A professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine advised Americans recently to “ignore” guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention due to the public health agency’s puzzling refusal to recognize natural immunity from previous infection.
Dr. Marty Makary, who also serves as a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested during a Tuesday appearance on “The Vince Coglianese Show” that 150 million Americans, or “half the country,” likely already have natural immunity to COVID-19 due to having been infected with the virus and then recovering.
Yet despite that staggering figure, Makary lamented the fact that the CDC, in concert with Biden administration officials, have neglected to recognize the reality of the situation. Instead, previously infected individuals who decline being vaccinated are routinely “demonized” by health officials who insist that virtually all Americans must be vaccinated before normal life can resume. But “herd immunity” has already been reached, argued Makary, citing up-to-date vaccination and infection data to suggest that 80% to 85% of Americans are currently protected from the virus.
“I never thought I’d say this, but please ignore the CDC guidance,” Makary stated, advising Americans to “live a normal life, unless you are unvaccinated and did not have the infection, in which case you need to be careful.”
Makary called the the CDC’s outright dismissal of natural immunity “one of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership” as Coglianese pointed out that the CDC amazingly offers no guidance for individuals who have recovered from COVID-19, in regard to what they can safely do.
“Natural immunity works,” he argued. “We’ve got to start respecting individuals who choose not to get the vaccine, instead of demonizing them.
“There is more data on natural immunity than there is on vaccinated immunity, because natural immunity has been around longer,” he continued, noting that both vaccination and previous infection likely provide “lifelong” immunity from the virus.
He added that reinfection is extremely “rare,” and even when it does happen, the “symptoms are mild or [those individuals] are asymptomatic.”
For months, Makary has been a consistent voice of reason, sounding the alarm on misinformation coming from progressive media as well as what he calls the “most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history.” Earlier this year, he derided the CDC’s “absurdly restrictive” guidance that permitted fully vaccinated people to mingle indoors with some other people without masks or social distancing, calling the agency “paralyzed by fear.” Then in May, Makary chastised media and health expert doomsayers for “fearmongering” even as the pandemic was waning by telling Americans that herd immunity may not be reached for a long time to come.
Representatives from across the U.S., slammed President Joe Biden on the crisis at the southern border while speaking to the Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura.
Republican California Rep. Mike Garcia said the border crisis is no longer a crisis just for border states.
“It’s a pervasive problem. This is a problem that’s not just touching the border, its touching every city in the United States. We’re seeing it in our district … we’re seeing illegal activity, we’re seeing illegal marijuana grows happening, people stealing our natural resources, our water, our land, committing crimes in our neighborhoods.”
WATCH:
Republican New Mexico Rep. Yvette Herrell said the Biden administration was focusing more on illegal migrants than American citizens.
“I feel it’s important for the American people to understand just how much money is being poured into these facilities. We have parents that can’t afford really good healthcare for their families because of COVID, because of restrictions of income. We have families that are living in cars. We have families that are living under bridges.”
Texas Rep. Brian Babin said the crisis is a result of Biden rolling back Trump-era policies.
“We know there’s a crisis down here and it’s building and it’s even worse now than it was six weeks ago. We’re seeing problems here that could so easily be solved. And the only reason they’re happening is because of the policies of the Trump administration that were reversed.”
The Biden administration ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy upon taking office which required migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., to wait in Mexico while their claims were processed.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org
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Source: AP Photo/Gerald HerbertTrending
Last week, we discussed Rebekah Jones, the crazy lady who wrote a 342-page telenovela about her ex-lover, Garrett Sweeterman, then went on to fame and fortune by claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was faking his state’s spectacularly low COVID numbers.
These infractions are contained not only in police reports and court filings, but in her prolix manifesto about her ex-lover that she herself posted all over the internet. Jones seems to think it’s a point in her favor that during Florida State University’s investigation of her obsessive behavior toward her former student, “Garrett didn’t even bother bringing any evidence — no copies of texts or calls … I brought more than 200 pages worth.”
That sounds normal.
Even after multiple demands that she stay away from Sweeterman, the still-married Jones writes:
Did you know that I would have given anything, truly anything to make things right between us?
Did it matter to you at all that I loved you?
Did it, Garrett?
If the genders were reversed, Jones’ obsession with a former student would be a movie on “Lifetime: TV for Women.”
No TV personality lavished more attention on Jones than MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, featuring her on his show on Dec. 8, Dec. 9, Dec. 16 and Dec. 22, 2020. As is common at MSNBC, O’Donnell jumped on the horse and rode off into the sunset without a map, directions or a compass.
In the first of his blockbuster reports, O’Donnell used a law enforcement raid on Jones’ home for one of his anti-police screeds, informing viewers that they were about to see a video of “outrageous conduct by American police officers” — and I have this hot MILF on my show to talk about it. If she wants, I’ll take her on my sailboat.
The MSNBC host scoffed at the basis for the raid, saying: “They were going after the person who sent what they considered, I suppose, some criminally dangerous text.” Ho ho ho. Jones — or at least her lawyer — knows damn well that the charge is serious, which is why, to this day, she stoutly denies sending the text.
According to the search warrant affidavit, six months after Jones was fired by the Florida Department of Health, she hacked into the state’s medical emergency notification system from her home computer, obtained the private information of thousands of people, and sent out a mass text, pleading: “it’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong,” and so on. She signed the deranged missive as if it were an official communique from Florida Department of Health.
Comcast determined that the text came from Jones’ Tallahassee home. Perhaps in addition to cuckolding him, she plans to pin the hacking felony on her husband. (Then she could run off with Garrett!)
On the day of the raid, as infinitely patient law enforcement officers banged on Jones’ front door for 22 minutes, she was inside, setting up a video camera. Donations to her GoFundMe page must have been flagging.
O’Donnell introduced her video, saying: “What you’re about to see is almost as bad as American policing gets.”
What we see is Jones (finally) opening the door and exiting the house. An officer enters, unholsters his gun, and calls out for anyone else in the house to come downstairs. In other words, standard operating procedure for executing a search warrant.
Although no one is pointing a gun at anyone, Jones can be heard in the background screaming, “He just pointed a gun at my children!”
This is classic hysterical woman behavior.
YOU’RE HURTING ME! STOP HITTING ME!
I’m not touching you. I’m 7 feet away.
But O’Donnell and the rest of the media repeatedly played Jones’ video while informing viewers that it showed something it plainly did not: officers “pointing” guns at Jones and her children.
“The only thing that could have made this worse,” O’Donnell said, “is if one of those recklessly aimed guns killed someone in that house. If one of those guns aimed at Rebekah Jones’ children fired.”
O’Donnell on the Zapruder film: As you can see in frame 187, President Kennedy is firing at Lee Harvey Oswald from the convertible.
Jones is like the white woman captured on video in Central Park, calling 911 on a black male birdwatcher. As he calmly speaks to her from 20 yards away, she shrieks to the dispatcher, “An African American man… [is] threatening myself and my dog.”
O’Donnell voiceover: The only thing that could have made this worse is if the birdwatcher had killed the woman.
My voiceover for the entire American media: As you can see, they are liars.
Trump was right and the media was wrong again, that it’s true COVID may have come from a lab in Wuhan China.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco 92021.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Prominent Southern Baptist preacher Voddie Baucham Jr. | Ema Capoccia
Although traditional Christian publishers turned their back on his latest book, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, denouncing critical race theory and the social justice movement, prominent Southern Baptist preacher Voddie Baucham Jr. found a home for it at Salem Books, and it is now one of the most talked-about works in evangelicalism.
It is currently the No. 1 book in several Christian categories on Amazon and is listed among the top 100 bestselling books on the e-commerce website, where 95% of those who have reviewed it gave it a five-star rating. On the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s bestsellers list for May, it sits at the No. 2 spot.
Data from Salem Books show that since its official release on April 6, nearly 50,000 hard copies of the book and just under 10,000 ebooks have been sold.
“This author has given us the definitive handbook for responding biblically to the critical theories assaulting evangelicalism. This is confessional polemics at its best. The author has carefully defined the terminology crafted, the truth compromised, and the trajectory considered — in the enemy’s battle against the sufficiency of the Scriptures,” gushed David Pitman, one of the many verified purchasers who gave Fault Lines a five-star review on Amazon.
“Though he has winsomely interwoven biographical and historical backgrounds, nevertheless, he never loses sight of the centrality of the cross of Christ. On page 233 he writes, ‘The Jew-Gentile divide was far more significant than the black-white one. If Christ took care of that on the cross, how much more did He take care of any man-made divisions we face today?’ I urge you to read this book carefully. The language, the logic, and the love in it — love for God and love for neighbor — are exactly the biblical message most needed in these tumultuous times,” Pitman wrote.
And these “tumultuous times” refer to the racial reckoning that has erupted in the evangelical church since the killing of George Floyd last May and the debate over whether issues like social justice and racial inequality should be explored through any other lens outside the Bible, such as critical race theory.
Critical race theory, as explained by Purdue University, “is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.”
In the summer of 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention passed Resolution 9“On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality,” in which they defined CRT as “a set of analytical tools that explain how race has and continues to function in society. Intersectionality is the study of how different personal characteristics overlap to inform one’s experience.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the law professor at Columbia and UCLA who coined the term intersectionality more than three decades ago, said, according to Time magazine: “It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.”
While acknowledging that “critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin,” SBC leaders accepted in Resolution 9 that “these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences.”
Many prominent Southern Baptists like Baucham decried the SBC for adopting the resolution, and he believes it should be scrapped at the SBC’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, next month.
“In terms of the SBC, I think there needs to be something done on Resolution 9. I think Resolution 9 was unfortunate, and I think there are a lot of things that led to Resolution 9 being passed that had nothing to do with whether or not the SBC believes or agrees with CRT and intersectionality. So I’m hopeful there will be an appropriate response at the convention next month because this stuff is poison. This stuff is deadly. It corrodes and destroys everything that it touches,” Baucham, who is dean of theology at African Christian University in Zambia and a board member of Founders Ministries, told The Christian Post in a recent interview.
Baucham offers a primer of social justice terms in Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, and makes a case for why the cult of antiracismshould be rejected. He doesn’t see anything redemptive in critical race theory and believes faithful Christians should not even consider it a useful analytical tool.
“[It is] absolutely not [a useful analytical tool]. CRT is built on premises that are anti-biblical. That would be akin to someone coming into your church and talking about Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva … and you coming and saying, ‘I understand these things come from Hinduism, but if we just look beyond the words and beyond the other religion, maybe there is something useful that we could use.’ That’s not what you do when somebody is coming with another gospel,” he said.
“The four main premises of critical race theory are things that we have to completely reject. The idea that racism is normal and unavoidable and ubiquitous in the United States and its history; the idea that white people are incapable of righteous actions on race unless their interests converge. You can’t get more anti-biblical than that,” Baucham explained. “…They reject objectivity and meritocracy, and their main idea is that we ascertain truth through narratives. Now, what part of that is a useful tool for Christians trying to understand racism? Absolutely none of it. So I think these people are completely wrong when they make this statement and they never get to specifics.‘
“They’ll say OK, CRT is a useful analytical tool, but they don’t say, here are the specific elements of CRT that are useful to us. And the other thing that they don’t do, is they don’t say here’s what CRT gives us that Bible and theology don’t give us. And that’s where this is hugely problematic because they’re essentially arguing that the Bible is not sufficient on issues of race, ethnicity, racism, et cetera., that CRT is needed to inform the Scriptures on these particular issues. So no, I couldn’t disagree more with people who try to take that third way or that middle ground,” he said. “There is no third way or middle ground with CRT and intersectionality.”
White privilege
In her groundbreaking essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh describes the controversial concept as“an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day.”
“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks,”she wrote.
Baucham says he doesn’t believe in white privilege.
“I don’t agree with McIntosh and others on that concept or idea,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t believe that McIntosh was right. I don’t believe that that concept that comes from her is something that is real or is something that exists.”
When asked if he would agree that there is racial inequality, he said it would depend on how race is defined and noted that there is nowhere in the world where equality exists.
“It depends on what you mean by racial inequality. And it also depends on what you mean by race. I would need that term defined in terms of what is racial inequality. There is no place on Earth, nor has there ever been any place on Earth, where anything has been distributed equally among various people groups. No two groups of people are the same, which means that by definition, there is always going to be inequalities,” he said.
“And it goes both ways. I mean, in the NFL and the NBA, black people make up 75% and 80%, respectively, of those leagues. That’s racial inequality, right? Austrians, wherever you go in the world, are some of the best violin makers in whatever country they find themselves in. That would be racial inequality, but is that an evil? Is that a sin?‘
“So I think the problem is when people say racial inequality, what they are referring to is this idea that any disparate outcome equals injustice. And that is just completely unsupported by the facts,” he said.
And Baucham boldly tackles this issue in his book. In addressing the argument of disparity in policing, Baucham takes high-profile cases highlighted in mainstream media of black people killed by police such as Tamir Rice, Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Philando Castile, and compares them to similar cases where the victims are white but didn’t get much media attention.
“Have you heard of Tony Timpa? Like Floyd, ‘Timpa wailed and pleaded for help more than 30 times as officers pinned his shoulders, knees and neck to the ground,’ reported The Dallas Morning News in August 2016. Timpa, a 32-year-old schizophrenic, called the police himself, saying he was off his meds and needed help. When police arrived, Timpa had already been handcuffed by a security guard. Three Dallas Police Department officers restrained Timpa for nearly 14 minutes as he pleaded, ‘You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me!’ Eventually, Timpa went limp, at which time the officers mocked him and made jokes. In the end, when the paramedics finally came and put Timpa’s flaccid body on a stretcher, one officer said, ‘I hope we didn’t kill him.’ But they had,” Baucham noted.
“The George Floyd case was indeed tragic. However, it was not unique. Nor does it represent clear evidence of a particular pattern of police brutality regarding black men. No one took to Twitter demanding that Christian leaders prove their bona fides by speaking out on the Timpa case, and no one wrote articles in leading Christian publications about losing sleep over it. In fact, few—if any—of the people who mounted their moral high horses and took to the streets in protest over George Floyd even knew Tony Timpa’s name. Why? Because he was white, and his case did not advance the right narrative,” Baucham explained.
One Amazon critic who only discussed his assessment of the cases as Amazon Customer #1080, and only gave the book a one-star rating, called Baucham’s assessment “disturbing.”
“Case after case is made that gives comfort, justification, and sanctuary to the senseless killings of unarmed African American men, women, and children. In doing so however, the writer succeeds in making the case that America indeed has a serious policing problem. This was undoubtedly unintended,” the critic wrote. “This book is deceptive. The author regurgitates the echo chamber talk of his sect. Drawing from an amalgamation of dated propaganda, Cold War Era rhetoric, and exaggerated unpersuasive arguments of fear, the writer will no doubt stir both a bizarre joy and philosophical panic in the religious minds of those who already lean the direction of his views.”
When asked if his target audience for the book was an echo chamber of sorts based on his arguments, Baucham said he considered the question an “insult.”
“I didn’t sit down and try to figure out how to write a book for an echo chamber. My goal in writing the book is my love for the bride of Christ and my belief that there is a threat to her. That threat to her is this modern ideology of social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality, critical theory. These ideologies — that I’ve been watching and speaking on and writing about since the early 2000s, by the way — these ideologies come straight out of classical Marxism,” he insisted.
“And cultural Marxism, these ideologies that have taken root in academia and that now are being talked about in popular culture by people who have no idea where they come from and no idea what these things mean and no idea how antithetical they are to biblical Christianity. So this is a threat. This is a wolf. And my job as a shepherd is to fight off wolves. This has nothing to do with echo chambers or want to please certain kinds of people. If anything, this book is the opposite of that,” he said.
He further pointed out that despite being evangelical, his positions have made him an outsider in the evangelical community.
“Popular evangelicalism is woke, so most of the things that I’m pointing out put me on the outside of the echo chamber, not the inside. I mean, I’m not going to be invited to CRU or Intervarsity or the Gospel Coalition or I could run down the list. I’m not going to be invited by any of those things that are the premier places in evangelicalism,” he said.
“Forget the SBC, forget the PCA, a Southern Baptist seminary couldn’t hire me today because of all of these ideas. They would be completely pilloried if they hired me. So far from writing for an echo chamber, I’m actually speaking out and putting myself outside the echo chamber.”
Baucham, who was some six weeks into his recovery from coronary bypass surgery when he spoke with CP, said he believes his book is resonating with evangelicals because many people are still grappling with the social justice movement.
“I haven’t divided up the people in terms of how many black people or how many white people I’ve heard from, but I’ve heard from people across the spectrum. And regardless of people’s color, what I’ve heard from people is: ‘This is a real issue. This is a real problem, and I’ve wanted to be able to wrap my head around it, and you helped me to wrap my head around it,’” he said.
For black Christians who don’t agree with the narrative of the social justice movement, Baucham, who recently penned an op-ed for the New York Post titled, Why antiracism zealots are trying to silence black voices like mine, his voice on the issue has been a blessing.
“In terms of some black people, they’ve recognized if they speak out on this issue they get their head chopped off. They’re called sellouts, house ni**er, Uncle Tom … and so a lot of them are staying in the shadows because it’s just not safe to speak out on this issue,” he said.
“They’ve been very grateful to have another black Christian to speak out against this and somebody who has a platform, if you will. In terms of white Christians, you’ve been seeing similar things where they’re going, ‘I don’t agree with this narrative. And the minute I say I don’t agree with this narrative, I’m called racist. I’m called white supremacist,’ so on and so forth. So I think on all sides of this, because of the nature of what’s been going on over the last several months, a lot of people feel like this has given them a voice,” he added.
Like many evangelicals, Baucham sees the use of critical race theory by Christians as a threat to the Gospel, and he wasn’t afraid to highlight names of prominent evangelicals in his book, who he sees on both sides of the divide to which he currently sees no real solution.
“Why are people and groups like Thabiti Anyabwile, Tim Keller, Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, 9Marks, the Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel (T4G) being identified with Critical Social Justice on one side of the fault, and people like John MacArthur, Tom Ascol, Owen Strachan, Douglas Wilson, and the late R.C. Sproul being identified on the other?” he asks in the introduction of his 270-page book. “It is not a stretch to say we are seeing seismic shifts in the evangelical landscape. But is it an exaggeration to call this a coming catastrophe? I don’t think so,” he writes.
The divide is so strong, Baucham argues, that America is on the verge of a “race war.”
“I have pursued justice my entire Christian life. Yet I am about as ‘anti–social justice’ as they come—not because I have abandoned my obligation to ‘strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord’ (Hebrews 12:14), but because I believe the current concept of social justice is incompatible with biblical Christianity,” he argues in the book.
“This is the main fault line at the root of the current debate—the epicenter of the Big One that, when it finally shifts with all its force, threatens to split evangelicalism right down the middle. Our problem is a lack of clarity and charity in our debate over the place, priority, practice, and definition of justice. The current cultural moment is precarious. The United States is on the verge of a race war, if not a complete cultural meltdown. And the rest of the Western world seems to be following suit. Tensions are rising in every place the African slave trade has left its indelible mark.”
Early this year, another prominent black Southern Baptist leader, Pastor Dwight McKissic, who founded and leads Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and where Baucham previously worked, according to his book, cut ties with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention over its “strongly worded, anti-CRT policy that denounces all aspects of critical race theory” and warned that if leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention rescind Resolution 9 on critical race theory at their convention next month, he would cut ties with them too.
That announcement came amid an exodus of prominent black SBC pastors, such as Ralph West and Charlie Dates, over a decision by the denomination’s Council of Seminary Presidents to denounce critical race theory and intersectionality as incompatible with their beliefs at their 2020 annual session. The Council of Seminary Presidents, which is comprised of six seminaries, voted to reject CRT as incompatible with their faith while condemning “racism in any form.”
When asked what advice he had for the black pastors that left the denomination, Baucham said many of the ones who have left the nation’s largest Protestant denomination weren’t really that committed to the SBC.
“What’s interesting is most of the black pastors who have left weren’t very committed to the SBC in the first place. Many of them had recently come to the SBC and had been given platforms. They weren’t committed to the Baptist Faith and Message, they weren’t committed to the Southern Baptist doctrine, per se. Many of their churches weren’t contributing very much to the SBC. And so again, not in all cases, but in many cases, these people left because they were never really committed to the SBC in the first place,” he said.
When pressed further for what advice he would give them, he suggested they follow their conscience.
“I guess my message would be they need to go wherever their consciences dictate,” he said. “You don’t change the SBC by leaving. It’s one of the most diverse religious organizations in the world. And you don’t change it by leaving.”
For Christians who read his book, Baucham, who plans on heading back to Lusaka in mid-to-late June, wants them to get from his message that “the Gospel is under attack.”
“We are at war because this ideology is at war with the Gospel and is at war with Scripture. And so I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see that this is about so much more than just black people see things one way, white people see things another way, Asians see things another way. It’s about so much more than that. And what’s ironic is that the rest of the culture is waking up to this,” he said.
“There are legislators now writing the law dealing with CRT because they see that it’s poison. And yet, Christians are still sitting around saying, well, useful analytical tool or third-way nuance … That’s why I chose the fault lines metaphor. That idea of an earthquake that’s coming that’s going to divide even more than it already has. On the one hand, I don’t want to see brothers and sisters divided. But on the other hand, I absolutely want to see a clear divide between the truth of the Gospel and the lie of CRT and anti-racism.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
An election audit in a New Hampshire town may have discovered why initial results were so far at variance from those revealed in a follow-up hand count. The audit was triggered because of what happened to Democratic state House candidate Kristi St. Laurent. As of election night, she was short by 24 votes of winning one of the four seats of for grabs in Windham, a town of 10,000. But when the recount was held, she was 420 votes short.
St. Laurent’s initial total had been overcounted by about 99 votes according to the recount, while the Republicans who finished ahead of her were undercounted in the initial tally. The audit was held to determine why the initial results were so far off.
The auditors currently suspect that fold lines in the ballots being scanned fooled the machine into thinking that a candidate whose name appeared on a fold line received a vote.
“Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,” said independent auditor Mark Lindeman, according to WMUR-TV.
The auditors tried to explain what happened in a series of tweets, noting one instance that showed a discrepancy between what was cast and what was counted, in which only 28 percent of the Republican votes cast were recorded accurately.
And the most frequent name to appear on a fold was that of St. Laurent.
“Wherever the fold happened to be was, I guess, most commonly through my name,” she told WMUR.
Auditors said their explanation fits the outcome.
“Because if someone voted for all four Republican candidates and the ballot happened to have its fold line going through St. Laurent’s target, then that might be interpreted by the machines as an overvote, which would then subtract votes from each of those four Republican candidates,” said auditor Philip Stark, according to WMUR.
“Conversely, if there were not four votes already in that contest by the voter, a fold line through that target could have caused the machine to interpret it as a vote for St. Laurent,” he said.
The audit is not complete, but if the initial conclusion is correct, it could have a ripple effect across the state.
“Throughout New Hampshire, you’re using the same voting machines, the AccuVote, and in principle, it could be an issue,” Stark told WMUR, which is based in Manchester, the state’s largest city.
“It really depends where the folds are in relationship to the vote targets,” he said.
In election jargon, a “vote target” is the equivalent of a candidate.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 that they required hospitalization, according to a damning American intelligence report.
The intelligence, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, adds weight to the Wuhan lab leak theory, which suggests the COVID-19 pandemic originated inside China’s only Biosafety level-4 laboratory.
The intelligence is particularly significant because it suggests COVID-19 was spreading in China much earlier than China has admitted. China’s communist government traced patient-zero to a man who became sick on Dec. 8. But if researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized one month prior, the virus was likely spreading even earlier than previously believed.
One official familiar with the intelligence described it as “of exquisite quality.”
“The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” the official told the Journal.
Another official told the Journal that while the intelligence was potentially significant, it needed further corroboration to be definitive. The intelligence corroborates a fact sheet released by the State Department in the final days of the Trump administration, which cited classified intelligence and suggested COVID-19 may have escaped from the Wuhan lab via infected researchers. That report said, “U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and seasonal illnesses.”
China’s Foreign Ministry bucked the intelligence, and continued to suggest COVID-19 originated in the United States. “The U.S. continues to hype the lab leak theory,” the foreign ministry told the Journal. “Is it actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?” China’s communist government has infamously refused transparency with investigations surrounding the pandemic’s origins.
“The Wuhan Institute hasn’t shared raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive work with coronaviruses in bats, which many consider the most likely source of the virus,” the Journal noted.
China has pointed to wet markets in Wuhan as the source of the pandemic. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council reiterated concerns about the pandemic’s origins, but declined to comment further.
“We continue to have serious questions about the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, including its origins within the People’s Republic of China,” the spokeswoman said. “We’re not going to make pronouncements that prejudge an ongoing WHO study into the source of SARS-CoV-2. As a matter of policy we never comment on intelligence issues.”
The Wuhan lab leak theory has been widely denounced as a conspiracy theory despite a lack of evidence disproving the possibility. In fact, aside from equally plausible origination theories, only the World Health Organization has said it was “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 came from the laboratory. But their conclusion came after a rushed investigation in which access to critical data was tightly controlled by Chinese authorities.
Indeed, 18 high-profile scientists published a letter this month calling for more investigations into the lab leak theory, saying, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The group even responded to the WHO’s conclusion, which they rebuked because, as they explained, the WHO did not give the Wuhan lab leak theory “balanced consideration,” writing, “Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, also said this month that he is no longer convinced COVID-19 originated naturally.
An ethnic studies professor has argued that “white supremacy” is the real reason why blacks are attacking Asians.
Jennifer Ho, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, published an article last month titled “White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US.”
“When a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy,” Ho writes. “White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.”
How is this the case? Ho says it’s because “white supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values and beliefs that are ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S.”
“The dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians,” she writes.
Ho also adds that “white supremacist ideas of Chinese people being to blame for COVID-19” have caused the alleged increase anti-Asian attacks, even if many of them were perpetrated by non-whites.
In 2003 Jennifer Ho received her PhD in English from Boston University. Before joining the University of Colorado Boulder faculty she taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2004 to 2019. Her Colorado.edu faculty page lists her research interests as follows:
Asian American literary and cultural studies, intersectionality, critical race studies, anti-racist theory and praxis, contemporary American multiethnic literature, critical mixed race studies
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
In one of the first signs that American citizens are cognizant of the country’s dangerous descent into a one-party rule, residents of Pennsylvania sent a powerful message to those responsible on Tuesday: Stop!
The pandemic provided governors, mayors and other local leaders with extraordinary opportunities to expand their influence over the citizens in their states. Nowhere were these emergency powers more egregiously abused than in states, cities and towns governed by Democrats. By all measures, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was one of the worst offenders.
WHYY-TV reported that two constitutional amendments passed statewide referenda that will provide the state’s General Assembly with “more power to block emergency declarations.”
The amendment to Article III, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution grants the legislature the ability to “terminate the Governor’s Covid-19 disaster emergency declaration without presenting it to the Governor for his approval.”
Prior to this amendment, measures passed by both the state House and Senate required the approval of the governor. Needless to say, all of the Republican-controlled legislature’s attempts to end or minimize Wolf’s orders ended in vetoes which required a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override. With the passage of this resolution, a simple majority vote in the state House and the Senate is all that is necessary. Veto power is no longer available to the governor.
Under the old law, the governor had the authority to issue an emergency order which would remain in effect for 90 days, at which point he or she could either renew it or end it. The new amendment stipulates that a “disaster emergency declaration will expire automatically after 21 days, regardless of the severity of the emergency, unless the General Assembly takes action to extend the disaster emergency.”
WHYY noted that a COVID-19 emergency order is currently in effect and is set to expire on Memorial Day. If Wolf chooses to renew it, a simple majority vote in the state House and Senate could end it in 21 days.
Democrats are reportedly worried that the legislature will act “to cancel COVID-19 emergency declarations without considering public health or consulting with the Governor’s office.”
State House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff and Speaker Bryan Cutler, both Republicans, sought to reassure them in a joint statement which said, “We stand ready to reasonably and responsibly manage Pennsylvania through this ongoing global pandemic, the scourge of opioid addiction, and other long-term challenges that may come to face this Commonwealth.”
State Republican lawmakers Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward and Senate President Jake Corman were more direct. In a joint statement, they wrote, “This decision by the people is not about taking power away from any one branch of government. It’s about re-establishing the balance of power between three equal branches of government as guaranteed by the constitution.”
Gov. Wolf, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed these amendments. According to The Morning Call, the governor said in January that “Republicans were injecting partisan politics into emergency disaster response in a ‘thinly veiled power grab.’ Just last week, he warned that the provisions were a threat to a functioning society that must respond to increasingly complicated disasters.”
A thinly veiled power grab? I’m practically speechless. What stunning hypocrisy coming from a man who used the COVID-19 pandemic to trample all over his constituents’ rights by shutting down businesses, halting participation in high school sports, closing schools and mandating mask-wearing outside the home.
Anyway, the governor held a news conference on Wednesday in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He said he’d spoken to leaders of both parties in the legislature to discuss “a path forward,” the Morning Call reported.
“We’re starting that conversation. You can’t just flick a switch and make the change,” he told reporters. “But the voters have spoken, and we’re going to do what I think the voters expect us to do and make the best of it.”
WHYY reported the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency expressed its disappointment with the election results in a statement which read, “The constitutional amendments have the potential to politicize future disasters and their management. PEMA always stands ready to respond to any situation but we’re extremely disappointed that our efforts, and the efforts of our other state agencies, could be constrained by partisan politics, which has no place in emergency response efforts.”
The passage of these amendments was a victory for those with whom the principles of liberty and freedom still have meaning. In an email provided to The Western Journal, Commonwealth Foundation President and CEO Charles Mitchell reacted to the passage of these amendments with tremendous joy and relief. He called Tuesday a “momentous day in the history of Pennsylvania and the United States” and wrote that “voters have defended some of our most important founding principles, including the separation of powers between branches of government and the fundamental importance of each citizen’s liberty.”
Many governors “saw their emergency powers laws as a vehicle for them to act in contradiction to their own state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution for as long as they’d like.” Most of us would agree with that statement.
Mitchell quoted James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others … it may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
“Two hundred and thirty-three years after Madison wrote that statement, voters in Pennsylvania reaffirmed its truth,” Mitchell concluded.
Elizabeth is a contract writer at The Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites including RedState, Newsmax, The Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, Instapundit, MSN and RealClearPolitics. Please visit Elizabeth’s new conservative blog: TheAmericanCrisis.org
Last week I wrote my column on “The First Amendment: Alive and well?” in which I noted the revolutionary impact of the Amendment on religious freedom in particular and on human rights in general.
The First Amendment has indeed proven itself to be a magnificent legal and political engine driving the cause of soul freedom and freedom of conscience in America first, and subsequently as a shining beacon of light and hope to a suppression-weary world.
This week I want to address the current tension that has arisen among various groups of Americans over what was the Founding Father’s ‘original intent,’ and how should the First Amendment be applied to today’s ever-more ethically and religiously diverse populace. Columnist Judd Birdsall has conveniently and helpfully divided and labeled the two camps as “First Freedom” and “Article 18,” personified by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (2018-2021) and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Pompeo was the most openly evangelical Secretary of State since William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) in the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Pompeo, as Secretary of State, took virtually unprecedented actions and initiatives to promote religious freedom worldwide. His unprecedented efforts yielded encouraging results with two very well attended ministerial events at the State Department, including one that was hailed as the largest meeting promoting religious freedom ever held at the State Department.
Pompeo and then-President Trump were leading exponents, along with the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, of the First Freedom view that argues that religious freedom is not just first sequentially because it touches on questions of “ultimate significance and the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly are there to aid and buttress the ‘first freedom’.”
Proponents of the Article 18 view, vocalized by current Secretary of State Blinken, argue that religious freedom, while crucially important, is “co-equal” with the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and peaceful redress of grievance.
I believe, however, based on my observation and experience, that there is disagreement on an issue of fundamental importance at stake in this debate.
I had the privilege of serving as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2001-2012. This Commission, set up by the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, is an independent, federal government commission, not under the State Department or Congress, charged with monitoring the state of religious freedom in every country in the world. They are required to write an annual report about the state of religious freedom in each country, followed by recommendations to both the President and the Congress on ways in which American foreign aid can, and should be, used to promote religious freedom.
The Commission is structured to be extremely bi-partisan. When you have a Democrat president, for example, he appoints three commissioners and the Democratic leader in the House and in the Senate nominate one commissioner each and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate nominate two each. So, the President’s party has a one-vote majority (5-4) and it takes six votes for the Commission to act.
During my years there, we would periodically undertake fact-finding trips to various countries around the world to measure for ourselves how much religious freedom was actually afforded to citizens in those countries. Undoubtedly the most memorable fact-finding trip we undertook during my tenure on the Commission was an almost two weeks visit to Communist China and Tibet in 2005.
This visit took place during what turned out to be a temporary “spring of hope” when the Chinese Communist government appeared to be relaxing many of its very oppressive policies against Christians in that country. Alas, the promised reforms were still-born and the situation has degenerated drastically for all religious faiths in China, with the Uyghur Muslims suffering what can only be called a genocidal policy.
Invariably, on these site visits, we Commissioners went to great lengths to make it crystal clear to the host country that the USCIRF standard was not America’s First Amendment standard that guaranteed complete religious liberty and freedom from government interference with people’s religious free expression rights. We often said that we would recommend it, but we could not demand it because that would interfere with the host nation’s sovereignty.
The USCIRF standard was the international one – the one codified in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, which reads:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, this right includes freedom to change his religious belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
So, what is the difference between the First Amendment and the Universal Declaration’s Article 18? The First Freedom position legally restricts the government from interjecting itself into the religious experience and practice of its people.
Quite simply, the First Amendment guarantees people from government interference with their religion. The Article 18 position merely guarantees some level of toleration for dissenting faiths in a society where Islam or Communist oppression may take over and rescind government support or toleration.
For example, when we were in China it became apparent that the Chinese officials were increasingly irritated that we were not more impressed with the comparatively greater toleration they had been granting people of faith.
In our final exit dinner with the Chinese officials, I was designated to explain the Commission’s position. I did so in the following way: “It has become apparent to us that you are frustrated that our team has not been more impressed with the greater degree of toleration you have been affording many religious groups in your country. We have noticed. However, while it is a bigger cage, and it is a gilded cage, it is still a cage. And that is toleration, not freedom.”
Sadly, history has proven our position correct since the Chinese have cracked down drastically and have made the cage very small.
Under Article 18, each country could make Islam or some other religion, the official state religion supported by the people’s taxes. Under the First Freedom system that would not or could not happen.
In other words, under the First Freedom position, the people are sovereign and no religion can discriminate against them or hamper their mission.
As Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote over a half-century ago in the famous Supreme Court prayer decision (School District of Abington, Pennsylvania et.al V. Schemp et.al):
“The fullest realization of true religious liberty requires that government neither engage in, nor compel religious practices, that it effects no favoritism among sects or between religion and nonreligion. . .” then Justice Goldberg went on to declare that “the attitude of government toward religion must be one of neutrality.” Justice Goldberg then went on to say that even “untutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to approval of results which partake not simply of that non-interference and non-involvement with the religious which the constitution demands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but it seems to me “are prohibited by it.”
Justice Goldberg warns, quite correctly, that even with the government neutrality required by the First Amendment freedom from government interference in religion must be carefully monitored. With mere toleration, you will always have government abuses against religion.
The conflict between First Freedom advocates and Article 18 supporters is clearly a “full-throated” freedom vs. “mere” toleration debate. Those who deny that this is the case either fail to comprehend the problem, or they support mere toleration.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent weighs a package of Fentanyl at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on October 2, 2019, in San Ysidro, California. – Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a range of conditions, has been central to the American opioid crisis which began in the late 1990s. China was the first country to manufacture deadly illegal fentanyl for the U.S. market, but the problem surged when trafficking through Mexico began around 2005. | SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images
An official with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection told members of Congress Wednesday that fentanyl seizures at the United States-Mexico border have increased by 308% in the fiscal year 2021.
Troy Miller, the senior official performing the duties of commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, appeared before the House Appropriations Committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee to discuss the continued surge in crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and the resources that CBP needs to respond to the situation and carry out its duties effectively.
Members of the committee asked Miller questions about various topics, including the seizure of illegal drugs by CBP officials.
“Our fentanyl seizures are up 308% in fiscal year ‘21,” Miller said.
He also noted that heroin seizures have increased by 14%, cocaine seizures have increased by 100%, and methamphetamine seizures have increased by 20% in the same period.
Miller shared the statistics regarding drug seizures following a question from Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Miss., about “the huge gaping holes in our southern border where we don’t know what’s coming over.”
According to Palazzo, “The COVID pandemic obviously did not keep the cartels from working overtime.”
He cited statistics finding that in the fiscal year 2020, CBP seized “[58,000] pounds of Cocaine, 5,700 pounds of heroin, 177,000 pounds of methamphetamine and 4,700 pounds of fentanyl.”
As Palazzo noted, the amount of fentanyl seized by CBP last year “is enough to kill every American two times over.”
The congressman also expressed concern that “as our CBP agents and others are misdirected,” criminals and hard narcotics have an easier time entering the country.
As the amount of drugs seized at the border continues to increase, the number of encounters between immigration officials and migrants continues to rise.
CBP Data shows that more than 178,000 migrants were apprehended at the southwest border in April, marking a 3% increase from March, when 173,348 people were apprehended. So far, in the fiscal year 2021, which began last October, there have been 749,613 encounters at the southwest border. In all of the fiscal year 2020, there were just 458,088 such encounters. In all of the fiscal year 2019, there were over 977,000 encounters.
Critics of President Joe Biden attribute the surge in border crossings to actions taken by the new administration to reverse the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including his rescission of the former president’s national emergency at the border, the reversal of a policy requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their claims are adjudicated and the suspension of construction of the border wall.
While Biden’s critics have blamed the president for the surge in crossings at the border, some contend that the rise in border crossings is consistent with a pattern of seasonal changes combined with a backlog created by the border’s closing during the pandemic.
Former President George W. Bush pointed the finger at Congress for the situation during a recent appearance on Fox News. He alleged that “the system is broken because Congress has failed to act.”
California Pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who heads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, argued in March that Biden’s “words and actions” have “given a haphazard and de facto green light to human traffickers around the world to apply their profane trade on the dreams of the most vulnerable.”
The border surge led to overcrowding at shelters that hold unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally. The crowding at CBP facilities, including a facility in Donna, Texas, came as the U.S. continued to grapple with the coronavirus. While the “pods” in the Donna facility had capacities of 260 people, one pod held more than 400 unaccompanied children at one point during the border surge. The overcrowding at the Donna facility and other similar locations raised concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, as migrants tested for the virus earlier this year had a higher positivity rate than the American public as a whole.
In Brownsville, Texas, migrant families tested had a 12% positivity rate. At the time, the positivity rate among the American public at large was 3.5%. A group of migrants who arrived at a shelter in Harlingen, Texas, in February reportedly had a 25% positivity rate.
The border crisis has seemingly reflected negatively on the Biden administration. A Real Clear Politics average of polls taken over the past month shows that most Americans (51%) express disapproval of the president’s handling of immigration policy. At the same time, the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows that a majority of the American people (53%) approve of Biden’s performance as president overall.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a trust for the grandchildren of President Joe Biden, according to newly surfaced emails. The financial contribution to Biden’s family allegedly happened in 2016, when Biden was vice president. The ex-FBI director reportedly sent emails to Hunter Biden expressing that Freeh would like to work “with you and dad.”
Freeh said he made a $100,000 donation to a private trust for two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren, according to emails leaked from Hunter Biden’s laptop that were published by the Daily Mail on Thursday night.
“As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” Freeh allegedly wrote to Hunter on April 24, 2017. “My accountants (PWC) now advise that since the grant did not go to a 501(c) organization [a charity], it was not a proper foundation gift. So we’ve been in touch with the IRS and PWC and want to correct the situation as follows: I’ll make a new $100k gift to Haley’s trust, and Hallie’s trust will reimburse the foundation by paying it $100k. Sorry for the extra burden. Best regards and warm regards to Hallie, Dad and Mom.”
The generous “gift” was sent to the two children of Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe’s late son Beau, who later became Hunter’s lover.
“Thanks so much and of course no burden at all. Speak to you soon,” Hunter Biden responded.
The Daily Mail published several communications between Freeh and Hunter dating back to mid-2016.
On July 8, 2016, Freeh allegedly emailed Hunter Biden in an email marked “confidential and privileged,” which said the former FBI director told the then-vice president’s son that he “would be delighted to do future work with you.”
“I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options,” Freeh reportedly wrote. “I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun and rewarding.”
“Have a great weekend and our love to Mom and Dad,” Freeh allegedly signed off.
Freeh reportedly copied Hunter on an email sent July 21, 2016, in which the ex-FBI director discussed one of his clients, Beny Steinmetz. Hunter replied on Aug. 24, 2016, to see if there was anything he could do to help.
Freeh reportedly replied, “I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year. No doubt both he and you have many options and probably some which are more attractive than my small shop,” an apparent nod to his consultancy firm.
“As you know, we have both a law firm and ‘solutions/investigations’ group with a very good brand, DC and DEL (and NYC) offices, and a profitable and interesting global practice (eg., I’m currently representing the Malaysian PM and his family),” Freeh allegedly boasted. “So if it’s something which interests you both, let’s talk about it at some point. I’m very flexible and we could set it up as an equity-share or whatever works best. It would certainly be an honor to work with you both.”
On March 12, 2017, Freeh allegedly sent an email to Hunter requesting his father’s contact information.
“I say [saw] Dad in St Joe’s and the 900a today and he said hi walking back from communion–I didn’t get the chance to return greetings,“ Freeh purportedly said. “If you have his cell and a personal email, I’d like to have his contacts (will protect). I would still like to persuade him to associate with me and FSS —as we have some very good and profitable matters which he could enhance with minimal time.”
The initials FSS are most likely a reference to the law firm of Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, where Freeh was a partner at the time along with Stanley Sporkin, who was previously the general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency and chief enforcement officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Hunter replied with Joe’s personal cell, and an email address for Kathy Chung, a staffer from Biden’s vice presidential office who he kept on after leaving the White House,” the Daily Mail reported.
Freeh is a former federal judge and served as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. At the time of the emails, Freeh ran a consulting firm, which represented three wealthy individuals who were all later convicted on corruption charges.
Beny Steinmetz, an Israeli diamond and minerals magnate, was convicted last January of corrupting foreign agents and forging documents by a Geneva court. The billionaire, who was once named the richest person in Israel, was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly bribing officials to control mines in Africa. Steinmetz is appealing the case.
Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu, who was accused of fraud and corruption, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2017.
Ex-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak was sentenced to 12 years in jail after he was found guilty on all seven counts in the first of several multimillion-dollar corruption trials, according to the BBC.
Freeh served on the board of the Beau Biden Foundation, a Delaware-based charity to help prevent child abuse. In a 2014 press release, Freeh labeled Joe Biden and Beau Biden as “dear friends.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, signs Senate Bill 8 into law, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around six weeks gestation. | Screenshot: Facebook Watch/Office of the Governor Greg Abbott
Texas has become the latest and largest state to enact a “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is usually at around six weeks gestation.
“Our Creator endowed us with the right to life,” Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed as he signed Senate Bill 8 into law Wednesday. “Yet, millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion. In Texas, we want to save those lives.”
The heartbeat bill is now LAW in the Lone Star State.
This bill ensures the life of every unborn child with a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.
Slated to go into effect on Sept. 1, Senate Bill 8 states that “a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” Physicians are also prohibited from performing an abortion if they failed to perform an ultrasound to detect a fetal heartbeat.
The bill also allows individuals to take civil action against an abortionist who “performs or induces an abortion” and any person who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of abortion through insurance or otherwise.”
At the signing ceremony, Abbott praised the Texas Legislature for crafting a bipartisan bill “that ensures that the life of every unborn child who has a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.” The governor also thanked the Legislature, singling out the bill’s authors, Sen. Bryan Hughes and Rep. Shelby Slawson. In addition, he expressed gratitude for the pro-life groups who “worked tirelessly during the course of the session to make sure this bill got passed,” thanking them for “everything they do to cultivate a culture of life in Texas.”
The crowd gathered around Abbott erupted into cheers and applause after he signed the bill. After he declared that “the Texas heartbeat bill is now law in the Lone Star State,” more cheers and applause broke out.
Senate Bill 8 passed the Texas House of Representatives on May 6 by a vote of 83–64 and the Texas Senate approved the measure, with House amendments, on May 13 by a vote of 18–13. In both chambers, one Democrat broke from his party to support the legislation, which no Republican opposed.
Pro-life groups quickly praised Abbott for signing Senate Bill 8, with Texas Right to Life predicting that the measure will “save thousands of lives,” characterizing it as “a vital step in the road to abolishing all abortions in Texas.” While praising the legislation as a “landmark victory,” the pro-life advocacy group urged the state Legislature to embrace additional pro-life measures before the legislative session concludes.
Meanwhile, pro-abortion groups slammed the measure and vowed to fight it. Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the U.S., described Senate Bill 8 as “cruel and extreme.”
Johnson expressed particular concern that the bill includes “a dangerous provision that allows ANYONE from any state to sue an abortion provider and others who help someone get care.” She cited the law as proof that “access to abortion has never been more at risk,” promising that “we’re going to fight back like hell.”
Heartbeat bills have previously faced resistance from the judicial branch in several states, including Mississippi, Georgia and Missouri. Abbott’s signing of Senate Bill 8 comes two days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case involving Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. The case has major implications for the pro-life movement as the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide nears its 50th anniversary.
The passage of Senate Bill 8 comes as Texas House Republicans face criticism for failing to consider a bill that would ban sex changes for children younger than 18 years of age. With less than two weeks to go, the Texas Senate approved a similar measure that still awaits approval from the House. The push to pass such a bill comes as the state’s 87th Legislative Session is scheduled to come to an end in less than two weeks.
Senate Bill 8 is one of several pro-life state laws signed into law so far this year. Late last month, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute released a report finding that more than 500 pro-life bills had been filed in the first four months of 2021, with 61 of those bills becoming law.
In addition to the legislative action taking place at the state level, individual communities in Texas have taken steps to protect the right to life. Two dozen Texas cities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn,” completely outlawing abortion at the local level. Earlier this month, the city of Lubbock, Texas, became the largest “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the country. The city of more than 200,000 people faced a lawsuit shortly thereafter.
Pastor Ché Ahn speaks at Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, 2019. | Facebook/Harvest Rock Church
California will have to pay over $1 million in legal fees and attorney costs as part of a settlement reached with Harvest Rock Church over litigation surrounding the state’s lockdown rules.
Last year, Harvest Rock and other ministries sued Gov. Gavin Newsom over a coronavirus pandemic lockdown order limiting the size and scope of worship gatherings they argued violated their religious freedom. U.S. District Court Judge Jesus G. Bernal issued an order last week requiring the state to pay the plaintiffs $1.35 million in attorney’s fees and legal costs incurred in the case. The order also prohibited unfair treatment of houses of worship in emergency orders, explaining that the state government could “impose capacity or numerical restrictions on religious worship services and gatherings at places of worship that are either identical to, or at least as favorable as, the restrictions imposed on other similar gatherings of similar risk.”
“This Order does not prohibit the State from issuing recommendations, best practices, precautions, or other measures, as long as such promulgations make clear to the public that they are voluntary and not enforceable,” continued the order.
Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver, whose legal nonprofit represented Harvest Rock, said in a statement released Monday that “Newsom has now been permanently quarantined and may not violate the First Amendment rights of churches and places of worship again.”
“We are grateful for Pastor Ché Ahn, Harvest Rock Church, and Harvest International Ministry. Pastor Ahn’s leadership and courage has toppled the tyranny and freed every pastor and church in California,” he added.
Last July, Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, which includes multiple member churches, filed legal challenges to California’s gathering restrictions. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 against Harvest Rock last October, concluding that the limits were justified.
“The Orders apply the same restrictions to worship services as they do to other indoor congregate events, such as lectures and movie theaters,” the court majority argued. “Some congregate activities are completely prohibited in every county, such as attending concerts and spectating sporting events.”
But in December, the U.S. Supreme Court granted injunctive relief for Harvest Rock, in light of the court’s 5-4 ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo.
In April, amid various legal challenges to the state restrictions, California lifted rules requiring houses of worship to adhere to capacity limits, changing the standards on places of worship from “mandatory” to “strongly recommended.”
“In response to recent judicial rulings, effective immediately, location and capacity limits on places of worship are not mandatory but are strongly recommended,” a government website explained. “The linked guidance is in the process of being updated. All other restrictions in the guidance remain in place.”
A top GOP senator is demanding answers after hearing allegations of high-ranking Biden administration officials cloaking communications using encrypted apps, potentially blocking conversations from public information requests.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member John Barrasso sentletters to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Monday, expressing his concerns about the reports. Sources who have recently interacted with the Department of the Interior (DOI) and Department of Energy (DOE) on environmental policy notified Barrasso’s office that officials had been using encrypted messaging apps to communicate with each other, his spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Ranking Member Barrasso’s office was notified by individuals who interact with the Biden administration on environmental policy,” the spokesperson said.
Barrasso expressed concern that using such software to conduct official government communications could shield conversations, which are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. It could also potentially hide communications regarding “illicit” activity, the senator said.
“The use of these encrypted applications, such as Signal, could represent an effort to cloak certain communications, limit Administration accountability, and potentially obscure illicit activity,” Barrasso wrote to Haaland and Granholm in the letters obtained by the DCNF.
“These reports are deeply concerning,” he said. “As you know, it is imperative that executive branch officials, especially unelected appointees, operate with the utmost integrity and transparency to maintain the public trust.”
Sen. John Barrasso speaks during a confirmation hearing on March 23. (Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images)
Barrasso asked both Haaland and Granholm for additional details on how officials communicate. He also asked if DOI and DOE officials have used encrypted software to contact the White House. He gave them one week to respond to his inquiry.
“I am not aware that any of the employees at the department are using encrypted messaging apps or devices if that’s the proper term to conduct government business,” Robert Anderson, who is a nominee for DOI principal deputy solicitor, told Barrasso during a hearing on Tuesday. “The mere fact that you raised this question with me is going to cause me to make some inquiries at the department and let folks know that this is not a permissible way to do business.”
Anderson noted that federal officials received mandatory ethics training during their first week in office and were instructed to keep “government records as government records” during the sessions.
The DOI is currently reviewing Barrasso’s letter, a department spokesperson told the DCNF.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
In another Very Florida story, a woman with a colorful criminal history has spent the last year collecting media accolades and a half-million dollars in donations by accusing the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, of fudging the state’s COVID numbers.
Rebekah Jones, website designer (not “scientist,” as the media insistently claim), falsely accused DeSantis of doing what Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York actually was doing with the COVID numbers. From the extensive media coverage, I figured maybe the DeSantis administration was taking advantage of gray areas to make the state’s record look as good as possible. Not as bad as what Cuomo was doing, but something.
Nope! This whole story was the fantasy of a crazed stalker, as explained in detail by Christina Pushaw in Human Events and Charles Cook in National Review.
I forgot my own admonition that you can’t believe anything the media say.
The canonization of Rebekah Jones is only the latest example of the press latching onto any lunatic who attacks a Republican. Remember Bill Burkett? (CBS’s deranged source for the fake Bush Air National Guard story.) Jamie Leigh Jones? (Falsely claimed she was gang-raped in Iraq by Halliburton employees.) How about media star and Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Avenatti? (He was going to vanquish Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh with Stormy Daniels and Julie Swetnick, until his criminal past caught up with him.)
Contrary to Jones’ allegations, she could not have been asked to falsify Florida COVID numbers, for the simple reason that she didn’t generate the numbers. She designed and updated the state’s website using data given to her by actual epidemiologists, but had no role in the collection of the information and no earthly idea what it should be.
— use the Florida emergency notification system to send out a deranged message pushing her personal conspiracy theory — something she staunchly denies despite overwhelming forensic evidence; and
— defame an accomplished black woman scientist as “the most corrupt, lying, incompetent and ignorant person that could be ever be (sic) put in charge.” (In this one instance, the media decided to give a pass to someone insulting a black person.)
As is probably true of many esteemed scientists, Jones had an illegitimate child in her junior year of college and, in 2016, as a graduate student at Louisiana State University, was charged with two counts of battery on a police officer.
But it wasn’t until she got to Florida that Jones really hit her stride. In 2017, then in her late 20s and an instructor at Florida State University, the married Jones had an affair with a student, Garrett Sweeterman.
She then penned a graphic 342-page essay on their relationship — written while she was married to the world’s most tolerant husband. Hello, honey! I’m home. I’ll be in the study for the next two hours working on that Penthouse Letter about my extramarital affair.
Jones has claimed that Sweeterman is the father of her 2-year-old child, but two days before he was to provide his DNA, her paternity suit against him was dismissed. (Only the hard-hearted would suggest she is a loon trying to entrap the kid into marriage because she prefers him to her husband.)
The manifesto reads like something a nitwit 13-year-old girl would write, giving a play-by-play description of their sexual encounters, followed by Sweeterman’s repeated attempts to break up with her, which she calls his “mind games.” Anyone reading her manifesto can see that her great love affair was nothing but a booty call for him.
In short order, Jones was stalking Sweeterman, destroying his property and posting naked photos of him online — as well as sending revenge porn to his mother and employer. Despite Sweeterman’s restraining order against her, in addition to a court order directing her to stay away from campus, Jones would show up unannounced at his classes, just to “talk.” (They always just want to “talk.”)
In Jones’ own telling, by October 2017, Sweeterman was repeatedly texting her things like, “I can’t see you … I don’t feel right about any of it. … YOU’RE MARRIED. You have a family.”
His mother blocked Jones’ texts. His sister replied to one of her texts, saying, “I don’t know who the f– you are or what the f– you want but you better stay the f- away from my family. Delete my number and delete my families number you f-ing bitch.”
After all this, Jones showed up at one of Sweeterman’s classes and they screamed at each other; then she drove to his house that night, he came out and they screamed at each other again. Sweeterman walked away from her and got in his car, saying, “I’m leaving.” She hopped into the passenger seat. He went back inside. His roommates came out and told her to leave.
Still sitting in his car, Jones asks herself: “Was I supposed to leave? Was that the end of our conversation? Was that the end of us?”
Jones’ ongoing hysterics resulted in criminal charges against her for vandalizing Sweeterman’s car, robbery and stalking. She was fired by the university, jailed at least three times and committed to a mental institution.
The smearing of DeSantis would be outrageous even if Jones were a rational human with an impeccable past, but she is not. DeSantis steered Florida through the pandemic with 30% fewer COVID deaths than New York, despite having a larger population and a lot more old people.
But journalists couldn’t be bothered to bring up Cuomo’s killing old people and cooking the books because they were too busy talking about his lats. Instead, our watchdog media attacked the governor with the best record on COVID, who was being stalked by a crazy woman.
Many on the like Tlaib of the Squad and the MS Media are screaming at Israel to ceasefire while Hamas continues to fire rockets at their populated cities.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Tuesday confirmed what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him two months ago about mask-wearing being unnecessary for Americans vaccinated against COVID-19.
Fauci appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new mask recommendations, reiterating that the CDC says it’s safe for vaccinated people to stop wearing face coverings. He explained that the science has “evolved” over the last few weeks to show that vaccinated people are protected from infection and that the risk of them spreading the virus to someone else is “extremely low, very very low.” When asked by host George Stephanopoulos how his personal mask-wearing habits have changed, Fauci responded that he feels more comfortable being seen in public indoors without a mask. Though he was vaccinated in December, Fauci said he had continued to wear a mask to avoid sending “mixed signals” to the American people by not wearing a mask.
“But being a fully vaccinated person the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low. And that’s the reason why in indoor settings now I feel comfortable about not wearing a mask because I’m fully vaccinated.”
Exactly two months ago, on March 18, Fauci told a different story to Sen. Paul during a hearing on the pandemic response. Paul had grilled Fauci on the absence of scientific evidence to suggest that vaccinated Americans needed to wear masks.
“You’re telling everybody to wear a mask whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine, what I’m saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity,” Paul said. “What studies do you have that people who have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?”
“If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?” he pressed.
At the time, Fauci told Paul “I totally disagree with you” and insisted that mask-wearing is not theater because of the risk that vaccines did not protect against COVID-19 variants. Now, Fauci admits that he continued to wear a mask indoors even though he was vaccinated and knew he didn’t need to because he didn’t want to send “mixed signals” to the American people, which appears to be the very definition of “theater.”
Sen. Paul has not yet commented publicly on Fauci’s remarks but he did share the following social media post from the Republican Party of Kentucky: “Two months TO THE DAY after Dr. @RandPaul said Dr. Fauci was performing ‘theater’ and wearing two masks ‘for show’ despite being vaccinated, Dr. Fauci finally admits it was, indeed, for show.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Athletes compete in the 5,000-meter final during the Oregon Relays at Hayward Field on April 23, 2021 in Eugene, Oregon. | Getty Images/Steph Chambers
Linnea Saltz wants to be a lobbyist. Haley Tanne intends to pursue a career as a physician’s assistant. Chelsea Mitchell plans to obtain a degree in marketing. While all three women have different career aspirations, they all have one common experience: losing to biological males who identify as females in female track competitions.
Athletics have played an essential role in all three women’s lives, and they take a great deal of pride in their accomplishments throughout high school and college. However, they have been negatively impacted by policies allowing biological males who identify as females to compete on women’s sports teams, leading them and other female athletes to embrace varying degrees of activism on the issue. Their activism comes as an effort is underway that could lead to more young female athletes experiencing the same setbacks as Saltz, Tanne and Mitchell as they seek to advance their athletic and career goals in both high school and college.
Policies in various states and athletic associations — such as the NCAA — permit trans-identified males to compete in women’s athletic events. Additionally, a wide-reaching legislative initiative billed by Democrats in U.S. Congress as necessary to enshrine federal protections for trans-identified individuals into federal law that has passed in the House of Representatives has a provision banning sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Female athletes of all ages worry that by requiring schools to allow athletes to play on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity instead of their biological sex, females will be placed at a competitive disadvantage.
As President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats push for the passage of the Equality Act, female athletes of all political persuasions are speaking out in defense of girls’ and women’s sports.
Fighting for an “equal playing field”
Linnea Saltz, a former student of Southern Utah University, runs in a track competition. | Jeff Porcaro
One of those voices is Saltz, a graduate student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who previously ran track at Southern Utah University.
Saltz told The Christian Post that she began running in high school.
“I wasn’t one of those typical athletes that had just been running their entire life. I always did different sports such as … dance and cheer and gymnastics,” she explained. “And in sophomore year of high school, I decided to go out and try running track. My brother at the time was participating in baseball and cross country, and I thought running would be fun and running would be something that we could potentially bond over.”
After joining the track team and making varsity in her first year, Saltz “fell in love” with the sport and wanted to continue running throughout college.
The athlete spent most of her college athletic career competing solely against biological females, but that changed in the summer of 2019 when her coaches at Southern Utah University told her that an athlete at a competing university who previously competed as a male would be competing as a female.
“I immediately read through the NCAA Gender Inclusion Handbook,” she recalled. After reviewing the handbook, Saltz discovered that “there wasn’t a lot of regulation, there wasn’t a lot of jurisdiction, there was … a lot of leeway.”
“There was a lot of ambiguity in the sense that it didn’t seem as if there was a real strict protocol in terms of how these kinds of athletes would be able to compete within the NCAA,” Saltz recalls.
Saltz reached out to the NCAA, telling them that the organization needed to update its protocols. In response to her concerns, the NCAA sent Saltz an e-mail informing her that “the rules are as they are and that isn’t going to change.” Saltz told CP that a trans-identified student from the University of Montana competed against her and other runners from Southern Utah in a distance running relay.
“I competed against a biological male, and our relay team lost,” she recounted. “During the competition, it was seen that the coach was telling the athlete to slow down during the race as they were winning by a pretty large margin.”
The NCAA’s policy regarding transgender athletes, as described by Saltz, allows males or females in transition to take a year off to undergo hormone suppression therapy. Upon completion of the therapy, she alleged, “they can then come back and compete in the opposite gender category with no … continuous testing, with no marks of certain estrogen or testosterone levels or anything of that nature.”
In its handbook, the NCAA argued that “any strength and endurance advantages a transgender woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen or testosterone-suppression therapy.” The handbook further argued that medical experts have said that the “assumption that a transgender woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is not supported by evidence.”
However, a study conducted by the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that even after a year of hormone treatments, trans-identified males still maintain an advantage over biological females in sports. The study also revealed that trans-identified males remained 12% faster than the average biological females of similar ages two years after taking hormones.
Saltz says she is speaking out about the issue because she has a desire to prevent other women from having “to feel as if they’ve already been beat before they’ve started a race or they’ve been beaten before entering the arena or playing basketball or whatever sport it may be.”
“It doesn’t even have to do just with your sport. It has everything to do with just women fighting … for an equal opportunity and an equal playing field in the NCAA and in the sports world,” Saltz assured.
While Saltz has received “nothing but positive feedback” from her coaches about expressing her opinion and concerns, she acknowledged that she does get “lots of backlash.”
“I do get lots of people reaching out to me saying horrible things about me. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t change the way I felt in my particular situation, and it’s not going to silence my voice,” she assured.
Even before the Equality Act first came up for a vote in the House in May 2019, policies allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports have prevented biological females from taking the top spots in some athletic competitions. In early 2020, Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith and Ashley Nicoletti sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the Connecticut Association of Schools and their individual school districts over policies allowing trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports at the K-12 level. A fact sheet compiled by the conservative legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which has represented the girls in their litigation and won several Supreme Court cases, highlights how such policies harmed their clients.
Soule “missed qualifying for the state championship 55m final and an opportunity to qualify for the New England championship by one spot in 2018-19 season” because “two spots were taken by males.”
Mitchell “lost four (4) girls’ state championships, two (2) all-New England awards, and many other awards to male competitors.”
Smith “ran a 2nd place finish in the 200m at the New England Regional Championships, but was dropped to 3rd behind a male competitor.” Nicoletti “missed an opportunity to compete at the 2019 outdoor State Open Championship due to two male competitors.”
“There have been countless other female athletes in the state of Connecticut, as well as my entire indoor track team,” Soule said in a 2019 interview. “We missed out on winning the state open championship because of the team that the transgender athlete was on.”
However, advocates with the American Civil Liberties Union claim that the girls are “attacking two black young [men] who are simply participating in the sport they love just because they are transgender.” Last month, a federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton dismissed the girls’ lawsuit.
The U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, had investigated the girls’ complaint. The government sided with the female athletes in their lawsuit, arguing that allowing trans-identified male athletes to compete in female competitions violated Title IX rights. But the Connecticut females have received less support under the Biden administration, which has reversed many of the Trump-era positions on the transgender issue.
The Big Picture: The Equality Act “erases what a woman is”
In 1972, Congress passed Title IX federal civil rights law to guarantee equal opportunities for women and girls in education, including sports. As the advocacy organization Independent Women’s Voice points out, “Title IX’s regulations allow schools to operate ‘separate teams for members of each sex.’”
The group contends that “given the competitive advantage that male athletes generally have over female athletes, these regulations play an important role in expanding athletic opportunities for women and girls,” crediting Title IX for the “explosion of women’s high school and college sports.”
The Equality Act’s opponents — from feminists to Christian conservatives — warn that the legislation championed by Democrats threatens to roll back this progress. Congressional Democrats’ efforts to pass the Equality Act date back to the 116th U.S. Congress, which met from 2019 through 2020. The measure easily passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. It failed to become law as a result of opposition from the Republican-controlled Senate as well as the Trump administration.
When Democrats took complete control of the federal government following the 2020 elections, they made the passage of the Equality Act a top priority. Biden promised to sign the legislation into law in his first 100 days in office on the campaign trail. The Democratic-controlled House passed the Equality Act in February, but it has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Biden has attempted to essentially enact some of the Equality Act’s provisions via executive order.
On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The executive order maintains that “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an employment discrimination case that the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination based on sex, also apply to sexual orientation and gender identity. The Biden administration has used that ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County to justify policies preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Several states have passed legislation banning trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports in recent years and months. Such efforts have been met with opposition from the NCAA, a leading body that oversees athletics at colleges and universities nationwide.
Beth Stelzer, an amateur powerlifter who founded the activist collective Save Women’s Sports, has emerged as one of the most outspoken supporters of these legislative efforts.
Beth Stelzer, an amateur powerlifter, is the founder of Save Women’s Sports, an advocacy group that pushes back against the effort to allow trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports. | Stephanie Foto
According to Save Women’s Sports, six states have passed laws restricting participation in women’s sports to biological females in 2021. Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee and West Virginia. Idaho passed a measure to that effect in 2020, which was met with resistance from the courts. Stelzer has traveled the country to testify in favor of such legislation as state legislatures debate the bills. More than two dozen similar bills have been introduced at the state level in 2021.
“It has been going great,” Stelzer told CP. “Of course, there are times that I have the opposition harassing me. But the Capitols always have security that makes me feel safe.”
“We’re going to keep the pressure on and we won’t back down,” she vowed. “We might even have more states enter in bills before their session ends.”
The ACLU claims that bills that seek to limit female sports to only biological females are discriminatory because they would deny trans students the right to play sports consistent with their gender identity. Some Democrats believe that federal discrimination laws that protect based on sex should be interpreted to include sexual orientation and gender identity even though those terms are not included in the text of those laws.
Stelzer shared her concern that by equating “gender identity” with sex, the Equality Act “erases what a woman is.”
Such an action, she believes, “erases the definition of womanhood and allows anyone to claim our spaces — that’s on the sports teams, that’s in restrooms, that’s in crisis shelters, hospital wards.”
“Our sex-separated spaces will be gone,” she fears.
The Save Women’s Sports website features the stories of female athletes who support the organization’s mission.
“I’m getting numerous messages daily now of support coming into just my e-mail and I’m seeing more and more and more support on social media,” Stelzer explained.
She alleged that if the Equality Act becomes law, “women’s sports will fade away” because “it will not take long until all of the records will be held by males.”
Stelzer asserted that participating in sports gives women “the building blocks to lead our futures,” citing the “90-some percent of female CEOs” who once played sports.
A similar participation rate also applies to “government officials that are females,” she maintained.
“Women have become the majority of the population. We are becoming economic powerhouses, and there is an ideology out there trying to erase us. And that’s what Biden is going to do if he signs the Equality Act,” she argued.
Describing Save Women’s Sports as a “nonpartisan, grassroots coalition,” Stelzer told CP that “we have people from all sides of the political spectrum, including transgender athletes, that support us in this.”
“And, it’s really sad that all the opposition has is name-calling and attack and blaming to create a toxic environment [so] that people won’t speak out,” she added.
She urged female athletes with concerns to not “let the bullies bully you … into silence because that’s what basically women like me have become, the silent majority.”
Haley Tanne, a student athlete at Southern Utah University, runs in a track competition. | Haley Tanne
Saltz spoke about her experience at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, warning that female athletes would be “watching their own sports from the sidelines” if the Equality Act became law.
Saltz recalled the moment that coaches at Southern Utah told her that she would have to compete against a biological male.
“It was really just a discouraging moment for me to hear that someone that had been running not only 10 seconds faster than me in my event, but running a world record time for women previously as a male, is now competing against us as females,” she said.
She characterized her experience as an “interesting kind of situation” that “was really hard to … understand.”
Saltz predicted that if “biological males that possess physiological advantages over biological females” are allowed to compete in women’s sports, girls are “no longer going to be interested in competing and being a part of sports.”
Haley Tanne, a junior at Southern Utah University who used to run with Saltz, has also spoken out about her concerns with allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. Tanne ran with Saltz in the relay race against the biological male.
“I ran the same leg as her. We both did the mile and it was just crazy watching as she … steadily … moved her way all the way up to … the front of the race,” Tanne explained in an interview.
“And I just remember feeling so angry and confused that this was even happening.”
Like Saltz, Tanne first heard that she would be competing against a trans-identified male from her coach at Southern Utah University.A Message from
“I remember kind of thinking ‘That’s crazy, that’s not going to happen.’ Like, ‘is this a joke?’” she asked.
“It just felt like it was so crazy to me that people couldn’t see this advantage and that people were going along with it.”
Both Saltz and Tanne praised the efforts by states to consider and pass bills banning biological males who identify as females from competing in women’s sports. Saltz expressed gratitude that the states were “creating the momentum” needed to address “something that needs to be talked about.” Meanwhile, Tanne remarked that “it feels good to just feel like I’m not crazy, that other people see this as an issue and are willing to pass it and move forward.”
“I think that overall, just taking out the emotion from it and looking at it logically, I think that this is a good thing,” Tanne added. “And … I think at the end of the day, we should make a goal to include all athletes competing in sports. But I think we should start with female sports and making sure that women’s sports are a fair playing field.”
She stressed the importance of addressing the issue from a “scientific standpoint,” adding “males are born with … different bone structures, [and] different lung capacities.”
In light of the biological differences between males and females, Tanne argued that “it’s not fair” to allow biological males to compete on women’s sports teams, adding “I think it’s kind of sad that the NCAA isn’t able to see that.”
As with Saltz, Tanne’s foray into running was spurred by the encouragement of a family member.
“My sister introduced me to cross-country when I was a freshman in high school, and I remember training with them in the summer,” Tanne stated. “And my coach approached me and told me that just based off of the talent I had shown so far in the season that I could potentially run in college. And so that’s when I really became excited about running.” Since competing against the trans-identified male in the relay race, neither Saltz nor Tanne have had to compete against another biological male.
In addition to college athletes, well-known retired athletes have also spoken out against the effort to allow trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports, including former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, former tennis player Martina Navratilova and former golfer Nancy Lopez.
Progressives have maintained that trans-identified athletes don’t necessarily have an advantage over biological female athletes. Earlier this year, the ACLU argued that “Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports.” The legal group added that: “Trans athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes.” The group asserted that in many cases, biological female athletes have performed “as well or better” than trans competitors.
The ACLU’s statement faced immense criticism online as much has been reported on the many physical advantages that biological males can have over females, including “larger hearts and lungs, more oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber, greater upper-body muscle mass, greater lower-body muscle mass, greater bone density.”
Some female athletes and their families contend that the participation of trans-identified athletes in girls’ sports can have a “ripple effect” that will impact some females who participate in the competition, if not all.
“A Ripple Effect”
While the collegiate athletic careers of Saltz and Tanne are coming to a close, the collegiate athletic careers of two of the plaintiffs in the Connecticut case are just beginning. Soule and Mitchell are now freshmen in college. As the threat of having to compete against trans-identified males looms large in light of the NCAA policy, the legal effort to remedy the losses they experienced to biological males in high school and prevent other girls from having to go through the same experience continues.
Chelsea Mitchell’s mother, Christy, and Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Christiana Holcomb spoke with CP. Mitchell said that her daughter has “always been involved in sports,” starting with soccer in kindergarten with soccer and later played basketball.
“Track isn’t available in our town until you hit middle school, so she started track in middle school and she was pretty good and got really serious about it when she started high school,” the mother said. “She qualified, competed for the state championship in her freshman year and she … competed at that really high level all throughout her high school years.”
According to Mitchell, Chelsea “competed against transgender athletes all four years of her high school career,” facing “transgender athletes 24 times in that period, in high-level elite races, which are state championships, New England championships.” Mitchell described those events as “really important to her from a recruiting standpoint.”
Mitchell told CP that Chelsea, who is now running track at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, “has not run up against this issue as of yet” in her collegiate career but expressed concern that “the policy that the NCAA has in place makes that a possibility.”
Mitchell has a younger daughter, currently in ninth grade, who is also an athlete.
“We’re hoping that she doesn’t have to go through what Chelsea did but it’s certainly a possibility,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell noted that in “every single race, someone isn’t making finals, someone isn’t advancing to the next level of competition, and someone isn’t getting … that championship title, and someone is getting bumped from second and third place. And so, it’s a ripple effect and it affects a lot of girls, not just Chelsea.”
Holcomb agreed: “I think the public needs to keep in mind that it only takes one biologically male athlete to take the championship title and it only takes three to push girls off of the podium entirely.”
“So, this is a big deal and it does matter and it has massive ramifications for young women as they compete, both in high school and college,” the attorney stated.
Next Steps: “As long as it takes”
A federal judge in Connecticut tossed the lawsuit filed by Mitchell and three other Connecticut athletes, concluding that “the request for an injunction enjoining enforcement of the CIAC policy is now moot.”
The judge ruled that the case is moot because the transgender athletes the girls competed against have since graduated and “there is no indication that Smith and Nicoletti will encounter competition by a transgender student in a CIAC-sponsored event next season.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom announced its intention to appeal the ruling to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We look forward to taking the case upon appeal and making … the argument to the court that the case is not moot for the reason that each one of the girls has suffered past injuries specifically as to different placements and recognition and so forth,” Holcomb stressed. “That … can be remedied. These are past injuries that the court can fix and can direct the CIAC to fix. So that stops the case from being moot.”
Holcomb also weighed in on the law firm’s plans if the Second Circuit upholds the district court judge’s decision.
“As far as whether or not this case makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court, I would say that I hope it doesn’t need to. I would hope that we’re able to get a policy change quickly so that young women in the state of Connecticut are protected and can compete on a fair and level playing field. … If that’s what’s necessary, then we’ll certainly pursue this as long as it takes.”
With their college careers coming to a close, both Saltz and Tanne want to keep running as a vital part of their lives even though they do not plan on pursuing the sport professionally. Characterizing running as “something I love,” Saltz said that “it’s not anything that I plan on just stopping right when I’m done with college.” Stating that she “definitely wants to continue running,” Tanne expressed a desire to serve as a coach when she is older, possibly at the high school level.
Additionally, both women have emphasized that their opposition to allowing trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports does not result from any ill will toward transgender people.
At CPAC, Saltz told the audience that “there’s no part of me that doesn’t want to be inclusive.”
“I’m looking for proposed solutions that would create inclusion for everybody, but not at the exclusion of biological women,” she stated.
“People don’t realize that by being inclusive in that sense, it is exclusionary to people like me. We don’t want men’s and coed sports; we want men’s and women’s sports.”
Tanne told CP that her concern about competing against a biological male “was nothing against the transgender athlete or their choices.” She argued that people on both sides of this debate should remain civil.
“I’ve had family members who haven’t completely agreed on the situation, and we’ve been able to just talk about our opinions and just agree to disagree,” Tanne said. “And I think that that’s the way it should be. I don’t feel like friendships should be ruined just based off of disagreements.”
“If you have something you’re passionate about, then you should fight for it and not tear other people down just because you disagree,” she concluded.
Memo to President Biden: Life moves pretty fast, and now the world is on fire.
Israel is erupting, Americans are utterly confused when masks should be worn for COVID-19 protection and then there are the agita-inducing long lines for gasoline.
And that was just Tuesday.
A lot has changed in a matter of days.
Friday was supposed to be a glorious day for Biden. The latest employment numbers were set to be released, and economists were gushing that a million new jobs had likely been created in April by exuberant employers and their newly vaccinated workers. His team no doubt was prepared to unleash Biden to perform a little victory dance at the White House celebrating the stupendous number. But the show had to be hastily revamped when the actual tally came in nearly three-quarters-of-a-million jobs lower than expected; just 266,000 jobs created and unemployment unexpectedly rising to 6.1%.
“You might think we should be disappointed,” Biden said, which was indeed something people might think. But the American Rescue Plan he signed into law in March “was designed to help us over the course of a year — not 60 days,” he said.
Far from being a disappointment, a jobs report that included 734,000 jobs fewer than expected was good news.
“Today, there is more evidence our economy is moving in the right direction,” Biden said. “This is progress. This is a testament to our new strategy,” he said. “We’ve got work to do, to state the obvious, we have work to do.”
You might think.
The jobs figures were just the first in a series of out-of-nowhere body blows hitting the president during a remarkable five days of bad developments that stretched from Israel to the Mexican border and up the East Coast via the Colonial Pipeline.
After delivering a few remarks Friday, taking in the “Weekly Economic Briefing” and meeting with his “Jobs Cabinet,” the president knocked off at 5:45 pm and headed for the peacefully wooded Catoctin Mountain Park, where the presidential refuge Camp David awaited in Maryland. He was ready for a rest, but the world wasn’t ready to give him one. By Saturday morning, the Colonial Pipeline, which transports nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel supplies up from Texas, had been turned off, the victim of a ransomware cyberattack by a group of nasty hackers who, by the way, might be working with the Russian government. Biden was “briefed” on the situation Saturday morning. Video By late Monday, more than one in 20 gas stations in Virginia was out of fuel. Tuesday, governors throughout the Southeast were declaring states of emergency, and the Biden administration was begging drivers not to hoard gasoline.
Meantime, Palestinians had begun violently clashing with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, an escalation of tensions that had been simmering and occasionally boiling over for weeks. Hamas began launching rocket attacks into Israel, which responded by bombing Gaza. Video Back in Washington, Republicans began accusing Biden of tilting too far toward the Palestinians while failing to at least verbally sock it to Hamas. From the other side, leftists in his own party hit the White House for supposedly coddling Israel, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., accusing Biden of “enabling” Israel with foreign aid. By Tuesday, an echo of the violence had spread to the streets of New York, where there were dustups between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian supporters in front of the Israeli consulate.
As new crises broke out all over the place, there were searing reminders that an old one was still festering.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed Tuesday that migrant encounters jumped yet again this past April: over 178,000 in all, nearly a tenfold increase from 2020 and still above levels seen in the 2019 surge at the Mexico border.Video In a heartbreaking scene, five unaccompanied migrant girls were found abandoned by a Texas farmer on his land. And reports emerged that border agents in Texas had seized $4.6 million in methamphetamine and cocaine, while a member of the National Guard had found an abandoned bag of “AK-47-style pistols” in the border region.
A new poll reminded the president that the border crisis was dragging him down, with only 43% of those surveyed approving of his immigration policy.
In a bit of beguiling partisan moves that has befuddled many Americans, Senate Democrats pressed ahead Tuesday with their plans to overhaul the nation’s election laws — after many states, such as GOP-guided governments in Florida and Georgia, enacted different changes for their own constituents. Divisive racial undercurrents have developed amid all this, all on the watch of the so-called unity president.
The ACLU quickly weighed in to tie new voting laws to race: “This terrible bill was drafted as a direct swipe at Georgians’ participating in the Black Lives Matter protests who are asserting for their constitutional rights,” Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, said in a statement posted on the group’s website.
On the COVID-19 front, the once-unimpeachable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was taking shots on the chin for some dubious recommendations to a populace ready to get back to normal. Video During a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, lambasted CDC chief Rochelle Walensky on “conflicting” guidance related to school reopenings, wearing masks outside, and summer camps.
“I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don’t anymore,” Collins said, giving examples where she said she thinks “the conflicting, confusing guidance from your agency has undermined public confidence and contradicts the scientific guidance of many experts.”
“Unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risk of outdoor transmission and unworkable restrictions on summer camps,” Collins continued. “Why does this matter?‘
“It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.”
To add insult to the various injuries, there was even criticism of how Biden looked — at least when he was wearing a mask. White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients found himself under fire Sunday morning from CNN’s Jake Tapper for Biden’s apparent attachment to his mask.
“Is it really necessary for a fully vaccinated person to wear a mask at a limited indoor gathering if everyone there is vaccinated?” Tapper wanted to know. “Why does President Biden in a room full of vaccinated journalists, everybody in that room vaccinated, why does he need to wear a mask?”
Zients mumbled something about following CDC guidance and all Americans being eligible for shots.
By Tuesday, Biden was hearing from Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox that fully vaccinated people should start acting like it so that Americans could see the benefits of the vaccine and go get their arms jabbed.
“One area where we could use some help from the White House and others is modeling what a fully vaccinated person can do,” Cox said.
The beleaguered Biden could muster little in the way of a defense.
“That’s a good point,” he said.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
Police in Louisville are reportedly investigating a potential hate crime after a disabled army veteran was viciously attacked in a parking lot on Mother’s Day. Pamela Ahlstedt-Brown, a disabled Army veteran, told WAVE-TV she was trying to back out of a handicapped parking space at her local Kroger grocery store when she noticed a vehicle parked behind her, preventing her from leaving. Ahlstedt-Brown said she confronted the passengers inside the vehicle, whom she identified as four young black women in a Dodge car.
“I get out and I say, ‘Do you guys need any help?’ and she said, ‘F*** you, you white b****.’ I said, ‘Hold on, you don’t even know me,'” Brown said. “I said, ‘That’s fine. If you don’t need anything, that’s fine. I’ll get back in the car,'” Ahlstedt-Brown explained.
That’s when Ahlstedt-Brown was attacked, she told WAVE.
“I mean, they were beating me, and I was in a fetal position, covering my face, making sure they didn’t get my eyes,” she explained.
According to WAVE, strangers in the parking lot — not Kroger security guards — stopped the attack.
More from WAVE:
Brown said she went back to the Kroger on Sunday to speak to LMPD officers and tried to retrieve security footage. Tuesday, her daughter called the police multiple times to obtain security footage to no avail.
“They told her, ‘You could have got the video from Kroger the first day.’ And then he followed that up with, ‘Well, a detective has it, so you can’t get it from Kroger.’ So which was is it? His response was to hang up on her,” Brown said.
Ahlstedt-Brown told WAVE she sustained a broken nose during the attack.
A spokesman for the Louisville Metro Police Department reportedly said detectives are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.
“We’re gonna collect all the evidence, present it in court, and they will decide,” a LMPD spokesman reportedly said. “A hate crime is an enhancement, in this case, it’s an assault is where we are at at this time. The courts will eventually decide that.”
TheBlaze reached out to Kroger about the incident, but did not receive a response as of press time.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A group of furious parents lined up before Virginia’s Loudoun County School Board this week to read several “pornographic” passages from books assigned to ninth graders in the district, amid a recall effort against several of the board’s members. In a clip from Tuesday night’s meeting provided by Media Research Center, the first mom reads from a book describing a domestic violence scenario where the narrator talks about a female “coming out of some car in these tight-a** little shorts…telling me she’s going to leave me.”
“I grab her by the neck and start punching her,” the mother continues to read. Later, the narrator describes keeping the female “in a closet for a couple of days” where “she kept on screaming, begging to be let out. Begging for water.”
The rest of the excerpts were sexual in nature.
“Jasper wasn’t even my boyfriend, just this dude I did some hacking with once in a while,” the second mother reads. “He was pretty basic…but he had a big d***. And sometimes a girl just needs a big d***.”
A third parent read about sex acts involving a “boy — his pants around his ankles — squeezed between April’s straddled legs as she lay on top of a teacher’s desk.” The narrator describes flipping the “boy” around, “pushing him against the wall” and then dropping to their knees.
The fourth mother reads an excerpt where the narrator declares, “she sucked my d***. I didn’t really want it to happen, it just kinda did.” Another character in the book replies, “Wait a minute, is that what was really going on? She did your homework and you ate her c******!”
A gentleman who said he is representing a group of parents in a harassment suit addressed the board following the readings. After listing off a number of the sexual acts covered, he pointed to the panel and asked, “By show of hands, does anyone up here want to talk about that stuff now? Not a single hand, because it’s very uncomfortable and we’re in a room full of adults.”
He said the reason no one wants to talk about it is “because they’re not acceptable topics,” and added, “my kids don’t go to your crap schools, but theirs do.”
Angry Loudoun County public school parents read heinous passages from county's 9th grade reading material. pic.twitter.com/GYnQFExJ00
When asked for reaction by Fox News, Loudoun County Public Schools pointed to a news release published Wednesday where the district reminded “parents that if they feel a book is not appropriate for their student” they may “submit a formal request for the Reconsideration of Instructional Materials.”
One parent, who did not want to be named, told the outlet, “This is the same district that banned Dr. Seuss and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as being ‘offensive,’ yet they’re having children read pornography that violates every code of conduct in their sexual harassment training.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The Democrats’ ridiculously named ‘For the People Act’ is nothing more than a power grab, intended to keep Democrats from losing elections. Ted Cruz went off on Democrats and the bill this week, calling it out for what it really is.
The American people need to understand what Democrats are really trying to do here.
“This legislation I believe is the most radical legislation the Senate has considered in the nine years I’ve been here and it is the most dangerous legislation pending before the United States Congress.‘
“I listened to the speeches this morning. I listened to Sen. [Chuck] Schumer’s speech where he recounted this country’s shameful history of Jim Crow laws. And he’s right. Jim Crow laws were bigoted, racist, and disenfranchised millions of people.“
“It is worth remembering that those Jim Crow laws were drafted by Democrats. They were implemented by Democrats and they kept Democrats in power.‘
“Now today’s talking point repeated in the media is that was the Democrats of yesterday, not today. Well today, the Democrats are doing it again. This legislation—to use a phrase that has been popularized on the media recently—is Jim Crow 2.0. This legislation would disenfranchise millions of Americans.‘
“Many of us are referring to this legislation as the “Corrupt Politicians Act” … Sen. Schumer talked about politicians picking their constituents. That’s what this legislation does. This legislation is designed to ensure that Democrats never lose another election.‘
“This legislation would register millions of illegal aliens to vote. It is intended to do that.“
All of the Republicans need to start speaking up as loudly as Ted Cruz is here.This is about the future of the country and whether or not we will have fair and honest elections ever again.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded to MSNBC host Joy Reid’s racist remarks against him by questioning why the network permitted her to get away with it and saying that comments of the like were leading Hispanics to turn their back on the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, Reid discussed the Texas senator with guests Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and NAACP legal counsel Janai Nelson, and made a reference to the movie “Django Unchained” — comparing Cruz to a traitorous house slave in the film for not supporting the For the People Act, which aims at altering voting processes across the country.
Cruz’s rebuttal was swift, calling out the host of the MSNBC segment “The Reid Out” for “using overt racial slurs” to make assumptions concerning how Hispanic-Americans should vote.
“I appreciate MSNBC lecturing me on how people of ‘my race’ are supposed to vote,” Cruz tweeted on Wednesday. “This arrogant condescension is a big reason Hispanic voters are moving right in large numbers.
“Also, why is MSNBC ok with their hosts using overt racial slurs (‘Stephen from Django’)?”
Cruz called the For the People Act, officially known as House Resolution 1, “Jim Crow 2.0” — a reference to President Joe Biden’s remarks about Georgia’s new voting law, which the president called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”
“Jim Crow laws were bigoted, racist, and disenfranchised millions of people,”Cruz said in a Tuesday tweet. “Those laws were drafted by Democrats and implemented by Democrats to keep Democrats in power. Today, Democrats are doing it again. The Corrupt Politicians Act is Jim Crow 2.0.”
Reid was highly critical of Cruz and the GOP after his comment, alleging that the Republican Party was attempting voter suppression in his state of Texas.
“Ted Cruz says a lot of stupid things,” Reid said Tuesday. “He does a lot of stupid things. But I personally — as a person of color, as a black person — am beyond offended that he would dare use the word ‘Jim Crow’ when his party is literally a ‘Jim Crow’ party at this point, trying to suppress the votes of people, including in his home state.”
She later called Cruz “Stephen from Django Unchained.”
Reid continued with attacks on the Texas senator, saying that he “could give a d**n about Jim Crow,” and that he has “never raised once concern ever in his entire life … about Jim Crow or racism or discrimination.”
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
Reid suggested Cruz was a traitor to Hispanics and defended HR 1, saying that if it fails to pass, America may never see free and fair elections again.
Republicans, however, have said that the act threatens election integrity and the rights of states.
“The legislation would strip states of their constitutional authority to run elections and allow the federal government to decree what’s best,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in a Fox News Op-Ed.
“It would ban voter ID laws, which maintain the integrity of elections in my state and a majority of others … To put it simply: states don’t need Washington, D.C., to strip them of their authority and impose burdensome requirements to fix problems that do not exist,” Moore said.
Reid has made racist comments about Republicans in the past. She has made an “Uncle Tom” reference, alluding to the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she called “Uncle Clarence.” She has also called Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina the token black person in the Republican Party.
More than 120 retired generals and admirals have signed a letter saying that the U.S. is in “deep peril” under the leadership of President Joe Biden, specifically warning that the mental condition of the nation’s oldest commander in chief “cannot be ignored.” The letter was released by Flag Officers 4 America, and was signed by 124 retired “military officers entitled to carry a flag indicating their rank,” The Daily Caller noted.
It begins, “Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.”
The retired military leaders went on to say that “without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the ‘will of the people’ our Constitutional Republic is lost,” saying that “aside from the election, the Current Administration has launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing the Congress, with more than 50 Executive Orders quickly signed.”
At the end of a long list of bullet points citing “additional national security issues and actions,” Flag Officers 4 America wrote:
“The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night. Recent Democrat leadership’s inquiries about nuclear code procedures sends a dangerous national security signal to nuclear armed adversaries, raising the question about who is in charge. We must always have an unquestionable chain of command.”
The officials ended the letter with a call for action, urging “all citizens to get involved now at the local, state and/or national level to elect political representatives who will act to Save America, our Constitutional Republic, and hold those currently in office accountable,” concluding, “The ‘will of the people’ must be heard and followed.”
Biden, 78, is the oldest American president to ever be elected, and he faced questions from opponents during both the Democratic primary and the general election over his mental fitness for office. A White House spokesperson told People magazine on Wednesday that Biden “is planning to have a checkup later this year, and the results will be made public.” The outlet noted that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week that the administration “will be transparent” to reporters about the results of Biden’s first physical when it happens. People further reported that “Biden similarly promised during the 2020 campaign to be ‘totally transparent in terms of my health.'”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, AND WhatDidYouSay.org
Source: AP Photo/Alex BrandonTrending
After a year of being browbeaten by “the scientists” not to wear a mask, to wear a mask, to wear double masks, to get vaccinated and still wear a mask, our analytic overlords are still no closer to determining the tiny little issue of where this virus came from.
Recently, the widely respected science writer Nicholas Wade published an article in Medium pushing the idea that — contrary to what “the scientists” assured us — COVID-19 might have come from the Wuhan virology lab, not the wet markets.
According to Wade, the virologists attacking the lab theory were claiming scientific certainty for something unknowable, and at least one of them has a gigantic conflict of interest. Even at a time when “TRUST THE SCIENCE!” has become a liberal mating call, I’m shocked at the deceptions of these guys.
Wade cites two groups as leading the attack on the lab theory.
Kristian G. Andersen, [Tweet him] a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in California, was the lead author of a paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, claiming: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Talk about influential — not only did The New York Times cite Andersen, but I did!
Now, a year later, Wade says, “Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.” While Andersen claimed that two of the virus’s characteristics couldn’t be made in a lab, Wade describes exactly how they could be.
The second group of experts denouncing the lab theory was led by Peter Daszak, [Tweet him] the president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak got two dozen other scientists to sign a letter to The Lancet that portentously declared: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Scientists, the letter said, “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
Well! No uncertainty there!
But Wade notes that Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had helped fund the Wuhan lab.
I have a problem when a guy with a financial and reputational stake in a lab organizes a group of scientists to say, It’s absolutely not from the lab!!! Daszak’s letter concluded with what only the deeply cynical might suggest was a lie: “We declare no competing interests.”
In response to the obvious question, “Why didn’t any other scientists speak up?” Wade says: “Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”
If we could give them a truth serum, I wonder what these experts would say about transgenders, IQ, the COVID shutdowns and any number of pressing social issues we’re all supposed to shut up about because of “science.”
And of course there was the fact that Trump had floated the lab theory. Before a liberal will answer any question, he needs to know:
Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another — he’s just laying out the facts! But it’s pretty clear that he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.
He doesn’t mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.
No, Wade’s argument is a purely scientific one. Not my bailiwick. But I can see when experts disagree, and, oh my gosh, do they disagree!
One of Wade’s main points is that COVID-19 is the only coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. (You don’t need to know what it is — substitute the words “chocolate bunny.”) “So,” Wade concludes, “it’s hard to explain how the [COVID] virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally.”
Last month, the World Health Organization released a major report on the origin of the coronavirus, so I checked to see what its scientists said about this “furin cleavage.” They say COVID-19’s “furin cleavage” is, in fact, like that in another bat coronavirus, RmYN02, “providing evidence that such insertion events occur naturally in animals.”
I can’t evaluate the science, but I can line up words, and those conclusions don’t match. In fact, they are direct opposites.
Like you, I’m inclined to believe Wade over the WHO, but that’s not the point. Do you see how absurd this is, trying to ascertain a scientific fact as if we’re assessing the credibility of witnesses in a sexual harassment case? Well, he lied about the lingerie, but she seems to have been stalking him …
We’re talking about SCIENCE, our new religion! Wear a mask — it’s “SCIENCE”! There’s no such thing as race — it’s “SCIENCE“! Global warming is incinerating our planet — it’s SCIENCE! The mere invocation of “SCIENCE” is used to slam the door on any argument.
This week on MSNBC, a host actually said, “There are no bad apples at the CDC.” Every hour of every day, I have to hear about the “bad apples” in policing. But at the CDC? Nope! They’re SCIENTISTS.
Whether the virus that destroyed the world economy and has already killed more than 3 million people came from a Chinese lab or a Chinese wet market, or a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side (unlikely), it’s China’s fault. What is mind-boggling about Wade’s article is the overweening and baseless pomposity of our high priests of SCIENCE.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Since Joe Biden’s inauguration, over 19,000 unaccompanied children have entered the U.S. along the southern border, an all-time monthly high that has forced the Biden administration to house migrant teenagers in convention centers, camps for oil workers, and a military base.
100 Percent Fed Up reports- Is this the “compassionate” party we heard so much about when basement Joe was running for office against President Trump, who did more to stop the flow of human trafficking into America than any US President in modern history? Where’s Kamala? Didn’t Basement Joe tell us she would be handling the border crisis?
On April 3, an off-duty US border agent was driving on a remote road in Texas when he noticed a little boy walking by the side of the road by himself. The border agent, who was curious about the boy, pulled over to inquire about what he was doing by himself. When he pulled over, the young boy immediately approached his vehicle and asked for help began sobbing and begging for help.
Now, in Kamala’s cruel new America, which encourages criminals to use children as pawns as a means to freely enter the United States, five young girls have been found lying on the ground on a Texas farmer’s ranch…one of them was naked and crawling.
The Daily Mail – On Sunday, a Texas farmer found 5 abandoned girls from Honduras and Guatemala on his land, hungry and crying after being left by their families to try to get into the country alone in another example of the worsening border crisis. All of the girls were under the age of seven, and one was so young she was crawling. There was also a two-year-old in the group.
Jimmy Hobbs, the 75-year-old farmer, and his wife Katie gave an interview to Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales, which was posted on Twitter after the pair submitted photos and videos to social media groups that campaign for tighter border control.
Jimmy and Katie Hobbs. Jimmy, 75, has lived on the farm his entire life. He said the situation is the worst he’s ever seen it and that thousands of kids will likely die this summer trying to enter the US illegally in the sweltering heat, with no food or water.
Gonzalez also shared a gut-wrenching image of the girls lying in the dirt. In one of the videos she shared, Katie fumed in the background: ‘These children dumped out on the side of the river here on our farm.
‘If this doesn’t make you mad and make you want to take to the streets, I don’t know what will. They have no mother, no father, no nothing. This is one of our workers’ wives right here taking care of this tiny one. No one with these children.’
Hobbs is an onion and watermelon farmer who has lived on the land he owns his entire life. The farm is in Quemado, Texas, which sits on the border with the Mexican state of Coahuila.
He said that he believes the girls would have died if he hadn’t found them and that the situation at the border is the worst it has been in the 75 years he has lived on the farm.
The youngest of the girls is so little she can’t walk yet. She was naked when the farmer arrived, and the girls didn’t have any diapers for her either. She is shown being cradled by one of the farm workers’ wives.
He and his wife warned that there will be ‘thousands more’ who get into perilous danger and die this summer trying to illegally cross the border as temperatures rise and President Biden continues to shrug off the crisis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exaggerated the rate of outdoor transmission of the coronavirus, according to a report by The New York Times (NYT).
The CDC announced in April that a majority of COVID-19 transmission happens indoors, with “less than 10 percent of documents transmission” occurring outdoors. The NYT, however, reportedthe number is misleading and is based on a misclassification of how some cases of the virus were spread.
Virologist at the University of St. Andrews Dr. Muge Cevik said the number “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” according to the NYT. The NYT reports outdoor transmission appears to be less than one percent and could even be lower than 0.1 percent. The transmission that does occur outside is typically a result of crowded spaces, according to the report. The CDC’s claim that COVID-19 transmissions are less than 10% is reportedly “deceiving.”
“There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table,” the NYT reported.
The method the CDC used to come up with 10% figure is reportedly skewed since it is based on a large number of outdoor transmission cases that occurred at construction sites in Singapore. One study cited in the report found that just 95 cases out of 10,926 cases worldwide were instances of outdoor transmission, with all 95 cases coming from construction sites in Singapore.
Another study cited by the NYT found that four out of 103 cases were classified as having occurred from outdoor transmission and all four cases were from Singapore construction sites. The second study did note, however, that “existing evidence supports the wide-held belief that risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is lower outdoors.”
The NYT explains the data from Singapore comes from a government base that does not put construction-site cases in the outdoor transmission category.
“We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” spokesman for the Ministry of Health Yap Wei Qiang told the NYT. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.“
Further, researchers gave a broad definition to ‘outdoor spaces’ that included any space that was a mix of both indoor and outdoor facilities, according to the NYT.
“We had to settle on one classification for building sites,” French researcher and co-author of research analyzed by the NYT told the outlet. “And ultimately decided on a conservative outdoor definition.”
Another study by the Journal of Infection and Public Health only counted two settings as indoors, “mass accommodation and residential facilities.”
It counted “workplace, health care, education, social events, travel, catering, leisure and shopping” as outdoor settings.
At some of the construction sites where COVID-19 transmission occurred in Singapore, the exterior construction for the project was finished prior to the pandemic began, according to the report. Alex Au of advocacy group Transient Workers Count Too told the NYT that since Singapore is warm year-round, many workers, including electricians and plumbers, would have likely held meeting and ate lunch indoors to avoid the heat, contributing to COVID-19 transmission.
Other studies have found the rate of outdoor transmission could be far lower than 10% as well, with a study from Ireland “which seems to have been more precise about the definition of outdoors,” putting outdoor transmission at 0.1 percent, according to the report.
A sign encouraging the use of face coverings in Washington, DC on April 16, 2021. -(W.G. DUNLOP/AFP via Getty Images)
Another study from China found out of 7,324 cases, only one was the result of outdoor transmission.
The CDC later told the NYT the 10% figure is “a conservative estimate from a recent systematic review of peer-reviewed papers,” and that “the data we do have supports the hypothesis that the risk of outdoor transmission is low.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci said in April that it was “common sense” that outdoor transmission of the coronavirus is “minuscule.”
“I think it’s pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really quite low, particularly – I mean, if you are a vaccinated person, wearing a mask outdoors, I mean, obviously, the risk is minuscule,” Fauci said while on ABC’s “This Week.”
A string of studies also recently found that with low outdoor transmission, outdoor mask mandates should be reduced.
The Daily Caller has reached out to the CDC but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
Tim Tebow’s likely return to the NFL has ignited a new controversy after angry fans voiced frustration that Tebow is receiving another shot in the big leagues while Colin Kaepernick remains sidelined. Multiple reports indicated that Tebow is expected to sign a one-year contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars in the coming days. Tebow, a former NFL quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, will play the tight end position.
Tebow, 33, also will reunite with coach Urban Meyer. The pair won two college football national championships while at Florida in 2006 and 2008.
“The #Jaguars are planning to sign QB-turned-TE Tim Tebow to a 1-year deal, per me and @TomPelissero, a deal that could be official in the next week or so. Nothing done yet. But he’ll have a chance to make the team to reunite with his mentor and college head coach Urban Meyer,” NFL reporter Ian Rapoport tweeted.
“Tebow hasn’t played football since the 2015 NFL preseason and has spent the past six years working as a broadcaster on the SEC Network and working on his professional baseball career,” ESPN reported.
Fans already angry that Kaepernick has gone many seasons unsigned were predictably angry that Tebow will earn yet another NFL contract despite not having played in the league since 2012. Among the reactions included claims that Tebow was able to secure a contract because he is white and Kaepernick cannot because he is black.
“Tebow – Hasn’t played in the NFL since 2012. Gets another shot. Kaepernick – Hasn’t played since 2016. Gets nothing. What’s the difference? Can’t seem to put my finger on it…” one person said, tweeting side-by-side pictures of Tebow and Kaepernick.
“Tim Tebow finding a team and Colin Kaepernick can’t. White privilege NFL style. Tebow can’t throw, never could, never played TE, and hasn’t played in ..what …8 years? Explain it to me like I’m 5,” another person claimed.
“There’s no way you can tell me that Tim Tebow deserves to be on a team as an unproven tight end who hasn’t played in 9 years more than Colin Kaepernick. There’s just no way that’s gonna make sense,” another person reacted.
“::laughs in Colin Kaepernick::,” Jemele Hill said.
“Tim Tebow hasn’t played football in 6 years and will be 34 heading into training camp and he just signed with the Jags. From here on out, I don’t ever want to hear another word about how Colin Kaepernick isn’t good enough for another shot in the NFL,” one person said.
“Interesting how the same people that are praising Tim Tebow for his values outside of football, see Colin Kaepernick’s values as a distraction,” another person reacted.
“But no one will sign Colin Kaepernick because hE hASn’T pLayEd in ForEvER and He woUlD bE a DiSTracTioN,” another person mocked.
Tebow, of course, is not guaranteed a starting spot, nor is he guaranteed a spot on the Jaguar’s 53-man regular season roster. Tebow will have to earn his spot on the team during training camp and preseason games.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden’s new policy redefining sex puts doctors at risk, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday. The Biden administration announced Monday that it would reinterpret “sex” in the context of healthcare anti-discrimination laws to include “sexual orientation”and “gender identity,” reversing a Trump administration policy that defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth.
“Make no mistake,” Schilling said. “The policy announced by HHS today is not about ‘fix[ing] a broken bone’ or ‘screen[ing] for cancer risk.’ No American was being denied access to these treatments for identifying as ‘LGBTQ.’ Rather, this policy is really about forcing hospitals and medical professionals to adhere to leftist ideology regarding sexuality and gender—and in particular to provide sex-change procedures to all comers, including children.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will interpret Section 1557 and Title IX prohibitions on discrimination based on sex to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and on the basis of gender identity, the Department of Health and Human Services announced in a memo released Monday.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a Monday statement.
“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” Becerra said. “It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone — including LGBTQ people — should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
APP President: Policy May Force Doctors To Violate Consciences Or Get Sued
Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine also said in a statement that HHS seeks to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans.‘
“All people need access to healthcare services to fix a broken bone, protect their heart health, and screen for cancer risk,” Levine said. “No one should be discriminated against when seeking medical services because of who they are.”
APP President Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday that though Levine and Becerra paint the HHS move as one “all about lifesaving care for transgender people,” the HHS announcement is merely “a way for the federal government to use its full weight and coercion to do the most controversial aspects of the gender identity stuff, which is gender transitions for minors.’
“There’s not some rash across the country where gay people are going in to get their broken arm fixed and the doctor is like ‘Oh sorry, you’re gay. I’m not helping you,’” Schilling said. “We would know about those cases immediately.”
CHARLOTTE, NC – SEPTEMBER 06: Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Democratic vice presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wave after accepting the nomination during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 6, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Schilling presented the DCNF with a hypothetical scenario in which parents take a child diagnosed with gender dysphoria to a doctor that does mastectomies. The doctor finds out that the child doesn’t have breast cancer, that the child is a 15-year-old girl who is gender dysphoric, Schilling suggested. If that doctor doesn’t perform the surgery, the parents can sue the doctor on civil rights grounds, Schilling said. He also noted that this scenario could play out similarly for doctors who have an issue prescribing puberty blockers to kids who wish to begin transitioning.
“Those doctors are also at risk,” Schilling said. “It’s basically forcing doctors to do off-label treatment for gender dysphoria, and it’s a total nightmare.”
The new policy reverses a June 2020 Trump era rule that had defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth and clarified that sex discrimination does not include abortion when it comes to health care and coverage. Former President Barack Obama’s administration had redefined sex discrimination in 2016 to include abortion and gender identity — defined as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”
Under the Trump era policy, HHS returned to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination “according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress,” Roger Severino, former director of OCR, said in June 2020. “We are unwavering in our commitment to enforcing civil rights in healthcare.”
The Biden administration’s new interpretation will guide OCR in conducting investigations and processing complaints, an HHS press release said, but will not “itself determine the outcome in any particular case or set of facts.” HHS also noted that “OCR will comply with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.
Pastor Artur Pawlowski and Dawid Pawlowski arrested after leaving a church service in Calgary Canada, on May 8, 2021. | YouTube/Artur Pawlowski TV
Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who kicked police out of his church after they tried to shut down a worship service during Holy Week, and his brother, Dawid Pawlowski, have been arrested for holding an “illegal” in-person gathering as per COVID-19 limits set by a new court order. Referring to the Pawlowskis of Street Church in Calgary, Alberta, Calgary Police Service said in a statement that its officers “lawfully enforced” the court order by arresting the two men after church.
A video posted on YouTube shows that Calgary Police Service sent at least five police vehicles to arrest the two from on the street. The brothers knelt on the road and refused to walk on their own during the arrest. A voice can be heard telling the officers, “Shame on you guys, this is not communist China. Don’t you have family and kids? Whatever happened to ‘Canada, God keep our land glorious and free?’”
In its statement, Calgary Police Service said it “proactively” served “an organizer of a church service with the court order to ensure that citizens attending the Saturday service were abiding by the current COVID-19 public health orders.”
“This order imposes new restrictions on organizers of protests and demonstrations requiring compliance with public health orders including masking, physical distancing and attendance limits,” it said.
The Pawlowski brothers “have both been arrested and charged with organizing an illegal in-person gathering, including requesting, inciting or inviting others to attend an illegal public gathering, promoting and attending an illegal public gathering,” it added.
Calgary Police Service claimed that law enforcement “recognizes people’s desire to participate in faith-based gatherings as well as the right to protest” but that it is seeking “to ensure everyone’s safety and wellbeing.”
Artur Pawlowski, who was born in Poland and lived under Soviet rule during part of his childhood, shared a video documenting police visiting his church last month. In that video, Pawlowski can be seen calmly greeting the officials at the front door. The public health officer presented Pawlowski with a warrant, possibly hoping to avoid the type of confrontation that unfolded three weeks ago during the Holy Week. He told them not to come back without a warrant. As he videotaped the encounter, one of the police officers accompanying the public health officer told Pawlowski, “you don’t have to get into her personal space,” as he attempted to zoom his phone in on the paperwork.
“You’re in my personal space,” Pawlowski responded.
When the public health officer requested to “explain” why she was there, Pawlowski remarked that he was “not really interested in what you have to say.” He agreed, however, to read over the paperwork she gave to him.
“What we want to do is make sure that we’re not going to disrupt any of the religious service,”she said. She expressed a desire to “explain the order, serve the order and then we can stand in the back.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no! You can contact my lawyer,” he replied. “My lawyer takes care of this. I’m not interested to listen to any word you have to say. I do not cooperate with Gestapo. I do not talk to the Nazis. You came in your uniforms like thugs. That’s what you are.” Pawlowski also referred to the officials as “brown shirts” and “Nazi Gestapo communist fascists,” reiterating that “I do not cooperate with Nazis.”
Calgary Police Service released a statement at the time suggesting that their presence at the church was justified because of a concern that “people in attendance were not adhering to the government’s COVID-19 public health orders, which are in place to ensure everyone’s safety.”
In the previous video, which showed police trying to shut down the church during Holy Week, Pawlowski received plaudits from people worldwide for his actions in forcefully ordering law enforcement officers — including a police officer and public health officer — off the church’s property after they interrupted a Passover mass. The video documenting his encounter with the local law enforcement went viral, receiving more than 3 million views. Throughout the video, Pawlowski is seen telling law enforcement officials to “get out.” He also commanded that they “don’t come back without a warrant” and called them “Gestapo” and “Nazi psychopaths.” About a minute after the video started, they began to depart from the property.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is blaming the pandemic for soaring gas prices. Since President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, the national average gas price has soared more than 50 cents. As of Friday, it stood at nearly $3 per gallon — $2.96. The average was $2.38 per gallon when Biden took office, and $2.11 per gallon on Election Day last year.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted Granholm on Friday about skyrocketing gas prices, asking the former Michigan Democratic governor whether high energy prices will slow down the post-pandemic economic recovery.
“Beyond whether or not you think your policies are to blame, are you worried that the prices could impact whether or not Americans travel, which is, of course, needed to put money back into the economy?” Tapper asked.
In response, Granholm suggested an out-of-control COVID-19 virus is to blame for higher prices at the pump.
“People need to travel, you’re right, but we need to get the virus under control first, we need to get to that 70%, we need to get to herd immunity,” Granholm replied.
“Why have gas prices gone up? Could that be because of the virus itself as well? Everything is tied together,” she added. “So I just want to say, this administration is totally focused on getting this virus under control, which means the economy will get under control, and then investing in the nation so that we can go big on America.”
Ironically, Granholm’s remark about herd immunity comes after the New York Times published a story suggesting herd immunity in the U.S. is no longer probable. While typical culprits such as refinery maintenance and converting to summertime blends are partly to blame for the surge in gas prices, oil expert David Blackmon recently explained in Forbes the Biden administration’s policies are also a major contributor.
“Since last November 3, the average price per gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. has skyrocketed by 75 cents. The markets clearly see the Biden/Harris administration as one that will work to inhibit U.S. oil production, which will also have the effect of tightening the global market, and traders have responded by driving up the price of crude oil,” Blackmon wrote.
He explained:
President Biden’s Day 1 executive orders to cancel the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and suspend the program for oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters were just initial shots across the bow. His order to raise the estimate for the “social cost of carbon” by over 700% will inevitably result in regulatory actions that will raise the cost of producing oil in the U.S., as will the coming effort by the Biden EPA to convince the courts to allow it to regulate carbon as a “criteria pollutant,” a topic I’ll address in more detail in the coming days.
All of these actions and more to come will increase the costs of not just oil and gasoline, but all forms of non-renewable energy for consumers, will make the country increasingly reliant on foreign oil imports and thus will render the country less energy secure than before. These outcomes are entirely predictable and are in fact features of the Biden/Harris plan, which is in part designed to make EVs and renewables more competitive by raising the cost of fossil fuels and other more traditional forms of energy. That’s not a value judgement: it’s just reality.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
In recent years, the number of Christians identifying as “Christian Socialists” or “Christian Communists” has skyrocketed in a way not seen in over 40 years. Sarah Ngu, in her 2020 article “Why These Young American Christians Embrace Socialism” wrote the following: “Over the past three years, some American Christians have rediscovered this tradition and found themselves gravitating to socialism—in all its varieties, from democratic socialism to full-fledged communism.” Gary Dorrien, a professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, writes “The revival (of Christian socialism) is a Christian flank of the current upsurge for democratic socialist”. For the most part, the orthodox Christian community has remained silent about this growing trend, seemingly oblivious to the dangers. It’s time we acknowledged how the Trojan Horse of Socialism entered the Church, and fight back.
First, doctrine and history make clear that Biblical Christianity and Socialism and/or Communism are in opposition on fundamental levels. The intellectual forefather of Socialism, Karl Marx, taught this about Christianity: “The social principle of Christianity preaches cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility….” Marx further asserted “The more of himself that man gives to God, the less he has left of himself”. Like all future communist and socialist leaders who follow Marx, he believed: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.” (Communist Manifesto, the Bible of Communism).
The history of the socialist war against Christianity is instructive. “The League of the Militant Godless” was developed by early Soviet leaders like Leon Trotsky and Lenin. Its slogan tells volumes: “The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism”. In just over 15 years, the League boasted 3.5 million members and included a hundred ethnicities. This was while Soviets in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were executing tens of thousands of Priests, millions of Christians, demolishing churches and ruthlessly suppressing Christianity. The official literature of the Comintern (International Communist Front), stated “One of the most important tasks of the cultural revolution affecting the wide masses is the task of systematically and unswervingly combating religion – the opiate of the people.”
Ben Gitlow was a top figure in the early Communist Party (USA), and twice ran as Vice President of the US on the Communist Party ticket in 1924 and 1928. He left the Communist Party in 1929, and began hearings before Congress about Communist infiltration in America starting in 1939. According to Gitlow in answering Congress about the Communist “united front” technique of infiltrating America: “the tactic of the united front adopted by the Communists in 1922 after they realized that their militant policy for instigating a revolution in Germany and then throughout Europe and the world had failed…….. The united front tactic enabled the Communists to greatly increase the effectiveness of their infiltration activities.” The aims were to first build pro-Soviet sentiment in America. Second, to set conditions for Communists to capture trade unions. Third to “Spread Communist propaganda, incite discontent amount the people, undermine the loyalty of the American people and to divide them on religion, national, racial, and economic lines.”
Importantly, Gitlow said this about infiltration of the Christian Church in America: “the united front policy enabled the Communists to widely expand their infiltration activities on the religious field because instead of using the Communist Party directly (on Christian organizations)”, they used united-front organizations not directly connected to the Communist Party. Communist Party USA leader Manning Johnson told Congress that “deceit” about the anti-Christian nature was “a major policy of the Communist Propaganda”. According to Johnson: “(Communists) made fine gestures and honeyed words to the church people which could be will likened unto the sea nymphs luring millions to moral decay, spiritual death, and spiritual slavery. An illustration of this treachery, I might point out, is smiling, sneaky Earl Browder, for example, who was vice chairman of the American League Against War and Fascism, greeting and praising ministers and other church workers participating with him in the united front anti-war activities, while secretly harboring in his heart only contempt for them and for the religion that they represented.”
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and no longer commands the worldwide Comintern. However, Communism as a worldwide movement continues. The ideology spawned during those decades made substantial inroads into the Church and academia (an estimated 18% of American Professors today identify as Marxist). United Methodist Reverend Lindsey Joyce provides a window into the modern infiltration: “Socialism gave me a politics that finally provided clarity….. It wasn’t about my individualistic faith or spiritual gifts.” Christianity centers around individual spiritual redemption, while socialism is about the collective and material. Communist “Christian” Dean Dettloff is indicative of the fraud being promulgated to soften and revive Communism within the Church. Dettloff claims “the worst abuses in history have actually been committed by people who are devoted to Jesus Christ”. This glosses over the upwards of 100 million people who died under 20th century communism, a number that dwarfs almost 2000 years of alleged Christian “abuses”.
The Church can no longer remain silent. The Trojan Horse of Socialism and Communism, wheeled in to the US in the 1920s, is a growing “enemy within”. Neither Communism, nor Socialism can be reconciled with Christianity, and it’s time to voice that truth boldly and loudly. We fight back with spiritual weapons and in Christian love, but against this threat we must fight back.
ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR:
Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book Articles from War.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Pastor John MacArthur speaks at Grace Community Church’s Shepherd’s Conference in 2020. | Facebook/Shepherds’ Conference
Pastor John MacArthur has warned that culture is “systematically designed” and “weaponized to destroy children” and stressed that God will severely judge parents who fail to raise their offspring “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
“What we’re facing today is fierce — I will confess — [but] of all the things that disturb me in this culture, of all the horrific, sinful, wretched, wicked, corrupt influences that go on in this culture, I think the thing that distresses me most is the war on children,” MacArthur, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, said in a sermon delivered over the weekend.
“… This culture is weaponized to destroy children. It’s systematically designed to do that.”
Abortion has resulted in 62.5 million babies “slaughtered in the womb” since Roe v. Wade, MacArthur said, adding that even if a child makes it to birth, they will be bombarded with anti-Christian teaching in the world.
“It is likely that the child will be sent to a public school and come under the influence of those whose agenda is anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Scripture,” he said. “As you know, our country [and] the politicians who lead it are making laws that are devastating to children under the pressure of sexual freedom, homosexuality, transgenderism. The desire is to make that normal and to punish people who speak against it with laws in the category of hate speech. The lies of systemic racism and the race hustlers dominate the ideologies of universities and even churches.”
The entertainment industry, social media, and big tech “literally pump out things that destroy children,” the pastor said, adding: “Children are under a relentless assault by all the forces of evil, and they are defenseless. And we have a society and a culture that wants to make sure that those who are pumping out this destruction are free to keep doing it without restraint.
“Children are defenseless,” he emphasized. “When their parents sell them to a human trafficker, who drops them 8 to 10 feet over a wall into Sodom and Gomorrah all by themselves. Or when the Disney Corporation creates characters that are transgender to seduce children into accepting wickedness as normal. Or when parents insanely offer their children gender identity options. Children are under assault now.”
It’s the God-given responsibility of parents to raise children to fear and love the Lord, MacArthur stressed, pointing out that “God judges when one generation fails its responsibility to pass on righteousness to the next.”
“We’re going to have to answer to [God] too, for the little ones He gives us,” MacArthur said. “When they arrive, they are [H]is. And our life commitment is to make sure that as they grow and we influence them, they come to faith in Christ, right? That’s raising your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
A recent study from Barna found that 31% of teens and young adults “strongly agree” that what is “morally right and wrong changes over time, based on society,” compared to just 25% in 2018. A previous study from Barna characterized Gen Z as the “first truly ‘post Christian’ generation,” with only 4% adhering to a biblical worldview.
Singer Kira Fontana, who worked as a successful vocal coach to major labels and shows such as “Glee” and “The Voice” before leaving the industry to focus on Christian music, recently warned that the content coming out of the secular entertainment industry is “darker than most people could ever imagine” and is “poisoning” children like never before.
“If you look at the content of the lyrics of the songs that are played on the radio, it’s unbelievably immoral and dark and anti-Jesus. When I started to see the sheer percentage of songs and videos that were leaning heavily in that direction, I came to recognize that it could not be an accident. People in very powerful positions are backing it; there are gatekeepers who are wanting this content that we hear now to be prevalent in our society.”
“It’s akin to poisoning our community, and our kids are drinking from a very, very, very destructive cup,” she said. “I saw the effect on kids as I worked in the city, and that effect is spreading. LA is the communication center for this planet; when you go to other countries, you still see content made in Los Angeles. It became a really heavy responsibility.”
“People can try to minimize what comes out of Hollywood and say, ‘Oh, it’s just entertainment,’ but it has a tremendous effect on the psyches and souls of our young people,” she said. “The Church needs to stand up against this darkness because it’s truly having a devastating effect on the next generation.”
Recently, pastor and author Michael Youssef highlighted the Church’s responsibility in light of this reality, warning that if the Body of Christ fails to adhere to biblical truth, the consequences will be devastating for future generations.
“The home is number one, the church is number two and school is number three,” he said. “Even if the school is working against the kids, if they have the strength in the home and in the church, they will make it. But when the church avoids talking about issues or goes along with culture, then kids are confused.”
Satan is “working overtime” to deceive children,” Youssef said, adding: “If these words are terrifying, I’m glad they are because it’s time for us to build the fences around our children and their hearts and seal them with the Holy Spirit.”
“Children must know that there is a Satan, and he hates God, he hates God’s children, and he’s conspiring against them every minute of every day. Therefore, they have to galvanize themselves with the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, in order to fight.”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
ANSWER: “Sen. Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina.”
QUESTION: “Who will loads of Republicans support for president in 2024?”
I know this because … I am Carnac the Magnificent! Also because Republicans have latched onto a black candidate for president every four years, pretty much throughout my entire adult life. I’m one of those Republicans, having enthusiastically supported Alan Keyes in at least one of his three presidential runs, Herman Cain in 2012 (9-9-9!) and Ben Carson, as my backup to Trump, in 2016.
Other black Republicans who were — in the words of Michael Kinsley — “drooled over” by the GOP include Colin Powell (the Weekly Standard’s choice for the 1996 contest), Condoleezza Rice (supported by Dick Morris and Rush Limbaugh as our 2008 nominee), and Allen West (Glenn Beck’s choice in 2012). The rational reason for this is that no black person in modern America casually rolls into being a Republican. I never really gave it much thought, but all my friends and family are Republicans, so I guess I am, too.
That doesn’t happen. By the time any black person decides to announce to the world that he’s a Republican, a lot of thought has gone into it. There will be no hagiographic profiles in The New York Times, Pulitzer Prizes or hosting gigs on MSNBC. That’s why black Republicans, on average, are a lot ballsier than white Republicans (and 147% smarter than black Democrats).
But there’s also a ridiculous reason Republicans make goo-goo eyes at any black Republican. As the Social Justice Warriors say, they’ve “internalized their oppression.” Oh, you call us “racist,” media? We support (Fill in Name of Black Republican Here)! What do you say now, media?
Media: Yeah, he doesn’t count.
Even Sen. Scott has internalized his oppression, acting as if he has to constantly prove that he’s not “racist” and that he’s really black. Sen. Scott’s big cause — and, indeed, about the only congressional legislation being discussed other than President Biden’s spectacular list of free goodies — is a bill to reform policing. And not a sane “reform,” like putting more officers on the street. Oh no, Scott’s bill, this year and last, is premised on the loony belief of Black Lives Matter that cops are too aggressive and desperately in need of more supervision. This has succeeded primarily in giving liberals yet another basis for attacking Republicans, sneering, as Vox put it, that Scott has the “unenviable task” of “talking to…Republicans” about race and policing.
Last year, Scott promoted his “Justice Act” with an op-ed in USA Today that opened with this:
“At the age of 21, I was pulled over for simply having an improper headlight, and yet the officer felt the need to place his hand on his weapon and call me ‘boy.’ Even today, while I have the privilege of serving as a United States senator, I am not immune to being stopped while driving at home in South Carolina or even while walking onto the grounds of the Capitol.”
I’VE NEVER HEARD ABOUT BLACK MEN BEING STOPPED BY THE POLICE! Who knew? Except anyone not in a coma for the past 20 years. I don’t doubt that it’s awful to be perceived as a possible criminal by the police. But there are worse things. Like being killed.
Thanks to the anti-police BLM movement, the year after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, the murder rate spiked 12.1 percent — the greatest year-to-year increase since 1968.
After BLM exploded last year in response to Saint George’s martyrdom in Minneapolis, the 2020 gun murder rate shot up by an astonishing 31 percent compared to 2019. It was the biggest year-to-year increase in history. And consider that the murders in honor of George Floyd didn’t even begin until sometime after May 25 last year. The majority of those doing both the murdering and the dying were black. (As I’ve often pointed out, in addition to everything else, criminals are lazy. They might prefer to commit crimes against other ethnic groups, but don’t want to leave their neighborhoods.)
Just two weeks ago in Chicago, a 7-year-old girl was fatally shot as she sat in a McDonald’s drive-thru line with her father. Some would say that’s even worse than Sen. Scott being stopped by the police.
Wouldn’t a great cause for any U.S. senator — especially a black senator — be to oppose the effectively pro-criminal, aggressively anti-police BLM, instead of catering to them?
Democrats, through their media, are using race to tear America apart for political gain and power.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
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
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
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
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
![R-TX Rep. Brian Babin speaks on border crisis [Youtube:Screenshot:Daily Caller]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/R-TX-Rep.-Brian-Babin-speaks-on-border-crisis-YoutubeScreenshotDaily-Caller-scaled-e1622127412397.jpg "R-TX Rep. Brian Babin speaks on border crisis [Youtube:Screenshot:Daily Caller]")
Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
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