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More Proof That Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.

January 22, 2024

We have so many proofs of the mental instability of the political Left, such as

WOKE or Mental Illness? pic.twitter.com/7zw30Pm6Vj
— A Man Of Memes (@RickyDoggin) January 21, 2024

Here is another proof.

I’ve said all along that the Left’s Mob army is called out just to cause inconvenience, fear and enough noise to cover the Left’s real agenda. A vast majority of these Leftist Mob Army members have no idea why they’re there, or what they’re protesting. The following is a great example of delusional people proving to the world that Liberalism is a mental virus that removes all reason and individualism.

Making lemonade 🍋 from watermelons 🍉 pic.twitter.com/lM0CvA52q6
— (((noa tishby))) (@noatishby) January 22, 2024

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SUMMING UP THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT FOR THE WEEK OF JANUARY 19, 2024

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HUMOR, Political

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Survey: Two-Thirds Of Elites Say There’s Too Much Freedom In America

BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 19, 2024

The nation’s ruling class holds deeply authoritarian opinions widely divorced from the rest of the American electorate, finds a survey out this week. It found nearly 60 percent of American “elites” think there is too much individual freedom in America. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of registered voters have the exact opposite opinion, reporting the United States has too much top-down control, limiting liberty.

The study, titled “Them Vs. U.S,” defined the American “elite” as “having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile.” Such people account for about 1 percent of Americans. The study also examined a sub-sample of the 1 percent who graduated from Ivy League schools or other name-brand institutions such as Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.

The study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found ruling class opinions on climate policies were particularly harsh and despotic. More than two-thirds of the 1 percent support rationing vital energy and food sources in an attempt to control the globe’s weather. That number jumped to nearly 90 percent among the Ivy Leaguers. Around two-thirds of normal registered voters, however, oppose rationing vital resources.

Limiting food and water consumption is a serious proposition to global leaders. For example, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an environmentalist organization of city leaders across the globe, has proposed annihilating meat and dairy consumption by 2030.

“An astonishing 72% of the Elites – including 81% of the Elites who graduated from the top universities – favor banning gas cars,” the study authors continued. “And majorities of elites would ban gas stoves, non-essential air travel, SUVs, and private air conditioning.”

Elites’ view of other elites is very different from regular registered voters’ view of elites. On the education front, “Two-thirds (67%) [of the 1 percent] say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.” Only 38 percent of registered voters felt the same.

“About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists,” wrote the study authors. Additionally, “In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to ‘do the right thing most of the time.’”

Unsurprisingly, “about three-quarters of these cultural elites are Biden supporters.” While only 20 percent of Americans say they are better off financially under Biden, nearly three-quarters of the elites say they are better off under Biden.

The study comes as global leaders meet in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting to discuss draconian climate policies and crackdowns on freedom of speech and therefore freedom of thought. So far at the conference, elites have discussed establishing a “new world order,” lobbied for censorship in the name of “disinformation and misinformation,” and labeled farming and fishing “ecocide.”

The WEF policy proposals and the results of this survey reveal what the Committee to Unleash Prosperity describes as a “Grand Canyon-sized chasm” between regular citizens and those who largely claim the expertise and power to rule over others with or without their consent.

“These results confirm what people have long suspected,” wrote the study authors: “Today, there are two Americas. One is wealthier, more highly educated, and attended the best schools. They put much more trust in big government ‘to do the right thing’ and, by their own admission, benefit from more expansive government policies. They have also been hurt far less by the high inflation of the Biden presidency than those who live from paycheck to paycheck and are in the lower and middle classes.”

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO

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Hunter’s Painting Foray Had All the Classic Earmarks of a Biden Family Influence-Peddling Operation

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 19, 2024

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MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Hunter Biden’s “Sugar Bro,” Kevin Morris, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday. A readout of Morris’ testimony, when considered in tandem with the testimony provided last week by Hunter Biden’s gallerist, suggests Hunter was setting up another front for the family influence-peddling racket when the plan collapsed due to public scrutiny.

On Thursday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer issued a statement following the committee’s transcribed interview of Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris. In his press release, Comer revealed that Hollywood producer Lanette Phillips introduced Morris to Hunter Biden during a campaign event at her Los Angeles home for Joe Biden in the winter of 2019. One week later, Phillips called Morris to discuss what Morris apparently framed as an “entertainment” issue. Morris later visited Hunter at his home in L.A., according to the press release.

According to Comer, Morris testified he began providing money to Hunter Biden in January 2020. Then on Feb. 7, 2020, Morris emailed Hunter’s advisers and tax accountants, writing, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.” Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden filed his long-overdue 2017 and 2018 tax returns, although he didn’t pay his hefty tax bill at the time. Around Oct. 18, 2021, Morris paid some $2 million in overdue taxes for the president’s son.

In addition to paying Hunter’s taxes, Morris also paid for many of his living expenses and bought 13 of Hunter Biden’s paintings — two from before Hunter retained a gallerist and 11 after, with Morris paying $875,000 for the set purchased from the gallerist.

The Gallerist

That gallerist, George Berges, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last Tuesday concerning his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s profiteering from his newfound career as a painter. Berges, the owner of the Soho-based George Berges Gallery, told the committee that he served as the “gallerist” for Hunter Biden beginning in December 2020. As Hunter’s gallerist, Berges acted as the exclusive agent, selling Hunter’s paintings. In that role, Berges had firsthand knowledge of the money flowing into Hunter’s bank account from his newest business venture.

Berges’ testimony pales in comparison to some earlier witnesses who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s dealing with Burisma and Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings. Yet, when studied in its entirety, the gallery owner’s testimony paints a picture of an attempt to launch a new enterprise to provide cover for a continuation of the Biden family’s pay-to-play scheme. Morris’ testimony this week adds further definition.

First, we have the gallerist’s testimony that Lanette Phillips also introduced him to Hunter in 2019, telling Berges that Hunter was an artist. Next, there is the fact that in December 2020, Hunter and Berges executed a contract appointing the gallery owner as his exclusive representative, with Berges receiving a commission of 40 percent on sales. That contract, Berges testified, included a provision that required the gallerist to disclose to Hunter the identity of the purchasers of his paintings.

As Berges explained, that was not a typical contract term; he had never included a similar clause in any of his other contracts. “Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are,” Berges confirmed, adding that of the 15 or so artists he currently works with, none ask to know who purchased their artwork. Berges elaborated, stating, “It’s my collector base,” and you don’t want “your artists to circumvent you if they know your collectors.”

While the contract required Berges to tell Hunter the names of the purchasers, Berges explained during the interview that he never did, and because Hunter didn’t push for their identities, his instinct was not to share the information. Nonetheless, Hunter learned the names of several of the purchasers — for instance, Elizabeth Naftali.

Again, Lanette, the same Hollywood producer and Biden-booster who introduced Hunter to Morris and Berges, introduced Berges to Naftali. Naftali purchased two of Hunter’s paintings, the first in February 2021, shortly after his father’s inauguration. She later purchased another painting, spending a total of $94,000 for the pair.

During the committees’ questioning of Berges, they noted that on July 1, 2022, President Biden appointed Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. A committee lawyer added that while Joe Biden was vice president he had also arranged for Hunter Biden’s then-business partner Eric Schwerin to be appointed to the same board.

In addition to Naftali, Hunter Biden also knew the identity of Morris, who on Jan. 19, 2023, purchased, in the name of his LLC, Kuliaky Art, 11 paintings for $875,000. Berges explained that Morris had seen the paintings at Hunter’s exhibit in California in October 2021 and then negotiated the January 2023 sale with him by telephone.

Berges further explained that Morris did not pay the galley for the paintings, but instead paid Berges his 40 percent commission and then paid Hunter (or reduced his loan balance) separately.

Comer notes in his readout from the interview of Morris that it was only after he purchased those paintings from Hunter that he scored a visit to the White House. But there is a bigger smoke cloud surrounding those purchases than Joe Biden welcoming his son’s benefactor to the White House.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

Why would Morris purchase paintings from Berges at all? As Berges testified, the reason gallerists don’t share the names of their buyers with the artists is so they aren’t cut out of the deal. Morris, however, likely didn’t want to ruin Hunter’s relationship with Berges, Berges reasoned. But that doesn’t explain why Morris wouldn’t have purchased art from Hunter before he had a gallerist.

Here we run into an interesting detail: Morris testified he had purchased two pieces of art from Hunter Biden before he had a gallerist. Why then wait for Hunter to enter a contract with Berges before purchasing more art? And why wait until January 2023, when he saw the art during an October 2021 exhibit? (It is also noteworthy that Berges got the impression from Hunter that he had never sold any artwork before retaining him as a gallerist.)

Morris’ $875,000 represented a huge chunk of Hunter Biden’s total sales of $1.5 million. In fact, Morris’ purchase represented such an “outlier,” as Berges put it, that the Soho gallery owner hasn’t renewed his contract with Hunter and is considering dropping him as a client.

“I look at the totality,” Berges explained. “If I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is.”

“It’s not that impressive,” he concluded.

Morris negotiating with Berges over the price of the pictures, however, sidesteps questions of whether he overpaid for the art to make a then-taxable gift to Hunter Biden. Morris’ purchase also creates the impression that his friend’s art is worth the high price Berges was asking, even though “the general response,” without Morris, was “not that impressive.”

One must wonder, though, if the lack of interest in Hunter’s high-priced paintings stemmed from the spotlight on what appeared to be the latest pay-to-play scam scaring off the target audience for the artist: those seeking favors or access to the now-president.

A Plan Foiled?

Without media coverage, it was a perfect plan: Hunter Biden reemerges as an artist and sends those he or his family want to shake down to Soho to buy his paintings from a gallerist who has independently set the prices of the paintings. Berges’ testimony indicates he is truly independent, for while he explained he has become friends with Hunter, much to his chagrin, he was forced to acknowledge donating multiple times to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Berges even hinted that he had voted for Trump and not his client’s father in 2020.

Hunter, in fact, even ensured he could learn the identity of the purchaser to confirm the transaction, although it soon became clear that wasn’t necessary; the buyer could just tell him or show him the artwork. But then the press got ahold of the story and, unlike the laptop scandal, this time they didn’t bury it. By the summer of 2021, the White House was forced to do damage control, claiming it was working on a deal with Hunter’s gallerist to ensure the identity of purchasers of his paintings remained anonymous.

Berges testified he was surprised to hear that from the White House since he had never spoken with anyone there about his contract with Hunter Biden. Nonetheless, at Hunter’s request, Berges removed the disclosure requirement and replaced it with a provision prohibiting the gallery owner from disclosing the identity of the purchasers. They then entered a new contract on Sept. 1, 2021.

Other than Morris’ large purchase last January, there seems to be little demand now for the paintings — leaving one to wonder if, without his target audience, Hunter’s art is as worthless as his board member skills.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Victor Davis Hanson Op-ed: The Hysterical Style in American Politics

Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / January 19, 2024

A far left protester equates then-President Donald Trump with Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler at a march for Trump’s Impeachment six years ago Saturday on Jan. 20, 2018, in Portland, Oregon. The Left is notorious for that sort of hysterical attack on their opponents. (Photo: Diego Diaz/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images)

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism. But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

Or, in the immortal words of former President Barack Obama‘s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

The 2008 economic emergency crested on Sept. 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry.

Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, more than four months after the meltdown. In that interim, the officials had finally restored financial confidence and plotted a course of economic recovery. No matter. The Obama administration never stopped hyping the financial meltdown as if it had just occurred. That way, it rammed through Obamacare, massive deficit spending, and the vast expansion of the federal government. All that stymied economic growth and recovery for years.

In 2016, then-President Donald Trump was declared Hitler-like and an existential threat to democracy. Amid this derangement syndrome, any means necessary to stop him were justified: the Russian collusion hoax, impeachment over a phone call, or the Hunter Biden laptop “disinformation” farce.

Eventually, the Left sought to normalize the once-unthinkable: Removing the leading presidential candidate from state ballots and indicting him in state and local courts. Nothing was off-limits—not forging a federal court document, calling for a military coup, rioting on Inauguration Day, or radically changing the way Americans voted in presidential elections.

In October 2017, allegations surfaced about serial sexual predation by liberal cinema icon Harvey Weinstein. The #MeToo furor immediately followed. At first, accusers properly outed dozens of mostly liberal celebrities, actors, authors, and CEOs for their prior and mostly covered-up sexual harassment and often assault. But soon, the once-legitimate movement had morphed into general hysteria. Thousands of men (and women) were persecuted for alleged offenses, often sexual banter or rude repartee, committed decades prior.

#MeToo jumped the shark with the left-wing effort to take down conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Would-be accusers surfaced from his high school days, 35 years earlier, but without any supporting evidence or witnesses for their wild, lurid charges. #MeToo hysteria ended when too many liberal grandees were endangered. Most dramatically, former Joe Biden senatorial aide Tara Reade came forward during the 2020 campaign cycle with charges that front-runner Biden had once sexually assaulted her—and was trashed by the liberal media.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States during the winter of 2020 prompted an even greater hysteria. Without scientific evidence, federal health czars Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were able to persuade the Trump administration to shut down the economy in the country’s first national quarantine.

Suddenly, it became a thought crime to question the wisdom of six-foot social distancing, of mandatory mask-wearing, of the Wuhan virology lab’s origin of the COVID-19 virus or of off-label use of prescription drugs. Left-wing politicians and celebrities, from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Gavin Newsom to Jane Fonda, all blurted out the political advantages that the lockdowns offered—from recalibrating capitalism and health care to ensuring the 2020 defeat of Trump.

The COVID-19 hysteria magically ended when Biden won the 2020 election. Suddenly, the explanations about the bat or pangolin origins of the virus faded. The damage from the quarantines could no longer be repressed. And herd immunity gradually mitigated the epidemic. The lockdown caused untold economic chaos, suicides, and health crises.

One result was the 120 days of looting, arson, death, destruction and violence spawned by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020. Suddenly, a hysterical lie took hold: American police were waging war against black males.

The details around Floyd’s sudden death—he was in the act of committing a felony, resisting arrest, suffering from coronary artery disease and the after-effects of COVID-19, and being high on dangerous drugs—were off limits. The riot toll reached $2 billion in property damage, more than 35 deaths and 1,500 injured law enforcement officers. A federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church were torched. Police forces were defunded. Emboldened left-wing prosecutors nullified existing laws. Diversity, equity and inclusion commissars spread throughout American higher education as meritocracy came under assault. Racial essentialism triumphed. Racially segregated dorms, campus spaces, and graduations were normalized. Everything from destroying the southern border to dropping SAT requirements for college admission followed.

Sometimes real, sometimes hyped crises led to these contrived left-wing hysterias—like the Jan. 6 violent “armed insurrection” or the “fascist,” “ultra-MAGA” threat.

Otherwise, the progressive movement cannot enact its unpopular agendas. So, it must scare the people silly and gin up chaos to destroy its perceived enemies—any crisis it can.

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The tables turn: Judge orders Fulton County DA Fani Willis to respond to misconduct allegations, orders court date

By: CHRIS ENLOE | JANUARY 18, 2024

A Georgia judge has scheduled a hearing to address the misconduct allegations against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D). On Thursday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing to address the serious allegations of misconduct that surfaced against Willis last week. He ordered Willis to respond to the allegations in writing by Feb. 2

Last week, Michael Roman, one of the co-defendants in the election interference case targeting former President Donald Trump, filed a motion to disqualify Willis and to dismiss the case.

The filing argues that such action is required because Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade “have been engaged in an improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case, which has resulted in the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers.”

Moreover, the filing claims that Willis personally benefited from the “lucrative” contract the DA’s office signed with Wade — benefits that include vacations and cruises — and that she was the sole authorizer of that contract. Public records show that Wade has been paid at least $653,880 to work on the case, more than a half-million dollars more than other special prosecutors working the case, WXIA-TV reported.

While Roman’s filing is short on direct evidence, it repeatedly cites “sources” close to both Willis and Wade as the basis of the allegations. Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, has promised that “concrete evidence” will be presented in court. Some of that evidence, she has said, is found in Wade’s divorce proceedings, which were sealed in 2022.

Importantly, Willis has been subpoenaed to give a pretrial deposition in that divorce case. But she filed a motion on Thursday arguing her testimony is not necessary. In her filing, Willis claimed that Joycelyn Wade is “obstructing and interfering with an ongoing criminal prosecution,” accusing her of having “conspired with interested parties in the criminal election interference case to use the civil discovery process to annoy, embarrass and oppress District Attorney Willis.”

The filing, however, “did not address the nature of the relationship between Willis and Wade,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution observed.

For her part, Willis attributed the scrutiny of her personal life to racial animus.

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Feds urged banks to flag purchases of Bibles, ‘MAGA’ transactions, House committee says

By CP Staff | Friday, January 19, 2024

The U.S. Treasury Department building is seen in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2023, following an announcement by the U.S. Treasury that it had begun taking measures Thursday to prevent a default on government debt, as Congress heads towards a high-stakes clash between Democrats and Republicans over raising the borrowing limit. | SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

A U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary subcommittee is seeking to question a former official in the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement office over revelations the agency urged financial institutions to flag customer transactions linked to phrases like “MAGA” and “Trump” as well as purchases of religious texts.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, sent a letter Wednesday to Noah Bishoff, the former director of an office in the Treasury’s Strategic Operations Division of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Requesting a transcribed interview with Bishoff, Jordan stated that the subcommittee obtained documents showing that following the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, FinCEN “distributed materials to financial institutions that, among other things, outline the ‘typologies’ of various persons of interest.” He alleges the agency also “provided financial institutions with suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.”

“These materials included a document recommending the use of generic terms like ‘TRUMP’ and ‘MAGA’ to ‘search Zelle payment messages’ as well as a ‘prior FinCEN analysis’ of ‘Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators,’” the letter reads.

“According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.’“

Jordan claimed that the documents show that “FinCEN urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

The findings from the subcommittee suggest federal law enforcement agencies also sought data on transactions at popular sporting goods stores like Bass Pro Shop, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s.

“We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,” Jordan tweeted. “What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.”

We now know the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP,” to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms.

What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop. pic.twitter.com/jjRaVNItWz
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 17, 2024

One of the sample slides distributed by FinCEN, “prepared by a financial institution,” gave instructions on how to query for transactions like those associated with “small arms,” “sporting and recreational goods and supplies,” and keywords like “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” “Cabela’s” and others, according to the documents.

While Jordan’s letter refers to the Jan. 6 date, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News that the documents linked to House committees’ investigation contained no “specific time frames or limitations for banks searching customer transactions with the terms.” This suggests federal investigators may have expanded their effort to collect data from merchants “beyond” those transactions linked to the Jan. 6 event.

The revelation comes just days after President Joe Biden released the first ad for his 2024 reelection campaign in which he labeled millions of Donald Trump supporters as “extremists” leading up to the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot.

The video released Jan. 4 highlights what Biden calls the “preservation of American democracy” as the “central issue” of the 81-year-old’s reelection campaign.

“There’s something dangerous happening in America,” the Democrat says in the ad’s voiceover. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?”

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KJP fumbles hard when Fox News reporter confronts — and then fact-checks — her false narrative about recent migrant deaths

By: CHRIS ENLOE | JANUARY 18, 2024

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stuck to the narrative — not the facts — the Biden administration parroted after three migrants drowned last Friday while attempting to cross the Rio Grande.

After the tragedy, the Biden administration rushed to blame Texas for the incident. Homeland Security, for example, accused Texas National Guard soldiers of having “physically barred” Border Patrol agents from responding to migrants in distress. The White House, on the other hand, suggested the migrants could have been saved had Texas soldiers not “blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance.”

But the Justice Department admitted in a filing to the Supreme Court on Monday that the migrants — two children and an adult woman — had already drowned when Mexican officials alerted Border Patrol agents of the tragic deaths. In fact, they had been dead for at least one hour.

On Wednesday, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich confronted Jean-Pierre over the White House’s dishonest narrative. She asked, “Will the administration amend its separate statement that implied that Texas officials were responsible for the deaths of those three migrants when, in fact, they had nothing to do with it?”

“They had already been dead for an hour by the time Mexico told anyone in the U.S. about it, and the administration admitted as much in their court filing,” Heinrich noted. “But the statement from the White House implies that Texas was responsible, and a number of outlets were forced to issue corrections and editor’s notes because of that White House statement.”

The falsehood exposed, Jean-Pierre responded by urging Heinrich to be “sensitive” because of the “devastating situation.” But then she refused to acknowledge the truth after repeatedly stumbling over her thoughts.

“Our statement is consistent with DOJ’s filing. As the DOJ filing said, there was an ongoing emergency situation that Border Patrol was blocked from accessing. There were other migrants in the water as well,” she responded.

“That was separate, though. The ongoing emergency situation was separate,” Heinrich fact-checked.

TENSE: Karine Jean-Pierre starts to sweat when @JacquiHeinrich holds her feet to the fire over the administration's lies about Texas officials who — contrary to the White House's claims — were not responsible for the deaths of three illegal immigrants. pic.twitter.com/Yp4TZRCHMQ
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 17, 2024

The Fox News reporter then read Jean-Pierre the White House statement — which said that “Texas officials blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance” — but the press secretary simply restated her earlier point.

“There were other migrants in the water as well,” she said.

“Then why wasn’t that included in the statement?” Heinrich shot back.

And when Heinrich asked if the statement was referring to those “other migrants” — which it clearly was not because it was released in direct response to the drownings — Jean-Pierre shut down questioning and referred additional questions to the DOJ.

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Top Stories
• New Poll Finds 66% of Americans Want Pro-Life laws Limiting Abortion
• Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Will Hold Huge Rally to Celebrate Abortion
• House Republicans Pass Two Pro-Life Bills to Help Pregnant Women, Unborn Children
• WATCH: Joe Biden Has Strange One-Word Answer to Question About March for Life

More Pro-Life News
• Poll Shows Americans Support Pro-Life Laws, Oppose Taxpayer-Funded Abortions
• Meet the Pro-Life Democrat Standing Up to Joe Biden’s Pro-Abortion Extremism
• Senator Introduces Bill Requiring Abortionists to Inform Women of Abortion Risks
• New Poll Shows 65% of Young Voters Support Abortion Limits
• Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories

New Poll Finds 66% of Americans Want Pro-Life laws Limiting Abortion

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Will Hold Huge Rally to Celebrate Abortion

House Republicans Pass Two Pro-Life Bills to Help Pregnant Women, Unborn Children

WATCH: Joe Biden Has Strange One-Word Answer to Question About March for Life

Poll Shows Americans Support Pro-Life Laws, Oppose Taxpayer-Funded Abortions

Meet the Pro-Life Democrat Standing Up to Joe Biden’s Pro-Abortion Extremism

Senator Introduces Bill Requiring Abortionists to Inform Women of Abortion Risks

New Poll Shows 65% of Young Voters Support Abortion Limits

MORE PRO-LIFE NEWS FROM TODAY

Senator James Lankford: I’m Joining the March for Life Because I’m Pro-Woman and Pro-Life

Abortion Drugs Aren’t Just Killing Babies, They’re Harming Women. Get Them Off The Market

Joe Biden and Democrats Support Abortions Up to Birth For Any Reason Whatsoever

Montana Attorney General Blocks Measure to Make Killing Babies in Abortions a Constitutional Right

Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.

Planned Parenthood Wants to Get Rid of Laws After Kermit Gosnell to Stop Live Birth Abortions

65,464,760 Babies Have Been Killed in Abortions Since Roe v. Wade in 1973

Argentina President Javier Milei Slams the “Bloody Agenda” of Abortion

Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland Will Receive National Pro-Life Award

Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com.
Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved.
For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Push It Real Good

A.F. BRANCO | on January 19, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-push-it-real-good/

Nikki Democrat Donors — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

Nikki Haley is on her way to New Hampshire backed by Democrat donor money and pushed by RINOs in a desperate attempt to stop Trump.

The morning after Iowa. One out, one clinging on, one to duck debates…

POSTED ON JANUARY 16, 2024 BY KELLY MCCARTHY

Last night, former President Donald Trump held on to his number one position in the Republican primary field. He won all but one of Iowa’s 99 counties. It was not without controversy. Trump opponents were incensed that The Associated Press and other outlets called the race minutes into the start of the caucuses, even before some of the caucus-goers in the bigger caucuses cast their ballots. They described getting mobile alerts calling Trump the winner before surrogates had a chance to finish their speeches. Cries of “election interference” … READ MORE

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Nikki Haley

Democrats Promise To Save ‘Democracy’ By Destroying It

BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 18, 2024

Philipp Foltz: Pericles famous funeral oration in front of the Assembly.

Author David Harsanyi profile

DAVID HARSANYI

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Granted, I’m not a professional political consultant, but I’m starting to get the sense that the Democrats’ 2024 focus on “saving democracy” suffers somewhat from their constant efforts to demolish every basic norm of constitutional governance.

Then again, maybe we just need to define our terms, since “democracy” has been stripped of any useful meaning. The word certainly doesn’t signify adherence to the Constitution — a document barely, if ever, mentioned by the contemporary left for obvious reasons.

Indeed, for the past eight or so years, many legal and traditional institutions of American governance — the Electoral College, the filibuster, two senators in every state, states, open discourse, the Supreme Court, and so on — have been framed as nemeses of “democracy” if they happen to temporarily benefit Republicans. Virtually every political setback, in fact, has been transformed into an existential threat to the foundations of “democracy.” Anyone with conventional conservative views, especially social ones, has been reimagined as MAGA extremists or “semi-fascists” or “Christofascists.”

Even when originalist justices, the most scrupulous devotees of American “democracy” in the country, strengthen majoritarianism, as they did handing the abortion issue back to voters where it belonged, Democrats have a collective fainting spell over the future of “democracy.”

Democrats are positive that asking someone to prove an ID before voting portends the rise of the Fourth Reich, but they have no problem pressuring private companies to censor political speech, ignoring the Supreme Court, unilaterally breaking millions of private contracts to buy votes, using executive power to circumvent the will of voters, and throwing the leading opposition candidate off ballots.

If you’re convinced that George W. Bush stole an election or that Donald Trump was “selected” by a foreign dictator, your griping about “denialism” holds no weight.

Do you know what’s definitely authoritarian, though? Plotting to undermine civilian control of the military. It’s one of the big ones.

NBC News reports this week that “a network of public interest groups and lawmakers, nervous about former President Trump’s potential return to power, is quietly devising plans to foil any effort on his part to pressure the U.S. military to carry out his political agenda.”

Dear lord, voters elect the commander-in-chief because of a political agenda. It is literally the military’s job to implement the democratic will of the people. It’s right there in the Constitution. It’s the point.

Invading Iraq was a political decision, not one made by a Star Chamber, but by the president and senators like Joe Biden. Leaving Afghanistan was a political decision, made by a president who promised the public he would do so if elected. The decision to take the Houthis off the global terror list was a political decision. As was the decision to grant Iran access to billions and to send Palestinian terror groups hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, if voters are unhappy with these decisions, they are free to support someone else the next time around. But if a bunch of unelected right-wing “public interest groups” and lawmakers, nervous about Biden’s failed — but completely legal — foreign policy decisions, formed a cabal within the government to “foil” him, it would not be strengthening “democracy.”

Then again, you remember when Gen. Mark Milley made two phone calls to our top geopolitical foes in China and promised to give them a heads-up should the United States attack? That was another clear-cut subversion of civilian authority over the military. Nothing about those calls comports with “democracy.” The opposite. Yet Milley is regarded as a hero of the resistance.

And you probably remember “Anonymous,” as well. The “senior Trump administration official” who published that overwrought op-ed in The New York Times contending that senior staffers secretly schemed to undercut Trump to protect the American people. “I work for the president,” wrote Miles Taylor, “but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Political appointees who join a shadow government to “thwart” the president’s decisions — not because he’s been engaged in any unconstitutional or illegal acts, but because they disagreed with him — are definitely not the heroes of “democracy” they imagine themselves. (Taylor is on TV these days warning that Trump might “turn off” the internet if he’s elected for a second term. Joke’s on him, though, since Trump already did so when he overturned net neutrality.)

David Axelrod, who worked for a president who acted as if he were a sovereign, contends that if Republican primary voters select Trump as the nominee, it “would be a stunning rebuke of the rules, norms, laws and institutions upon which our democracy is founded and would have profound implications for the future.”

Now, a lot of that sounds like projection to me. Sometimes, you get the sense that just maybe all this “democracy” talk is a cynical strategy to hold onto power.

But let’s say it’s true. Every illiberal precedent Democrats set in their own alleged efforts to save our “democracy” from Trump will also have profound implications for the future. Trump will leave us one day. Democrats’ constant attacks on governing norms won’t.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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REPUBLICANS ACCELERATE PROBE INTO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ACTIONS TO HOUSE MIGRANTS ON FEDERAL LANDS

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Hugh Hewitt Op-ed: Morning Glory: No Border Wall, no deal on Israel and Ukraine

By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published January 18, 2024 5:00am EST

“Ninety-one percent of Republicans support the building of the wall…”

That’s the policy and political reality behind the about-to-emerge “immigration compromise” negotiated between President Biden, Senate Democrats and a handful of Republican Senators. But it is the reality the Senate Republicans are about to ignore and not merely ignore, but actually demonstrate contempt for, and for the party that elected them.

The “supplemental” bill about to emerge promises to be a complete disaster for the GOP. One for the books. There is still time for Leader McConnell to lead a retrograde movement away from the fiasco.

McConnell has pulled off many miracles before. He’s the best legislative leader the GOP has had in my lifetime. He saved the Constitution with his refusal to allow hearings on the Supreme Court vacancy following the death of Justice Scalia. McConnell preserved the First Amendment through litigation over decades. He’s put together crucial Senate majorities only to see lesser political talents destroy them with party nominees he told everyone could not win.

McConnell got former President Trump elected because of the Leader’s “no hearings on any nominee” stance which made Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees the key to the upset win in 2016 by the former president. McConnell will work with Trump again for the good of the Republic. McConnell’s two best pieces of advice —”First, you have to win” and “You can start too late but never start too early”— are worth the cost of his brilliant memoir “The Long Game.

Will McConnell save the GOP once more?

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We need to get Israel aid. We need to get Ukraine aid. We need to secure the southern border. These are all pressing national security needs. They are of equal importance to America.

If we send the wrong sort of aid to Israel or Ukraine it will not help them win. If we don’t build the 900 miles of fence where it is needed on the 2000 miles of southern border, Americans will continue to die from fentynal, more millions will walk across “UN encountered,” along with the 8 million who have been “encountered” in the three years of the Biden Border Era. The Wall isn’t one of five things that need doing. It is the first thing that must be done if the other things that need to be done are going to work.

The Wall is a necessary but not sufficient national security measure. To repeat: It is the first thing that must be done. Other things are useful —more Border Patrol, more return flights, more detention facilities, more Administrative Law Judges and changes to the actual asylum and refugee law. All of it.

But none of it matters without the Wall. The Wall is the “signal” amid the noise. It actually gets the message to the endless column of millions trudging north. That message is “Closed save by appointment.”

Officials at the southern border with Mexico — National Guard agents place a barbed wire wall on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on March 8, 2023. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

This is not a hardliner position. It is the moderate position. Most “moderates” on immigration reform including me are people who want to care for the stranger when they get here. Most of us are aware that only a small percentage of the millions crossing illegally are undoubtedly dangerous, but they are dangerous indeed, and those who engage in human smuggling are depraved while possible terrorists should be understood as 10/7 types. We moderates are also concerned with innocents caught up in this river of misery that has to be damed before those on this side of the order can’t be helped.

If Democrats say “No” to the Wall, then it is no, and the GOP walks away from the talks, explains why, and campaigns on the Wall.

All three of the remaining possible GOP presidential nominees want the Wall. The Senate candidates the GOP needs to win the 2024 elections and thus the 2025 majority all want the Wall. Only a handful of Senators and their staffs have persuaded themselves that the Wall isn’t necessary. Wake up. It is necessary, and the 91 percent aren’t wrong. They are your bosses.

The supplemental without the Wall is far, far worse than a dead end. It’s a cliff. We won’t climb back up to a moment of clarity like this for decades, if ever. And the House GOP should never approve it anyway, and I doubt incumbent GOP senators who support it will in turn find themselves supported by 90 percent of the Party. Who is selling this? On what grounds?

Please, Senate GOP, the momentum of a terrible ride is no reason to stay on the runaway train. Get off. Now. Walk away.

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HUGH HEWITT

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Who Are We?

A.F. BRANCO | on January 18, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-who-are-we-2/

The DNA of America Cartoon — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

Who are we as a nation? Our American DNA is that of individual freedom and rights endowed by our creator life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but our very soul as a country is in serious jeopardy and if we don’t vote right this 2024 election, we may not have a county any more because the left who hate our country seek to destroy it, DNA and all.

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ICE LAUNCHES 60-DAY EVALUATION OF CALIFORNIA DETENTION FACILITY AMID GOP DEMANDS TO FULLY REOPEN

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14 House Democrats join Republicans to rebuke Biden over border crisis

By Elizabeth Elkind Fox News | Published January 17, 2024 5:19pm EST | Updated January 17, 2024 5:34pm EST

More than a dozen Democrats in the House of Representatives formally rebuked President Biden over his border and immigration policies on Wednesday.

Lawmakers passed a Republican-led resolution “denouncing the Biden administration’s open-borders policies, condemning the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border, and urging President Biden to end his administration’s open-borders policies.”

Fourteen Democratic lawmakers voted with the GOP, including Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas; Jared Golden, D-Maine; Mary Peltola, D-Alaska; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash.; and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.

It’s a largely symbolic move, but a pointed message from the House GOP Conference as talks are underway between the Senate and White House on a border security compromise in exchange for Republican support for sending Ukraine more aid.

Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, who spearheaded the resolution in the House, told Fox News Digital that it sent a clear message of unity to those negotiators.

Biden and migrants — President Biden’s border policies were targeted in a House GOP-led resolution of disapproval (Photo by Katie McTiernan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images | Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

“It shows that we’re in lockstep together to make sure that the president has a clear, unified message from the House Republicans and the Senate has a clear, unified message from the House Republicans, that says border security is of utmost consequence for this nation and its national security,” Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital.

The vote comes just after the top four Congressional leaders — Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — met with Biden at the White House to discuss the status of supplemental aid talks.

ICE DETENTION CENTER HOUSES HANDFUL OF INMATES DESPITE HAVING THOUSANDS OF BEDS: LAWMAKER

Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries — House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., met with Biden on Wednesday (Getty Images)

Democrats are trying to pass a mammoth $110 billion supplemental aid bill that includes money for Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian causes like aid to Gaza.

Johnson has fixed the House GOP’s position on H.R.2, the comprehensive border security and immigration bill his conference passed back in May. Democratic leaders have called H.R.2 a nonstarter.

TEXAS BEGINS FLYING MIGRANTS TO SANCTUARY CITIES WITH FIRST FLIGHT TO CHICAGO

“Last May, we passed H.R.2, which provides a lot of the substantive solution that’s necessary to close our borders,” Moran told Fox News Digital. “What we’ve seen since then though, is stonewalling from the Democrats.”

Immigrants from Venezuela walk towards a U.S. Border Patrol transit center after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States on January 08, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)

“This resolution is trying to re-sound that alarm to the Democrats and the American public to say we really do have a crisis.”

More than 300,000 migrants were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in December, an all-time record.

Elizabeth Elkind is a reporter for Fox News Digital focused on Congress as well as the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and politics. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.

Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com

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LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Opinion, Political

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State Lawmakers Are Freeing Colleges From DEI’s Racial Bias

By: Jonathan Butcher / @JM_Butcher / January 17, 2024

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt—seen here addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference-Texas on Aug. 5, 2022, in Dallas—issued an executive order in December that said executive state agencies may not use taxpayer funds to “grant or support diversity, equity, or inclusion provisions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs” that treat people differently based on race or color or national origin. (Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/Light Rocket/Getty Images)

State lawmakers continue to unravel the thread of discrimination leading to university bureaucracies committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

This spring, prepare for more legislators to cobble together provisions that protect students and college employees from DEI’s racial bias.

Last year, public officials in five states—Florida, Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Wisconsin—adopted proposals that put university systems on notice that DEI departments’ discriminatory activities would be shut down.

Florida

After Florida lawmakers adopted proposals in May calling for an end to DEI on college campuses, the state university governing board voted in November to prohibit universities from using taxpayer funds on DEI.

Texas

In Texas, a new state law requires state university administrators to begin shutting down campus DEI offices this year.

State legislators in most states returned to session earlier this month, and DEI is at the top of the agenda for many.

Utah

In Utah, lawmakers are considering a proposal that prohibits mandatory DEI trainings that advocate for racial preferences or “promotes the differential treatment of an individual” based on race. The proposal also says universities cannot operate programs that assert “directly or indirectly that an individual should be discriminated against, receive adverse treatment, be advanced, or receive beneficial treatment because of the individual’s personal identity characteristics.”

Utah State University operates a DEI office that, among other pledges to the woke orthodoxy, provides a “land acknowledgement statement” on its website. Universities use these statements as a guilt offering, as though by saying the school was not the first to use the property on which the college sits, they absolve themselves of historical events the school had nothing to do with. No word on whether the school intends to give the land back.

The University of Utah also has a DEI office that will host an event in February on “Lunar Perspectives: Moonlight Dialogue with Black Queer Voices.” DEI offices often host events such as these, and parents and taxpayers should wonder how such DEI programs improve student achievement or prepare students to be better engineers, medical professionals, educators or even astronomers when they graduate.

South Carolina

In South Carolina, lawmakers have introduced a proposal that would prohibit colleges from “establishing or maintaining an office or division or other unit by any name whose purpose, in whole or in part, is the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.” To the university’s credit, the University of South Carolina renamed its DEI office last year and added civil rights to the new office’s title, though Clemson University still operates a DEI office.

Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, state lawmakers have introduced four proposals to enforce Gov. Kevin Stitt’s executive order from last December that said executive state agencies may not use taxpayer funds to “grant or support diversity, equity or inclusion provisions, departments, activities, procedures or programs” that treat people differently based on race or color or national origin.

Both the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University have DEI offices, and the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs found that the University of Oklahoma spent more than $83 million on DEI activities over the past 10 years. Last year, school officials spent $56,000 on drag queen shows alone.

Whether state officials will identify DEI offices as discriminatory—and document how these departments do nothing to advance racial or intellectual diversity—will be key measures of success for state lawmakers this legislative session.

DEI offices and training programs advocate for racial preferences and other slippery components of Marxist critical theory, such as so-called microaggressions and implicit bias.

Legislative proposals also should prevent college administrators from requiring job applicants to write DEI statements as a condition of applying for a position.

West Virginia

West Virginia lawmakers are considering a new proposal that bans these loyalty oaths, saying, “No diversity statement shall ever be required or solicited as part of an admissions process, employment application process, hiring process, contract renewal process or promotion process.”

For proposals to deal effectively with the bias inherent in DEI, lawmakers should directly state that colleges and universities cannot use taxpayer funds to create or operate DEI offices.

Public officials in five states are freeing their states’ campuses from DEI’s discrimination—and there are more to come.

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Dennis Prager Op-ed: If You Insist Men Can Give Birth, We Likely Know What You Think About Hamas

Dennis Prager / @DennisPrager / January 17, 2024

The real “science deniers” aren’t those skeptical of risks posed by climate change, but rather those who insist that men can get pregnant and give birth. (Photo: Andriano_cz/iStock/Getty Images)

If you say, “men give birth,” we all know your position on Hamas.

Now, why is that? Why, if a person says “men give birth” or says that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, can we be virtually certain that the person sides with Hamas in its war to eradicate Israel?

Theoretically, the two claims—that men as well as women give birth and Israel is the villain in its war against Hamas—have absolutely no connection.

But they do—for two reasons.

Reason No. 1: When people have a distorted moral value system, that distortion applies to just about every issue. Just as a broken compass will almost always point in the wrong direction, a broken moral compass will do the same.

However, to be more precise, people who say, “men give birth” and who side with Hamas, i.e., progressives and leftists—liberals don’t believe men give birth or side with Hamas—do not merely have a broken moral compass. They have a moral compass that works in the way progressives and leftists have configured it: North always points south and east always points west.

Some examples of how the progressive compass works:

Women who object to men who say they are women competing in women’s sports—even in weightlifting—are haters and bigots (“transphobes”). The men who compete against them are heroes.
Adults who object to schools’ sponsoring drag queen performances for 6-year-olds are haters and bigots (“transphobes”). The teachers who take children to drag queen events are progressive, compassionate, and open-minded.
If a 9-year-old girl says she is a boy, the only therapists she is allowed to see are those who engage in “gender affirmation,” which is, of course, a left-wing Orwellian term. The one thing these therapists do not do is affirm the actual gender of the child.
All-black dorms on college campuses are anti-racist. Objecting to racially segregated dorms is racist.
Those who want to build walls or fences to prevent millions of people from illegally entering the country are xenophobic. Those who oppose building such barriers and declare their cities “sanctuary cities” are humanitarians.
Demanding that citizens show a voter ID before being allowed to vote—the norm in virtually every democracy in the world—constitutes “voter suppression.”
If we have fewer police officers, we will have safer cities.
Marriage is a product of patriarchal misogyny. It wasn’t created to protect and honor women, but to exploit them. Anyway, a woman needs a man as much as a fish needs a bicycle.
Scientists who express skepticism about catastrophic man-made global warming are “science deniers.”

These are some of the morally and factually perverse positions of the Left. Just about every individual who holds these positions also holds the morally perverse position that Israel is the villain and Hamas and its Palestinian supporters are the moral party.

The converse is also true: With the exception of Muslims, those who are anti-Israel also tend to believe that men give birth and the other examples of left-wing moral chaos. Few Muslims—certainly no religious ones—believe that men give birth or that children should be taken to drag queen shows. They just want Israel destroyed.

Reason No. 2: People who say that men give birth also say that Israel is the villain because these positions emanate from the same aim; namely, the destruction of Western civilization, beginning with the destruction of the West’s moral and social norms.

Because some people need a daily reminder… pic.twitter.com/DG6OrmIaX9
— Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) November 19, 2023

When people say that men give birth and that men can compete in women’s sports, they are seeking to undo the bases of Western civilization—truth, science and the belief that we live in an ordered universe. That is why the Left is so adamant about denying that sex (“gender”) is binary. The fact that there are only two sexes represents order—natural and, worse, divine.

Those on the Left unwittingly acknowledge the connection between their anti-Western positions and their Israel-hatred. They routinely attack Israel for being an “outpost of Western civilization.” That is precisely what Israel is, which tells you a great deal about both of Israel’s enemies—the Left and much of the Muslim world.

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Mike Gonzalez Op-ed: The Left Feels Threatened by Those Who Tell the Truth

Mike Gonzalez / @Gundisalvus / January 17, 2024

A belief in man’s power to deconstruct reality produces an ideological morass that prevented Harvard’s Claudine Gay from rejecting genocide categorically at a catastrophic congressional hearing. Pictured: Gay, left, then president of Harvard, testifies Dec. 5 about on-campus antisemitism before the House Education and Workforce Committee in Washington. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and is the author of the book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.” Read his research.

Are conservatives plotting to subvert American institutions?

This bold assertion was tucked inside the op-ed that Claudine Gay published in The New York Times the day after she stepped down as Harvard University’s president. Gay made the accusation twice in her op-ed, so it was not a passing fancy. She devoted a full paragraph to the idea, which deserves quoting in full:

The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Further on in the op-ed, Gay added that courage was needed “to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.”

This contention is at first blush paradoxical. Many people, especially those in the center and the center- Left, are belatedly coming around to agree that our cultural institutions have made a gigantic mistake in enforcing the view that all of life must be seen through the power dynamic of the “oppressed vs. the oppressor.”

But those of us who have been writing about this for years have made the case that to get power over these institutions, the Left first had to undermine American norms and institutions. This is the heart of what is known as “cultural Marxism.” It is not always possible to settle economic scores and overthrow regimes through violent and bloody revolutions as Karl Marx wanted (and the bloodier they were, the more Marx liked them), so a better approach is to infiltrate the institutions and indoctrinate the population, especially the young.

In the lingo of the cultural revolutionaries, this is called replacing the existing “cultural hegemony” with a “counterhegemony,” or engaging in “consciousness raising” with those who have “false consciousness” because they, wrongly in this view, identify with the oppressor class.

Your average woke professor may call false consciousness being “white adjacent” because our present-day cultural Marxists have racialized cultural Marxism. If you have ever taken a graduate seminar or debated one of these pinheads, you are sure to have heard these phrases. But what is known as the Left’s “March Through the Institutions” (their term) has been so successful that Gay and the rest of the cultural Marxist Left are now putting us on notice that they are the new hegemony and we unwashed are running a subversion that wants to impose a counterhegemony.

Some might call it a quiet insurrection, though let’s not give them any ideas.

We saw an element of this exactly a year ago when an NHL player born in Russia, Ivan Provorov, refused to wear an LGBT “pride” jersey during warmups, citing his Christian Orthodox religious beliefs. An ESPN commentator, E.J. Hradek, said that if Provorov couldn’t “assimilate” to American ways, he should go back to Russia.

“If this is that much of a problem for him, to maybe assimilate into his group of teammates, and in the community and here in this country, that’s OK,” Hradek said. “Listen, you can feel any way you want. But the beauty is if it bothers you that much, there’s always a chance to leave, go back to where you feel more comfortable.”

Except that the immense changes the cultural Left has wrought (and yes, they have been immense) have been accomplished in a very few years. There is still more than folk memory of how things used to be.

Although many people have come to accept gay marriage, for example, the Supreme Court only judged it constitutional less than a decade ago. Many other people continue to see marriage as society recognizing the species’ reproductive strategy and government’s sanction of it based solely on its interest in regeneration. And there’s even less consensus on the T in LGBTQ, especially concerning grotesque medical procedures on minors.

What is truly un-American is demanding that anybody affirm anything against their belief system or leave the country.

It is ludicrous therefore for Hradek to claim that Provorov is not assimilating “in the community and here in this country,” just as it is for Gay to claim that conservatives are undermining “pillars of society” and “expertise” because these tools enable society to see through propaganda. This is true only if you accept the cultural Marxist charge that reality is not real, that man’s perception of the natural world cannot be relied upon because it is comprehended only through a conceptual superstructure that can be built, torn down, or replaced.

This canonical belief in man’s power to deconstruct reality only produces the ideological morass that prevented Gay from rejecting genocide categorically at a catastrophic congressional testimony Dec. 5. Her “expertise” consists only in the ability to speak this lingo—to share, as she so self-incriminatingly put it at one point, “her truth.”

This new hegemony is thus unmoored from reality, from natural law, from eternal truth, and the shaky institutions built on them engender their own cynicism. All critics have to do is tell the plain truth to undermine it.

This commentary originally was published by the Washington Examiner

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Staying Strong

A.F. BRANCO | on January 17, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-staying-strong/

Trump is Still Standing — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco

Despite all the arrows Marxist Democrats, Deep Staters, RINOs, and the legacy Mainstream media have thrown at Donald J. Trump, he’s still standing and going strong.
With the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Ukraine phone call hoax, the classified documents hoax, censoring his speech, Kagaroo J6 Hearing, RINOs, and a multitude of phony indictments, Trump is ahead in all the polls, because most of the American people can see through their evil strategy of trying to eliminate their political opponent.

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After Media-Brutalized Gun Freedom Law, Violent Crime Drops in Florida

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 16, 2024

When Florida became the 26th state to adopt constitutional carry, corporate media and Democrats lost their minds.

None of the requirements for how citizens obtained guns in the Sunshine State changed when Florida House Bill 543 became law July 1, 2023. That didn’t stop the anti-gun press, which were not welcome at the signing, from claiming that permitless concealed carry would exacerbate shootings.

“Following mass shootings, DeSantis signs permitless carry bill,” one NBC News headline complained. In the article, the producer of “The Rachel Maddow Show” sneered at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for trading what he dubbed “modest gun safeguards” for an “extreme” and “controversial” law.

Forbes also amplified rhetoric from gun control groups including Giffords claiming the pro-Second Amendment law is “dangerous” and “will drive gun violence up and further jeopardize the safety of our families and communities.”

Even President Joe Biden’s White House joined the dogpile on DeSantis and Florida Republicans for daring to reinforce their constituents’ constitutional rights.

“It is shameful that so soon after another tragic school shooting, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a permit- less concealed carry bill behind closed doors, which eliminates the need to get a license to carry a concealed weapon,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote. “This is the opposite of commonsense gun safety. The people of Florida — who have paid a steep price for state and Congressional inaction on guns from Parkland to Pulse Nightclub to Pine Hills — deserve better.”

Now, more than six months after the law’s adoption, evidence contradicts Democrats’ fearmongering that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry a loaded gun for self-defense would result in more “senseless tragedies.”

Since the legalization of constitutional carry in July 2023, Florida’s biggest cities saw a significant decrease in violent crimes, including shootings. In Jacksonville, murders and homicides dropped 6 percent in 2023 from the previous year.

The real record-breaking reduction in homicides was recorded in Miami. In 2022, the municipality recorded 49 homicides. By 2023, that number was down to 31, the fewest number of killings ever recorded in the Magic City. Miami also reported a 34 percent drop, from 151 to 100, in non-fatal shootings and 124 fewer “non-contact” shootings than in 2022. The change mirrors a national trend in less violent crime in 2023.

Florida’s constitutional carry law may not be the sole reason for those numbers, but this is the exact opposite of what Democrats claimed would happen after the law passed. Indeed, it’s fair to suspect respecting citizens’ constitutional right to self-defense played a role in the crime decline. Good guys with guns can deter, prevent, and even stop crime. The legal use of firearms helps thwart an estimated 2.5 million crimes a year.

Studies show that constitutional carry laws like the one in Florida don’t cause legal gun owners to commit crimes like mass shootings. Instead, permit-less carry emphasizes that the growing number of legal gun owners in the United States have the Second Amendment right to defend themselves and others if the need arises.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-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 Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

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[READ: Meet ‘Ad Fontes Media,’ The Left’s Latest Tool For Annihilating Conservative Voices Like The Federalist]

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State Department Hired German Propagandists to Introduce Censorship in American Schools

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JANUARY 16, 2024

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

The U.S. Department of State reportedly hired German censors to train American teachers on how to facilitate so-called anti-disinformation efforts in the classroom.

Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Media Research Center (MRC) and shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal that the State Department paid for trainings for hundreds of teachers “created mostly by German ‘disinformation’ activists.” The “Medialogues on Propaganda,” which featured 11 online training meetings between June 2021 and April 2022 and was attended by some 700 teachers, was funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.

“The intent was to train teachers to ‘inoculate’ students against disinformation that train them in ‘media literacy,’” The Daily Wire reported. “The State Department sessions were used by its activist organizers to promote products from their for-profit ‘partner,’ Ad Fontes, as well as NewsGuard.”

Ad Fontes is a for-profit firm founded in 2018 that advises advertisers, online platforms, and educators about which websites to either boycott or censor. While the company claims to be impartial, its recommendations show otherwise by disproportionately targeting conservative media as outlets for clients to avoid.

NewsGuard is a similar “disinformation” group backed by federal grant money. It operates as a browser extension that rates the credibility of news organizations and has been deployed in classrooms. A study published last month by the Media Research Center shows NewsGuard’s credibility ratings “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” Prominent examples of NewsGuard’s biased ratings include perfect grades for legacy outlets that botched the Hunter Biden laptop story while giving failing grades to conservative websites that got it right.

The federal government’s use of taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard is the subject of a lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, which are collectively suing the State Department to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.” The case exposes federal censorship efforts beyond the dramatic discoveries in the pending Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).

[READ: Meet NewsGuard: The Government-Backed Censorship Tool Billed As An Arbiter Of Truth]

The State Department did not respond to The Federalist’s repeated inquiries about why the agency did not shut down the propagandist trainings by German censors.

The government trainings were reportedly run by Germany’s University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab and the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab with Media Literacy Now (MLN), a non-profit group.

“MLN lobbies for mandatory training in schools to fight ‘misinformation’ and ‘online radicalization,’ boasting that it has helped convince 18 states to make laws on media literacy training,” the Daily Wire reported. “And while the Rhode Island Lab wrote an entire report on the importance of ‘media literacy’ without ever defining it, MLN had spoken more clearly, calling it a ‘tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.’”

University of Rhode Island Communications Professor Renee Hobbs is an MLN advisory board member and the founder of the Rhode Island Lab. According to the Daily Wire, Hobbs previously pressed for $60 million in subsidies for “anti-disinformation work like hers — legislation whose momentum rested on the idea that Russians caused Trump to win in 2016, itself a conspiracy.”

Hobbs played host to the state-sponsored “disinformation” seminars while also serving as chair of a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) group encouraging teachers to shift their focus to “consumerism and economic injustice.” Hobbs’ Rhode Island Lab also once used a fake, satirical Lego set to encourage teachers to hold student discussions about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

“When asked why the State Department would fund a propaganda seminar aimed at Americans,” the Wire reported, “the State Department told The Daily Wire that with its $30,000 grant to Media Literacy Now, ‘the U.S. Embassy in Germany supported the participation of German participants in the media literacy program you are inquiring about.’”

The current U.S. ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, was sworn in back in April 2022, just as the State Department trainings were purportedly ending. Before becoming Biden’s ambassador in Berlin, however, Gutmann was president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was established under Gutmann’s tenure, where about ten classified documents were discovered from Biden’s time as vice president that included “top-secret material.” Biden was paid a nearly seven-figure salary from the Ivy League university despite rare school appearances.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Education, Political

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Survey Finds Conservatives, Independents Skeptical of Biden’s Action Against Houthis, but Liberals Confident

By: Victoria Coates / @VictoriaCoates / January 16, 2024

Most American voters who are tracking the issue anticipate rising domestic prices for vital goods because of disruptions to commercial shipping in the Red Sea. a survey finds. Pictured: Yemenis lift rifles, Palestinian-Yemeni flags, and Houthi emblems Friday while shouting slogans to protest U.S.- and U.K.-led airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels for disrupting maritime traffic. (Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)

An opinion survey taken before the recent U.S.-led military action against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen found strong concern that disruptions in the Red Sea would elevate food and energy prices here at home.

The new polling from TIPP Insights surveyed 1,401 adults about the Houthi rebels’ attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The survey first established the extent to which respondents were tracking the issue, finding Americans closely divided: 48% said they’re following the issue very or somewhat closely, while 46% said they’re not following it very closely, or not at all. Only 6% say they were unaware of the Houthi attacks on commercial shipping.

Broken down by party line, 52% of Democrats, 49% of Republicans, and 43% of independents said they are aware of the attacks, suggesting this generally isn’t a partisan issue.

Once this baseline was established, TIPP Insights posed three additional questions to those respondents who said they were following the Houthi attacks.

The first question, which got the most dramatic results, asked whether respondents were very, somewhat, not very, or not at all concerned that the attacks might disrupt vital supply chains of commodities such as food and energy.

Fully 89% answered that they were very or somewhat concerned, while only 9% said they were not. The smallest group of respondents in the survey, just 2%, said they had no opinion.

These results remained consistent across all demographics. Although younger voters were marginally less concerned than their older counterparts, the survey found that those concerned still had a significant majority that held across genders and ethnic groups.

In other words, for the roughly half of the U.S. electorate tracking the Red Sea issue, the majority anticipates a rise in domestic prices for vital goods because of the disruptions, which should get the attention of both parties at the outset of 2024.

Given that the price of Brent crude already is creeping up over $80 per barrel because of extended voyages around the Cape of Good Hope to deliver cargoes, this concern is likely to intensify in coming months.

The survey’s second question asked whether respondents placed the primary blame for the attacks on Iran’s Islamist regime, the Israel-Hamas war, or both.

The largest group of respondents, 42%, said they blamed both, and the second largest, 32%, said they blamed Tehran, a result that suggests 74% of American voters consider the Iranian regime at least partially culpable for the turmoil.

Only 15% said they blamed the Israel-Hamas war and, when the response of “both” was accounted for, 57% blamed the war.

It’s worth noting that of the 671 voters surveyed who said they were following the issue and so moved on to the additional questions, the single largest age demographic was 25 to 44, with a total of 230 respondents.

This group was considerably more likely to blame the Houthis’ attacks on the Israel-Hamas war (24%) than were those 18 to 24 (14%), 45 to 64 (12%), or 65 and older (7%), so the real percentage of Americans who blame Israel and the war may be lower.

The third question revealed the starkest partisan divide in the survey. “How confident are you,” it asked, “that President Biden’s Operation Prosperity Guardian will secure commercial shipping in the Red Sea?”

Overall, 52% of respondents said they either were very confident or somewhat confident that Biden would be successful, compared with 41% who said they weren’t confident and 8% who said they’re not sure. That should be welcome news for the president.

Democrats were significantly more confident, with 81% responding positively and only 11% disagreeing. But the numbers for the other political groups tell a different story: Only 26% of Republicans and 41% of independents said they have a degree of confidence in Operation Prosperity Guardian, compared to 68% and 49%, respectively, who said they don’t.

So although Biden’s action has the strong support of those in his base who are following events in the Red Sea, he is underwater on the issue not only with conservatives but also with independents. These survey results could signal broader unease with Biden’s performance as commander in chief.

TIPP Insights conducted its polling as Houthi attacks on commercial shipping were escalating, but before the Biden administration took retaliatory action Jan. 11 and 12.

While the Houthis rebels’ immediate response was muted, they escalated retaliation and struck two commercial vessels in recent days. There are no indications that the U.S.- and U.K.-led airstrikes restored freedom of navigation in the region—in fact, all reports are that shipping is still being diverted in the wake of the airstrikes.

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, for example, announced a two-week hiatus in production at German factories due to lack of components.

If the Houthi threat isn’t neutralized and this type of stoppage spreads in coming weeks, supply chain disruptions will start to compound in a fashion that may grip the American electorate more broadly as primary voters head to the polls.

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Islamic News, Military, Political

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EXCLUSIVE: Rubio Memo Lays Out Pro-Life Strategy for GOP

By: Mary Margaret Olohan / @MaryMargOlohan / January 16, 2024

Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has a plan for a Republican party struggling to message on abortion post Roe v. Wade. Pictured: a pro-life activist holds a model fetus during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court June 29, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) — A pro-life activist holds a model fetus during a demonstration in front of the Supreme Court on June 29, 2020. (Photo Alex Wong/Getty Images)

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has a plan for a Republican Party struggling to message on abortion post-Roe v. Wade.

“Pro-life Americans, leaders, and elected officials should consider three distinct, but related, steps to reverse course,” Rubio writes in a memo first obtained by The Daily Signal. The senator plans to share the memo with his colleagues in Congress this week ahead of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, The Daily Signal has learned.

“First, we need to develop and fight for a compassionate, pro-family agenda that counters caricatures of our beliefs and makes life easier for mothers and their children,” he writes. “Second, we need to put Democrats on the defensive about their extreme support for abortion. Third, we need to tell the truth about what abortion is—the taking of innocent life—and advocate limits to the practice.”

The senator told The Daily Signal that although the abortion landscape may have shifted, the stakes have not. “Our mission remains unchanged: Building a nation where every life is cherished and protected,” he explained.

“We must be compassionate and stand with families in crisis, offering support, not judgment, for every life that is brought into this world, and dismantling the false choice between motherhood and opportunity,” Rubio stressed. “We will expose the truth about abortion, from the horrors of late-term abortion to the lack of basic protections for the most vulnerable. Finally, we will rely on common sense, finding areas where even those who disagree can stand together for the sanctity of life.”

“Every life saved, every family supported, every law rewritten is another step toward a future where every beating heart finds refuge in the law and compassion in our hearts,” he added.

01.16.2024_Rubio-Office_Memo-to-Interested-Parties-re.-Winning-Strategy-for-the-Pro-Life-Movement_Final Download

The Landscape

The Florida senator addressed the challenging landscape the pro-life movement faces. In spite of a massive victory in overturning Roe v. Wade, pro-life lawmakers and activists now must grapple with near-record high support for abortion, accelerated by Democrats’ “apocalyptic visions of what a supposedly pro-life future would look like.”

A key part of Democrats’ strategy to increase support for abortion is the lie that pro-life laws criminalize treatments for miscarriages, stillbirths and ectopic pregnancies,” he said.

That strategy of “fear and control” has been effective, Rubio told his peers, particularly when it comes to ballot initiatives, such as “Issue 1″ in Ohio, an amendment enshrining abortion into the Ohio Constitution.

“The pro-life side has lost seven out of the past seven ballot initiatives at the state level—a perfect record of failure,” he said. “This failure is starker because some of the initiatives concerned pro-life policies that strong majorities of Americans support.”

The senator’s memo notes that “some have looked at these losses and concluded that being pro-life is a losing position,” while others have “fallen silent” or “punted to the states, claiming that Congress has no authority over the matter—a claim that is wrong on the merits, as well as a disservice to voters.”

Abortion-rights activists argue with pro-life activists in front of the Supreme Court on June 26, 2022. (Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

“Each of these positions amounts to abandonment of the unborn, mothers and families,” Rubio said. “It cannot be our solution.”

“At this moment, Democrats largely control the narrative about abortion, and that means they control the narrative about us and our policies,” he told his colleagues. “Consequently, despite voters’ deep unease about abortion and revulsion at such barbaric practices as late-term abortion, they do not trust Republicans to lead on this issue. This image problem has devastating policy results. Action is needed, or worse outcomes will follow.”

Rubio’s Solution

Rubio’s three-part strategy—to fight for a pro-family agenda, to highlight Democratic extremism, and to tell the truth about the horrors of abortion—includes a point often lost in translation on Capitol Hill: Republicans have the moral high ground on an issue dealing with the killing of an unborn child.

“Pro-lifers should recall that protecting unborn human beings is the moral center and purpose of our movement—and we cannot be shy about saying so,” he noted. “No pro-life strategy deserves the name without advocating just limits on abortion.”

“This moment is an opportunity for Republicans to refocus and remember who we are,” he writes. “Our party believes in the dignity of the human person, the importance of family, and the unalienable right to life. There is no cause that unites those beliefs more perfectly, and that motivates tens of millions of our party’s supporters more fully, than the pro-life cause. We have a responsibility to advocate effectively for that cause.”

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ABORTION/PRO LIFE, Political

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Emperor Biden Wants to Nationalize Patents

By: Deroy Murdock / January 16, 2024

Then-Sens. Bob Dole, R-Kansas (left), and Birch Bayh, D-Ind., confer at a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 21, 1980. That same year, the two lawmakers, now both deceased, co-authored a patent law that the Biden administration is now seeking to subvert. (Photo: Arnie Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

On December 7, a date that shall live in infamy, Biden’s Commerce Department proposed a mechanism to invoke the so-called “march-in” clause of the 1980s-era bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act. This would empower Uncle Sam to capture and control patents that fully or partially were funded with federal research grants if Washington bureaucrats disliked the market prices or rollout speeds of their ensuing technologies.

“March-in” authority. What a perfect image: Jackbooted thugs stomping on private property and seizing it for Big Government.

As usual, Biden hopes to capsize the efficient, productive status quo. Since then-Sens. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., and Bob Dole, R-Kan., secured this legislation, universities and other institutions have owned the patents that emerged from federally funded research. Many then license those patents to companies and entrepreneurs who nurture them into goods and services. (Officially, the law is the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980.)

“Since its passage more than 40 years ago, the Act has spurred nearly 300 new drugs and discoveries that have driven the innovation economy—contributing $1.7 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output and adding more than 5.9 million jobs,” according to Laura Savatski, former chair of AUTM, an intellectual-property licensing group.

Before Bayh-Dole, under 5% of federally supported patents were licensed. By 2022, AUTM data show, 9,884 licenses and options arose among that year’s 16,857 U.S. patent applications. By that measure, 58.6% of patents typically are licensed each year, nearly 12 times the pre-Bayh-Dole pace.

The resulting embarrassment of riches has improved lives from Kansas to Kazakhstan:

Google’s pioneering search algorithm
Firefighting drones
HDTVs
Honeycrisp apples
Nicotine patches
Rotavirus vaccines
Taxol cancer therapy
Touch screens
Windows software
Zerit anti-AIDS treatments

Now, imagine life with few new amusements, business tools or medical cures. The ever-meddlesome Biden now wants new powers to reassign or simply nationalize patent licenses if his pests decide that these items are not marketed quickly or cheaply enough.

“Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products,” its authors explained in The Washington Post. “The law makes no reference to a reasonable price that should be dictated by the government. This omission was intentional.”

Such Big Government caprice would karate-chop private investment. Why would venture capitalists license new patents if federal busybodies could march in, expropriate and award them to politically connected competitors?

Even worse, anti-capitalist bureaucrats could snatch licenses and sit on them while chanting “Equity!” “Social justice!” or “Climate!”

As it happens, no administration—Democrat or Republican—has marched in on a patent since Bayh-Dole blossomed. While screaming “Democracy!” Biden lusts for a nightstick to bash to bits this 44-year-old precedent.

Biden & Co. argue that when the state goes marching in, cheaper medicines will flow like the mighty Mississippi. This will prove to be yet another Marxist mirage, as drug companies avoid licensing patents for fear of being fleeced by the Everything for All crowd.

Taxpayers also will suffer if these patents cannot be harnessed. They never will taste the fruits of scientific developments that stay theoretical. They also will not collect the corporate taxes that commercialization now yields. In that sense, taxpayers’ return on federal research investment would dwindle, potentially to zero.

While America faces a $34 trillion national debt, and $875.5 billion in annual debt service, the marginal corporate taxes from these new products represent federal revenues generated by economic growth, rather than higher tax rates. Even the late, great Milton Friedman would bless such tax receipts. Assuming today’s 21% corporate tax, Bayh-Dole’s $1.7 trillion in blessings already would have rendered unto Ceasar up to $357 billion.

Bayh-Dole was “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century,” The Economist swooned in 2002. It “unlocked all the inventions and discoveries that had been made in laboratories throughout the United States with the help of taxpayers’ money. More than anything, this single policy measure helped to reverse America’s precipitous slide into industrial irrelevance.”

But 22 years later, Biden is not amused. As he bans gas stoves and incandescent bulbs, mandates electric vehicles, censors his critics, and labors to imprison the leader of the opposition, he increasingly resembles the late, but not-so-great Latin dictator Hugo Chavez. Giving Biden and his comrades the power to smash patents and grab them for “better uses” would imperil property rights and endanger innovation. It could cripple the conveyor belt that speeds modern marvels from university labs to Best Buys, Walgreens and Whole Foods across America.

Biden should peel his sticky fingers off Bayh-Dole.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Neocon In 3″ Heels

A.F. BRANCO | on January 16, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-neocon-in-3-heels/

Nikki Haley Neocon Cartoon — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

Nikki Haley is the Neocon princess or as Vivek would say Dick Cheney in 3″ inch heels. She’s the big favorite among the GOP establishment, anti-Trumpers, and believe it or not, a lot of Democrats.

Nikki Haley Donor Reveals Where Her Money is Coming From During Interview with Never-Trump Fox News Host Neil Cavuto (VIDEO)

By Cullen Linebarger

A prominent Republican mega-donor appeared on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto on Sunday to discuss Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and dropped a bit of news that is stirring conservative interest.

Thanks mainly to Ron DeSantis’s complete collapse and Chris Christie’s exit, Haley is surging in New Hampshire according to some polls and major donors have flocked to her campaign. They see her as the last hope in stopping President Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march toward the GOP nomination.

During the interview, Sabin told the Trump-hating Cavuto where Haley’s money was coming from, and it will not come as a surprise to Gateway Pundit readers… READ MORE

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Family, LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Political

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How A Ballot Initiative to Save Kids from Trans Madness in California Could Save Them Elsewhere Too

BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | JANUARY 15, 2024

kids sitting a room while a teacher reads them a book

Author Nathanael Blake profile

NATHANAEL BLAKE

The Democrats who run California love “transitioning” kids, including chemically and surgically sterilizing them. But a courageous group of residents is betting California voters are less radical than their politicians and that the tide can turn against gender ideology even on the West Coast.

A proposed ballot initiative by Protect Kids California would put the Golden State’s radical “trans kids” agenda — which has previously been checked only by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambition — before the people.

The initiative would enact three policies:

First, it would end the practice of government schools socially transitioning children without telling parents. Schools would be required to inform parents about mental health issues, including gender-identity issues, and to have parental permission before pretending a boy is a girl, or vice versa.

Second, the law would require that sex-specific spaces and sports be based on sex, rather than self-declared “gender identity.” Boys would no longer be allowed to participate in girls’ sports or share the girls’ locker room, showers, and other private spaces.

Finally, the law would prohibit medically transitioning children with chemicals, hormones, and surgeries in an impossible quest to change a child’s sex. Chemically castrating boys and amputating the healthy breasts of troubled adolescent girls would be illegal.

These worthy goals might seem impossible. Even as many other states have enacted such policies, California’s leaders have doubled down on radical gender ideology and transitioning children. But the organizers of the initiative point to polling to argue that California’s voters are on their side on this issue, even if Californians tend to vote for Democrats who are in the grip of gender ideology and the transgender lobby. Erin Friday, one of the leaders of the effort, is a lifelong Democrat, and she is convinced there are many more like her who find the transgender industry’s targeting of children abhorrent.

She may be right. The campaign’s website highlights polling showing that the public is with them, and in an email to me, Friday shared additional polling commissioned by the feminist Women’s Liberation Front showing overwhelming support for the child-protection policies this ballot initiative would enact.

This ballot initiative would protect children from outside California as well. As Friday has explained, California is a sanctuary state for sexual experiments on children. In the name of gender ideology, California now refuses to return runaways to their out-of-state parents, pays for minors to be chemically and surgically castrated, and shields doctors who flee to California after breaking the laws of other states. Winning in California is a victory for everyone.

Thus, California’s Democrat establishment will do everything it can to stop this. The state attorney general has already written a biased and inaccurate summary of the measure (the title line is literally “RESTRICTS RIGHTS OF TRANSGENDER YOUTH”) that by law is included on the petition pages. And additional resistance is sure to follow — for example, petition signatures will be rigorously scrutinized by people who otherwise denounce election-integrity measures as racist.

The debate over the measure will be ugly. Its opponents will undoubtedly resort to suicide threats early and often, declaring that this law will push kids to kill themselves. It won’t, but telling kids to take themselves hostage is the transgender movement’s main weapon. After all, the only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that castrating or mutilating kids reduces suicides. And in other contexts, we recognize that constantly threatening suicide is manipulative and abusive.

The ugliness won’t end just because the election does. If this measure gets on the ballot and passes, there will be lawsuits. There will be protests that turn into riots. There will be promises of noncompliance from government officials and employees. But it will all be worth it.

Because some people need a daily reminder… pic.twitter.com/DG6OrmIaX9
— Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) November 19, 2023

If gender ideology goes down in California, it will fall everywhere. Even the most committed Democrats (and the most craven Republicans — looking at you, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine) will have to acknowledge that it is a political liability. And the collapse could be swift. Many people went along with radical gender ideology not out of conviction, but because they were afraid of being caught on the wrong side of the latest front in the cultural revolution. They will happily abandon it if their fear is taken away, and defeating transgender radicalism in California will do that.

There is work to do before that happy future is realized. The initiative has yet to qualify for the ballot, let alone pass. California residents can print out the petition, sign it, and mail it in. They can also volunteer. And everyone can donate to help fund the effort. Collecting more than a half-million valid signatures isn’t free, to say nothing of countering the mass of lies the media will tell about it.

But it is worth the attempt. 2023 brought a lot of victories in protecting children in Republican states from transgender insanity, but victory requires going on offense, even — especially — in California.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Dishonest Ballot Initiative Wording Is Another Way Democrats Rig Elections

BY: ELLE PURNELL | JANUARY 15, 2024

Author Elle Purnell profile

ELLE PURNELL

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

Would you support a law protecting healthy minors from life-altering injections and amputations, side effects of which may include infertility, cancer, sexual dysfunction, and heart trouble?

Would you support a law that makes it a crime for a doctor to give “gender-affirming care” to minors whose gender dysphoria places them at a heightened risk of suicide?

If the average voter were asked each of these two questions, it’s not hard to deduce that the wording of question No. 2 is far more likely to garner “no” answers, regardless of the false assumptions the question relies on. We see the same reality at work in polling: The way you ask someone a question greatly influences the answer. Its why lawyers aren’t allowed to “lead the witness” during direct examination.

For example, when PBS commissioned a poll in 2021 asking about restricting transgender surgeries for children, pollsters used this euphemistic language: “Do you support or oppose legislation that would prohibit gender transition-related medical care for minors?”

Unsurprisingly, they got 66 percent of respondents to say “oppose,” with only 28 percent admitting support. Who doesn’t want kids to get “medical care”?

Conversely, when the conservative group Convention of States Action asked respondents the following year, “Do you believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex change procedures?” an overwhelming 79 percent said yes.

There are doubtless other factors contributing to the polling discrepancy (though it’s worth noting both survey samples included more Democrats than Republicans). But the more than 50-point spread between the polls has something to do with the question language. Researchers have tested the idea that ballot language affects voters’ decisions and come to the same obvious conclusion. Democrat officials and activists are aware of this too — and use it to their advantage when writing the language voters see on their ballots.

‘Prejudicial, Partial, and Inaccurate’

For example, parents rights group Protect Kids California is suing the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, for dishonestly crafting the title and summary of their proposed ballot initiative to benefit Democrats’ policy preferences. The summary provided by Protect Kids California for its own ballot initiative says it will:

(1) repeal the California law that permits [male] students to compete in female’s sports and students to be in females’ locker rooms and bathrooms; (2) prohibit schools from deceiving parents about their student’s gender identity crisis and stop them from secretly transitioning a child; and (3) stop sex change operations and chemical castrations on minors.

I might quibble with the phrase “sex change” — since it’s metaphysically impossible to change a person’s sex — but overall, the summary is pretty clear. The actual text of the proposed statute is similar, with provisions like, “Health care providers are not permitted to provide sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures on a patient under the age of 18 years,” and “any sex-segregated facility, including, but not limited to, a bathroom or locker room, on the campus of a school shall be segregated based on biological sex.”

Bonta took it upon himself to title the initiative the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.” The summary created by his office says the initiative, in part, “Prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents consent or treatment is medically recommended,” and that it “Requires schools to notify parents whenever a student under 18 asks to be treated as a gender differing from school records without exception for student safety.” According to California law, the attorney general’s dishonest title and summary must appear on every page of the petition.

Protect Kids California is suing Bonta over his obvious attempt to prejudice voters and run interference against the ballot initiative. The group contends his “title and summary is prejudicial, partial and inaccurate.”

How to Get Away with (Making People Vote for) Murder

Sometimes the dishonest framing is in the proposed measure itself, rather than the summary. In Ohio last year, for example, pro-abortion activists behind Issue 1 carefully crafted the benign-sounding amendment to cloak its drastic ramifications.

“Every individual has the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion,” the amendment text stated, brushing over the fact that it made no exception for minors and threw open the door to transgender surgeries for kids as a kind of “reproductive decision.”

Furthermore, the text used a common Democrat trick to ensure the amendment would allow abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy. It winked at allowing abortion restrictions after “fetal viability,” but kneecapped any such restrictions by making exceptions “if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.” It sounds nice to the voter who skims the page for the first time at the polling station on his lunch break, but it really allows any doctor to prescribe an abortion for any reasons that can be couched as “health”-related — presumably including a woman’s mental distress at being pregnant.

Define the Terms, Control the Discourse

Language is an all-important tool, and Democrats often use it to manipulate and take advantage of Americans who don’t have hours to spend sifting through media lies to figure out the truth. Dishonest terms like “gender-affirming care” sound positive and invite sympathy, even though the procedures described by the term are neither medical “care” nor “affirming” of a person’s real sex.

And — just like media blackouts (see: Hunter Biden laptop) or partnerships between election offices and left-wing dark-money groups — deceptive ballot initiative language is one of the many methods Democrats use to rig elections before the first vote is even cast.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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Why Trump Is Winning by Double Digits Heading into Iowa

BY: EMILY JASHINSKY | JANUARY 15, 2024

Rallygoers lined up to enter the Target Center arena for a Donald J. Trump for President rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Nobody did it. Probably, at least.

It’s the morning of the Iowa caucus and, in the words of the Des Moines Register, “Donald Trump retains a commanding lead.” This comes according to the outlet’s latest poll, which shows Trump with a staggering 28-point advantage going into the “coldest caucus” in years.

This should chill the Beltway most of all. The Des Moines Register now puts Ron DeSantis in third place at 16 percent, down four points to Nikki Haley, a number just outside the margin of error. This is a shocking failure on the part of DeSantis, a successful populist who tapped an army of Beltway pundits to put nearly all the campaign’s eggs in the Iowa basket. But add DeSantis’ 16 points together with Haley’s 20, and Trump is still up by double digits. Consider also that many millions more ad dollars were spent touting DeSantis and Haley.

Republican voters just prefer Trump. In RealClearPolitics’ polling average, Trump is at 52.5 percent in Iowa and 61.4 percent nationally. He leads by double digits in New Hampshire. Sure, Haley and even DeSantis could over-perform the polls in Iowa, head into New Hampshire and South Carolina with momentum, over-perform there, and cruise into Super Tuesday on March 5 with an influx of cash and confidence.

The odds are low but not impossible. There’s a path if you squint. Yet it requires convincing an enormous swath of the Republican electorate — which has moved further and further into Trump’s corner over the last year — to suddenly pivot.

In 2016, Trump led Iowa by about five points in RCP’s final average. He lost by about three points to Ted Cruz. Trump was polling just under 30 percent. Nationally, he hovered around 35 percent. Well over half of the Republican primary electorate preferred a candidate other than Trump as the caucus kicked off.

DeSantis, according to RCP, was at one point about 13 points behind Trump. He’s now almost 40 points behind the former president nationally.

Democrats’ lawfare coincided with a rise in the polls for Trump. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the indictments were always going to make it difficult for another GOP candidate to poll more competitively. To her credit, Nikki Haley has been steadily eating away at DeSantis’ comfortable second-place position since the fall. (DeSantis led in New Hampshire until Haley started gaining on him in mid-September.) In Iowa, nearly half of Haley’s voters say they would vote for President Biden over Trump. She likely has a ceiling in most states that’ll make it tough to compete down the line.

Ultimately, if Iowa shakes out anywhere near the polling, it will mark the beginning of the end for DeSantis’ much-anticipated political experiment: Can Trump be defeated by a candidate with all the benefits and none of the baggage?

Perhaps the most frustrating takeaway from DeSantis’ slump is that we still don’t know the answer to that question because he allowed Beltway vest aficionados and their friends in the donor class to steer his career off course. When Trump finally attacked Vivek Ramaswamy two days before Iowa, the long-shot candidate’s response was a vision of what could have been for DeSantis.

“Yes, I saw President Trump’s Truth Social post,” Ramaswamy posted on X. “It’s an unfortunate move by his campaign advisors, I don’t think friendly fire is helpful. Donald Trump was the greatest President of the 21st century, and I’m not going to criticize him in response to this late attack.”

He added, “I’m worried for Trump. I’m worried for our country. I’ve stood up against the persecutions against Trump, and I’ve defended him at every step,” later concluding, “I want to save Trump & to save this country. Let’s do it together. You won’t hear any friendly fire from me.”

Back in September, The New York Times reported on a memo from an anti-Trump PAC helmed by Club for Growth President David McIntosh. The memo, McIntosh wrote, “shares findings from our attempts to identify an effective approach to lower President Trump’s support among Republican primary voters so we can maximize an alternative candidate’s ballot share when the field begins to consolidate.”

The takeaway from their research was perhaps the most important observation of the primary cycle, though should have been obvious from the moment every candidate entered the race.

“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” McIntosh wrote. “It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump, otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”

Whatever you think of Ramaswamy (he previewed a potential Iowa surprise in an interview with The Federalist here), his response to Trump captured the lesson of that memo almost effortlessly. He’s been doing it for months.

On DeSantis, a popular and successful governor with a healthy war chest, that approach to Trump would almost certainly have improved his odds. It’s why Florida voters loved him. Politically, at least, running against Trump didn’t need to mean attacking him. The governor’s approach didn’t need to change. (I say this as someone endlessly sympathetic to the merits of DeSantis’ arguments on this particular question.)

The McIntosh memo should have been understood by DeSantis’ campaign before it ever launched. Republican voters who see Democrats relentlessly trying to put Trump in prison don’t trust GOP politicians who proactively attack him, often echoing the same critiques made by the same people who pushed the Russia-collusion hoax.

It looks like DeSantis will lose Iowa and New Hampshire. As of now, at least, it looks like Nikki Haley will too. Easily. If that’s the case, it’s remarkable how much money and effort was invested in campaigns that got the biggest question wrong from the beginning, especially the one campaign that should have known better.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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Democrats Talk About Illegal Immigrants the Same Way They Used to Talk About Slaves

BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 13, 2024

“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.”

“The fact is, the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” he continued. Nadler is adamantly anti-life and given that abortion is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn American children, it’s unlikely that he’s sincerely concerned about the United States’ replacement rates.

Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery. Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway pointed out that Democrats in 1823 were backing slavery because if there were no slaves, “Who would pick our cotton?” Today, Democrats are making the argument that low-wage working illegal migrants are necessary to pick “our vegetables.”

Another striking comparison is the Democrats’ past support of slave traders and their current aiding of human trafficking at the southern border. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis explained, “Before the Civil War, Democrats bought their slaves from human traffickers who kidnapped them and then shipped them across the Atlantic. In 2023, they use cartels to smuggle illegal immigrants across a border Democrats refuse to close.”

Indeed, human trafficking at our southern border is now a multi-billion dollar business, and Democrats have no plan to stop the abuse. In December alone, over 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the United States.

Now, illegal immigration isn’t just a problem for border states but the entire nation. Massive influxes of aliens are now invading places like New York City and Chicago, putting massive strain on city resources. Meanwhile, the fentanyl crisis created by the open southern border is taking countless American lives in all corners of the country — both urban and rural.

[Read: Border-Jumpers Are Pushing American Kids Out Of School All Across The Country]

This week, citizens were given some hope after the Texas Military Department took over a 2.5-mile long stretch along the Rio Grande River, supposedly to stop illegal immigration in the high-traffic crossing area and keep out federal border officials who “perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area.”

However, as my colleague Jordan Boyd explained, the move appears to be nothing more than political theater. “Yet despite the addition of personnel, barriers, gates, concertina wire, and military Humvees’ to the area,” Boyd wrote, Texas Gov. “Abbott has not authorized the Texas National Guard to detain and deport illegal immigrants, who are still being turned over to Border Patrol for processing and, in most cases, release.”

“So, while the move prompted an outcry from the Biden administration and federal border officials who say the state’s interference prevents them from doing their jobs,” she added, “Abbott’s move won’t fundamentally change the dynamic at the border.”

In other words, the border remains open, and the drug and human trafficking crises caused by it rage on. But, according to Nadler, it’s all worth it because the vegetable industry needs people to pick produce for exploitative slave wages.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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HOW TWO IOWA VOTERS FEEL ABOUT THE CANDIDATES AHEAD OF THE CAUCUSES

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Alfredo Ortiz Op-ed: Iowa caucus marks voters’ first chance to begin kicking Bidenomics to the curb

By Alfredo Ortiz , Erik Lee Fox News | Published January 15, 2024 5:00am EST

The Iowa Caucus marks Americans’ first opportunity to begin replacing President Joe Biden’s failed economy. Sadly, voter pushback won’t come soon enough for many small business casualties such as the Jerald Sulky Company, a Waterloo, Iowa-based manufacturer of performance horse-drawn vehicles owned by Erik Lee that is closing after 125 years in business.

Over the past three years, small businesses have faced numerous hurdles, including COVID-19 shutdowns, historic inflation, high borrowing costs, tax increases and over-regulation. Arguably, the biggest challenge facing small businesses is the beleaguered American consumer.

The pressure on household budgets, including at higher income levels not historically impacted by inflation, has caused underlying changes in spending patterns that are not yet reflected in overall economic figures.

Since President Joe Biden took office, prices of goods and services have increased by nearly 20%, far outpacing wage growth over the same period. Talk to ordinary consumers and many will tell you prices have increased even faster than the topline figures suggest.

Erik Lee is the owner of the Waterloo, Iowa-based Jerald Sulky Company. (Photo courtesy of Erik Lee)

According to a recent study by the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, ordinary households are spending nearly $11,500 more per year to maintain the same standard of living as in January 2021.

These new costs cannibalize consumers’ discretionary income — their fun money that many businesses like Erik’s rely on to keep their doors open. When money is tight, consumers cut back spending on non-necessities like sports, hobbies, and tourism.

Equestrian isn’t spared. The problem is especially severe for small businesses like Erik’s that face competition from their own used products that become available in the secondary market as participation decreases.

Middle-class consumer spending drives the economy, and most discretionary businesses cannot make it by relying only on the wealthy. As consumers continue to trade their extra income for more expensive groceries, rent and debt interest payments, expect many more enterprises to follow the Jerald Sulky Company out of business.

Erik Lee and his wife Shelli stand next to a Fine Harness Buggy. (Photo courtesy of Erik Lee)

A recent viral video of one ordinary worker in Arizona complaining about how she can’t make ends meet even though she works three jobs illuminates the plight of many ordinary consumers in today’s economy. “I have three jobs. And I’m still f—ing struggling,” says Jourdan Bourdain. “I’m just getting myself farther and farther into credit card debt, because I don’t have enough after the first of the month to avoid using it. It just isn’t working.”

And she’s not alone. National credit card debt has risen to a record $1.2 trillion. A Financial Times poll finds only 14% of Americans say they are better off financially than when Biden took office.

While inflation increases have moderated in recent months due to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rates, it’s important to remember that even moderate inflation figures still mean increasing sticker prices that stack on top of the historic inflation of recent years. Prices aren’t going down. They are just going up more slowly. Wages are still growing at about the same pace as core inflation.

Over the past three years, small businesses have faced numerous hurdles, including COVID-19 shutdowns, historic inflation, high borrowing costs, tax increases and over-regulation. Arguably, the biggest challenge facing small businesses is the beleaguered American consumer.

Trillions of dollars in deficit spending over the past three years have bid up prices and distorted the economy. Last year’s federal deficit was a near-record $1.7 trillion. Productive small businesses can’t compete for resources against nearly unlimited government funds.

The next administration must rein in reckless spending to finally slay inflation and restore America’s vibrant small-business economy. It can rebalance the economy and prices by balancing the budget and squeezing unproductive, government-supported activity and cronyism out of the economy.

According to Job Creators Network’s recent SBIQ poll of small businesses located in Iowa and other early-primary voting states, 8 in 10 respondents said they’re more likely to vote for a candidate who commits to reducing inflationary spending. It’s too late for businesses like Erik’s, but to the extent ordinary voters understand this small business dynamic, they can begin a much-needed national turnaround on Monday.

Erik Lee is the owner of the Waterloo, Iowa-based Jerald Sulky Company.

Alfredo Ortiz is president and CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of “The Main Street Matters” podcast.

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Iowa AG Bird to Newsmax: Trump Set for Record Caucuses Win

By Fran Beyer | Monday, 15 January 2024 02:02 PM EST

Former President Donald Trump could smash an Iowa GOP caucus record — with “all parts of the state very supportive,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird told Newsmax on Monday. Bird recalled on “Newsline” then-candidate and Kansas GOP Sen. Bob Dole’s 12-point victory in 1988 caucuses in Iowa, predicting Trump “is poised to blow that out of the water,” crediting “his strong energy and momentum.”

“He’s going to do very well tonight,” she said of Trump. “I think he’s going to place 1st, 2nd and 3rd from all of the energy and momentum that I’m seeing out there. And I think how the other [contenders in the state] just won’t matter. I think we’ll have a big win in Iowa with all of this support — every demographic in Iowa, all parts of the state very supportive of President Trump.”

She also dismissed any impact from cold weather and a snowstorm that could challenge participation in the caucuses.

“We’re used to winter here in Iowa and it is cold. It’s colder than it usually is,” she noted. “But the snow has been cleared. The good news is that caucuses are indoors. People just need to go to their caucus, bring their ID and vote for President Trump. He has strong support here, and we just need to get everybody out on caucus night.”

Bird also trashed the Georgia case against Trump now that the prosecutor faces a scandal of her own. Court papers filed in the case claim an alleged romantic partner was employed by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to prosecute Trump.

“President Trump has had a target on his back since day one,” Bird said. “They have been after him and Iowans and Americans see right through it.”

“I think that we’re going to see more about this as this goes forward, but I don’t think … the whole prosecution has much of an impact other than reminding Americans that President Trump is the one that the powerful elites are scared of right now, and they’re doing everything they can even kicking him off the ballot.”

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Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.

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ABC Poll: Biden Has Lowest Approval in 15 Years, 71% Say Economy ‘Bad’

By Charlie McCarthy | Monday, 15 January 2024 10:17 AM EST

President Joe Biden has the lowest job approval rating of any chief executive in the past 15 years, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll found. Biden’s approval rating is 33%, the lowest since then-President George W. Bush in 2006-2008, ABC News reported. Biden also has a 58% disapproval rating. Such negative approval/disapproval numbers could suggest support of the current House GOP’s investigation of Biden’s alleged influence peddling and potential impeachment.

The ABC/Ipsos poll also focused on election comparisons

Trump Dominates in Party Vote, ABC Poll: ‘Satisfactory as Party Nominee’

The poll shows that 72% of Republicans support former President Donald Trump as their nominee.

By comparison, just 57% of Democrats said they would be satisfied with him as their party’s nominee.

Younger Blacks Abandon Biden, ABC Poll: Black Approval

Biden’s job approval rating is 21 points below average among Blacks, compared with 15 points below average among Hispanic people, compared with 6 points among white people.

Black voters, once a lock to back Democrats, shows that the demographic no longer guaranteed to support the party’s candidates. Biden’s support among Blacks falls sharply, the poll shows, with younger Blacks:

32% of Blacks under 50 approve of Biden
65% of Blacks 50 and over approve of the president.

Trump More Fit for Job, ABC Poll: Biden vs. Trump

Asked about the candidates’ mental fitess for the presidency, 47% supported Trump, 77, versus 28% for Biden, 81.

On the question of physical fitness, 57% supported Trump, while 28% backed Biden.

Economy Under Biden, ABC Poll: US Rejects Handling

With the economy always a top issue, if not the No. 1 issue for voters in a presidential election, Biden’s standing is poor. More than half of the respondents (56%) said they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, while 31% approved. The poll also indicates that 71% said the economy is in bad shape, while 24% said he economy was good.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted Jan. 4-8 among a random national sample of 2,228 adults.

Charlie McCarthy | editorial.mccarthy@newsmax.com

Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.

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‘DEEPLY DISTURBING’: GOP Senators Slam Biden Admin for Using SPLC on ‘Domestic Terrorism’

By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / January 13, 2024

Marsha Blackburn speaks behind two microphones — Three Republican senators–Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, Alabama’s Katie Britt, and Florida’s Rick Scott–condemned the Biden administration Friday for reaching out to the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center for guidance on “domestic terrorism.” Pictured: Blackburn speaks Sept. 27 during a press conference at the Capitol on border security. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Republican senators condemned as “deeply disturbing” the Biden administration’s decision to reach out to the Southern Poverty Law Center for advice in combating the “domestic terror threat.”

“Since January 2021, the Biden administration has consistently attempted to weaponize the federal government against its political opponents,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “That it would turn to the SPLC to do so is disturbing but unfortunately not surprising, given their shared animosity towards religious freedom and parental rights.”

“The present-day SPLC has devolved into a disreputable, deeply unserious organization that dishonestly attempts to silence anyone across America who disagrees with its far-left activist agenda,” Britt added. “That makes it a natural ally and echo chamber for a president who routinely demonizes Americans who simply have different political beliefs and perspectives.”

The Alabama Republican was responding to The Daily Signal’s exclusive report Thursday that SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in 2021 that the Biden administration had reached out to her organization in its efforts to combat “the domestic terrorism threat.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. This bias suggests the Biden administration views conservatives as a threat to domestic tranquility, critics say.

“Instead of targeting law-abiding Americans, this administration should be combating the national security, humanitarian, and economic crisis at the southern border—which gravely threatens the safety of our homeland and the well-being of our communities every single day,” Britt said. “I am proud to be a Christian and a conservative, and I’ll continue to fight back against the Biden administration’s radical agenda.”

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also slammed the Biden administration, noting as well its work with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The SPLC has echoed Weingarten’s rhetoric in condemning parental rights groups.

“Since he took office, President Biden’s administration has routinely worked with radical individuals and groups like Randi Weingarten and the SPLC to shape dangerous policy that targets Americans based on their religion [or] political views or simply because they rightly believe they should be involved in their child’s education,” Scott told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.

“It’s wrong and shows just how far President Biden will go in dangerously using the same tactics to weaponize government against its people that we see in Communist China, Venezuela and Cuba,” the Florida Republican added. “I will not tolerate this political targeting and will use every tool at my disposal in the Senate to hold this administration accountable for these despicable decisions.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also condemned the Biden administration’s move.

“The SPLC, which masquerades as a civil rights organization, is a far-left activist group that has smeared countless conservatives, including religious and parental rights groups,” Blackburn told The Daily Signal. “It is deeply disturbing that the Biden administration would enlist its help to target conservatives as domestic terrorists, marking just the latest example of this administration’s two-tiered system of justice.”

In Video, SPLC Head Brags About Advising Biden

The Daily Signal exclusively reported that Huang, SPLC’s president, is seen in a video bragging to donors attending a fall 2021 meeting that many agencies in Biden’s administration had approached the center to craft a domestic terrorism strategy.

“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang said, according to the video.

The Biden administration’s ties to the SPLC make Huang’s claim credible, and neither the White House nor any of the agencies involved in the administration’s domestic terrorism strategy denied Huang’s claim.

Biden and his team hosted SPLC leaders and staff at the White House at least 11 times since Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden became president. Biden nominated an SPLC attorney, Nancy Abudu, to a federal judgeship.

Last year, the FBI’s Richmond office used the SPLC’s “hate group” list to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in an infamous memo. According to the SPLC’s logic, critics say, the entire Roman Catholic Church arguably should be listed as a “hate group” because the SPLC cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church in branding the Ruth Institute a “hate group.”

Just this week, the White House touted Vice President Kamala Harris’ meeting “with voting rights leaders.” Among the leaders highlighted: Seth Levi, the SPLC’s chief strategy officer.

SPLC’s Lack of Credibility

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced numerous hits to its credibility, especially on the issue of domestic terrorism.

In 2012, a terrorist gunman used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Christian nonprofit the Family Research Council. He planned to shoot everyone in the building, but the building manager successfully foiled his plan. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept FRC on its map.

Last March, police arrested an SPLC attorney at a riot in Atlanta involving Molotov cocktails, and he now faces domestic terrorism charges. The SPLC also has a long track record of carrying water for Antifa, the violent extremist group involved in the 2020 riots across the country.

Critics on both the Right and the Left long have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of exaggerating hate in order to scare donors into ponying up cash. In 2019, amid a racial discimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

In 2018, the SPLC paid $3.4 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after it branded a Muslim reformer an “anti-Muslim extremist.” The SPLC currently faces another defamation lawsuit for branding an immigration reform organization an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

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From Hungary, a ‘Last Warning to the West’

By: Virginia Allen / @Virginia_Allen5 / January 15, 2024

Hungarian flags fly on the Hungarian Parliament Building on a sunny day. — In her new book, “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” Shea Bradley-Farrell outlines a road map for how America can correct course and learn from our friends in Hungary at this moment in history. Pictured: Hungarian flags fly outside the Hungarian parliament. (Photo: Sndr/Getty Images)

For years, especially during the Cold War, Hungary looked to America as an example of freedom, but now it might be time for the U.S. to take notes from Hungary, according to Shea Bradley-Farrell.

Bradley-Farrell, president of the Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education, recently spent several months in Hungary doing research for her new book. While in the European nation formerly controlled by the then-Soviet Union, Bradley-Farrell says she found herself often having a similar conversation with Hungarians.

“Hungarians told me over and over, ‘the rhetoric coming out of the United States reminds us of our Soviet era,’” Bradley-Farrell recalled. “And the more I dug into that, the more that I realized that the things that we’re dealing with here and the so-called progressive agenda, the woke agenda, the Biden administration, they’re directly out of the playbook of communism,” she says.

As a deeply religious and freedom-loving nation, Hungary—which came out from under Soviet oppression in 1991—has long looked to America as a “light on a … hill,” Bradley-Farrell says. But Hungary is not a model for America because “America and our Constitution, our founding, is the model for the world,” she says. in 1991—has long looked to America as a “light on a … hill,” Bradley-Farrell says. But Hungary is not a model for America because “America and our Constitution, our founding, is the model for the world,” she says.

However, “our Hungarian friends, the people that care about us, are saying, ‘Hey, your rhetoric is communist. You guys need to wake up, because you’re about to lose what we loved about you.’”

In her new book, “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” Bradley-Farrell outlines a road map for how America can change course and learn from our friends in Hungary at this moment in history.

Bradley-Farrell joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the book and share the stories of the conversations she had in Hungary.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF POLITICALLY INCORRECT HUMOR January 12, 2024

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Battle-Tested Trump Brings A New And Improved Ground Game To Iowa

BY: M.D. KITTLE | JANUARY 12, 2024

M.D. KITTLE

URBANDALE, Iowa — With four days and a few hours to go before the starting gun of the presidential nominating season, Donald Trump Jr. rallied the troops in suburban Des Moines on behalf of his frontrunner father.

Motivation was a hard commodity to come by on a cold and gray January day, with the remnants of the first heavy snowstorm of the season mucking up the streets with dirty slush. But the troops — warriors for former President Donald Trump — are hearty stock, like Hawkeye Cauci veterans around the state. After all, some of these folks have been showing up to this curious exhibition of representative democracy for more than 50 years, and they take their role as first-in-the-nation ambassadors of the presidential nomination chase very seriously.

We’ll see just how serious Iowa’s Republican voters are come Monday, caucus day, when the high is expected to drop below zero. By 7 p.m. Iowa time, when this internationally watched political pageant gets underway, temperatures could plummet to as low as minus-15 degrees with a wind chill of Ouch!

But if the 2024 presidential campaign and the past eight years have taught us anything, it’s that there are people in this deeply divided republic who would crawl through broken glass, barbed wire, and solid ice to vote for the former president. Still, Trump, rolling into the caucuses with a 50-point lead over his nearest challengers nationally and up by at least 35 points in Iowa, isn’t taking anything for granted.

“That’s why this Monday is so critical. We’ve got to send a message,” Don Jr. told the gathering of some 80 Trump supporters and reporters gathered at Urbandale’s Machine Shed restaurant. The event was organized by the Des Moines Bull Moose Conservative Club.

“I understand it’s going to be minus-4, but if I can get my Florida butt back up here … everyone can get back up here,” the president’s eldest child said.

The Trump campaign, unlike eight years ago, is taking nothing for granted. Forget the polls, turnout is the thing, campaign officials say.

“We’ve got to treat Monday as if we’re 10 points back,” Trump Jr. admonished. He said the left, establishment Republicans, and the Trump-hating corporate media are counting on caucus-goer apathy to diminish expected big numbers for the former president. A smaller margin of victory, perhaps driven by Trump supporters believing the win is in the bag, is a narrative Trump’s opponents would pounce on heading into next week’s New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, the thinking goes.

In short, Trump is beatable.

His opponents point to Iowa 2016, when Trump took the political world by storm, but finished tied for second with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won the caucuses in a much more crowded field of candidates.

‘Night and Day’

But much has changed in eight years. Trump may be the same Trump in many ways, but he’s a much different candidate coming in. The Iowa surprise for Cruz ultimately meant little. Trump went on to claim the GOP nomination, win the presidency, and become the subject of the left’s unrelenting loathing. He’s battle-tested, with arguably more political scars than any presidential candidate in the republic’s history.

Moreover, the Trump ground game in Iowa is significantly improved, more nimble, and much better organized than it was during his first presidential run. It’s so good, in fact, Trump can’t even seem to believe it.

“I was with the president all last week and he asked me that exact question [about whether the ground game has improved since 2016], and I told him it’s the difference between night and day,” said Iowa state Sen. Brad Zaun, a Des Moines-area Republican who was the first state elected official to endorse Trump in 2016 and again this year.

Zaun may be a bit biased, but the Trump ally was a frequent witness to the campaign’s Iowa operations in 2016, as he has been this campaign cycle. The senator said there’s a professionalism and an organizational focus this go-round that wasn’t there eight years ago.

The campaign’s suburban Des Moines headquarters has been hopping for months, with an army of volunteers working extended shifts seven days a week. There’s a greater emphasis on data, and an almost manic drive to connect with grassroots conservatives in every corner of the kick-off caucus state.

“It’s vastly improved,” said John Humeston, a caucus captain for the Trump campaign in Ankeny. “They’ve got a great staff that started early.”

Trump caucus captains are charged with turning out the voters. They’re given a list of Iowans that have shown support, or even a passing interest, in the former president. Humeston said his list is six pages long. He and his fellow volunteers place plenty of calls in the evenings.

At the headquarters, it’s a little like the Frank Capra Christmas classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life”: Instead of angels getting their wings, Trump volunteers ring a call bell every time an Iowa voter commits to caucusing for the frontrunner.

“Caucus captains have to find 10 new ones to bring to the caucus,” Humeston said. “It gives everyone more of a goal.”

There’s a lot more money involved, too.

Big Money, Bigger Stakes

In 2023, Republican presidential candidates and outside groups spent nearly $105 million on ads in Iowa, NBC News reported. It’s a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the $10.2 billion in total political advertisement expenditures that AdImpact projects for the 2023-24 election cycle.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and the super PACs backing her presidential quest lead the money chase, spending a combined $30 million according to the NBC News report. Haley, who served as Trump’s United Nation’s ambassador, has helped turn Iowa’s airwaves into a blanket of campaign ads.

The campaign for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent $2.3 million on ads in Iowa, while pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down has kicked in at least $17.6 million, according to the AdImpact figures. Trump’s campaign has spent north of $4 million, while super PAC MAGA Inc. has dropped $11.4 million in its Iowa ad campaign.

The former president has spent comparatively less time in the Hawkeye State than most of his rivals, focusing on periodic large-scale rallies and foregoing the small retail politics events at the core of the long caucus campaign season. A New York Post article recently quipped that “Trump is outsourcing his Iowa campaign to surrogates.” Prominent supporters including Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and cancel culture target Roseanne Barr have been barnstorming Iowa on behalf of their candidate in recent days.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has made campaign stops in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, fulfilling his promise to do the “Full Grassley.” Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s senior U.S. senator, has for decades made it his annual mission to pay a call on Iowans in every county.

Haley, too, has made scores of campaign stops in Iowa, and fellow GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy last month celebrated the “double Grassley.” The Ohio entrepreneur, who has essentially made Iowa a second home since entering the race nearly a year ago, has held at least two campaign events in each of the 99 counties. Ramaswamy is running a distant fourth in Iowa, at south of 7 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.

DeSantis has bet heavily on Iowa, devoting a significant share of his campaign’s staff and volunteers to his Hawkeye State operations. Despite the investment and time, DeSantis is polling at 15.5 percent to Trump’s 53 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa Republicans. The popular Florida governor is running third in Iowa, just behind Haley, who is polling at 17.8 percent. After being seen as the strongest Republican challenger to Trump, DeSantis shook up his campaign in August as he lost traction in the polls.

‘Double Forms of Justice’

As the New York Post notes, Trump’s supporters get why he’s not been as present on the campaign trail as his rivals. The former president has had his share of distractions this campaign season, with a host of legal problems tying up much of his time. He’s been busy fending off a long list of charges across four indictments that threaten to send him to prison for the rest of his life — charges brought by Democrat President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice and his leftist prosecutor allies in a naked political quest to dispose of Biden’s No. 1 political opponent.

It’s the attack on Trump and the rule of law that has so many of his Iowa supporters ready to brave a brutally cold winter’s evening in Iowa to caucus for their candidate. Beyond their concerns about the economy, inflation, and the debacle at the Southwest border, Trump backers at the Machine Shed Thursday afternoon said they’re tired of what they see as a two-tiered system of justice under Biden.

“The politics of this current administration, the double forms of justice that are just so obvious, it just doesn’t seem like America,” said Suzanne Spooner of nearby Granger when asked about her greatest concerns this election year. “I think our country is a mess. I think President Trump did a good job of getting us in a better space than we’ve ever been in before, and I support getting things back on track again.”

Members of the Trump army, particularly the caucus captains, say they’re ready to help bring home a big victory Monday night for the former president in his latest pursuit of the White House. Trump’s son reminded them that there’s not a moment to lose.

“We have an opportunity to do something, but we have to do it now,” Trump Jr. said. “Let’s get out there on Monday. Let’s make sure everyone shows up. Let’s decide this thing early. Let’s finish this thing strong.”

M.D. Kittle is an award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism.

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TEXAS SEIZES CONTROL OF PARK, BLOCKS BORDER PATROL FROM ENTERING, AS PART OF ANTI-ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION EFFORTS

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DOJ renews SCOTUS push to act after Texas seizes border areas, blocks Border Patrol from entering

By Adam Shaw Fox News | Published January 12, 2024 3:08pm EST

The Department of Justice has renewed its push for the Supreme Court to act on an ongoing legal dispute between Texas and the federal government after a dramatic move in which Texas seized control of a park near the border and blocked Border Patrol from entering.

“Texas’s new actions since the government’s filing demonstrate an escalation of the State’s measures to block Border Patrol’s ability to patrol or even to surveil the border and be in a position to respond to emergencies,” the DOJ told the high court in an overnight supplemental filing on Friday.

The Texas National Guard seized Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas and set up razor wire and fences to block off the area. Eagle Pass has been one of the hottest spots of migrant crossings in the three-year border crisis and Shelby Park is a key staging area for processing during the enormous migrant surges the state has seen.

In a statement, the Texas Military Dept. said it has maintained a presence in the park since 2021, including with security points and temporary barriers.

“The current posture is to prepare for future illegal immigrant surges and to restrict access to organizations that perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area,” it said.

Jan 11 2024: Texas troopers secure Shelby Park near Eagle Pass. (Fox News)

Senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources later confirmed that Border Patrol is being blocked at two areas of operation in Eagle Pass and said that agents pulled resources to avoid a confrontation. In the overnight filing, the DOJ says Border Patrol learned of the new barriers late on Wednesday and says that the barriers stop Border Patrol from reaching the Rio Grande Reiver in certain areas.

“It also includes the staging area that Border Patrol has used to evaluate and begin inspecting migrants that it has apprehended along this stretch of the border,” the administration said.

The government says that Border Patrol had requested access to use a boat ramp and to access the staging area but were refused access.

The move ramps up an ongoing dispute between Texas and the administration over Texas’ setting up of razor wire along the southern border to stop illegal crossings. The Biden administration was recently blocked by an appeals court from cutting or damaging the wire, and asked the Supreme Court to intervene as a result. The administration said the wire was preventing agents from apprehending migrants and accessing parts of the border.

The latest filing comes as part of the case, with the DOJ pointing to claims Texas had previously made that agents could access the border via boat or road without cutting the wire, and said that now the one safe and operationally practical boat ramp was blocked.

“Because Border Patrol can no longer access or view this stretch of the border, Texas has effectively prevented Border Patrol from monitoring the border to determine whether a migrant requires the emergency aid that the court of appeals expressly excepted from the injunction,” it argues.

BIDEN LAWSUIT OVER TEXAS IMMIGRATION LAW LATEST ATTEMPT TO STIFLE STATE’S MOVES TO STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

The filing argues that the new actions have “changed the situation on the ground from the account in prior filings in this Court, including Texas’s opposition.’

“Those developments reinforce the need for this Court to vacate the court of appeals’ injunction, and to do so as soon as possible,” the DOJ says. “This Court should vacate the injunction pending appeal in order to restore Border Patrol’s access to the border it is charged with patrolling and the migrants it is responsible for apprehending, inspecting, and processing.”

It’s one of several ongoing disputes between the Biden administration and Texas over the southern border. The government has sued Texas over its establishment of buoys along the Rio Grande and a recent anti-illegal immigration law that allows for state and local police to arrest illegal immigrants.

Texas has stood by its policies, saying that it is acting where the Biden administration has failed to secure the border.

BIDEN DOJ SEEKS SUPREME COURT INTERVENTION OVER TEXAS RAZOR WIRE AT SOUTHERN BORDER

Video

“Texas is holding the line at our southern border with miles of additional razor wire and anti-climb barriers to deter and repel the record-high levels of illegal immigration invited by President Biden’s reckless open border policies. Instead of enforcing federal immigration laws, the Biden Administration allows unfettered access for Mexican cartels to smuggle people into our country,” Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Border Patrol Union backed Abbott, saying he is enhancing operations, not harming them.

“His seizing control of Shelby Park allows our agents to deploy to troubled spots that experience high numbers of gotaways. Governor Abbott’s actions should be seen as a force multiplier,” National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd said in a statement.

Fox News Bill Melugin and Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.

Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.

He can be reached at adam.shaw2@fox.com or on Twitter .

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EXCLUSIVE: Vivek Ramaswamy Slams Biden Admin for Enabling ‘a Tentacle of the Work-Industrial Complex’

By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / January 12, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy gestures in a black suit with a red tie and an American flag pin — Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, condemned the Biden administration Firday for turning to the Southern Poverty Law Center for advice on combating “domestic terrorism.” Pictured: Ramaswamy speaks Dec. 6 during NewsNation’s Republican presidential debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy condemned the Biden administration Friday over reports that it reached out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which critics call a far-left smear factory, for advice on combating the “domestic terrorism threat.”

“This is the same organization that added parental rights organizations to its so-called ‘hate map,’” Ramaswamy told The Daily Signal in a written statement. The GOP presidential hopeful was referencing the SPLC’s map plotting mainstream conservative and Christian groups—which it brands “hate groups” or “antigovernment groups”—alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The SPLC is a tentacle of the woke-industrial complex,” Ramaswamy added. “I exposed the game in [the book] ‘Woke, Inc.’ Countless companies blacklist law-abiding Americans because nonprofits like SPLC label them members of ‘hate groups.’”

Companies such as Amazon, Eventbrite, and NextDoor have used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to refuse their services to conservatives.

“The real problem isn’t that SPLC spouts off its nonsense. It’s that powerful companies & institutions take action based on its judgments,” Ramaswamy told The Daily Signal. “This is an invisible force that fuels the spread of woke-infused cancel culture in America.”

Video Shows SPLC Bragging About Advising Biden

On Thursday, The Daily Signal exclusively reported on a video showing SPLC President Margaret Huang bragging in a fall 2021 donor meeting that many agencies in Biden’s administration had approached the SPLC to craft a domestic terrorism strategy.

“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang says in the video.

The Biden administration’s ties to the SPLC make Huang’s claim credible, and neither the White House nor any agency involved in the administration’s domestic terrorism strategy denied Huang’s claim.

Biden and his team hosted SPLC leaders and staff at the White House at least 11 times since Biden took office Jan. 20, 2021. The president nominated an SPLC attorney, Nancy Abudu, to a federal judgeship.

Last year, the FBI’s Richmond office used the SPLC’s “hate group” list to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in an infamous memo. According to the SPLC’s logic, the entire Roman Catholic Church arguably should be listed as a “hate group” because the center cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church in branding the Ruth Institute a “hate group.”

Earlier this week, the White House touted Vice President Kamala Harris’ meeting “with voting rights leaders.” Among the leaders highlighted was Seth Levi, the SPLC’s chief strategy officer.

SPLC’s Lack of Credibility

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has taken numerous hits to its credibility, especially on the issue of domestic terrorism.

In 2012, a terrorist gunman used the SPLC “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in the nation’s capital, the Family Research Council. He planned to shoot everyone in the council’s headquarters, but the building manager successfully foiled his plan. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept FRC on its map.

Last March, police arrested an SPLC attorney at a riot in Atlanta that involved the use of Molotov cocktails, and he faces domestic terrorism charges. The SPLC also has a long track record of carrying water for Antifa, a violent extremist group.

Critics on both the Right and the Left long have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of exaggerating hate to scare donors into ponying up cash. In 2019, amid a racial discimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

In 2018, the SPLC paid $3.4 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after it branded a Muslim reformer an “anti-Muslim extremist.” It currently faces another defamation lawsuit for branding an immigration reform organization an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Nation at Risk

A.F. BRANCO | on January 12, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-nation-at-risk/

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The left-wing control of our nation is playing a sick game of opposite Russia roulette pointed at all of us with their policies putting America at risk. 5 deadly bullets in their gun. 2 tier Justice, Debt, Open Borders, Green Agenda, and their endless wars, any one of them could bring National destruction.

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The DNC Is Engaged In ‘Unlawful Voter Suppression’ Ahead Of Primaries, New Hampshire AG Says

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 10, 2024

The office of New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella issued a cease-and-desist order to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Monday after the committee purportedly violated the state’s voter suppression laws.

On Jan. 5, the co-chairs of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee submitted a letter to the New Hampshire Democratic Party (NHDP) demanding the state party comply with DNC guidance to “take steps to educate the public that January 23rd” — the date set for the jurisdiction’s Democrat presidential primary — “is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless and the NHDP and presidential candidates should take all steps possible not to participate.”

The memo came nearly a year after the DNC passed a new early presidential primary calendar for 2024. The updated calendar, supported by President Biden, sought to make South Carolina the first state on the Democrat presidential primary schedule. While Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, have historically marked the first electoral contests in the presidential primary process for both major political parties, the DNC’s decision to schedule South Carolina first was, as NBC News described, due to Iowa’s caucuses being viewed as “too white and too undemocratic.”

Someone needs to press the DNC for some definitions, like their definition of “democracy.” They through around the term so much, and the context of what they’re saying does not match the 200 plus years definition of democracy. And while you’re at it, what in the world does, “too white and too undemocratic” mean?

Despite state law mandating New Hampshire host a presidential primary “7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election,” the DNC told the NHDP that the Jan. 23 primary scheduled by the New Hampshire secretary of state “cannot be used as the first determining stage of the state’s delegate selection process and is considered detrimental.” The guidance further informed the state party that no “delegates or alternates shall be apportioned” and no “scheduling of events related to the selection of delegates or alternates in New Hampshire may be” based on the Jan. 23 election.

In his cease-and-desist order to the DNC, Assistant Attorney General Brendan O’Donnell underscored how “[f]alsely telling New Hampshire voters that a New Hampshire election is ‘meaningless’ violates New Hampshire voter suppression laws,” and further ordered the organization to stop engaging in such “unlawful” conduct.

“Regardless of whether the DNC refuses to award delegates to the party’s national convention based on the results of the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire [D]emocratic Presidential Primary Election, that election is not ‘meaningless.’ Your statements to the contrary are false, deceptive, and misleading,” O’Donnell wrote. “Telling the public or any person qualified to register to vote or vote in New Hampshire that the [aforementioned election] is ‘meaningless,’ or soliciting NHDP or any other party to make such statements, constitutes an attempt to prevent or deter another person from voting or registering to vote based on fraudulent, deceptive, misleading, or spurious grounds or information.”

O’Donnell further warned the DNC that he reserved the right to pursue further legal action.

It’s worth mentioning that the DNC’s decision to hold South Carolina’s primary before the party’s Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary is designed to benefit Biden. During the 2020 Democrat presidential primary cycle, the Delaware Democrat lost both Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing fourth and fifth, respectively. It was his dominating victory in South Carolina’s primary that put Biden on track to become Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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SHAWN FLEETWOOD

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Judge Lets Trump Speak at N.Y. Civil Trial, Cuts Him Off

Thursday, 11 January 2024 01:36 PM EST

Barred from giving a formal closing argument, Donald Trump still got a brief chance to speak in court at the conclusion of his New York civil trial Thursday, calling the proceedings “a fraud on me” before the judge cut him off.

“We have a situation where I am an innocent man,” the former president said. “I’m being persecuted by someone running for office and I think you have to go outside the bounds.”

After about six minutes, Judge Arthur Engoron — who had denied Trump permission earlier to give a closing statement at the trial — cut him off and recessed for lunch.

The exchange took place hours after authorities responded to a bomb threat at the judge’s house.

Police checked out the threat at Engoron’s Long Island home, which came a day after he denied the former president’s extraordinary request to deliver his own courtroom close, officials said. The proceedings were not delayed.

Trump, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly disparaged Engoron, accusing him in a social media post Wednesday night of working closely with the New York attorney general “to screw me.”

“At this moment the judge is not letting me make the summation because I’ll bring up things he doesn’t want to hear,” Trump said as he walked into the courtroom, characterizing the decision as “political interference.”

“Forty-four days of trial — not one witness came into this courtroom, your honor, and said there was fraud,” Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said, contending his client “should get a medal” for his business acumen instead of punishment he deemed the “corporate death penalty.”

At 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, hours before the trial’s final day was to begin, Nassau County police said they responded to a “swatting incident” at Engoron’s Great Neck home. Nothing amiss was found at the location, officials said.

The false report came days after a fake emergency call reporting a shooting at the home of the judge in Trump’s Washington, D.C. criminal case. The incidents are among a recent spate of similar false reports at the homes of public officials.

Taking the bench a few minutes late, Engoron made no mention of the incident at his home.

On Wednesday, Engoron had nixed an unusual plan by Trump to deliver his own closing remarks in the courtroom, in addition to summations from his legal team, after lawyers for the former president would not agree to the judge’s demand that he stick to “relevant” matters.”

That left the last words to the lawyers in a trial over allegations that Trump exaggerated his wealth on financial statements he provided to banks, insurance companies and others.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wants the judge to impose $370 million in penalties. Trump says he did nothing wrong. He contends outside accountants that helped prepare the statements should’ve flagged any discrepancies and that the documents came with disclaimers that shield him from liability.

The former president had hoped to make that argument personally, but the judge — initially open to the idea — said no after a Trump lawyer missed a deadline for agreeing to ground rules. Among them, Engoron warned that Trump couldn’t use his closing remarks to “deliver a campaign speech” or use the opportunity to impugn the judge and his staff.

“This entire case is a manufactured claim to pursue a political agenda,” Kise said in his closing argument. “It has been press releases and posturing but no evidence.”

Lawyers from James’ office were to deliver their closing argument Thursday afternoon.

Trump returned to court as a spectator Thursday despite the death of his mother in-law, Amalija Knavs, and the launch of the presidential primary season Monday with the Iowa caucus.

Since the trial began Oct. 2, Trump has gone to court nine times to observe, testify and complain to TV cameras about the case, which he called a “witch hunt and a disgrace.”

He clashed with Engoron and state lawyers during 3½ hours on the witness stand in November and remains under a limited gag order after making a disparaging and false social media post about the judge’s law clerk.

Thursday’s arguments were part of a busy legal and political stretch for Trump.

On Tuesday, he was in court in Washington, D.C., to watch appeals court arguments over whether he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election — one of four criminal cases against him. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

In New York, James sued Trump in 2022 under a state law that gives the state attorney general broad power to investigate allegations of persistent fraud in business dealings.

Kise argued the case amounted to the “weaponization” of a consumer protection statute and, urging Engoron to consider his legacy as a judge, warned that a ruling in the state’s favor would have a chilling effect on every company doing business in the state.

Engoron decided some of the key issues before testimony began. In a pretrial ruling, he found that Trump had committed years of fraud by lying about his riches on financial statements with tricks like claiming his Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its actual size.

The trial involves six undecided claims, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

Trump’s company and two of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are also defendants. Eric Trump was also in court for closing arguments.

Besides monetary damages, James wants Trump and his co-defendants barred from doing business in New York.

State lawyers say that by making himself seem richer, Trump qualified for better loan terms from banks, saving him at least $168 million.

Kise, however, said the bank didn’t lose out on anything.

He pointed to testimony from bank officials that the former president more than qualified for special services afforded to ultra-rich people, and that the bank adjusted his numbers downward and still loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kise, praising Trump as “part of the fabric of the commercial real estate industry” for a half-century, pointed to Trump’s testimony that he intended lenders to do their own research and vetting after receiving his financial statements.

The lawyer also argued that the documents understated — rather than overvalued — the former president’s net worth.

Kise acknowledged that some holdings may have been listed “higher by immaterial” amounts, but he added” “there’s plenty of assets that were undervalued by substantial sums.”

Engoron said he is deciding the case because neither side asked for a jury and state law doesn’t allow for juries for this type of lawsuit. He said he hopes to have a decision by the end of the month.

Last month, in a ruling denying a defense bid for an early verdict, the judge signaled he’s inclined to find Trump and his co-defendants liable on at least some claims.

“Valuations, as elucidated ad nauseum in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engoron wrote in the Dec. 18 ruling. “But a lie is still a lie.”

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Border-Jumpers Are Pushing American Kids Out of School All Across the Country

BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 10, 2024

Author Joy Pullmann profile

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Democrats’ open border is turning the entire United States into a refugee camp. The record-breaking numbers of foreigners allowed to break U.S. border laws are most heavily affecting large and sanctuary cities like New York City, but the numbers are so high they can’t help but affect cities across America as well.

Yesterday, a Brooklyn high school informed parents their children will be

getting low-quality remote instruction because their school is being turned into a refugee camp. The 4,000 students are being displaced on behalf of approximately 1,900 foreign lawbreakers. In spring 2023, city officials also occupied school gyms with migrants, prompting safety concerns from parents about unvetted, military-age male foreigners sharing buildings with their kids.

As the “Louder with Crowder” blog notes, “Brooklyn went 74%-25% to Joe Biden, whose policies started the current border crisis. Also, pro-illegal immigration Governor Kathy Hochul won Brooklyn 72% to 28%.”

BREAKING: Buses are now pulling up to @JMHSBklyn and dropping off illegals. School is closed tomorrow because illegals will be sleeping in the school’s gym. This is disgraceful! NYC is prioritizing illegals over Americans. pic.twitter.com/2jmKXfRTHX https://t.co/ViZiWlqTX5
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 9, 2024

James Madison High School is going remote tomorrow to accommodate this. NYC just can't stop putting kids dead last. https://t.co/uxLNxXBWO2
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) January 9, 2024

This is just a stark illustration of a phenomenon affecting the 50 million American K-12 kids still

seriously struggling to recover from three years of lockdown learning damage. Just as they’ve gotten back into schools, American kids everywhere are being placed in classrooms with even more illegal migrant kids who don’t speak the language, don’t share our customs, are in high-risk

circumstances linked with bad classroom behavior, and whose trafficking into America is swelling the fortunes of evil cartels.

A slightly earlier mass influx of foreigners, mostly Somalis, to the Midwestern Twin Cities has helped turn parts of the city and its schools into no-go zones. A majority of staff feel unsafe in high-violence St. Paul schools, and only one in five students in that district are meeting math and reading benchmarks. Foreign-born English language learners are the least proficient in reading, with aggregate scores even lower than those of homeless kids.

Statewide, Minnesota kids’ latest reading and math scores are the lowest on record. Kids don’t learn anything in those schools except violence-justifying racial grievance ideology. At this point, they’re not actually schools; they’re juvenile detention centers. A key factor making them juvenile detention centers is Democrats’ influx of illegally present foreign-born kids.

It’s completely impossible for a teacher to help kids seriously learn when several in a classroom don’t even speak English and arrive with little foundation for learning. Creating this situation is stiffing all the kids already here, who in cities like Minneapolis already enter school struggling. Further stretching already broken public institutions is not charity — it’s avoiding existing responsibilities.

The open border is rapidly replicating these circumstances across the country. The Biden administration is depositing pockets of “refugees” and fraudulent asylum seekers in flyover cities, making the border problem national. An Afghan “refugee” relocated to Billings, Montana was quickly charged with rape, which some Islamists consider a form of jihad. In Europe, “refugee” influxes have accompanied dramatic increases in rape. The Billings migrants also enter a city with already overcrowded schools.

Sioux City, Iowa schools are majority-minority, a dramatic and quick change. The district pays for services that help translate English into more than 150 languages. Most kids in the district are under the federal poverty level, qualifying them for multiple welfare programs and subsidies.

The same is true in Chicago, Boston, Denver, Washington D.C., and smaller cities across the American heartland. Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Wichita, and St. Louis all dramatically increased in foreign-born residents from 2010 to 2019 by 10 to 50 percent, and given border data since Biden took office, it’s certain that has seen yet another spike.

All these school districts were lower-performing than the rest of their states even before lockdowns and migrant dropoffs. Those two have made things even worse for everyone in town and everyone across the nation funding this national self-destruction. Admitting illegal border crossers to public schools violates American citizen children’s rights, secured in most state constitutions, to an effective education.

It is not the American government’s job to teach every poor kid in the world English, give them breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and provide their housing and health care. It sounds charitable, but it’s really an abdication of the government’s core duty to secure the rights of its own citizens. It is logistically impossible and existentially destructive for American taxpayers and communities to be forced to accept massive numbers of people whom our social institutions radicalize against this country rather than assimilate.

It’s ridiculous to think Americans should tolerate our libraries, schools, public parks, shopping malls, and every other public area made completely inhospitable by people breaking our laws and stealing our peace. This is our home, and we have a right to evict all trespassers who exploit our goodwill and generosity. Nobody would tolerate squatters in his living room because that violates Americans’ natural rights to affirmatively consent to those who would join our communities, as well as to property and safety.

New York City residents are dying in the streets in droves. Native kids in their schools can hardly read and write by eighth grade. It’s utterly ridiculous to think that city or any other should be doing anything for random foreigners when it cannot keep its own people from dying in their bodily excretions on the curb. The solution to refugee camps is not to make them cover the entire country.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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HUNTER BIDEN MAKES SHOCKING APPEARANCE AT HIS OWN CONTEMPT HEARING

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House Judiciary passes resolution to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress, setting up full floor vote

By Brooke Singman Fox News | Published January 10, 2024 4:15pm EST

The House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for defying a congressional subpoena as part of the House impeachment inquiry against President Biden, setting up a full vote on the House floor in the coming days that would recommend the first son for prosecution.

The vote at the House Judiciary Committee was 23-14.

The House Oversight Committee also met for a markup Wednesday at 10 a.m. to consider their own resolution that recommends contempt proceedings against the first son after he refused to comply with a subpoena compelling him to appear for a closed-door deposition.

Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell speaks after Hunter Biden walked out of a House Oversight Committee hearing — Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, listens to his attorney Abbe Lowell as they depart following a surprise appearance at a House Oversight Committee markup and meeting to vote on whether to hold Biden in contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a request to testify to the House last month, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 10, 2024. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

The House Oversight Committee’s resolution has not yet been passed, and the panel’s mark-up meeting is ongoing.

The House Judiciary Committee’s resolution will go to the House Rules Committee. If the House Oversight Committee passes its separate resolution, it will also go to the House Rules Committee.

It is unclear, at this point, whether each committee’s resolution will be considered on the floor for a full vote, or if the House Rules Committee will combine both resolutions into one for consideration for a contempt of Congress vote.

A source familiar tells Fox News Digital a full House floor vote could come as early as next week.

Hunter Biden made a surprise appearance at the House Oversight Committee markup with his attorneys Abbe Lowell and Kevin Morris.

Hunter Biden (L), son of U.S. President Joe Biden, with lawyer Abbe Lowell departs a House Oversight Committee meeting on January 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee is meeting today as it considers citing him for contempt of Congress. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

Hunter Biden, ahead of his subpoenaed deposition on Dec. 13, had offered to testify publicly. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan rejected his request, stressing that the first son would not have special treatment and pointed to the dozens of other witnesses that have appeared, as compelled, for their interviews and depositions. Comer and Jordan vowed to release the transcript of Hunter Biden’s deposition.

The first son, though, defied the subpoena, ignored the offer and delivered a public statement outside the Capitol. At the time, he said his “father was not financially involved in my business.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said Wednesday that Hunter Biden “blatantly defied two lawful subpoenas.”

Hunter Biden makes surprise appearance at House hearing — Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, sits with his attorney Abbe Lowell as he makes a surprise appearance at a House Oversight Committee markup and meeting to vote on whether to hold Biden in contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a request to testify to the House last month, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 10, 2024. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Comer said “Hunter Biden’s willful refusal to comply with the committees’ subpoenas is a criminal act” that “constitutes contempt of Congress and warrants referral to the appropriate United States Attorney’s Office for prosecution as prescribed by law.”

HOUSE GOP SAYS HUNTER BIDEN ‘VIOLATED FEDERAL LAW’ BY DEFYING SUBPOENA, PREPARE CONTEMPT RESOLUTION

“We will not provide Hunter Biden with special treatment because of his last name,” Comer said. “All Americans must be treated equally under the law. And that includes the Bidens.”

During the meeting Wednesday, lawmakers acknowledged Biden was in the audience, with Democratic lawmakers asking to have Biden take questions during the session — a request Republicans rejected.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., said if the committee wants to hear from Biden, the panel should vote and “hear from Hunter right now.”

Jordan and Comer react to Biden defying subpoena — From left, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., speak to reporters after Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, defied a congressional subpoena to appear privately for a deposition before Republican investigators who have been digging into his business dealings, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

“Who wants to hear from Hunter right now, today? Anyone? Come on,” Moskowitz said. “Who wants to hear from Hunter? Yeah, no one. So I’m a visual learner, and the visual is clear. Nobody over there wants to hear from the witness.”

WHITE HOUSE MUM ON WHETHER HUNTER BIDEN GAVE ADVANCED NOTICE HE WOULD APPEAR AT HOUSE CONTEMPT MEETING

Biden and his attorneys ultimately left the markup session before the vote on the resolution.

“Hunter chose a hearing where Republicans could not distort manipulate, or misuse that testimony,” his attorney Abbe Lowell said, calling the move to consider a resolution to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress “unprecedented” in light of his offer to “publicly answer all their proper questions.”

“The question there is, what are they afraid of?” Lowell asked, before departing the Capitol.

Meanwhile, the White House refused to answer questions on whether it was told in advance that Hunter Biden would attend the House Oversight’s mark-up session on Wednesday.

“So here’s what I’ll say. And I’ve said this many times before: Hunter, as you all know, as a private citizen, he’s not a member of this White House,” Jean-Pierre said. “He makes his own decisions like he did today about how to respond to Congress.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre — White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on January 03, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

She went on to refer “any further questions, any additional questions about this process” to Hunter Biden’s attorneys.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

When pressed again on whether the White House was informed in advance, Jean-Pierre said: “I don’t have anything — we don’t have anything else to share beyond that.”

President Joe Biden speaks during an event at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14 2023. (Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, expanded their investigation to probe whether President Biden was involved in his son’s “scheme” to defy his subpoena for deposition earlier this month, which, they say, “could constitute an impeachable offense.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Brooke Singman is a political correspondent and reporter for Fox News Digital, Fox News Channel and FOX Business.

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1st Dem Lawmaker Calls for Defense Sec. Austin’s Resignation

Wednesday, 10 January 2024 04:41 PM EST

Rep. Chris Deluzio has become the first congressional Democrat to call for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s resignation amid a controversy involving his hospitalization and medical treatment.

“I have lost trust in Secretary Lloyd Austin’s leadership of the Defense Department due to the lack of transparency about his recent medical treatment and its impact on the continuity of the chain of command,” Deluzio, a Pennsylvania Dem, said in a statement, according to a report from Politico.

The lawmaker thanked Austin for his service and wished him a speedy recovery. Politico said Deluzio represents a swing district.

But the lawmaker also said “I have a solemn duty in Congress to conduct oversight of the Defense Department through my service on the House Armed Services Committee. That duty today requires me to call on Secretary Austin to resign.”

Austin, being treated for prostate cancer and a urinary tract infection, remains hospitalized and is in good condition, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, adding that it still does not have a specific date for his release.

Austin’s hospitalization for complications following prostate cancer surgery was not disclosed to the public, the White House or Congress for much of last week, triggering a political backlash and prompting a congressional investigation.

Austin, 70, was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland on Dec. 22 to treat prostate cancer. He returned to the hospital on Jan. 1 due to complications including a urinary tract infection and has remained there ever since.

Austin’s effort to keep his treatment completely private has raised questions about whether he broke rules about notifications to Congress and embarrassed U.S. President Joe Biden, who did not learn that Austin was hospitalized until Jan. 4 and learned on Jan. 9 that he had prostate cancer.

The White House and the Pentagon have so far dismissed calls for Austin to be fired.

Newsmax contributed to this report.

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LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Political

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Ohio House Votes to Override Governor’s Veto of Bill Protecting Kids from Transgender Surgeries, Hormones

By: Mary Margaret Olohan / @MaryMargOlohan / January 10, 2024

The Ohio House of Representatives voted Wednesday to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine's veto of a bill that protects children from irreversible transgender sex change procedures and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormones. Pictured: DeWine addresses members of the media in Columbus, Ohio on June 24, 2023. (Photo: Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) — The Ohio House of Representatives voted Wednesday to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that protects children from irreversible transgender sex change procedures and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormones. Pictured: DeWine speaks to reporters in Columbus, Ohio, on June 24. (Photo: Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images)

The Ohio House of Representatives voted Wednesday to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would protect children from irreversible transgender sex-change procedures and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormones.

The state’s House of Representatives met Wednesday afternoon to vote 65-28 to override the governor’s veto. It now heads to the senate.

Activists and organizations that backed the bill were quick to celebrate the news on Wednesday.

“Ohio and the entire nation have spoken,” said Center for Christian Virtue Policy Director David Mahan in a statement. “It’s not okay to chemically sterilize and mutilate children, and no clinic can transform little girls into little boys with pills and scalpels. Additionally, HB68 will protect women’s and girls’ privacy rights and guarantee them a fair playing field and the opportunity to win athletic scholarships.”

“I want to thank Representatives Click and Powell for courageously championing this legislation, and Speaker Stephens for acting swiftly to protect our kids from the dangerous consequences of Governor DeWine’s veto of HB68,” he added. “I now urge the Senate to do the same.”

🚨 The Ohio House voted (65-28) to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of HB 68!

The override effort now moves to the Ohio Senate. pic.twitter.com/WcQU3cUSIp
— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) January 10, 2024

But organizations opposing the legislation, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned the override.

“This state-sponsored vendetta against some of Ohio’s most vulnerable young people is beyond cruel,” said the ACLU of Ohio in an “X” post. “We stand in solidarity with all trans youth.”

“This bill bans gender-affirming care for trans youth & restricts participation in sports matching their identity,” added the Human Rights Campaign in another “X” post. “Even after Ohioans told politicians to leave medical decisions alone, they put themselves in control.”

NEW: The Ohio House has overridden Gov. DeWine’s veto of HB68. This bill bans gender-affirming care for trans youth & restricts participation in sports matching their identity.

Even after Ohioans told politicians to leave medical decisions alone, they put themselves in control. pic.twitter.com/CoopOSpIFC
— HRC 🥥🌴 (@HRC) January 10, 2024

On Friday, DeWine issued an “emergency” executive order to ban sex-reassignment surgeries for minors (but not hormones and puberty blockers) just one week after he vetoed House Bill 68, the Enact Ohio Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.

The SAFE Act would ban cross-sex hormones and so-called puberty blockers for children, measures DeWine’s executive order apparently omits. The bill would also have addressed fairness in women’s sports, an issue DeWine’s executive order also does not address.

“Although I vetoed … House Bill 68, I stated clearly in my veto message that I agreed with the General Assembly that no gender-transition surgeries should be performed on anyone under the age of 18, and I directed agencies under my purview to draft rules to ban this practice in Ohio,” DeWine said in his Jan. 5 executive order.

He also declared that “an emergency exists requiring the immediate adoption of rules 3701-59-06 and 3701-83-60 of the Ohio Administrative Code.”

According to the executive order, the regulations “would prohibit gender-transition surgeries on anyone under the age of 18 in Ohio’s hospitals and health care facilities, including ambulatory surgical facilities.”

National organizations like Catholic Vote and the Alliance Defending Freedom commended Ohio legislators for standing up for the state’s parents.

“DeWine has turned his back on the values of Ohio families, but we are grateful to have safeguards such as this to protect the future of Ohio’s children,” Logan Church, the political director of CatholicVote, said in a statement. “CatholicVote engaged our grassroot supporters throughout the state to urge their representatives to vote the right way, and we will continue that initiative with the Senate. We hope the Senate promptly follows in the House’s footsteps to preserve the principles Ohioans hold dear.”

Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, emphasized: “Now and always, young people deserve the loving embrace of family members who guide them toward this truth rather than be subjected to risky, often irreversible, and life-altering experimentation and drugs. These approaches are dangerous, as they block healthy puberty, alter hormonal balance, and remove healthy organs and body parts.”

“No one has the right to harm children, and, thankfully, states have the power—and duty—to protect them,” he added. “Now, we urge the Ohio Senate to act and join over 20 other states and several European countries in fighting for truth and curtailing the deployment of harmful surgeries and drugs that are devastating countless lives.”

Tyler O’Neill contributed to this report.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Crooked Mountain

A.F. BRANCO | on January 10, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-crooked-mountain/

Deep State Proping Biden Up — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco (revised 2020)

The Deep State’s hate for Trump is so deranged that they would do anything to keep Biden in office. They are the real threat to democracy and our Constitutional Republic.

Propping up the Big Guy may not be enough

POSTED ON JANUARY 10, 2024 BY KELLY MCCARTHY

There are calls from within the Democrat party that suggest Joe Biden can no longer continue to be propped up by his liberal allies in the Deep State, media, and Big Tech. His stance on several issues is at odds with the new generation of progressives seeking a central command economy, forgiveness of student debt, universal single-payer healthcare, and especially, the obliteration of Jews from Palestine called for by “From the River to the Sea” Hamas supporters.

Currently, Donald Trump leads Biden in many polls. This is scaring the Democrats and they are aware that Sleepy Joe could not withstand a head-on confrontation with the man. So, they are… READ MORE…

Michelle Obama Sounds the Alarm About 2024: “I ‘am Terrified About What Could Possibly Happen” (VIDEO)

By Cullen LinebargerJan. 8, 2024 2:30 pm

As Joe Biden’s poll numbers continue to plummet, and the world falls apart around him; a figure arguably more powerful than he has emerged from the shadows to sound the alarm. Michelle Obama recently went on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast for an interview, which was released Monday, where she made some comments that will likely create speculation about whether she will launch a belated challenge for the most powerful office in the world.

The former First Lady revealed that she is “terrified” about the 2024 election, which will hopefully see Joe Biden removed from power. Should this occur, his almost-certain replacement will be… READ MORE…

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TOP TRUMP PROSECUTOR, GEORGIA DA ALLEGED TO BE IN ‘IMPROPER’ ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP: COURT FILING

Biden’s Campaign Doesn’t ‘Brief’ The Media, It Colludes with Them

BY: EDDIE SCARRY | JANUARY 09, 2024

President Joe Biden meets with senior advisers to discuss the budget and debt ceiling, Monday, May 15, 2023, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

Author Eddie Scarry profile

EDDIE SCARRY

VISIT ON TWITTER@ESCARRY

A short item this week on the news site Semafor had an interesting way of describing the existing dynamic between the national news media and Joe Biden’s angry reelection campaign. It said Biden’s team has “begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters and editors” to meet up at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, for the purpose of “background briefings on campaign strategy.”

I’d like to think that the person who authored the article is just hopelessly naive, but it’s Ben Smith, who has been running in these circles for what feels like three lifetimes. So, he certainly knows that contrary to his depiction, these aren’t boring scenes where curious reporters show up to get a rundown of Biden’s campaign schedule and themes. That’s not what happens.

What happens is the nation’s most influential media outlets send representatives to a Democrat candidate’s facilities — in this case, Biden’s campaign headquarters — to coordinate what their coming “news coverage” should look like, according to the Democrat’s needs and preferences. Thusly, Smith wrote that in these recent meetings, “Campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail.” In other words, CNN and MSNBC are about to start showing a lot more clips from Trump rallies wherein he says something that’s supposed to offend the audience. And if it doesn’t, no problem. Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough will be on hand to helpfully explain why it should. Over and over and over again.

We’ve already seen a version of this play out in recent days. Not even a month ago, in perfect unison, the media reupped their Trump-is-Hitler routine.

Associated Press, Dec. 18: “Senate border security talks grind on as Trump invokes Nazi-era ‘blood’ rhetoric against immigrants.”

The Washington Post, Dec. 18: “That language has caused alarm among some civil rights advocates and immigrant groups, who have compared it to the writings of Adolf Hitler.”

The New York Times, Dec. 17: “In New Hampshire on Saturday, he told the crowd that immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ a comment that previously drew condemnation because of echoes to [sic] language used by white supremacists and Adolf Hitler.”

Reuters, Dec. 16: “Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, said on Saturday that undocumented immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ repeating language that has previously drawn criticism as xenophobic and echoing of Nazi rhetoric.”

Unable to help themselves, Biden campaign officials then rushed to Politico to brag that it was all their idea. That article explicitly quoted Biden’s campaign communications director claiming that Trump is “going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we’re going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time.” (The “rhetoric” in question was Trump’s perfectly innocuous mantra that the unmanageable hordes of impoverished migrants unlawfully dumping themselves over the southern border are “poisoning” the country by chipping away at its social and legal fabric.)

It’s never a hard sell for a Democrat to get the media to pick up its preferred storyline. Biden slurs through those “Trump is a threat to democracy!” speeches with mind-numbing repetition, and the accomplice media take the cue.

“A second Trump term ‘poses a threat to the existence of America as we know it,’ says The Atlantic’s top editor”— CNN.com, Dec. 5.

“IF TRUMP WINS: The staff of The Atlantic on the threat a second term poses to American democracy”— The Atlantic, Dec. 4.

“Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First”— The New York Times, Dec. 4.

“A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”— The Washington Post, Nov. 30.

So, no, these gatherings with Democrat media aren’t dry informational sessions. They’re all-hands meetings for reporters to receive instruction as to how the next week, month, and season should go. If the Biden campaign wants more hype over whatever it is Trump is saying at his rallies, trust that it will be done.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Media, Political

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The Only School Shootings Corporate Media Don’t Hype Are by Gender-Fluid Murderers

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 09, 2024

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

Only five days have passed since a 17-year-old shot up his school in Perry, Iowa, killing one and injuring five. Yet anyone looking for updates about the tragedy would be hard-pressed to find it on the front pages of any corporate outlet, unusual given the media’s typical amplification of such tragedies. The press is known for lengthy coverage glamorizing killers, inspiring copycat acts, and using shootings to push gun control. When covering tragedies that contradict leftist claims, however, Democrats and their cronies in the corrupt media quickly go radio silent.

The Perry shooting is one such case. Once the Iowa killer was identified as a teen who flirted with Democrat gender ideology, headlines and TV segments about his shooting spree slowed to a trickle. The fact that the shooter used a shotgun and small-caliber pistol instead of the ever-popular Democrat boogieman, the AR-15, also likely played a role in the story’s disappearance.

Those media that did bother to keep coverage of the issue going, like NBC, sought to shift blame from the shooter to sexual sanity advocates such as Libs of TikTok Founder Chaya Raichik. She dares to report on the growing trend of violent transgender shooters, including details linking the Iowa school shooter to gender-fluid identity politics.

“Each time there is a mass shooting where the shooter’s identity is possibly LGBT, you and other conservative influencers appear to fixate on this and suggest to your millions of followers that people with LGBT identities are prone to violence,” NBC’s LGBT issues writer Matt Lavietes wrote in a comment request Raichik posted. “What would you say to your critics who say you’re stoking fear, hatred, and potential violence against a marginalized group of people?”

It wasn’t long before Lavietes’s article, “Musk and far-right figures seize on Iowa shooter’s possible LGBTQ identity,” began making its rounds.

Democrats and the press followed a similar playbook in 2023 when a woman masquerading as a man shot and killed three children and three staff at a small Christian school in Nashville. They framed Christians as the perpetrators of the shooting rather than the victims and blamed Tennessee gun laws, gun lovers, and laws protecting children from drag shows and irreversible sexual disfigurement. Some outlets even complained that authorities “misgendered” the shooter.

When a man shot and killed five at Old National Bank in Lousiville, Kentucky in the name of furthering the left’s gun-control agenda, gun grabbers also used the shooter’s logic to fuel Democrats’ push for unconstitutional red-flag laws.

The corporate media’s double standards on shootings should not surprise Americans, 39 percent of whom say they do not trust media at all. These double standards should, however, enrage them.

For noticing patterns in violence among gender-indoctrinated kids and warning that taking away Second Amendment rights won’t solve the mental health crisis or the weakening family and community ties that exacerbate these tragedies, the media believes conservatives deserve more criticism. The press is perfectly content smearing their political enemies with the acts of those so evil they’d murder children, while refusing ever to look in the mirror.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-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 Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Crime, LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Media, Political

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Fulton County prosecutor, Fani Willis romantic partner, met with Biden White House twice before charging Trump

By Brooke Singman , Brandon Gillespie Fox News | Published January 9, 2024 2:54pm EST

The Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor with whom District Attorney Fani Willis allegedly had an “improper” romantic relationship met with the Biden White House twice last year as he worked to investigate former President Trump’s alleged election interference, according to court documents.

According to a new filing from a co-defendant in the Trump case, Willis hired special prosecutor Nathan Wade, her alleged partner, to prosecute Trump and benefited financially from the relationship in the form of vacations the two took using funds that his law firm received for working the case.

Fani Willis and Nathan Wade — Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade (Getty Images)

But also embedded in the filing are invoices for the Law Offices of Nathan J. Wade. One invoice calls attention to “Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.” Wade billed the county for a May 23, 2022, event described as “Travel to Athens; Conf with White House Counsel.” Wade charged $2,000 for eight hours at $250 an hour. Several months later, Wade billed for “Interview with DC/White House” on Nov. 18, 2022. Wade again charged $2,000 for eight hours at $250 an hour, according to the documents.

The subject of the meetings remains unclear.

Former President Donald Trump — Former President Trump (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

“Fani Willis’ alleged romantic partner/special prosecutor coordinated with the White House while building the political prosecution of Donald Trump,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., posted on X in reaction to the filing Tuesday. “All on the taxpayer dime.”

Fani Willis' alleged romantic partner/special prosecutor coordinated with the White House while building the political prosecution of Donald Trump.

All on the taxpayer dime.

See for yourself: pic.twitter.com/uoctxV3wL8
— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) January 9, 2024

“It has become increasingly clear that the Biden White House is directing these baseless, political prosecutions against President Trump because they know they cannot beat him fair and square at the ballot box,” MAGA Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “This latest news about Fani Willis is disturbing yet sadly unsurprising.”

Meanwhile, Fulton County records show Wade has been paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees since January 2022, an amount authorized by the district attorney, which is Willis in this case. The revelations come as part of a motion that was filed on behalf of former Trump campaign official Michael Roman, a co-defendant in the case, in a bid to have the charges against him dismissed. It cites “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney” as confirming “they had an ongoing, personal relationship.”

The filing also calls for the entire district attorney’s office, including Willis and Wade, to be disqualified from prosecuting the case.

In August, Willis charged Trump out of her investigation into his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state. Trump was charged with one count of violation of the Georgia RICO Act, three counts of criminal solicitation, six counts of criminal conspiracy, one count of filing false documents and two counts of making false statements.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Roman, alongside Trump, was hit with a racketeering charge as part of Willis’ case and was charged with seven felony counts last August.

Brooke Singman is a political correspondent and reporter for Fox News Digital, Fox News Channel and FOX Business.

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Elise Stefanik Gives Master Class on Refuting Democrats’ ‘Insurrection’ Lies

BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 08, 2024

In an NBC interview Sunday, Rep. Elise Stefanik deftly demonstrated how to handle Democrats’ false claims about a Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection” to justify criminalizing the speech of the half of the country that opposes their policies.

At the beginning of “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker’s interview with Stefanik, Welker played a deceptively edited clip from Jan. 6, 2021. On the House floor, Stefanik characterized the events from earlier that day as “tragic” and stated that violent individuals should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Had NBC honestly portrayed the clip, it would have included the main point of Stefanik’s speech. That was to call out Democrats for dismantling election integrity laws ahead of the 2020 election in key swing states. Watch Stefanik’s remarks in full here.

Welker asked the dark-horse potential for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick whether she still believes “that day was tragic, and that those who were responsible should be held responsible to the fullest extent of the law.” This was an attempt to entrap Stefanik into accepting the Democrat lie that Jan. 6 amounted to an “insurrection” that justifies the Biden Department of Justice’s continued investigation and prosecution of nonviolent attendees at the protest.

Stefanik refused to take the bait, responding, “Well, first of all, Kristen, as typical for NBC and the biased media, you played one excerpt of my speech… If you go back and play the full speech I gave on the House floor, I condemned the violence just like I condemn the violence of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] riots. But I also importantly stood for election integrity and security of our elections. If we don’t have that, we do not have a democracy.”

[Read: America’s Justice System Says Jan. 6 Was Neither A Terrorist Attack Nor An Insurrection]

Stefanik also expressed “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” and the “weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but [all] conservatives.”

Indeed, countless peaceful protesters who demonstrated at the capitol three years ago have been slandered by the media and House Democrats’ J6 Committee, harassed by Biden’s Department of Justice, and held for months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Traditional Catholics, pro-lifers, parents who oppose critical race theory at school board meetings, and Trump supporters have also found themselves targets of the Biden DOJ for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly.

“And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so proud to serve on the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the [Federal] Government,” said Stefanik. “Because the American people want answers. They want transparency, and they understand that as you look across this country, there seem to be two sets of rules. If your last name is Clinton, or it’s Biden, you get to live by a different set of rules than if you’re an everyday patriotic American.”

“So the real threat to our democracy is these baseless witch hunt investigations and lawsuits against President Trump,” Stefanik added. “[It] is undemocratic and it’s shredding our Constitution, and you know who agrees with me, Kristen? The American people. That’s why President Trump is winning in poll after poll against Joe Biden.”

Welker also asked Stefanik if she would “vote to certify the results of the ’24 election no matter what they show?” Again, refusing to fall into Welker’s trap, Stefanik replied matter of factly, “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.”

This answer has been seized on by the corporate media to somehow insinuate that Stefanik is anti-democratic. Apparently, Welker and the rest of her media peers do not comprehend the point of certifying the presidential election, which is to validate the integrity of the electoral process. In other words, no representative should be committed to certifying or not certifying the election until after it has taken place and been verifiably conducted lawfully.

Importantly, Stefanik pointed out the key fact that Democrats are already interfering in the 2024 election through multiple means. “What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot,” Stefanik continued. “That is a suppression of the American people.”

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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