insisting he will remain in the race, sources say Biden is now taking calls to step aside seriously, and multiple Democratic officials think an exit is a matter of time. A Democratic group called Pass the Torch said it would run TV ads on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” one of Biden’s favorite shows, urging him to drop out.
‘A LOT OF WORK TO DO’
Biden campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon acknowledged that Biden faces a difficult path to reelection but said his support has not fallen significantly in recent weeks.
“We have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are reassuring the American people that, yes, he’s old, but he can do the job and he can win,” she said on MSNBC.
Though a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this week found Biden and Trump effectively tied nationally, strategists from both parties say Biden’s path to victory is narrowing as he trails in most of the battleground states that will decide the election.
Were Biden to step aside as a candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, could fill the role. Reuters/Ipsos polling shows her as performing marginally better against Trump in a theoretical head-to-head matchup.
Harris will address a group of donors on short notice on Friday afternoon, at the request of Biden senior advisers, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Democrats could face some limits on what they can do with the $91 million Biden’s campaign had on hand as of the end of last month if he were to drop out, according to campaign finance experts.
TRUMP TIGHTENS GRIP ON REPUBLICANS
Trump on Thursday night delivered a dramatic account of the attempt on his life by a gunman at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday and sought to appeal to undecided voters and said he would be a president for “all of America, not half of America.”
But he spent much of the rest of his 92-minute acceptance speech repeating well-worn attacks on the Biden administration and attacking migrants.
He claimed once more that his criminal indictments were part of a Democratic conspiracy, predicted Biden would usher in “World War Three” and described what he called an “invasion” of migrants over the southern border.
Trump and his 39-year-old running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, are due to campaign on Saturday in Michigan, one of three Rust Belt states seen as must-wins for Biden’s campaign.
President Joe Biden speaks at the NAACP’s national convention Tuesday in Las Vegas. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Conservative pundit Michael Knowles says that President Joe Biden demolished his own plan to brand former President Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” after the assassination attempt on the Republican presidential nominee.
“What the near-assassination of Trump did is, it took all the wind out of the sails of the Biden campaign,” Knowles said in an interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
Knowles, a Daily Wire host, pointed to the fact that Biden publicly said he was thankful Trump survived the shooting, which injured the former president and two rallygoers and killed a third.
Biden’s reelection bid “is premised entirely on the lie that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, that Trump admires Hitler, that he is, in some way, the second coming of Hitler, and his political project is an existential threat to our sacred democracy and the Constitution and the country,” Knowles said mockingly on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast.
“The moment Biden said, ‘I’m so grateful that Trump is OK,’ he admitted that was all a lie,” Knowles explained. “You wouldn’t be happy that Hitler was OK. You wouldn’t be happy that the existential threat to your country [was] OK. So, that campaign went away.”
Watch the full episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” to hear Knowles and Roberts discuss the future of Trump’s campaign ahead of the November elections.
Below is my column in USA Today on the decision to dismiss the Florida case against former president Donald Trump. The decision will soon force the Eleventh Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court in the wonderland of Special Counsels.
Here is the column:
In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the Mad Hatter asks Alice, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” It turned out that the Mad Hatter had no better idea than Alice. In her 93-page order, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon seemed to face the same dilemma when she asked special counsel Jack Smith why a private citizen is like a confirmed U.S. attorney. On Monday, she dismissed the criminal case against former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.
Cannon has struggled with the assertion of Attorney General Merrick Garland that he may pick private citizens to serve as special counsels and exercise greater authority than a federal prosecutor without any appointment under the Constitution or clear statutory authority. The Biden administration has argued that even asking about its authority is as absurd and frivolous as asking about ravens and writing desks. It notes that most courts have dismissed these claims with little argument or consideration.
Yet, Cannon kept coming back to the question: Why is a private citizen like a confirmed U.S. attorney?
Justice Clarence Thomas raised same issue in Trump immunity case
“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,” Thomas wrote. “The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”
Someone just did. Cannon found the question neither frivolous nor easy. After all, we have a demanding constitutional process for the presidential appointment of a U.S. attorney and the Senate confirmation of that nominee. Yet, the Justice Department has argued that Garland can either follow that constitutional process or just grab any private citizen (like former top Justice Department official Jack Smith) to exercise more power than a federal prosecutor. Moreover, he can make such unilateral appointments by the gross if he wants.
Cannon also noted that the special counsel is pulling funds from the Treasury ($12 million by the latest count) without any clear appropriation from Congress.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution states, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Yet, Smith is pulling money under a permanent indefinite appropriation reserved for an “independent counsel.”
He is not an independent counsel, however, because the Independent Counsel Act expired in 1999. This means Smith must show some “other law” granting him this authority. The court said that he failed to do so.
‘Very little oversight or supervision’
Cannon noted that “there does appear to be a ‘tradition’ of appointing special-attorney-like figures in moments of political scandal throughout the country’s history. But very few, if any, of these figures actually resemble the position of Special Counsel Smith. Mr. Smith is a private citizen exercising the full power of a United States Attorney, and with very little oversight or supervision.”
From the outset, I have maintained that the Florida case was the greatest threat to Trump. Where the other cases had serious constitutional, statutory and evidentiary flaws, the Florida case was based on well-established laws and precedent.
It was not the law but the lawyer who proved to be the problem. Jack Smith was himself the argument that would bring down his case − at least for now.
The special counsel said Monday that he will appeal, but the decision makes any trial in Florida before the election virtually impossible. That in itself is a huge victory for Trump.
Smith still has a second case in Washington, D.C., with an ideal judge and jury pool. However, the Supreme Court recently ripped the wings off that case by first limiting the use of obstruction charges (which constitute half of the four counts against Trump) and then declared that Trump is either absolutely immune or presumptively immune on a wide array of acts and evidence impacting the indictment.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has proved very favorable to Smith in moving away obstacles to try Trump before the election. However, perhaps for that reason, the Supreme Court went out of its way to narrow her range of movement on these questions.
Thus, even if Chutkan refuses to reconsider the constitutional issues on Smith’s appointment, she will be hard pressed to hold a trial before the election and even harder pressed to make it stick on appeal.
In the end, the appointment question has good-faith arguments on both sides, which Judge Cannon acknowledged in her detailed opinion. She could be reversed on appeal, but this issue seems likely to go to the Supreme Court.
Immunity case could go up to Inauguration Day
Convicting Trump either before or after the election seems to be Smith’s overriding priority. The Washington Post reported this month that the special counsel is prepared to pursue the conviction of Trump until Jan. 20, when Trump would take the oath of office if elected in November.
The problem for Smith is now another question worthy of the Mad Hatter: What can crawl and fly with only hands but no legs or wings?
The answer is the one thing that Smith no longer has: time.
We previously discussed how Hunter Biden adopted the arguments of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun rights groups to challenge the law that his father has championed as a key gun control reform. In his effort to challenge his various charges, Hunter Biden has gone full Trump. Now, Hunter has adopted the Trump argument that special counsels are unconstitutional in seeking to toss out all of the charges by Special Counsel David Weiss, it is the very argument that Democrats and liberal law professors have denounced as meritless and menacing. Having recently embraced the conservative justices in challenging gun laws, Hunter is now channeling Justice Clarence Thomas on the unconstitutionality of special counsel appointments — an argument that his father denounced as wrong and “specious.”
I recently discussed the decision of Judge Aileen Cannon to strike down the Florida case against former President Donald Trump. Law professors ridiculed the concurrence of Justice Thomas in arguing that special counsels lack a constitutional foundation.
Biden is now asking the federal courts to adopt the Thomas position. On Thursday, courts in California and Delaware were asked to dismiss the criminal tax and gun cases against Biden.
The motions track the analysis of Judge Cannon and argue that “the Attorney General relied upon the exact same authority to appoint the Special Counsel in both the Trump and Biden matters, and both appointments are invalid for the same reason.”
I wrote in my column that the challenges seem to draw courts into the Wonderland of Special Counsels.
In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the Mad Hatter asks Alice, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” It turned out that the Mad Hatter had no better idea than Alice.
In her 93-page order, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon seemed to face the same dilemma when she asked Special Counsel Jack Smith why a private citizen is like a confirmed U.S. Attorney.
However, a key difference between Smith and Weiss is that it could lead these courts to asking, “why is a Weiss like a Smith?” The extent that he is not could prove a critical distinction. Weiss is a Senate confirmed U.S. Attorney where Smith was a private citizen plucked by Merrick Garland from the general population for the position.
Biden is seeking to brush over that Mad Hatter anomaly:
“The constitutional flaw at the center of the Special Counsel’s appointment is that Congress has not established the office of a Special Counsel. Given that Congress requires a U.S. Attorney to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, it makes no sense to assume that Congress would allow the Attorney General to unilaterally appoint someone as Special Counsel with equal or greater power than a U.S. Attorney. That is what has been attempted here.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Many feel the Media’s years of flaming rhetoric against Donald Trump is mostly to blame for the violent attack on the former president.
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.
MILWAUKEE — The man who would be vice president formally introduced himself to a jubilant Republican National Convention on Wednesday evening in Wisconsin — and to voters nationwide. And he had a very compelling story to tell.
Sen. James David “J.D.” Vance, R-Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s freshly minted running mate, accepted the nomination and addressed his fellow Republicans, his fellow Americans. What many heard was a guy who, despite being a millennial millionaire, shares an all-too-common upbringing in impoverished rural America. Vance, the author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, literally wrote the book on it.
At 39, Vance is one of the youngest vice presidential candidates in American history, nearly 40 years Trump’s junior. The significant age spread is by design in an election year where, once again, two elderly men — at least at the moment — are the major party standard bearers on the ballot.
From Humble Beginnings
By many measures, Vance is the epitome of the American Dream. He grew up in poverty, a “family tradition” in rust-belt Middletown, Ohio, and in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. The son of a drug-addicted mother and a father who left him, Vance, as they say, rose above his circumstances. He went to college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the Marines and the Iraq War. He earned his law degree from Yale and made a very comfortable living in venture capital. Vance’s bleak memoir was made into a movie in 2020, a couple of years before his successful Senate run.
“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be standing here tonight,” Vance told the thousands of conventiongoers assembled at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and the millions more watching across the country.
God and Mamaw
While his parents were absent from much of his childhood, Vance said he had God.
And Mamaw.
The senator’s “guardian angel” grandmother raised him. She was tough as nails, Vance said, a Christian woman who loved the Lord nearly as much as she loved the “F word.” Mamaw once told her grandson that if she ever caught him again hanging out with a kid who was a notorious drug dealer in town, she’d run the boy over with her car.
“And she said, J.D., no one would ever find out about it,” Vance recalled. The convention hall erupted in laughter, then echoed with a chant of “Mamaw.” The GOPers love them some Mamaw. They seemed pretty taken by her successful grandson too.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate said he made it out of the generational poverty that has trapped so many of his family and friends. He escaped through hard work, with the help of his guardian angel, and by the grace of God, Vance said. Every now and then, he said, he’ll get a call from a relative back home asking if he remembered this person or that. As a face in time fills his mind, Vance said he’s often told that the old neighbor or schoolmate has died of a drug overdose.
‘Failed and Failed’
“As usual, America’s ruling class wrote the check. Communities like mine paid the price,” he said. He then took aim at the members of said ruling class — Democrats and Republicans — who have over the last generation-plus enriched themselves while average Americans have suffered. The people on the list of D.C. elites include Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. None more, Vance stressed, than career politician Biden, hungry for another term in a rematch with Trump.
“For decades, that divide between the few — with their power and comfort in Washington — and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who governed this country have failed and failed again,” he said.
There is, of course, according to Vance, one exception to the governing class rule: businessman Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran on nothing short of a revolution to “drain the swamp.” Vance wasn’t on board the Trump train then, blasting Trump as “reprehensible” during his first run. Vance has had a change of heart since those early days, becoming one of the more ardent defenders of Trump’s vision of “making America Great Again.” Biden’s curious victory in 2020 put the MAGA agenda on hold. Trump’s new running mate sounds like he is champing at the bit to help the former president bring it back and make the case, particularly in the critical swing states, for a return to Trumpenomics and homeland sanity.
“It’s about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying your jobs,” Vance said. “It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin, who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.”
“It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country,” Vance hammered.
Trump’s running mate wasn’t simply speaking to the party; he was attempting to connect with what he called the “cast aside and forgotten.” In the tradition of Trump.
The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway, also covering the convention with wife and Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway, told me in a “Federalist Radio Hour” podcast that the GOP establishment types aren’t happy with the Vance VP pick, a good sign Trump made the right call.
Meanwhile, Democrats and their corporate media public-relations firms have spent the past couple of days trying to diminish Trump’s lieutenant, as the corporate media are wont to do. The Atlantic’s Stuart Stevens lamented Ohio transforming from a swing state to a dependable red. He decried the Buckeye State’s abandonment of weak-kneed RINOs for Trumpicans like Vance.
“But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values,” Stevens whined.
The old guard, Vance tried to convey to voters, is part of why this republic is in so much trouble.
‘The American Story’
David Arredondo, former chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party, part of the Cleveland metropolitan area, told me Vance brings pluses and minuses to the ticket, but a lot more positives than negatives.
“He checks all the boxes,” Arredondo said. Vance is young and a veteran. And Vance’s experience with poverty and family drug addiction, Arredondo said, makes him relatable to voters billionaire Trump needs to win the election.
“It’s the American story of the person who started from nothing and became great,” he said.
David Arredondo, former chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party
As the former county GOP chairman noted, Vance won a lot of Ohio hearts and minds following the devastating train derailment in East Palestine in early 2023. He was there. So was Trump, handing out bottled water and standing with a broken community as Biden and his competence-challenged transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, were slow to show up to the conservative-leaning community near the border of Pennsylvania. Biden waited a year. He was not well received.
“Vance’s quick response to the train derailment and advocacy for local residents landed him in the spotlight and earned him a front row seat in the news for months. Trump joined Vance and other Ohio lawmakers on Feb. 22, 2023, to shake the hands of local residents and distribute water, food and other supplies to those desperately in need of necessities,” Fox News reported shortly after Trump announced Vance as his second-in-command.
Vance closed with a vow to the “cast aside and forgotten.”
“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” he said.
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.
A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from continuing to implement a new student debt relief plan designed to lower monthly payments for millions of Americans.
The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by seven Republican-led states to put on hold parts of the U.S. Department of Education’s debt relief plan that had not already been blocked by a lower-court judge.
That ruling last month by U.S. District Judge John Ross in St. Louis had blocked the department from granting further loan forgiveness under the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan but had not blocked all of the plan.
That plan provides more generous terms than past income-based repayment plans, lowering monthly payments for eligible borrowers and allowing those whose original principal balances were $12,000 or less to have their debt forgiven after 10 years.
State attorneys general led by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey subsequently last week asked the 8th Circuit to block the rest of the SAVE Plan. The court did so through a one-page order granting an administrative stay.
Bailey on the social platform X hailed the ruling as a “huge win for every American who still believes in paying their own way.” He said the student loan plan “would have saddled working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in Ivy League debt.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carnegie Mellon University Professor Uju Anya has joined the ranks of academics spreading the conspiracy theory that the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was “staged.” As for the killing and wounding of bystanders, Anya explained that “that’s exactly what they do.” We previously discussed other academics who have spread this conspiracy theory. However, few are willing to go as far as Professor Anya in explaining how the other victims were used to make the staging more plausible. Anya declared:
“It was staged. Like a stupid Tubi movie set in the Bronx with palm trees in the background. They lie, and people die. That’s exactly what they do
…That’s the record. Whatever ‘attack’ on him they set up to stoke his followers’ fears and sentiments threat and persecution has now cost lives.
…And people died behind this farce. Actual people’s lives gone for them to stage this stupid show. People dying doesn’t make the attack any less staged. Someone who thought the attack was real could’ve killed others trying to prevent harm. Also, someone could’ve shot the shooter to hide the plot.”
The faculty bio states that Anya is an Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition. She describes herself as
“a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism. My primary fields of
inquiry are critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students.”
Likewise, in a now since-deleted Threads posting, Professor of Psychology at San Diego Mesa College Inna Kanevsky also fueled the baseless conspiracy theory. She posted
“‘He took a bullet for his country!’ No, he didn’t. He took it, like everything else he
took and keeps taking, for himself. For his own personal aggrandizement.”
Professor Anya has long been a controversial figure including her wish that Queen Elizabeth would die a long “excruciating” death. She later doubled down on the hateful statements.
She also tweeted out crude remarks about the 2022 elections: “contrary to all these major media outlets, the red wave coming is my period on Friday.”
So, these and other faculty believe that Trump enlisted a kid who was thrown out of his high school shooting club as a bad shot to wing him at 130 yards from a sloped position. The conspiracists also decided to kill or wound some supporters to make the staging look real. In our age of rage, this all makes sense to these professors.
I agree with Professor Anya that such political statements are protected speech. However, her unhinged and hateful commentary exposes the radicalism of many faculty in higher education today.
France’s Sports Minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, has announced that French Muslim athletes will be barred from wearing hijabs at the Olympics. The decision is a gross violation of the religious freedom of Muslim athletes and should be condemned throughout the world.
I have long been critical of the French crackdown on Muslim head coverings and swimwear. Officials insist that such religious clothing is inconsistent with the secular laws of the country. The denial of basic religious freedom in France is consistent with the French denial of free speech protections. As discussed in my new book, free expression is in tatters in France.
France has been a leader in the rollback on free speech in the West with ever widening laws curtailing free speech. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
The freedoms of speech and religion are co-existent and co-dependent. Religious speech is the leading target of government crackdowns under blasphemy laws and censorship systems. The freedom of speech sustains all other rights, which is why it is accurately called “the indispensable right.”
It is little surprise that a nation that criminalizes speech would also deny religious expression and observances.
There should be global outrage over the refusal to allow French Muslim women to adhere to their religious values in sporting events. These women want to compete for their nation, but their nation will not allow them to do so in a way that is consistent with their faith.
Every nation should protest this action and demand that France reverse its intolerant position.
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 • Kamala Harris Goes to Michigan to Promote Killing More Babies in Abortions • Biden Will Propose Radical Changes to the Supreme Court • Tucker Carlson: “Every Bad Person in Washington is Aligned Against J.D. Vance” • Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump Reminds Us That Life is Precious
More Pro-Life News • 68 Members of Congress File Brief to Support Defunding Planned Parenthood • 9 Years Ago This Week, Planned Parenthood Was First Exposed Selling Aborted Baby Parts • Biden Sees Massive Drop in Support From Black Women • Parents Sue Vermont for Denying Them Adoption License Because of Their Christian Views • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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All together now. Shout it loud and strong with conviction.
The Democrat party is working out a way to “DISENFRANCHISE” YOUR VOTE. As a responsible patriot, you took the time to vote in the primary of your state. You let your voice be heard. Your expression of choice firmly established in your ballot. Now, because the DNC no longer believes that President Biden, your choice, your vote, your desire, is no longer of any value, and are searching for ways to “DISENFRANCHISE” YOUR VOTE.
You’re correct. It is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. But they told you that doesn’t matter to them with all the highly illegal lawfare they’ve been involved with these last three years.
Oh, by the way, The United States of America was formed as a “REPUBLIC”, NOT A “DEMOCRACY”. During their deliberations, the decision was made early to avoid a democracy at all costs. You see, a democracy is 51% of the people controlling the 49%: Mob Rule.
A Republic is a government controlled by the citizens who hire representatives to vote as they desire to form laws that benefit all the people. A Republic is equal to all, regardless of the size of the State. Democracy pits the majority, against the minority, and uses mob violence to enforce mob rule.
When you think about the last three years, you’ll recall all the mob violence that has occurred. Remember the uneasiness, the fright, the fear, the uncertainty of what life was going to be? Yeah. Not good. Democracy relies on that kind of “control by fear”. Did you notice who refused to do anything about that violence?
Well, now they’ve made the decision to do what they’ve incorrectly told you the Republicans want to do. They are looking for ways to “DISENFRANCHISE” YOUR VOTE.
We don’t want that. We hold to the Constitution as the framers intended. You’re always welcomed here.
The officer who confronted Thomas Matthew Crooks on the roof radioed a "blanket tactical channel" that there was "an individual on the roof with a weapon" before the assassination attempt on President Trump.
It’s clear by now that the U.S. Secret Service is not a very elite security detail. Random, weaponless rallygoers paid more serious attention to the would-be assassin before he fired than the allegedly professional team assigned to Donald Trump on Saturday. Trump’s security detail did not secure him. Someone else did.
The Person who saved Trump’s life — and our nation from dangerous social unrest — is Jesus Christ. It is not random that wind gusts were present in just the right amount to have shifted the bullet’s course from fatal to flesh wound. It is not accidental that Trump turned his head at precisely the right second to avoid sudden death.
To phrase it as Whittaker Chambers did in explaininghis conversion from atheism to Christianity, which began when he watched his toddler eating: “My eye came to rest on the intricate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. … They could have been created only by immense design.’ … I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid on my forehead.”
The finger of God was also laid on Trump’s forehead Saturday night, turning it in the precise direction at the precise moment to spare his life. The chances of everything occurring as it did by random chance are impossibly improbable. No, the only Person who saved Trump is the same Person Who saves anyone who is ever saved: Jesus Christ, the God of the universe in human flesh.
He Who Controls Both Body and Soul
The whole world watched a miracle in live-time on global TV Saturday night. We watched in striking color the reality that the life and death of every person — and nation — is held in God’s hands. It is Jesus Christ who proclaims:
[D]o not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So, everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
This is why the Christian martyrs often surprised their captors by boldly declaring that no one could put them to death. For the true God promises that “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” The good man who died saving other people’s lives in Pennsylvania Saturday, Corey Comperatore, believed in Him Who Is “the resurrection, and the life,” and Who promises, “[W]hosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
According to Comperatore’s daughter, he was a “man of God” who “loved Jesus fiercely.” No one took Comperatore’s life. Like his Savior, Jesus Christ, he laid it down for those he loved. Also, like Jesus Christ, he will rise again. In the same chapter of Matthew quoted above, Jesus promises, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” See you in eternity, brother.
The Power of Life and Death Is God’s
Saturday was not Trump’s Day to die. His near-death experience was a very visible divine event displaying to all the world Who holds full power over life and death: Jesus Christ. It is a spiritual shock treatment to increase the faith of those who believe and ignite new faith in those ready to believe.
Even with a highly competent Secret Service, Trump could fall at any time God chooses, to any malady. Like every one of us, he could have — God forbid, of course — a heart attack, an aneurysm, or myriad other fatal events. Not even the world’s best doctors or warriors can stop death. The best they can do is sometimes delay it.
As Proverbs says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes.” Yes, the king’s heart and his head as well. The psalmist says, “But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. … I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.”
No one but God shifted Trump’s head that day, and no one but God decides when Trump will meet his Maker. It’s direct and clear evidence that, yes, there is a God, and he divinely intervenes in human affairs.
Miracles Are Proof God Is Real
Miracles are everywhere. They are proof that God is real. And the fact that He’s real should change all of us every moment of our lives.
Miracles are both a rare and everyday occurrence. Every time a child is conceived is a miracle. That happens hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of times each day. It’s a miracle there aren’t more wars, that millions of people have clean and even hot water, that billions of people can eat enough to stay alive every day. Such quotidian miracles are typically hidden: inside mothers’ bodies, plastic pipes, farmers’ tools, the everyday.
Miracles like the one we saw Saturday are rarer and thus a special call for us all to stop, reflect, and pray. That’s because, if we’re honest, we all understand that any of us could die at any moment and face God’s just judgment, yet so many of us are mercifully spared each minute. This highly visible mercy for our undeserving nation calls for national and international gratitude, repentance, faith, and prayer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speaks during a Get Out The Vote meet and greet at IATSE Local 80 on March 4, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Nick Pope is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff called on President Joe Biden to leave the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday. Schiff—a high-profile Democrat—made a public appeal to Biden to quit the race so that a different candidate can be on the ticket against former President Donald Trump in November, the congressman told the Los Angeles Times. The California Democrat, who is also running for Senate, becomes the 21st congressional Democrat to have called upon Biden to drop out following the president’s disastrous performance in his first presidential debate against Trump in June, according to The New York Times.
Biden“has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a Vice President, and now as President has made our country better,” Schiff said in his statement to the Los Angeles Times. “But our nation is at a crossroads. A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
The decision about whether to stay in the race “is President Biden’s alone,” Schiff told the outlet, adding that he thinks it is time for Biden “to pass the torch” to a different candidate and “secure his legacy of leadership.” However, Schiff made clear to the outlet that he will still support Biden or whoever else may be on the ticket in November.
“I will do everything I can to help them succeed,” Schiff told the Los Angeles Times. “There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high.”
The internal Democratic effort to push Biden out of the race is reportedly back on after the failed assassination attempt against Trump on Saturday altered the nation’s political landscape. Numerous national, swing state and internal polls show that Trump is currently in the driver’s seat as November draws closer, prompting a major Democratic concern about Biden’s prospects and even the outcomes of key congressional races down the ballot.
Moreover, leading Democratic donors are reportedly freezing about $90 million in donations to a major pro-Biden political action committee (PAC) unless or until Biden gets out of the race. However, the president has so far shown no intention of stepping aside to make space for a different candidate to run against Trump, as he and his campaign have both vociferously dismissed suggestions that he should quit as an elite narrative that is out of touch with how voters feel about the president and his record.
Schiff, one of the leading promoters of the debunked Russiagate investigation into Trump, won the Democratic primary for the Senate seat currently occupied by fellow Democrat LaPhonza Butler. The late Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein formerly occupied the seat, to which Butler was appointed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom after Feinstein passed away in September 2023.
Winston Churchill once famously said that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
For Donald Trump, the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania could prove politically exhilarating. After rising with a fist pump and a call to fight on, Trump seems to have gone from being a movement to a mythological figure with his supporters. All he needs now is a big blue ox named Babe to return to the campaign trail.
This assassination attempt should also concentrate the minds of everyone on the escalating rhetoric in this campaign, particularly the media in maintaining inflammatory narratives. Yet, the hateful and unhinged language has continued unabated from academics declaring that the assassination attempt was staged to those who complain that the only problem was that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.
For years, Democrats have repeated analogies of Trump to Hitler and his followers to brownshirted neo-Nazis. Indeed, defeating Trump has been compared to stopping Hitler in 1933. The narrative began as soon as Trump was elected when the press and pundits uniformly and falsely claimed that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and Klansmen in 2017 as “fine people” in Charlottesville.
It did not matter. The press and politicians have hammered away at the notion that Trump is seeking to end democracy and that everyone from gay people to reporters will be “disappeared.”
After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, Rachel Maddow went on the air with a hysterical claim that “death squads” had just been green lighted by conservatives. Democratic strategist Jame Carville insists that Trump’s reelection will bring “the end of the Constitution.”
It is all what I call “rage rhetoric” in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” The book explores centuries of rage politics and political violence. This is not our first age of rage but it could well be the most dangerous.
Two years before the assassination attempt, I appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the expansion of domestic terrorism investigations. Democrats were seeking to pressure the FBI to focus on far-right groups as potential terrorist groups. The use of political views rather than conduct has been used historically to crackdown on groups from socialists to anarchists to feminists.
The narrative that the threat of violence is coming primarily from the Right is demonstrably false but consistently echoed in the media. We have seen a growing level of leftist violence in the last decade. That includes riots in cities like Portland and Seattle where billions of dollars of damage occurred, hundreds of officers injured, and many citizens killed. In 2020 alone, 25 people were killed in the protests.
The Democrats often raise the Jan. 6th riot, and it is important to acknowledge that the damage extended to an attack on our constitutional process. However, the preceding protest around the White House caused more injuries and more property damage. Then President Trump had to be removed to a safe location as Secret Service feared a breach of the White House.
There were a reported 150 officers injured (including at least 49 Park Police officers around the White House) in the Lafayette Park riot. Protesters caused extensive property damage including the torching of a historic structure and the attempted arson of St. John’s Church.
Mass shootings by leftist gunmen have repeatedly occurred but those are treated as one off while any conservative shooter is part of a pattern of right-wing violence.
Keith Ellison, the Democratic attorney general of Minnesota, mocked the notion of liberal violence. In one tweet, he declared “I have never seen @BernieSanders supporters being unusually mean or rude. Can someone send me an example of a ‘Bernie Bro’ being bad. Also, are we holding all candidates responsible for the behavior of some of their supporters? Waiting to hear.”
Republican Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana replied dryly: “I can think of an example.” Scalise was severely wounded at the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice by a Sanders supporter.
Ellison was a particularly ironic Democratic politician to repeat this mantra. When he was the Democratic National Committee deputy chair, Ellison praised Antifa, a violent anti-free speech group that regularly attacks conservatives, pro-lifers, and others. Ellison said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany.
Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer. When confronted about Antifa’s violence, then House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler denied that the group existed. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”
In the meantime, Biden has called Trump and his supporters “enemies of the people.” He recently said that the threat to democracy was so great that debates are no solution: “we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Even after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the media has failed to see a pattern while stoking the claim of a right-wing violent movement.
In the meantime, Democrats previously filed to strip Secret Service protection from Trump. The former Chair of the J6 Committee and the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee introduced the legislation, called Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED).
The press and pundits continue to tell Americans that Trump and his supporters are going to kill democracy and probably those they love. While most people dismiss the rage rhetoric, there are some who take it as a license to take the most extreme action.
We are still learning about Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who was killed after trying to assassinate Trump. A registered Republican, Crooks gave money to ActBlue to support Democratic candidates. Yet, we know him all too well. He is likely to be found to be a lonely, unhinged individual who found meaning in an attempted political murder.
Thomas Crooks like Nicholas Roske (who tried to kill Justice Kavanaugh) are the faces that watch from the political shadows. They hear leaders telling them to stop the Nazis before democracy dies . . . and they believe them.
As for Democrats, the anger evident every night on cable networks may reflect a degree of insecurity about becoming the very thing that they are campaigning against. It is time for the party to look around to take stock of its anti-democratic policies.
Democratic secretaries of state have sought to block not just Trump but third-party candidates from ballots to prevent voters from supporting them. They have called for cleansing ballots of over 120 other Republicans. They have supported censorship, blacklisting, and other attacks on free speech.
As a lifelong Democrat, I have repeatedly asked what we have become in this age of rage. If we embrace groups like Antifa, oppose free speech, and cleanse ballots, we will have little beyond our rage to sustain us.
President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party insist that “Democracy is on the ballot” this election. While some of us have challenged that hyperbolic claim, one thing that may not be on the ballot is choice, if the defenders of Democracy have anything to say about it. Georgia Democrats have joined counterparts in other states to prevent citizens from being able to vote third-party candidates.
Months ago, I wrote a column about how Democrats have continued to try to block voters from being able to vote for candidates while claiming the mantle of the defenders of Democracy. This effort not only included Democratic Secretaries of State attempting to remove former president Donald Trump from the ballots, but efforts in the primary from the ballot. Many of these Democrats now calling for a “blitz primary” previously said nothing as voters were barred from having a choice in the primary.
North Carolina joined this effort recently to block third-party candidates to avoid “mischief.”
Georgia Democrats are challenging efforts to place Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and three other candidates on the state’s presidential ballots. With Biden struggling in the polls and the vast majority of voters viewing him as too enfeebled to serve another four years, Democrats are rushing to reduce the choices for voters.
Democratic Party of Georgia Executive Director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye insists that Kennedy, independent Cornel West, Claudia De la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Jill Stein of the Green Party “have not faithfully observed the state of Georgia’s election laws.” All of them must go.
For voters who may not be thrilled with Trump, the Democrats insist that all is well. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have any choice of candidate so long as it is Biden.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Many say it had to be divine intervention that protected President Trump on the day he was nearly assassinated. A half of an inch and the hope of him being our next president would have been over in a flash.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Statement on Assassination Attempt on President Donald Trump: We Are Deeply Grateful to Our Lord Who Saved This Brave Warrior”
By Margaret Flavin – July 16, 2024
The Gateway Pundit reported that Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò was summoned to the Vatican to be excommunicated by Red Pope Francis. Pope Francis is clearly threatened by Archbishop Viganò because he is a true friend of the faithful and totally dedicated to the Church and sharing the word of Jesus Christ. Archbishop Viganò has also been outspoken against the destruction of the Church, COVID mandates, and stolen elections. He has called out the current Pope for his destructive actions against the Church.
He has warned about the World Economic Forum. For this, he was excommunicated from the Holy Catholic Church.
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 • Planned Parenthood Calls J.D. Vance an “Anti-Abortion Extremist” • J.D. Vance: “I’m a Very Pro-Life Person. I’ve Been Pro-Life Since I Was 14-Years-Old” • Ohio Pro-Life Group: “J.D. Vance is a Strong Fighter for the Pro-Life Movement” • Democrats “Resigned” That Trump Will Likely Win After Assassination Attempt
More Pro-Life News • Coach Jim Harbaugh and Courageous Pro-Life Prisoner Receive National Pro-Life Awards • Pro-Life Sidewalk Counseling Organization Asks Supreme Court to Restore Free Speech Rights • Babies Will be Saved Now That Abortion Funds Running Out of Money • Newborn Abandoned at Fire Station Safe Haven Returns as a Thriving High School Graduate • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
CNN contributor and former Biden White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Monday that Democrats need to “turn their fire” on former President Donald Trump to win the election, just days after he survived an assassination attempt. Bedingfield immediately backtracked, but the Freudian slip was another example of the inflammatory rhetoric Democrats and left-wing corporate media deploy against Trump and his candidacy.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper played a recent clip from President Joe Biden’s sit-down interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which Biden became angry that the media apparently won’t talk about the “18 to 28 lies” Trump told during the debate.
Anderson, noting that Biden’s team is receiving internal polling data suggesting Biden is doing poorly among voters and losing any potential chance of winning, asked Bedingfield how much longer this scenario for Democrats can continue.
“It shouldn’t go on much longer if Democrats want to win this election,” Bedingfield said. “Joe Biden became the nominee by the votes of voters who voted in the Democratic primary. He has said many, many times after having been questioned many times about this, that he’s not stepping down, and he is going to be the nominee.”
“At some point, Democrats have to decide that they want to try to win this election and turn their fire on Donald Trump. I think there is — I shouldn’t have said ‘turn their fire.’ I apologize. That was not the phrase that I meant. They need to turn their focus on Donald Trump,” Bedingfield said.
It has been less than 72 hours since Trump avoided near-certain death by half an inch and a local former fire chief was brutally murdered while shielding his family from gunfire. It’s been less than 48 hours since Biden himself called for people to “lower the temperature” and “cool” “down” the rhetoric following the near assassination. But already, left-wing media and Democrats are returning to the inflammatory language they’ve used to describe Trump for years.
Biden told donors recently, according to Politico, that he’s “done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly called Trump a “threat” the both “democracy” and “the very soul of this country.”
Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.
The most central and important rule of the Biden administration is that nothing that happens is ever the fault of the Biden administration. It’s not just that the buck doesn’t stop with the president, it doesn’t stop anywhere in the executive branch, including, we now know, the Secret Service.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we’ve heard that the once and likely future president was being protected by a mix of Secret Service agents and state and local police. And as it has become more obvious that the Saturday attack was a catastrophic security failure, the finger-pointing and ass covering has begun.
According to Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, the federal agency was only responsible for the actual grounds where Trump spoke, not the surrounding area, which he claims was the responsibility of the local police. This is abject nonsense. The idea that the Secret Service was not responsible for a building with perfect sniper sightlines 150 yards from where Trump was speaking doesn’t just strain credulity, it snaps it in half. And the idea that guarding Trump was up to local cops and not the agency whose sole mission is keeping protectees safe doesn’t pass the smell test.
We are talking about the life and death protection of a former and, at this point, likely future president of the United States. You don’t outsource that to local cops in a town of 13,000 people. It’s like asking Andy Griffith to hunt down ISIS.
The director of the Secret Service, Kim Cheatle, we have to come to understand, is a massive proponent of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. After Biden in 2022 made her just the second woman ever to lead the agency, she boasted Security Magazine of her prowess at breaking glass ceilings and the agency’s website states that Cheatle is responsible for executing the agency’s integrated mission of “protection and investigations by leading a diverse workforce.”
It’s too soon to say that this obsession with DEI came at the expense of Trump’s safety, but we all saw the video of the shooting’s aftermath, where a female agent a foot shorter than Trump tried to cover his body and another struggled to holster her gun. It made the Keystone Cops look like Kojak.
Allow me to be blunt, Cheattle should be fired. It should have happened days ago, but as Trump pointed out at the debate, nobody ever gets fired by Joe Biden.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Jake Sullivan still has his job after saying the Middle East was calm about 10 minutes before Hamas’ heinous Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Alejandro Mayorkas is still running the broken and busted border, and now a Secret Service Director’s incompetence and bizarre priorities have come within a whisker of getting Trump killed. At this point, I have no idea what somebody would have to do to get fired by Biden. Maybe burn down the White House?
We all know that people make mistakes, and that sometimes people just aren’t good at their job. If that person is an office manager or barista, we’ll all survive. When your job is to keep the leader of the free world breathing, you don’t get to make oopsies.
Now would be a good time to start changing all that, for Biden to summon his inner Harry Truman, and say the buck does stop with him, and that he does have the backbone to let people go when their incompetence puts America and the lives of its citizens at risk.
But we all know very well that that isn’t going to happen. Once again, there will be no consequences, no transparency, and no accountability, just the same shameful pat on the back, and you’ll do better next time we always see. America deserves much, much better than this. Corey Comperatore, who was murdered under the not-so watchful eye of the Secret Service certainly does, as did the three other victims, including Trump.
It didn’t seem to be a coincidence that when Donald Trump made his surprise appearance on Monday at the Republican National Convention, his Secret Service detail looked much different. Members were taller, more male, and more like law enforcement and less like a Benetton ad. But it is too little too late.
It was too late to save a brave American husband and father, and nearly too late to save the Republican presidential nominee. It needs to stop, before more Americans lose their lives.
Immigration is at center stage as the Republican National Convention resumes Tuesday, with speakers spotlighting a key issue for former President Donald Trump that helped endear him to the GOP base when he began his first campaign in 2015. Meanwhile, Trump and JD Vance. his choice for running mate, are scheduled to appear in the convention hall every night this week, according to two people familiar with the schedule who were not authorized to speak publicly. The nominee and his newly minted running mate sat together Monday night in what was Trump’s first public appearance following the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Vance is expected to give his own speech Wednesday night, with Trump to headline Thursday night’s closing evening. One of Trump’s top GOP primary rivals will take the stage Tuesday night, the latest signal the party is solidifying its fight to take President Joe Biden on in November.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will speak in primetime Tuesday night. A senior Trump campaign adviser says that fact shows that Republicans have mended any fences in need of repair following the bruising primary season.
Two days after surviving an attempted assassination, Trump appeared triumphantly at the convention’s opening night Monday with a bandage over his right ear, the latest compelling scene in a presidential campaign already defined by dramatic turns. GOP delegates cheered wildly when Trump appeared onscreen backstage and then emerged in the arena, visibly emotional, as musician Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the USA.” That was hours after the convention had formally nominated the former president to head the Republican ticket in November against Biden.
Trump, accompanied by a wall of Secret Service agents Monday night, did not address the hall — his acceptance speech is scheduled for Thursday — but smiled silently and occasionally waved as Greenwood sang. He eventually joined his newly announced running mate to listen to the night’s remaining speeches.
The raucous welcome underscored the depth of the crowd’s affection for the man who won the 2016 nomination as an outsider, at odds with the party establishment, but has vanquished all Republican rivals, silenced most conservative critics, and now commands loyalty up and down the party ranks.
“We must unite as a party, and we must unite as a nation,” said Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley, Trump’s handpicked party leader, as he opened Monday’s prime-time national convention session. “We must show the same strength and resilience as President Trump and lead this nation to a greater future.”
But Whatley and other Republican leaders made clear that their calls for harmony did not extend to Biden and Democrats, who find themselves still riven by worries that the 81-year-old is not up to the job of defeating Trump.
“Their policies are a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people,” said Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, welcoming the party to his battleground state, which Trump won in 2016 but lost to Biden four years ago.
Pennsylvania delegate John Fredericks had a simple recommendation for Tuesday’s immigration speakers, “Close the border. If you’re here illegally, get them out – now. That’s all I’m interested in. Get them out.”
Trump’s campaign chiefs designed the convention to feature a softer and more optimistic message, focusing on themes that would help a divisive leader expand his appeal among moderate voters and people of color.
In her first public appearance of the convention Tuesday morning, RNC co-chair Lara Trump encouraged more than 200 Pennsylvania delegates and guests to vote early. The guidance signaled a flip the party has made for this election, after the former president previously cast doubt on early and absentee ballots and urged same-day, in-person voting.
On Monday, a night devoted to the economy, delegates and a national TV audience heard from speakers the Trump campaign pitched as “everyday Americans” — a single mother talking about inflation, a union member who identified himself as a lifelong Democrat now backing Trump, a small business owner, among others.
Featured speakers also included Black Republicans who have been at the forefront of the Trump campaign’s effort to win more votes from a core Democratic constituency.
U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas said rising grocery and energy prices were hurting Americans’ wallets.
“We can fix this disaster,” Hunt said, by electing Trump and sending him “right back to where he belongs, the White House.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the opinion of Judge Aileen Cannon. Once again, Democracy is “under attack” because a judge ruled against the prosecution in a Trump case. Indeed, law professors and legal experts are demanding the removal of Cannon for having the temerity to adopt an opposing view of the underlying constitutional claim.
Here is the column:
“This is how republics collapse.”Those ominous words captured the hand-wringing, hair-pulling reaction to the dismissal of the Florida case against Donald Trump by Judge Aileen Cannon. It was not just that she reached a conclusion long supported by some conservative lawyers and a Supreme Court justice. To rule in favor of Trump in such a dismissal is, once again, the end of Democracy as we know it.
The 93-page order methodically goes through the governing cases and statutes for the appointment of prosecutors. There has long been a debate over how an attorney general like Merrick Garland can circumvent the constitutional process for the appointment of a U.S. Attorney and unilaterally elevate a citizen to wield even greater power.
With the expiration of the Independent Counsel Act in 1999, attorneys general have long relied upon their inherent authority to appoint “inferior officers” to special counsel investigations. The issue has never been conclusively ruled upon by the Supreme Court, even though lower courts have rejected this challenge.
The Trump ruling is certainly an outlier and the odds favor prosecutor Jack Smith on appeal. Many point to a challenge in 2019 in the D.C. Circuit to the appointment of Robert Mueller. The court found that “binding precedent establishes that Congress has ‘by law’ vested authority in the Attorney General to appoint the Special Counsel as an inferior officer.”
That is the view of many lawyers and judges. However, Judge Cannon disagreed and found a lack of clear authority for both the appointment and the appropriations used for Smith. Nevertheless, legal experts were incredulous and irate. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University Law professor, is quoted as expressing shock that Judge Cannon is essentially saying, “I’m not bound by the DC Circuit, and I think they misinterpret this.”
He added that it showed an “astonishing level of dismissiveness.”
However, in point of fact, Judge Cannon is not bound by the D.C. Circuit. As a federal judge in Florida, she is bound by the 11th Circuit and, of course, the Supreme Court. She is allowed to reach a different conclusion on a matter of law.
Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, declared that “Judge Cannon just did the unthinkable,” He added, “This finally gives Jack Smith an opportunity to seek her removal from the case. I think the case for doing so is very strong.” (Tribe previously declared that he was certain “without any doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt” that Trump could be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Michael Pence).
It does not matter to these critics that other lawyers and judges agree with Judge Cannon.
Justice Clarence Thomas recently expressed the same view in the Trump immunity decision in his concurrence. He did not view this as a settled question and wrote “if this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”
Yet these experts believe that a judge without a direct controlling case on the question should be removed for reaching the same conclusion as a member of the Supreme Court and at least two former U.S. Attorneys General.
Of course, these experts would be aghast at any suggestion that D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan should be removed after being reversed by the Supreme Court in the recent immunity opinion.
Such experts are not raising questions of bias over Chutkin’s rulings in favor of Smith or the similar pattern of Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan.
Yet Cannon is viewed as not simply wrong, but partisan in ruling for Trump.
How do republics collapse?
When judges are pressured or removed for ruling against favored parties.
When the system is undermined by leading political leaders who go to the steps of the Supreme Court to threaten justices that they “will pay the price” for ruling against one side.
Alexander Hamilton once said that the Republic is preserved “through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
That does not mean that the trial courts are always right. That is why we have appellate courts. However, conflicting decisions are the norm in cases that make it to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the justices often wait for such divisions to occur before they finally resolve long-standing questions.
These demands for the removal of Judge Cannon are simply extensions of the same group think culture of the “defenders of Democracy.”This Republic will not “collapse” if Judge Cannon is right or if she is wrong. It is safe as long as judges are able to rule according to their understanding of the law, regardless of the demands of the perpetually and emphatically enraged.
University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko took a break from teaching students to get the word out this week that the entire assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump was a staged event for suckers. Mokoko explained that it was just a ploy to get the votes of “idiots.” He, however, is available to offer sage-like clarity that the Secret Service, local police, and the Trump campaign conspired to fake the assassination, kill a bystander, and seriously wound others to get the sucker vote. He is not alone in this theory while others on the left are simply bemoaning that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.
In his tweet, Mokoko said that security ”ignored [Crooks] because trump & secrete service staged theatrics to win idiots’ vote.”
So let me get the conspiracy down. The Secret Service allowed a kid who flunked out of the high school shooting club as a bad shot to fire multiple rounds at the former president from a sloped roof at 130 yards in the hope that he would only wing him?
Mokoko previously taught at Clemson University, Gold West College, Long Beach City College and University of California, Long Beach, according to his Linkedin page.
His faculty bio states that Mokoko teaches “Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice” and “Writing about Culture and Society.” His focus is “teaching students to appreciate and value social justice rhetorics across media; to become rhetorically listening writers, readers, and viewers; and to understand how global rhetorics shape and define agency and identification.”
He is not alone. Within minutes of the assassination attempt, the staging theory was going viral and has been picked up by many on the left. For example, actress Amanda Seales took to social media to claim that Trump used fake stage blood and sound effects to stage his assassination attempt.
“That sh** was more staged than a Tyler Perry production of Madea Runs for President. I lived in Harlem long enough to know that gunshots do not sound like making popcorn on the stove.”
She does not explain how local fireman Corey Comperatore died from the fake bullets.
Aberdeen, Wash., Mayor Douglas Orr declared “The shooter is dead so we will never know if this was staged. I hope I’m wrong, but because of his record of deceit, that’s the first thing that came to mind.”
Still others accepted that the shooting was real but complain that Crooks should not have missed. Bellarmine University English instructor John James posted on Instagram: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”
Jack Black’s Tenacious D partner Kyle Gass made a wish while performing with Black that the next assassination would not miss. Various people joined in on regretting that the assassination was not successful.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance as his running mate. A Man that could propel MAGA well into the future. I’m sure the media is gearing up right now for an all-out assault to try and destroy him.
Trump Announces JD Vance as His Choice For Vice President
By Cristina Laila – July 15, 2024
President Trump on Monday announced his choice for Vice President: 40-year-old Ohio Senator JD VANCE!
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social. “After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio. J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association. J.D.’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a Major Best Seller and Movie… 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 Selects Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as His Running Mate • Pro-Life Groups Praise J.D. Vance: “Excellent Choice” for VP Running Mate • Senator J.D. Vance is a Conservative Republican Who is “Solidly Pro-Life” • Catholic Priest Refuses Politician Communion for Supporting Abortion
More Pro-Life News • George Stephanopoulos Claims Trump and His Voters are Responsible for the Assassination Attempt • Pro-Life Group Heads to GOP Convention to Urge Republicans to “Defend Babies” From Abortions • Democrats Should Apologize for Calling Trump and His Supporters a Threat to America • Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis Will Speak at GOP Convention to Support Trump • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us
Former President Trump is now breaking his silence on the assassination attempt against him during a rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told the New York Post. “I’m supposed to be dead.”
“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump also told the newspaper onboard his private plane while heading to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for this week’s Republican National Convention.“By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.”
Trump told the Post that had he not turned his head slightly to the right to read a chart on illegal immigration, the bullet that grazed him would have been fatal.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is moved from the stage at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
He described the Secret Service agents that rushed at him like “linebackers,” mentioning another one eliminated the gunman with “one shot right between the eyes.”
“They did a fantastic job,” he told the Post. “It’s surreal for all of us.”
As Secret Service agents rushed Trump off the stage, he was heard saying he wanted to get his shoes.
“The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight,” he explained to the Post.
Trump, reacting to images of him raising his fist and being surrounded by Secret Service agents in the seconds following the shooting, said, “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen.”
Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by Secret Service agents as he is taken off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, July 13. (Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images)
“They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually, you have to die to have an iconic picture,” he added. “I just wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot.”
Trump also told the New York Post that he appreciated the “fine” and “very nice” call he received from President Biden in the aftermath of the event, noting – without specifics – that the race between them could be more civil going forward.
He praised his rally audience for staying calm during the entire incident.
Trump is describing photos of him raising his fist following the shooting as “iconic.” (Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images)
“A lot of places … you hear a single shot, everybody runs. Here there were many shots and they stayed,” Trump said. “I love them. They are such great people.”
MILWAUKEE – With an eye toward the future of a Republican Party dominated by former President Trump and his legions of MAGA supporters, Trump has named 39-year-old Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate on the GOP’S 2024 national ticket. The former president, who made his greatly anticipated and high-stakes announcement on Monday as the Republican National Convention kicked off in swing-state Wisconsin’s largest city, will now share the ticket with one of his top supporters in the Senate and a one-time Trump critic who has transformed into a leading America First disciple.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform.
Trump emphasized that Vance, on the campaign trail “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond….”
Former President Trump, left, and then-Republican candidate for U.S. Senate JD Vance greet supporters during the rally at the Dayton International Airport on Nov. 7, 2022 in Vandalia, Ohio. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Vance, a former venture capitalist and the author of the bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” before running for elective office, was one of a handful of Republicans considered top running mate contenders. That group also included North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
While Vance hails from Ohio, a one-time battleground state the former president comfortably carried in the 2016 and 2020 elections, the senator’s selection is expected to boost Trump among working-class Democrats, especially across the Rust Belt, who otherwise might have been supporters of President Biden, according to multiple experts who spoke with Fox News Digital as Trump was weighing his options.
Vance grew up in a working-class family in a small city in southwestern Ohio. His parents divorced when he was young, and as his mother struggled for years with drug and alcohol abuse, Vance was raised in part by his maternal grandparents.
After high school graduation, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Iraq War. He later graduated from Ohio State University and then earned a law degree at Yale University. Vance, who lives in Cincinnati, moved to San Francisco after law school and worked as a principal in a venture capital firm owned by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who later became a major financial supporter of Vance’s successful 2020 campaign for the Senate.
Senator JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, speaks to members of the media outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in New York, on Monday, May 13, 2024 during former President Trump’s criminal trial. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Before running for Senate, Vance grabbed national attention after “Hillbilly Elegy” – which tells his story of growing up in a struggling steel mill city and his roots in Appalachian Kentucky – became a New York Times bestseller and was made into a Netflix film. The story spotlighted the values of many working-class Americans who became supporters of Trump’s policies.
Vance was a vocal critic of Trump when the former president first ran for the White House in the 2016 cycle. However, Vance eventually supported Trump, praising the former president’s tenure in the White House, and in a Fox News interview in 2021, he apologized for his earlier criticism of Trump.
Trump’s endorsement of Vance days before the 2022 GOP Senate primary boosted him to victory in a crowded, competitive and combustible nomination race.
“Look, I was wrong about Donald Trump. I didn’t think he was going to be a good president,” Vance told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview last month. “He was a great president, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.”
In the Senate, Vance has been one of the most vocal supporters of Trump’s America First agenda and has been a vocal opponent of U.S. aid to Ukraine.
U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing titled “Improving Rail Safety in Response to the East Palestine Derailment” in Washington, D.C., March 22, 2023. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
During the vetting process for the vice-presidential nominee, Vance had a major ally in Donald Trump Jr. The former president’s eldest son and popular surrogate in the MAGA world is a close friend of Vance.
The elder Trump has also appeared to build a friendship with Vance. The former president likened Vance to “a young Abraham Lincoln” while speaking with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade last week following a report that said he found facial hair like Vance’s to be distasteful.
“No. I’ve never heard that one,” Trump said when asked about the report, which suggested Vance’s facial hair could potentially hinder his selection as his running mate. “He looks good… He looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”
Minutes after the announcement, Trump’s campaign posted a new image and logo of the GOP’s 2024 national ticket.
President Biden, reacting to the news Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, wrote in a social media fundraising pitch, “Here’s the deal about J.D. Vance. He talks a big game about working people. But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”
“Well, I don’t intend to let them,” the president emphasized.
The president’s re-election campaign was quick to illustrate Vance as a champion of Trump’s MAGA movement.
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argued in a statement that “Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.”
Fox News reported earlier on Monday afternoon that Burgum and Rubio were informed ahead of the Vance announcement that they would not be named as the running mate. Burgum, in a social media post, wrote that Vance’s “small town roots and service to country make him a powerful voice for the America First Agenda. I look forward to campaigning for the Trump-Vance ticket to Make America Great Again!”
Rubio took to social media to exclaim “#TrumpVance2024!!!”
Below is my column in the Hill on the recent report of the House Judiciary Committee and the disclosure of yet another effort to silence opposing viewpoints by squeezing the revenue of individuals or groups, including Elon Musk and Joe Rogan.
Here is the column:
Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change.
An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).
It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting.
In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” I discuss our history of speech crackdowns and how this is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech period that we have faced as a nation. The reason is an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic and media institutions supporting censorship and the targeting of largely conservative viewpoints.
As discussed in the book, there is a crushing irony to the current anti-free speech movement. During the Red Scare and the McCarthy period, it was the left that was targeted with blacklisting, censorship and arrests. It is now the left that has constructed a global censorship system that exceeds anything that Joe McCarthy even dreamt of in the control of news and commentary.
Through the years, I have testified repeatedly in Congress on this system supported enthusiastically by President Biden and his administration. It has proven to be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole for civil libertarians. The Democrats in Congress have uniformly opposed any investigation or action on censorship while denying for years that there was a coordinated effort between government and corporations. When we were successful in uncovering components of this system, they were often quickly shut down as the work shifted to other components and assets.
One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns. Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.
These censorship groups typically proclaim that they are merely trying to promote “brand safety” when they target for suppression the same sites that challenge the political and media establishment. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”
That “harmful content” seems to be the very same sites long targeted by the Biden administration and its allies in business, the media and academia.
The internal communications of these censorship groups demonstrate their contributors’ underlying agenda. In one conversation between Global Alliance for Responsible Media co-founder Rob Rakowitz and individuals with an associated “GroupM,” two executives explained to Rakowitz how they identified sites that they did not like and simply monitored them until they could find something that crossed the line. An example is the Daily Wire, a site hated by liberals for its conservative viewpoints and critiques of mainstream media.
In describing how they work to bag such sites, John Montgomery, executive vice president of Global Brand Safety, explained: “There is an interesting parallel here with Breitbart. Before Breitbart crossed the line and started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on our exclusion lists. As much as we hated their ideology and bulls–t, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”
In other words, they preselected the sites and then followed their every move like a patrol unit following a car to wait for them to go one mile per hour over the limit. This is called “deplatforming,” a favorite term from higher education, whereby liberal groups organize to shout down and block speakers with opposing views. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is too sophisticated to simply bullhorn groups into silence. Instead, it strangles them financially.
Those who do not yield, from Elon Musk’s X to mega-podcaster Joe Rogan, were quickly added to the list to be deplatformed. Musk is particularly dangerous because he was responsible for blowing the lid off the censorship system by releasing the “Twitter Files,” detailing coordination between government and social media companies to silence citizens and groups. To this day, companies like Facebook continue to fight efforts to disclose their own censorship files.
Musk has threatened to sue in light of the report. “Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, X has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” he said.
A lawsuit would be difficult to maintain. These groups have a right to organize to silence opposing views just as book burners have a right to burn books. However, deplatforming, book burning and blacklisting have long been anathema to free speech values. They are efforts to prevent opposing views from being heard rather than to respond to such views on the merits.
And Musk is right in describing this as a “racket.” There is now a disinformation cottage industry where a wide array of academic and private groups are raking in a fortune targeting individuals and other groups for blacklisting, banning and censorship.
There are other groups working in tandem in this effort. For example, Newsguard was created by to Chief Executive Officers Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz to monitor and effectively blacklist media that they deemed misinformative or false. The site uses mainstream journalists to rate news sites, even though many of these sites have challenged the bias of the mainstream media.
Once again, the apparatus serves to shield that bias in targeting disfavored sites. The Biden administration has extended contracts with Newsguard to incorporate the system, and it is even being used in schools, despite complaints that it shows the very same pro-Democrat and left-wing bias.
There is a reason why projects such as the Global Disinformation Index have been largely concealed from public view. There is a reason Facebook and other companies have fought mightily to conceal their own censorship files. The anti-free speech movement is not a popular movement.
A majority of the public continues to oppose censorship. This is a movement that came from higher education and has been pushed by the political and media establishment, not the public.
That is why many of us in the free speech community are hoping that the 2024 election will become a referendum on censorship. Biden has given a full-throated endorsement of these efforts, even to the point of claiming that companies that do not censor American citizens are “killing people.” He presides over the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams.
So now, let him defend it with voters.
In 1800, that did not work out well for Adams, who was defeated by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had run on restoring freedom of speech. The public can now flip the script. It is time to defund and deplatform America’s censors.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Presidential politics in Minnesota isn’t looking good for Democrats. Trump is sneaking up fast on Biden, well within the margin of error. And after the assassination attempt on Trump, polls could well surpass Biden in the next few days.
WSJ, NYT polls latest in string of surveys showing Biden losing ground to Trump after debate
By Rebecka Zelijko – July 4th
(Daily Caller News Foundation) — Former President Donald Trump has widened his lead in several polls following President Joe Biden’s much-maligned debate performance on Thursday, including in two surveys from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times released on Wednesday. Trump had been steadily leading in all six swing states and nationally over the last few months, according to RealClearPolling averages. But after Biden stumbled through the first presidential debate, Trump has managed to widen his lead in at least five polls, including his largest lead recorded in the New York Times Times/Siena poll since 2015. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – According to the latest polls, like a boomerang, the Democrat propaganda and lies are coming back around hit them upside the head. Like The Russia Russia hoax, Hunter Laptop isn’t genuine, etc. More people are realizing this every day, and it’s affecting their popularity.
LIST OF TEN MOST Misleading Mainstream Media Headlines After Failed Trump Assassination
By Patty McMurry – July 14, 2024
The mainstream media are liars. It’s no longer a question of if they are telling the truth. When they report the news to you, they are either completely misleading you or they are outright lying.
On Saturday afternoon, President Trump was shot by a would-be-assassin during his speech in Butler, PA, in front of tens of thousands of his supporters.
Here are the TEN MOST ridiculous mainstream media lies.1. AP The AP headline only moments after President Trump was shot, read: BREAKING: Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd. “loud noises ring out?” Does the Secret Service usually rush the stage and remove a former President with a bleeding ear because of “loud noises” ringing out? 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 • Senators Slam Army After Presentation Calls Pro-Life Americans Terrorists • Pro-Life Group Blasts U.S. Army for Presentation Calling Pro-Life Americans Terrorists • After Massive Criticism, Fort Liberty Walks Back Slide Claiming Pro-Life Groups are Terrorists • Josh Hawley: Republicans Can’t Stop Fighting Abortion
More Pro-Life News • Mike Pence Urges GOP to Restore Stronger Pro-Life Platform • Poland Rejects Bill to Legalize Killing Babies in Abortions • Serena Williams Trashes Harrison Butker for His Pro-Family Views • Catholic Voters Prefer Trump Over Biden By 17% • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
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Seeking to assuage concerns among Democrats that he’s mentally incapable of taking on Donald Trump this November, Joe Biden held a “big boy” press conference during Thursday’s NATO summit — and did it not disappoint.
Not content to just step on his own tongue morethanonce, the president spewed some of the most outrageous mistruths of his presidency (so far). From claiming Trump is his vice president to rewriting history on Afghanistan, the lies were almost nonstop.
1. Rising Prices
Biden claimed that “overall prices fell last month.”
That statement is false. According to PBS News, “Wholesale prices in the United States rose by a larger-than-expected 2.6 percent last month from a year earlier.”
2. ‘Vice President Trump’
Biden falsely claimed that he picked Donald Trump as his vice president.
“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [if I didn’t] think she was not qualified to be president,” the Delaware Democrat said.
Biden picked Kamala Harris, not Trump, to be his vice president.
3. Zelensky or Putin?
When confronted by a reporter on a moment from earlier in the day when he mistakenly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden claimed, “I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, Zelensky.’ And then I added five other names.”
Biden blamed his travel schedule as the cause for his poor debate performance against Trump.
“The next debate, I’m not going to be traveling 15 time zones a week before. Anyway. That’s what it was about,” the president said.
Contrary to his claim, Biden did not travel through 15 time zones a week before the debate. The president returned from his overseas Europe trip on June 15 and spent the week before the debate prepping at Camp David.
5. Trump’s NATO Comments
Biden distorted comments about NATO Trump issued at a recent rally in Florida.
“I think he said at one of his rallies, don’t hold me to this, recently, where, ‘NATO — I just learned about NATO,’ or something to that effect. Foreign policy’s never been his strong point,” the president claimed.
That characterization is false. When describing his mindset prior to his first NATO summit in 2017, Trump said, “I didn’t want to be obnoxious because I felt, you know, it was the first time I’d ever done this. I went; I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they weren’t paying.”
6. Hamas’ Popularity
While discussing the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, Biden contended “[t]here is a growing dissatisfaction in, on the West Bank, from the Palestinians, about Hamas,” and that the terrorist group “is not popular now.”
Polling has shown that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
7. Endorsements
Biden claimed that the United Auto Workers Union “just endorsed me.”
That statement is misleading. The group endorsed Biden for president nearly six months ago on January 24.
8. U.S. Presence in Afghanistan
Biden whitewashed his prior support for the United States having a military presence in Afghanistan.
“You may recall, I still get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan,” the president asserted. “Once we got bin Laden … we should’ve moved on, because it was not in our — no one’s ever going to unite that country.”
As noted by left-wing CNN, “In the early years of the war, Biden, then a U.S. senator for Delaware, was a vocal public supporter of the US having a sustained military presence in Afghanistan and engaging in extensive ‘nation-building’ there — and he explicitly rejected the idea of a narrow military mission targeting terrorists.”
9. Bad Poll Numbers
Biden claimed that “[t]here are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now later in the campaign.”
Even The Washington Post’s “fact-checkers” admitted this isn’t true.
“According to the presidential ratings tracked by FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating, 36.8 percent, at this point in his presidency is lower than any other presidents besides George H.W. Bush (36.7 percent) and Jimmy Carter (33.9 percent),” the Post reported. “Gerald Ford had an approval rating slightly higher. All three lost.”
10. Growing Economic Pains
Biden downplayed the notion that his policies are responsible for America’s ongoing economic pains.
“As you recall, understandably, many of you and many economists thought my initial initiatives that I put forward, ‘can’t do that, it’s going to cause inflation, things are going to skyrocket, debt’s going to go up,’” the president said.
Contrary to his insinuation, inflation skyrocketed after Biden took office and implemented far-left economic policies.
11. Illegal Border Crossings
Biden regurgitated the lie that “border encounters have gone down over 50 percent,” and the “current level is lower today than when Trump left office.”
That isn’t true, as illegal border crossings have exponentially risen to record highs under Biden’s presidency.
12. Trump’s Foreign Policy
The Democrat president contended that “[f]oreign policy has never been [Trump’s] strong point.”
That statement is inaccurate. During his presidency, Trump secured peace agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors, re-established a working coalition among like-minded nations in the Indo-Pacific region to counter Chinese aggression, and decimated ISIS, among other achievements.
13. Classified Documents
While speaking about his prior interactions with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, Biden suggested he turned over “all” of his notes to federal officials upon leaving office.
“I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any world leader … and by the way, I handed in all my notes,” the president claimed.
Biden did not, in fact, turn over all classified materials in his possession upon leaving office. Federal officials discovered boxes of classified documents in Biden’s Delaware beach home, including records that dated back to his time in the U.S. Senate.
14. Child Gun Deaths
Biden claimed, “More children are killed by the bullet than any other cause of death.”
That assertion is misleading. Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contends the leading cause of death among minors is firearm-related incidents but considers 18- and 19-year-olds as “children” in its analyses. When using the actual classification of minors (individuals under the age of 17), the leading cause of death among children is motor vehicle-related incidents.
15. Trump’s Russia Comments
Biden claimed Trump told Vladimir Putin, “Do whatever the hell you want,” regarding Russia’s invasion of Eastern Europe. But that’s not accurate.
Trump’s remarks came during a South Carolina rally, during which he recounted a story from when he was president and speaking with a NATO member. Trump purportedly told this state that he would withhold U.S. support if they didn’t pay their minimum defense spending obligations.
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
The vaunted saviors of democracy in the Democratic Party were ready to throw out all the norms this summer to make sure voters keep them in power. Unfortunately for them, the calendar is not their friend. With just four months before the general election ends, Democrats and their advocates in the media began floating the idea of changing the primary rules just ahead of the finish line. Calling for a “blitz primary,” two influential Democrats this past week unveiled a plan to essentially redo the primary.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the Truman Balcony of the White House on July 4, 2024. (Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, would have one month to campaign to delegates of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the Aug. 19 convention. Star-studded candidate forums would be held weekly. The nominee would be selected via ranked choice voting at convention.
It’s an entirely new process, thrown together on the fly. One that seeks to preserve power by disenfranchising the party’s own voters. And one that requires them to find an extra-constitutional way to oust a sitting president of their own party – since Biden has made it clear he’s not going anywhere, at least for the moment.
It’s not going to work this time. You don’t get to redo your primary because someone had a bad debate or the truth is suddenly exposed. You don’t get to change the rules the moment it looks like you won’t win. They are stuck with Biden-Harris.
Too many voters have had enough of the gaslighting, the dishonesty, and the hyperbole of Democrats in government and media since the debate exposed their duplicity. The debate was an a-ha moment for many voters (excepting, of course, those who tune in to Fox News. You all saw this coming from a mile away). Since the debate, the truth that Democrats have so desperately tried to hide has been on full display.
More voters may now come to realize that for Democrats, gaming the system is par for the course. They aren’t protectors of democracy. They’re protectors of power.
Even as the party made former President Trump’s alleged “threat to democracy” a central theme of the race, the president’s party is quick to jettison democratic processes that don’t augment their power. Apparently, democracy is expendable when Democrats are at risk of losing power.
Throwing out the votes of Democratic primary voters? Just the beginning.
Threatening to restructure the Supreme Court when rulings don’t go their way? Or to eliminate the Electoral College when their message isn’t appealing broadly enough? They don’t think twice. Banning, censoring and gagging a presidential candidate whose message they don’t like? No problem.
But this time it’s different. Voters are catching on. How is this saving democracy? Voters understand you don’t get to redo your primary just because someone had a bad debate. You don’t get to rewrite the rules every time your party suffers a setback.
Democrats are likely stuck with Joe Biden and Kamala. Harris. Time is too short. It’s too late to change the campaign finance rules that govern Biden’s campaign fund, or the party rules that govern who can be on the ballot in each state. More importantly, there is no mechanism to force Biden out simply because he might lose. Although Democrats have likely frantically looked for one.
As the ugly truth sets in, debate watchers who trusted their government and their media have to be asking serious questions. If Trump is such a threat to democracy, why are Democrats the ones breaking all the norms?
Several top donors to the Democratic Party will withhold about $90 million in promised donations unless President Joe Biden steps aside from his reelection campaign, The New York Times reported.
Donors to the pro-Biden super PAC Future Forward are reportedly holding onto tens of millions of dollars in promised donations, including multiple contributions in the eight figures, two sources who spoke under the condition of anonymity told the Times. These sources estimated the total amount of frozen donations to be around or above $90 million.
Future Forward declined to give a statement when contacted with a request for comment about conversations with donors or how much promised money is being held back. An adviser for the group did say that the super PAC expects donors who paused their contributions to resume them once Democrats resolve the uncertainty surrounding the Biden presidential campaign.
Multiple prominent donors to the Democratic Party, including Netflix head Reed Hastings, former Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus, and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, have called on Biden to step aside since his widely criticized performance in his debate against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, last month.
Below is my column in Fox.com on renewed attacks on free speech and the apologists for this anti-free speech movement, including most recently comedian Jon Stewart. From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, the left is pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.
Here is the column:
“The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” That headline in a recent column in the New York Times warned Americans of a menace lurking around them and threatening their livelihoods and very lives. That menace is free speech, and the media and academia are ramping up attacks on a right that once defined us as a people.
In my new book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how we are living in the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history. An alliance of the government, corporations, academia, and media have assembled to create an unprecedented system of censorship, blacklisting, and speech regulation. This movement is expanding and accelerating in its effort to curtail the right that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “indispensable” to our constitutional system.
It is, of course, no easy task to convince a free people to give up a core part of identity and liberty. You have to make them afraid. Very afraid.
The current anti-free speech movement in the United States has its origins in higher education, where faculty have long argued that free speech is harmful. Starting in secondary schools, we have raised a generation of speech phobics who believe that opposing views are triggering and dangerous. Anti-free speech books have been heralded in the media. University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has written how dangerous free speech is for the nation. Her book, “Attack from Within,”describes how free speech is what she calls the “Achilles Heel” of America, portraying this right not as the value that defines this nation but the threat that lurks within it.
McQuade and many on the left are working to convince people that “disinformation” is a threat to them, and that free speech is the vehicle that makes them vulnerable. It is a clarion’s call that has been pushed by President Joe Biden who claims that companies refusing to censor citizens are “killing people.” The Biden administration has sought to use disinformation to justify an unprecedented system of censorship.
As I have laid out in testimony before Congress, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over “critical infrastructure” to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So, you can cite true facts but still be censored for misleading others.
The media has been running an unrelenting line of anti-free speech columns. Recently, the New York Times ran a column by former Biden official and Columbia University law professor Tim Wu describing how the First Amendment was “out of control” in protecting too much speech. Wu insists that the First Amendment is now “beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” He bizarrely claims that the First Amendment “now mostly protects corporate interests.”
So free speech not only threatens your life, your job, and your privacy, but serves corporate masters. Ready to sign your rights away?
Wait, there is more.
There is a movement afoot to rewrite the First Amendment through an amendment. George Washington University Law School Professor Mary Anne Franks believes that the First Amendment is “aggressively individualistic” and needs to be rewritten to “redo” the work of the Framers.
Her new amendment suggestion replaces the clear statement in favor of a convoluted, ambiguous statement of free speech that will be “subject to responsibility for abuses.” It then adds that “all conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.” Franks has also dismissed objections to the censorship on social media and insisted that “the Internet model of free speech is little more than cacophony, where the loudest, most provocative, or most unlikeable voice dominates . . . If we want to protect free speech, we should not only resist the attempt to remake college campuses in the image of the Internet but consider the benefits of remaking the Internet in the image of the university.”
Franks is certainly correct that those “unlikeable voices” are rarely heard in academia today. As discussed in my book, faculties have largely purged conservative, Republican, libertarian, and dissenting professors. The discussion on most campuses now runs from the left to far left without that pesky “cacophony” of opposing viewpoints.
Experts at leading universities were fired or stripped of positions for questioning COVID claims. Conservative faculty have been hounded from schools and conservative sites have been targeted by government-funded programs. Thousands have been banned from social media.
What is particularly maddening for many in the free speech community is how the left has responded to opposition to censorship and blacklisting. Some are claiming to be victims by those who criticize their work to target individuals and groups as disinformation.
Others, like comedian Jon Stewart mock those who object to the erosion of free speech by noting that conservatives are making these objections on television or online. So, according to Stewart, how can there be a problem if you are able to still object? The suggestion is that there can be no threat to free speech unless people are completely silenced.
Stewart insists that “we are surrounded by and inundated with more speech than has ever existed in the history of communication.” In other words, because people can still speak, the well-documented systems of censorship and blacklisting must not be so bad.
It is not clear what Stewart would accept as sufficient censorship. In universities, polls show both faculty and students afraid to speak openly. The government has funded a host of programs to pressure the source of revenue of conservative sites and to target dissenting voices. Yet, because we are raising objections to these trends, Stewart laughs at the very notion that free speech is under fire. After all, he is doing just fine.
What appears to be a punchline to Stewart is a bit more serious for others who have their livelihoods threatened by the anti-free speech movement. Stewart has the benefit of being a liberal comedian on a liberal network. Try being a conservative comedian today getting air time on most cable outlets or college campuses. Like so many academics, everything seems just fine to them. With the purging of opposition viewpoints, those who remain have little to complain about.
The effort to assure citizens that “there is nothing to see here” is belied by a massive censorship system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.” Conservatives face cancel campaigns and blacklisting in academic and media forums.
As I discussed in my new book, conservative North Carolina professor Dr. Mike Adams faced calls for termination for years with investigations and cancel campaigns. He repeatedly had to go to court to defend his right to continue to teach. He was then again targeted after an inflammatory tweet. He was done. Under pressure from the university, he agreed to resign with a settlement. Four years ago this month, Adams went home just days before his final day as a professor. He then committed suicide.
Many others have resigned or retired. For them, the anti-speech movement takes away everything that brings meaning to an intellectual life from publications to associations to even employment. It is a chilling message to others not to join the “cacophony of … unlikeable voices.”
Some citizens seem sufficiently afraid or angry to surrender their free speech rights. They have lost faith in free speech. For the rest of us, their crisis of faith cannot be allowed to become a contagion. We must have a reawakening in this country that, despite our many divisions, we remain united by this indispensable human right.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
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Democrat officials have launched a disinformation campaign about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, misattributing policies nowhere to be found in the project and falsely linking them to former President Donald Trump.
The project is a policy roadmap for a future Republican administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and outlined in a nearly 1,000-page document highlighting long-held conservative priorities. The left’s fearmongering campaign comes amidst panic in the Democratic Party, which has fractured over Biden’s cognitive decline and abysmal election polling.
“[Project 2025] is a dangerous takeover by Trump and his allies to pass his extreme MAGA agenda,” Biden recently said on X, including a video that claims the project “would allow employers to stop paying overtime for millions” and “enact a national abortion ban.”
The claims are massive distortions of the project’s actual policies. The outline, in reality, suggests “calculat[ing] the overtime period over a long number of weeks” with the goal of giving workers greater flexibility in their schedule.
A national abortion ban is nowhere to be found in the policy outline, which insists conservatives should “recogn[ize] the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations.”
The project encourages “complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion” and notes that “alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”
The Biden campaign has doubled down on efforts to attribute the project to Trump, even creating a webpage that calls the policy plan “Trump’s Project 2025.” Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the think tank’s policies.
“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The website, nevertheless, insists that Trump plans on “reinstating and expanding [the] racist Muslim ban,” “arming teachers,” and “raising the retirement age.” It also claims Project 2025 will put “families’ access to IVF treatments … in jeopardy” and “cut Social Security.”Not one of these policies is contained anywhere in Project 2025.
Other Democrats have participated in the fearmongering.
“They’re going after IVF,” Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed on MSNBC in February. “They also want to control … what they call recreational sex. … This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy.”
Project 2025 makes no mention of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or “recreational sex.” Mentions of “God” and “Christian” are limited to religious freedom, tax exemptions, work as “service to God,” and “God-given individual rights to live freely,” contrary to AOC’s claims of theocracy.
Celebrities on the left have joined in the misinformation campaign as well.
Hollywood actor Mark Hamill, a longtime Democrat fundraiser and Biden supporter, spoke out against Project 2025 in a recent post, writing, “With fear for our Democracy, I dissent.”
The actor included a graphic of Trump with a laundry list of goals supposedly outlined in the project, including ending no-fault divorce, banning African American studies, banning contraception, banning Muslim immigration, cutting social security, raising the retirement age, and court packing.
Project 2025 responded with an enumerated list of 30 “myths vs. facts,” clarifying Hamill’s more misleading claims.
“Mandate for Leadership calls for LOWER taxes for ALL Americans. Individuals spend their money in more productive ways than the government does,” the post noted, debunking the assertion that Project 2025 calls for higher taxes for working-class people.
MYTHS VS. FACTS ABOUT PROJECT 2025
We are not affiliated with former President Trump. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations.
“Mandate for Leadership’s plan would not eliminate the FDA or the EPA, and NOAA’s functions would be transferred to other agencies, the private sector, and states and territories,” the post clarified about misleading claims on government agency policy.
But regardless of the facts about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Democrats and their supporters will continue to lie about the policy plan’s substance and inaccurately link the plan to Trump in an attempt to derail his presidential campaign.
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
Did you know that four months before the world had ever heard of COVID-19—on Sept. 3, 2019—authorities in the Veneto region of Italy discovered COVID-19 antibodies in local blood samples. Of course, you didn’t. The deadly and mysterious COVID-19 was around much longer than anyone had previously suspected.
We now know that fact, and indeed much more, because of the investigative diligence of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
On June 18, the committee focused on the crucial question of the pandemic’s origins—whether the pandemic originated from a viral transmission from an animal in nature to humans or somehow leaked from a laboratory in Communist China. Dr. Gregory Koblenz of George Mason University told the committee that there could be a “definitive conclusion” on COVID-19’s origin without an “independent” and fully transparent international investigation.
Short of a full confession from China or a Western intelligence breakthrough, that’s unlikely.
However, there is a mountain of accumulating evidence, both biological and circumstantial, that points to a laboratory origin. And the prime candidate for such a leakage remains the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had long been engaged in the genetic manipulation of coronaviruses and which had also been a secondary recipient of American research grant funding.
The Senate committee heard sworn testimony from several prominent virologists on both sides of this vexing question in an attempt to get a better idea of where and how one of the world’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens emerged. However, the most powerful testimony was delivered by Dr. Steven Quay, an independent virologist and president of Atossa Therapeutics, and by Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University.
Based on mounting evidence, Quay and Ebright provided detailed scientific assessments of the origins of COVID-19, and their combined contributions on this crucial topic constitute the most impressive account to date on the topic. Both provided the Senate with a detailed description of the critical timeline and the circumstances of the contagion, while Quay offered compelling data and impressive statistical analyses.
Weight of Evidence
True, certain facts are already well-known. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, barred from U.S. grant funding by the Trump administration at the inception of the pandemic, was a center of risky coronavirus gain of function research; that is, research using “humanized mice” deliberately designed to make coronaviruses more transmissible and pathogenic.
Worse, the experiments were conducted under substandard safety conditions. Altogether, the weight of the available evidence, provided by both scientists, points straight to a Chinese laboratory leak.
Among the scientists’ many impressive arguments, three stand out:
The Hunan seafood market is a weak candidate for COVID-19 Origins. While cited by Communist Chinese officials and some Western virologists as the most likely location of viral spillover from some animal to a human, Quay told the Senate: “First, the virus was spreading in Wuhan in the early fall of 2019, two to four months before the first case in the Hunan seafood market. This is supported by 14 observations or evidence. This should be sufficient to dismiss the Hunan market as the source of the outbreak.” Likewise, Ebright stated, “Human cases at the Hunan seafood market in mid- to late-December 2019 cannot—even in principle—shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier in July-November 2019.” Both scientists emphasized that no infected animal host has yet been identified that would justify the natural origin of COVID-19 at the market or anywhere else. Ebright added,“No—zero—sound evidence has been presented that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin.”
The genomic features of the novel coronavirus are incompatible with a natural origin. Among the many reasons pointing to a lab origin, Dr. Quay noted, “ … the genome of SARS-CoV-2 has seven features that would be expected to be found in a virus constructed in a laboratory and which are not found in viruses from nature. The statistical probability of finding each feature in nature can be determined and the combined probability that SARS2 came from nature is less than one in a billion.”
Among the genetic features of the novel coronavirus is a peculiar feature of its capacity to infect organisms on its surface. SARS-CoV-2 is called a coronavirus because its surface is literally covered with protein spikes, giving it a crown-like appearance. It is the spikes that enable the virus to bind and infect the cells of its victims. But this particular coronavirus has what virologists call a “furin cleavage site” among its spikes, a unique feature that makes humans especially vulnerable to this viral infection.
As Ebright told the senators, “SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 800 known SARS-related coronaviruses (sarbecoviruses) that possesses [a furin cleavage site]. Mathematically, this finding—by itself—implies that the probability of encountering a natural SARS-related coronavirus possessing [a furin cleavage site] is less than 1 in 800, P<0.005.”
Note well: In his testimony, Quay cites a revealing email from none other than Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute to his colleagues that “[t]he furin link keeps bugging me … .” Likewise, in a Feb. 2, 2020, email, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University outlined his detailed observations to his colleagues: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotides that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function—that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level—it’s stunning.”
Andersen was the lead author of “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, and Garry was one of his co-authors. Despite their private assessments, they publicly concluded: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
Their paper quickly became one of the most influential papers in academic history. When Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, strongly endorsed the paper, he solidified the then-dominant government and media narrative that COVID-19 had a “natural” origin.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases “prompted” the authors to write the paper, though he claimed he did not steer them toward any specific conclusion and maintained an “open mind” on the origins issue, recently reaffirming that claim under oath in recent congressional testimony. Nonetheless, despite Andersen’s initial misgivings, as well as Garry’s own stated incredulity of the “natural” origin of the novel coronavirus, they plowed ahead with their publication anyway. Their rapid reversal from their initial assessments remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of the global pandemic.
The circumstantial evidence is most compatible with a lab leak. As Quay told the Senate, “There is complete agreement that the closest viruses to SARS 2 are coronaviruses found only in bats from Southern China or across the southern border in Laos. This is 1,500 [kilometers] from Wuhan. The distance from Washington, D.C. to the Florida Everglades. Imagine you are having dinner at a restaurant in North Bethesda [in Maryland] next to NIAID labs. You get sick and are told that the virus you caught is only found in bats from the Everglades, but it is also being studies at those laboratories you see out the restaurant window.”
Quay and Ebright also recited the well-known efforts of the Chinese communist officials in January 2020 to shut down crucial scientific information and cover up the research being conducted in Wuhan. Even though China locked down Wuhan in January 2020, as Ebright noted, three Wuhan Institute researchers were infected and hospitalized with COVID-19 as early as November 2019.
Fading Natural Origin Theory
During the pandemic’s early stages in America, federal officials and a team of top virologists worked diligently to promote the narrative that COVID-19 had a natural origin and had jumped from an animal—an “intermediate host”—to humans. The problem, however, is that the proponents of the “natural origins” hypothesis have failed to produce the evidence of any such a host before the first human infections.
It was not for lack of a herculean effort. In attempting to prove that the pandemic had a “natural origin,” Chinese officials and scientists took hundreds of specimens of animals and market suppliers from the Hunan market, plus thousands of animal specimens from three provinces in southern China, and many more thousands of specimens from wildlife, including pangolins and bats, as well as from domestic animals.
All were found “negative” for SARS-CoV-2. In detailing China’s extraordinary research effort, Quay observed, “… the largest effort to find a virus host in the history of the world came up empty.”
In his June 18 Senate testimony, Garry reaffirmed his conviction that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin and remains the most rational explanation for the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the hearing, however, Ebright directly challenged his fellow witness and took aim at the validity of the famous March 2020 Nature Medicine article.
As Ebright told the senators, “It presents no new data and presents no new data analyses.” As he further noted, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency also criticized the paper because, in their language, it was not based on “scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”
In questioning Garry, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., exclaimed, “Multiple intelligence community agents and components have concluded it was likely a lab leak, and they concluded that at the same time that you and your people were propagandizing the American public and using the channels and influence of the American government to censor ordinary Americans.”
Underscoring Hawley’s point, neither Garry nor his co-authors could have even begun to make a strong, data-driven, scientific argument for a “natural origin” of COVID-19. China had shut down release of any such information in January 2020, hiding samples, deleting the genetic sequences of the virus, and crushing internal scientific dissent. Moreover, even if the novel coronavirus emerged naturally from an animal, that does not mean that it did not come from a Chinese laboratory. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., noted, “Dr. Garry has told us that this couldn’t have come from bats. It had to go through an intermediate host. That may well be true … but what he also doesn’t tell you is the animal host could be a laboratory animal.”
More to Come
The Senate probe came on the heels of a staff report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealing email communications from Fauci, Collins, and Jeremy Farrar, a British scientist who participated in the early 2020 deliberations among top virologists, as well as the authors of the Nature Medicine article. There is, however, more to come. During the Senate hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., for the second year in a row, highlighted the continuing failure of Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to release 50 unredacted emails, including internal communications between Fauci, Collins, and Farrar, and any discussions they may have had concerning the origins of the pandemic. While Becerra told Johnson last year he would get back to him, Johnson has still not gotten the vital information he requested.
Washington “cover-ups” are invariably self-destructive. House and Senate investigators are enriching a large and growing public record, while detailing the well-documented federal weaknesses in responding to the global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.
Such a strong record can provide a basis not only for major institutional reforms at our federal public health agencies, but also the long overdue accountability for those who have deliberately misled Congress and the American people.
Robert Schmad is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Alexander Soros, son of George Soros and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, is engaged to veteran Democratic operative Huma Abedin, according to his Instagram account.
“This happened … we couldn’t be happier, more grateful, or more in love,” Soros wrote on social media on Tuesday alongside a picture of him proposing to Abedin. Soros proposed to Abedin in New York City in late May, with the couple later absconding to Italy to celebrate and only making their engagement public more than a month later, Vogue reported.
George Soros handed over control of his $25 billion philanthropic empire to Alex in June 2023, with the younger Soros subsequently describing himself as “more political” than his father in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Abedin, meanwhile, is a close ally of Hillary Clinton, having served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff during her time as secretary of state and working as the vice chair of the former first lady’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“The House of Soros is passing on the title to the firstborn son. And now, that son is marrying a powerful duchess to shore up the family empire,” America 2100, a think tank run by a former chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote on X. “Every society has a ruling class.”
One of the great lies of our time is that “meritocracy” replaced the Old World nobility. It didn’t.
The House of Soros is passing on the title to the firstborn son. And now, that son is marrying a powerful duchess to shore up the family empire.
Soros and Abedin first met at a mutual friend’s birthday party last fall and bonded over their mutual interest in politics, according to Vogue. Since then, the two have made a number of public appearances together, including at a White House state dinner and at the 2024 Met Gala.
Now that he has control of the charitable network built by his father, the younger Soros plans to levy its resources to boost Democratic politicians and to expand access to abortion, he told The Wall Street Journal.
One former Clinton aide told the New York Post that Soros and Abedin are a “classic Clinton World couple.”
The marriage will be Soros’ first and Abedin’s second as the high-profile Democratic staffer was married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. Abedin and Weiner divorced after he was caught sexting with an underage girl, according to CBS News.
NBCUniversal lost a major motion in the defamation lawsuit brought by Plaintiff Dr. Mahendra Amin, an obstetrician gynecologist who was accused by MSNBC hosts, including Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace, of performing unnecessary hysterectomies at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center. The case will now go forward to trial on the claim that Maddow and Wallace made “verifiably false” statements on air.
Defamation lawsuits are fairly common for major media, including like the recent settlements of Fox with Dominion and NBC and various outlets with high school student Nicholas Sandmann.
The Supreme Court has given the press added “breathing room” with the higher standard of proof found in cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan. Under that standard, a plaintiff must show that a statement was knowingly false or published with reckless disregard of the truth. The complaint alleges that NBC reporters Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley developed the story on whistleblower’s claims despite initial skepticism from the network’s standards department.
MSNBC quickly followed with a series of on-air reports in which the doctor was often referred to as the “uterus collector.” The story was based on allegations by “a former nurse at the facility named Dawn Wooten.” Wooten is quoted extensively in the opinion:
We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out …. That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly … is he collecting these things or something[?] … Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out.
Despite misgivings about Wooten’s credibility, MSNBC went forward with stories that portrayed Dr. Amin as a virtual Dr. Mengele. Critics charged that the story was irresistible for the channel in bringing together reproductive health issues, immigration, and social equity issues. Whatever the reason, hosts and executives set aside their doubts and ran stories that made Dr. Amin an infamous figure throughout the country.
Judge Lisa Godbey Wood (S.D. Ga.) found that the stories were false in claiming that Dr. Amin performed “hysterectomies that were unnecessary, unauthorized, or even botched.” She also found that MSNBC may have published the reports knowing that the allegations were false or with reckless disregard of the truth.
In granting summary judgment in favor of Dr. Amin, Judge Wood wrote:
Multiple statements are verifiably false. The undisputed evidence has established that: (1) there were no mass hysterectomies or high numbers of hysterectomies at the facility; (2) Dr. Amin performed only two hysterectomies on female detainees from the ICDC; and (3) Dr. Amin is not a “uterus collector.” The Court must look to each of the statements in the context of the entire broadcast or social media post to assess the construction placed upon it by the average viewer. Doing so, the undisputed evidence establishes that multiple NBC statements are false.
The Court emphasized that “it does not matter that NBC did not make these accusations directly, but only republished the whistleblower letter’s allegations. If accusations against a plaintiff are “based entirely on hearsay,” “[t]he fact that the charges made were based upon hearsay in no manner relieves the defendant of liability. Charges based upon hearsay are the equivalent in law to direct charges.”
That can be a chilling standard for the media, which often reports on the fact of allegations that are newsworthy. However, Judge Wood said that NBC went well beyond such a role in this case:
…the focus of these three broadcasts was not on unnecessary or unconsented-to “medical procedures.” The focus was on “mass hysterectomies” and “high numbers of hysterectomies,” performed without necessity and consent, at the facility. This is reinforced by MSNBC’s own headlines: “WHISTLEBLOWER: HIGH NUMBER OF HYSTERECTOMIES AT ICE DETENTION CTR.” and “COMPLAINT: MASS HYSTERECTOMIES PERFORMED ON WOMEN AT ICE FACILITY.”
The court noted that “[w]hile opinions and hyperbole are typically non-actionable, they become actionable when they are capable of being proved false.” That includes MSNBC referring to Dr. Amin as someone known to be a “uterus collector” and “taking everybody’s stuff out” state facts that can be proved false. Judge Wood held that “[t]hese statements are not mere subjective assessments of Plaintiff over which reasonable minds could differ. They are also not simply rhetorical hyperbole or obviously exaggerated statements that are unprovable…”
Under Georgia law, the court held that this met the “actual malice” standard. What makes the case particularly damaging is the use of MSNBC’s own hosts, lawyers, and fact-checkers to show knowingly false or reckless publication:
Plaintiff has presented evidence that NBC’s statements were inherently implausible. The allegations that there were “mass hysterectomies,” Plaintiff was a “uterus collector” or collected uteri, Plaintiff performed hysterectomies “for which no medical indication existed,” and that Plaintiff performed hysterectomies on all or nearly all his patients are so implausible that a jury could infer actual malice. The implausibility of these statements is clear, given that NBC found evidence of only two hysterectomies. NBC’s investigation did not yield evidence of more than two hysterectomies. Wooten told NBC she did not know how many women had had hysterectomies.
An attorney source, Sarah Owings, told NBC that her team was not finding evidence of mass hysterectomies. Another attorney source, Ben Osorio, told NBC that one client had had a hysterectomy that medical records revealed was medically necessary and another client believed she had had a hysterectomy, but no evidence supported this claim. NBC’s own reporter, Julia Ainsley, reinforced these facts when she texted her colleague: “But only two hysterectomies?” The attorney who told NBC that there were more than two hysterectomies, Andrew Free, also told NBC that those reports had not been confirmed and were still being vetted. Free even explicitly told NBC that he could confirm only one hysterectomy.
Nevertheless, NBC published statements that Plaintiff performed mass hysterectomies. Although NBC’s own sources told it that there was evidence of only one hysterectomy, NBC stated as fact: “five different women … had a hysterectomy done”; “as many as 15 immigrant women were given full or partial hysterectomies”; and “[e]verybody this doctor sees has a hysterectomy, just about everybody.” These statements contradict information known to NBC at the time of reporting. The same applies to the accusations that Plaintiff was a “uterus collector” or that detainees referred to him as such. Aside from Wooten’s allegation, NBC lacked any evidence that could support the accusation that Plaintiff collected uteri or was known as the “uterus collector” at the ICDC. A jury could conclude that NBC knew these allegations were false.
Plaintiff has presented evidence that there were obvious reasons to doubt Wooten’s reliability, credibility, and accuracy. In her interview with NBC, Wooten could not name Plaintiff, did not know what happened when detainees visited Plaintiff, and did not know how many women had received gynecological procedures, even acknowledged this herself. Wooten could not provide a number for how many women she had spoken to about gynecological care at the facility. She told NBC that she had spoken to “several women” in the eight years she worked at the ICDC. In essence, Wooten could provide only hearsay evidence to support her allegations. NBC’s reporter, Jacob Soboroff, texted his colleague that one source had “heard mixed things about Wooten.” NBC’s deputy head of Standards was critical of Wooten because she “provide[d] no evidence to back up her claims,” had “no direct knowledge of what she’s claiming,” and she could not “name the doctor involved.”
MSNBC’s hosts also voiced concerns over Wooten’s reliability. Rachel Maddow believed Wooten’s whistleblower letter jumped to conclusions and “didn’t want to assume it’s true.” Chris Hayes also criticized Wooten’s letter because it was based on secondhand information and Wooten had “no factual, firsthand knowledge.” Not only did NBC have reasons to doubt Wooten, but NBC actually doubted her.
…
Here, there is evidence of just that. The deputy head of NBC’s Standards, Chris Scholl, said that the whistleblower letter “boils down to a single source—with an agenda—telling us things we have no basis to believe are true.” He also later said that Wooten “has a beef” and “a whole separate agenda.” As detailed above, Scholl interspersed these observations of Wooten’s bias with doubts about the truth of Wooten’s story. While only a jury can determine whether Wooten was a credible or believable source, Plaintiff has submitted sufficient evidence that would enable a jury to find that she was not….
The court also details how top executives ran the story despite their own reservations.
Chris Scholl approved the initial news article written by Ainsley and Soboroff. He also worked on MSNBC’s broadcasts of the statements. As detailed above, Scholl expressed concerns over the veracity of the statements. He pointed out the lack of evidence to support the accusations, doubted Wooten as a credible source, and said that NBC had been unable to verify the accusations. Scholl even explicitly stated: “We don’t know the truth.” A jury could determine that Scholl expressed serious doubts.
Judge Wood notes that Maddow “is responsible for the content of her show,” but ran the story despite expressing the fact that she had “serious doubt” about the account of the whistleblower.
She also noted that Hayes said that the story went viral because it recalled Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow South, but, in reality, that was “not the case here.”
While the court acknowledges that NBC could well convince a jury at trial, he held:
Plaintiff has presented sufficient evidence that could enable a jury to find actual malice. A jury could also conclude that NBC did not act with actual malice given the evidence that it published opposing information. This duel of conflicting evidence must be resolved by a jury….
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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