The debate last night was chilling for many citizens as President Joe Biden clearly struggled to stay focused and responsive. It appeared to put on display what Special Counsel Robert Hur saw in his interview before concluding that Biden’s loss of mental capacity would make a prosecution difficult. What may be equally troubling for Democrats and the media is a poll that came out just before the debate that shows more swing-state voters see former President Donald Trump rather than President Joe Biden as protecting democracy.
According to a new poll from the Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, if “democracy is on the ballot,” the majority of the public believes that threat comes from elsewhere, including possibly Biden himself.
Over half of the respondents told the Washington Post that threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president. However, 44% said they think Trump would do a better job at handling those threats. Only 33% of respondents said they believe Biden would be better for democracy.
Many citizens are alarmed by prosecutions like the one in Manhattan where the legal system seems to have been weaponized against political opponents.
The poll not only shows the diminishing faith in the President but also in the press. The media has been unrelenting in pushing the narrative that this election is a choice between democracy and tyranny. The public is clearly tuning out the media message. This is only the latest example of that widening gap. Indeed, the whole “Let’s Go Brandon” chant is as much a criticism of the media as it is President Biden.
I have previously written that democracy is not on the ballot, but free speech is. The Biden Administration has chilling analogies to the Adams Administration in the weaponization of the legal system and the crackdown on free speech. What should most concern Biden is the possibility of another aspect of history repeating itself: a defeat like the one in 1800.
The anti-free speech movement has flourished largely in the echo chambers of academia and the media. It is time for the public to render its judgment. Free speech is again on the ballot. It is time for the public to decide.
The presidential debate last night was chilling to watch as President Joe Biden clearly struggled to retain his focus and, at points, seemed hopelessly confused. The winner was clear: Special Counsel Robert Hur. For months, Democrats in Congress and the media have attacked Hur for his report that the president came across as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur concluded that prosecuting Biden would be difficult because a jury would view him as a sympathetic figure of a man with declining mental capabilities. That was evident last night, and the question is whether a man who was too diminished to be a criminal defendant can still be a president for four more years.
Hur laid out evidence that President Biden had unlawfully retained and mishandled classified evidence for decades. However, he also concluded that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He found that “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
What has followed is the usual pile-on in the media with legal analysts, press, and pundits denouncing Hur for his findings.
Hur likely does not anticipate any apologies even as commentators on CNN and MSNBC admit that there are now unavoidable questions of Biden’s ability to be the nominee.
Democrats have repeatedly insisted that Hur did not find Biden diminished and that he actually was impressed by his memory and mental acuity. Hur contradicted that in his own testimony before Congress.
Indeed, the denial campaign took on a bizarre character, particularly when Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) insisted that Hur “exonerated” Biden. Hur pushed back: “I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration.’ That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.”
Jayapal shot back, “You exonerated him.”
Hur responded, “I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in the report.”
The debate showed not only what Hur saw but why the Justice Department is making a clearly laughable privilege claim to delay any release of the audiotape until after the election.
A leading House Republican filed a resolution in Congress urging Vice President Kamala Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment in the wake of President Joe Biden’s performance Thursday night in the first debate with former President Donald Trump. Even Democrats and Biden supporters described the president’s performance as poor, though few have suggested a need to invoke the 25th Amendment.
“I intend to put forth a resolution calling upon the [vice president] to immediately use her powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene & mobilize the principal officers of the Cabinet to declare the [president of the United States] is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote on X on Friday morning.
I intend to put forth a resolution calling upon the @VP to immediately use her powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene & mobilize the principal officers of the Cabinet to declare the @POTUS is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office.
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, sets up a process by which the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can notify the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office, enabling the vice president to become acting president. Under the amendment, the president can submit a written declaration that no inability exists, at which time he would resume his office.
Throughout the debate, Biden spoke with a raspy voice and made numerous verbal stumbles, including instances of rambling.
🤔What is going on here? Real video of Joe Biden in the middle of a presidential debate "The ability of Medicare… to… ugh.. for the ability… for us to be able to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma companies." pic.twitter.com/XExK7ywKbu
The resolution directly calls upon Harris to take office as acting president.
“Whereas President Joseph R. Biden has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated his inability to discharge the powers and duties of the presidency, including, among others, the powers and duties of the commander-in-chief: Now, therefore, be it resolved that the House of Representatives calls upon Vice President Kamala D. Harris to immediately use her powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare that President Joseph R. Biden is unable to discharge the duties and powers of the office; and to transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives that she will be immediately assuming the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
“A lot of people who are fans and supporters of President Biden or who are Democrats or who are just worried about the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the presidency feel like this was not a strong performance tonight from President Biden,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told Harris. “I want to hear your assessment and how you respond to those critics.”
“Well, it was a slow start, there’s no question about that, but I thought it was a strong finish,” the vice president responded. “What we know is that when you look at the two sides of the ledger, what we had in Joe Biden is someone who wanted to have a debate based on facts, based on truth, and in Donald Trump we have what we have come to expect, which is someone who will push lies and distract from the reality of the damage he has created and continues to create in our country.”
Harris said that Biden has done “historic work” and did not mention the 25th Amendment.
🚨BREAKING: Kamala Harris dismisses concerns about Joe Biden's debate performance, and doesn't mention the 25th Amendment. pic.twitter.com/85DREWoZqJ
Yet former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Biden failed to demonstrate that he was up to the job.
“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it,” McCaskill said. “He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.”
😲Former Sen. @clairecmc: Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn't do it. He had one thing he had to accomplish and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that.‼️ pic.twitter.com/CLcoRiJba1
Two Republican senators also suggested Biden’s performance suggested an inability to carry out his duties.
“We’ve definitely entered 25th Amendment territory,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote on X.
“If you think Democrats in Washington and across the country aren’t talking about the 25th Amendment right now, you’re crazy,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote. “It’s not a question of whether he should be on the ballot. That ship has sailed. It’s a question of whether he can serve as president right now.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said Biden’s debate performance will strengthen her calls for Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the tapes of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
“Every member of Congress has a constitutional duty to ensure we have a coherent President,” she wrote on X. “We MUST hear the Hur tapes. A lawsuit can take years. I will be calling up the vote to hold Garland in inherent contempt this morning. This is a national security issue.”
Every member of Congress has a constitutional duty to ensure we have a coherent President. We MUST hear the Hur tapes. A lawsuit can take years. I will be calling up the vote to hold Garland in inherent contempt this morning. This is a national security issue.
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) June 28, 2024
Will Democrats replace Joe Biden as their presidential nominee?
It’s not that simple, logistically or politically, as long he’s still alive. States have pretty strict rules on last-second ballot changes, but Democrats have always found ways to get courts to rewrite laws for them at the last second. Just look at what they did for Frank Lautenberg and Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. It would be a heavy lift but not an impossible one.
The real problem for Democrats is political: Removing Biden as nominee requires them to deny and reject the election results of their voters in all 50 states after they spent four years accusing everyone else of being “election deniers.” They also will have a very hard time removing Biden as nominee but leaving him in as president. If he’s not mentally fit to be on the campaign trail or debate stage, how on Earth can he be fit enough to remain as president? The downsides of that strategy are immense, with little upside.
And that brings us to the real problem for Democrats: Kamala Harris. They know she’s political kryptonite because she’s both incredibly stupid and extremely unlikeable. Democrat voters can’t even stand her. So, if they manage to get rid of Biden both as nominee and as president, they end up stuck with her, which might even be worse than doing nothing. Do they really want to be in the position of preventing the first female president from running as an incumbent? And can they sideline her while promoting another white dude like Gavin Newsom when their entire party is built around identity politics?
So, the predicament for Democrats right now is they have to somehow find out how to get rid of Biden as the nominee, keep him as president, and prevent the black woman who is currently vice president from being the nominee. I don’t think it’s a needle they’ll be able to thread without resorting to violence and republic-destroying tactics.
Now, they could just reap what they’ve sown, accept the consequences of their choices, and accept losing an election for once — but I’m not holding my breath.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Democrats are in a full-blown panic attack over Biden’s debate performance with Donald Trump. Rumors are swirling around about Michelle Obama jumping in to save them.
Trump Campaign Fact-Checks Biden in Real Time — Here are the Details (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft June 27, 2024
In a bold move to keep the current administration accountable, the Trump campaign has launched a real-time fact-checking initiative aimed at Joe Biden’s statements during the debate.
Here are the details:
FACT CHECK: BIDEN FUELED THE INFLATION CRISIS
Crooked Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed inflation was “9%” when he took office, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
Biden took office with year-over-year inflation at 1.4% — then promised rising inflation was “transitory” as it went higher and higher, peaking at 9.1% well over a year later.
Under Biden, Americans have experienced the longest period of high inflation since the late 1980s — with overall prices up 20.1% since he took office. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Free speech may have taken a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling giving Big Government and Big Tech free rein over the First Amendment, but an attorney for the private plaintiffs in the case says the battle is far from over.
NCLA represents the private plaintiffs in the ruling that saw a 6-3 majority in Murthy v. Missouri reverse a lower court’s injunction that blocked the federal government from partnering with social media giants to silence posts it doesn’t like. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood wrote, the decision — based on an absurd standing argument — effectively frees the Biden administration to continue its censoring operations during the 2024 election.
“The Supreme Court majority has practically erased the First Amendment and permitted government to co-opt private entities, like social media platforms, to accomplish its censorship aims,” NCLA said in a press release following the ruling.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the plaintiffs failed to establish standing because they did not “demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek.”
“Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” the decision opines.
‘Truth Can Get You Fired’
But if the past is truly an indicator of the future, it’s difficult to reconcile the standing argument with the speech suppression that occurred, particularly against those who rightly questioned the government’s Covid policies and voiced legitimate concerns over Covid vaccines.
NCLA’s clients, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, were all censored for daring to challenge the government’s “disinformation” campaign on the pandemic. It cost Kulldorff his job as a respected professor at Harvard.
“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story — a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for City Journal. Kulldorff had questioned the lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
"Scientific institutions have enjoyed enormous prestige among the public. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the dreadful performance of the experts and institutions, ended this idyll. – @mgurrihttps://t.co/3KcnfTq0Gj
No one was hurt by the government? The majority opinion asserts that while the Big Tech speech suppressors did have content moderation policies and may have been censoring users, the plaintiffs provided no documentation showing the government coerced the social media giants to do so. As censor-in-chief Joe Biden would say, that’s malarkey.
Younes said the ruling is rooted in some “factual errors” by the majority. The Louisiana District Court Judge who on July 4, 2023, issued the injunction against the government said the executive branch“seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty conducted a thorough review of voluminous records showing dozens of agencies communicating with Big Tech companies, according to Younes.
“[There were] probably close to 100 federal officials that we know of who were colluding with, coercing, pressuring, influencing the companies to effectuate their censorship desires,” the attorney said, adding that the justices in the majority appear to have “read the government’s brief and just believed everything they said.”
In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the government’s conduct was “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
“Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”
Difficult but Not Impossible
While the high court remanded the case to the lower court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Younes said expanded discovery might just stop the overreaching government yet. NCLA plans to go after government and Big Tech communications involving its clients to show the direct harm caused, as demanded in the majority’s standing argument.
“The district court has shown that it believes in our case and … said this is arguably the most massive attack on free speech in the history of the United States, which I agree with,” Younes said. “The federal government was censoring entire narratives, entire lines of thought. If you questioned the efficacy of the vaccines in 2021, even if you were a vaccine expert like our client, Martin Kulldorff, you would be censored on social media, as he was.”
The case may also get an assist from a presidential candidate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running as an independent, had sought to intervene in the Supreme Court case but was turned back by the majority. If anyone knows censorship, it’s RFK Jr., who was blocked from social media as part of what the government and corporate media have described as the “Disinformation Dozen” for challenging the government’s faulty narrative on Covid vaccines. Kennedy has lots of emails showing the Biden administration trying to silence his speech.
As government water carrier USA Today reported, one email shows the Biden administration pouncing after Kennedy suggested baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death may have been caused by his Covid-19 vaccine.
“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the digital director for the White House’s Covid response team wrote in an email to an official at Twitter, the publication reported.
Alito also dissented in the court’s rejection of Kennedy’s motion to join the lawsuit, suggesting standing could be a problem and RFK Jr. could help take away that argument.
“[The Supreme Court is] making it very difficult to bring the case, but they’re not making it impossible,” Younes said.
If the Supreme Court won’t stand up to assaults on the First Amendment, Congress must, said plaintiff Jill Hines, NCLA client and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana.
“After reviewing the shocking and incriminating evidence indicating a massive government censorship scheme, the Justices erroneously determined to allow the government access to social media companies for the purpose of undermining free speech,” she said in the press release. “Congress must act immediately to defund agencies and third parties actively involved in this broadly pervasive and unconstitutional censorship scheme.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
A bus bearing the faces of female athletes, coaches, and sports advocates has been traveling the country to raise awareness of the Biden administration’s attack on Title IX. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal)
The Biden administration is waging war on Title IX and, in response, a group of female athletes, coaches, and sports advocates have spent the month of June touring the country to sound the alarm.
Title IX has long served to protect girls’ and women’s education and sports opportunities. The 1972 federal education amendment requires there be equal opportunities for men and women in schools across the country, but President Joe Biden is working to undo those protections by unilaterally rewriting Title IX.
“The Biden administration has decided they want sex to be equivalent to gender identity; meaning, anyone that identifies as a woman, aka men, can take female opportunities,” former collegiate swimmer Paula Scanlan says.
Scanlan was forced to compete with a male athlete who identifies as a woman on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team. Now, she is speaking out against Biden’s attempted changes to Title IX because, by redefining sex in Title IX to include gender identity, Biden is swinging the door wide open for girls and women to be relegated to the sidelines in their own sports.
Scanlan says she thought it was a prank when a male swimmer, William Thomas, announced in the fall of 2019 that he would be competing on the female team the following season.
“I thought that someone was going to come out with a camera crew and say, ‘Pranked you! We’re starting a new prank TV show,’” Scanlan said, explaining that a male competing on the women’s team just sounded “so unreal.” But it was real, and soon Scanlan and the other University of Pennsylvania female swimmers were sharing a locker room with Thomas, who now goes by the name Lia Thomas.
After she graduated, and after watching Thomas take medals and opportunities from female athletes, Scanlan joined other defenders of women’s sports, among them Riley Gaines, and began speaking out about her experience.
Scanlan is one of the many female athletes who have participated in the Independent Women’s Forum Take Back Title IX Summer Bus Tour to inform Americans of the Biden administration’s bid to change Title IX, which not only threatens women’s sports, but throws open restrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories.
Scanlan and Kim Russell, the former head women’s lacrosse coach at Oberlin College, join the “Problematic Women” podcast to discuss the fight to keep women’s sports female only.
Below is my column in USA Today on why the opponents of President Joe Biden should make free speech the focus of this election. With the Supreme Court taking an off ramp in Murthy v. Missouri on Internet censorship, the free speech community is left, for now, with the political process to protect free speech. It is a potentially unifying issue for many Americans who are alarmed by the current anti-free speech movement. I have previously written that the Biden Administration has chilling analogies to the Adams Administration in the weaponization of the legal system and the crackdown on free speech. What should most concern Biden is the possibility of another aspect of history repeating itself: a defeat like the one in 1800.
The 2024 election is looking strikingly similar to the election of 1800 and, if so, it does not bode well for Biden. In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” released last week, I discuss our long struggle with free speech as a nation. It is an unvarnished history with powerful stories of our heroes and villains in the struggle to define what Justice Louis Brandeis called our “indispensable right.”
One of the greatest villains in that history was President John Adams, who used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his political opponents – including journalists, members of Congress and others. Many of those prosecuted by the Adams administration were Jeffersonians. In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran on the issue and defeated Adams.
Government efforts to limit free speech are Orwellian
We are now seeing what is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in our history. President Joe Biden is, in my view, the most anti-free speech president since Adams. Under his administration, we have seen a massive censorship system funded and directed by the government.A federal judge described the system as “Orwellian” in its scope and impact.
Biden has repeatedly called for greater censorship and accused social media companies of “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices. Other Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have pushed for restrictions on “unacceptable” speech. The Biden administration seeks to censor even true statements as disinformation.
For example, I testified before Congress last year on how Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
The left has picked up the cudgels of censorship and blacklisting once used against them. During the McCarthy period, liberals were called “communist sympathizers.” Now, conservative justices are called“insurrectionist sympathizers.”
Candidates should call out Biden on censorship
In this election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, Donald Trump and Cornel West should talk about the threats against free speech at every debate and stump speech. They will have to overcome a news media that has been complicit in the attacks on free speech, but these candidates can break through by raising it as a key issue dividing Biden from the rest of the field.
So far, the anti-free speech movement has flourished largely in the echo chambers of academia and the media. It is time for the public to render its judgment.
As discussed in my book, we are hardwired for free speech. It is in our DNA. Despite these periods of crackdowns on free speech, we have always rejected those who wanted to regulate the views of others. Jefferson called the Federalists “the reign of the witches.” (Ironically, Jefferson would himself prosecute critics, though not to the same extent as Adams).
Attacks on free speech have returned with a vengeance before another presidential election. After fighting in the courts and in the public to expand censorship, Biden should now have to defend it with the voters. Let’s have at it, as we did in 1800.
Free speech is again on the ballot. It is time for the public to decide.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trump had illegal immigration down to a trickle compared to Biden blowing up the dam and allowing over 10 million Illegals along with unknown gotta-aways and terrorists.
Biden’s Broken Border Allowed 400 Illegals Tied to ISIS-Affiliated Human Smuggling Network into US, The Whereabouts of Over 50 Remain Unknown
By Margaret Flavin – June 26, 2024
Two Venezuelan illegal immigrants were arrested for 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray’s murder in Houston, Texas, after reportedly abducting her, strangling her, and dumping her body in a bayou.
An illegal from Ecuador wielding a “machete-style” knife kidnapped two school children from a New York park in broad daylight, tied them up, and then sexually assaulted the young girl.
The Gateway Pundit also reported that an illegal alien from El Salvador was charged with brutally raping and murdering Rachel Morin, a mother-of-five, on a Maryland hiking trail last year.
Now, disturbing news from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals that they have identified over 400 illegals who have entered the U.S. from Central Asia and elsewhere by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network and are considered “subjects of concern.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Miss Maryland USA professes to celebrate both the beauty and confidence of young women, promising a “fair environment in which young women have the opportunity to develop skills that will help them win in life by being their personal best in everything they do.”
But on June 1, when the beauty pageant crowned a man the winner of Miss Maryland USA, a number of the contestants felt that they had not been granted that fair and supportive environment they were promised.
The male winner goes by the name Bailey Anne Kennedy and identifies as a transgender woman. The day that he was crowned Miss Maryland USA was also the first day of Pride Month—a fact that was not lost on the contestants.
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Bailey Anne Kennedy was crowned the new Miss Maryland USA in June, becoming not only the first transgender woman to win the title but also the first Asian American to achieve the coveted honor. ❤️https://t.co/ldx4WgnksJpic.twitter.com/W7k79dC6S8
“I was shocked,” one contestant told The Daily Signal as she described how she found out that she was competing against a man. This contestant, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy, will be identified as Contestant A. “I had mixed feelings. I started to think that the winner might be predetermined.”
“A transgender woman gets crowned during first day of transgender Pride Month?” she asked. “It did not seem like a coincidence. Especially when owner of the pageant is a transgender woman herself. I was feeling like neither myself nor my fellow contestants had a fair opportunity from the beginning.”
Kennedy will now go on to compete for the title of Miss USA in Los Angeles in August. The 31-year-old beauty pageant contestant, who would reportedly be the oldest Miss USA winner in pageant history if he won, is married to Marine Corps officer Casey Guthrie.
Kennedy describes himself as a military wife. Immediately after winning the Miss Maryland contest, Kennedy marched in the Capitol Pride Parade in Washington, D.C.
“To be able to be in this position and be able to make an impact on my community, especially with the LGBTQIA community, military spouses, and immigrant women—to be able to make such an impact,” Kennedy told ABC News this week. “I think that’s just something that I could never dream up, and it’s such an honor to be here.”
This year, Miss Maryland USA removed multiple requirements for the contest and now allows women who are over the age of 28 and women who are married to compete. And it is not lost on Kennedy that his win is breaking with former precedent for the contest.
“To win the whole thing, I knew it was bigger than me,” Kennedy told ABC. “I knew that ultimately, this will mean something more to my community, the LGBTQIA community and military spouses and immigrant girls. Hopefully, this will send out a message to everybody, and it will be a delicious invitation for people to just be themselves and to forge their own path, even if they can’t see.”
Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by Instagram direct message, the male beauty contestant blocked The Daily Signal. Miss USA similarly did not respond to a number of requests for comment.
The Daily Signal reviewed a copy of the 2024 Miss Maryland USA Contestant Agreement, which specifically asks contestants to verify that they are biologically female. If a contestant is not a woman but is a man, such as in Kennedy’s case, that contestant would have to provide proof that he’s legally recognized by the government as a woman—and maybe even that he had undergone so-called transgender surgeries and hormones.
“I attest that I am a female, recognized legally and medically as such in the United States,” the agreement states. “If your sex designated at birth was not female, [you] must be able to provide legal and governmental recognition of [your] assigned sex as female by the U.S. federal government or [your] U.S. state of residence (which may include, if requested by us, any certification that [you have] fully completed sex reassignment required by your state and/or provided by a physician).”
A former state-level contestant within the Miss Universe organization who spoke with The Daily Signal about the matter expressed that she was very concerned that a man was allowed to not only compete in and win the competition, but also to share women’s spaces while some of these women were completely unaware of his actual sex.
“We need transparency and consent to protect women-led spaces, especially those that involve minor teen contestants,” said the former contestant, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
“Unless things have changed from when I competed, contestants share changing rooms and bedrooms,” she added. “Parents (and all contestants) have the right to know of biological male individuals occupying their female children’s private spaces, including shared changing rooms and hotel rooms. Further, organizations must not impose political agendas that undermine the hard work, finances, and dedication of contestants.”
A Man … or a Woman?
Multiple female contestants who spoke with The Daily Signal said they were not sure if Kennedy was a man or a woman until after the competition had finished and he had been declared Miss Maryland USA.
This is likely due to the fact that Kennedy does, very convincingly, look like a female beauty queen. Photographs of the male contestant show that Kennedy is toned, leggy, and slim, with long black hair and accentuated cleavage. Several of the women who spoke to The Daily Signal indicated that Kennedy looks more masculine in person and that his online photographs depict him as more feminine than he is in real life.
“I first realized I competed with a biological man a few days after the competition,” said contestant Elizabeth McCarthy. “I saw it on the Miss Maryland USA Instagram post. At first, I was shocked. I felt sick to my stomach and was so upset for the other women in the top five. I was disgusted and disappointed that the pageant coordinators allowed women to undress in front of a man without any disclosure.”
“I just don’t understand what happened to embracing your TRUE self,” she added. “The self that God made perfectly in His image. I don’t understand what happened to loving ourselves for who we ARE, not how we WANT to be. I feel absolutely terrible that society pushes us to change who we are. It’s not fair, kind, or loving.”
A third contestant, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy and will be identified as Contestant B, said that she felt betrayed by the way the contest was handled.
“I felt lied to,” she shared. “I would’ve liked to know ahead of time, as I was subject to change, utilize the bathroom, and be in the same space as a biological man … it surely seemed like the organization and Bailey was trying to hide this fact until it was convenient to them.”
A third Miss Maryland contestant, who will be identified as Contestant C, stressed that she is “not against the LGBTQ community” and believes that individuals who identity as LGBTQ have “rights just like every individual.”
“However, I do believe the competition was rigged,” she shared. “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that it was not. For example, I think in previous years, the pageant secured different judges … I think they were changed. In addition, the staff were not respectful nor pleasant. I completely understand that this is a pageant and it is fast paced, but there is a certain respect that individuals should provide, especially since we are all grown women who can take direction and listen.”
“I believe it is disheartening to have so many women pay for coaches, hair and makeup, and find sponsors when they already knew who they were going to select,” Contestant C added.
Contestant B also pointed out that Kennedy is a self-described “stay-at-home wife with no kids.” Given that the Miss Maryland USA contest awards women not only for beauty but for hard work and professional success, Contestant B found it odd that Kennedy would win without a job or a family.
“I met a lot of women who were moguls in business, philanthropy, and more. But Bailey ended up winning without a job or being in school,” the contestant stressed. “How does that showcase or inspire women/young women that they can do anything?”
A Pride Month Win
Several of the women that The Daily Signal spoke with believe that Kennedy’s win was attached to his transgender identification, noting that he won the pageant on June 1, the very first day of “Pride Month.”
“It was Pride Week when she won, so I would assume it was to show that the pageant community does not discriminate,” Contestant C said.
“I feel Kennedy won this competition because it was set up,” McCarthy told The Daily Signal. “What are the odds that a trans-identifying individual wins the Miss Maryland USA title on the first day of Pride Month? I feel that men are taking over everything that women worked so hard for.”
“I believe Kennedy won this title solely based on her status of being transgender and the first transgender to win Miss Maryland, especially it being the first day of Pride Month,” Contestant B argued.
“This organization wanted to check all of its diversity and different boxes, so instead of selecting the most qualified, they selected what would make them stand out to the new organization owner, who is also transgender,” she added, arguing, “This space is less about women supporting women and more about how many boxes we can check.”
All of the female contestants who spoke with The Daily Signal said that they wished Miss Maryland USA would have been truthful in acknowledging why they selected Kennedy as the winner, and they argued that Miss Maryland USA owes the 2024 contestants a “public apology.”
McCarthy even suggested that Miss Maryland USA replace Kennedy with first runner-up, Terra Johns. Johns, who did not return The Daily Signal’s request for comment, supported Kennedy publicly in an Instagram post and said she was “honored” to have the “opportunity” to watch Kennedy make history.
“You’re going to Miss USA, and I can’t wait to cheer you on!” she wrote. But in the same caption, the beauty pageant contestant and first runner-up also discussed the important of God’s plan for her life, hinting at disappointment.
“This is not rejection, it’s redirection,” she wrote. “God always has a plan, and I haven’t lost sight of that. I trust Him and I know that my best days lie ahead of me. As my best friend so eloquently reminded me before competition weekend, the true glory is in the process of becoming. Here’s to the beautiful unknown and to steppingstones of elevation. The work doesn’t stop here.”
Given that many of the contestants poured huge sums of money into their outfits, makeup, and hair, the women would like to see some kind of monetary compensation as well an apology.
“It’s expensive,” said one woman, “and they already had [picked] a winner.”
“I hope that they give all of the women their money back,” added another contestant. “Pageant life is big money, and I cannot imagine how much money they obtained from us. I believe that the Miss Maryland pageant should have held a separate pageant for transgender individuals where they can compete and go onto to become Miss USA if they would like to do so.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Joe Biden has been preparing for the debate for the past week, so who is running the country? Probably the same people who have been running it for the past 3-1/2 years: Obama and his puppet master Soros.
CNN Contacts Social Media Companies to Censor Conservative Media During Live Presidential Debate (VIDEO)
By Jordan Conradson – Jun 25, 2024
CNN is attempting to silence independent media and control the narrative surrounding the first 2024 Presidential debate on Thursday by not allowing the use of CNN’s live broadcast to report and comment on the debate in real time.
This revelation comes after CNN’s Kasie Hunt abruptly cut off Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, after she brought up Jake Tapper’s history of comparing Trump to Hitler and told people to “Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump.’”
It’s not enough to turn off President Trump’s microphone or to cut off spokespersons in interviews. Jesse Watters compared this move to slapping a gag order on the Trump campaign. “We knew Trump’s mic would be muted during the debate, but we didn’t know his campaign’s mic would be muted before it,” said Watters. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
President Joe Biden meets June 17 with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
If Democrats seek to swap out President Joe Biden for another candidate on the Nov. 5 ballot, they’ll face legal challenges, according to an analysis by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
That’s because a patchwork of state laws determines what a political party must do to substitute someone else as a presidential nominee.
“If there is a freezing moment or something very consequential that happens at the debate, the likelihood goes up,” Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, told reporters Tuesday.
CNN will host a 90-minute debate Thursday night between Biden and former President Donald Trump.
“There is not a political exception that if you’ve been trying to cover up the fact that your candidate has been declining rapidly to the extent that you are even invoking executive privilege to hide an audio tape … you just get to supersede all of the election integrity rules that exist in the various states,” Howell told reporters.
Special counsel Rober Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents from his years as vice president and senator characterized him as “elderly” and “struggling” with memory loss. The Biden administration invoked executive privilege to block release of audio recordings of his two interviews last fall with the special counsel. The Oversight Project is part of a multiparty lawsuit by CNN and other news outlets, as well as watchdog groups, to access the audio recordings of the Biden interviews.
More recently, Biden had a wandering incident at the G7 summit in Italy and also appeared to freeze onstage at the end of a Los Angeles fundraiser and be physically guided away by former President Barack Obama (who Biden served as vice president for eight years).
If delegates to the Democratic National Convention were to nominate another candidate for president in August, it might not affect relevant state laws, said Sam Dewey, counsel for Heritage’s Oversight Project.
“There are two separate questions. One is who gets the party’s nomination. The second is ballot access,” Dewey told reporters. “You can be nominated by a party and not necessarily have access to a ballot. We are seeing that right now with attempts by the DNC to keep Robert Kennedy, RFK Jr., off the ballot. It’s separate. Just being nominated by a party doesn’t get you on a ballot.”
Dewey continued:
Even if at the convention, superdelegates and a bunch of [other] delegates get together and said, ‘We’re not doing this, we’re subbing in the vice president [for Biden], we’re subbing in Hillary Clinton,’ pick whomever, that wouldn’t at all speak to what [our] memo was addressing, which was access to ballots. That’s an entirely different question. If someone drops out, that frequently is litigated.
The Oversight Project sent a memo on substituting candidates to top election officials in all 50 states for their review.
Battleground states such as Georgia and Nevada have procedures under which a presidential candidate may withdraw from the ballot. Wisconsin allows it to occur only in case of death, according to the memo.
“Important caveats include the timeline and triggering events,” the Oversight Project’s memo says, adding:
For example, some states allow withdrawal before the 74th day before an election, and failure to adhere to these timelines can result in the candidate’s name remaining on the ballot (which provides its own corollary of post-election litigation). Likewise, the rationale for withdrawal (death, medical, or other) can be outcome determinative. Some states, like South Carolina, do not allow withdrawal for political reasons.
Limited case law exists on swapping out political candidates on a ballot, the memo notes. And at least 31 states defer to state or national party rules and nominating committees in the event of a candidate’s withdrawal.
“These states circumvent the substitution process highlighted above,” the Oversight Project’s memo says. “There may be some avenues for challenges to these laws on improper delegation grounds, however, these may be marginally beneficial.”
For its part, the Biden White House has denied that the president has had any mental or physical problems barring his seeking a second four-year term. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued that recent videos unflattering to Biden were “cheap fakes.” First lady Jill Biden has said her husband is a great president “because” of his age.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the vicious attacks being directed at Judge Aileen Cannon as she addresses pre-trial motions in the Florida prosecution of former president Donald Trump. The sheer hypocrisy in the media is overwhelming after denouncing any criticism of Judge Juan Merchan in the Manhattan prosecution. For Cannon, it is nothing short of a press pile-on.
Here is the column:
The politicians, the press, and pundits are in a feeding frenzy around Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding in the Florida case against former President Donald Trump. There is a torrent of hit pieces and petty attacks on virtually every media platform. What is impressive is the complete lack of self-awareness over the hypocrisy of these attacks. Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times and other media outlets went into vapors when anyone uttered criticism of Manhattan Justice Juan Merchan in another Trump case.
In 2020, Judge Cannon was confirmed in a bipartisan vote, with the support of liberals such as Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.). Now she is being denounced as a “partisan, petty prima donna, “wacko, crazy, loony, nutty, ridiculous, and outlandish,” and a “right-wing hack.” From the descriptions in the Washington Post, New York Times and virtually every mainstream media outlet, you would think that Cannon was a freak in the courtroom, raving uncontrollably at any passerby.
These critics often stress that she is an appointee of Trump, even though many Trump appointees have ruled against the former president on 2020 election issues. And these same figures denounced Trump for attacking the perceived political bias of Democratic nominees in some of his cases.
Cannon was randomly selected, as opposed to Merchan, who was hand-picked to try Trump even though he is a political donor to President Joe Biden and has a daughter who is a major Democratic operative. Yet these same figures denounced those who questioned Merchan’s refusal to step aside or criticized his rulings against Trump throughout the trial.
In reality, the “loose Cannon” spin is utterly disconnected with her actual rulings.
She has ruled for and against both parties on major issues. That includes the rejection of major motions filed by the Trump team and most recently challenged Trump counsel on their claims that the Special Counsel is part of “a shadow government.”
Notably, when Cannon recently rejected the main motion for dismissal by the Trump team, the Washington Post buried that fact in an article titled “Judge Cannon Strikes Paragraph in Trump Classified Document Indictment.” The suggestion was that the striking of a single paragraph was more newsworthy than insisting that Trump go to trial on these counts. (Also buried in the article is a recognition that the removal of this one paragraph “does not have a substantive effect on the case.”)
Most recently, the left expressed nothing short of horror that Judge Cannon allowed the Trump team to argue a point of constitutional law in a hearing. Scholars and former prosecutors (including former attorneys general) have argued that the appointment of special counsels like Smith are unconstitutional. This is a novel and intriguing constitutional objection that is based on the text of the Constitution, which requires that high-ranking executive officers like U.S. Attorneys be appointed under statute or nominated by the president (and confirmed by the Senate).
Yet after the expiration of the Independent Counsel Act in Jun 1999, the Justice Department asserts the right to take any private citizen like Smith and effectively give him greater authority than a U.S. Attorney. This glaring inconsistency has led to a number of challenges. Thus far, they have been unsuccessful, but none have gone to the Supreme Court. Cannon wanted to hear oral arguments before ruling on the question. That decision has sent the politicians and reporters into another frenzy of faux outrage and indignation.
MSNBC legal analyst and NYU law professor Melissa Murray went on with host Chris Hayes to tell Judge Cannon to “stay in her lane” and mock her consideration of constitutional claim:
“Girl, stay in your lane. Stay. In. Your. Lane. So, yes, not only has the issue of whether the special counsel comports with the structures of constitutional law, that’s been settled. That’s been addressed in multiple courts. Settled. We don’t have to rehash that … If this were an actual issue it would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, not by a district court judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.”
It is a baffling lecture. Cannon is precisely in her lane in hearing a claim without controlling authority. The fact is that the Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue and many lawyers have objected to the summary treatment given the claim by other courts. The point of creating a record is to allow a full review that could well end up at the Supreme Court.
Who isn’t staying in their lane? Cannon’s colleagues.
The New York Times recently reported that two judges attempted to get Cannon to hand off the case when it was randomly assigned to her. So, the suggestion is that two of her colleagues breached any sense of collegiality and confidentiality to contribute to a hit piece on Cannon.
It is worth noting that there was no reason for Cannon to decline the selection, particularly not due to her appointment by Trump. A variety of Trump appointees have ruled against Trump on matters without a hint of objection from the left.
While it is true that Cannon was just put on the bench a couple years ago, that did not seem to bother these same pundits in the Georgia case. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee was put on the bench only shortly before being assigned the Georgia case against Trump and associates.
Cannon is a true American success story and, if she were only to rule in favor of the left, she would certainly be the subject of glowing stories of how she went from being born in Cali, Colombia to joining the federal bench. Her mother escaped Cuba after the revolution, and she grew up with a deep-seated faith in the rule of law. She graduated from Duke University and, after a stint as a journalist, graduated from Michigan Law School magna cum laude.
Yet there will be no “American dream” stories for Cannon like the ones that ran for Sonia Sotomayor after her nomination.
Cannon is a Republican and has the temerity to follow a conservative jurisprudence. For the media, that makes her unworthy (much like the lack of coverage on Justice Clarence Thomas’ incredible life story).
There is little chance that the scorched Earth campaign against Cannon will work. When your family escapes Communist Cuba and then the drug-ravaged city of Cali, partisan media hit pieces are hardly intimidating. That may be frustrating for many in the media, but she is fulfilling the purpose of Article III of the Framers. She will rule and she will not yield.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University School of Law.He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon and Schuster, 2024).
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trump may not have to prep much for the upcoming debate with Biden. How will Trump react to Joe Biden mumbling or walking off stage? Or will Biden be so juiced up with some kind of chemicals that he’s coherent for an hour?
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HAS SAID THAT THE UPCOMING CNN DEBATE “COULD BE THE MOST BORING OR IT COULD BE QUITE EXCITING, WHO KNOWS?”
By Cassandra MacDonald – June 23, 2024
CNN will be hosting the first presidential debate on June 27 in Atlanta, Georgia, and has named Jake Tapper and Dana Bash the moderators. Trump discussed the debate during his rally in Philadelphia on Saturday. “There’s two [of] us and two of them — it’s like death,” Trump said, referencing that there will only be the two moderators and two candidates without an audience. “This could be the most boring or it could be quite exciting, who knows?” Biden is currently doing debate prep at Camp David while Trump continues on the campaign trail, which the Republican presumptive nominee referred to by saying Biden had “gone to a log cabin to study.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump cheer as he arrives to speak at a campaign event in Racine, Wisconsin, on June 18, 2024. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
A Department of Homeland Security advisory board characterized supporters of former President Donald Trump, as well as those who are in the military and religious people, as posing potential domestic terrorism risks, according to internal documents obtained by America First Legal.
The board, called the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group, was created in September 2023 to provide DHS with “expert” analysis on subjects such as terrorism and fentanyl trafficking. The panel included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe, all of whom signed an October 2020 letter casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop and suggesting its release was a Russian disinformation ploy.
Internal documents obtained by America First Legal show the board characterizing “supporters of the former president” as constituting “most of the Domestic Terrorism threat” in the United States. The documents also classified traits such as having served “in the military” and being “religious” as “indicators of extremists and terrorism,” citing unnamed research.
Military personnel are less likely to be supporters of radical political causes than other Americans, according to a 2023 RAND Corp. study. Nevertheless, suspicions of extremism in the military were popular among Democrats in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, as 15 Democrat lawmakers signed a letter in 2021 urging Inspector General Sean O’Donnell to “take action on this wave of violent extremism” in the military.
America First Legal on Thursday released the first collection of documents that detailed the committee’s desire to increase information collection on Americans, including getting “mothers” and “teachers” to report on children suspected of extremism under the pretext of “public health.” The committee cited the model of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign after 9/11, which was an initiative by the DHS to encourage American citizens to report potential terror threats.
/1🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨
Internal docs from Biden’s DHS show their plans to target Trump supports as domestic extremists.
The Brennan-Clapper intel group discussed how “most of the domestic terrorism threat now comes from supporters of the former president.” #DeepStateDiaries PART 2: pic.twitter.com/q2HcoAe2Kd
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) June 21, 2024
The DHS panel was shut down following a lawsuit from America First Legal in conjunction with former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell. The lawsuit alleged the group violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which governs how federal advisory committees can legally operate.
Brennan and Clapper were also signatories of the 2020 letter that alleged the Hunter Biden laptop contents may have been part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The contents of the laptop were verified by the Daily Caller News Foundation along with other media outlets.
The DHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Rarely have seven innocuous words, misinterpreted and then amplified, caused so much mischief.
On Wednesday, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana ignited leftist outrage by signing a bill that requires all the state’s public-school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Predictably, opponents of the bill cited a paraphrased version of a line that appeared in an 1802 letter written by President Thomas Jefferson: “wall of separation between church and state.”
As we shall see, the use of that “separation” phrase to attack Louisiana’s law amounts to an act of sophistry.
No doubt anticipating such objections, Louisiana earmarked no state money for the mandate’s implementation, relying instead on private funds.
Likewise, to affirm that the mandated display constitutes an acknowledgement of the Ten Commandments’ historical significance, not an endorsement of a particular religious creed, the law also requires a four-paragraph context statement tying the Ten Commandments to American foundational documents.
That, of course, did not satisfy the bill’s opponents.
“BREAKING: We’re suing Louisiana for requiring all public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Public schools are not Sunday schools,” the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted.
BREAKING: We’re suing Louisiana for requiring all public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Displaying the Ten Commandments, a cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian tradition that undergirds all of Western civilization, would transform public schools into Sunday schools? Where might the confused and litigious folks at the ACLU get such an idea?
They got it from Jefferson’s “separation” phrase, of course, but not from any real understanding of what Jefferson meant.
“Here’s the deal: We stop pretending there is any kind of separation of church and state here. Tax them. Tax them hard,” one person wrote Wednesday on the social media platform X.
Here’s the deal: We stop pretending there is any kind of separation of church and state here. Tax them. Tax them hard.
In other words, leftist objections to the Louisiana law rest on the phrase “separation of church and state.” Alas, that famous phrase’s historical context does not support the leftist interpretation.
Sometime after Oct. 7, 1801 — the precise date remains unknown — a three-man committee representing the Danbury Baptist Association, a group of 26 Baptist churches in western Connecticut and eastern New York, wrote a letter congratulating their “beloved” Jefferson on his election to the presidency and laying out principles with which they knew he would agree.
“Sir, we are sensible that the President of the united States, is not the national Legislator, & also sensible that the national goverment cannot destroy the Laws of each State; but our hopes are strong that the sentiments of our beloved President, which have had such genial Effect already, like the radiant beams of the Sun, will shine & prevail through all these States and all the world till Hierarchy and tyranny be destroyed from the Earth,” the letter read.
The authors even suggested to the president that “America’s God has raised you up to fill the chair of State out of that good will which he bears to the Millions which you preside over.”
“And may the Lord preserve you safe from every evil and bring you at last to his Heavenly Kingdom throug Jesus Christ our Glorious Mediator,” the letter concluded.
Jefferson did not receive this remarkable letter until Dec. 30. Nor did it reach him without fanfare. In fact, the same itinerant preacher who carried the letter also delivered a now-legendary giant wheel of cheese made by the citizens of Cheshire, Massachusetts, another Baptist stronghold in a state that did not disestablish its Congregational Church until 1833.
In other words, Jefferson had New England Baptists on the mind as the New Year approached. It might even have been the reason he invited Republican Rep. William Eustis of Massachusetts to dine with him.
Over the next two days, the president’s reply to the Danbury Baptist Association went through two drafts.
In the first draft, he explained why, as president, he had avoided proclaiming religious fast days. But another New England Republican who reviewed the draft encouraged the president to excise that passage, so he did.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State,” Jefferson’s famous second paragraph began.
Why take readers so deep into the weeds with this Jefferson letter? What could all this historical context possibly tell us? And what difference does it make?
For one thing, it reminds us that in 1802 those New England states had long-established (i.e. tax-supported) churches. Likewise, while Jefferson did not approve of established churches, he made no effort to influence state laws. Indeed, he could not have done so had he wished. As the Danbury Baptists noted, the president “is not the national Legislator,” nor could the federal government — and that includes every branch of the federal government — “destroy the Laws of each State.”
Furthermore, the president’s consultation with several New England Republicans suggests that he intended his letter, once published, primarily for an audience of New England Republicans, in this case Baptists who shared the president’s views on religious freedom. And that suggests a political act, not a statement meant to clarify, alter or forever enshrine First Amendment’s meaning.
Finally, note Jefferson’s use of the word “whole,” as well as his italicization of the word “their.” The “whole American people” had declared that “their legislature” would make no laws establishing religion or inhibiting its exercise.
Why would Jefferson italicize “their” unless he meant to refer to the legislature of the “whole American people” only? That tells us that Jefferson recognized the First Amendment as binding on Congress but not on state legislatures.
In sum, could a seven-word phrase from a 222-year-old letter — written for a special purpose, expressing principles that denied the First Amendment’s applicability to the states and responding to a letter that did the same — really keep a cornerstone of Western civilization out of public schools?
Leftists believe that it can. And they believe it because, as the ACLU tweet illustrated, they have relied on courts to ensure that it does. In fact, in a brilliant 2006 essay, Daniel Dreisbach of the Heritage Foundation, author of the book, “Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State,” explained how federal courts spent decades twisting Jefferson’s casual “wall” metaphor into a “high and impregnable” barrier.
Ironically, the very mechanism on which “separation of church and state” advocates depend for the enforcement of the Jeffersonian phrase they have misinterpreted happens to be the very mechanism Jefferson himself most feared.
In an 1819 letter, Jefferson denounced the activist federal judiciary of his day. Courts, he argued, could not “usurp” the power to interpret the Constitution’s meaning. If they did, it would make the entire Constitution a “felo de se” — an act of suicide.
“For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independant, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others; and to that one too which is unelected by, and independent of, the nation,” he wrote.
Thus, outraged leftists who hope to invalidate Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law based on their own misunderstanding or distortion of Jefferson’s famous phrase will find that Jefferson himself refutes them at every turn.
After many years as Chapel Hill’s Prayer Leader, Ruth Esther is focusing her passion for prayer in other ways. We thank her for the dedication to this blog. Praying is timeless and so are these writings. We hope you will feel God’s presence when reading these words.
While doing research on the Internet for statistics after prayer and the Ten Commandments were taken from schools, I found conflicting statistics. You can sway the numbers to portray your agenda. Check out the resources at the end of my blog.
Beginning in 1964, for 18 years, the SAT scores dropped drastically until the 1980’s when Christian schools opened for competition. (1) The higher scores of the private Christian Schools helped stabilize the scores. The clientele of families enrolling in schools has become more diverse with people from many countries immigrating to the U.S.A.. Less rural and more urban families have caused a shift in the cultural dynamics of each community. (4) Then the SAT Test underwent several changes to dumb down the test so more people would pass. No longer can you compare the test results from the beginning until now.
I decided to take a different slant and explain what has happened to our country since those fateful decisions were enforced. I made a chart for clarity. Imagine youth who were not grounded in the application of the Ten Commandments in their daily lives, how this has warped our perspectives on life. No wonder we spend more money on inmates that educating students.
The Ten Commandments
Results of not being taught the Ten Commandments
1. You shall have no other gods before Me.
Church attendance has continued to decline. People are into Horoscopes, witchcraft, zombies, and communicating with the dead. Atheism is rising. People choose sports or extra-curricular activities over church events.
2. You shall not make idols.
Sports figures, movie stars, musicians, and rich people are held in more esteem than God. Illegal drug usage is up 6000%. (2)
3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
Foul language is allowed on television, radio, and movies. The youth embrace swearing in music and daily speaking because they were not taught to honor God.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Businesses are open on Sunday to make a profit and people choose work over attending church. Sporting events, movies, and other activities take people away from their homes so they can’t rest.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
The home does not expect respect of mothers and fathers. The divorce rate has sky-rocketed. Many women choose to raise their children without a father. Blended families struggle to unify. Same sex families and transgender families are on the rise. More elderly parents are forgotten. Child abuse cases increased 2300%. (2)
6. You shall not murder.
The crime rate is unbelievable. Youth are bringing guns to school to kill people who made them angry. We hear of a murder every day. Television, movies, and video games have glamorized killing, thus numbing the senses of our youth to respect each person as the creation of God. Teen suicide is up 450%. (2)
7. You shall not commit adultery.
Divorce continues to rise even in the Christian communities. We have become self-centered-it’s-all-about-me-and-my-needs. People lack commitment. Divorce rates have increased 350%. Teen pregnancies escalated. (2)
8. You shall not steal.
People have come to the point where when they see something they want, they find a way to steal it instead of work for it. Criminal arrests of teens increased 150%. (2)
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
All we have to do is look at our government leaders who demonstrate that lying is acceptable, just don’t get caught. Violent crimes increased 350%.
10. You shall not covet.
Our society wants to keep up with their neighbor’s home, vehicle, clothes, and private school, in order to look good at work or in their community. Back-biting at work, to get a promotion, is a form of coveting. Bullying may be a form of coveting others in reverse. The bully thinks he is cooler, smarter, and better in every way. Pray for their hearts to be healed of hate.
I began teaching in 1971, retired in 2008, and have been a Title 1 Tutor ever since. I have seen too many changes to mention. The biggest change is the lack of respect for authority, peers, and parents. A larger per cent of students show little regard to being truthful and co-operative. Their crude, rude language reflects the way they dress and act. The Founding Fathers of the United States predicted this would happen if education was no longer based of Christian principles.
“The Philosophy of the school room in one generation . . . will be the Philosophy of Government in the next.” Abraham Lincoln (3)
Below is my column in The Hill on last week’s cases and the sharp contrast to the handling of the Trump case in Manhattan. Two of these cases hold particular resonance with some of us who criticized Bragg’s prosecution.
Here is the column:
In 1976, Saul Steinburg’s hilarious “View of the World from 9th Avenue” was published on the cover of the New Yorker. The map showed Manhattan occupying most of the known world with wilderness on the other side of the Hudson River between New York and San Francisco. The cartoon captured the distorted view New Yorkers have of the rest of the country.
Roughly 50 years later, the image has flipped for many. With the Trump trial, Manhattan has become a type of legal wilderness where prosecutors use the legal system to hunt down political rivals and thrill their own supporters. New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) ran on a pledge to bag former president Donald Trump. (She also sought to dissolve the National Rifle Association.)
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also pledged to get Trump. Neither specified how they would do it, but both were elected, and both were lionized for bringing controversial cases against Trump.
Just beyond the Hudson River, the response to these cases has been far less positive. James secured an obscene civil penalty of almost half a billion dollars without having to show there was a single victim or dollar lost from alleged overvaluation of assets.
Through various contortions, Bragg converted a dead misdemeanor case into 34 felonies in an unprecedented prosecution. New Yorkers and the media insisted that such selective prosecution was in defense of the “rule of law.”
This week in the Supreme Court, a glimpse of the legal landscape outside of Manhattan came more sharply into view. It looked very different as the Supreme Court, with a strong conservative majority, defended the rights of defendants and upheld core principles that are being systematically gutted in New York.
In Gonzalez v. Trevino, the court held in favor of Sylvia Gonzalez, who had been arrested in Castle Hills, Texas in 2019 on a trumped-up charge of tampering with government records. She had briefly misplaced a petition on a table at a public meeting.
This was a blatant case of selective prosecution by officials whom Gonzalez had criticized. She was the only person charged in the last 10 years under the state’s records laws for temporarily misplacing a document. She argued that virtually every one of the prior 215 felony indictments involved the use or creation of fake government IDs.
Although the charges were later dropped, the case reeked of political retaliation and selective prosecution. There is no evidence that anyone else has faced such a charge in similar circumstances. Yet when she sued, the appellate court threw her case out, requiring Gonzales to shoulder an overwhelming burden of proof to establish selective prosecution for her political speech. The justices, on the other hand, reduced that burden, allowing Gonzalez togo back and make the case for selective prosecution.
Unlike the Trump case, the criminal charges against Gonzales were thrown out before trial. For Trump, selective prosecution claims were summarily dismissed, even though no case like Bragg’s appears to have ever been brought before.
The Bragg case is raw political prosecution. No one seriously argues that Bragg would have brought this case against anyone other than Trump. Indeed, his predecessor rejected the case. Yet people were literally dancing in the streets when I came out of the courthouse after the verdict against Trump. In fact, the selectivity of the prosecution was precisely why it was so thrilling for New Yorkers.
Another case decided this week was Erlinger v. United States. The justices ruled 6-3 (and not along the standard ideological lines) to send back a case in which Paul Erlinger had been convicted of unlawful possession of a firearm as a felon. He was given an enhanced sentence for having three prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses. However, the court denied him the right to have a jury rule on the key issue of whether these prior offenses occurred on different occasions.
The court ruled that a jury had to decide this issue unanimously under a standard of beyond reasonable doubt. This is in contrast to how the Trump case was handled, in which jurors could disagree on key aspects of the crime yet still convict the defendant.
In Trump’s trial, Judge Juan Merchan effectively guaranteed a conviction by telling jurors that they did not have to agree with specificity on what had occurred in the case to convict Trump. The only way to get beyond the passage of the statute of limitations on the dead misdemeanor for falsifying business records had been to allege that the bookkeeping violation in question occurred to conceal another crime. Bragg did not bother to state clearly what that crime was, originally alluding to four different crimes.
It was not until the end of the case that Merchan would lay out three possible crimes for the jury. All the way up to the final instructions in the case, legal analysts on CNN and other outlets expressed doubt about what the actual theory of the criminal conduct was in the case.
Despite spending little time on these secondary crimes at trial, Merchan told the jury that they could convict if they believed that invoices and other documents had been falsified to hide federal election violations, other falsification violations or a tax violation.
Those are very different theories of a criminal conspiracy. Under one theory, Trump was hiding an affair with a porn actress with the payment of hush money before the election. Under another theory, he was trying to reduce a tax burden for someone else (that part was left hazy). As a third alternative, he might have falsified the documents to hide the falsification of other documents, a perfectly spellbinding circular theory.
If those sound like they could be three different cases, then you are right. Yet Merchan told the jurors that they did not have to agree on which fact-pattern or conspiracy had occurred. They could split 4-4-4 on the secondary crime motivating the misdemeanors and just declare that some secondary crime was involved.
That was all that is required in New York when in pursuit of Trump.
Neither of these two cases is controlling in the Trump case, although there are two others pending on the use of obstruction (Fischer v. United States) and presidential immunity (Trump v. United States) that could affect some of the cases against Trump. But Gonzales and Erlinger demonstrate the high level of protections that we normally afford criminal defendants. A court with a 6-3 conservative majority just ruled for the rights of all defendants in defense of the rule of law.
That is not how the law is seen from 9th Avenue.
It all comes down to the legal map. As even CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig observed, this case of contorting the law for a selective prosecution would not have succeeded outside of an anti-Trump district.
On the New Yorker map circa 2024, once you cross the Hudson River eastward, you enter a legal wilderness.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University School of Law.He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon and Schuster, 2024).
A.F. Branco Cartoon—Minnesota has an ever-growing fraud problem. The Feeding Our Future estimate is the one provided by the U.S. Department of Justice almost two years ago. Despite adding two dozen more defendants over the years, the original estimate has not been updated. My own estimate places the final figure at double that amount.
Tracking Minnesota’s growing fraud problem
By Bill Glahn – June 22, 2024
There are many examples of Minnesotans defrauding the federal government directly (PPP, small business loans, etc.). These cases are not included. The Feeding Our Future estimate is the one provided by the U.S. Department of Justice almost two years ago. Despite the addition of two dozen more defendants over the years, the original estimate has not been updated. My own estimate places the final figure at double that amount. The child care (CCAP) fraud estimate is one provided by a whistleblower in the case. About the estimate, the legislative auditor wrote the following back in 2019: READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – On Wednesday, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana ignited leftist outrage by signing a bill that requires all the state’s public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
Leftists Cry ‘Separation of Church and State’ Over New Ten Commandments Law – Here’s a History Lesson for Them
By Michael Schwarz – June 21, 2024
Rarely have seven innocuous words, misinterpreted and then amplified, caused so much mischief. On Wednesday, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana ignited leftist outrage by signing a bill that requires all the state’s public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Predictably, opponents of the bill cited a paraphrased version of a line that appeared in an 1802 letter written by President Thomas Jefferson: “wall of separation between church and state.”
As we shall see, the use of that “separation” phrase to attack Louisiana’s law amounts to an act of sophistry.
No doubt anticipating such objections, Louisiana earmarked no state money for the mandate’s implementation, relying instead on private funds. Likewise, to affirm that the mandated display constitutes an acknowledgement of the Ten Commandments’ historical significance, not an endorsement of a particular religious creed, the law also requires a four-paragraph context statement tying the Ten Commandments to American foundational documents. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
“There’s something going on in our country, and it’s not an accident,” Ben Carson, former secretary of housing and urban development, says Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Dr. Ben Carson provided personal anecdotes Friday and encouraged faith in God at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 15th annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C.
“There’s something going on in our country, and it’s not an accident,” said Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration. America is in the way of a one-world government, so “they need to change us,” Carson told the crowd at the Washington Hilton. “That’s why they have gone inside to destroy the moral fabric of the U.S.”
By removing God from the public square, diminishing the role of the family, and making sexual immorality “natural, normal, and healthy,” he said, the Left has been successful in destroying that moral fabric.
To combat this, the celebrated brain surgeon said, conservatives must be willing to be more visible and stand up for what they believe in.
“I’ve had a lot of people try to cancel me,” Carson said. “I don’t care about those people. I only care about God.”
When he was younger, he recalled, he had a terrible temper. He reflected on the time that, as a teenager, he attempted to stab another boy. That boy’s belt buckle stopped his blade, which broke. Carson promptly locked himself in a bathroom where there was a Bible, which he started reading.
“That was the last day that I had a problem,” Carson recalled, because God “took the knife out of the hand of an angry teenager and turned it into a scalpel to save lives.”
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (Photo: Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard accused corporate media outlets of parroting “propaganda” talking points from the White House regarding controversial videos of President Joe Biden.
Gabbard, who ran as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, spoke with The Daily Signal on Friday at the Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., where she addressed the Biden White House dismissing videos highlighting Biden’s declining mental acuity as “cheap fakes.”
“It made me laugh, because I’m obviously familiar with how the mainstream propaganda media works,” said Gabbard, who served four terms in the House as a Democrat, but has since become an independent. “And when you look at the montage of all of these different people, on many cable networks or broadcast networks, and they’re literally all using the same talking point. They warn misinformation, disinformation—[but] they are doing it right now.”
“We are not stupid, and I think that’s the thing that is most fascinating to me. They really think that we are that stupid, to buy their spin on the unfortunate reality of what we’re seeing, which is President Biden’s deteriorating condition.”
A number of recent videos of Biden at various public events show the president looking confused, freezing up, or wandering away from the location where he’s supposed to speaking or standing. At a D-Day anniversary event in France, for example, videos show him turning away from a group of other world leaders. Another video, at a campaign fundraiser, shows former President Barack Obama leading him off stage.
The White House has repeatedly claimed that such videos are edited.
Joe Biden highlights in Normandy on the 80th anniversary of D-Day:
– Sits in an invisible chair – Forgets where his seat is – Talks about how many Russians died in Ukraine – Gets pulled away by Docta Jill as Macron greets D-Day veterans. pic.twitter.com/sWFsYpt1o5
“It’s also very insulting to the folks, the viewers who are watching it,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told MSNBC on Tuesday. “And so, we believe we have to call that out. We’ve been calling it ‘cheap fakes.’ That is something that came directly from the media outlets in calling it that, the fact-checkers … calling it that. And so, we’re certainly going to be really, really clear about that as well. And calling it out from where we are, from where we stand.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates similarly told Fox New Digital that the videos are the products of “discredited right-wing critics” of the president.
“Their panicked reaction to mainstream reporters, including at The Washington Post, NBC News, and PolitiFact, citing misinformation experts taking anti-Biden cheap fakes apart says more than we ever could,” Bates told Fox News Digital.
In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, and a recent academic work, I discuss a new rationale being used by administrators to punish free speech: threatening academic collegiality or campus tranquility. I was discussing the Fourth Circuit case of Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, which was unfortunately not reviewed by the Supreme Court. Now, as feared, it is being replicated by the Sixth Circuit in Gruber v. Tenn. Tech. Bd. of Trustees. The result is a new and serious threat to free speech in higher education to curtail speech where it would be “likely to cause disruption” or undermine the “fostering [of] a collegial educational environment.”
The Porter case involved the targeting of a conservative faculty member who opposed diversity views. Given the purging of conservative professors from faculties and the intolerance on our campuses, the use of collegiality to justify disciplinary action is likely to fall more heavily on the dwindling number of conservatives.
However, Gruber involved professors who spoke out against a conservative colleague. As previously addressed by Keith Whittington, the case involved Professor Andrew Donadio, who serves as the faculty advisor for the local chapter of Turning Point USA at Tennessee Tech University.
Donadio was attacked by Professor Julia Gruber and Instructor Andrew Smith who hold strikingly anti-free speech views that are evident in the flyers that they put up around campus denouncing the “hate and hypocrisy” of “Professor Donadio and Turning Point USA.” In addition to saying that his views are “not welcome at Tennessee Tech,” they declared that there should be “no unity with racists” and that “hate speech is not free speech.”
Gruber and Smith are only the latest examples of academics who reject free speech rights for others, but still demand that their own views be protected. Fortunately for them, the free speech community supports free speech regardless of its inherent merits or the hypocrisy of speakers.
Provost Lori Bruce disciplined Gruber and Smith under Policy 600, requiring faculty members “to conduct themselves fairly, honestly, in good faith, and in accordance with the highest ethical and professional standards.”
As with Porter, the use of a lack of collegiality has long been used against those with unpopular views. I previously wrote:
“The lack of collegiality and professionalism has long been shibboleth for those have sought to block minorities and women from appointments. Many objected to the claims of ‘lack of collegiality’ and bad ‘temperament’ raised against figures like Justice Sotomayor when she was nominated for the Court. Indeed, the American Association of University Professors has stressed that collegiality is often a coded or biased basis for discrimination. It cautioned against this use since, “[i]n the heat of making important academic decisions regarding hiring, promotion, and tenure, it would be easy to confuse collegiality with the expectation that a faculty member display ‘enthusiasm,’ or evince ‘a constructive attitude’ that ‘will foster harmony.’” Indeed, collegiality is commonly defined as being “cooperative,” a virtue that is hard to display when you are a dissenting voice on a matter of intense and passionate debate with your colleagues.”
Nevertheless, Sixth Circuit Judges Richard Griffin, Helene White, and Eric Murphy upheld the lower court decision supporting the university:
When deciding whether the plaintiff engaged in protected activity, we first determine whether the action constitutes speech on a matter of public concern, and if it does, we apply the “Pickering balancing test” to determine whether the plaintiff’s interest in commenting outweighs the defendant’s interest as an employer in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees. The balancing test considers the manner, time, and place of the expressive action, and the pertinent considerations include whether the action (1) impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among coworkers, (2) negatively affects close working relationships for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary, (3) impedes performance of the speaker’s duties or interferes with the employer’s regular operations, and (4) undermines the employer’s mission….
TTU does not dispute that the district court properly concluded that the plaintiffs’ speech was a matter of public concern. Even so, as the district also properly concluded, the plaintiffs’ distribution of the flyers was not protected speech because their speech interest was outweighed by TTU’s interest in preventing a disruption to its pedagogical and collegial environment….
At the outset, the “manner” of the plaintiffs’ speech decreased its expressive value and increased TTU’s operational interests. Plaintiffs did not speak in the classroom or through scholarship, where professors’ “rights to academic freedom and freedom of expression are paramount.”
Nor is this a simple case of one professor raising a race-related issue with another or expressing disagreement with a group’s ideology, perhaps one-on-one or in a more private setting. Instead, the plaintiffs posted flyers in an academic building at a time they knew students would be on campus for class and posted an additional flyer the next day. Those flyers were highly likely to cause disruption, and they did so in several ways.
Specifically, the flyers identified Donadio as a “racist college professor” and branded members of Turning Point USA as “racist students.” They stated in bold text that the professor and group’s “hate & hypocrisy are not welcome at Tennessee Tech.” The dissemination of “disrespectful, demeaning, insulting, and rude” messages targeting a colleague and students—regardless of whether some accusations may have had basis in fact—to the entire university community undoubtably threatened to disrupt TTU’s learning environment and academic mission.
For one, flyers that publicly attack a colleague as racist and threaten that the colleague is on the anonymous author’s “list” certainly “impairs … harmony among co-workers.” {Plaintiffs protest that they did not interact with Donadio professionally, so there was no harmony to impair. But even if the professors did not work closely together, they were nonetheless colleagues on TTU’s faculty, and it was not unreasonable for Bruce to conclude that on-campus and public accusations of racism—even between colleagues who did not work together—could cause disruption of the university’s operations.}
Perhaps more critically, by attacking students, the flyers threatened the core of TTU’s educational “mission” and undermined the plaintiffs’ ability to perform their teaching “duties.” The flyers insinuated that, like Donadio, all students who were members of Turning Point USA were racist. The accusations harmed these students’ educations.
For example, one Turning Point USA member, having been deemed a racist, missed class because of the fallout. In addition, the accusations affected the plaintiffs’ effectiveness in the classroom. Students in the club, or those considering joining the club, who were taking courses with Gruber and Smith might reasonably fear the potential treatment they would receive in class due to differing political views. This case is thus factually distinguishable from cases like Pickering, where a teacher was disciplined for writing a letter to a local newspaper criticizing the school district that was “in no way directed towards any person with whom [the teacher] would normally be in contact in the course of his daily work as a teacher.” And most basically, TTU has ‘an interest in fostering a collegial educational environment.’ Permitting professors to circulate flyers with personal attacks on colleagues and students undoubtably undermines that interest.
To be sure, the flyers were quickly collected and affected only a handful of students and professors. But evidence of widespread disruption is not necessary: it was reasonable for Bruce to believe that, had the flyers remained posted, they could have caused far greater disruption.
Lastly, the “place” of the plaintiffs’ speech undermines their interests even further. Even if they did not undertake this speech pursuant to their official duties, they also did not engage in it away from campus as private citizens. Rather than make their claims on their personal Facebook pages or in a local newspaper, they chose to use TTU’s own property as the billboard for their speech. But public employers have greater interest in regulating speech “at the office” (or here on campus) than they do away from the public employers’ property. Indeed, the conclusion that the First Amendment protected the plaintiffs’ speech would mean that TTU remained powerless to remove the flyers off of its property. So this case raises no concern that TTU sought to “leverage” its employment relationship with the plaintiffs to regulate their speech “outside” the context of its university functions.
All told, the Pickering balancing test weighs against the plaintiffs’ speech being protected. The flyers, which attacked a professor and student organization and stated that they were not welcome on campus, created a reasonable threat of disrupting TTU’s academic mission and is the type of speech that a learning institution has a strong interest in preventing. Under the Pickering balancing test, TTU’s interest in preventing a potential disruption to its pedagogical and collegial environment outweighed the plaintiffs’ interest in distributing the flyers. Thus, the plaintiffs’ speech was not protected, foreclosing their First Amendment retaliation claim.
The allowance for censorship and sanctions for speech “likely to cause disruption” would gut free speech protections on campus. The court suggests that the ability of the university to crack down on the speech was magnified by the fact that others might be particularly interested in their views or exposed to them. It is enough that it threatened the tranquility of campus and the collegiality of the faculty.
This week we discussed an analogous position at Harvard where Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
The refusal of the Court to take the Porter decision was crushing for many of us in the free speech community and academia. Hopefully, Gruber will receive a more favorable review in light of the expanding threat to free speech to “foster a collegial educational environment.”
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In 2023, the legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) to add anti-discrimination protections for “gender identity” but failed to revise the corresponding religious exemption, effectively attempting to remove it.
This year, “gender identity” was added to a list of already protected categories of protections in the MHRA. “Sexual orientation” was already protected by the MHRA, but the term “gender identity” was added explicitly. A religious exemption that had already been in place since 1993 “prohibited the state from forcing religious organizations to comply with the anti-discrimination law provisions with respect to protected categories like sexual orientation when those provisions are inconsistent with a religious organization’s sincerely held beliefs,” said Renee Carlson, general counsel for True North Legal. However, the religious exemption was not updated to include the term “gender identity.”
“While we had hoped it was an oversight, the House Judiciary Chair stated on the record that the omission of those words was intentional,” Carlson said. “A discussion ensued during the committee where Democratic legislators not only refused to accept an amendment to protect religious organizations, but also called the amendment to protect religious organizations ‘disturbing’ and ‘disgusting’ after hearing a testimony from a diverse group of testifiers.”
By openly failing to include “gender identity” in the previously established religious exemption, the Minnesota legislation openly attacked religious freedom, but the attack does not stop there. Churches and religious institutions would be directly impacted by this exemption, but so would many unprotected groups served by religious organizations.
“A threat to religious organizations extends well beyond the churches and ministries that the statute protects. Religious organizations often serve marginalized and underserved communities, such as victims of sex trafficking, homeless families, and youth through programs that help kids graduate high school and even go to college. These religious entities in Minnesota meet individual needs and fill gaps that the government could never achieve on its own. To be sure, this was an unprecedented attack on religion and people of faith, but also on the communities that they serve,” said Carlson.
The MHRA could even threaten the existence of some religious organizations whose mission and religious beliefs are inseparable, Carlson added. “For religious organizations and its members, every decision is inextricably bound up in the tenets of its faith tradition. Removing statutory protections for religious organizations from the Minnesota Human Rights Act threatened the existence of all religious entities whose missions are inseparable from their employment practices, catechisms, and governance.”
According to Jason Adkins, general counsel at Minnesota Catholic Conference, the religious exemption was put in place in 1993 and had functioned without any problems until the bill introducing “gender identity” protections. The religious exemption was never meant to compromise anti-discrimination law but was intended to protect the freedom of religious institutions.
“The clear religious exemption provides predictability to religious organizations, potential litigants, and others about the scope of the MHRA and the pluralism of values that it protects, including the autonomy of religious institutions on matters of sexual identity. Anti-discrimination provisions related to sexual orientation and gender identity made it into law in 1993 in part because religious groups did not oppose them due to the inclusion of the exemption. This clarification of law restores the gender identity exemption and ensures that the MHRA is not used as a sword against faith communities,” said Adkins.
After public backlash, both the Minnesota House and Senate voted unanimously to restore religious protections.
While the restoration of the exemption somewhat protects religious organizations, there are many members of religions working in fields not controlled by religious institutions. Christian workers, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors, fear the need to compromise their religious beliefs in order to do their jobs in a way that respects the MHRA. “Our big concern is that doctors may be punished for declining to provide treatments they believe are unethical or harmful. This is not a tenet of a specific religion, but of natural law and universal human rights,” said a medical doctor from the Association of American Physicians.
Despite the religious exemption being restored, legal battles to defend religious freedom are constantly raging in Minnesota. Still in effect are the new standards requiring state-licensed teachers to affirm students’ gender identities. After the MHRA tried to effectively remove the religious exemption, new amendments to the Minnesota constitution intending to attack religious institutions have been proposed.
Doug Seaton, a lawyer at Upper Midwest Law, emphasized the constant need for vigilance in an environment where religious liberty is always under attack. “We have to be constantly fighting these assaults in the dark and bringing them to the light. This attempt ended in success, but it is a lesson in how eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
In my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I write about the anti-free speech movement that has swept over higher education and how administrators and faculty hold a view of free speech as harmful. Now Harvard is again at the heart of a free speech fight after Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
Bobo warns that public criticism of the school could “cross a line into sanctionable violations.”
“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.”
The column adopts every jingoistic rationale used by anti-free speech critics today, including the invocation of the Holmes “crowded theater” analogy:
“But many faculty at Harvard enjoy an external stature that also opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy. Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker have well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy.
Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”
First and foremost, the ability of faculty to speak out on public disputes should not depend on whether you are more popular or visible. However, it is the theater analogy that is most galling.
I have an entire chapter in The Indispensable Right that addresses the fallacies surrounding this line out of the Holmes opinion. It is arguably the most damaging single line ever written by a Supreme Court justice in the area of free speech.
I have previously written about the irony of liberals adopting the analogy, which was used to crack down on socialists and dissenters on the left.
One of the most telling moments came in a congressional hearing when I warned of the dangers of repeating the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare, when censorship and blacklisting were the norm. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-New York, invoked Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view that free speech does not give a person the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. In other words, citizens had to be silenced because their views are dangerous to others.
When I attempted to point out that the line came from a case justifying the imprisonment of socialists for their political viewpoints, Goldman cut me off and “reclaimed his time.”
Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left.
Dean Bobo is now the latest academic to embrace the theater rationale to justify the silencing of dissent. At Harvard, he is suggesting that the entire university is now a crowded theater and criticizing the university leadership is a cry of “Fire.” It is that easy.
By punishing criticism of the school’s leadership and policies, Bobo believes that they can look “forward to calmer times” on campus. It is precisely the type of artificial silence that academics have been enforcing against conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters for years. It is the approach that reduced our schools to an academic echo chamber.
The reference to Professor Steven Pinker is particularly ironic. As we have previously discussed, Pinker was targeted for exercising free speech. In past controversies, most Harvard faculty members have been conspicuously silent as colleagues were targeted by cancel campaigns. It was the same at other universities.
As faculties effectively purged their ranks of conservative or Republican members, the silence was deafening. Others either supported such campaigns or justified them. Notably, over 75 percent of the Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Then the Gaza protests began and some of these same faculty found themselves the targets of mobs. Suddenly, free speech became an urgent matter to address. Fortunately for these liberal professors, the free speech community is used to opportunistic allies. Where “fair weather friends” are often ridiculed, free speech relies on “foul-weather friends,” those who suddenly see the need to protect a diversity of opinions when they feel threatened.
Bobo’s arguments are consistent with years of rationales for silencing or investigating dissenting faculty for years. It violates the very foundation for academia in free speech and academic freedom. The university is free to punish students or faculty for unlawful conduct. However, when it comes to their viewpoints, there should be a bright line of protection.
Of course, this criticism is likely to trigger another common fallacy used to rationalize speech controls: as a private university Harvard is not subject to the First Amendment and thus this is not a true free speech issue.
As discussed previously, free speech values go beyond the First Amendment whether it is a controversy on social media or campuses. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media or academic censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies or institutions. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.
The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations and universities to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.
Dean Bobo’s desire for “calmer times” would come at too high a price for free speech as well as Harvard.
In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, a court informs the irascible character of Mr. Bumble that it assumes a level of control of his wife’s conduct. Mr. Bumble responds that “if the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot.” The scene came to mind with a decision yesterday when the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 4-3 in Sojenhomer v. Village of Egg Harbor that a sidewalk is not a “pedestrian way.” Lawyers in Wisconsin are already sending around Bumble-like harrumphs to the decision, which is a testament to the ability of judges to ignore plain meaning to achieve desired results.
Where the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland asked, “why is a raven like a writing-desk?” the Wisconsin Supreme Court asked why a sidewalk is not like a pedestrian way. The result is equally maddening.
At issue was the effort of the state to create more sidewalks. Faced with resistance from homeowners, the state was using eminent domain to simply condemn the land and claim it for sidewalks. However, Wisconsin has strong protections for homeowners, including statutes expressly stating that the power of eminent domain must be “strictly construed” against the government.
Moreover, there is a statute that expressly bars the use of eminent domain to take property for “pedestrian way[s].” It defines a “pedestrian way” as “a walk designated for the use of pedestrian travel.”
To every Bumble and non-Bumble alike, that would seem to describe a sidewalk, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a usually paved walk for pedestrians at the side of a street.”
Reading the text of this section as a whole, we find several indications that the definition of pedestrian way does not include sidewalks. For starters, both § 346.02(8)(a) and (b) use the terms “sidewalk” and “pedestrian way” in ways that signify that each term has a separate, non-overlapping meaning. … Section 346.02(8)(b) states that pedestrian ways shall be treated ‘as if’ they were sidewalks for utility installation and assessment purposes. The phrase “as if” signals that one category (pedestrian ways) should receive the same treatment as a different category (sidewalks). That is the same way the legislature used “as if” in, for example, Wis. Stat. § 53.03, which states that Wisconsin courts “may treat a foreign country as if it were a state” in guardianship proceedings. Just as foreign countries are not states but should be treated as if they were for guardianship purposes, pedestrian ways are not sidewalks, but should be treated as if they were for utility-installation and assessment purposes.
The analogy is a poor one, in my view. The treatment of a foreign state like a domestic state captures the fact that both are governing units with similar inherent functions and powers. That is a far cry from saying a “pedestrian way” is NOT a “sidewalk.”
Justice Dallet then adds:
The language of § 346.02(8)(a) also suggests that sidewalks are not pedestrian ways. That paragraph makes the rules of the road pertaining to sidewalks also applicable to pedestrian ways. But if sidewalks are pedestrian ways, then the rules of the road applicable to sidewalks would already apply to pedestrian ways. The point here, to be clear, is not that reading the term “pedestrian way” to include sidewalks would result in surplusage….
However, that may indicate that “pedestrian ways” are a broader category than just sidewalks. It does not suggest that sidewalks are not pedestrian ways.
That seems to be the point of the dissent by Chief Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler:
The plain language of the statute demonstrates that the term “pedestrian way” is broadly defined, and includes sidewalks. A sidewalk——that portion of the highway created for the travel of persons on foot——is clearly a subset of pedestrian ways——walks set apart or assigned for the use of pedestrian travel. It is a straightforward, common-sense interpretation of the statutory language that a “walk designated for the use of pedestrian travel” necessarily includes that part of the highway “constructed for the use of pedestrians…”
[I]n other words, a closer look at the plain meaning of the statutes reveals that all sidewalks are pedestrian ways, but that not all pedestrian ways are sidewalks….
What is particularly galling about the decision of the majority is that they avoid the required strict construction of the law against the government as inapplicable by simply declaring that there is no ambiguity in the language of the statutes, a preposterous claim that requires a level of willful judicial blindness.
The creative effort to ignore the obvious is reminiscent of the fictional Canadian case where a horse was declared a bird. Though sometimes cited as a real case, it appears to be an opinion written to show how legal interpretations can take on absurd dimensions to result in desired ends.
In Regina v. Ojibway (8 Criminal Law Quarterly 137 (1965-66)), a Canadian indigenous tribe member puts down a suffering horse but is then charged under a criminal provision for shooting a bird under the Small Birds Act (R.S.O.). Blue, J., delivers the opinion for the court, granting the appeal, saying:
For the purpose of the Small Birds Act, all two-legged, feather-covered animals are birds. This, of course, does not imply that only two-legged animals qualify, for the legislative intent is to make two legs merely the minimum requirement. The statute therefore contemplated multi-legged animals with feathers as well.
Counsel submits that having regard to the purpose of the statute only small animals “naturally covered” with feathers could have been contemplated. However, had this been the intention of the legislature, I am certain that the phrase “naturally covered” would have been expressly inserted just as “Long” was inserted in the Longshoreman’s Act.
Therefore, a horse with feathers on its back must be deemed for the purpose of this Act to be a bird, a fortiori, a pony with feathers on its back is a small bird.
In Wisconsin, it appears that the Supreme Court would have simply said that the pony, since a pony can be treated “as if” it is a horse, it is not a horse.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Democrats are censoring, arresting, election interfering, opening borders, and gaslighting, all to destroy our Democratic, representative constitutional republic in an effort to hang on to power while shouting they are saving democracy.
Newest Insanity From CNN – It’s a Conspiracy Theory to Say That America is a Republic and Not a Democracy (VIDEO)
By Mike LaChance – June 14, 2024
The United States of America is a constitutional republic, but don’t say that to anyone at CNN or they might label you a conspiracy theorist. The far left network recently did an entire segment about the fact that Trump supporters and other people on the right insist (correctly) that we are not a democracy. The left has repeated their canned line about ‘our democracy’ so many times that CNN is now trying to rewrite history to suit the Democrat party. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump. READ MORE…
President Joe Biden announced an executive order (EO) Tuesday that awards amnesty to illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens. And while he dubbed his overreach as keeping “families together,” it is nothing more than another step in Democrats’ plan to expand their future electorate.
The EO makes it easier for illegal immigrants who married U.S. citizens — and their children — to apply for lawful permanent residence status without leaving the country, and after that, U.S. citizenship. An approximate 500,000 illegal immigrants who married a U.S. citizen will benefit from this order along with 50,000 children, according to the White House.
Without providing any explanation as to how, Biden claims this will “strengthen” the U.S. economy. Notably, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows foreign-born workers gained 637,000 jobs year-over-year while native-born workers lost roughly 299,000. The BLS acknowledges foreign-born workers likely include illegal immigrants. As economist E.J. Antoni recently explained to The Federalist, the drain illegal migrants place on the economy offsets their production value.
By federal law, “non-citizens, including permanent legal residents,” are not allowed to “vote in federal, state, and most local elections,” according to USA.gov. But lawful permanent residents are “eligible to become a U.S. citizen after five years of becoming a lawful permanent resident, or three years if you are married to a U.S. citizen,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Unless there are specific carveouts in Biden’s executive order prohibiting individuals who came into this country illegally before receiving amnesty from registering to vote, then Biden just gifted Democrats with hundreds of thousands of potential future voters.
Former President Donald Trump warned that under Biden’s election-year order, “a deluge of illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast track to rapid citizenship so they can vote.”
“Couple this with [Biden’s] previous voter registration EO and it is clear that Biden is attempting to win the upcoming election, not by winning over legitimate American voters, but by attempting to legitimize illegal immigrants,” said Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. “He won’t stop with this EO. He will keep attempting to dilute the power of the vote of legal Americans.”
Of course, Biden and Democrats, as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “want Americans to believe they aren’t interested in handing out U.S. citizenship and voting rights to foreign nationals like it’s candy on Halloween.” Yet their actions, including this EO, suggest otherwise.
In fact, Biden’s EO sends the same message that a trio of Democratic witnesses sent during a Senate Judiciary Hearing in March. Not a single Democrat witness could resolutely say they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election. And it’s the same message being sent by Democrats nationwide who oppose legislation to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections. As of right now, anyone registering to vote in federal elections must simply check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. Individuals — legal or not — can simply lie on their registration forms. In other words, our elections hinge on the honor system. It’s a loophole Republicans are working to close via the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would amend current law to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Democrats have insisted the SAVE Act is unreasonable and unnecessary since, according to federal law, it’s illegal to vote in an election if you’re not a U.S. citizen. It’s also illegal to bum-rush border agents and break into the country.
Only one state, Arizona, requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in state elections. As a result of the federal government’s attempt to weaken Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law, individuals who cannot prove their citizenship can register as federal-only voters.
During the 2020 election in Arizona, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, according to AZ Free News. Biden won that state by 10,457 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Bogus Russian dossier peddler and Democrat Party problem fixer Marc Elias has again injected himself into a key election integrity case to “defend the broken status quo.” Swing-state Nevada’s dirty voter rolls include hundreds of suspect addresses, at bars, strip clubs, empty parking lots, and other commercial addresses, according to an investigation by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Doing so is clearly against the law.
“In Nevada, by the state law, you are required to be registered where you actually live, where you sleep. Not where you work, not at a P.O. Box. So we’re trying to get elections officials to enforce the law,” Lauren Bis, PILF’s director of communication and engagement, says in a video tracking bad addresses in the Las Vegas area.
To that end, the foundation has filed a petition in Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous county, to force elections officials to investigate and fix commercial addresses on the voter roll. PILF investigators found addresses on the rolls reported as liquor stores, empty lots, and even the Nevada Gaming Control Board, among others.
Baseless Attacks?
Elias Law Group and a band of leftists have sought to intervene in PILF’s petition for a writ of mandamus, arguing that forcing Washoe election administrators to follow the law and clean up the county’s dirty voter rolls will “threaten” voting rights.
The would-be intervenors claim that their members and constituents would be forced to “expend substantial resources to educate voters and protect them from baseless attacks on their eligibility.”
Baseless attacks?
As The Federalist recently reported, Bis was greeted with a lot of quizzical looks from employees at the casinos, fast-food restaurants, retailers, post offices, funeral homes, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and jails where registered voters — at least according to Nevada’s dirty voter rolls — “resided.” What PILF found was equal parts sad and hilarious, foundation President J. Christian Adams told me on “The Federalist Radio Hour.”
The election integrity public interest law firm tracked data from the Nevada secretary of state’s office, which in the 2022 midterm elections reported 95,556 ballots sent to undeliverable, or “bad,” addresses. PILF investigators documented commercial addresses purported to be the residences of registered voters, confirming on video that the individuals did not live where they reported residing.
“We’ve been to all of the locations. It’s not some data exercise we see sitting at a computer in Chicago. We’ve actually got boots on the ground looking for the voters, and they don’t exist,” Adams said.
‘Disastrous Elections System’
Making matters worse, Nevada automatically mails a ballot to every active registrant on the voter rolls.
“I’m looking for Ronald or William Phelps,” Bis says in the video to a bartender wearing a “Tacos por favor” T-shirt at a local watering hole on North Nellis Boulevard in Vegas. “I don’t know who that is,” the barkeep replies.
“So, they don’t live here?” Bis asks. “Uh, at the bar? No,” the bartender says, chuckling. She’s clearly amused by the question.
It’s almost as amusing as Elias and friends’ apparent efforts to stop election officials from following the law under the absurd premise of voter rights. Their court filing offers a dire warning about what will happen if Washoe County is required to do what PILF has done: Washoe County’s job.
“If the Court grants such relief, Respondent Burgess — and other clerks and registrars across the state — will be flooded with third-party demands to investigate all manner of alleged peculiarities in the voter rolls, based on unsourced, unverified, and unsworn information,” the court filing admonishes. “Petitioners are not the only ones making such demands. Nevada is in the midst of a storm of baseless efforts by third parties to force election officials to undertake a rushed purge of registered voters before the November election.”
Adams called Elias’ latest lawfare stunt a “cry wolf exercise.”
“He does this all over the country. He spools up these progressive astroturf organizations and they file a legal brief, which they have done in our case, which we have to respond to, that says, ‘Oh, if you listen to these evil conservatives, there will be eligible people improperly removed from the rolls.’ Nonsense,” said Adams, who formerly served in the Voting Section at the U.S. Department of Justice and was appointed to President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
“Marc Elias is in the business of defending the riches of a disastrous elections system with universal vote-by-mail that are sending ballots automatically to thousands of bogus addresses,” Adams added.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
There is a controversy in Oregon over a proposed change in the ethics rule from the Oregon Medical Board. At issue is the use of “microaggressions” to discipline doctors and to make reporting such transgressions mandatory for all doctors. It seems before you can give stitches, you have to join snitches under one of the most ambiguous categories of prescribed speech.
I have been a critic of microaggression rules on college campuses and discuss this trend in my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage. In past debates over this category of offensive speech, I have objected that it is hopelessly vague and highly controversial.
: a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)
A digital photo project run by a Fordham University student about “racial microaggressions” features minority students holding up signs with comments like “You’re really pretty … for a dark-skin girl.”—Jinnie Spiegler
There is a real and worthy conversation taking place in this country now, particularly among young people, around the idea of microaggressions—slight, often unintended discriminatory comments or behaviors.—Charles M. Blow
also: behavior or speech that is characterized by such comments or actions
… argues that the power of microaggression lies in its invisibility to the perpetrator, who typically finds it difficult to believe that he or she possesses biased attitudes.—Emily Skop
That ambiguity creates a threat to free speech through a chilling effect on speakers who are unsure of what will be considered microaggressive. Terms ranging from “melting pot” to phrases like “pulling oneself up by your own bootstraps” have been declared racist. Some of those have been identified by Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue, cited by Oregon’s state government as a “microaggressions expert.”
Professor Sue considers statements like “Everyone can succeed if they just work hard enough!” as an example of a microaggression. Sue’s work on “microassaults,” “microinsults,” and “microinvalidations” are being effectively adopted by the Board.
Notably, when I have objected to this category, advocates have insisted that they are merely voluntary and instructive, not mandatory. I have long argued that they are used in a mandatory fashion by triggering investigations of professors and would inevitably be made mandatory.
That appears to be happening in Oregon. A couple of conservative sites have covered the controversy.
Under the new ethics rule from the Oregon Medical Board, “unprofessional conduct” (over which a doctor can lose his or her license) will include microaggressions:
“In the practice of medicine, podiatry, or acupuncture, discrimination through unfair treatment characterized by implicit and explicit bias, including microaggressions, or indirect or subtle behaviors that reflect negative attitudes or beliefs about a non-majority group.”
The new section “J” ranks microaggressions with fraud, sexual assault, and ordering unnecessary or harmful surgeries.
Oregon Medical Board states that
“The proposed rule amendments update the definition of “unprofessional conduct” to include discrimination in the practice of medicine, podiatry, and acupuncture, which would make discrimination a ground for discipline. The proposed rule may favorably impact racial equity by making discrimination a ground for discipline for OMB licensees. It is not known how the other proposed rule amendments will impact racial equity in the state.”
The incorporation of microaggressions under the new ethic rules is precisely what some of us have been warning about for years. As is often the case, activists begin by insisting that language monitoring is purely instructional and optional before codifying those rules in mandatory terms.
We have seen the same trajectory in other areas like land acknowledgments where the line between the optimal and the mandatory is hard to discern. As discussed in my book:
“What began as voluntary statements have become either expressly or implicitly mandatory…George Brown College in Toronto requires faculty and students alike to agree to a land acknowledgment statement to even gain access to virtual classrooms. While such statements are portrayed as optional, they are often enforced as compulsory. The University of Washington encouraged faculty to add a prewritten ‘Indigenous land acknowledgment’ statement to their syllabi. The recommended statement states that ‘The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.’
Computer science professor Stuart Reges decided to write his own statement. He declared…’I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.’ … He was told that, while the university statement is optional, his statement was unacceptable because it questioned the indigenous land claim of the Coast Salish people. Reges’s dissenting statement was removed, and the university emailed his students offering an apology for their professor’s ‘offensive’ opinion and advising them on ‘three ways students could file complaints against’ him.”
Federal courts have ruled in favor of academics in disputes over microaggression rules, but the movement is expanding beyond campuses, as shown in Oregon.
I have no objection to the sharing of views of others on how certain phrases are received. I have dropped certain terms or phrases even though I did not see why a term or phrase is insulting. When others have a reasoned basis for objecting to language, I err on the side of caution to avoid making others uncomfortable. Yet, this category of speech was created to encompass a broad, ill-defined range of speech that falls below outright discriminatory or harassing language. That makes for a dangerously vague standard for a mandatory reporting rule.
The free speech concern is how such microaggressive terms can be used to curtail or punish speech, including supporting complaints for formal investigations. Disciplinary actions often seem based on how language is received rather than intended. Schools need to be clear as to whether microaggressive language can be the basis for bias complaints and actions.
Consider again the language from the Oregon Medical Board. It would encompass any “indirect or subtle behaviors that reflect negative attitudes or beliefs about a non-majority group.” The standard is heavily laden with subjectivity. (Notably, it does not include making such comments about any majority group, presumably whites or males).
The board then amplifies the standard by making it mandatory for other doctors to report colleagues. Under the proposed ruled,
“a licensee must report within 10 business days to the Board any information that appears to show that a licensee is or may be medically incompetent or is or may be guilty of unprofessional or dishonorable conduct or is or may be a licensee with a physical incapacity.”
So, doctors will have to police any “indirect or subtle behaviors” that “reflect negative attitudes or beliefs” . . . or face discipline themselves.
The Hippocratic oath is based on the pledge that doctors will “first do no harm.” Unfortunately, that pledge does not appear to apply to free speech in Oregon. Rather than merely publish opinions on phrases or practices that can be seen as microaggressive, the Oregon Medical Board is about to impose an ambiguous speech regulation that is likely viewed by some doctors as turning them into social-warrior snitches.
The Oregon Medical Board should remove the microaggressive provision. Sometimes the best treatment is the least intrusive.
When Indiana University implemented DEI standards in its law school curriculum, Professor John Lawrence Hill warned the state legislature about attempts by “extreme idealogues to indoctrinate students” that “fly in the face” of America’s legal foundations.
“This class is guaranteed to further polarize and politicize the law school environment and represents yet another attempt by the academic Left to provide a platform for extreme idealogues to indoctrinate students who are essentially academic hostages,”Hill wrote in his letter. “DEI is now ‘in’ at the McKinney school….”
In an interview with The Federalist, Hill, a professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law (IU McKinney) says that issues with the ABA’s DEI requirements are long-standing.
A New ABA Requirement
In February 2022, the ABA introduced a new standard for legal education. Standard 303(c) reads, “A law school shall provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism: (1) at the start of the program of legal education, and (2) at least once again before graduation.”
This marks the first time the ABA has mandated non-legal coursework in law school curriculum.
Hill learned of the new ABA requirement when he was serving on the law school’s academic affairs committee, which was tasked with implementing curricular reform. At the time, Hill chalked it up to an “unnecessary” addition to students’ legal education.
Once Hill departed from the committee, however, the university faculty capitalized on the new ABA instructions. Although standard 303(c) can be satisfied through orientation sessions, lectures, or “other educational experiences,” the faculty at IU McKinney opted to create a mandatory DEI course.
“[As] things developed, and I saw the way it was going … it wasn’t just unnecessary. It’s been baleful,” Hill says. “I mean, it’s really been … used as a predicate to make other changes.”
DEI at the Expense of Constitutional Law
In order to introduce new DEI coursework, the committee gave three proposals to the faculty. Two of them involved moving constitutional law to the second year, a major departure from traditional law school curriculum. Hill says this provoked a “huge faculty fight.”
“Every single one of us took constitutional law in the first year. Every single law student has taken Con Law in the first year for a century,” Hill recalls telling the faculty. “Why is it that all of a sudden our students can’t do this?”
In a memo, Hill urged the faculty to reject the abandonment of constitutional education for first-year students. Hill says he suggested a number of alternatives, including reducing the hours of one of his own classes, civil procedure.
“People freaked out at the memo,” Hill remembers. “There was a lot of anger.”
As a professor of constitutional law himself, Hill viewed the proposals to move constitutional law as particularly egregious.
“I believe that the real reason for throwing Constitutional Law out of the first year is plainly ideological,” Hill wrote in his letter to state senators. “Our Constitution enshrines and projects the values of liberty, individuality, and equality under the law. These values, which have served our nation for over 235 years, fly in the face of the DEI paradigm.”
In April, the faculty agreed to keep constitutional law in the first-year curriculum while still incorporating the “responsible lawyering” course. The new curriculum will take effect this fall.
“The law school has not considered or approved a 1-hour Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) course,” a spokeswoman for IU McKinney said in a statement to The Federalist. “A new 1L course, Responsible Lawyering, will include professional identity formation, consistent with ABA Standard 303, among other professionalism topics.”
However, “responsible lawyering” was added in direct response to the ABA’s DEI agenda. According to the ABA, this type of coursework will “reinforce the skill of cultural competency and their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession.” Hill describes this curriculum as a sign of more leftist change down the road.
“In law, sometimes a case is called a signal. It may be more modest in terms of what it actually rules, but it signals a change … a new way of doing things. The ABA requirement was cover, and it was a signal that … law schools can make changes, including pretty dramatic changes,” Hill says. “Many people in our faculty said this is a cover. The ABA has given us cover. That term was used specifically by other faculty members.”
According to Hill, these changes run deeper than some may think.
“What ties all this together is that there is an ideological agenda. Some people understand that consciously. They embrace it. They pursue it. A lot of other people just sort of go along, understanding the current. You know, people can sense when political currents are changing or where they’re moving, and so they sort of move with it, without really sharing the goal as such. But I think that this was something that came down from on high [that is] ideological, deeply ideological.”
In an interview with The Federalist, Raatz confirmed he is investigating the matter personally.
“We can all be sensitive to one another, but to mandate diversity, equity, inclusion … what does that really mean?” Raatz, a recipient of Hill’s letter, told The Federalist. “To just be frank about it, I’m not a proponent of DEI, honestly, and I’m going to determine just what their parameters are, and we’ll go from there.”
Fighting a DEI Agenda
Hill sent his letter to Raatz and Crane on Saturday afternoon. The senators are members of the Indiana Senate Education and Career Development Committee, and Hill hopes making them aware of the situation could lead to action.
“I have taught at McKinney for 21 years. I love this school and I love our students,” Hill wrote. “I hope that there might be something that you and your colleagues in the Indiana House and Senate might be able to do to respond to these developments.”
In the meantime, his concern is primarily for the quality of education at IU McKinney.
“When I started teaching, I was middle of the road. I wasn’t, you know, a wild-eyed progressive, but I wasn’t a libertarian or a conservative, either. I tried to kind of find the middle way, but I started to see the extent to which our textbooks, the way people teach classes, who gets tenure, who’s elevated — I mean, there’s so much of politics in it.”
Today, Hill says he still has hope for the law school — and for Americans.
“The most important thing is that you get everything accurate,” Hill told The Federalist. “I think once people know, it makes it harder for the powers that be to continue to advance these causes. I mean, everyone is aware of what’s going on. People are smart. Americans are smart. Once they’re aware of what’s going on, how it’s going on, it removes the cover for people who are trying to essentially push these values, these courses.”
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed on Monday that it is pursuing a four-count indictment against a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on a kids’ transing scheme at the largest children’s hospital in the United States.
Dallas-based Dr. Eithan Haim first discovered Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston — which originally claimed it no longer offered body-butchering services to pediatric patients — employed physicians who continued to castrate children during his residency rotations. The 34-year-old leakedevidence of this deceptive activity along with proof that the hospital administration promoted procedures to cut off the breasts and genitals of physically healthy people to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo in May 2023. Both Haim and Rufo maintain that the information Haim passed along contained redactions that kept minor patients’ information secret.
The four-count indictment, unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Texas on Monday, however, alleges Haim obtained “protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization” by requesting to “re-activate his login access at TCH to access pediatric patients not under his care” shortly before the article debuted.
Prosecutors led by U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari, who has already been accused of a long list of misconduct in the investigation, claim Haim acted “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”
The HIPPA Privacy Rule prosecutors will invoke in their case against Haim states that “covered entities” are allowed to disclose seemingly protected health information as long as “they believe [it] is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to a person or the public, when such disclosure is made to someone they believe can prevent or lessen the threat (including the target of the threat).”
According to Haim, the threat posed by medical professionals who swore to “do no harm” but continued to subject children to dangerous gender experiments was serious and imminent enough to risk his livelihood for it. He also believes the Biden administration’s sudden show of interest in an exposé from last year at the same time it continues to weaponize itself against its ideological enemies is no coincidence.
“I believe the reason they are doing this is clear. They want to send a message to any potential whistleblower — the punishment for telling the truth, for challenging the dominant political ideology, will be the heavy hand of the most powerful federal leviathan in human history,” Haim wrote on his Give Send Go page earlier this month.
If convicted, the expectant father could face up to 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
An ex-Obama fundraiser who once raked in millions of dollars for the Democratic Party is none too happy with the direction of the country these days, telling Fox News she is so dismayed, she’s switching her vote to Trump.
“Biden has been asleep at the wheel,” Allison Huynh said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends First.”
“He’s allowed Big Tech as well as the looters to take over Silicon Valley. San Francisco has been the science experiment that’s gone awry. I wake up in the morning, there’s no grocery stores to go to, there’s no malls to take my teenage girls shopping to. The streets are not safe, there are more fentanyl users and dealers than high school students in our once great city,” she continued.
Allison Huynh attends FORMS Opening Reception Presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch at Miami Design District on December 05, 2023 in Miami, Florida. (Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Huynh, along with her then-husband Google programmer Scott Hassan, helped raise millions of dollars for the Obama campaign in 2008, according to The New York Post. Her nature as a “hopeful” person and what she called former President Obama’s “great ideas” focused on equality for women and people of color led her to support the candidate promising “hope and change.”
She now describes herself as an independent who plans to vote for former President Trump this November. She even recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago to show support for Trump at a fundraiser.
Huynh has joined the number of people who have switched their pledged vote from President Biden to former President Trump. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“When he [Obama] came into power, he was very scared. In his biography, he talked about being afraid of doing things because he didn’t want to ruin it for future Black leaders and Black presidents, and therefore, he let the government bureaucracy and red tape take over him whereas Trump was very specific with coming out with great ideas to allow people to grow great wealth,” she said.
“Biden is changing that. Right now, it’s very hard in this country to make money unless you work for a Big Tech company. If you’re an emerging tech company, they’re driving you offshore,” she added.
Huynh elaborated on that point a bit further, noting that the current administration exacerbates entrepreneurial challenges in a few ways, including, in her words, by “legislating and suing emerging technology companies, startup companies and just regular entrepreneurs who are funding their business.”
Huynh, a former Obama fundraiser, said Biden is “asleep at the wheel” while remarking on the current state of the nation. (Getty Images)
To further showcase her deteriorating enthusiasm for the Democratic Party, she’s selling off memorabilia tied to party history, including a rocking chair that belonged to former President John F. Kennedy, which she purchased at an auction for nearly $10,000, according to The Post. Among the other Democratic memorabilia in her house sits the iconic Shepard Fairey artwork of Obama that inspired the “Hope” posters that defined his 2008 campaign against late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
The report stated she paid more than $1 million for the piece.
She argued, however, that policies outlined by Trump today are more hopeful for fledgling businesses, including promises of lower taxes for emerging A.I. and Blockchain companies.
“They will lead the next wave of the industrial revolution, and we need specific policies to encourage that innovation,” she said.
Vicious lawbreakers are able to enter the United States illegally because the Biden administration has a border policy by which criminal checks are done at the end of the process rather than at the beginning, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax on Tuesday. Lankford made the comments after a El Salvador man, who had been in prison in his own country for murder, and illegally fled to the U.S. was arrested over the weekend for the killing last year of a Maryland mother.
The White House announced Tuesday the Biden administration will soon permit certain spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually, citizenship, a move that could affect some half a million people here illegally.
Lankford called the new policy “out of touch” telling “Wake Up America,” “this is something I have said all along.
“For years I’ve said we don’t know if people are fleeing from the law or if they are fleeing from poverty: We don’t know because [this administration is] not checking it, they are not evaluating it,” Lankford added.
“Any criminal checks they are doing for individuals are actually at the end of the process, years after they have been in the country rather than at the very beginning. This is one of the things I have fought for, to have a criminal check at the very beginning and turn people around immediately rather than release them into the country.”
What makes the new Biden policy even worse is he announced recently that “he is going to close down the border,” Lankford said, “but doesn’t do it, as it was just a public show [and he] is actually not enforcing that.
“And then he announces, Oh, we are also going to allow half a million people that are in the country illegally to now get a path to citizenship, which is just a big flag to everyone internationally to say, Get into the country as fast as you can, because we are going to give you citizenship.”
Biden just get worse with every move, according to Lankford.
“This has been a challenge of Biden all along,” he continued. “He has done 94, now 95 executive orders opening the border up and inviting more people to come and then announces that he is going to close the border down and actually does not.”
“Day after day they have said [in regards to illegal immigration] that basically what [former President Donald] Trump did was mean, and so now we’re going to open the border up. What I have said over and over again to this administration is following the law is not mean.”
“We are a nation of the rule of law,” he concluded, “so as crimes increase, as murders increase, as all these problems that happen are a direct result of a president saying, Well I’m going to try to do something fair for these individuals. Instead, let’s do something fair for the American people.”
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Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday accused one of the scientists behind the assertion that the COVID-19 virus was not grown in a lab of “shameful propaganda” at an “Origins of COVID-19″ hearing.
“You should have done better, and because you didn’t, people have suffered,” the Missouri Republican said to Robert Garry.
Hawley said people have lost their jobs and social standing because of the “propaganda article” of Garry, one of the five authors of the March 2020 opinion paper on “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.
“It is wrong to censor and lie to the American public,” the Missouri lawmaker said. “It is wrong to withhold critical information from them.”
Garry is a professor of microbiology and immunology, and associate dean for biomedical sciences at Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans.
“As a scientist who is supposed to follow facts, do you regret that your work was used to censor your fellow scientists and ordinary Americans who asked questions about the virus?” Hawley asked Garry.
Garry responded that scientists are not responsible for their articles after they are published.
“All we did was write a paper,” he said. “It’s been one of the most scrutinized papers in history,” he said. “It’s held up very well. It wasn’t an attempt to distort things and to mislead the American public. It was just a paper.”
The Missouri senator accused Garry of lying about the intelligence community coming to the conclusion that the virus did not originate from a lab.
“That is a lie,” Hawley said. “The intelligence community did not come to that conclusion. Multiple intelligence community agencies and components have concluded it was likely a lab leak, and they concluded at the same time you and your people were propagandizing the American public.”
“I am not going to sit here and allow you to lie any further,” he continued. “You have disgracefully participated in shameful propaganda that has been one of the worst chapters in American history with the country propagandizing its own people.”
Garry agreed that there is more to learn from the intelligence community.
“All agencies should come forth with more information,” he said.
The hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee aimed to identify the truth about where the coronavirus came from, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said. Agencies and officials withheld information about the COVID-19 virus from the American public, Paul said in his opening remarks.
“Privately, they were saying one thing,” Paul said. “Publicly, they were saying another. Media pundits parroted the narrative, while social media platforms censored discussion about the lab leak, labeling it as misinformation and stifling open discourse about the virus’s origins.”
Molecular biologist Richard Ebright called the paper “fraudulent.”
“I would tell a younger scientist that you do not state a conclusion without evidence, even in an opinion piece in a scientific journal,” Ebright said. “And you never, under any circumstances in a scientific journal, state conclusions that you know to be unsound. That represents scientific misconduct.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon—Rumors are flying that Biden will be replaced by the leaders of the Democratic party before the 2024 election. If so, who will they replace him with that will continue Obama’s Marxist-Globalist agenda?
The Look on Obama’s Face Says it All: Biden Incoherently Babbles About “Joe Jobs” as Obama Stares (VIDEO)
By Cristina Laila – June 17, 2024
The look on Obama’s face said it all. Joe Biden and Barack Obama appeared on stage together for a fundraiser in Los Angeles, California Saturday evening. Biden reportedly raised $28 million from California Hollywood elitists in Los Angeles. Out-of-touch Hollywood actors and singers like George Clooney, Barbara Streisand and Julia Roberts helped Biden raise money Saturday night at the Peacock Theater. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel interviewed Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Biden babbled incoherently about the unemployment rate and lack of jobs under his watch. SEE MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump. READ MORE…
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was blasted on social media over the weekend for a Father’s Day post, which the New York Democrat eventually deleted, showing off his backyard grill.
“Our family has lived in an apartment building for all our years, but my daughter and her wife just bought a house with a backyard and for the first time we’re having a barbeque with hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill!” Schumer posted on X on Sunday. “Father’s Day Heaven!”
The post was immediately criticized by conservatives accusing him of placing cheese on one of the burger patties prematurely and not knowing how to properly grill the burger.
“Chuck is making an E. coli with cheese,” Cavalry founding partner Michael Duncan posted on X.
“You put cheese on a raw patty,” Popular conservative account
“Nuance Bro” posted on X. “Y’all are so bad at pretending to be normal human beings.”
“I get that you’re playing to the masses but literally no one puts cheese on a raw beef patty,”
Donald Trump Jr. posted on X. “If you need help learning how to do basic grilling stuff let me know. Nice try relating though. Fuc$&?g communists!!!”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at a news conference. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Schumer eventually deleted the post which had been “ratioed” by conservative accounts.
“Chuck Schumer just deleted this post where he got insanely ratioed for not knowing how to make a cheeseburger,” LibsofTikTok posted on X.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., conducts a news conference after the senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, June 21, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Democrats try to be relatable without being super cringe challenge: IMPOSSIBLE.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer’s office for comment but did not receive a response.
“Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!” Schumer said in another Father’s Day post that remains on social media.
Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he is planning to hold a vote on legislation to bar gun bump stocks after the Supreme Court invalidated a ban on them.
“The Senate can help restore this public safety rule, and next week, it will try. As majority leader, I have the ability to allow a unanimous consent vote, and we’ll see just what Republican MAGAs do: Will they allow it to go forward, or will they cower to MAGA and hurt the American people?” Schumer said Sunday.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that sided with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban on bump stocks. The devices enable semiautomatic rifles to fire rapidly like machine guns. The court’s liberal minority dissented from the decision.
“The only way to permanently close this loophole is through legislation,” Schumer said after the ruling. “Bump stocks have played a devastating role in many of the horrific mass shootings in our country, but, sadly, it’s no surprise to see the Supreme Court roll back this necessary public safety rule as they push their out-of-touch, extreme agenda. They’re even further to the right of Donald Trump.”
Schumer has planned a series of votes in the Senate to help boost embattled incumbents and divide Republicans on key issues.
President Joe Biden, who blasted the Supreme Court ruling Friday, said he would sign a bill banning bump stocks immediately if it reached his desk.
“Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation,” Biden said.
The bump stock ban was enacted by the Trump administration in 2017 after a Las Vegas concert shooting in which 60 people were killed.
At the polls, Europeans and Africans join Americans in showing what they think of the Left’s green energy agenda, supporting politicians who say voters can keep their cars. Pictured: Robert Habeck, left, Germany’s minister of economy and climate action, meets March 8 with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres in New York City. (Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has proclaimed fossil-fuel companies “godfathers of climate chaos,” but many Europeans, Africans, and Americans clearly disagree. They’ve shown recently what they think of the green agenda of costly renewables and instead support politicians who will let them keep their cars.
In elections for the European Parliament, a good number of Europeans joined the pushback that has already begun in the U.S and South Africa against the green-energy movement. Right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, and France, all with platforms opposing the green agenda, fared strikingly well.
French President Emmanuel Macron called national elections after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, which supports fossil fuels, gained 12 seats and won 31% of the vote: a plurality, and about twice the total achieved by Macron’s Renaissance Party.
Major losers in the European parliamentary elections included Renew Europe, the party that boasts“it has played a leading role in raising the European Union’s ambitions to reach climate neutrality by 2050,” and the European Greens Party, which seeks a green deal and wants the union to be powered 100% by renewable energy by 2040.
On June 5, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, indefinitely postponed New York City’s planned “congestion charge,” or tax, which was originally set to go in effect June 30. Had it been implemented, drivers would have been required to pay $15 per day to enter Manhattan’s central business district below 60th Street.
New York expected to raise $1 billion a year from drivers to fund public transit, although one congressional report commissioned by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., forecast revenues of over $3.4 billion.
Proponents said that the tax would improve air quality, reduce congestion, and fund public transit, but it would have disproportionately hurt small businesses, poor residents, and others who rely on personal transportation.
The tax would also have been harsh on older and handicapped people, many of whom can’t take public transit. And at a time when working from home has been hitting the economy of downtown Manhattan, it would have been an additional reason for office workers to forsake the city.
The Big Apple is fortunate to have escaped this outcome. There was vast resistance to the new tax, and Hochul was wise to cancel it. People don’t like to be without their cars, and she listened.
Virginia residents escaped a similar outcome recently, as Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin decided not to abide by California’s new Advanced Clean Cars II standards. Passed in 2022, the standards require 35% of new passenger vehicles sold in the Golden State to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2026 and 100%tto be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2035. Virginia will comply with federal law rather than California law.
Virginia’s prior governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had required that the commonwealth embrace the 2021 automobile standards of the California Air Resources Board, which would have mandated that a certain share of auto dealers’ sales in 2025 be battery-powered cars. The 2022 standards are stricter but were passed after Virginia (and 15 other states) had signed on to California’s 2021 standards.
Virginia is the first state to walk away from California’s 2022 standards, and it will encourage others to do the same. People need affordable, reliable transportation for personal and business use. Electric tractors can’t substitute for diesel-powered ones. Small businesses rely on gasoline-powered pickup trucks that can tow equipment without having to stop for an hour or two to recharge during long trips. Construction workers need inexpensive cars to get to work. And this is a global reality.
In the South African general elections last month, the African National Congress won only 40% of the popular vote, failing to secure a majority for the first time since the party’s 1994 founding. Although South Africa has vast supplies of coal and gas, blackouts have damaged the economy and contributed to the ANC government’s unpopularity. Unplanned outages rose from 176,000 in 2007 to almost 20 million in 2023. Between 2012 and 2022, South Africa’s gross domestic product per capita declined by 17%, from $8,174 to $6,766, and manufacturing output decreased by almost a third. The latest official unemployment rate is 32.9%. South Africa’s new government will need to ensure a reliable energy supply to revive the country’s manufacturing sector and reduce unemployment.
Fossil fuels are demonized by the secretary-general of the United Nations, but they enable people to heat and cool their homes, operate their vehicles, and use electrical appliances reliably. And resilient sources of fuel are essential to many countries’ manufacturing sectors.
Voters know this, and they are making themselves heard all over the world.
Below is my column in The Hill on the concerning record of Attorney General Merrick Garland on a variety of recent matters, including a frivolous privilege claim to withhold the audiotape of President Joe Biden during the Hur interview. There is a certain corruption of judgment that is evident from this and other decisions by Garland since he became Attorney General.
Here is the column:
This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland took to the pages of the Washington Post to lash out at critics who are spreading what he considers “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.” His column, titled “Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end,” missed the point.
It is Garland himself who has become the problem. The solution is in Wilmington, Delaware, where 12 average citizens just showed a commitment to the rule of law that seems to be harder and harder for the attorney general to meet.
Since his appointment, Garland has repeated a mantra that he is apolitical and would never yield to the pressures of politics or the White House. When he was nominated, I believed that claim and enthusiastically supported Garland’s confirmation. He was, I thought, the perfect man for the job after his distinguished judicial service as a moderate judge.
I was wrong. Garland’s tenure as attorney general has shown a pronounced reluctance to take steps that would threaten President Biden. He slow-walked the appointment of a special counsel investigating any Biden, and then excluded from the counsel’s scope any investigation of the massive influence peddling operation by Hunter Biden, his uncle and others.
However, it is what has occurred in the last six months that has left some of us shaken, given our early faith in Garland.
I have long been a critic of Garland’s failure to order a special counsel to look into the extensive evidence of corruption surrounding the Bidens. As I stated in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, there is ample evidence that Biden lied repeatedly about his knowledge of this corruption and his interaction with these foreign clients.
However, a more worrisome concern is the lack of consistency in these investigations. First, Special Counsel Robert Hur found that Biden knowingly retained and mishandled classified material. However, he concluded that Biden’s age and diminished faculties would make him too sympathetic to a jury. It was less sympathetic than pathetic, given that this is the same man who is running for re-election to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. More importantly, Garland has not made obvious efforts to reach a consistent approach in the two cases by dropping charges based on the same crimes by Trump in Florida. (Such action would not affect the obstruction counts).
Second, Garland has allowed Special Counsel Jack Smith to maintain positions that seem diametrically at odds with past Justice Department policies. This includes Smith’s statement that he will try Trump up to (and even through) the next election. It also includes a sweeping gag order which would have eviscerated free speech protections by gagging Trump from criticizing the Justice Department. While Garland has said that he wants to give the special counsels their independence, it falls to him to protect the consistency and values of his department.
Garland’s most brazenly political act has been the laughable executive privilege claim used to withhold the audiotape of the Hur-Biden interviews. The Justice Department has not claimed that the transcript is privileged, but only that the audiotape of Biden’s comments is privileged. This is so logically disconnected that even CNN hosts have mocked it.
The Justice Department went further in court by adding conspiracy to absurdity as part of its unhinged theory. It asserted a type of “deepfake privilege” on the basis that the release of the audiotape could allow AI systems to create fake versions of the president’s words. It ignores that there are already ample public sources now to create such fake tapes and that, by withholding the real audiotape, the Justice Department only makes such fake copies more likely to arise and ensnare the unwary.
Most importantly, the arguments of a “he-who-must-not-be-heard” privilege or a deep-fake privilege are ridiculous. Garland knows that, as would any first-year law student. Yet, he is going along with a claim that is clearly designed to protect Biden from embarrassment before the next election. It is entirely political and absurd.
After stumbling through a half-hearted defense of the audiotape decision before he was held in contempt of Congress, Garland was faced with another clear test of principle. Three House committees (Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means) this month referred for prosecution cases of perjury against Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden. Despite what appear to be open-and-shut allegations that they lied to Congress, most everyone in Washington believes that Garland and the Justice Department will slow-walk and then scuttle the referrals to protect the Bidens.
This is the same Justice Department that seemed on a hair-trigger to prosecute Trump officials for perjury and contempt after referrals from Democrat-controlled committees.
The questions at issue were not “gotcha” traps, like showing up at Michael Flynn’s office to nail him on his description of a meeting with Russian diplomats. These were some of the most-discussed questions heading into Hunter Biden’s long-delayed appearance before the committees.
Hunter is accused of lying about his position at Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a corporate entity that moved millions of dollars from foreign individuals and entities to Hunter Biden. He also allegedly lied about the identity of the recipient of his controversial message to a Chinese businessman, in which he threatened that his father was sitting “right next to me” and would join him in retaliating against the Chinese if they did not send millions. They promptly wired the money as demanded.
Hunter’s answers appear to be demonstrably untrue. Yet, there is little faith that the Justice Department will allow the matter to be presented to a grand jury. If Garland’s pledge to remain apolitical were widely accepted, there would be little question about the prosecution of such compelling claims.
Garland now appears entirely adrift in his own department. While mouthing platitudes about being beyond politics, he continues to run interference for the Biden White House. He appears to be looking to close aides for such direction.
He should instead look to those 12 people in Wilmington, Delaware.
Despite facing overwhelming evidence of Hunter Biden’s guilt, his legal team pursued a jury-nullification strategy. Wilmington is Bidentown, the hometown for the president and his family. An array of Bidens, including the first lady, lined up behind Hunter during the trial, in case anyone forgot that fact.
Yet the jury convicted Hunter on all counts without any hesitation. Despite sympathy for a recovering drug addict in a town that has overwhelmingly supported the Bidens for decades, “nobody mentioned anything about political motivations” in the jury room, as one juror noted. “I was never thinking of President Joe Biden,” said another.
Garland needs to show a modicum of that courage and principle as attorney general. He could start by dropping the farcical privilege claims over the audiotape and sending the referrals to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the same priority treatment afforded to Trump officials like Flynn.
As it stands, few believe that will happen, despite Garland’s repeated line about transcending politics. It is not the mantra that is in doubt, but the man.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University School of Law.He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon and Schuster, 2024).
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Audit slams Walz administration for oversight failures that enabled Feeding Our Future fraud. In some cases, MDE shockingly “asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.”
Audit slams Walz administration for oversight failures that enabled Feeding Our Future fraud
In some cases, MDE shockingly “asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.”
By Evan Poellinger – June 13, 2024
The Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) issued a 120-page report Thursday which lambasted the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) for failing to take necessary oversight measures, enabling the multi-million dollar Feeding Our Future fraud to occur.
In the report, Legislative Auditor Judy Randall declared, “Federal regulations required MDE to monitor and enforce Feeding Our Future’s compliance with program requirements. MDE’s responsibilities under federal law ranged from providing guidance and training to Feeding Our Future staff, to terminating the organization’s participation in the programs if warranted. However, we found MDE’s oversight of Feeding Our Future to be inadequate. In fact, we believe MDE’s actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud.” READ MORE…
While Bidenomics continues with its same old, same old “bribe the young and illegal, tax the stuffing out of the middle class, and reward the corporate elites” policies, Trump is throwing out some interesting ideas to kick around in regard to the economy and how he would run his second term.
Trump’s economic plans include several fresh initiatives. You probably heard of his plan to end the taxing of tips for service workers. Tips are not wages. They are rewards from individuals. They are a nightmare to account for. And they help – very directly – people on low incomes. His suggestion is both kind and pragmatic. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump. READ MORE…
Below is my column in The Hill on the renewed attacks on Justice Samuel Alito after a liberal activist secretly taped a dinner conversation with him and his wife. The feigned outrage of pundits and politicians is absurdly unconnected to anything even remotely surprising or unethical in the comments.
Here is the column:
In a world of moral relativism, Lauren Windsor may reign supreme. The Democratic activist recently lied to justices in order to record answers at a dinner.
In an interview with CNN, the filmmaker (who has been lionized by many in the media for her dishonesty) cheerfully explained that she lies to “elicit truths that serve the greater public good.” The “greater good” is to contribute to a campaign of harassment and attacks on Supreme Court justices by academics, the media and Democratic members. The chief target of these efforts lately has been the author of the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito.
For years, the left has maintained a well-funded, unrelenting campaign against the court and its conservative majority. This has included an effort by such figures as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to pack the court immediately with a liberal majority. Warren declared that the court must be packed because it is daring to oppose “widely held public opinion.”
The statement, of course, ignores that the court was designed to resist public pressure (and even members of Congress) in order to protect the constitutional rights and liberties of minority groups.
Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects have assembled again to call for resignations and impeachments after Windsor’s surreptitious taping of both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. That includes Warren, who declared that “Alito is an extremist who is out of touch with mainstream America. His rising power on the Supreme Court is a threat to our democracy.”
It did not matter that what Windsor captured on her secret recording was neither surprising nor unethical. Pretending to be a religious conservative at a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Windsor successfully induced the deeply religious Alito to say . . . wait for it . . . that he believes the country should return to a place of “godliness.”
It was an otherworldly moment as this notoriously anti-conservative activist asked an unsuspecting Alito why the nation was so filled with rage. In the recording, Alito laments the divisions in the country, stating, “I wish I knew. I don’t know. It’s easy to blame the media, but I do blame them because they do nothing but criticize us. And so, they have really eroded trust in the court…American citizens in general need to work on this to heal this polarization because it’s very dangerous.”
When pushed on what the court can do, Alito again answered honestly: “I don’t think it’s something we can do. We have a very defined role, and we need to do what we’re supposed to do. But this is a bigger problem. This is way above us.”
There is nothing even slightly controversial there. But the quote being repeated, often in isolation, was when Alito acknowledged that, while “there can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully…it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So, it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
Warren and others already prove that very point on the left, as do many on the right. Again, this is not at all controversial. We are divided because people hold irreconcilable beliefs on which they are unwilling to compromise. Imagine the reaction of liberals if Justice Sonia Sotomayor suddenly “compromised” on abortion rights.
But pundits and politicians have since lined up, feigning vapors at the thought of a justice saying privately that he believed in “godliness” and had little hope of “compromise” on many issues.
Warren seemed beside herself with shock, acting as if Alito’s bland, obvious observation were some clear sign of political bias: “I am most concerned about the appearance that Justice Alito has prejudged cases that will come before him. That is one of the biggest sins that a judge or justice can commit.” Bear in mind, these are the words of a senator seeking to pack the court with an ideological majority to give predictable rulings on major cases.
Likewise, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) declared the tape to be proof that Alito is “a movement activist,” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.) denounced Alito’s “outrageous” behavior. Of course, the lying democratic activist was not outrageous, but the justice was outrageous in sharing his observation in a private conversation that the nation is irreconcilably divided on major issues.
Warren, Whitehouse, Blumenthal and many of the same pundits were strangely silent when liberal justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg engaged in actual partisanship, as when she openly opposed the election of Donald Trump and discussed cases and controversies that might come before her. There was no demand for a resignation when Justice Sonia Sotomayor called upon students to politically oppose pro-life laws after acknowledging, “they tell me I shouldn’t.” There were no vapors at the thought of justices expressing their political sentiments from the left.
Media even cleaned up interviews for liberal justices. Katie Couric famously deleted disparaging comments made by Ginsburg about players kneeling during the National Anthem at NFL games, even though that matter could have ended up before the Supreme Court.
What is most galling is the pile-on over not just this manufactured controversy, but the earlier controversy over flags. Years ago, one of the best reporters at the Washington Post investigated a report that the Alitos had flown an upside-down American flag, to see if it was a political statement associated with Trump. Robert Barnes interviewed neighbors and concluded that it was not Justice Alito but his wife Martha-Ann who had hoisted the flag. Mrs. Alito, he learned, was responding to an ongoing spat with a neighbor.
Barnes and the Post responsibly decided not to run the story. That type of journalistic restraint is now anathema in our age of rage, with reporters denouncing the Post for failing to run a “blockbuster” story.
This was then amplified when the public was told that Mrs. Alito had also hoisted at one of their properties the Revolutionary War-era “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has enjoyed something of a revival since it featured in the introductory sequence of the acclaimed 2008 miniseries on the career of President John Adams.
It is not clear how that story was a “blockbuster” — that a justice has a wife with a flag fetish, which includes flying the historic Pine Tree Flag. (Tellingly and amusingly, after the left added that flag to its list of Alito’s transgressions, Democratic politicians suddenly had to scramble to remove it from their own buildings to clear the way for the outrage.)
Of course, Windsor also targeted Mrs. Alito in her secret recordings at the dinner. The media again pounced on a line where she complained of “feminazi” critics and added, “Don’t get angry. Get even!”
That statement followed her suggestion that they may sue for defamation, and that “there’s a five-year defamation statute of limitations.” She also added that her husband had tried to keep her from flying her flags and getting into neighborhood spats, but that “he never controls me.” Indeed, she said he had prevailed on her not to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag, but that she was not giving up the ghost even on that flag.
Windsor generously allowed that a Supreme Court spouse “certainly” has a right to speak, before adding that expected “but!” Such liberty, she asserted, may not apply to Mrs. Alito “when your spouse is one of the most powerful men in the country, you know, with his fingers on the scale, literally, of justice. I mean, are we going to say that we are going to do away with impartiality, the bedrock principle of our democracy, of our jurisprudence? Is it okay?”
Well, the answer is yes, Miss Windsor. It is okay.
We do not require justices to divorce outspoken or irascible spouses. We do not punish them for speaking freely in private conversations with bottom-feeding gotcha activists who secretly record them at dinners. Justices are even allowed to have strong opinions about controversial issues in dinner conversations. Strong personal opinions do not on their own constitute conflicts of interest.
None of this will matter, of course. Democrats will continue to chase Alito around the Beltway like a scene out of Lord of the Flies. The absurd demands for meetings with justices and threats of subpoenas will continue to thrill liberal voters. It is all part of the threats made by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the steps of the Supreme Court. Schumer threatened the conservative justices, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
It is an extension of the pledge by activists to change the court “by any means necessary.” While thankfully denouncing the attempted assassination of Justice Bret Kavanaugh, liberals have proposed “more aggressive” targeting of justices at their homes, bribing conservatives to retire, and literally cutting off the justices’ air conditioning.
As Windsor explained, it is all just for “the greater good.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is the author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (Simon & Schuster 2024)
We have previously discussed the view of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade on free speech. We have strikingly different views on free speech. McQuade just published “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America” and calls free speech our “Achilles heel.” My book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, is out in the coming days with a more robust view of free speech.
Notably, McQuade’s call to limit free speech is justified as needed to combat disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. Yet, McQuade just went public with a full-throated defense of what the U.S. government now calls a “conspiracy theory.” She maintains that the Hunter Biden laptop should still be discounted or dismissed as Russian disinformation.
In her comments, Professor McQuade joins the Post’s Philip Bump as one of the last dogs in this fight. Most media figures have long accepted the view of the U.S. government that the Hunter Biden laptop is “real” and authenticated.
I have previously disagreed with Professor McQuade on issues such as her belief that former president Donald Trump could be charged with manslaughter over the January 6th riot. Yet, those disagreements represent materially different understandings of the operative legal standards. Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe went even further in arguing that Trump could be charged with attempted murder. Academics can disagree on such matters and free speech allows us to hash out our differences.
However, I was still surprised by the effort to resurrect the Russian disinformation claim. Professor McQuade noted that the agent at the Biden trial could not say with certainty that nothing was changed to the laptop before it was obtained by agents from the computer shop. However, FBI agent Erika Jensen said that there was no evidence tampering.
That space, however, was big enough to drive a conspiracy theory through on X:
Trying again!
This week, FBI Agent Erika Jensen testified at the trial of Hunter Biden about the abandoned laptop that a repair shop owner gave to Robert Costello, attorney for Rudy Giuliani, shortly before the 2020 election. At the time, 50 former senior intelligence officers…
As noted by @emptywheel, however, questions remain about the chain of custody of the laptop, and [FBI] Agent [Erika] Jensen testified that she was unable to say whether the laptop was tampered with before the FBI obtained it.
And, as @AshaRangappa has noted, even if the content was authentic, it still may have been a Russian influence operation, just like the DNC hack-and-leak operation, designed to sow discord. If so, mission accomplished! […] Therefore, it remains unknown whether Russia was involved with the scheme, and it is still correct to say that the laptop has “all of the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.”
Under this theory, any negative stories found in documents or electronic sources can have “the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation” in any given election. That same skepticism, of course, did not apply to the Steele dossier, which was secretly funded by the Clinton campaign and found by U.S. intelligence as containing possible Russian disinformation.
It is a variation on proving a negative. McQuade and others appear to be arguing that you must prove that there was no Russian involvement before giving weight to the damaging contents of the laptop.
Of course, there still has been no showing of any fake file or email. To the contrary, the most damaging emails on influence peddling and other potential criminal conduct have been verified. Yet, McQuade is repeating the claim that “even if the content was authentic, it still may have been a Russian influence operation.” There is also the more obvious explanation that Hunter abandoned his laptop at a computer shop and it was given to the FBI.
What is striking is how advocates are now abandoning the claims of false emails and files in favor of an argument that it may be true but still disinformation. This is consistent with the positions of many academics and the Biden Administration. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintains this position.
CISA head Jen Easterly declared that her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure would be extended to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes not just “disinformation” and “misinformation,” but combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
The chain of custody argument continues to be used in Congress despite the federal court and federal agencies recognizing the authenticity of the laptop. The Delaware jury also did not appear persuaded by the claims of Hunter Biden’s defense counsel. It is, in my view, transparently evasive. The issue remains the files on the laptop detailing a massive influence peddling operation and a myriad of criminal acts committed by the President’s son. None of those files have been challenged by evidence of tampering or planting.
Ironically, the continued effort to keep this theory alive seems precisely the type of disinformation that Professor McQuade has cited in justifying limits on free speech.
There are obviously many media and academic figures who are heavily invested in what the government now calls a “conspiracy theory.” I previously discussed how the Bidens have succeeded in a Houdini-like trick in making this elephant of a scandal disappear from the public stage. They did so by enlisting the media in the illusion. Houdini knew the trick would work because the audience wanted the elephant to disappear.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Democrats and their media claim Trump will do to them what they are doing to him through their lawfare and abuse of the legal system. Those who broke the law and stepped out of the constitutional guidelines may have to worry.
NBC News Reports ‘Deep State’ Plot to Facilitate a ‘Military Coup’ Against Trump Amidst Fear for Alleged ‘Retribution’ if Re-Elected
By Jim Hoft – Jan 14, 2024
Concerns are intensifying among far-left national security “experts” and Pentagon insiders over the possibility that former President Donald Trump might leverage the U.S. military to enforce his political will if he returns to the Oval Office. In a detailed report, NBC News inadvertently admitted the existence of a “Deep State,” allegedly working to facilitate a military coup against former President Trump if he is freely and fairly elected by Americans. The NBC article paints a portrait of a left-wing plot to disrupt military allegiance to civilian control.
Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist wrote, “NBC reports the left is plotting ways to have military not be under civilian control. This dangerous and unconstitutional usurpation of power is being framed by NBC as good because it will undermine Trump if he is freely and fairly elected by Americans.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump. READ MORE…
During a virtual town hall event last week, Paula Collins, who is challenging Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., suggested that supporters of former President Trump be sent to “re-education camps,” according to audio obtained by the Post Millenial.
Collins, a marijuana tax attorney, argued that even if a majority of Democrats are elected to Congress in November, there will still be a need for re-education camps to “put[] it all back together again” after “this MAGA nightmare.”
The uncontested Democrat nominee for NY-21 said, “Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating, basically — that sounds like a, rather, a re-education camp.” She told voters on the call they will need to find “another way to phrase” the concept of “re-education camps” with the general public.
New York Democrat Paula Collins suggests Trump supporters need a “reeducation camp” after the election.
Collins is running for Congress and made the comments in a town hall meeting. pic.twitter.com/6VGNmtlcY7
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 6, 2024
Her remarks have drawn comparisons to a 2016 CNN interview of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, during which she said Trump supporters need “deprogramming.” Clinton said, “At some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.” On her campaign homepage, Collins notes the comparison to Clinton, saying she is honored.
Stefanik called for Democrat leadership to condemn the comments. Stefanik said in a press release, “Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer must immediately condemn this statement.”
My statement calling on Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer to immediately condemn NY Democrat congressional candidate's call to force Trump voters into re-education camps: pic.twitter.com/WPYEsg0Jrx
Instead of retracting and apologizing, Collins blamed the media for airing her controversial remarks. Collins claimed Stefanik is attacking her because she is “panicked.”
The left-wing candidate is using the controversy to fundraise, asking for $250 campaign donations. Asking for campaign donations, Collins writes on her website, “Help me end the MAGA mania.” “Far-right politics” is listed as one of her top issues on her campaign website.
Ratings on Ballotpedia describe Stefanik’s district as “Solid Republican,” based on data from three political analysis organizations.
Federal Election Commission filings highlight the weak chances of New York’s 21st congressional district flipping blue. Collins has just $6,337.93 cash on hand and $11,130 in campaign debt. Meanwhile, Stefanik, who is reportedly under consideration as Trump’s running-mate, boasts nearly $5 million in available funds.
Arianna Villarreal is a summer intern at The Federalist.
Attorney General Merrick Garland—seen here returning from a break in testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on June 4—is catching heat from House Republicans. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Attorney General Merrick Garland has been held in contempt of Congress.
The vote in favor of contempt was over Garland’s refusal to hand over audio recordings related to President Joe Biden’s interview about classified documentswith Justice Departmentspecial counsel Robert Hur.
The vote was by party line with one Republican voting against, Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, according to Fox News’ Chad Pergum.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Wednesday before the vote that the action had to be taken because Garland is refusing to comply with a “lawful subpoena.”
This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland will be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) June 12, 2024
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 4, Republicans demanded that Garland hand over the audio recordings. The Hur interviews with the president were prompted by the charge that Biden mishandled classified documents after his time as vice president.
A transcript of Hur’s discussions with Biden has already been released. However, the president has withheld the audio recording, claiming executive privilege. Republicans argue that the full audio recordings would give the public a full picture of Biden’s mental state. That’s because the special counsel recommended not prosecuting Biden because he came off in the lengthy interview as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and saidthe president’s “diminished faculties” mean he was less likely to have willfully violated the law.
Garland also refused to hand over the audio, which is what prompted Republicans in the House to move for holding him in contempt.
Two former aides to former President Donald Trump, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon have been sentenced to jail for being held in contempt of Congress. However, former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was held in contempt of Congress while serving under President Barack Obama, did not face prosecution. Obama’s DOJ inspector general refused to prosecute Holder.
Garland has said that the Justice Department went to great lengths to cooperate with Congress on the Hur investigation, but that the request for audio constituted a larger attack on the DOJ.
“There have been a series of unprecedented and, frankly, unfounded attacks on the Justice Department,” Garland said in a press conference in May, the Associated Press reported. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just the most recent.”
Republicans argued in debates on the House floor that withholding information from Congress interferes with the legislative branch’s ability to provide a check on the power of the president. Rep. Jim Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight and AccountabilityCommittee, said on the House floor on Wednesday that Biden misled the American people about his handling of classified documents and that the president needs to be held accountable.
🚨Chairman Comer Speaks on House Floor in Support of Resolution to Hold Attorney General Garland in Contempt
"President Biden has lied to the American people about his mishandling of classified documents.
“President Biden’s Department of Justice appears to be taking every step to insulate him from the consequences—whether it’s hiding these audio recordings or attempting to give Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal to shield Joe Biden from facing any accountability for his role in his family’s influence-peddling schemes,” Comer said. “That is unacceptable.”
Congressional Democrats have opposed the attempt to retrieve the special counsel’s audio recording.
“This is what they want to do, because they don’t have the votes to impeach Joe Biden, right? That’s why they did Merrick Garland,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., said, as reported by Fox News. “That’s why they went after [Hunter Biden]. It’s all trying to please their base because Congress doesn’t want to do what Donald Trump wants, which is to impeach Joe Biden, so they can have even scores.”
Over the weekend, thousands of pro-Hamas protesters, many of them masked and some wearing green Hamas headbands, descended on Washington, D.C., surrounding the White House amid chants calling for a victory of “jihad or martyrdom.” At one point, protesters with tents set up an encampment on the Ellipse, while others defaced and vandalized historic statues, including the Andrew Jackson and Marquis de Lafayette statues in Lafayette Square.
The day before, on the other side of the country, three teenagers in Spokane, Washington, were arrested on felony charges for driving their scooters over a painted “pride” crosswalk and leaving some tread marks on the mural.
Spokane, Wash. — 3 teens are each charged with a felony (first-degree malicious mischief) for leaving scooter skid marks on the pride trans BLM flag on the street. Prosecutors asked for a $15k bond & @limebike says it is taking action against the youths. pic.twitter.com/mSWwWSY1Xb
As tempting as it is to call out the hypocrisy here — teenagers hunted down and charged for defacing a pride mural, no punishment at all for a mob of left-wing protesters defacing national monuments — that would miss the point. This isn’t hypocrisy on display, it’s hierarchy.
When you see harsh punishments for those who dissent from the regime on the one hand, but total leniency (and tacit regime endorsement) for those who are essentially regime enforcers on the other hand, what you’re seeing is a display of power. Its purpose is to communicate to the rest of the country who has power and who doesn’t, who is protected and who isn’t.
You see this everywhere lately. Most dramatically, you see it in the lawfare against former President Donald Trump, recently convicted for invented crimes in a farcical trial that made a mockery of the rule of law. Trump’s conviction in New York has made it clear, to friend and foe alike, that the judiciary in certain parts of this country has become nothing more than an instrument to destroy the political enemies of the regime. This isn’t supposed to be a subtle message; you’re meant to understand, explicitly, that there is no equality of justice in the law now, and act accordingly.
As former Trump administration official Brooke Rollins wrote recently in The American Mind, “All this is meant to achieve a singular goal: to use the apparatus of the law and the judiciary to utterly break American opposition to the progressive regime by instilling a climate of fear so pervasive that Americans will no longer defend themselves, no longer defy leftist orthodoxy, and no longer dare to publicly disagree with the regime.”
The criminal trial of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on federal gun charges should also be understood in this light. As of this writing, the jury is still deliberating. But it hardly matters what the verdict is. If he is acquitted, the message is that the rule of law is a dead letter in America, and you’d better align yourself with the side that can protect you.
If he’s found guilty, the message is that America has a two-tiered justice system that makes only the most feeble attempt to disguise itself. Hunter Biden can run a complex, years-long foreign influence-peddling scheme to enrich his family, and all he’ll ever face are minor, unrelated gun charges — a fig leaf over the corruption that’s right at the heart of the White House. Hunter has never been charged for the many financial crimes related to his time working for Ukraine energy company Burisma, never charged for operating as an unregistered foreign agent or selling influence and government policy.
The federal prosecutor charged with investigating Hunter allowed the statute of limitations to expire on tax evasion associated with Hunter’s Burisma earnings and then simply ignored every other crime connected to the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme. The gun trial only materialized after a federal judge blew up the prosecutor’s corrupt plea deal. The entire purpose of the trial is to provide a thin veneer of justice served, while the real crimes of the Biden family go unpunished and unacknowledged.
Of course, this hypocrisy-versus-hierarchy framework extends far beyond the justice system. Corporate media this week are breathlessly reporting on remarks Justice Samuel Alito made to a left-wing documentary filmmaker who posed as a religious conservative and secretly recorded the conversation. Rolling Stone reported the story as some kind of scandal because Alito agreed that the United States should return to a place of godliness and that the battle for America “can’t be compromised.” There’s nothing scandalous about that. Indeed, he simply says what leftist radicals say among themselves all the time.
What’s notable about Alito’s remarks, though, is that he goes on to say his power as a judge is limited and defined, and that there are many problems in American life that the Supreme Court can’t address or fix.
The substance of what Alito said isn’t the point, though. The point is the timing of the hit piece, coming right before the end of the Supreme Court’s current term and close on the heels of another fake outrage news cycle centered on Alito’s wife flying a popular historic flag from the Revolutionary War outside their beach house. The media’s current fixation on Alito comes after unrelenting hysterics from the media over Justice Clarence Thomas occasionally taking vacations with wealthy friends — something nearly every Supreme Court justice does.
Why the obsessive, deranged attacks on conservative Supreme Court justices? Because the Supreme Court is one of the last institutions in America that the left doesn’t control, and it’s standing in the way of their revolution. Smearing and discrediting the conservative justices, demanding they recuse themselves for made-up offenses, is part of a longer-term strategy to delegitimatize and ultimately destroy the court.
So, remember that the next time you see a hit piece on a conservative Supreme Court justice, or the book being thrown at a group of people opposed to the regime, or when Trump is actually sent to prison later this summer. It’s not hypocrisy you’re seeing, it’s hierarchy.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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