POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE: Tulsi GOES OFF on Barack Obama – Says Obama Criminally Implicated (VIDEO)
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – July 23, 2025
ODNI Tulsi Gabbard made a surprise appearance in the White House press briefing room after she released the second batch of previously undisclosed documents on Wednesday morning that include more proof that Barack Obama directly gave the order to publish Russia Collusion hoax knowing there was no proof to back it up. Wednesday’s document release followed Friday’s document dump by ODNI Tulsi Gabbard of a declassified December 2016 presidential briefing revealing Barack Obama knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a hoax Tulsi went off on Barack Obama for covering up the blackmail Putin had on Hillary Clinton… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
Pope Leo XIV arrived in the papal summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo on Sunday, July 6 to start a six-week vacation, giving the hilltop town back its most illustrious resident after Pope Francis stayed away during his 12-year pontificate.
It has been widely reported that Pope Leo will be using part of his vacation to begin drafting his first encyclical. These are important teaching documents for the Roman Catholic Church and sometimes they teach that the current pontiff can be very right, very wrong, very smart or simply not very good at this particular part of his duties. Most Catholics have high hopes for this first missive. Still, who doesn’t need editors to help with my suggestions?
The new pope has been very measured, calm and careful in the months since his election on May 8. It has to be the most dizzying of ascents and upon arrival as head of the Vatican, a confrontation with the broadest range of problems for any religious leader, and most political ones, on the planet. So Pope Leo taking things slowly and cautiously is a relief.
An encyclical is a big deal for practicing Catholics who assume encyclicals are intended to be read, studied, and the occasion of a prayer for discernment. The audience is assumed to be primarily Catholics everywhere, but Pope Leo has to be aware that the secular press —from supportive to hostile— will also be looking the first one over very carefully.
Here are some suggestions from an American Catholic his age which means we share a lot of culture, from network television, movies and music to the transition that followed Vatican II. (If Leo had to learn the Mass in Latin in order to be an altar boy only to have that chore tossed out as soon as it was accomplished and replaced with the English script, he will have perfect pitch for millions of Catholic seniors —young and old seniors alike.)
When he does begin to do interviews, if he chooses long form sit-downs with respectful journalists, the pope will go a long way to making the promise of his papacy real. Those interviews should focus on the encyclical if one issues before he does his sit-downs with reporters at least a few of whom, American Catholics hope, will be American. Curiosity about a new pope is always acute. It is off the charts about the first American pope.
So will curiosity be about the encyclical, which is a reason to hope that it is (1) written in clear, concise English and then translated by the Vatican’s best Latin scholars into the official language of the Church and (2) relatively short.
If the pope writes in English, not only will he be using his native tongue and thus be as certain as he can be that he’s conveying his meaning, it will be a huge hit with the English-speaking peoples of the world, especially the Americans, especially Midwesterners, and most especially Chicagoland Catholics. Some inside baseball phrases for Americans would be a nice touch.
The more concise the encyclical, the less susceptible it is to misleading excerpts and agenda-driven reporting. Even with the reach of the internet, hundreds of millions of people who have not read it will be told by others what it says and what it means.
As with discussions of Supreme Court decisions, the second-hand reports are usually at best incomplete and at worst intentionally misleading. In this new age of AI-driven deep fakes, don’t be surprised if subtlety-altered encyclicals instantly appear. The Vatican press office might want to assure that the real deal has arrows pointing to it. Simultaneous distribution to many of the world’s major outlets would be another guardrail.
So in English and relatively concise. I hope as well that it is not overtly political in the sense of the left-right spectrum that dominates most of the West where Leo’s letter will not be subject to suppression. If he encourages religious liberty, great! If he speaks to the need to care for life from conception to natural death, great! If he wants to encourage the flock to read and reflect on the Beatitudes, great!
If he wants to encourage Catholics to renew their commitment to the confessional, bravo! (The decline in the practice of this Catholic sacrament is pronounced, but its revival would have to begin with the direction to bishops and priests to make it a priority above all but the other Sacraments.
Pope Leo XIV could even begin with an appeal for vocations to the religious life which are needed everywhere, but especially in his homeland.
But pray he has already decided he’s not going to do immigration and especially that he’s not going to disparage capitalism or America as his predecessor was fond of intimating.
Catholics believe the Church is divinely ordained and can never fail. But it can and frequently does stumble. The road back from a divided and disillusioned Church in America begins with finding the good in the United States and praising it. Now that would be a welcome change from the past dozen years.
And please, nothing about President Trump. Read the room Pope Leo, please. You don’t need to single out the president. Lots of Catholic commentators like to do so. You don’t have to. At all.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
The Left’s Safe Space: Where Consequences Go to Die
Let’s start with a universal truth: Leftism is the only ideology where you can openly fantasize about punching Nazis (read: anyone right of Karl Marx) while simultaneously clutching your pearls if someone dares to disagree with you. Ah Leftism: the magical realm where hypocrisy isn’t just tolerated—it’s celebrated.
Take my recent conversation with a conservative friend who, like many, has adopted the “live and let live” approach to his Leftist acquaintances. His reasoning? “She’s not that bad.”
Really? The classic conservative cop-out.
She only wants to dismantle the nuclear family, not the entire Western legal system. She only supports Antifa when they’re firebombing federal buildings, not when they’re (allegedly) firebombing your federal building.
This is the modern Democrat Party in a nutshell: a coalition of useful idiots who’ve convinced themselves that their side is merely “passionate” while the other side is “violent extremists.” But let’s be real—when was the last time you saw a conservative hunt down a Leftist in the streets? Meanwhile, Antifa’s resume includes shooting at ICE officers and ambushing cops. But sure, both sides.
The Myth of the ‘Reasonable’ Leftist
My friend’s argument hinges on the idea that his Leftist pal isn’t “one of the bad ones.” She just posts memes about conservatives being fascists—harmless stuff, really. But here’s the rub: silence is complicity. If she’s not actively condemning the worst of her side (spoiler: she’s not), then she’s enabling it.
Brigitte Macron: A Case Study in Leftist Absurdity
Speaking of delusion, let’s talk about France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron. Two women were acquitted after being sued for claiming Brigitte was born male. Now, one of them is turning the tables and suing her for fraud. The rumor? Brigitte is actually Macron’s father, who transitioned. Now, I don’t care if Macron married a sentient baguette—just own it. But Leftists can’t handle the truth. They’d rather litigate it into oblivion.
Astroturfing 101: How the Left Manufactures ‘Grassroots’ Outrage
Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, the New York socialist who—shockingly—isn’t actually supported by New Yorkers.
*“Once more, with feeling (and for about the 1000th time): There are NO grassroots movements on the Left. It’s ALL top-down, astroturf funding and organizing. BREAKING: Campaign finance records reveal 72% of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign cash came from out-of-state donors — not local supporters. His donors? Hollywood elites and tech billionaires.”*
Even John Fetterman—a man who dresses like he’s perpetually mid-Napoleon Dynamite cosplay—called Mamdani out for not being a “real Democrat.” The Left is so fractured they’re eating their own. And this is before the 2024 election cycle, where we’ll undoubtedly uncover a decade’s worth of Leftist election “irregularities.”
The Conservative Conundrum: Why We Lose by Playing Nice
Here’s the kicker: Leftists post their insanity because they can. There are no consequences. Meanwhile, conservatives self-censor because we actually have jobs to lose. The asymmetry is the point.
So, the next time a Leftist friend posts some inane drivel about “fascist Republicans,” ask them: Are you cool with Antifa’s violence? The persecution of the unvaxxed? The fact that your ‘movement’ is bankrolled by coastal elites? Watch them squirm.
Because at the end of the day, the only thing worse than Leftist idiocy is conservative silence in the face of it.
Final Thought: The Left isn’t just wrong—they’re dangerously stupid. And until conservatives start treating them like the existential threat they are, we’ll keep losing. So speak up. Or get ready to live in their delusional world.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked in the past a lot about the unfortunate turn to the hard Left that Democrats have made. But in the last week, it’s become surreal.
We had this minor official—a Democratic official—Sade Perkins, and she posted that she was almost happy that we lost over a hundred people, the majority of them children, in this flash flood in Texas. She said they were “all white,” and therefore, they were discriminatory. I’ve never seen anything like it.
And then, people weighed in. And they had some atrocious comments. A pediatrician was almost gloating. And they had a variety of mechanisms to show how grotesque and ghoulish they were. One group of people said, “It was global warming. You people in Texas”—where, by the way, there’s more, I think, there’s more wind turbines and solar than almost anywhere—”you people denied global warming. This was caused by global warming. And therefore, you got your just desserts.”
It was not caused by global warming. It was a once-in-a-century flash flood of a magnitude no one had seen in a hundred years.
And then there were other people who said, “You supported the Department of Government Efficiency cuts, so you got what you deserved.” And in her case, she said, “You’re white people.”
So, it’s very, very, very disturbing.
At the same time, we’ve had now two organized assassination attempts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are just following the law. Remember what they’re doing. Apparently, in the mind of the Left, it was a moral thing to break the law and let 12 million people—without vaccinations, without audits, without criminal background checks—come into the United States. But it is an amoral thing to enforce the law and restore the rule of law, and ask people, who came in illegally, to please return.
But in that conundrum, we’ve had now 10 people arrested. And they were kind of Antifa types. I’m not saying they were Antifa. But they were dressed in black. They had radios. They had semi-automatic weapons. They had body armor. They were young, mostly white kids that looked like they were children of the middle class. And they shot an ICE agent in the neck. And they had a gun battle. And then, this was following an earlier assassination attempt.
Now, you think that the Democratic Party would be worried. But we’ve got even more disturbing reports that Democratic Congress people said, “Well, what are we supposed to do? We meet with our constituents and they’re telling us that one of us should be shot. I don’t mean shot by punishment. They’re urging us to use violence and be willing to be shot by others to promote a radical agenda.”
And I don’t know if that’s true because they won’t report any circumstances that would substantiate that. But basically, the congressional Democrats are saying, “I don’t know what I can do. These people are pushing us to the radical edge.”
And then you saw House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, didn’t you? He was posing with a bat like he was going to club people, in opposition to the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
I could go on with all of these examples. But I mean, this is an age in which people tried to kill President Donald Trump twice. And we know what happened to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other congressional personnel. And so, we’re getting a Luigi Mangione, etc. The attacks on Jewish people in Washington, D.C. We’re getting to the point now, the Left is entering the era of sedition, insurrection.
We had Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass go to a park and confront ICE agents who were federal law enforcement people, obeying and enforcing, and trying to restore the legitimacy of federal law, which surpasses municipal and state law, remember? And she said, “You’ve got to get out of my city.”
This is insurrection. Why is it happening? We’ve said in the past that part of it is that the Democratic agenda nobody wanted, there were 80/20, 70/30 issues, and as a result of that, they lost the Congress, they lost the White House, they lost, of course, in most cases, the Supreme Court.
So, they don’t have any power. So, they’re frustrated. But I think, even more importantly, in the first administration, Donald Trump addressed symptoms of the progressive project: Let’s restore deterrence. Let’s try to deal with the border. Let’s try to stop crime. Let’s cut taxes. But he didn’t have time or the knowledge or the constituencies. And he was working with a hostile Congress to address the root causes of those symptoms.
This time he’s saying, “This lunacy, it’s caused by certain institutions: foundations, universities, the Democratic Party, public broadcasting, the media.” And so, what he’s doing is he’s going after blue-stocking, left-wing law firms. He’s going after the endowment and taxing university endowments. He’s looking at grants on federal—grant surcharges gouging the federal government on university grants. He’s dealing with countries that are openly promoting open borders.
So, he’s dealing with the symptoms. And the Left is saying, “Oh my gosh, we have no institutional power. And now the way that we exercise power without having legislative or executive influence is institutions, foundations, media, K-12, universities. And Donald Trump is starting to address our left-wing monopoly and dominance of those institutions. And if he were to be successful, we would collapse, dissipate, disintegrate. So, we’re going to go take to the streets and we’re going to use violence and we’re going to do anything possible to stop this Donald Trump counterrevolution.”
It’s going to be very dangerous times. We’ve got to be very careful about what everybody says and not escalate the situation. But it’s mostly, now, coming from a frustrated and impotent Left.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Have you noticed, everyone, that the crescendo of hatred toward Elon Musk is becoming surreal?
We had a congresswoman from Ohio, I think her name was Marcy Kaptur, she recently said that she wasn’t sure where Elon Musk’s loyalties lay because he’d only been a citizen for 22 years.
He’s a naturalized citizen. This is very interesting because, remember, the Left says that people who are here illegally, and not citizens, should gain all of the protections and rights of citizens. They should be de facto citizens. Anybody who would question a naturalized citizen’s loyalty, according to the Left, would be xenophobic, nativist.
I think Rep. Kaptur has actually voted for resolutions damning—if I could use that word—Republicans for being insensitive to the status of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.
This follows a whole series of personal attacks. We had posters in Washington, D.C., saying, “Eliminate Musk.” We had a man arrested from Indiana online for promising, threatening to kill Elon Musk.
Here in California we have Rep. [Robert] Garcia, I think his name is. And he was on television and he said that Elon Musk was a d—. And when called on it, he said you had to bring weapons, i.e., against Musk, for this bar fight. WEAPONS.
Then we had this unhinged minister, Caudle—was that his name? I think it was. Steve Caudle from Tennessee. And he got up in his pulpit—and it was televised—and he said that Elon Musk was satanic, a devil, and sometimes you had to use violence to stop such devilry.
Add all of this up and you’re getting to the situation in which the bar of what is permissible has been drastically lowered.
We have turned someone who has saved the U.S. space program and will probably save two astronauts, who otherwise would perish in space if it was left to the government program; who reinvented the entire auto industry; who opened up all of social media with X—we have turned this person into a demon. A disloyal demon. A traitor. Someone that we smear and we slander all day long.
For what? For saying the following: that the $36 trillion in debt and the $1.5-$2 trillion, and Joe Biden in some years had $5 trillion and $6 trillion deficits, are unsustainable. And through a series of revenue enhancements and drastic cuts of programs that are unnecessary, we can get near a balanced budget.
He takes no money. He’s not confirmed as the head of a government agency, but, of course, there’s all sorts of deputies and heads of agencies that require no confirmation, including the national security adviser of the United States of America.
So, what is my point? We saw this earlier with Donald Trump.
Just a few days before the first assassination attempt, Joe Biden told a group of people that it’s time “to put Donald Trump in the bull’s-eye.” He ranted and raved about semi-fascist and ultra-MAGA, as if they were somehow dangerous insurrectionaries and threatened the republic. At the same time he was saying this, The New Republic ran a cover story of Elon Musk as Hitler, with a Hitlerian mustache.
Remember, we had had retired generals who said he was Nazi-like. He was equivalent to people who had set up the concentration and, indeed, death camps at Auschwitz. And he was synonymous with Mussolini.
And what did that do? That lowered the acceptable discourse. And that lowering of discourse led to acceptable behavior, such as two assassination attempts.
So, all I would warn the Left is, I think it’s time to stop this. Because if you continue this rhetoric, somebody—as this person in Indiana or this minister in Tennessee—is going to openly call for violence, if they have not already, against one of the most iconic Americans in our history. And when that happens, the responsibility is going to be on you.
So, it’s time to tone down the rhetoric and stop comparing a Renaissance American citizen—A CITIZEN, A CITIZEN—to one of the worst mass murders in history.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Missing ballots put Minnesota House at 67 – 67 tie. An investigation into ballot discrepancies in Scott County is still ongoing, but preliminary conclusions released today from the county attorney state that 20 ballots were likely thrown away without being counted.
20 ballots likely ‘thrown away’ in Scott County, preliminary investigation says
By Luke Sprinkel – Alpha News – Nov 27, 2024
After a recount, Democrat Brad Tabke leads Republican Aaron Paul by just 14 votes. An investigation into ballot discrepancies in Scott County is still ongoing, but preliminary conclusions released today from the county attorney state that 20 ballots were likely thrown away without being counted. Earlier this month, the county announced that its elections manager “identified a discrepancy in the count of ballots, in which 21 more absentee records than ballots were counted in the City of Shakopee.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon – If you can’t join them, beat them. Trump will use his tariff club to negotiate better deals and positions for the U.S… Even before becoming president, you see countries falling in line. What America needed all along is a strong leader like Trump.
MEAN TWEETS ARE BACK: Trump Puts BRICS on Notice, Threatens Countries With 100% Tariffs if They Try To Replace the ‘Mighty’ Dollar
By Paul Serran – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 30, 2024
And so, we’ve come to the point where the ‘mean tweets’ are fully back, and President-Elect Donald J. Trump is dishing out policy initiatives and warnings to actors around the world via his own postings. Today (30), Trump’s target was the BRICS countries: – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. The ‘multipolarity’ initiative, while almost a decade old, took great impulse during Joe Biden’s Administration from hell, in which the absolute lack of leadership and national project opened the doors for other solutions in the… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Hegseth has been nominated for Defense Secretary with a stellar military record and combat experience. Both Hegseth and Walz are both from Minnesota, but Tim Walz, although he has a military background, carries the stigma of stolen valor and wacky left-wing values.
Hegseth would be highest ranking Minnesotan serving White House in decades
By Hank Long – AlphaNews.com – Nov 21, 2024
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is expected to introduce Hegseth to his Senate colleagues this week. Since Minnesota achieved statehood in 1858, only a few Minnesotans have had the honor to serve in a presidential cabinet and stand in the line of presidential succession. If the incoming Republican majority class of U.S. Senate members vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense in January, the Forest Lake native would become one of the highest-ranking White House cabinet members from the North Star State ever. Vice President-elect and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, is expected to introduce Hegseth to his Senate colleagues this week. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Elon Musk is Rumored to be considering buying MSNBC. That could change the media landscape for decades and send left-wing propagandist Rachel Maddow packing her bags.
Elon Musk Just Gave the Strongest Hint Yet That He Might Actually Buy MSNBC
By Ken Kew – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 23, 2024
Elon Musk has just given the strongest hint yet that he may actually purchase MSNBC. The troubled left-wing network has seen its ratings nosedive in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the 2024 presidential election as furious viewers lash out at the false hope the network gave them or just check out of politics altogether. Another major controversy has been that involving Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who informed their audience this week that had met with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and would seek to take a “new approach” to covering his second term in office. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon: Trump battles the McConnell swamp, pushing Senator Thune to keep his recess appointments promise. If it wasn’t for Trump, they wouldn’t be in the majority right now. Let’s see if they show him any gratitude.
“Yes There Will Be” – Sen. Rick Scott Claps Back After Reporter Alleges Mitch McConnell Will Not Allow Trump Recess Appointments
By Jim Hoft – The Gateway – Nov 18, 2024
Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) has assured the conservative base that, contrary to reports suggesting otherwise from outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, recess appointments are still very much on the table. According to a now-deleted tweet by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, McConnell was quoted at a Washington gathering on Sunday as saying, “There will be no recess appointments.” READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trump and the GOP may have won the 2024 election, but America is far from being cured of this leftist disease that has been ravaging the country for decades. Now, the real battle for a healthy government for We the People is just beginning.
No, We Will Not Honor Your Delusions! – Young Conservative Gives the Best Explanation Yet on Why Republicans Swept the 2024 Elections (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 16, 2024
This young conservative who calls himself Grand-Ole-Evan gave the best explanation on why President Donald Trump and Republicans swept the 2024 elections. It came down to half of America living in reality of consequences of Democrat leadership and policies versus the other half of America living in delusion that their rights were going to be taken away. It was reality versus delusion. It really was that simple and not the deluded Democrats are furious that Republican voters did not put the left’s delusions before their needs to eat and find affordable housing. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The GOP broke the Democrat trifecta in Minnesota this past 2024 election, leaving Gov. Walz to preside over a divided government, making it harder to push their radical left agenda.
Minnesota House GOP ‘broke the Democrat trifecta’ with three big wins in Greater Minnesota
By Hank Long – Alpha News – Nov 6, 2024
Just about 24 hours after the polls opened in Minnesota and more than 3 million people had cast their ballots, a picture of who will control the levers of power at the Minnesota Capitol in January began to emerge but remains somewhat blurry. This much is known: Tim Walz will return to St. Paul as governor. He will preside over a divided legislature. Whether Republicans in the Minnesota House will share power with the DFL (where each caucus would hold 67 of 134 seats), or will have a razor thin majority of one or two (recount dependent) seats has not yet been cemented. Nevertheless, Republicans were declaring victory when it came to Minnesota’s legislative landscape around the same time Tuesday night that it became clear Donald Trump would return to the White House as president. READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The left is in full-blown panic with cabinet picks such as Matt Gaetz after Biden/Harris’s disastrous appointments that pushed lawfare, censorship, the Afghanistan debacle, and men in women’s sports. Some appointments were men in women’s dresses, along with their DEI agenda.
By Robert Ramano – Daily Torch – Nov 15, 2024
During President Joe Biden’s honeymoon in early 2021, Senate Republicans routinely deferred to the President’s selection for Cabinet secretaries, no matter how radical they were, how much they disagreed with the President’s policies and no matter how awful the selections turned out to be for national security and the individual liberties of the American people. The Biden-Harris administration ushered in a regime of censorship, government surveillance and political weaponization that targeted now President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters, botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan on an arbitrary, no-conditions timeline, left the U.S. southern border wide open and allowed millions of illegal aliens to penetrate the U.S., restricted U.S. energy and agriculture production while prices soared, institutionalized Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) racial and gender hiring quotas into the federal bureaucracy and U.S. corporations via… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Gov. Tim Walz lost his own Blue Earth County in Minnesota. Trump also flipped three other counties: Winona, Nicollet, and Carlton.
Trump flips four Minnesota counties, including win in Walz’s home county.
Former President Donald Trump didn’t win Minnesota in Tuesday’s election, but he delivered another shock to Democrats, flipping four counties from blue to red—including Gov. Tim Walz’s home turf, Blue Earth County. The narrow flips tightened Trump’s margin of defeat in the state to just four points—an improvement from his 7-point loss to Joe Biden in 2020. While Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz claimed victory statewide with 50.88% of the vote to Trump’s 46.66%, the results reveal a growing divide between Minnesota’s urban and rural voters. READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Revised from 2018 and revised for 2024 Veterans Day. Our Veterans are being left in the cold while Democrat priorities have been focused on housing and feeding illegal Immigrants coming across the border by the millions. Kamala/Biden’s disastrous immigration policies are one of the main reasons Trump won.
SHAMEFUL: Biden Admin’s John Kirby Said to Ignore Afghanistan Veterans Because They Don’t Vote Democrat
By Mike LaChance – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 11, 2024
John Kirby of the Biden administration has just been caught saying something truly shameful about American veterans. He did not realize that he had hit ‘reply all’ on an email inquiry sent to his office by FOX News seeking comment on veterans and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Kirby’s response stated that there was ‘no use in responding’ because these veterans are not Harris voters. On the anniversary of 9/11, White House National Security Council communications adviser John Kirby dismissed the concerns of military veterans critical of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, writing in response to a Fox News Digital press inquiry that there’s “no use” weighing in on the veterans’ views. READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trump supporters are rooting for Rick Scott to be the next Senate Majority Leader, hoping he can beat McConnell clones Thune and Cornyn.
KEEP THE HEAT ON: GOP Senators Feeling “Bullied” as MAGA Nation Makes Their Choice for Senate Majority Leader Crystal Clear
By Cullen Linebarger – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 11, 2024
As The Gateway Pundit reported, the Senate Republican leadership vote will take place in a closed-door session this Wednesday, November 13, 2024. The three candidates running for the position of Majority Leader are Texas Senator John Cornyn, South Dakota Senator John Thune, and Florida Senator Rick Scott. The Gateway Pundit has endorsed Scott for the position. As Jim Hoft notes, Scott is a devoted supporter of President-elect Donald J. Trump and a highly successful former businessman. He has also pledged full support for the Trump agenda and will implement recess appointments to make it easier to drain the DC Swamp while also ensuring no one sabotages Trump from the inside. For these reasons, ordinary Trump supporters, along with Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, have endorsed Scott. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Kamala Harris speaks during a July 13 campaign event at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. (Drew Hallowell/Getty Images)
As Vice President Kamala Harris slips in the polls, the Democratic National Committee/Harris campaign/mainstream media fusion talking points become even more absurd. Claiming that JD Vance and Donald Trump were “weird” did not work—especially given the genuinely odd behavior of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and would-be first gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Nor was the next Harris meme convincing: that the frenetic and nonstop Trump was somehow “exhausted,” “senile,” and “confused.” Voters know the workdays of the younger Harris are usually far shorter—or sometimes not workdays at all.
But Harris also falsely claimed the physically and mentally challenged President Joe Biden was, in her words, “absolutely authoritative” and “very bold and vibrant.”
Now Harris asserts that Trump is a “fascist,” a “dictator,” and “unfit” for office. But this new talking point will also not stop the Harris campaign’s hemorrhaging—and for a variety of reasons.
First, voters see the election as a conflict of two absolutely antithetical visions.
On the one hand is the prior, concrete Trump 2017-20 record: border security, no major wars abroad, calm in the Middle East, a deterred Russia, Iran, and China, low inflation, low interest rates, lower crime, lower taxes, strong deterrent military—and opposition to mandatory electric vehicle mandates, biological males competing in women’s sports, and the woke/DEI agenda.
On the other hand, is the Biden-Harris 2021-2024 record: the unchecked entry of 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and a destroyed border. People still struggle under Biden-Harris’ earlier hyperinflation and high interest rates. The horrific regional wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue. Biden-Harris embraces the unpopular woke/DEI agenda.
Harris herself knows that the Biden-Harris years were a failure. That is why she has shed almost all of the administration’s hard left-wing agendas—policies she has embraced for much of her adult life.
So suddenly, in the last 90 or so days, Harris has completely flipped and flopped.
Now she is for more funding of, not defunding, the police. She pivots for a secure border, not 20 million illegal aliens pouring across it. Harris brags about fossil fuel energy, not banning fracking; she’s for increasing, not cutting, defense.
In fact, several endangered incumbent Democratic senators in swing states are claiming more allegiance to Trump’s issues than identifying with Harris and her unpopular record as vice president.
Voters likely conclude that if Trump doubles down on his record, while even Harris and many senators temporarily piggyback on it, then it must be more effective and popular than Harris’ own.
Second, Harris now claims Trump is a fascist and insurrectionist.
But mouthing “Jan. 6” ad nauseam no longer persuades voters that Trump is a danger to anyone. They recall that Harris bragged of the far more violent demonstrations of 2020—five killed, $2 billion in damage, 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, 14,000 arrested—and said that the unrest would not and “should not” stop, while drumming up support to bail out jailed violent protesters.
Nor does the slur that Trump is a fascist resonate. The Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations weaponized the CIA and FBI to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections by peddling the fake “Steele dossier” and suppressing all the embarrassing news about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop.
Trump certainly didn’t coordinate, as Biden did, with local, state, and federal prosecutors to wage lawfare prosecutions to destroy his political opponents. He didn’t use the FBI to partner with social media to suppress the news.
Neither Trump nor his supporters tried to remove Biden from state ballots.
The House’s Republican majority didn’t impeach Biden twice despite the Biden family’s corruption and Joe Biden’s unlawful, decadeslong removal of classified papers to several insecure private residences.
Trump and the Republicans never coercively removed the party’s primary-winning nominee. They didn’t nullify the will of 14 million primary voters. And in backroom fashion, they didn’t anoint a candidate who had never entered a single primary in her life.
Nor did Trump support packing the Supreme Court. He doesn’t seek unconstitutional means of destroying the Electoral College. He isn’t demanding an end to the Senate filibuster or the creation of two new states to obtain four partisan Senate seats.
Third, as for Trump being “unfit” and lacking “decorum?” It depends on what the Biden-Harris standards were.
Having a trans activist reveal his breasts on camera at a White House “pride party?”
Biden’s reportedly calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a f***ing idiot” and “son of a b**ch?” Bragging about locking Trump up, while waging lawfare against him?
Unleashing son Hunter Biden with impunity to shake down foreign governments?
The Nov. 5 election will not be decided on these empty talking points or fake, media-generated narratives.
Instead, only two criteria matter: Which candidate’s past record and current agenda best appeal to voters? And which candidate seems the most authentic and genuine?
Vice President Kamala Harris has so over-used her talking points about “growing up in a middle-class family” and about her “love of the American people and our “hopes, dreams, ambitions, and aspirations,” that they have become punch lines to jokes. That’s not a good macro-political sign for her presidential campaign. And neither are some of the numbers emerging from the smaller demographics she must have to win. One of those smaller units of the American electorate are the Arab Americans generally, and in Michigan specifically, and the news isn’t great for Team Harris there either.
In early October, the Arab American Institute released its poll of Arab Americans on the upcoming presidential election. The “top line” takeaway was very surprising: “Trump and Harris [are] in a virtual tie with Arab American voters (42-41%), with 12% supporting third-party candidates.”
I asked former President Trump why he was doing this well with this demographic, especially at the same time as his support among Jewish Americans is increasing?
“Because I want to see everything get worked out,” he replied. “I want peace,” he continued. “I don’t want to see people killed. I want peace, and they [Arab Americans] know that. And the Jewish people know that. And both sides like it and know that I can get peace.”
That’s a good answer, and perhaps it does account for a good chunk of some Arab Americans voting Trump, but the same poll revealed that when “asked to rank their top issues, the following were the top three for Arab American voters: jobs and the economy (39%), Gaza (26%) and gun violence (21%).” Turns out that this demographic cares the most about the same issue the entire electorate cares the most about: The economy. There was no cross-tab provided on how the 39% break down between Trump and Harris, but my guess is that, as with the electorate as a whole, Arab Americans who are worried about inflation and their jobs break for Trump.
Then there are the issues that very few pollsters ask about and which this poll didn’t. The first is “transgender rights” which can mean a lot of things to different people. But to at least many millions of voters it means this: Boys who identify as girls playing in girls’ sports and using girls’ locker rooms. The second issue not often polled is “reparations.” This issue was introduced into the campaign just this week when Vice President Harris was asked about reparations by podcaster “Charlamagne tha God” and the Democrat nominee declared the issue “needed to be studied.”
The Harris campaign has distanced itself from the controversy. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)
“Americans view the prospect of reparations mostly negatively,” according to a 2021 Pew Research Study. “Three-in-ten U.S. adults say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, such as given land or money,”Pew reported. 77% of Black Americans support reparations while only 39% of Hispanic Americans and 33% of Asian Americans do. (Arab Americans were not broken out in the polling.)
What about the first issue mentioned above? A super-majority of all Americans—69% according to Gallup—believe that “transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.” But the Biden-Harris Administration has proposed new Title IX rules that have been widely viewed as mandating the right of transgender athletes to compete in the sports reserved for the biological category they identify with. To most voters that probably means “boys who identify as girls playing girls sports.”
While Harris has not spoken to this specific issue, she has adopted the very controversial position of taxpayer payment for prison inmates seeking to transition from one sex to another. (The Trump campaign has made Harris’s on-the-record support for these taxpayer payments part of their ad rotation.)
It is a guess, but a safe one, that conservative family cultures of the sort typical for Arab Americans—Muslim, Christian or agnostic—largely reject both reparations for Blacks and the idea of biological boys playing in girls’ sports.
That’s an informed guess because the Arab American Institute polling demonstrated that Arab Americans are in fact like most Americans on what matters most. Don’t be surprised when the post-election exit polling reveals that Arab Americans ended up supporting Trump in roughly the same percentage as all Americans and that they viewed Vice President Harris as simply too radical to take a chance on.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
Here we are just a few weeks before election day. People have already begun voting around the country and yet panic is setting in at the Kamala Harris campaign. Maybe it’s the RealClearPolitics polling averages showing former president Donald Trump leading in 6 of 7 swing states. Or it could be headlines like this, “Trump is in a better polling spot now than he was against Clinton or Biden,” from USA Today. Ouch!
Despite raising $1 billion, Harris not only isn’t making any inroads with voters, but she’s losing momentum. Americans have complained from the start of her selection as the Democratic nominee that they need to hear more about where she stands on the issues considering her history and the disastrous results of Biden-Harris policies. But Kamala, the woman of “change” and “joy,” has supplied neither details nor seriousness.
Kamala remains oblique, much like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill. But there is one group that isn’t confused at all about Harris’ positions and intentions: the progressive left. Why? Because for years she has been showing them who she is, and during this campaign she has been telling them in their own special language, that nothing has changed.
Harris has no problem being specific and avoiding word salads when she’s actually speaking her mind and not trying to hide something. Like in 2020 when telling Stephen Colbert in the wake of George Floyd’s death that the riots “were not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop… and they should not, and we should not.” This, as she also promoted and encouraged a fund to bail out those arrested during the riots. A clip of Harris has also emerged of the vice president addressing the National Congress of American Indians on Columbus Day in 2021—full of red meat with nary even a side salad in sight—discussing the “shameful past” of Columbus Day, decrying the explorers “perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.”
Destroying America’s heroes is an important plank in destroying the country.
In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, Kamala Harris made clear her enthusiasm for the cancerous leftist ‘woke’ ideology. Fox News reported on her remarks at a conference imploring people that, “We have to stay woke. Like everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke.” Her commands were punctuated by bursts of her now well-known bizarre and inappropriate laughter.
But this is not the version of Kamala voters with which voters have been presented for the past few months, which is understandable. After all, even a home invasion robber knows he can’t announce at the door what he’s up to; you unlock the door because you think you’re helping a guy who wants to mow your lawn. No one wants more of malevolent, woke progressives. The Democrats and Kamala know it, but they believe America deserves to be kneecapped, so they won’t stop.
Hence, Kamala is behaving as though she’s been dropped in from the planet Venus as a gift from the stars to chart a new way by “turning the page” to better vibes and joy. Or from what has been, to the same darn thing but with pearls on.
The bad news for Harris is, platitudes and fantasy talk might be good for a first date, but not when you’re running to become president of the United States. But progressives are just fine with Kamala Harris despite her talk of being a capitalist, believing in entrepreneurs with great lawns, and her affinity for the middle class because well, you know the rest.
The so-called progressive left (which is actually quite regressive) are comfortable that Kamala hasn’t changed, because she tells them so directly and indirectly. Her most direct wink-and-nod to her pals on the fringe of her party came during the CNN interview with Dana Bash in August. After being asked about her dramatic policy shifts on issues like immigration and energy production, she told Bash,“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.”
That may sound like another vacuous platitude but having been on the left as a community organizer, I recognized that phrase immediately and can tell you there’s much more to that line than people realize. When leftist organizers talk about their “values” they mean the socialist wish-fantasy of government which owns and controls everything, devoting its efforts to centralized planning on behalf of the workers who exist to maintain the bureaucratic state. “Fundamentally transforming” the nation is their “value” system. With that simple, seemingly innocuous phrase, Kamala was saying a great deal to the leftist extremists who hold the Democratic Party in thrall.
The indirect message comes from the vacuousness of the campaign itself. It is understood by the left that the goal is to win, no matter what that takes. Have they gotten the message? You bet. Take it from Sen. Bernie Sanders.As reported by The Hill, “Asked during an interview on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ whether Harris had abandoned her progressive ideals, Sanders said she is saying what she needs to say to beat Trump. ‘No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she’s tried to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election…”
The duality of Kamala’s message involves believing the average American is too dumb to know when they’re being manipulated with gibberish, and the left will understand the language meant to assuage them. And just in case, Kamala herself will use a blunt instrument if things start to go south, as they are. When asked on “The View” if she would have “done something differently than President Biden during the past 4 years,” the page-turning change-agent answered, “There is not a thing that comes to mind… And I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” Oh, the tangled web she weaves.
Harris is entering what David Sacks, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, calls a “doom loop” noting, “What I said two months ago is that if Harris gets behind, she’s going to have to abandon the basement strategy of not doing interviews… The problem is she is not good at interviews, and if she does more interviews, she’s going to fall further behind in the polls… That’s where we appear to be right now.”
As her campaign falters and she scrambles to make more noise at the voters with interviews, Democrats are coming to grips with having underestimated the American people. The left understands what her intentions are. The rest of us must also understand that her gibberish has an actual meaning meant to obscure her intentions and gain power to maintain the catastrophic Democratic agenda.
The vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night was staggeringly one-sided.
Sen. JD Vance was poised, calm, friendly, likable, and in control of the facts and himself.
By contrast, Gov. Tim Walz began the debate so nervous it was painful to watch. Then he made a series of mistakes which were cumulatively disqualifying. It was hard to believe he is on a national ticket.
Callista and I went to bed on Tuesday night convinced that Sen. Vance had won a substantial triumph. In that victory, he also vindicated President Donald J. Trump’s gamble in selecting a running mate so early in his career. At 40, with only two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance is only a few months older than Richard Nixon when President Dwight Eisenhower picked him to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1952. Nixon would remain a major part of the political scene for 42 years. That would give Sen. Vance a potential role in American government and politics until 2066.
When I got up on Wednesday morning, virtually all the commentaries validated the sense that the debate was something extraordinary.
This new reality was best summarized by Mark Halperin in the Wide World of News newsletter:
“1. One can pretend, as most of the Dominant Media does, that Tim Walz was not ‘clobbered’ by JD Vance, but, as honest Joe Klein (fully credentialed as second-to-none in contempt for Donald Trump and Vance) told the world, Walz was indeed clobbered, so badly that it ‘wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close.’ Remember: Biden’s perf[romance] was so bad it ended his candidacy and career.”
Pollster Frank Luntz tweeted that his focus group voted 12 to 2 that Vance had won.
Glenn Greenwald posted on X: “The most bizarre part of that debate was how Tim Walz repeatedly and flagrantly undercut Dems’ core attack on Trump/Vance: that they’re “weird,” freakish dangers wildly out of the mainstream.
“Everything Walz said treated Vance as a totally normal, reasonable, likable colleague.”
The most bizarre part of that debate was how Tim Walz repeatedly and flagrantly undercut Dems' core attack on Trump/Vance: that they're "weird," freakish dangers wildly out of the mainstream.
Everything Walz said treated Vance as a totally normal, reasonable, likable colleague.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted:“I would rate that the most successful Republican debate performance of this century, eclipsing Romney in the first debate with Obama in 2012.”
Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume had no regard for the performances of moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, saying they were “obnoxious” and made the debate a three-on-one proposition against Vance.
These were just a few. The Trump-Vance campaign collected no fewer than 22 journalists and public figures who agreed that Vance trounced Walz. Donald Trump Jr. was the third big winner in this debate. He had strongly backed Sen. Vance as a running mate and worked to get his father to pick him. That choice certainly seemed to work out brilliantly.
As Caitlin Doornbos in the NY Post wrote, Gov. Walz’s problems started at the beginning. “Tim Walz got one chance to make a first impression at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, and blew it before his opponent, JD Vance, even got the chance to speak.”
His nerves clearly kept him from meeting the challenge.
Finally, Gov. Walz said a couple of things that were just weird. In a clear moment of confusion, he said he’d become “friends with school shooters.” When asked why he had lied about being at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 suppression and killing of students demonstrating for democracy, Walz ultimately called himself a “knucklehead”for simply saying something that was false. Being the “knucklehead candidate” is not a good way to campaign for the last five weeks before the election.
After last night, Sen. Vance is a huge national figure among Republicans and conservatives. He will have much more impact campaigning than he did before the debate.
After Tuesday night, Gov. Walz will be seen by most Americans as someone who is clearly not ready to be president or vice president.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s comment that she was exhausted and sleepless when she picked him will now look like a first step toward minimizing his role – and her ability to make decisions under pressure.
A vindicated President Trump will campaign with more enthusiasm and a greater sense of certainty that he has built a winning ticket.
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999 and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is chairman of Gingrich 360.
Kamala Harris speaks at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University on Sept. 25, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen via Getty Images)
An October surprise is usually defined as the well-known (and more often left-wing) tactic of manufacturing or unloading a news story right before voting to surprise a rival without allowing them time sufficiently to respond or recover.
Think of the last-minute bombshell disclosure, five days before the 2000 election, that candidate George W. Bush had been cited for drunk driving over a quarter-century earlier. That surprise may have cost Bush the popular vote that year.
Sometimes, an incumbent can use his powers of office to warp the election. President Joe Biden benefited before the 2022 midterm elections when leftist activists leaked the impending Supreme Court repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Closer to the actual voting, Biden sought to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt owed to the federal government. He also began draining the strategic petroleum reserve to lower gas prices (as he is doing again this election year, as well). No wonder the predicted Republican midterm red wave ended up a tiny ripple.
More often, October surprises are more ad hominem and unleashed on a rival candidate’s supposedly previously undisclosed failings. At the end of the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s team leaked news of her purchased bogus “Steele Dossier” as supposed proof of Trump-Russian “collusion.”
On the eve of the last 2020 presidential debate, Biden delegated now Secretary of State Antony Blinken to work with former interim CIA Director Mike Morrell to round up “51 former intelligence authorities.” They were to lie that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was likely a product of a Russian intelligence “disinformation” operation. The ruse worked—turning potential proof of Biden family corruption into a replay of the fake 2016 Trump-Russian collusion hoax.
This time around, apparently the Harris campaign could not wait until October or early November to spring their surprises. Perhaps the Harris campaign’s impatience is due to Democratically inspired radical changes to state voting laws. Remember that in 2020, under the cover of COVID-19, Democrat legal teams got state laws altered to institutionalize early and mail-in voting in key states. Those changes reduced our once iconic Election Day into a mere construct when only 30% of voters cast their ballots. So, former October surprises—both the embarrassing disclosures and the use of incumbency to warp the election—are now becoming earlier and more frequent preemptive “September” shocks.
Suddenly, the Federal Reserve Bank, just 50 days before the election, decided that interest rates that spiraled under Biden-Harris in reaction to their hyperinflation right now need to be slashed—as supposed proof that the Biden-Harris inflation is now over, and the economy needs a sudden revving up.
Just as abruptly, on Sept. 23, just 43 days before Election Day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was flown by the Biden-Harris administration—at U.S. government expense—into the United States. More amazingly, Zelenskyy landed first in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, where most observers believe the currently deadlocked election will be decided. No surprise, Zelenskyy immediately toured a Pennsylvania munitions plant making artillery shells likely destined for his Ukraine—at a time when the state’s voters are concerned about job losses. The Harris-Biden administration was sending the not-so-subtle message that providing billions of dollars in arms to Zelenskyy’s Ukraine translates into jobs for voting Pennsylvanians.
But that was not all to this crass September surprise. In an interview with the left-wing, pro-Biden-Harris New Yorker magazine, Zelenskyy plunged right into the current neck-and-neck presidential race. He trashed Harris’ rival, former President Donald Trump, as someone who “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.” Not satisfied with that putdown, the Ukrainian president hit even harder Trump’s running mate and vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, as “dangerous” and “too radical.”
The left still talks nonstop about nonexistent 2016 Trump-Russia “collusion” and equally bogus 2020 Trump-Russian “disinformation.” Yet it would be hard to define any clearer “election interference” than the current Zelenskyy surprise. After all, has any vice president incumbent running for president ever flown in a foreign leader on a U.S. military jet to the one key U.S. state that will likely decide the impending election?
And furthermore, has any paraded him around that state’s weapons export plant while he trashed current Vice President Kamala Harris’ two opponents with invectives like “dangerous” and “radical?”
And why else was Zelenskyy’s Pennsylvania trip arranged by the Biden-Harris administration but to coincide with the traditional dates that mail-in and early-voting balloting start? Yet were the Zelenskyy sudden Pennsylvania drop-in and his crude domestic politicking and trashing of Trump and Vance all that wise? After all, Harris’ opponent Trump had just escaped an assassination attempt from a pro-Ukrainian gunman furious over Trump’s purported preference for a negotiated settlement to the 30-month-long, 1-million-casualties war.
Add it all up, and sometimes September surprises backfire—when they appear to voters as crude and insulting rather than just conniving.
This screenshot from AFPTV on Monday shows Ryan Wesley Routh at a rally to urge foreign leaders and international organizations to help in the evacuation of civilians and Ukrainian servicemen from Mariupol in central Kyiv on April 27, 2022, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Routh, 58, was arrested Sunday in connection with an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in West Palm Beach, Florida. (AFPTV-AFP/Getty Images)
Just two months after the failed Trump assassination attempt by one Thomas Matthew Crooks, we witnessed Sunday yet another foiled one, by Ryan Wesley Routh—a would-be assassin and anti-Trump/radical pro-Ukraine War social media addict. Somehow he, too, once again got within relatively easy shooting range of former President Donald Trump.
Is there a continued pattern here of lax Trump Secret Service protection, coupled with a general social media and televised climate that equates Trump with Hitler and lowers the bar on assassination?
That is, are we sending unambiguous messages to would-be assassins that a) lots of Trump-hating people would welcome an assassination attempt and canonize the wannabe assailant; b) it would not be that difficult to pull an assassination off, given security laxity and incompetence; and thus c) we will likely witness a series of such unhinged attempts?
On Aug. 14, almost exactly two months ago, I predicted the following:
If Donald Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump—without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination—what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign?
Is the message that if a 20-year-old amateur sniper can brazenly and visibly for nearly an hour breach all Secret Service security perimeters to shoot eight times at the president, hit him in the ear, kill one innocent bystander, and wound two others, then almost any future, more-experienced serious shooter could match or exceed the ability of that disturbed amateur to get close enough to Trump to fire more than eight shots at his head?
And that shooting Trump in many leftist quarters would subsequently earn the unhinged killer eternal fame, applause, and immortality?
And that if there are such anticipated rewards and perceived opportunities, then we may well see more attempts on candidate Trump’s life?
And here is just today’s example of the usual left-wing daily vitriol equating Trump with some sort of existential enemy that must be somehow stopped—expressed on both television and social media:
After the would-be assassination attempt, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York posted this: “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.”
Jeffries is spreading untruths: Trump has never supported a national abortion ban and has consistently distanced himself from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. And after such deliberately lying, what exactly does the House minority leader mean by “We must stop them”?
And after Sunday’s failed assassination attempt, Rachel Vindman, wife of Alexander Vindman of Trump’s first impeachment notoriety, and sister-in-law to current congressional candidate Eugene Vindman, D-Va., posted, “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.” What does Ms. Vindman mean? Another weekend, just another attempt to kill Trump, so no big deal?
And also, on MSNBC, Democratic activist the Rev. Jacqui Lewis ranted (to the silence of the network’s host, Jonathan Capehart), “Let’s not pretend that Donald Trump isn’t exactly like Mussolini, exactly like Hitler … . You nice Christians, kind, loving Jewish people … we’re not these people. We’re not these people. And we’re not going to get what we want if we elect this fascist, authoritarian weasel.”
So, what does Lewis suggest to Americans that they do with such a “Hitlerian weasel”?
And we should remind Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden—for yet the nth time—that Trump did not call for a “bloodbath” if he lost in November. (He was talking about the economic consequences to the U.S. automobile industry of mandating electric vehicles, and outsourcing automobile plants and jobs to Mexico.)
Nor did he claim that white supremacists were “good people” at Charlottesville, Virginia—but, as the liberal Snopes fact-checked, just the opposite: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
These serial assassination attempts, unfortunately, occur in a weary context of Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, state ballot removal, and lawfare. And they are starting to reflect a larger environment of justifying extralegal means to achieve the ends of ending Trump’s presidency and later reelection by any means necessary.
So, is it all that hard over the next 50 days for Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to extend adequate Secret Service security for ex-president and Republican presidential nominee Trump (which some congressional Democrats, led by Jan. 6 Committee Co-Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., had sought to stop entirely in April of this year)?
And can we just stop with the demonizing of Trump as a “Hitler/fascist/bloodbath/weasel/dictator” that must be stopped—before we see third, fourth, and fifth such assassination attempts?
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
A.F. Branco Cartoon—If Walz is elected Vice President, many in Minnesota will be happy to see him leave their state. He has single-handedly destroyed Minnesota with leftist draconian policies.
REPORT: Independent Voters in Tim Walz’s Home State of Minnesota Are Breaking for Trump
By Mike Lachance – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 13, 2024
Trump gains a competitive edge with independent voters in Minnesota despite Walz being added to the Kamala Harris is probably going to regret choosing wingnut Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Since the decision to bring Walz onto the ticket, her numbers have actually gone down in Minnesota. Now, we are learning that independent voters in Minnesota are breaking to Trump. Can you even imagine the meltdown of the left if Trump wins Minnesota despite the state’s governor being on the Democrat ticket? READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Dick Cheney teams up with Harris to defeat Trump. Just a few months ago, She and the Democrats hated Him, calling him Darth Cheney and labeling him a warmonger. Now they love him.
Disgusting! Warmonger VP Dick Cheney Endorses Kamala Harris, Says Trump Greatest Ever Threat to Republic
By Ken Kew – The Gateway Pundit – 09/7/24
The former vice president and architect of America’s foreign wars, Dick Cheney, has endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. In a statement on Friday, the 83-year-old argued Trump was the greatest ever threat to the American republic. “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he continued. “He can never be trusted with power again.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Over 25 Kamala Harris lies were counted during her debate with Trump. She lied about Trump’s stand on abortion, IVF, his Bloodbath comment (debunked), his “good people on both sides” comment (debunked), and his connection with Project 2025, just to name a few. ABC was quick to fact-check Trump numerous times, even when he was right, but failed to fact-check Harris’s lies not once.
Trump Campaign Fact-Checks Kamala Harris Point by Point After Biased Moderators Fail to Call Out Her Lies During Debate — Here are the Details
By Jim Hoft – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 11, 2024
The Trump campaign is taking matters into its own hands after a blatantly biased performance by the debate moderators, who failed to hold Kamala Harris accountable for her numerous lies. Last night’s debate featured Kamala Harris dodging responsibility for her failed policies while a complicit moderator allowed her to escape scrutiny in yet another display of blatant media bias. Despite the stacked odds, President Donald Trump emerged victorious, offering clear solutions while exposing Kamala Harris’s disastrous record and long list of lies. The debate was a glaring example of how far the radical left is willing to go to distort the truth. Kamala Harris, with the full support of a biased moderator, attempted to rewrite history while pushing dangerous, far-left policies. But the facts speak for themselves. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
It has been 39 days since President Joe Biden abdicated and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democrat nominee for president. From that day until Thursday, Harris has refused to be interviewed—a comprehensive media blackout for the entire 39 days—but Thursday she sits down for her first interview with anyone, having chosen CNN’s Dana Bash as her interlocutor. Harris will be accompanied by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
No doubt Walz is there as a blankie of sorts, a hand-holding helpmate to steady the notoriously nervous-on-camera Vice President who is prone to word salad answers, every one of which, if uttered, will greatly damage her campaign. It will thus be important for Bash to establish early on that she has a set of questions for Harris, one for Walz, and one for both of them and that they respect the audience’s right to hear answers from the person the questions is directed to.
Harris has a right to be nervous. Bash is a professional and will not ask questions about the importance of abortion rights or an assault weapons ban as we know what Harris thinks on these issues. The electorate needs to learn things about Harris that we do not currently know.
Harris has never struck many people as being up to the job of vice president much less president. As former President Trump is fond of reminding people, Harris was a risible figure as recently as the day before Biden’s incapacity became obvious at his debate with former President Trump and the subsequent crashing poll numbers obliged him to leave the race. Since that moment, Democrats and their colleagues in legacy media have been going 24/7 to turn Harris from a subject of derision into a brand new and highly polished candidate, one with no connection to Biden or the past three-and-a-half years.
Bash’s job is to explore in fair fashion whether Harris is ready to be president. Bash is a fine broadcast journalist, the equal of any I have worked with, and I have worked with almost all of the major networks’ major names. Bash and I helped moderate four GOP presidential primary debates in 2015-2016, and I recommended her to the Republican National Committee this past spring as a trustworthy professional for the debates it was then awarding.
But CNN is, as a whole, very left wing and very much part of legacy media which has been complicit in helping Harris hide thus far. This one interview will define Bash’s career much like Candy Crowley’s career was defined by her intervention into, and helping hand wrongfully extended to, then President Obama in his second debate with Mitt Romney. Bash does not want to enter the Hall of Shame for Journalists. She doesn’t have to be a bulldog or an ambush artist. She just needs to ask the simple and very direct questions the electorate needs answered.
Here are questions which Bash should pose to Harris:
1. President Biden named you as the lead in the effort to stem the flow of migrants across our southern border in March of 2021. That did not happen. Why? 2. How many people entered the country without invitation since you and Joe Biden took over? 3. What was your role in the withdrawal from Afghanistan? 4. In your acceptance speech you noted the horrors that occurred in Israel on 10/7 as well as the loss of innocent life in Gaza. Was it your intent to in any way equate the massacre on 10/7 with Israel’s actions in Gaza since then? 5. Did Israel have the right this past weekend to strike Hezbollah in a preemptive attack on the terrorists’ missile force? 6. Does Israel have the right to strike Iran to preempt another attack from Iran? 7. If Israel is attacked by Iran, would it be legitimate for Israel to destroy the oil export facilities on Kharg Island? 8. If China attempts to invade Taiwan, will American military force be used to defend the island nation? 9. Should the Supreme Court be expanded in its size? 10. How much of GDP should be spent on the Pentagon? 11. How do you fix the recruitment crisis our military is experiencing? 12. America’s ability to lead and indeed dominate in AI and supercomputing requires at least a doubling of our total domestic energy output. That is easiest to accomplish with new nuclear power plants. Do you support building them? 13. You were absolutely against fracking in your 2019 presidential campaign. What is your policy on fracking now? 14. What is the highest marginal tax rate you want to see enacted into law and at what level of adjusted gross income should that rate apply? 15. What is the most significant issue on which you have disagreed with President Biden?
Note that these are all direct, simple questions. A rule of serious journalists is not to pose multiple questions at the same time and only the last question above includes a request for two answers as those answers are inextricably connected. One question at a time obliges the guest to focus and respond to that question. Bash is very good at her business. If she stays true to the mission of informing the public, an already excellent reputation will grow even stronger.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo was a win for the separation of powers. (mj0007/iStock/ Getty Images)
To hear Vice President Kamala Harris tell it, the Supreme Court’s decision this summer to curb the federal bureaucracy’s authority to interpret vague laws so as to favor giving itself more power threatens everything from clean water and air, accessible health care, and sound financial markets to safe products and worker safety.
Well, don’t believe everything you hear.
The court’s decision doesn’t spell doom for medicine, industry, or the environment, but it is important for a different reason; namely, the separation of powers and an important check on government power.
In schools that still teach civics, kids learn that the three branches of government have different jobs: The legislative branch makes the law, the judicial branch interprets it, and the executive branch enforces it. That separation of power, America’s Founders said, protects our freedom by preventing too much power from ending up in too few hands.
At least that’s the theory. The separation of powers works only if the branches actually stay in their own lanes. The Supreme Court’s June 28 decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo was a big step toward making that happen.
More than ever, the rules and regulations that govern our lives come from bureaucrats in powerful executive branch agencies. Implementing Congress’ statutes is not as simple as delivering a package to a particular address. Sometimes laws are unclear, and figuring out what Congress meant by what it enacted may take some work. How can we make sure that agencies don’t cross the line from interpreting what Congress meant to changing statutes altogether?
The Supreme Court blurred that line in a 1984 decision, Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, by requiring that courts must accept “permissible” agency interpretations of statutory provisions that are “ambiguous” or “silent” about a particular issue.
Needless to say, those interpretations are in the eye of the bureaucratic beholder. The upshot of Chevron is that bureaucrats will often have almost free rein to define their own power and how to use it.
Loper Bright, in which the Supreme Court overruled Chevron, is a good example of how this paradigm can go wrong.
In 1976, Congress enacted a statute to manage the coastal fishery industry. The National Marine Fisheries Service implements this statute through regional fishery management councils. The statute allows the agency to require that “one or more observers be carried on board” domestic vessels for data collection and to require that two categories of such vessels bear the cost of those observers, which can top $700 per day.
The agency, however, began requiring that fishing vessels outside those categories also pay for observers, and Atlantic herring fishermen sued. The lower courts, citing Chevron, upheld the regulation, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, explained that America’s Founders designed a system in the “interpretation of the laws” would be the “proper and peculiar province of the courts.”
Don’t get us wrong. One of us worked in the U.S. Senate for a long time and saw how the legislative sausage is made. Congress enacts statutes with vague or unclear language, without defining important terms or answering key policy questions. It’s almost as if Congress figures that unelected bureaucrats will finish the job of lawmaking for them. Chevron, in fact, practically invited them to do so.
Article III of the Constitution, however, forecloses that option by assigning the “the judicial Power of the United States [to] one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Interpretation of statutes—that is, determining what a legislature meant by what it enacted—is a core element of judicial power.
The point is that, as the Supreme Court put it in Marbury v. Madison, it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Chevron turned that design on its head. In his concurring opinion in Loper Bright, Justice Clarence Thomas explained that the deference required by Chevron “compromises [the] separation of powers” by both “curb[ing] the judicial power afforded to courts” and “expand[ing] agencies’ executive power beyond constitutional limits.”
That obviously does not mean that courts should ignore the judgment or opinion of agencies. That input can be helpful, but it cannot take the place of courts doing what they alone have the authority to do. Nor does a statute’s subject matter make any difference: Agencies have no more lawmaking power when a statute concerns the environment than when it involves something much more pedestrian.
So, while Harris’ complaints about Loper Bright are emphatic, they are completely unjustified. Agencies will still be able to enforce clear statutes that protect industry, health, and the environment. But Chevron deference went too far. It invited agencies to abuse judicial power when the law was unclear.
That breached the separation of powers. Therefore, Chevron had to go.
Thankfully, our system of government prioritizes individual liberty over collective government power. In Loper Bright, the Supreme Court took an important step toward getting those priorities back in order.
And now, apparently, Harris has reversed herself on many of these issues. But we haven’t actually heard her explain these flip-flops, of course. Instead, these reversals are being leaked to the press from her campaign via “unnamed sources.”
Which begs another question: It’s been more than 10 days since Harris secured enough delegates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, so why exactly hasn’t she taken one question from an actual journalist yet about any of her past positions on policy? She did “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” as her first interview as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, and her handlers continue to give her the Biden treatment… where basically the strategy is to plead the Fifth all the way to Nov. 5th.
This strategy is unsustainable, of course. Team Kamala believes they can simply ride the current sugar high for the next 95 days or so without doing one single press conference or real interview. But here’s the thing: She still trails Trump on average nationally and in almost every swing state. The Harris team is allowing Trump to define her, which is quite easy to do, given her own comments in the past.
The Republican nominee was treated with outright hostility by Rachel Scott of ABC News straight out of the gate, but Trump hammered home his points around illegal immigration impacting minorities through social services being drastically cut regarding sanitation, education and police to help pay to support those in the country illegally. Trump also underscored the cruel tax that inflation is to all communities, regardless of color.
Meanwhile, Harris decided to blow off the event and instead will do it by Zoom instead.
Why? Because her people know that if she ever had to take questions from an objective, prepared moderator, someone for example, like Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, it would be utterly disastrous to her campaign. She simply does not have the ability to think or speak extemporaneously. And her policy positions are almost indefensible.
Ultimately, this race will come down to any debates Trump and Harris have. But here’s a prediction: Trump is arguing, rightly so, that he agreed to debate Biden, not Harris, on ABC in September. But now Harris is saying the debate agreement still stands.
No, it does not. Trump and Harris are supposed to debate now, making the prior agreement with Biden null and void.
Harris says she’ll still show up to the ABC debate regardless if Trump is there. I predict the former president will hold his ground, and the vice president will declare he chickened out while also declaring that there will be no more debates because Trump is “afraid” of her, with the media cheering her on every step of the way.
And that’s the goal: Avoid Trump, and any substantive questions, at all costs. And try to eke out a win without ever being held to account.
So, who is Kamala Harris?
We may never truly know. At least not until after Election Day.
It wasn’t the plan, and it wasn’t smooth. But when the cover-up of President Joe Biden’s physical infirmity fell apart, the left wing of the Democratic Party, led by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama and supported by the American Left’s vast “dark money,” carried out a coup. Out with Joe and in with Kamala. The out-of-power Clinton clique tried to prop up Biden but to no avail. The American Left is nothing if it isn’t ruthless in its drive for political power.
The Democratic Party is lurching left, just as it did in 1984. That year the Democrats gathered for their convention in San Francisco; this year it will be in Chicago. But no matter the city, the leftist pull of the Party’s power centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan and the Beltway is never out of power within the party, though it prefers to pretend that there are moderates in the leadership.
With the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, the American Left will openly and inarguably be at the controls. Then candidate Barack Obama pretended on 2008 to be a centrist, but he governed from the left and shifted the entire party to the left. President Biden’s disastrous term cemented the left and its ideology into the driver’s seat of the Democrats. What Kamala Harris says over the next three months as she rhetorically tries to tack to the middle does not much matter. She and her party are from and for the American Left’s vision for the United States.
We have rarely seen that agenda on full display. It’s been 40 years in fact since the mask was last off the Democrats in a presidential election. It was a different set of radicals atop the party then. The country was bitterly divided in the 1980s over how to confront the Soviet Union, and the American Left’s embrace of appeasement was on full display.
President Reagan had run and won in 1980 on a platform of “Peace Through Strength” and his first four years had been confrontation over confrontation with a Democratic Party being taken left by its activists demanding a “nuclear freeze.” Reagan began the Defense build-up that would eventually cause the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Democrats did their best to stop both the defense build-up and Reagan’s full-throated opposition to communism.
A young activist named Randall Forsbergissued a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” in the same year as Reagan’s first of two sweeping victories. The insurgent left wing of the Democratic Party, picking up the pieces of the rout of Jimmy Carter, embraced the “Nuclear Freeze” as a central tenet of their party. In the early 1980s, a staff writer for The New Yorker, Jonathan Schell, wrote a series of essays for the magazine about nuclear weapons and then published a revised form of them in a best-selling book, “The Fate of the Earth,” which soared up the best-seller lists. One of his colleagues, Bill McKibben, wrote a memorial to Schell in the magazine not long after Schell’s death in 2014, which revealed that Schell was ahead of his time in anticipating what the left would do in the aftermath of the triumph of Reaganism.
“Some months ago, I phoned Jonathan,” McKibben wrote. “By then gravely ill, he’d abandoned work on a book in part about climate change, a subject of great mutual interest.”
Schell was in the final months of his life when McKibben called. “But he hadn’t stopped mulling over, with his characteristic penetration,” McKibbon continued, “his great topic, which really was the fate of the earth.”
The “nuclear freeze” movement was an umbrella for the American Left, which had sprung up during the Vietnam War. That movement was busy burrowing into academics and thereafter into public education and beyond. Christopher Rufo in his best-selling book of last year, “America’s Cultural Revolution” laid out in extraordinary detail the left’s “long march through the institutions.”
Demonstrators hold hands and vocalize as they march towards Central Park during a massive nuclear disarmament rally where 750,000 gathered to demand a freeze on nuclear arms, New York, June 12, 1982. (Lee Frey/Authenticated News International/Getty Images)
The nuclear freeze movement was the organizing slogan of the American Left in the Reagan years. It was based on the fundamentally flawed belief in appeasement of enemies. Whether because they are socialists like the European left, or even Leninists like China’s Xi Jinping, Democrats don’t like their core beliefs on full display. So, America rarely gets a full-frontal exposure of what the left edge of the Democratic Party really wants. Even today, when climate change theology permeates everything on the left, rarely does the American Left spell out what its agenda means for the average voter.
Democrats spelled it out in 1984 when Walter Mondale and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro went all in with the American Left. “MONDALE PLEDGES IMMEDIATE EFFORT FOR ARMS FREEZE” was the headline in the September 6, 1984, New York Times.
The American electorate did not care about the Freeze Movement’s mass marches. It did not buy into the rhetoric of the left which captured the Democratic Party during the 1980s. “Under Mr. Reagan,” the Democratic Party’s platform to stop Reagan in 1984 read, “the nuclear arms race would continue to spiral out of control. A new generation of destabilizing missiles will imperil all humanity. We will live in a world where the nuclear arms race has spread from earth into space.”
President Reagan, in the mind of the Democrats, “has contributed to the decline of U.S.-Soviet relations to a perilous point. Instead of challenges, he has used easy and abusive anti-Soviet rhetoric as a substitute for strength, progress, and careful use of power.”
Former President Ronald Reagan, the late Henry Kissinger and Howard Baker laughing during a GOP fund raising dinner. (Photo by Larry Downing/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
The “San Francisco Democrats” as then U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick labeled them at the Republican Convention in 1984, got crushed by the American electorate that year. But “leftism light” under the banner of Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis fooled no one four years later and Vice President George H.W. Bush brushed Dukakis aside.
The American Left would remain dominant within the Democratic Party until Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council drove it out of sight before his successful campaign for the party’s nomination in 1992. The thumping the Democrats had at the polls in 1994 after “Hillarycare” crashed and burned reminded the Manhattan-Beltway media elites, again, that ours is a center-right country.
When Ambassador Kirkpatrick took the stage at the 1984 GOP convention, she reminded the audience that she was herself a Democrat as President Reagan had once been and began by quoting Harry Truman who had said four decades earlier that the “elements of our strength are many. They include our democratic government, our economic system, our great natural resources. But the basic source of our strength is spiritual. We believe in the dignity of man.”
Kirkpatrick then contrasted the Democrats of Truman’s era with those of 1984:
“That’s the way Democratic presidents and presidential candidates used to talk about America.”
“These were the men who developed NATO, who developed the Marshall Plan,” Kirkpatrick continued, “who devised the Alliance for Progress. They were not afraid to be resolute nor ashamed to speak of America as a great nation. They didn’t doubt that we must be strong enough to protect ourselves and to help others.”
“They didn’t imagine that America should depend for its very survival on the promises of its adversaries,” Kirkpatrick added.
“They happily assumed the responsibilities of freedom,” she said, approaching the defining moment of her speech.
“I am not alone in noticing that the San Francisco Democrats took a very different approach.”
So was born the term “San Francisco Democrats” and it has endured, though the fortunes of the American Left ebbed from that moment until now. Perhaps it is a forty year cycle: Every four decades the Democrats openly go “full San Francisco left wing extreme” and get blown out in the November election.
Their cover-up of Joe Biden’s infirmity blown by the debate with President Trump and their lawfare strategy proven an enormous mistake, the American Left has gone all in again, with Vice President Harris replacing the infirm incumbent. No matter whom Harris picks as her running mate —even if it is the old school liberal Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, there will be no blurring of the edges of the socialism the Democrats wholly embrace, no watering down of their appeasement policies of the four years of Biden and the eight of Obama.
Democrats are going to put a choice before the American people: A mangled “managed decline” of the U.S. overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris or a renewal of American strength under President Donald Trump.
It’s as clear a choice as America has had since 1980 and 1984. Pray our center-right join with the old school liberals in the FDR-Truman-JFK-LBJ mold to finish the American realignment away from the American Left.
Prayer is in order because we really don’t want to live under the control of Kamala Harris, the Squad and the dark money web behind them. That they are planning a radical agenda isn’t in doubt. If the American Left somehow pulls off a miracle out of the wreckage of their bait-and-switch coup from “Scranton Joe” Biden back to the San Francisco Democrats, the bell will be tolling for all of us as well as our allies like Israel, NATO and in the Asian Pacific theater.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Audit slams Walz administration for oversight failures that enabled Feeding Our Future fraud. In some cases, MDE shockingly “asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.”
Audit slams Walz administration for oversight failures that enabled Feeding Our Future fraud
In some cases, MDE shockingly “asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.”
By Evan Poellinger – June 13, 2024
The Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) issued a 120-page report Thursday which lambasted the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) for failing to take necessary oversight measures, enabling the multi-million dollar Feeding Our Future fraud to occur.
In the report, Legislative Auditor Judy Randall declared, “Federal regulations required MDE to monitor and enforce Feeding Our Future’s compliance with program requirements. MDE’s responsibilities under federal law ranged from providing guidance and training to Feeding Our Future staff, to terminating the organization’s participation in the programs if warranted. However, we found MDE’s oversight of Feeding Our Future to be inadequate. In fact, we believe MDE’s actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud.” READ MORE…
While Bidenomics continues with its same old, same old “bribe the young and illegal, tax the stuffing out of the middle class, and reward the corporate elites” policies, Trump is throwing out some interesting ideas to kick around in regard to the economy and how he would run his second term.
Trump’s economic plans include several fresh initiatives. You probably heard of his plan to end the taxing of tips for service workers. Tips are not wages. They are rewards from individuals. They are a nightmare to account for. And they help – very directly – people on low incomes. His suggestion is both kind and pragmatic. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump. READ MORE…
The United States today, effectively and enduringly, is not one but three nations. There is a “Red America” a “Blue America,” and an “I don’t care” America. Rarely do those in Blue or Red America agree on matters political, or reconcile with friends and family estranged because of politics, and increasingly they do not congregate together.
What used to be differences that were accepted and understood have become breaking points among families and former friends. We are far, far from “civil war” or even 1968 levels of antipathy, but there is a separation between Blue and Red America that is deep and deepening.
This is most manifest in the struggles of the many businesses that purport to “do news.” Only 32% of Americans say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” according to Gallup in a survey from last October, a low point equaling the previous bottoming out in 2016 and a small decline since 2021 (36%) and 2022 (34%).
The legacy media’s slow motion credibility crash has led to a collapse in audience and revenue for most such platforms. The core reason seems obvious: The legacy media seethes with contempt for “Red America,” and Red America knows that legacy media is overwhelmingly staffed by Blue America. In turn, “Red America” has walked away from those platforms.
The Red America/Blue America split manifests in the polling in the presidential race, but also on almost every major issue of consequence. Support for Israel is the most salient such issue at this moment, but the same divide separates “pro-life” from “pro-abortion rights camps,” as well as with the divisions over public education’s lurch left, gender ideology and pretty much every cultural and most economic debates.
Before he became one of a handful of the great British statesmen of the 19th, Benjamin Disraeli was a successful novelist. In his “Sybil” from 1845, he wrote about a divide in language that returns to remind us of conditions not just in Victorian England but today in the United States. There existed in the United Kingdom then, Disraeli wrote, “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were inhabitants of different planets.”
This is our condition today, and increasingly any institution that is obviously aligned with one or the other of the two Americas cannot expect the patronage of the other. This legacy media, overwhelmingly, indeed suffocatingly “Blue,” has simply walked away from Red America. Red America noticed. And they have overwhelmingly stopped watching and reading the Blue media.
The assertion that “legacy media” has simply become “Blue media,” cannot be proven because most employees of “Blue journalism” refuse to admit their POVs, but most people I speak with intuitively know the assertion that “legacy newsrooms are Blue” is true. If we gathered all the creative staff of the old networks, plus CNN, as well as the staffs of the old brands in newspapers, and got honest answers to six questions, we could get this “proven”:
For whom did you vote in 2016 and 2020? Are you “pro-life” or “pro-abortion rights”? Do you own a gun? Do you attend church more than six times a year? Are there two genders? Do you support the State of Israel’s right to exist and right to defend itself?
My guess is that more than 90% of the assembled legacy media journalists would provide “Blue America” answers to at least 5 of these 6 inquiries. Red America, by contrast, would prove the opposite answers in at least 4 of the six. If a news organization is overwhelmingly populated by “Blue America” journalists, Red America viewers, readers and listeners are going to walk away. In fact, they already have.
Now the question is: Does legacy media want to survive? If so, it will consciously change its staffing and its subject curiosity and ruthlessly throttle biased coverage. It isn’t hard to diagnose what has gone oh so wrong with legacy media generally, but it does require great resolve to fix.
While Democrats deny President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of Donald Trump’s five criminal and civil prosecutions, their behavior suggests otherwise. Pictured: Biden delivers remarks at the White House on June 4, 2024. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them. But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump. Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.
Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had (Attorney General Merrick) Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”
If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it—even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”
Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”
Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?
Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.
And why would Biden’s own attorney general, Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.
Yet Smith’s politicized persecution of the innocent McDonnell was reversed by a unanimous verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court. That rare court unanimity normally should have raised a red flag to the Biden DOJ about both Smith’s partiality and his incompetence.
But then again, Smith’s wife had donated to the 2020 Biden campaign fund. And she was previously known for producing a hagiographic 2020 documentary (“Becoming”) about Michelle Obama.
Selecting a special counsel with a successful record of prior nonpartisan convictions was clearly not why the DOJ appointed Smith.
The White House’s involvement is not limited to the Smith federal indictments.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s paramour and erstwhile lead prosecutor in her indictment of Trump, Nathan Wade, met twice with the White House counsel’s office. On one occasion, Wade met inside the Biden White House.
Subpoenaed records reveal that the brazen Wade actually billed the federal government for his time spent with the White House counsel’s staff—although so far no one has disclosed under oath the nature of such meetings.
Of the tens of thousands of local prosecutions each year, in how many instances does a county prosecutor consult with the White House counsel’s office—and then bill it for his knowledge?
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s just-completed felony convictions of Trump were spearheaded by former prominent federal prosecutor Matthew Colangelo. He is not just a well-known Democratic partisan who served as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee.
Colangelo had also just left his prior position in the Biden Justice Department—reputedly as Garland’s third-ranking prosecutor—to join the local Bragg team. Again, among all the multitudes of annual municipal indictments nationwide, how many local prosecutors manage to enlist one of the nation’s three top federal attorneys to head their case?
So, apparently, it was not enough for the shameless Bragg to campaign flagrantly on promises to go after Trump. In addition, Bragg brashly drafted a top Democratic operative and political appointee from inside Joe Biden’s DOJ to head his prosecution.
Not surprisingly, it took only a few hours after the Colangelo-Bragg conviction of Trump for Biden on spec to start blasting his rival as a “convicted felon.” Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge, and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.
So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden’s White House “neutrality.” Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them.
Joe Biden is running out of excuses. While many Democrats have urged him to end his re-election bid, including friendly columnists like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and Washington Post’s David Ignatius, it has been the conventional wisdom that Biden could not do so, fearful that an even less popular Kamala Harris would replace him as the 2024 Democratic candidate for president.
That is changing. Vice President Harris has been out on the stump, performing the kind of all-out energetic campaigning that the president cannot manage. She meets almost daily with women’s groups talking about abortion and Black groups talking about racial justice.
She travels incessantly to swing states to hand out money and programs, crediting the Biden-Harris White House – emphasis on Harris – with passing the enormous spending bills at the heart of the administration’s campaign.
She also frequently entertains important Democrats at her home in Washington, getting to know the important power brokers. Quietly, off the radar, even as she is being virtually ignored by Republican analysts and commentators, Harris’ efforts are paying off.
Harris’ overall approval ratings of 38% (net 11% disapproving) on average today are slightly better than those of her boss (net 17% disapproving), and they have improved since the beginning of the year, when her net disapproval was above 17%. Biden’s have not. Importantly, recent surveys show she is more popular with Black voters – where Biden has suffered a serious swoon – than the president.
Harris can make a solid case that she can carry on the Obama/Biden agenda and that she is healthy and fit to serve four more years. If a large portion of Biden’s unpopularity is due to his age, Harris would be a significant upgrade.
Harris’ improved posture comes at a pivotal time in the campaign and for the president. Scheduling the first of two presidential debates on June 27, way earlier than usual in the election calendar, has triggered renewed speculation about Democrats dumping Biden at the convention. Some think that the timing of the face-off with Donald Trump, many weeks ahead of the Aug. 19 gathering in Chicago, is intended to give Democrats some optionality. If the debate is a complete disaster, it is thought, the party will have enough time to regroup and consider an alternative before their convention.
If a large portion of Biden’s unpopularity is due to his age, Harris would be a significant upgrade.
Recent polls showing former President Trump leading in critical swing states promise disaster in November, not only for Biden but possibly for down-ballot candidates as well. Vulnerable Senate candidates in toss-up states like Pennsylvania and Nevada are reportedly distancing themselves from the president, fearful of being dragged down by the top of the ticket.
But what about all those primaries? Is it even possible to ditch Biden? The answer is yes; during the Democratic convention, the party could technically decide to pick another candidate if Biden withdrew from the race or if the majority of delegates was persuaded that the president was not up to the task.
There are some 4,000 delegates who will elect the party’s nominee, and roughly 700 so-called Super Delegates who step in only if there is no apparent winner on the first round of voting. There is no legal obligation for any of those delegates to back Biden. In the event of some calamity – a health problem, for instance, or a humiliating defeat in the debate – the majority could choose someone to replace the president.
Or the party could finally persuade Biden to step aside. Some political analysts have expected him to do so for months, considering his age, infirmity and declining popularity. Despite considerable pressure, Joe has hung on, perhaps knowing he can best protect his son Hunter from the Oval Office, because his wife Jill has encouraged him to run again or maybe because of Harris’ weak standing.
For the first three years of his presidency, Biden outshone Harris, who repeatedly got tangled up in hilarious word salads but more importantly, was tagged with accomplishing little and, especially, doing nothing about the open border.
Though Harris’ approval ratings are still poor, she is arguably more capable than Joe. If Democrat bosses decide to open up the convention to other candidates, in order to keep the party from splitting wide open, Vice President Harris is likely to prevail. That is what happened in 1968.
When Lyndon Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race on March 31, 1968, his approval rating was about 36%, according to Gallup, only slightly worse than Biden’s today. LBJ knew his chances were dim, given anger about the Vietnam War, and took himself out of contention. At the Democratic convention that year, delegates picked Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to succeed him as the 1968 candidate, despite many within the party seeking an anti-war candidate.
President Richard M. Nixon dedicates his new administration to the cause of “peace among nations” as former President Lyndon Johnson, left, listens to the inaugural speech Jan. 20, 1969, in Washington. Seated at right is Vice President Spiro Agnew. (AP Photo)
Humphrey was not popular – only 34% of the country supported him on the eve of the convention, compared to 40% backing Richard Nixon and 17% leaning toward the segregationist (former Democrat) George Wallace, who ran as an independent. But, nominating Humphrey was the least contentious of possible outcomes; in the end, Democrat power brokers opted for harmony. The decision did not go well; Humphrey lost that year to Richard Nixon in a tight election.
The reality for Democrats is that if they open up the convention to considering other candidates, Kamala Harris will likely emerge the nominee. She will not leave the game without a fight; and, like Humphrey, the vice president would be the least contentious of alternatives.
For sure, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and others might throw their hats in the ring, but neither has done the coast-to-coast politicking so necessary to build their case. And, Black leaders, who put Joe Biden in the Oval Office, would almost certainly prefer Harris.
Gov. Gavin Newsom talks about the future UCLA Research Park, California’s new global hub for innovation, being built at the former Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles on Jan. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Humphrey lost, but he went from basement-level approval ratings to nearly winning. It’s possible that Harris could do the same. Democrats may have no other choice.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
Donald Trump’s legal battles are being prosecuted by his political opposition and sabotaging his presidential campaign, raising concerns about the precedent being set in American politics. Pictured: Trump walks to the courtroom following a break in his alleged “hush money” trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on May 9. (Photo: ANGELA WEISS, POOL, AFP/Getty Images)
Josh Hammer, a syndicated columnist, is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. He also is counsel and policy adviser for the Internet Accountability Project and contributing editor for Anchoring Truths.
It is a presidential election year, and a leading candidate for president of the United States, who also happens to be a former president of the United States, is currently a criminal defendant chained to a dingy courtroom four days of the week—time that he should be spending interacting with voters out on the campaign trail. That’s terrible. But it’s only the beginning.
The daughter of the presiding judge is a professional political operative for the presidential candidate’s opposition party, and the candidate himself is subject to an over-inclusive and unconstitutional gag order.
The George Soros-funded district attorney, who campaigned on a platform of prosecuting that candidate, only pressed charges after his own left-wing predecessor opted not to do so due to the frivolous nature of the charges. One of the Soros-funded district attorney’s subordinates curiously joined his team—just in time to prosecute the candidate—from a high-ranking perch in the Department of Justice that is headed by the candidate’s chief political rival.
And this week, the candidate was subjected to tawdry and salacious testimony from a discredited former porn star, who spoke openly in court about how she “blacked out” during their alleged 2006 sexual encounter. Due to the sprawling gag order, the candidate was not—and is not—legally permitted to defend his honor and contest her lurid, legally irrelevant claims.
Welcome to our American banana republic.
America has many real, glaring problems on its hands. Inflation remains stubborn, and Americans widely report feeling pessimistic about the economy, despite nominal low unemployment metrics. Our wide-open southern border is disastrous, leading to artificially suppressed working-class wages and the most rampant illegal alien crime in the nation’s history. Violent and property crime rates remain too high, especially in large urban corridors. Energy prices should be considerably lower, and they would be if our moronic leaders allowed producers to tap into America’s great natural wellspring of hydrocarbons.
Around the world, hostile regimes act against our interests in unrestrained and revanchist fashion. At home, childlessness, godlessness, anxiety, and depression are all rising, symptomatic of a broader civilizational rot and a society that has lost confidence in what it claims to stand for.
Amidst all this, it would be ideal to have a normal, competitive presidential race in which the flailing incumbent is directly confronted, and his record is challenged for all to see. But Americans are now being deprived of anything remotely resembling a normal presidential race. Donald Trump is physically chained down to Judge Juan Merchan’s New York courtroom, unable to get out on the campaign trail and deliver his signature rallies to adoring fans across the heartland.
These often-forgotten Americans are, in a quite literal sense, denied the opportunity to hear the full argument against the Biden Regime due to these insidious workings of the Democrat-lawfare complex.
Instead of permitting the Regime’s challenger, Trump, to campaign for votes in Wisconsin, he is forced to silently endure the unhinged courtroom musings of a literal porn star and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen)—all in furtherance of a case that suffers from insuperable statute of limitations problems in addition to the structural absurdity of a local district attorney (the Soros-funded Alvin Bragg) prosecuting and attempting to prove a federal crime (a campaign finance violation).
Oh, and if Trump doesn’t shut up and keep quiet, Merchan might throw him in jail—as he has repeatedly threatened to do, if Trump keeps violating his unconstitutional gag order.
What a sick, cruel joke it all is.
Democrats seem not to have given any thought to what happens if they lose. If Trump wins, do Democrats seriously not expect him to respond in kind? Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
Just as Senate Democrats’ November 2013 invocation of the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster for lower-court nominees directly led to Republicans doing the same for Supreme Court nominees just a few years later, so, too, is it impossible to know what may ultimately come from the lawfare precedent Democrats are setting today.
The new rules have been established. Many of us didn’t want these rules, but here we are anyway. So, game on.
Anti-Israel protesters routinely spout untruths about Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and its aftermath. Here are 10 of the most common. Pictured: An Israeli soldier prays Tuesday next to an army vehicle near Israel’s border with the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel Defense Forces seek to root out Hamas terrorists. (Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protesters. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion from the Biden administration after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorism in Israel.
Here are 10 of their most common untruths about Oct. 7 and the Israel-Hamas war that followed.
‘Progressive Hamas’
Gay and transgender student protesters in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas, a terrorist organization that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.
Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.
‘Colonists and settlers’
Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”
But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.
By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1,800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.
‘Two-state solution’
When student protesters scream “From the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution.
It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on Oct. 7.
‘Occupied Gaza’
The Gaza Strip, adjacent Israel, was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.
So on Oct. 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.
After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas canceled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians.
Israel hosts 2 million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.
‘Netanyahu is the problem’
The U.S. and Europe claim that the conservative government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is alone behind Israel’s tough response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 attacks. Thus, both the E.U. and the U.S. are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.
Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza.
There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.
‘Targeting civilians’
After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Its preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.
Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.
‘Protesters are pro-Palestine’
Increasingly, protesters make no distinction between supporting “Palestine” and Hamas.
Their chants often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership.
Some protesters wear Hamas logos and wave the terrorist organization’s flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7.
‘Anti-Israel is not antisemitic’
When protesters scream to Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or call for the “Final Solution,” or assault them or bar them from campus facilities, they do not ask the Jewish students whether they are pro-Israel.
For protesters, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their antisemitic invective and violence.
‘Genocide’
Israel has not tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’ one-state solution plan for Jews.
Before Oct. 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel—on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.
If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israel Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the Oct. 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.
According to Hamas’ questionable “genocide” figures, roughly 4% of the Gazan population died during the Israeli military response to Oct. 7. At least a third to almost half of those deaths, according to various international observers, were Hamas terrorists.
‘Disproportionate response’
Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three.
Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the Israel Defense Forces responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.
Israel has been disproportionate only in the effectiveness of its response. Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel, but utterly failed.
So, Israel proved to be competent and Hamas incompetent in their similar efforts to use disproportionate force.
There are a hundred different definitions, and indeed an entire PBS series devoted to that question. “Civilization: The West and the Rest with Niall Feruguson” debuted in 2012, and the accomplished historian issued a companion book at the same time and with the same title.
“In ‘Civilization: The West and the Rest,’” the summary of the book relays, “bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic.”
Those characteristics are fine and easily applied to exclude from “The West” tyrannies such as the People’s Republic of China, Russia and Iran and all of their puppet states or proxies. But it does not include the essential ingredient: freedom. “The West” is defined by this essential, must-have feature: Some significant measure of individual liberty. That liberty must include the rule of law and not the rule of despots or oligarchs. There is no rule of law where the law can be easily manipulated or avoided. There cannot be in any member nation of “The West” a secret police that operates without restraint and oversight but solely on the direction of unaccountable despot(s).
The members of “The West” have free elections at regular intervals and guarantee freedom of conscience, speech and almost always movement within their boundaries to their citizens. Constitutions of member states may be written as in the United States, or unwritten as in the United Kingdom.
Nations in “The West” may be large or small, rich or poor, and since the end of World War Two at least, can be found on every continent. Countries can be part of “The West” and then lose that status as has happened to Venezuela, or it can aspire and eventually join or re-join “The West” as has happened with many former members of the now defunct “Warsaw Pact.” Poland is one such country, as are many others surrounding Ukraine. Ukraine aspires to be part of “The West” and is fighting and its people suffering and many thousands dying to keep that dream alive. Japan was a tyranny and an empire but, defeated by the Allies in 1945, it is now among the West’s leaders.
Even as the definition becomes clearer, the first question becomes more and more difficult to answer: “Which nation leads the West?”
Until December 7, 1941, the leader of “The West” was the United Kingdom, standing alone after the defeat of France by Hitler’s Germany in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the United States was thrust into that role and has remained there without question until this decade. Until very recently in fact.
Now, there are reasons to doubt that leadership, for the United States has failed to fulfill that role since 10/7, slipping again and again into a catastrophic ambiguity about the nature of the alliance of “The West,” and at times throwing into considerable doubt whether we can be relied upon as an ally and as an enemy of tyrants and maniacs. A similar palsy overtook us in the aftermath of our loss of the Vietnam War, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. President Ronald Reagan cured and restored us. That palsy that marked the late 1970s in the United States has returned.
The U.S. remains by far the wealthiest and strongest nation in the world, but it is at present divided at home and deeply confused about good and evil, friend and enemy. President Biden, already infirm and increasingly incoherent, seems to be headed towards incapacity, but he is, by operation of the Constitution, the commander-in-chief of our supremely strong military. We cannot know what he is like in private and many Americans suspect he is not in full control of the Executive Branch. Certainly, many suspect that some among our allies are concerned about his “leadership.”
President Biden’s infirmity and growing incoherence has indeed caused the whole world to wonder if anyone at all is in charge of the country. Of course, few will say this out loud. America’s power to punish is still robust even if its president isn’t. So, our allies pretend that all is fine, while our enemies plot and plan. But since the collapse in Afghanistan signaled to the world that the United States was run by a band of weak bumblers headed in title if not in fact by a very old man of limited ability, it is hard to argue that the United States is “leading” ’anything at all these days.
If “The West” as understood as the family of nations committed to everything laid out above has any leader at all right now, it seems like Israel is the only candidate qualified to step up into the vacuum left by the U.S. paralyzed by the weakness of its leadership. But Israel is also under siege on the world stage and at war with ruthless enemies, and the United States is of a divided mind about Israel, with the left wing of the Democratic Party apparently afraid that Israel might actually win and destroy the military capabilities of Hamas and perhaps after that Hezbollah.
If the United States cannot proudly stand with Israel on the side of victory by Israel over an evil terrorist puppet of an evil theocracy, then we have to, at least for a season, given up title to leadership of “The West.” Israel is the unlikeliest of all nations to become the most courageous defender of the West’s highest and best traditions, but there it is: Alone and besieged, with weak-kneed allies and an absurd world media elite that has lost any idea of why a free press matters, this nation reborn in 1948 is still very young, but it is very much a nation of warriors and however rancorous its internal politics, it has not lost sight of its purpose.
An American and Israeli flag wave in the breeze on either side of signs that discuss IDF soldiers and people kidnapped by Hamas. (Nikolas Lanum/Fox News Digital)
In his introduction to a book of essays, “The City and Man,” the most significant political theorist of the last century, Leo Strauss, wrote this:
“However much the power of the West may have declined, however great the dangers to the West may be, that decline, that danger, nay, the defeat, even the destruction of the West would not necessarily prove that the West is in a crisis: the West could go down in honor, certain of its purpose. The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.”
Israel is not uncertain of its purpose. America or at least its present Executive Branch quite obviously is. If there are any other nominees for the job of leading The West, by all means nominate them, or work to restore America to its former position. Until that happens, every citizen of the West looking for a nation committed to the freedom of its citizens and willing to defend that freedom at the cost of extraordinary losses of life and treasure, will need to study the example of Israel, and be willing to develop the weapons it will need to deter the enemies of freedom who have quite openly organized against “The West.”
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Brett Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/TV show today.
Liars don’t win trials. The truth does. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.
Fulfilling that maxim is the challenge for the defense in the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. Lawyers for the former President are tasked with exposing the legal deceit of District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the chronic dishonesty of his star witness, Michael Cohen. Compounding the challenge is a presiding judge, Juan Merchan, whose anti-Trump bias is conspicuous and disgraceful.
Back on the stand Thursday was the Beverly Hills attorney who negotiated payments for two women who demanded exorbitant cash from Trump in exchange for their silence about purported affairs. But the witness, Keith Davidson, admitted he had no contact whatsoever with the defendant and never met him. He dealt exclusively with Trump’s ex-lawyer, Cohen, who appeared to be acting entirely on his own. Nothing in his testimony involved crimes allegedly committed by Trump.
Davidson’s description of Cohen was both accurate and scathing —profane, offensive, unceasingly angry, and often threatening. Importantly, he depicted Cohen as a liar who turned bitter toward Trump when the newly elected president refused to take him to Washington, D.C. Jurors learned that Cohen had delusions of grandeur, envisioning himself as White House chief of staff or even attorney general of the United States.
When his bubble burst, Cohen detonated like a nuclear device with seething hatred for his former boss that became a maniacal obsession. He raged to Davidson, “Jesus Christ, can you f***ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that guy?” Cohen seemed suicidal. This helps shape the defense theory that Cohen’s real objective in testifying against Trump is vengeance, not truth.
It’s hard to imagine that any sentient or ethical prosecutor would ever rest his case on the slumped shoulders of an unhinged and inveterate liar like Cohen. After confessing in 2018 to a string of shameful fabrications under oath, he was dispatched to prison for perjury and fraud. He is exactly what a federal judge called him recently, “a serial perjurer.” He’s the Talented Mr. Ripley…without the talent.
After appearing incessantly on television shows trashing Trump and calling him a criminal, Cohen has taken to TikTok during the trial to comment on the testimony and escalate his Trump tirades. His social media rants reap financial profits, which means that now, more than ever, he has an economic motive to lie. Indeed, his livelihood depends on it. Prosecutors’ heads must have exploded when they discovered what he was doing. What little credibility Cohen might have brought to the courtroom has vanished.
FILE – Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump is seen outside federal court in New York City on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The mere mention of Cohen’s name in a court of law should equal “reasonable doubt.” He’s the definition of untrustworthy. Without him there is no legitimate case to be prosecuted. But instead of throwing in the towel by admitting that their central witness has gone rogue and self-destructed, Bragg persists in his contemptible pursuit of Trump. The D.A. is like an attack dog who won’t let go.
If there is a sleaze factor to the trial, it has rubbed off on Bragg’s witnesses more than Trump. Increasingly, the defendant resembles a victim of blackmail, which the law defines as a demand for money under threat.
If Bragg thought that Davidson would be a stellar witness for the prosecution, it may have backfired. He refused to call the Stormy Daniels payment “hush money or a payoff” while insisting that its proper definition is “consideration.” That is a fancy legal term in contract law that simply means an exchange of benefits. Here, it was compensation in return for a non-disclosure agreement. Booking it as a legal expense would, therefore, be manifestly proper.
This key testimony blows a gaping hole in all of Bragg’s 34 charges against Trump that he falsified private business records. What was false? The Daniels deal was a legal settlement negotiated by two lawyers that culminated in the execution of a legal document. Of course, it was a legal expense. What else would it be?
On cross-examination, Davidson melted like a Joe Biden ice cream cone when confronted with evidence that he was once investigated by law enforcement for criminal extortion, although never charged. He admitted that much of his practice involved “extracting” money (he preferred to label them “settlements”) from celebrities. He also “brokered sex tapes.” For the defense, it fits a pattern of squeezing prominent people for cash during times of vulnerability. People such as Donald Trump.
If there is a sleaze factor to the trial, it has rubbed off on Bragg’s witnesses more than Trump. Increasingly, the defendant resembles a victim of blackmail, which the law defines as a demand for money under threat. In 2016, as the presidential election neared, the cash ultimatums intensified and, in the case of Daniels, Trump reluctantly capitulated.
However, that does not mean that Trump himself committed any crimes. His personal reimbursements to Cohen did not constitute a violation of election laws, as Bragg contends. The two government departments that have exclusive authority over such matters —the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department— correctly concluded that the payments to Daniels did not constitute an unlawful contribution.
In other words, there’s no there there. But Alvin Bragg could care less. He deliberately commandeered a state statute that has no application to a federal election and twisted it into a pretzel to bring a preposterous charge against Trump that is utterly unsupported by the facts and the law.
The consternation for the defense is the jurors who may be predisposed to convict in a politically charged case involving a presidential candidate they might dislike. Are they capable of setting aside their personal beliefs to see through the prosecution’s charade? Or will they be snookered into believing that there is an election crime here, even though there is none?
When an unscrupulous prosecutor contorts statutes and deploys nefarious or lying witnesses to fool a jury into convicting an innocent defendant, it is an assault on the rule of law and an abuse of our justice system. In Manhattan, the crooked cards are stacked against Trump.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.”
Maybe you saw a recent clip-on X from conservative talk radio personality Erick Erickson criticizing what he calls a “weird movement within conservatism” that questions things like “limited government” and “free markets,” principles long associated with the conservative movement.
If you haven’t seen the clip, take a look. It’s like watching someone talk about the state of conservatism halfway through Obama’s first term, when Republican leaders were vowing to repeal Obamacare and inveighing against Democrats for violating the Constitution with a “socialist” health care scheme. (Obamacare was of course never repealed and is now, all these years later, a permanent feature of America’s health care system.)
A growing number of individuals and groups on the right are turning their back on conservatism without giving up the label. They have abandoned the three-legged stool of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a foreign policy approach of peace through strength. Instead,… pic.twitter.com/Ddv6i7vKxG
Erickson’s point, which he also made in a post for National Review, is that the Republican coalition for decades was built on the “three-legged stool” of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy. This is what won the Cold War and unleashed prosperity at home. I’m sure you’ve heard the story.
The problem now, he says, is that some people on the right (whom he doesn’t name) are calling into question these orthodoxies, especially free markets and limited government. They aren’t fighting to cut the size of the government but are instead working to gain control of it and wield power to achieve their preferred outcomes.
Erickson thinks this is bad, a betrayal of the old three-legged stool of Reaganite conservatism. After all, he says, if you use government power when your side is in control, the opposing side will use it against you when they’re in control. And we don’t want that, do we?
It’s hard to overstate how out-of-touch this way of thinking is, as if the past 15 years simply never happened, to say nothing of the past 50.
Consider the three legs of the stool. On fiscal conservatism, we’re swimming in an ocean of debt that grows no matter which party controls Congress, while inflation is killing middle- and working-class families. On traditional values, we legalized gay marriage and then quickly moved on to normalizing transgenderism and acquiescing to so-called “gender-affirming care,” even for minors. On peace-through-strength foreign policy, we lost the War on Terror and are now funding multiple wars all over the world as part of a crumbling global imperium. The stool has no legs left.
As for limited government, we saw how much the GOP cared about the former during Covid, and even recently when it refused to do anything about our intelligence agencies routinely spying on us and censoring disfavored speech online. And free markets, although fine in theory, have in practice served as a permission slip for massive corporations to hollow out America’s industrial base and ship jobs overseas, enriching the upper and managerial classes while everyone else struggles.
In other words, the conservative movement as its currently constituted has stood athwart history yelling stop, and history has ignored it. Conservatism as Erickson understands and articulates it has not only failed to conserve anything, it has also turned out to be a shell game. Republicans would raise money on promises to repeal Obamacare or restrict abortion or secure the border, but never follow through once in power. They would rail against fiscal profligacy but always end up passing massive budgets with no real reforms or cuts. A strong foreign policy now looks more like a corporate welfare program for Pentagon contractors in a world that’s anything but peaceful.
Now, you could look at all this and dismiss it by saying a failure of Republican politicians to stand up for conservative principles doesn’t mean the principles are bad, it just means we have bad politicians. And that’s true up to a point. But such a critique fails to acknowledge two crucial things.
First is the incompatibility of an American global empire with the notion of “limited government.” After the Allied victory in World War II, and especially after the Cold War, America was never going to have a limited government. Or rather, our ability to limit the government was going to be rather limited. We have seen this play out with our intelligence agencies and the vast surveillance apparatus they wield. That apparatus, once used to topple foreign governments by staging coups and manipulating public opinion overseas, is now being used against American citizens (and of course was infamously used against President Trump).
Second is the plain reality that we are in a life-or-death struggle against the left, and the left is playing by a different set of rules. If the right agrees as a matter of principle that it will not wield government power to achieve its preferred outcomes, but the left vows to use the government whenever and however it can, then the left is going to win every time. And that is exactly what has happened.
So what to do about this? Erickson’s admonition amounts to a posture of permanent defeat. If conservatives can’t wield power to bring about their vision of the good, of a rightly ordered public square and a prosperous society, then the leftist radicals will continue to seize power and press forward with their permanent revolution, as they have been for decades.
Instead, we need to recognize that the conservative movement has failed. It is dead; we have seen it die. The fusionism of the Cold War era, when libertarians and social conservatives made common cause against communism, is finished. So too is the GOP establishment whose first priority was always corporate welfare at the expense of everything else.
As I wrote in these pages nearly two years ago, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as conservatives and start thinking of ourselves, and our movement, as restorationist and counterrevolutionary. In a very real sense, we have to re-found our country, and to do that we will have to seize power from the left — and use it.
It’s understandable if that makes some conservatives uneasy. After decades of repeating the phrases “limited government” and “free markets,” it’s a sobering thing to realize they were just empty slogans, at best just means to some other, higher end.
But the situation is what it is. Following Erickson’s advice, eschewing power because of allegiance to a political fantasy, means certain defeat. It means permanent dhimmitude for conservatives in a country run by people who hate them and are determined to destroy them and their way of life. The other option is to fight back, establish a beachhead, and use whatever power we can marshal to push back the left in hopes that future generations of Americans can live in true peace and prosperity.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
As the Biden White House continues to brag about the alleged success of its economic policies, government data shows the country is hemorrhaging full-time jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans reporting full-time employment dropped by more than 1.7 million jobs from November 2023 to the end of March 2024, the most recent month for which data is available. That’s a decline of 1.33% over a five-month period. Excluding job losses related to the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, the recent drop in full-time employment is the largest five-month decline since the Great Recession in 2009, 15 years ago.
President Biden visits Nowhere Coffee shop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 12, 2024, as he touts his Bidenomics agenda. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Before that, the last time the number of full-time jobs declined this much over a similar period was in 1994.
Despite these remarkable figures, the Biden administration has continued to boast about its economic policies. For example, on April 11, the White House’s official X account claimed, “Under Bidenomics, our economy has created 15 million jobs and unemployment has remained under 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years.”
The Biden administration has made similar claims for much of the president’s time in office. At best, they are wildly misleading.
Although it’s true that total employment has increased dramatically since Biden entered the White House, the vast majority of those jobs were recovered from the coronavirus-related government lockdowns. They are not “created” jobs.
Compared to employment figures recorded in January 2020, immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of jobs added under Biden’s tenure is just 2.98 million, an unimpressive figure compared to many of his predecessors.
During Donald Trump’s first three years in office, the U.S. economy added 6.33 million jobs, more than double the figure recorded in the Biden era. These numbers are made even more remarkable by the fact that, excluding the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, Biden’s government has spent more money in a three-year period than any other president in history.
Two of the four highest federal deficits ever recorded have occurred under Biden, and a third, the $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009, happened while Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden’s economic agenda of dramatically increasing the size and power of government programs, raising taxes, and imposing increasingly more regulations on businesses has been a complete and utter failure. Not only has it been killing full-time jobs in recent months, it also is the driving factor behind America’s lingering inflation problem.
As difficult as it is for the Biden White House to understand, when a government consistently spends far more money than it receives in tax revenue and turns to money-printing policies to pay the bills, inflation increases. And when inflation gets out of control, as it has been for years now, most people get poorer. Based on the Consumer Price Index’s inflation estimates, an American family buying $200 worth of groceries in January 2021, when Biden took office, would have to spend $238 today to purchase the same products.
Most Americans can barely afford to pay basic living expenses. The average cost of rent has increased dramatically. The average sales price of a home and the cost of mortgages have skyrocketed.
The cost of purchasing a new car has increased by thousands of dollars in just a few years.
The American people are suffering under the Biden administration’s economic agenda. And based on the recent full-time jobs data outlined earlier in this article, the situation is not likely to improve while Biden’s failing policies remain in place.
President Joe Biden has an antisemitism problem. It is large and growing larger. It is his problem, and he can’t shed responsibility for it. In a nutshell: The people who work for him are not doing their jobs to stop discrimination against Jews in America. Anyone with eyes and ears can see and hear what has been happening in America for six months, and a climax of sorts was reached this weekend at Columbia and Yale Universities. Police have taken some action against the violent protesters at the New Haven and Upper West Side campuses of the two schools, but how did it reach this point? Why have the Biden Departments of Education and Justice been MIA?
The problem manifests immediately on the landing page of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights where any visitor finds this notice right off the bat: “The majority of OCR staff are working remotely because of the pandemic.”
Huh? The pandemic is long gone everywhere except the DOE. Everyone in the federal government should be at their desk and answering their phones or at least making it through a few emails a day. That would not be enough though. There should be task forces of DOE and DOJ personnel dispatched to every campus where these outages are occurring. Take the pictures. Make the first-hand reports. Become witnesses, not desk jockeys.
Even folks “working remotely” from the vast Department building at 400 Maryland Avenue SW in D.C. ought to be able to do the easy stuff of answering emails. The portion of the website titled “Race, Color, or National Origin Discrimination” includes what should be known to every DOE-OCR employee: “Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”
There is an online form for filing a complaint about unlawful discrimination —but it hardly seems necessary when every news organization and social media platform has produced coverage of the antisemitic harassment at Columbia and Yale and before that at Harvard, the University of Michigan etc.
Nevertheless, the organization “Campus Reform” has stepped up to wake up DOE-OCR by filing complaint after complaint about the rolling waves of anti-Semitism on American campuses.
Campus Reform bills itself as “America’s leading site for college news.” It also brands itself as a “conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system,” one which “exposes liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” Maybe that’s why the Biden administration seems to be ignoring its emails: Complaints from conservatives don’t count.
“Our team of professional journalists works alongside student activists and student journalists to report on the conduct and misconduct of campus administrators, faculty, and students,” the organization adds. “Campus Reform holds itself to rigorous journalism standards and strives to present each story with accuracy, objectivity, and public accountability.”
Good for them and they have indeed been relentless in cataloging many of the antisemitic incidents and filing the complaints required by the Department of Education. To what end?
Dr. Zachary Marschall is the editor-in-chief of Campus Reform and in January he opined that the “beginning of the end is here for unaccountable, radical campus indoctrination.” Nearly three months later, however, the hatred is metastasizing, not abating, and not for lack of notice.
Marshall and his team have filed scores of complaints against the highest profile offenders like Princeton. But nothing has happened. No funds have been cut off; no civil rights actions filed in federal court by DOE-OCR in conjunction with the Division of Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. Why not? It’s certainly not for “lack of notice.” The answer has to be in either the incompetence or the ideology of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, or both.
The StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice has brought a private suit against MIT for the antisemitism there, but DOJ has not joined it. Finding any DOJ suit against any college or university for antisemitic acts since Oct. 7 is impossible. They aren’t in that business. Like the DOE-OCR, the feds at Justice have taken a vacation from enforcing civil rights laws when Jews are the victims.
In sharp contrast, the State Department appears set to sanction units in the Israeli Defense Forces that somebody at State believes are committing war crimes of some sort. Astonishing but true: Team Biden can find defendants to accuse of bad acts inside of Israel but can’t muster any response to our civil rights meltdown in the U.S.
At what point do American supporters of Israel and especially American Jews realize that the Democrat Party has reverted to the policies of the State Department throughout 1940 to 1944 —the era of Breckinridge Long? Don’t recognize the name? Read this.
Too harsh to compare the bureaucrats of today with Long? Maybe it would have been in October or even early November. But there has been six months of growing antisemitism in the U.S. generally and creeping anti-Israel policies inside the Biden administration specifically. It will be up to voters to punish this disgusting abdication of enforcement of the country’s civil rights laws coupled with a turn against our ally Israel.
Let’s hope no student has to be killed before DOE and DOJ acts.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Brett Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/TV show today.
You may never have heard of Threat Actor Storm-0558, but this top Chinese hacker gang broke into the State Department computer systems via Microsoft Exchange Online last spring and read emails for several weeks before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing. They also got to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Ill., and 391 other Americans plus other government offices in the U.S. and Europe.
Then the State Department caught Storm-0558 in June, and Microsoft mitigated the attack. End of story? Not quite.
A scathing report on the incident released Apr. 2 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Review Board has ignited a firestorm. According to the Board, “this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred.” Worse, experts are still not sure how China pulled off the key part of the deception required to slip in. That touched off fears for data security. First, the State Department. Next, the cloud?
To cut to the chase: Homeland Security is plenty mad at China for the diplomatic data breach. But they are anxious that this same cyber war tactic could allow China to do far more damage if their cyber gangs hack data in the cloud.
Here are five reasons the Cyber Review Board is both furious and worried.
1. Diplomatic damage occurred.
No question, the Chinese hack did damage to U.S. diplomacy. The Storm-0558 intrusion occurred as U.S. diplomats were preparing for a summer of high-level meetings in Beijing, beginning with Blinken in June 2023. For the State Department at least, the Storm-0558 breach was way worse than China’s giant spy balloon.
Turns out Storm-0558 hackers in China have been tracked by industry for over 20 years. They are known to have carried out major attacks in 2009 and 2011, and probably more mischief the government doesn’t talk about. Pretty annoying to see them back again. On top of that, Storm 0558 is a “nation-state actor” which in Washington, DC lingo means: yes, these guys work for Xi Jinping.
President Joe Biden issued a lengthy Executive Order back in May 2021 beefing up government cyber security with zero trust and better cloud security. Agencies were exhorted to carry out “proactive detection of cybersecurity incidents within Federal Government infrastructure, active cyber hunting, containment and remediation, and incident response.” In fact, the Cyber Security Review Board was set up under Biden. Still, China was reading Gina Raimondo’s emails. No wonder Homeland Security is sounding the alarm.
The big worry is that China will get access to the cloud and steal or corrupt data. As you’ve probably noticed, US government agencies are migrating data and processing to cloud services. The review said Storm-0558 apparently forged an encryption key and exploited another opening to gain access and sit inside secure systems for quite some time. Those tactics could be used against a cloud, too. In fact, investigators apparently interviewed Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle among others about their cloud security practices as part of the analysis.
“Cloud computing is some of the most critical infrastructure we have, as it hosts sensitive data and powers business operations across our economy,” said DHS Under Secretary of Policy and CSRB Chair Robert Silvers. “It is imperative that cloud service providers prioritize security and build it in by design.”
If the breach is undetected over the long term, that’s a very serious problem. Worst case, hackers could twist and corrupt data to influence how AI models are trained.
I think Homeland Security came out swinging in part because the U.S. government is relying so much on big tech companies in the competition with China. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and other companies are basically critical infrastructure, just like dams, bridges and the electric grid. The government has nowhere else to turn for the basic products to stay ahead in the digital domain. And it’s the leading tech companies that will fund and fuel the AI revolution. Nobody else has the cash.
Clearly, Homeland Security is hoping that the stern report and public pillorying will help America’s tech firms redouble their efforts. “You have to prioritize security over feature development,” SentinelOne’s Chris Krebs told CNBC “Squawkbox” on Apr. 4. And as the Cyber Review Board pointed out, it was none other than Microsoft founder Bill Gates who called for placing trust and security first. “Microsoft is one of the most important, if not the most important, technology companies in the world and we all depend upon them for hardware, software, productivity, cloud and security,” Krebs said. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
How vast was the Great COVID Cover-up? Well, my investigation has recently discovered government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was trying to create a coronavirus like COVID-19. These officials knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID 19-like virus and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public. In fact, 15 agencies with knowledge of this project have continuously refused to release any information concerning this alarming and dangerous research.
Government officials representing at least 15 federal agencies were briefed on a project proposed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci adjusts his face mask during a Senate hearing on the federal response to the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, March 18, 2021. (Susan Walsh-Pool/Getty Images)
This project, the DEFUSE project, proposed to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.
For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project. Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that the DEFUSE project was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018.
It means that at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19. Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research. Not one of these agencies warned anyone that this Chinese lab had already put together plans to create such a virus. Peter Daszak concealed this proposal. University of North Carolina scientist Ralph Baric, a named collaborator on the DEFUSE project, failed to reveal that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already proposed to create a virus similar to COVID-19.
And now we know that 15 agencies heard the proposal and when each agency discovered that COVID-19 was strangely similar to DEFUSE’s proposed virus creation, not one agency head stepped forward to warn the public that the virus might be man-made and therefore already adapted to transmit freely among humans.
Not surprising to some of us, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was not only briefed on Wuhan’s desire to create this virus, NIAID was actually listed as a participant in the initial DEFUSE pitch. Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab was named as a partner alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the proposal.
These documents also reveal that a scientist whose lab has received millions of dollars from EcoHealth was also part of the original plan to create these chimeric coronaviruses. This researcher, Ian Lipkin, also later became one of the authors of “Proximal Origins,” a journal paper commissioned by Fauci and National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins to throw shade on anyone arguing that the virus might have come from the lab. Yet, Ian Lipkin never revealed to the public the DEFUSE proposal.
Did NIAID warn us? Did Anthony Fauci warn us? No! All lips remained sealed.
Millions of people died from COVID-19. We now know that over 15 government agencies, as well as the investigators Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and scientists at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Lab, all knew of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s desire to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, a virus pre-adapted for human transmission. And no one spoke up. We only know of this DEFUSE proposal because a whistleblower, one brave Marine, Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, came forward with the truth.
Likely, hundreds of people in the government knew of this proposal to create a COVID-19-like virus and virtually every one of these people chose to keep quiet, to obscure, and ultimately to conceal information that might have saved lives by letting the world know this was no sleepy animal virus with poor transmission. No, all evidence suggests COVID-19 was a laboratory-enhanced virus purposefully adapted for human transmission.
Shame on all those who covered up the DEFUSE project! Of course, they all should be punished but likely won’t. At the very least, though, the perpetrators should be made to admit the truth and Congress should finally put in place sufficient oversight to make sure dangerous gain of function experiments are sufficiently vetted and, if necessary, prevented.
Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate. He is the author of “The Case Against Socialism” (Broadside Books, October 15, 2019).
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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