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Jacksonian Obstruction: Smith Explains How He Was Planning to Circumvent the Decision in Fischer

By: Jonathan Turley | January 14, 2025

The release of the first part of Jack Smith’s report at midnight was the special counsel’s version of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision: we had seen it before. Putting aside the public filings where Smith fought to get this information out before the election, there was little new in the report. What the report did not contain is an explanation of how Smith destroyed his own cases against Trump. However, one notable element was Smith’s reliance on a dubious concurrence by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the subject of a prior column on what would be an interpretation that was too clever by half.

Much of the report was vintage Smith in dismissing countervailing precedent and insisting that he could “obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” He may be right about obtaining a conviction before a D.C. jury and a highly motivated judge against Trump. However, he would not have been able to sustain any conviction — and this report makes that abundantly clear.

Smith repeats the same conclusory evidence, such as citing how Trump said “fight” ten times in his January 6th speech. He minimized the immunity decision by removing some evidence but kept largely the original indictment. However, the treatment of the obstruction claims was the most telling and indicative of Smith, who has repeatedly lost cases due to overextending constitutional and statutory authority.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Fischer v. United States rejecting the use of obstruction of legal proceedings against January 6th defendants will potentially impact hundreds of cases. For some, it may lead to dismissals or, in the cases with multiple charges, resentencings. One of those cases that will be impacted is the pending prosecution of former president Donald Trump who is facing four charges, including two obstruction counts. It was not clear if Special Counsel Jack Smith would yield to the decision or possibly take the dubious path laid out by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her concurrence.

However, Smith tended to push the law to the breaking point to bag defendants. That was the case when his conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell was unanimously reversed as overextending another law.

As I wrote previously after the decision, “It is doubtful that [Smith] will go quietly into the night after the Fischer decision.” In most cases, a prosecutor would go back and secure a superseding indictment in light of the loss of the obstruction claims. Those claims were central to the narrative of the government under the Trump indictment. However, I wrote that it “is not Smith’s style” to yield to precedent and that he would likely “take a not-so-subtle hint from Jackson in her concurrence.”

Jackson supported the majority in finding that the obstruction provision, Section 1512(c), was enacted after the Enron case to address the destruction of documents and records.

Section 1512(c)(1) prohibits corruptly obstructing an official proceeding by altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing a record, document, or other object with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding. However, a second provision under subsection (c)(2) allowed for charges that would “otherwise” obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding. The Court held that the obstruction cases under Section 1512(c)(2) must be tied to impairing the integrity or availability of evidence.

However, in a single justice concurrence, she added a way that Smith and other prosecutors might still be able to shoehorn January 6th into a Section 1512 offense:

“That official proceeding [Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote] plainly used certain records, documents, or objects—including, among others, those relating to the electoral votes themselves. And it might well be that Fischer’s conduct, as alleged here, involved the impairment (or the attempted impairment) of the availability or integrity of things used during the January 6 proceeding “in ways other than those specified in (c)(1).” Ante, at 8. If so, then Fischer’s prosecution under §1512(c)(2) can, and should, proceed. That issue remains available for the lower courts to determine on remand.”

Once again, no other justice joined Jackson in the concurrence.

Right on cue, Smith revealed that he was going to do precisely what I feared in taking a position supported by a single justice. In his report, Smith wrote:

“Mr. Trump’s and his co-conspirators’ obstruction involved replacing valid elector certificates from the contested states with false ones they had manufactured-the Office anticipated the possibility of such a result in Fischer and confirmed that the evidence would prove Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt even under a narrow interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2).”

Just saying that a proceeding involves “certain records” is transparently artificial and forced. Even the submission of an alternative slate of electors is not the destruction of electors certified by the secretaries of state.

The federal law allows for challenges in Congress, which Democrats previously utilized without claims of insurrections or attacks on democracy. J6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), voted to challenge the certification of the 2004 results of President George W. Bush’s reelection; committee member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to challenge Trump’s certification in 2016. Both did so under the very law that Trump’s congressional supporters used in 2020. And Pelosi and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the challenge organized by then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in 2004.

Those challenges under the same loose theory could have been viewed as attempting to negate or destroy certifications from the states. It would have likely, in my view, result in another reversal. However, Smith is always about securing convictions more than sustaining appeals. That is why he filed the second case in D.C., where he was given the best possible judge for the prosecution, a judge viewed by many as predisposed against Trump.

In a sentencing hearing of a Jan. 6 rioter in 2022, Chutkan had said that the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution.” She added then, “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” That “one person” was then brought to her for trial by Smith.

So Smith was going to proceed on the theory of a single justice with the help of a favorable jury and a motivated judge. Little has changed with Smith since his unanimous reversal in the McDonnell case, which seems much of the reason that he was appointed.

Jonathan Turley is 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.”

This column also appeared on Fox.com

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Crime, Law, Political

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Monday, January 13, 2025

Top Stories

•Mel Gibson Condemns Abortion: “It’s Human Sacrifice”
•Biden Gives Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis
• Josh Hawley Urges Trump to Defund Planned Parenthood
•Woman Arrested After Attempting to Flush Her Baby Down the Toilet
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Mel Gibson Condemns Abortion: “It’s Human Sacrifice”

Biden Gives Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis

Josh Hawley Urges Trump to Defund Planned Parenthood

Woman Arrested After Attempting to Flush Her Baby Down the Toilet

Senate Will Vote on Key Pro-Life Bill to Protect Babies From Infanticide

They Said People Would Flee States With Abortion Bans, They Didn’t

Donald Trump Will be President in One Week

Deacon Helps Save Church From California Fire

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More Catholic Members of Congress are Pro-Abortion Than Pro-Life

Planned Parenthood Takes Over Facility of Abortionist Who Killed Babies in Partial-Birth Abortions

We Must Remember Ending Abortion is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Abortion is Not a “Loving Act” Because You Don’t Kill the People You Love

Geline Williams, Who Founded America’s Oldest Pro-Life Organization, Passes Away at 100

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Merchan’s Monster: Judge’s Attempt to Calm the Townspeople Fails Spectacularly in Trump Trial

By: Jonathan Turley | January 13, 2025

Below is my column in the New York Post on the statement by Acting Justice Juan Merchan in the sentencing of President-elect Donald Trump. Merchan’s effort to justify the handing of the case sounded like the second defense argument made in the hearing. It likely changed few minds in the court of public opinion.

Here is the column:

This week, the sentencing of President-Elect Donald Trump saw one of the most impassioned defense arguments given at such a hearing in years . . . from the judge himself. Acting Justice Juan Merchan admitted that the case was “unique and remarkable” but insisted that “once the courtroom doors were closed, the trial itself was no more special, unique, and extraordinary than the other 32 cases in this courthouse.”

If so, that is a chilling indictment of the entire New York court system. Merchan allowed a dead misdemeanor to be resuscitated by allowing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively prosecute declined federal offenses. He allowed a jury to convict Trump without any agreement, let alone unanimity, on what actually occurred in the case. Merchan ruled that the jury did not have to agree on why Trump committed an alleged offense in describing settlement costs as legal costs. Neither the defendant nor the public will ever know what the jury ultimately found in its verdict.

I once described this case as a legal Frankenstein: “It is the ultimate gravedigger charge, where Bragg unearthed a case from 2016 and, through a series of novel steps, is seeking to bring it back to life…Bragg is combining parts from both state and federal codes.”

Even liberal legal experts have denounced the case and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) recently called it total “b—s–t.”

Now, Merchan seemed to assure this Frankenstein case that he was just like any other creature of the court. It did not matter that he was stitched together from dead cases and zapped into life through lawfare.

Merchan knows that there is a fair chance this monstrosity will finally die on appeal, and he was making the case for his own conduct. The verdict, however, is likely to last far longer than the Trump verdict. It is a judgment against not just Merchan but the New York legal system, which allowed itself to be weaponized against political opponents.

In the Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein says “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.”

Trump can now appeal the case as a whole. Prior appeals in the New York court system were unsuccessful, and hopes are low that the system will redeem itself. However, Trump can eventually escape the vortex of the New York court system in search of jurists willing to see beyond the rage and bring reason to this case.

Notably, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass cited Chief Justice John Roberts in his argument before Merchan, noting that Roberts recently chastised those who attack the courts. (Roberts just the night before joined liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in refusing to stay the sentencing). Steinglass portrayed Trump as an existential threat to the rule of law.

Roberts, however, is everything that Merchan is not. You can disagree with him, but he has repeatedly ruled against his own preferred outcomes in cases, including rulings against President Trump and his campaign and Administration. For his part, Trump declined to criticize the court and declared that “This is a long way from finished and I respect the court’s opinion.”

Indeed it is. Merchan’s monster will now go on the road and work its way back to the Supreme Court. Outside of New York this freak attraction will likely be viewed as less thrilling than chilling.

The election had the feel of the townspeople coming to the castle in the movie. In this case, however, the townspeople were right about what they saw in the making of a creature that threatened their very existence. Lawfare is that monster. It threatens us all, even those who hate Trump and his supporters. Once released, it spreads panic among the public which can no longer rely on the guarantees of blind and fair justice. That includes businesses who view this case and the equally absurd civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James as creating a dangerous and even lawless environment. Many are saying “but for the grace of God go I” in a system that allows for selective prosecution.

In the sentencing proceeding, Merchan was downplaying his hand in creating this Frankenstein. However, the case is the fallen angel of the legal system. While heralded in court by Bragg’s office as the triumph of legal process, it is in fact the rawest and most grotesque form of lawfare. Many will be blamed as the creators of this monster but few will escape that blame, including Merchan himself.

Jonathan Turley is 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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How Jack Smith Destroyed His Own Case Against Trump

By: Jonathan Turley | January 13, 2025

Below is my column in The Hill on the one thing that the forthcoming report of Special Counsel Jack Smith will not address: how he destroyed his own case against Donald Trump. Smith will be something of a tragic figure for future special counsels. The only thing missing is a shirt reading, “I spent over two years and $50 million dollars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt (and a redacted report).”

Here is the column:

The expected release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report will occur as early as this weekend, albeit without those sections dealing with the Florida documents case. (Other defendants are still facing prosecution in that case.) However, the most glaring omission will be arguably an explanation of how Smith lost this war without firing a single shot in a trial.

After more than two years, two separate cases and countless appeals (not to mention more than $50 million spent), Smith left without presenting a single witness, let alone charge, at trial. It is an example of how a general can have the largest army and unlimited resources and yet defeat himself with a series of miscalculations.

History probably won’t be kind to Smith, whose record bespeaks a “parade general” — a prosecutor who offered more pretense than progress in the prosecution of an American president.

Indeed, this report will be one of Smith’s last chances to display a case that notably never got close to an actual trial. One-sided and unfiltered, it will have all of the thrill of a Sousa march of a regiment in full dress. We know because we have seen much of this before. At every juncture, Smith has taken his case out on parade in the court of public opinion.

The Smith report will reportedly concern only the Washington case alleging crimes related to Jan. 6 and the 2020 election — a case that was always a bridge too far for Smith.

When first appointed, Smith had a straightforward and relatively easy case to make against Trump over his removal and retention of presidential materials. The case was not without controversy. Some of us questioned the selective nature of the prosecution given past violations by other presidents, particularly as shown by the violations of President Biden going back decades found by another special counsel.

However, the case originally focused on the conspiracy and false statements during the federal investigation into the documents at Mar-a-Lago. Those are well-established crimes that Smith could have brought to trial quickly with a solid shot for conviction.

But Smith’s undoing has always been his appetite. That was evident when he was unanimously reversed by the Supreme Court in his case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R).

In Florida, Smith was in signature form. He took a simple case and loaded it up with press-grabbing charges regarding the retention of classified material. In so doing, he slowed the case to a crawl. As a defense lawyer who has handled classified documents cases, I said at the outset that I did not believe he could get this case to a jury before the 2024 election, and that after that election, Smith might not have a case to present. Smith had outmaneuvered himself.

Then came the Washington filing, the subject of this forthcoming report. It was another vintage Smith moment. Smith played to the public in a case that pushed both the Constitution and statutory provisions beyond the breaking point. He simply could not resist, and he was only encouraged after the assignment of Judge Tanya Chutkan, a judge viewed by many as predisposed against Trump.

In a sentencing hearing of a Jan. 6 rioter in 2022, Chutkan had said that the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution.” She added then, “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” That “one person” was then brought to her for trial by Smith.

The D.C. case was doomed from the outset by both a prosecutor and judge who, in their zeal to bag Trump, yielded to every temptation. As time ticked away, Smith became almost apoplectic in demanding an expedited path to trial, including cutting short appeals. After refusing to recuse herself, Chutkan seemed to indulge Smith at every turn. But the Supreme Court failed to agree that speed should trump substance in such reviews.

With both cases slipping out of his grasp, Smith then threw a final Hail Mary. He asked Chutkan to let him file what was basically a 165-page summary of this report against Trump before the election. There was no apparent reason for the public release of the filing, except to influence the election — a motivation long barred by Justice Department rules. Chutkan, of course, allowed it anyway, despite admitting that the request was “procedurally irregular.” It did not work. Although the press and pundits eagerly repeated the allegations in the filing, the public had long ago reached its own conclusion and rendered its own verdict in November.

In my view, Smith’s D.C. case would never have been upheld, even if he had made it to a favorable jury in front of a motivated judge. As established by the court in Trump v. United States, Smith could not rely on much of his complaint due to violating constitutionally protected areas.

Smith responded to the immunity decision again in typical Smith fashion, largely keeping the same claims with minimal changes. His new indictment was to indictments what shrinkflation is to consumer products — the same package with less content. As in the McDonnell case, Smith was going for conviction at all costs, despite a high likelihood of the case eventually being overturned.

Then the public effectively put an end to both cases by electing Trump.

The Smith investigation should be a case study for future prosecutors in what not to do. An abundance of appetite and arrogance can prove as deadly as a paucity of evidence and authority.

Ironically, Smith will not be the only special counsel offering such a cautionary tale. The report of Special Counsel David Weiss into the Hunter Biden controversy will also be released soon. Weiss was widely denounced for allowing major crimes to lapse against Hunter Biden and offering an embarrassing sweetheart plea deal that collapsed in open court. Notably, Weiss succeeded by minimizing his charges (for the wrong reason). In that way, Weiss has one claim that Smith does not: He made it to court and secured a conviction. Indeed, he was about to prosecute a second case when President Biden pardoned his son.

Weiss’s report will likely only increase questions over his failure to pursue Hunter more aggressively. For Smith, the question is whether he was too aggressive, to the detriment of his own prosecution.

Prosecutions are not the sole measure of success for a special prosecutor. At times, the report itself can be of equal, if not greater, importance to the public.

This is not one of those cases.

The public will be given Smith’s detailed account of a case that was never brought and would likely never have held up. At more than $50 million, it is arguably the biggest flop since “The Adventures of Pluto Nash.“ The difference is that it did not take more than two years to watch Eddie Murphy’s film disaster, and the actor did not then write up a report on how good the movie really was.

Jonathan Turley is 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.”

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New Hampshire Supreme Court Rejects Hate Speech Enforcement

By Jonathan Turley | January 13, 2025

The New Hampshire Supreme Court just handed down a victory for free speech in Attorney General v. Hood. As is often the case, defending free speech means supporting viewpoints that most of us find grotesque and hateful. However, the justices rejected the position of the Portsmouth Police Department that it could force the removal of a racist banner from an overpass. Such signs and flags are commonly allowed, but the police and prosecutors insisted that racist messages “interfered with the rights” of other citizens. The controversy began on July 30, 2022, when a group of roughly ten people with NSC-131, a “pro-white, street-oriented fraternity dedicated to raising authentic resistance to the enemies of [its] people in the New England area,” hung banners from the overpass, including one reading “KEEP NEW ENGLAND WHITE.”

The police informed the leader, Christopher Hood, that they were violating a Portsmouth municipal ordinance that prohibited hanging banners from the overpass without a permit. While the group removed the banners, it later posted statements on the incident. The state responded by filing complaints against the defendants seeking civil penalties and injunctive relief for their alleged violation of RSA 354-B:1.

Notably, the state did not deny that groups routinely hang flags and signs from overpasses. However, it claimed that hanging banners reading “Keep New England White” was “motivated by race and interfered with the lawful activities of 2 others.”

N.H. Stats. 354-B:1 provides,

All persons have the right to engage in lawful activities and to exercise and enjoy the rights secured by the [constitutions and laws] without being subject to actual or threatened physical force or violence against them or any other person or by actual or threatened damage to or trespass on property when such actual or threatened conduct is motivated by race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability….

It shall be unlawful for any person to interfere or attempt to interfere with the rights secured by this chapter.

The justices held that the enforcement in this case violated the New Hampshire Constitution’s free speech provision:

[T]he State alleged that the defendants “trespassed upon the property of the State of New Hampshire and the City of Portsmouth when [they and other individuals] displayed banners reading ‘Keep New England White’ from the overpass without a permit.” In objecting to Hood’s motion to dismiss, the State argued that “[t]he defendant displayed a banner upon the fencing—causing a thing to enter upon land in possession of another, without any prior authorization from city or state authorities.” Because the State alleged that the defendants intentionally invaded the property of another, and because “[t]he State, no less than a private owner of property, has power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated,” we conclude that the State’s complaints sufficiently alleged a civil trespass.

Nonetheless, we must next determine whether the State’s proposed construction of the Act, applying the aforementioned definition of trespass, violates the defendants’ constitutional rights to free speech…

Government property generally falls into three categories — traditional public forums, designated public forums, and limited public forums. Here, the trial court correctly reasoned that because “application of the Civil Rights Act requires no consideration of the relevant forum or the nature of the underlying regulations as to that forum,” it applies “with equal force in traditional public fora as it does in limited or nonpublic fora.” We agree with the trial court’s assessment and proceed to the regulation at issue.

Government regulation of speech is content-based if a law applies to a particular type of speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed. The State argues that the Act “does not become a content or viewpoint-based action because the State relies upon a defendant’s speech.” Rather, it maintains that “[c]onsidering an actor’s motivation to assess whether that remedy may be warranted has no impact on the person’s right to freedom of speech, even when proof of motivation relies upon evidence of the person’s speech, because a person’s motivation has always been a proper consideration.” We disagree.

The Act prohibits threatened and actual conduct only when “motivated by race, color, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability.” Thus, we agree with the trial court’s assessment that “[b]ecause the Civil Rights Act’s additional sanctions apply only where a speaker is ‘motivated by race’ or another protected characteristic, it is ‘content-based’ in that it ‘applies to … particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed.’”

Content-based restrictions must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. The State asserts that the requirement that a trespass be unprivileged or otherwise unlawful functions as a limitation sufficient to prevent its construction of the Act from being unconstitutionally overbroad. We are not persuaded. The trial court determined, and we agree, that although “prohibiting or discouraging interference with the lawful rights of others by way of bias-motivated conduct (including actual trespass) is a compelling government interest,” the State’s construction of the Act “is overly broad and not narrowly tailored to that end because, so construed, the Civil Rights Act applies in numerous circumstances which have no relation to this interest.”

The ruling is notable in part because of the position of various Democratic leaders that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment. I have spent years contesting that false claim, including in my recent book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz repeatedly claimed that “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Ironically, this false claim, repeated by many Democrats, constitutes one of the most dangerous forms of disinformation. It is being used to convince a free people to give up some of their freedom with a “nothing to see here” pitch.

In prior testimony before Congress on the censorship system under the Biden administration, I was taken aback when the committee’s ranking Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), declared, “I hope that [all members] recognize that there is speech that is not constitutionally protected,” and then referenced hate speech as an example.

That false claim has been echoed by others such as Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer. “If you espouse hate,” he said, “…you’re not protected under the First Amendment.” Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.”

The Supreme Court has consistently rejected Gov. Walz’s claim. For example, in the 2016 Matal v. Tam decision, the court stressed that this precise position “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

Jonathan Turley is 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).

H/T Gene Volokh

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – What Goes around

A.F. Branco | on January 12, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-what-goes-around-4/

Blackwell Sues Alpha News — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Katie Blackwell’s lawsuit against Alph News may backfire. Dozens of Police officers claim Katie Blackwell perjured herself when testifying in the Chauvin Trial that MPD didn’t train officers in the knee on the neck ‘Improvised Position. 33 former Minneapolis police officers and one current officer who have all sworn under oath that MPD actually trained the knee on the neck restraint.

Director of ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’ responds to defamation lawsuit after bombshell court filings

By Liz Collin – AlphaNews.com – Jan 8, 2025

Dr. Chaix believes that in filing her lawsuit, Blackwell has unwittingly helped bring more of the truth to light.
For the first time, the director of “The Fall of Minneapolis” responded to the defamation lawsuit filed by Minneapolis Assistant Police Chief Katie Blackwell. The suit names producer and reporter Liz Collin, Alpha News and director Dr. JC Chaix. Dr. Chaix believes that in filing her lawsuit, Blackwell has unwittingly helped bring more of the truth to light.
Blackwell has said Alpha News defamed her by using her sworn testimony during Derek Chauvin’s trial when she testified that she did not recognize what she called an “improvised position” that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) did not train. READ MORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

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Now, on the Lighter Side

January 11, 2025

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HUMOR, Political

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Top Stories

•Senate Will Vote on Bill to Protect Babies Who Survive Abortions
•2,500 Christian Doctors Challenge Biden Abortion Mandate
• Majority of Americans Say Biden Is Worst President Since Nixon
•ZERO Doctors Have Been Prosecuted Under Texas Abortion Ban
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Senate Will Vote on Bill to Protect Babies Who Survive Abortions

2,500 Christian Doctors Challenge Biden Abortion Mandate

Majority of Americans Say Biden Is Worst President Since Nixon

ZERO Doctors Have Been Prosecuted Under Texas Abortion Ban

Churches Open Doors to Families Fleeing California Fires

Pro-Abortion Texas Medical Board Director Removed

Satanic Temple is Shipping Abortion Drugs to Women

Arizona Abortions Climb 11%

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Facebook and Instagram Ban LifeNews for Sharing Pro-Life Medical Video

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California’s DEI-Obsessed Anarchotyrants Threw Money at Everything but Water and Firefighters

By: Chris Bray | January 10, 2025

California Palisades fire — California has enormously expensive and intrusive government that can’t even provide firefighters or water when your neighborhood burns down.

Chris Bray

Astonishingly devastating fires are burning mostly unchecked in Los Angeles, destroying whole neighborhoods, and see if you can spot the problem in this Yahoo News update, I found in my inbox this week:

As of that report, thousands of acres of fire burning into (and then straight through) neighborhoods; 1,400 firefighters. In Pacific Palisades alone, where the biggest fire started first, we’re below one firefighter per two acres of fire. I’ve spent most of my life in California, and a quite common experience is to be in way-Northern California, for example, and watch a line of fire engines go racing past from San Diego and Newport Beach, 500 miles from home. We deal with big fires with prompt statewide mutual aid, a well-practiced system.

I live near the Eaton fire, which is burning in the hills above Pasadena, and I listened all Tuesday night for the cavalry to arrive. The cavalry, bizarrely, did not seem to arrive. And so, I watched houses burn, on the news, with reporters present but no firefighters.

Around 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, a hydrant firefighters were using on Lachman Lane ran dry. You can hear what sounds like air pushing out, but no water. #PalisadesWildfire #PalisadeFire #PacificPalisades pic.twitter.com/09e6FRrcIM
— Matthew Seedorff (@MattSeedorff) January 8, 2025

This is becoming a widespread problem, so serious and obvious that even the Los Angeles Times has noticed, writing:

As wildfires raged across Los Angeles on Tuesday, crews battling the Palisades blaze faced an additional burden: Scores of fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades had little to no water flowing out.

“The hydrants are down,” said one firefighter in internal radio communications.

“Water supply just dropped,” said another.

By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area “went dry,” diminishing the flow of water from hydrants in higher elevations, said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city’s utility.

Where I live, in the western San Gabriel Valley, a large group of suburban fire departments has built an effective system of integrated and automatic mutual aid, the Verdugo system, run from a shared dispatch center in Glendale. I was listening to Verdugo dispatch Tuesday night, and the dispatchers gave up on dispatching. They broadcast calls in sets of 10 or 12, without assignments, so firefighters could hear what was happening, in case anyone could get to any of it: homes burning at the following addresses, brush burning at the following addresses, wires down at the following addresses…

The fire departments aren’t the problem, and the firefighters on the ground are very much not the problem. A cluster of headlines this morning at the highly alert news aggregator Rantingly begins to get at the underlying reality:

The mayor of Los Angeles, having cut fire department funding to pay for social justice programs, was on a city-funded outreach trip to Ghana as her city burned. How important.

As a matter of symbolism, the destruction of Pacific Palisades (and, as we saw Wednesday morning, big stretches of Malibu) is a gut punch. These are the most comfortable places in Los Angeles, and one of the discussions on social media this week is about which celebrities have evacuated or lost their homes. (“Oh my God, Tom Hanks!”) The places that are burning are the Democrat Party’s ATM machine. One wonders if they’ll notice the meaning of the fires. Meanwhile:

So yes, the ability of leftists to miss the point appears to be infinite. California has enormously expensive and intrusive government that can’t provide firefighters or water when your neighborhood burns down, which proves that Orange Man Bad.

I’m more than a mile from the edge of the nearest evacuation warning, so we’ll be fine. But that’s because of the accident of our location relative to the fire, not because anything here actually works.

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of “Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond,” published last year by W.W. Norton.

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DONALD TRUMP SENTENCED WITH NO PENALTY IN NEW YORK CRIMINAL TRIAL, AS JUDGE WISHES HIM ‘GODSPEED’ IN 2ND TERM

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‘Great embarrassment’: Hear Trump’s courtroom response to Judge Merchan’s ‘political witch hunt’ trial

By Andrew Mark Miller Fox News | Published January 10, 2025 1:09pm EST | Updated January 10, 2025

‘Great embarassment’: Hear Trump’s courtroom response to Judge Merchan’s ‘political witch hunt’ trial

The audio tape of President-elect Trump’s New York City sentencing hearing was released to the public on Friday, giving insight into the unprecedented conviction against a former president where Trump was ultimately sentenced to an unconditional discharge.

“This has been a very terrible experience,” Trump, who virtually attended the criminal trial sentencing hearing, told the New York City courtroom on Friday morning. “I think it’s been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system.”

“This is a case that Alvin Bragg did not want to bring. He thought it was, from what I read and from what I hear, inappropriately handled before he got there. And a gentleman from a law firm came in and acted as a district attorney,” the president-elect continued. “And that gentleman, from what I heard, was a criminal or almost criminal in what he did. It was very inappropriate. It was somebody involved with my political opponent.”

“I think it’s an embarrassment to New York and New York has a lot of problems, but this is a great embarrassment,” he added.

Video

At one point, Trump, appearing virtually, leaned forward, looking at Judge Juan Merchan, and referenced the November election, suggesting that it represented a repudiation of this case.

“It’s been a political witch hunt,” Trump explained. “It was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election. And obviously, that didn’t work. And the people of our country got to see this firsthand because they watched the case in your courtroom. They got to see this firsthand. And then they voted, and I won.”

Assistant District Attorney Josh Steinglass stated that there was “overwhelming evidence to support the jury’s verdict” and was critical of Trump, claiming the president-elect “has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way” with the comments he publicly made during the trial.

“I very, very much disagree with much of what the government just said about this case, about the legitimacy of what happened in this courtroom during the trial and about President Trump’s conduct fighting this case from before it was indicted, while it was indicted, to the jury’s verdict, and even to this day,” Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche said in response to the prosecution.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: SUPREME COURT ALLOWS TRUMP TO BE TAINTED AS A FELON. BUT THERE’S A CATCH

Former President Donald Trump appears in court for arraignment before Judge Juan Merchan following his surrender to New York authorities at the New York County Criminal Court. (Seth Wenig-Pool Photo via USA TODAY) — Former President Trump appears in court for arraignment before Judge Juan Merchan following his surrender to New York authorities at the New York County Criminal Court in April 2024. (Seth Wenig-Pool Photo via USA TODAY)

During the hearing, Merchan defended the actions he took along the way.

“The imposition of sentence is one of the most difficult decisions that any criminal court judge is called to make,” Merchan said, noting the court “must consider the facts of the case along with any aggravating or mitigating circumstances.”

Merchan reflected on the case, saying that “never before has this court been presented with such a unique set of circumstances.” The judge said it was an “extraordinary case” with media interest and heightened security but said that once the courtroom doors were closed, the trial itself “was not any more unique or extraordinary” than any other case.

Merchan acknowledged that Trump is afforded significant legal protections but argued that “one power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict.”

“Sir, I wish you Godspeed as you assume the second term in office,” Merchan said at the close of the hearing.

Justice Juan Merchan instructs the jury before deliberations as Donald Trump looks on — In this courtroom sketch, Justice Juan Merchan instructs the jury at Manhattan state court in New York City on May 29, 2024, before deliberations during former President Trump’s criminal trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. (Reuters/Jane Rosenberg)

Merchan’s unconditional discharge sentence means there is no punishment imposed: no jail time, fines or probation. The sentence also preserves Trump’s ability to appeal the conviction.

“After careful analysis, this court determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction is an unconditional discharge,” Merchan said Friday. “At this time, I impose that sentence to cover all 34 counts.”

Trump’s team said in court that they will appeal the conviction, and he will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Jan. 20.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.

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Law, Political

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With the Trump Sentencing, the Verdict is in . . . for the New York Legal System

By: Jonathan Turley | January 10, 2025

Below is my column at Fox.com on the sentencing of President-Elect Donald Trump. The conviction should be overturned on appeal. However, the most lasting judgment will be against the New York court system itself in allowing this travesty of justice to occur.

Here is the column:

With the sentencing of Donald Trump Friday, the final verdict on the New York criminal trial of the president-elect is in. The verdict is not the one that led to no jail or probation for the incoming president. Acting Justice Juan Merchan has brought down the gavel on the New York legal system as a whole.

Once considered the premier legal system in the country, figures like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Justices Arthur F. Engoron and Juan Merchan have caused the system to be weaponized for political purposes. Trump will walk away from this trial and into the White House in less than two weeks, but the New York system will walk into infamy after this day.

The case has long been denounced by objective legal observers, including intense Trump critics, as a legal absurdity. Even CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig denounced the case as legally flawed and unprecedented while Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., simply called it total “b—s–t.”

It is a case based on a non-crime. Bragg took a long-dead misdemeanor and zapped it back into life with a novel and unfounded theory. By using federal violations that were never charged, let alone tried, Bragg turned a misdemeanor into dozens of felonies and essentially tried Trump for federal offenses.

Merchan not only allowed those charges to be brought to trial but then added layers of reversible errors in the effort to bag Trump at any cost. For that, he was lionized by the liberal media and many New Yorkers. However, Trump still managed to pull in 3.6 million New York votes, or 42.7%, in the 2024 election. After all of the lawfare and every advantage (including a heavily biased media and a larger war chest), Vice President Kamala Harris lost hundreds of thousands of votes in 2024 in comparison to Joe Biden just four years earlier.

Many polls showed that the public saw the Manhattan criminal case for what it was: raw lawfare targeting a leading political opponent. The election itself felt like the largest verdict in history as citizens rejected the political, legal, and media establishments in one of our nation’s most historic elections.

The New York court system will now have a chance to redeem itself, but few are holding their breath. The appellate court has still not ruled on an appeal of Attorney General Lettia James’s equally absurd civil lawsuit against Trump. Despite judges expressing skepticism over Engoron’s use of a law to impose a grotesque $455 million in fines and interest, we are still waiting for a decision.

Most are waiting for this criminal case to escape the vortex of the New York court system. With this appeal, this peddler’s wagon of reversible errors will finally pull up in front of the Supreme Court itself.

With its ruling on Thursday night, the setting for a decision could not be better for Trump. The Supreme Court has again demonstrated that it has shown restraint and independence in these cases. In response to the ruling, Trump struck the perfect note Thursday night and declined to criticize the Court, stating that “This is a long way from finished and I respect the court’s opinion.”

The ultimate penalty on Friday morning from Judge Merchan reflects the lack of seriousness in the case. It was more inflated than the Goodyear blimp, pumped up by hot rage and rhetoric. The sentence was the pinprick that showed the massive void within this case.

The verdict is in. The New York legal system has rendered it against itself.

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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Crime, Law, Political

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Adam Schiff Signals Potential for New Trump Impeachment

By: American Patriot | January 8, 2025

Donald Trump is set to return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States on January 20, 2025, after securing both the Electoral College and the popular vote in a historic victory. For Republicans, this marks a turning point and a chance to advance their legislative agenda without the same gridlock that characterized much of Trump’s first term.

However, the former president’s triumph also heralds a new chapter in the bitter partisan battles that have defined American politics in recent years. Leading the charge from the Democratic side is Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has already indicated his readiness to scrutinize Trump’s administration—and potentially impeach him again.

One of the key victories for Republicans in the 2024 election was retaking control of the Senate. This development provides a legislative stronghold to support Trump’s policy initiatives and block Democratic resistance. GOP leaders have emphasized that Senate control is vital not only to push forward Trump’s agenda but also to safeguard against Democratic attempts to stymie his administration through investigations or impeachment.

During his first term, Trump faced significant opposition from a divided Congress, which resulted in two impeachment trials. This time, with the Senate firmly in Republican hands, Trump enters office with a stronger foundation to implement his policies.

Despite Trump’s fortified position, Democrats are not backing down. Adam Schiff, who played a prominent role in Trump’s first impeachment trial, has already made his intentions clear. Speaking in a recent interview, Schiff declared: “If he abuses his office, we will vigorously push back, fight back, stand up to him as we had to do during his first term in office.”

Schiff’s statement reflects a broader Democratic strategy to closely monitor Trump’s actions and hold him accountable for any perceived misconduct. However, what Democrats define as “abusing his office” has often been a contentious issue. Critics argue that during Trump’s first term, ordinary executive actions were frequently portrayed as egregious oversteps, leading to constant investigations and political turmoil.

Unlike his first term, Trump’s return to the presidency comes with a clearer mandate. Winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College demonstrates a broad base of support, which could empower him to act with greater confidence.

For his supporters, this victory is a vindication of Trump’s leadership and policies. They see his second term as an opportunity to continue the work he began in his first administration, this time with fewer obstacles.

At the same time, Trump’s opponents, including Schiff, remain prepared to challenge his every move. Democrats have framed their vigilance as a defense of democracy, while Trump’s backers dismiss it as yet another round of obstructionism.

Trump’s first term was marked by relentless legal and political battles, many of which his supporters labeled as “lawfare.” Efforts to investigate and prosecute Trump through various means ultimately failed to derail his presidency or diminish his influence.

Category:

corruption, Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by (Fellow California Resident) A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Where There’s Smoke

A.F. Branco | on January 10, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-where-theres-smoke-3/

Californis Fires Dems at Fault — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – S. California fires all lay at the foot of the Democrats. They’ve been so focused on DEI, LGBTQ, the Green Agenda scam, etc. They have failed to do the job of protecting their citizens.
Their poor forest management, DEI hiring, shortage of firefighters due to COVID firings, and lack of water in the reservoirs so they can protect the tiny smelt fish. To name a few.

WAYNE ROOT: Wildfire Alone Didn’t Destroy Los Angeles. How the Dumb, Radical, Left’s 6 Favorite Obsessions Made the Fire Unstoppable- Woke DEI, Climate Extremism, Homelessness, Vaccines, Open Borders & Ukraine

By Assistant Editor – The Gateway Pundit – Jan 9, 2025
I left Malibu, California 23 yrs ago because of high taxes and liberal morons. I just couldn’t take the liberals and their crazy, radical, extreme ideas anymore. I moved to Las Vegas. It was the best move of my life.
In Las Vegas we have no taxes- no income tax, no business tax, no capital gains tax, no inheritance tax and among the lowest property taxes in America. Guns are legal. The sun is always out. And everyone I know is a conservative MAGA Trump supporter. You know what I call that? HEAVEN… READ MORE

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corruption, Political

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Top Stories

•Facebook and Instagram Ban LifeNews for Sharing Pro-Life Video
•Governor Ron DeSantis Will Headline National March for Life
• Planned Parenthood Official Ousted From Texas Medical Board
•Tennessee Abortions Drop 47% During First 6 Months of Abortion Ban
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Facebook and Instagram Ban LifeNews for Sharing Pro-Life Video

Governor Ron DeSantis Will Headline National March for Life

Planned Parenthood Official Ousted From Texas Medical Board

Tennessee Abortions Drop 47% During First Months of Abortion Ban

Joe Biden Leaves Office With His Approval Rating at Rock Bottom

After Biden’s Abortion Agenda, Trump Can Bring Pro-Life Change

Twins Born at 22 Weeks and Weighing 1 Pound Survive

Abortion Pill Reversal is Saving Thousands of Babies From Abortions

MORE PRO-LIFE NEWS FROM TODAY

Canada Killed Over 15,000 People Under MAiD Euthanasia Program

Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Illinois Law Censoring Pro-Life Speech

Virginians, Tell Your Legislators to Oppose Abortions Up to Birth

New Mexico Supreme Court Rules Cities and Counties Can’t Ban Abortions

Comments orquestions? Email us at news@lifenews.com.
Copyright 2003-2025 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved.
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DEI ets Fire to California: Adam Carolla Exposes Discriminatory Firefighter Policies

By Jimmy Parker | January 9, 2025

In recent years, there has been much debate over DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies and their destructive consequences. However, the truth is, this has been an ongoing issue for quite some time.

During a Congressional testimony several years ago, comedian Adam Carolla shared a shocking story from his own personal experience. He applied to become a firefighter in Los Angeles, a job that is known for its heroic efforts and selfless service. However, he was told that as a white male, he would have to wait years just to take the test.

🇺🇸#EUA #Malibu California BURNING in 3 Massive FIRES for SMART CITY Rebuilding.

Southern Cali, including Pasadena and Malibu, burning Down NOW as 3 separate fires start with no explanation, water hydrants are empty, and the planning agencies for SMART CITIES Drool in delight. pic.twitter.com/arWGvAwerl
— Gran Reinicio 2030 (@nosmienten_) January 8, 2025

This is a clear example of how DEI policies are damaging and counterproductive. Communities in California are facing devastating wildfires, yet the very policies that were put in place to promote diversity and fairness are the ones hindering the hiring of qualified individuals for these crucial roles.

Carolla recounted his experience, saying, “Geez, I want to talk about my white privilege so badly. I graduated high school with a 1.7 GPA and couldn’t find a job. I walked to a fire station and asked for a job, but was told I couldn’t have one because I wasn’t black, Hispanic, or a woman. They told me to come back in 7 years.”

Watch

California is on fire because of DEI@adamcarolla applied to be a fireman in LA and was told to wait 7 years to test because he’s white

7 years later when he took the test he asked a black women there how long she waited to test. She responded “Wednesday” (less than a week) pic.twitter.com/PZkDyLkHsG
— Pharmwhistleblower (@pharmwhistlblow) January 8, 2025

He continued, “I had a young woman of color standing behind me in line, and I asked her when she signed up to become a firefighter. She said, ‘Wednesday.’ That is an example of my white privilege.”

It’s absurd to think that politics would take priority over creating the most efficient and effective firefighting force. Yet, this is exactly what is happening in Los Angeles.

The liberal media often pushes the narrative of “systemic racism” and the need for diversity and inclusivity. But the reality is, these very policies are the root cause of the problems we face today. Carolla’s story is just one of many examples of how these policies are not only discriminatory but also detrimental to society.

DEI ruins every agency and institution it touches.
— Helen Raleigh (@HRaleighspeaks) January 8, 2025

Enough is enough. It’s time for the truth to come to light and for these destructive policies to be replaced with fair and merit-based hiring practices. We cannot continue to let the liberal agenda ruin our communities and endanger our lives.

h/t: Steadfast and Loyal

Category:

LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Political

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Judge Scraps Biden’s Title IX Rules, Reversing LGBTQ+ Regulations

Thursday, 09 January 2025 04:23 PM EST

The Biden administration’s Title IX rules expanding regulations for LGBTQ+ students have been struck down nationwide after a federal judge in Kentucky found they overstepped the president’s authority. In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves scrapped the entire 1,500-page regulation after deciding it was “fatally” tainted by legal shortcomings. The rule had already been halted in 26 states after a wave of legal challenges by Republican states. President-elect Donald Trump previously promised to end the rules “on day one” and made anti-transgender themes a centerpiece of his campaign.

The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia. In a statement, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti called it a “victory for the protection of girls’ privacy in locker rooms and showers, and for the freedom to speak biologically accurate pronouns.”

The Education Department did not immediately comment on the decision.

The Biden administration ignited controversy when it finalized the new rules last year. The regulation expanded Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education, to also prevent discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. It also expanded the definition of harassment to include a broader range of misconduct.

Civil rights advocates hailed it as a victory, saying it gave LGBTQ+ students new recourse against discrimination. But it drew outrage from conservatives who said it could be used to protect transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

The rule didn’t explicitly address athletics and mostly detailed how schools and colleges were required to respond to cases of discrimination and sexual assault. A separate proposal dealing with transgender athletes in sports was put on the backburner and later revoked after it became a focal point of Trump’s campaign. In his decision, Reeves found the Education Department overstepped its authority by expanding the scope of Title IX.

There’s nothing in the 1972 law suggesting that it should cover any more than it has since Congress created it, Reeves wrote. He called it an “attempt to bypass the legislative process and completely transform Title IX.”

The judge also found that it violated free speech rights by requiring teachers to use pronouns aligning with a student’s gender identity.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves wrote.

Rather than carve out certain aspects of the rule, Reeves decided it was best to toss the regulation in its entirety and revert to a previous interpretation of Title IX. He said his decision will “simply ‘cause a return to the status quo’ that existed for more than 50 years prior to its effective date.”

Among the biggest critics of the rule was Betsy DeVos, former education secretary during Trump’s first term. On the social media site X, she wrote that the “radical, unfair, illegal, and absurd Biden Title IX rewrite is GONE.”

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Democrats’ Delusional Security Blanket

By: Kevin Jackson | January 9, 2025

For decades, Democrats have treated the popular vote as the ultimate barometer of legitimacy in presidential elections. It’s their comfort zone, their “win” even when they lose.

And then came the election of 2024.

When Donald Trump not only secured the Electoral College but also crushed the popular vote in 2024, it was more than a mere political defeat—it was an existential crisis. The Left had banked on retaining the moral high ground, even in a hypothetical but inevitable Kamala Harris loss. They planned on clutching their beloved “popular vote victory” narrative. Then, Trump’s decisive win kicked their ideological stool right out from under them.

The backlash was predictable: a masterclass in Leftism 101—whine, bitch, rinse, repeat.

Election Denial, the Democrat Way

Let’s address the elephant—or donkey in this case—in the room. The same Democrats who incessantly accuse Republicans of being “election deniers” have a rich history of refusing to accept election outcomes they don’t like. Their hypocrisy was on full display in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and her supporters pushed the “Russia collusion” hoax to delegitimize Trump’s presidency. Fast forward to 2024, and they’ve simply swapped out the script but kept the act.

Among the Left’s most vocal election deniers is Michael Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO operative and fellow at the Center for American Progress. Podhorzer absurdly claimed that Trump didn’t really win the popular vote in 2024. His rationale? A convoluted cocktail of cherry-picked data and wishful thinking. Podhorzer isn’t alone in his denialism—he joins a long list of Leftist luminaries like Rick Wilson, James Carville, and Allan Lichtman, all of whom confidently predicted a Harris victory and were proven spectacularly wrong.

And let’s not forget the “Russia, Russia, Russia” chorus from 2016, starring Clinton herself, bolstered by Stacey Abrams, who to this day insists she won the Georgia governor’s race in 2018. If denial were an Olympic sport, the Democratic Party would sweep the medals.

Trump: The People’s Choice

What truly terrifies the Left isn’t just Trump’s win—it’s his growing popularity. Despite years of relentless demonization, Trump emerged as the most popular politician in American history, leaving even his critics scratching their heads. His ability to resonate with everyday Americans, even in the face of unprecedented media and institutional attacks, is nothing short of remarkable.

Democrats tried everything to suppress his 2024 bid. They slapped him with the “felon” label, orchestrated smear campaigns, and unleashed their full propaganda machine. Yet Trump’s numbers soared. Imagine how overwhelming his victory might have been without the Left’s interference.

In states with voter ID laws, Trump’s dominance was undeniable. Harris clung to victory only in states where voter ID wasn’t required—a clear indicator of foul play. Without these dubious practices, Harris would have faced a landslide loss of epic proportions.

The Billionaire Betrayal

Adding salt to the wound, some of the wealthiest individuals in America, including Silicon Valley billionaires, have thrown their support behind Trump. The Left, once proud of its tech-savvy allies, now finds itself abandoned by many of the same figures who helped fuel their rise. This shift has left Democrats reeling, as their narrative of Trump being universally despised crumbles before their eyes.

The Left’s Desperate Clinging

In their desperation, Democrats now embrace figures like Podhorzer, who swim against the tide of reality to keep hope alive. These self-proclaimed “defenders of democracy” cling to their denial like a lifeline, even as their arguments grow increasingly absurd. But the truth is inescapable: Trump won, and he won big.

What’s next for the Left? More whining, more protests, and more finger-pointing. But as they flail in denial, the rest of the country moves forward, united behind a president who defied the odds and emerged as the undeniable choice of the American people.

Humorously, the Democrats’ desperation brings to mind an old adage: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Instead, they’ve opted for dynamite—because why just dig when you can destroy the whole foundation of your argument?

As we watch this political theater unfold, one thing is clear: the Democrats’ love affair with the popular vote has officially turned into a tragicomedy.

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Snail Darter RIP: The Species that Shut Down the Tellico Dam May Not Actually Exist

By: Jonathan Turley | January 9, 2025

In the annals of environmental law, no creature is more famous than the Snail Darter, the endangered species that shut down completion of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. It required congressional legislation to allow the dam to be finished after years in the courts where judges maintained that the species had to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. According to the New York Times., the species may turn out to be as mythical as a unicorn.

The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced, “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”

Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job, and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.

That was then.

The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered. Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology

In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.

Under the ESA, the snail darter was listed as protected and therefore triggered Section 7 of the Act barring federal agencies from undertaking actions that could jeopardize a species’ survival or destroy any of its critical habitat.

In Tennessee Valley Auth. v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978), Chief Justice Warren Burger noted that the finding of this “previously unknown species of perch” changed everything on a legal level. He added:

“Until recently, the finding of a new species of animal life would hardly generate a cause celebre. This is particularly so in the case of darters, of which there are approximately 130 known species, 8 to 10 of these having been identified only in the last five years. The moving force behind the snail darter’s sudden fame came some four months after its discovery, when the Congress passed the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Act), 87 Stat. 884, 16 U.S.C. § 1531 et seq. (1976 ed.).”

Plater insisted that Dr. Near is merely a “lumper” who tends to rely on genetics rather than being a “splitter” who proliferates new species. Dr. Plater added that “whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act.”

That was a particularly revealing point from the law professor since it suggests what could be an overwhelming motive could be legal and not scientific in declaring the new species — the very objection raised in the litigation and denied by many advocates.

Roughly three years ago, the government declared victory in restoring the snail darter and the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing it from the ESA list of threatened species.

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Education, Green New Deal, Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – New Flag, Eh?

A.F. Branco | on January 9, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-new-flag-eh/

Canada 51st State? — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

HUMOR, International Politics

A.F. Branco Cartoon – There’s a lot of talk of Canada becoming a part of the United States. Is it just trolling, or is it a real feasible possibility? There are many Canadian citizens open to the idea after enduring the tyrannical rule of PM Justin Trudeau (Castro Jr).

Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Finally Responds to Trump’s ‘Vow’ to Make Canada the 51st State – Gets Roasted on X

Cullen Linebarger – The Gateway Pundit – Jan 7, 2025

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson reported, soon-to-be former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as leader of his Liberal Party Monday morning during a news conference. He will remain Liberal leader and prime minister until his replacement is chosen in March.
This came following Trump’s vow last month to impose a 25% tariff on all products from Canada and Mexico in response to the “illegal alien invasion and ‘promising’ to ‘annex’ Canada as the 51st state. While Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee to Trump on tariffs, he had noticeably remained silent on whether Canada should become another star on the American flag. READ MORE

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Top Stories

•Snowstorm Shuts Down Planned Parenthood, Saving Babies From Abortions
•This Husband Was Arrested While Saving Babies Outside Abortion Clinic
• Canadian Doctors Want to Euthanize Patients to Harvest Their Organs
•Her Exposure of Planned Parenthood May Get it Defunded
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Snowstorm Shuts Down Planned Parenthood, Saving Babies

This Husband Was Arrested While Saving Babies at Abortion Clinic

Canadian Doctors Want to Euthanize Patients to Harvest Organs

Her Exposure of Planned Parenthood May Defund It

Abortions Continued Killing and Injuring Women in 2024

Tens of Thousands Will Join West Coast Walk for Life

Texas Must Stop Sales of Illegal Abortion Pills

Pro-Life Group Launches Campaign in 26 States

MORE PRO-LIFE NEWS FROM TODAY

Slovenia Parliament Rejects Killing People in Euthanasia

Arkansas Has Given Nearly $650K to Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers

21 Years Later, Firemen Reunite With Baby Saved From Infanticide

Students Win National Pro-Life Essay Contest

Comments orquestions? Email us at news@lifenews.com.
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Facebook Has Admitted Its Error, But Its ‘Fact Checkers’ Are Still Complicit in Censorship

By: Mark Hemingway | January 08, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people.

Mark Hemingway

Visit on Twitter@heminator

Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship policies and moving towards a “community notes” model for policing content like X. This includes terminating their “third party factchecking program” where the company paid legacy media organizations to “fact check” content on the site and then used those judgments to censor content.

At this point there’s little reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg can do much to atone for what he did to suppress speech and damage conservative publications. However, on the surface level this is a significant PR victory for free speech and, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s fact checking partners are not taking it well. Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact which is one of Facebook/Meta’s original fact checking partners going back eight years, just posted this defensive letter on X. Some of the highlights:

The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg could not be less subtle. …

Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and U.S. fact-checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. …

When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information. That’s how the information cycle is supposed to work.

If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror.

PolitiFact has been a thoroughly dishonest and contemptible organization since its inception, but this is a particularly dishonest and self-serving excuse, even for them. And I happen know what I’m talking about. After years of detailed reporting on the dishonesty of so called “fact checkers,” the publication I worked for, The Weekly Standard, made the decision to become, like PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s official fact checking partners. And I can tell you a few things about this arrangement that, if you care about free speech and journalistic integrity, will make your blood boil.

The first is that Facebook paid it’s fact checking partners for participating in this program — in PolitiFact’s case, Meta supplied more than 5 percent of their annual revenue. In practice, this meant that news organizations such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this program were taking a large sum from one of the country’s largest and most influential corporations. This was a massive conflict of interest, considering these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news. Which was a lot.

Already news organizations were skittish about Facebook because the death of print media and the subscription model meant they were heavily dependent on Facebook for steering traffic their way to make money on digital advertising. Taking money directly from Facebook meant they had you over a barrel in multiple ways. If there was cause to criticize Facebook’s policies about censoring content or any other matter, doing so meant these publications were biting the hand that fed them.

The second is that the inception of Facebook’s fact checking program was explicitly political and intended to suppress right-leaning news by design. Here’s an excerpt from Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by an author named Hemingway:

Soon after the [2016] election, BuzzFeed was reporting, “Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election last week.” The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump’s favor was “crazy.” Zuckerberg had already faced criticism earlier, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported, “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.”

By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged “fake news” that troubled Facebook’s left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to “fact-check” news on the site. With media revenue steadily declining — in no small part because Facebook had radically disrupted the traditional journalistic business models — once reputable news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program. Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print.

Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, much of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was about their inability to control American opinion.

Third, the idea that PolitiFact or any of Facebook’s media fact checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebook’s censorship and stifling free speech is such a dubious and offensive argument it’s incredible anyone would attempt to make it.

In the summer of 2018, the Weekly Standard’s participation in the Facebook’s fact checking program led to far and away the most awkward staff meeting in the eight years that I worked there. I wrote about this episode at length (and in this book), but essentially what happened is that the young journalist The Weekly Standard employed who wrote fact checks for Facebook openly said he was uncomfortable with the responsibility:

He explained that whenever he did one of his fact checking columns, part of his gig involved going into a special portal in Facebook’s backend created for its fact checking mercenaries, where he entered details about his fact check. When he entered a claim of “false,” he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he found the claim – at which point Facebook, according to their own press releases, would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn’t absolute.

It was a record scratch moment in the staff meeting. After a beat, I spoke up and said something to the effect of “you mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to render judgment to nearly wipe a news story off of the internet?” Where our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media, it dawned on me — and more than a few others in the room — that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being leveraged to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world’s richest men.

Suffice this anecdote to say, this all culminated in one editor at the magazine raising his voice — in defense of Facebook — in a way that made everyone in the room rather uncomfortable. Imagine you’re a writer at a conservative magazine and confronting the fact you’re participating in a program where a centi-billionaire pays a bunch of legacy media hacks to disproportionately censor politically inconvenient opinions on the right. I knew it was bad, but I was pretty alarmed to realize not all of my colleagues found this intolerable. But by this point The Weekly Standard was hemorrhaging subscribers and was shut down a few months later. Alas, the more animated editor in that meeting doesn’t appear to have learned from the episode.

After the closure of The Weekly Standard, alumni from that magazine started a new publication known as The Dispatch. Despite what had happened at our ill-fated previous employer, becoming a Facebook fact checking partner was one easy way for a new publication to get revenue, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t long before this new arrangement prompted controversy. A Dispatch fact check claimed two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List claimed “partly false information.”

The allegedly false information was that the Susan B. Anthony List was claiming Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. It didn’t matter that this claim wasn’t even particularly debatable as Biden and the Democrat Party clearly support late-term abortion.

After a lot of online blowback — at the time, one of the marquee names at The Dispatch was David French, an alleged evangelical pro-life stalwart turned Kamala Harris voter — the publication promised to review and correct their error. Despite the public promise, you should not be surprised to learn that, either through negligence by The Dispatch or Facebook, the “process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information” touted above got no results. Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook in the critical weeks right before the 2020 election, which was decided by a mere 40,000 or so votes.

Mind you, this is all based on my comparably limited experience with a censorship program whose flaws were readily apparent to anyone. It would be impossible to muster enough contempt for an organization such as PolitiFact, who by their own admission did thousands of fact checks for Facebook to enable their direct censorship of ordinary citizens and important political voices alike.

Like I said, I find Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations suspect, to say nothing of the restitution he owes conservative publications like this one that told the truth only to be suppressed and censored. But regardless of how we arrived at this point, Facebook’s statement that what they were doing was wrong and the termination of their fact checking program are important concessions to the reality that ordinary Americans believe in and want free speech.

I imagine it’s hard to accept that you’ve been the villain all along, but Sharockman and PolitiFact don’t get to have it both ways. PolitiFact concedes they took Facebook’s money, but that doesn’t mean they share any responsibility for Facebook justifying censorship with the services they provided? No, PolitiFact knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebook’s gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.

We’ll see if Facebook follows through with its promise to be less censorious, but it’s impossible to read Sharockman’s hackneyed justifications without looking forward to the day where self-appointed fact checkers are irrelevant to what Americans are allowed to say.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Business, censorship, Free Speech, Political

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Elderly Democrats Say Thousands of Donations to ActBlue Were Made Fraudulently in Their Names

By: Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell | January 08, 2025

An elderly man votes. — (AJ Watt/Getty Images)

Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue may have raked in millions through fraudulent donations, according to the testimonies of elderly Americans who said federal election records do not reflect their giving.

Eighteen registered Democrats in Connecticut, all over the age of 70, appear to have donated $1.9 million to Democratic causes, including ActBlue, through hundreds of thousands of small donations from 2016 to 2024, according to a review of Federal Election Commission filings by Dominic Rapini, CEO of technology company Queralt Inc. and a former Connecticut Republican candidate for office.

Curious about the donation patterns, Rapini tracked down some of the Connecticut residents and asked them if they really did make thousands of small donations, sometimes multiple in a day, through ActBlue. Several of the supposed donors told Rapini they did not make any of the reported donations, nor did they know anything about how their names were being used, Rapini told The Daily Signal.

An 88-year-old retired Yale University professor, for example, supposedly made 7,539 donations for a total of $213,163, according to FEC records. After Rapini informed him about the significant donations in his name, he signed an affidavit saying, “I believe this does not reflect my donation frequency or dollars I have donated.”

According to Rapini, who has analyzed numbers for three decades in the tech industry, this is a possible case of alleged identity theft and money laundering. A contribution made by one person in the name of another is illegal.

“When I examine the donation patterns tied to these alleged ‘smurfs,’ the irregularities jump off the page, revealing behavior that defies both human logic and common sense,” he told The Daily Signal. “To safeguard trust in our election process, we must confront these anomalies head-on.”

Rep. Brian Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the House Administration Committee, told The Daily Signal he’s aware of similar reports from across the country.

“In response, last fall, I shared the findings of our investigation with several state attorneys general,” Steil said in an emailed statement. “The committee and I remain fully available to collaborate with any state law enforcement officials who wish to access the information we have gathered on this critical issue.”

An elderly acupuncturist and registered Democrat appears to have made 17 donations in 2022 through ActBlue totaling $317. In an email to Rapini, she promised she hasn’t made political contributions since 2016.

“I can promise you I have NOT made donations myself to the [Democratic National Committee] or Democratic local party since 2016 … ,” she said. “Anything past that are fake and/or manipulated donations.”

A 91-year-old woman appears to have made 2,591 donations totaling $41,000, according to FEC filings. She signed an affidavit with Rapini denying making the reported donations.

Another 75-year-old woman looks to have made 4,270 small donations adding up to $32,323. She too signed an affidavit with Rapini denying making the donations in this frequency or quantity.

ActBlue is currently under congressional investigation for alleged laundering of foreign money laundering.

ActBlue came under fire on Oct. 29 because of its donor-verification policies. In a letter that day to ActBlue, Steil said foreign actors from Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China could use the platform to launder illicit money for use in U.S. political campaigns.

The Democratic fundraising platform admitted in 2023 to Steil that it didn’t require contributors to use a card verification value, or CVV, to donate on its website with a credit card. Those security codes are meant to ensure that the person making a purchase physically possesses the credit card.

ActBlue responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the affidavits by referring The Daily Signal to a post on its blog, which says, “Because of how reporting works for intermediaries, contributions made on platforms like ours often show up more than once in public FEC records, because both ActBlue and the receiving campaign or committee must report the contributions.

“FEC rules require ActBlue to itemize every contribution made through its platform, regardless of amount,” the post says.

“Additionally, FEC reports often lump multiple donors with the same name together,” the post continues. “This can make it difficult to easily identify which contributions should be associated with each individual donor, especially donors with common names.”

Rapini said whether the suspicious donation patterns come from “sloppy data systems at the FEC” or “nefarious actors laundering money through unsuspecting elderly donors,” an investigation is needed.

“Transparency and accountability are nonnegotiable when it comes to protecting the integrity of our democracy,” he said.

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corruption, Crime, Political

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Meta Culpa: Zuckerberg Joins Musk in the Global Fight for Free Speech

By: Jonathan Turley | January 8, 2025

Below is my column in Fox.com on the potentially historic change in policy at Meta to restore free speech protections. As one of the longest and loudest critics of the company over its censorship history, it is admittedly hard to trust. However, an alliance of Mark Zuckerberg with Elon Musk could prove the most important development for free speech

Here is the column:

“Faithful friends are hard to find.” For the free speech community, those words from Shakespeare have long been tragically true. Indeed, until Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), we were losing ground around the world to an unprecedented anti-free speech coalition of government, corporate, media, and academic interests. Now, Musk may have added a major new ally that could help turn the tide for free speech: Mark Zuckerberg.

In a new video, Meta’s CEO announced that the company would adopt X standards and restore free speech protections across Facebook, Instagram, and Meta platforms. Meta will also end its third-party fact-checking program, introduce a ‘community notes’ system, and focus on removing criminal and fraudulent material—the very guidelines proposed by some of us in prior years.

For the free speech community, it was like the United States entering World War II to support Great Britain. Where Musk stopped the progress of the global anti-free speech movement, Zuckerberg could actually help us regain ground around the world.

As one of Zuckerberg’s most vocal critics over free speech, it is admittedly hard to trust. We all love redemptive sinners, but it would be more impressive if the redemption preceded the apprehension.

So allow me a brief cathartic moment…

In the last few years, a mix of House investigations and litigation has forced more of the censorship system under the Biden Administration into public view. That is expected to draw even greater attention with the continued discovery in Missouri v. Biden, showing years of false statements about the extent of this government-corporate alliance across social media platforms.

In my recent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I wrote about Zuckerberg and Meta’s record on censorship, including their failure (until recently) to release the Facebook files.

Meta resisted efforts to uncover this evidence for years, even after Musk released the Twitter Files and revealed a censorship system described by one court as perfectly “Orwellian.”

While Zuckerberg portrayed Meta as an unwilling partner in this censorship system in his video, he and the company ignored many years of objections from many of us regarding the critical role the company plays in targeting and censoring opposing viewpoints. Facebook even ran a creepy ad campaign to try to convince young people to embrace what they call “content modification” as part of their evolution with technology. It did not work.

When the anti-free speech movement targeted Musk, Zuckerberg did nothing for years. Fearing that other companies might restore free speech protections, members of Congress, including now Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), sent a chilling letter to Facebook stating that it should not even consider such a move or risk becoming “part of our ongoing oversight efforts.”

In a November 2020 Senate hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), D-Conn., warned Zuckerberg and other CEOs that he and his Senate colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.”

While Musk defied those threats, the pressure seemed to work with Zuckerberg. It was not until the Republicans won both houses and the White House that Zuckerberg and Meta decided that free speech was worth fighting for.

In his exclusive interview with Fox News, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, admitted that the Trump election changed the situation for Meta: “We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression.”

It is a chilling statement if one thinks of what might have happened if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, arguably the most anti-free speech ticket in history, had won. The suggestion is that the new spring at Meta would have turned into a frozen tundra for free speech.

Around the world, free speech is in a free fall. Speech crimes and censorship have become the norm in the West. A new industry of “disinformation” experts has commoditized censorship, making millions in the targeting and silencing of others. An anti-free speech culture has taken root in government, higher education, and the media.

We will either hold the line now or we will lose this indispensable right for future generations. Zuckerberg could make this a truly transformative moment but it will take more than a passing meta-culpa.

We need Zuckerberg now more than ever. So, with that off my chest, I can get to what I have longed to say: Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome to the fight.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

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Free Speech, Media, Political

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Sue, Baby, Sue: Trump Plan to “Un-Ban” the Biden Drilling Order Could Prove Difficult

By: Jonathan Turley | January 8, 2025

After a presidential campaign where both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pushed back on claims that they were trying to shut down much of the fossil fuel industry, Biden waited until the final days of his administration to ban oil and gas drilling over 670 million acres of America’s coastline. President-elect Donald Trump responded that“It’s ridiculous. I’ll un-ban it immediately. I have the right to un-ban it immediately.” It will likely be more difficult than a simple “un-ban” order. Environmental groups will likely push a “sue, baby, sue” campaign to counter Trump’s “drill, baby, drill.”

In his statement, Biden justified the move to counter the “climate crisis.” A White House announcement stated that “President Biden has determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential.”

The question is whether the order can handcuff Trump in pursuing one of the main parts of his campaign platform to unleash America’s fossil fuel resources.

This is all familiar ground.

Biden acted under Section 12(a) of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which states that the president “may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

As noted in a Congressional Research Service report there is an ongoing debate over whether presidents can reverse the withdrawals of prior presidents. Trump faced that question in 2017 when he sought to overturn a ban by President Barack Obama in order to open up Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas and some parts of the Atlantic to oil and gas exploration. Two years later, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska struck down Trump’s order. While acknowledging that the law is ambiguous, it did not find express authority for such reversals. Litigation ran out the clock and Biden later overturned Trump’s executive order.

So, there are grounds to assert this authority of reversal, but it will take years in court. The alternative and preferred route would be Congress. This is an issue that should ultimately rest with Congress. This ambiguous law is unfortunately common in poorly crafted provisions giving presidents sweeping authority. Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has already pledged to “push back using every tool at our disposal.”

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With Trudeau on his Way Out, Can Canadians Get Their Free Speech Back?

By: Jonathan Turley | January 8, 2025

Below is my column in the Hill on the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his anti-free speech legacy. The collapse of free speech in Canada is a cautionary tale for Americans. It shows how Trudeau and the Liberal Party used faux rhetoric of tolerance and inclusion to justify intolerance and exclusion.

Here is the column:

With Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he will step down as prime minister, Canada is now looking for a new leader after a decade under his policies. The question is whether anyone will look for the remnants of Canadian free speech in the wreckage of the Trudeau government.

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about the collapse of free speech in Canada under Trudeau.

Canada has long been a country caught between two influences: the United Kingdom and the United States. It has shared DNA with both nations. Unfortunately, it has largely followed the British approach in treating free speech more like a privilege than a right. That dubious tradition was magnified over the last decade by a wholesale attack on free speech deemed hostile, insulting or triggering for different groups. In many ways, Canada has been a cautionary tale for many in the U.S., as the same voices of censorship and criminalization grow on our campuses and in Congress.

Indeed, BlueSky, a social media site that offers a safe space for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views, has apparently embraced Canadian-style standards for censorship as part of its pitch for those with viewpoint intolerance.

For over a decade, Trudeau has been the cheerful face of modern censorship. While exuding tolerance and inclusivity, he hammered critics with draconian measures and perfectly Orwellian soundbites. In the name of tolerance, he proudly proclaimed intolerance for opposing views.

Trudeau shows how speech codes and virtue signaling are now chic on the left. In a town hall event, Trudeau chastised a woman for asking a question that used the term “mankind” and instructed her, “We like to say ‘peoplekind’ … because it’s more inclusive.” (He later claimed he was joking. If so, many of his policies have the same punchline and are no joking matter.)

In many ways, Trudeau’s true colors emerged in his crackdown on the trucker protests opposing COVID-19 mandates in 2022, a campaign widely supported by an enabling media. Trudeau invoked the 1988 Emergencies Act for the first time to freeze bank accounts of truckers and contributions by other Canadian citizens, powers long condemned by civil liberties groups in Canada.

The anti-free speech apple did not fall far from the tree. It was Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister used the predecessor to the act for the first time in peacetime to suspend civil liberties.

Trudeau was widely criticized for his anti-free speech policies, including his move to amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act to criminalize any “communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

It was used to prevent “social media platforms [from being] used to threaten, intimidate, bully and harass people, or used to promote racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and homophobic views that target communities, put people’s safety at risk and undermine Canada’s social cohesion or democracy.”

Under Trudeau, human rights commissions became virtual speech commissars in Canada. A conservative webmaster was prosecuted for allowing third parties to leave insulting comments about gay people and minorities on the site. Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley insisted that “the minimal harm caused … to freedom of expression is far outweighed by the benefit it provides to vulnerable groups and to the promotion of equality.” Even a comedian was prosecuted for insulting jokes involving lesbians.

Recently, a Canadian mayor and a town were prosecuted for not hoisting an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag” in celebration of Pride Month — even though they did not have a flagpole.

Despite crushing the trucker protests, the Canadian parliament extended Trudeau’s emergency powers to allow him to continue to harass and threaten those on the right. Despite broad opposition, the Liberal Party, the NDP and other allies were able to muster 181 votes to keep authoritarian powers alive in Canada. (The Canadian courts later, belatedly, declared the Trudeau powers unconstitutional).

Many of the same legislators would later push to increase the penalties for certain speech crimes to life imprisonment. One of the most tragically ironic moments for Canada came last year, when Trudeau’s government blocked the citizenship of Russian dissident Maria Kartasheva because she has a conviction in Russia. She had been tried in absentia by a judge sanctioned by Canada for her exercise of free speech in Russia in condemning the Ukrainian war. The Canadian government informed Kartasheva that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offense relating to false information in Canada.

Think about that. Canada was concerned because she violated anti-free speech laws that are similar to its own. The Russians convicted her of disseminating “deliberately false information,” and Canada convicts’ people under laws like Section 372(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada for efforts “to convey, cause, or procure to be conveyed false information with the intent to alarm or injure anyone.”

That is why some of us spit out our soup in 2022 when Trudeau’s government condemned Cuba for its own crackdown on protesters, claiming that “Canada strongly advocates for freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly free from intimidation.” Trudeau also condemned China for cracking down on protests over COVID-19, the very subject of his own crackdown on the truckers.

Yet Trudeau has been a darling of the Canadian and American press despite a disapproval rate of around 68 percent among Canadian citizens. The media clearly approves of his position that “freedom of expression is not without limits” when others seek “to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”

So the question is: Now that Trudeau is heading out, where do Canadians go to get their free speech back?

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Top Stories

•Texas Abortions Drop to 0, Saving Up Thousands of Babies Per Month
•Facebook Finally Stops Discriminating Against Pro-Life Conservatives
• Oldest Abortion Biz in Minnesota Closes, Building Will be Demolished
•Trump Must Pardon Pro-Life Americans Like This 75-Year-Old Disabled Woman
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Texas Abortions Drop to 0, Saving Up Thousands of Babies/Month

Facebook Stops Discriminating Against Pro-Life Conservatives

Oldest Abortion Biz in Minnesota Closes, Building Demolished

Trump Must Pardon Pro-Life Americans Like Her

Cardinal Dolan Will Lead Opening Prayer for Trump’s Inauguration

Planned Parenthood Sells Aborted Babies Parts, Should be Defunded

Mom Rejects Abortion of Disabled Baby: “She’s Perfectly Fine”

Since We are Human From Conception, Abortion Kills a Human

MORE PRO-LIFE NEWS FROM TODAY

Awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Radical Leftists Renders the Award Worthless

Democrat AGs are Trying to Shut Down Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers

Conservative Party Expected to Win Canadian Election Despite Justin Trudeau Resigning

Pro-Life Groups Challenge New York Law Forcing Them to Hire Abortion Advocates

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Departing Gifts

A.F. Branco | on January 7, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-departing-gifts/

Metal Of Freedom and the Devil — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Joe Biden is handing out Medals of Freedom like candy to the very people trying to take Americans’ freedom away, such as Hillary Clinton, Soros, and Liz Cheney. Biden would give on to the devil if he could.

Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec on George Soros Receiving Presidential Medal of Freedom: “They are Spitting in Your Face on the Way Out” (VIDEO)

David Greyson – The Gateway Pundit – Jan 4, 2025

War Room founder Steve Bannon talked with Jack Posobiec on Saturday regarding Biden giving George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“George Soros in the freakin White House today getting the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, your thoughts?” Bannon asked.
“I applaud the fact that Joe Biden is finally admitting who has been in charge this entire time,” Posobiec said.
“They are the people who have been in charge. They are the people who have been calling the shots when Joe Biden was catatonic,” Posobiec continued.
Bannon had said that the Biden regime is using the last few remaining days to try and sabotage President Trump by sending officials around the world to various countries. READ MORE

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HUMOR, Political

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Monday, January 6, 2025

Top Stories

•Congress Certifies Trump’s Victory, Kamala Forced to Confirm He Won
•Pro-Abortion Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Will Resign
• Biden Gave Radical Abortion Groups $1.2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds
•Pro-Life Advocate Arrested for Preaching Gospel Outside Abortion Biz
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News

Congress Certifies Trump’s Victory, Kamala Forced to Confirm

Pro-Abortion Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Will Resign

Biden Gave Radical Abortion Groups $1.2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds

Pro-Life Man Arrested for Preaching Gospel Outside Abortion Biz

Arkansas Named Most Pro-Life State in America Fifth Year in a Row

Pope Francis Names Archbishop Who Approved Communion for Pelosi

Joe Biden Honors Radical Leftist George Soros

Tell Virginia General Assembly to Reject Abortions Up to Birth

MORE PRO-LIFE NEWS FROM TODAY

Pro-Life Group Celebrates Justin Trudeau Resignation

New Orleans Terrorist Also Planted Explosives at Catholic Church

Florida Abortion Amendment Sponsor Must Pay $186,000 in Fines for Fraudulent Signatures

IVF is Morally Wrong Because It Destroys Human Beings

Pro-Abortion Groups Fighting to Strike Down Arizona’s 15-Week Abortion Ban

Joe Biden Honors Radical Abortion Activist Eleanor Smeal With Presidential Citizens Medal

Tim Walz Signed Abortions Up to Birth, Then 2,000 More Babies Were Killed in Abortions

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CANADA’S TRUDEAU ANNOUNCES RESIGNATION FOLLOWING PARTY PRESSURE AMID CRITICISMS OF TRUMP, BUDGET HANDLING

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Trump reacts to Trudeau resignation: ‘Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State’

By Greg Norman Fox News | Published January 6, 2025

President-elect Trump on Monday reiterated his suggestion that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, just hours after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his plan to resign.

“Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State. The United States can no longer suffer the massive Trade Deficits and Subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat. Justin Trudeau knew this, and resigned,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them. Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!” he added.

Sources told Fox News in December that Trump brought up the merger idea to Trudeau in person when the pair met at Mar-a-Lago in late November.

trudeau-trump-mar-a-lago — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida in late November to discuss topics like the economy, illegal immigration and a proposed 25% tariff. (Justin Trudeau X)

Trudeau jetted to Trump’s Florida residence unannounced that month after the president-elect threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products. Trump is warning of 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico over failures by both nations to curb the flow of illegal immigrants and illicit drugs from those countries into the U.S.

“We discussed many important topics that will require both countries to work together to address, like the fentanyl and drug crisis that has decimated so many lives as a result of illegal immigration, fair trade deals that do not jeopardize American workers and the massive trade deficit the U.S. has with Canada,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.

Trudeau announced earlier this morning that he will resign as prime minister and as the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party.

TRUMP PLANS TO ‘IMMEDIATELY’ REVERSE BIDEN’S ‘RIDICULOUS’ BAN ON NEW OIL AND GAS DRILLING ALONG US COAST

Trudeau announces resignation — Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with media outside Rideau Cottage on Monday, Jan. 6, in Ottawa. (AP/Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

“I intend to resign as party leader, as Prime Minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust nationwide competitive process,” Trudeau said in a Monday morning address. “Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process. This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.”

Trudeau, who has led Canada for nearly a decade, has been grappling for months with significant drops in his approval ratings over mounting frustration relating to issues like the soaring cost of living and rising inflation.

Trump speaks behind a microphone wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks during a campaign rally at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Oct. 15, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The long-time prime minister saw an increase in calls for his resignation — from at least seven Liberal Members of Parliament as well as opposition party leaders — following the abrupt departure of his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, who wrote a scathing letter of resignation mentioning Trudeau’s handling of certain economic policies as well as the threats levied by Trump.

Fox News’ Michael Dorgan, Caitlin McFall and Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.

Greg Norman is a reporter at Fox News Digital.

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International Politics

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Pathetic Schumer Bashes Voters: ‘They Didn’t Realize How Much We Did for Them’”

By: Daphne Moon | January 6, 2025

In a stunning admission, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered up an explanation for his party’s drubbing in the 2024 elections. According to Schumer, voters simply “didn’t realize how much” the Democratic Party had done for them during their time in power. This shocking revelation came during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” where host Kristen Welker pointed out that Democrats had suffered historic losses, with President-elect Donald Trump winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Schumer blamed his party’s defeat on a failure to focus on the needs of working families in America and to show enough empathy towards their struggles. He cited the passing of legislation like the CHIPS Plus Act and efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs as examples of the Democrats’ commitment to helping the average American. But according to Schumer, this message didn’t reach voters, and the party also failed to show enough concern for their well-being.

But what Schumer fails to mention is the widespread criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy, with many Democratic strategists and pundits pointing to this as the root cause of their defeat. Not only did Trump gain 2.5 million more votes than in 2020, but Vice President Kamala Harris also saw a massive drop in her vote count compared to Biden’s numbers in 2020. She even failed to match Trump’s gains in three of the seven key swing states and in 80% of counties nationwide.

Despite this overwhelming evidence of a strong showing for Trump and a lackluster one for the Democrats, Schumer tried to spin the narrative in his party’s favor. He claimed that voters simply didn’t realize how much Democrats had done for them and that the media should focus on showing this to them in the future.

But it’s clear that Democrats are out of touch with the American people. Instead of addressing the concerns of the average working family, they chose to focus on talking about the details of their legislation, neglecting to show empathy and concern for the struggles of everyday Americans.

WATCH

With Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and the subsequent endorsement of Kamala Harris, questions arose about whether the Democrats would hold a primary. But despite never winning any delegates, Harris was able to secure enough support from Democratic National Convention (DNC) delegates to become the party’s presumptive nominee. This just goes to show the lack of democracy and true representation within the Democratic Party.

Schumer’s attempt to explain away his party’s losses as a result of voters not realizing their accomplishments is a feeble attempt to shift the blame from the Democratic Party’s failures. It’s time for Democrats to wake up to the reality that the American people do not support their extreme policies and instead focus on addressing the needs and concerns of everyday Americans.

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Continue reading “The Trump Sentencing: Curtain to Fall on Merchan’s Hamlet on the Hudson”→

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Three Reports from Jonathan Turley

January 6, 2025

The Trump Sentencing: Curtain to Fall on Merchan’s Hamlet on the Hudson

Below is my column in the Hill on the sentencing this week of President-Elect Donald Trump in Manhattan. Judge Juan Merchan waited to schedule the hearing for just ten days before the inauguration, limiting the time available to appeal. His order suggests that, if there is any interruption or delay in his sentencing, he might follow the advice of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and suspend sentencing for four years, a terrible option that we previously discussed. One could call that passively aggressive, but it seems quite actively aggressive.

Here is the column:

At 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 10, 2025, the curtain will fall on the longest performance of “Hamlet” in history. Acting Justice Juan Merchan will finally decide whether “to be or not to be” the judge to sentence Trump to jail. (Spoiler alert: He appears set to avoid a jail sentence and likely reversal.)

Since Trump’s conviction in May 2024, Merchan has contemplated his sentencing options. This was to be the orange-jump-suit moment many longed for over years of unrequited lawfare. They will likely be disappointed. As some of us noted after the verdict, this type of case would often result in an unconditional discharge or a sentence without jail time. That prediction became more likely after Trump was reelected in November. Limits on Trump’s freedom or liberty would likely result in a fast reversal, and Merchan knew it.

While various pundits predicted that Trump “will go to jail” after the trial, more realistic lawfare warriors had other ideas. The next best thing was to suspend proceedings and leave Trump in a type of legal suspended animation. Merchan would hold a leash on the president as a criminal defendant awaiting punishment. But the whole point of a trophy-kill case is the trophy itself. Merchan will not disappoint. While indicating that he is inclined to a sentence without jail or probation, he will finalize the conviction of Trump just 10 days before his inauguration. In so doing, he will formally label the president-elect a convicted felon.

It will be punishment by soundbite. Trump will become the first convicted felon to be sworn into office, a historical footnote that will be repeated mantra-like in the media. Merchan seems at points to be writing the actual talking points for the talking heads. In his order, he states grandly that the jurors found that this “was the premediated and continuous deception by the leader of the free world.” He then adds that he could not vacate the conviction because it would … constitute a disproportionate result and cause immeasurable damage to the citizenry’s confidence in the Rule of Law.”

Of course, this did not work out as many hoped. That apparently includes President Biden. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Biden was irate over the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute Trump more quickly to secure a conviction before the election. He also reportedly regretted his appointment of Attorney General Merrick Garland as insufficiently aggressive in pursuing Trump. It appears Garland was not sufficiently Bragg-like for Biden’s lawfare tastes.

The sentencing, however, will have another impact. Trump will finally be able to appeal this horrendous case. It has always been a target-rich opportunity for appeal, but Trump could not launch a comprehensive appeal until after he was sentenced.

Those appellate issues include charges based on a novel criminal theory through which…..

“Does the Gentlelady Have a Problem?” : Yes, Delegate Plaskett Most Certainly Has a Problem

“This body and this nation has [sic] a territories and a colonies problem.” Those words from Del. Stacey Plaskett echoed in the House chamber this week as the delegate interrupted the election of the House speaker to demand a vote for herself and the representatives of other non-states. The problem, however, is not with the House but with Plaskett and other members in demanding the violation of Article I of the Constitution.

After her election in 2015, Plaskett has often shown a certain disregard for constitutional principles and protections. Despite being a lawyer, Plaskett has insisted in Congress that hate speech is not constitutionally protected, a demonstrably false assertion. Where there is overwhelming evidence of a censorship system that a court called “Orwellian,” Plaskett has repeatedly denied the evidence presented before her committee. When a journalist testified on the evidence of that censorship system, Plaskett suggested his possible arrest. (Plaskett suggested that respected journalist Matt Taibbi had committed perjury due to an error that he made, not in testimony but in a tweet that he later corrected).

However, ignoring the free speech or free press values pales in comparison to what Plaskett was suggesting this week in nullifying critical language in Article I.

Article I, Section 2, states:

“The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch in the States Legislature.”

The ability to vote in the House is expressly limited to the elected representatives of “the several states.” Nevertheless, as the vote was being taken on the eventual election of Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), Plaskett rose to demand recognition and to know why she was not allowed to vote:

“I note that the names of representatives from American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia were not called, representing, collectively, 4 million Americans. Mr. Speaker, collectively, the largest per capita of veterans in this country.”

The presiding member asked a rather poignant question in response: “Does the gentlelady have a problem?”

The answer was decidedly “yes.”

Plaskett responded, “I asked why they were not called. I asked why they were not called from the parliamentarian, please.”

The response was obvious:

“Delegates-elect and the resident commissioner-elect are not qualified to vote/ Representatives-elect are the only individuals qualified to vote in the election of the speaker. As provided in Section 36 of the House rules and manual, the speaker is elected by a majority of the members-elect voting by surname.”

Plaskett then declared “This body and this nation has a territory and a colonies problem. What was supposed to be temporary has now, effectively, become permanent. We must do something about this.”

As Plaskett’s mike was cut off, she objected “But I have a voice!” as Democrats gave her a standing ovation………

Continue reading ““Does the Gentlelady Have a Problem?” : Yes, Delegate Plaskett Most Certainly Has a Problem”→

MSNBC’s O’Donnell: Veterans are a Greater Threat of Terrorism Than Those Crossing Over Border

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is under fire this week for using the terrorist attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans to attack the United States Army as a greater threat than those crossing our Southern border. The statement is a vintage example of why many are turning away from legacy or mainstream media, including MSNBC (which has lost nearly half its audience since the election).

O’Donnell has long maintained his show as something of a safe space for the left, including declaring that no Trump supporter would be allowed to speak on his show because they are all “liars,” a label that now applies to a majority of American voters in the last election.

Yet, this statement stands out for many in its unhinged effort to spin the tragedy into a more favorable liberal talking point.

O’Donnell declared:

“The simple fact is, this country has suffered more deadly terrorism at the hands of American-born citizens who are veterans of the United States military than people who have crossed into this country at the southern border. It is very clear from the evidence that if you want to worry about terrorism in this country, the United States Army is a much bigger problem than the southern border.”

There are two curious elements to O’Donnell’s comment. The first is that Army training somehow makes veterans greater threats of terrorism. The military also tends to instill patriotism and public service in its members. Moreover, O’Donnell was referencing the fact that Shamsud-Din Jabbar served in the Army, even though he was largely trained as a human resources and information technology expert. His attack was not a McVeigh-like truck bomb, but the use of the truck itself — an unfortunately common terrorist method that hardly speaks to any Army training.

Second, O’Donnell makes reference to those crossing the Southern Border as opposed to others who have either crossed any border or have entered this country legally. Again, the suggestion is that there is something about military training worthy of special concern. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Colvin Reid, James T. Hodgkinson, Thomas Matthew Crooks, Darrell Edward Brooks Jr., and others may beg to differ.

O’Donnell made specific reference to Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995:

“Timothy McVeigh parked a truck outside that building loaded with explosives in an act of homegrown American terrorism. Timothy McVeigh’s hatred of the American government was not tamed in any way by his service in the American military. So, too, with America’s latest terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve, with an American military veteran driving a pickup truck through a crowd to murder 14 people.”

Ok, McVeigh and Jabbar became extremists after they served in the military. However, all terrorists make such ………

Continue reading “MSNBC’s O’Donnell: Veterans are a Greater Threat of Terrorism Than Those Crossing Over Border”→

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Law, Media, Political

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HAPPY NEW YEAR! Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons from A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – He’s in the Tank

A.F. Branco | on January 5, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-hes-in-the-tank/

Walz and Minnesota Fraud — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Now, after years of allowing fraud and abuse to flourish in Minnesota, Tim Walz vows to crack down on it. It seems as though he noticed his poll numbers dropping, hoping voters will ignore his part to play in these Democrat shenanigans.

After losing hundreds of millions, Walz vows to ‘turn the dial’ on rampant fraud

By Jenna Gloeb – AlphaNews.org – Jan 3, 2025

Speaker-designate Lisa Demuth said Minnesota needs “a process that is truly independent of the leadership that allowed fraud to run rampant over the last five years.”
After six years in office and hundreds of millions lost to fraud, Gov. Tim Walz announced a new anti-fraud initiative Friday, raising questions about why it took so long for the governor to act.
With just under two years left before the next gubernatorial election, Walz says he wants to “turn the dial” on the state’s approach to combating fraud.
“It’s simply unacceptable. It’s maddening, and it makes myself and Minnesotans angry about this,” Walz said.
The plan includes creating a centralized fraud investigation unit under the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), expanded use of artificial intelligence for fraud detection, and increased penalties for financial crimes targeting public assistance programs. READ MORE

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trojan H-1B Horse

A.F. Branco | on January 6, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-trojan-h-1b-horse/

H-1B Trojan Horse — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – H- IB visa program is a Trojan Horse breaching our walls that will hurt Americans’ job opportunities. This goes against the America First policies we were promised.

Steve Bannon Doubles Down, Calls for Elimination of H-1B Visas, Deportations of “ALL H-1B Visa Holders Immediately” and Reparations for Americans who Had Their Jobs Stolen by Foreigners

By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Jan 05, 2024

Steve Bannon is not backing down in the ongoing MAGA civil war over H-1B visas sparked by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher. These occupational fields often include IT, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.
As of September 30, 2019, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)estimated that approximately 583,420 individuals were authorized to work in the United States under the H-1B visa classification. Each fiscal year, there is a congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, with an additional 20,000 visas available for individuals holding a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution, totaling 85,000 new H-1B visas annually. READ MORE

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HUMOR, Political

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Thursday, January 2, 2025

Top Stories

•Abortion Was the Leading Cause of Death Worldwidein 2024, Killing 73 Million People
•Pope Francis Condemns Abortion: RespectLife “From Conception to Natural Death”
•Minnesota Abortions Increase 16% After Tim Walz Signs Abortions Up toBirth Law
•Identical Twins Went Home for Christmas AfterParents Refused Abortion
•Scroll Down for More Pro-Life News