Evangelical Christians of multiple races mixed their faith in God with their faith that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can heal the nation at a Christian gathering in Cleveland on Wednesday.
Trump appeared at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference where he said, “I want to thank the African-American community because, I don’t know if you’ve been watching, but the poll numbers are going like a rocket ship. I fully understand the African-American community has suffered from discrimination.”
Trump also said that America’s cities must be rebuilt- “It breaks my heart to see any American left behind or to see a city like Cleveland that has had so many struggles, and that there are many wrongs that still must be made right.”
Journalist Tom Boggioni at Raw Story reports that after Trump addressed a few African-American pastors and a whole lot of white people at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference, pro-Trump pastor and co-host of the event, Darrell Scott, took the mic.
Speaking to the attendees, Scott claimed that a “nationally known” — but unidentified — preacher had forewarned Trump “that if you choose to run for president, there’s going to be a concentrated Satanic attack against you.”
In video captured by Right Wing Watch, Scott can be seen announcing, “He said there’s going to be a demon, principalities and powers, that are going to war against you on a level that you’ve never seen before and I’m watching it every day.”
Taking the microphone, Scott’s wife, Belinda, led the plea to the almighty by praying: “Now God I ask that you would touch this man, Donald J. Trump. Give him the anointing to lead this nation.”
Jack Davis at Western Journalism reports that the meeting was open to clergy or all faiths and political ideologies.
“I think it’s good he’s open to hearing from clergy,” said Pastor Mike Wingerd of Emmanuel Assembly of God. “I’m very glad he’s concerned about religious freedom.”
Scott, who led the session, had spoken for Trump at the Republican National Convention.
“America is a melting pot, a country of diversity. We stand poised to make history, by standing together as Americans, as one. We are here as Americans regardless of race, creed or color. We are here as those who hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said.
“The truth is the Democratic Party has failed us,” Scott said. “At home, our debt has grown, we are spiritually empty and we are more divided now than we have ever been before. Abroad, we are neither respected, we’re not feared by our adversaries, and our friends cannot count on us either. This is their legacy, and we need to make a sharp turn. We need to put into practice the great ideas and principles that our country was founded on, and which, after God, are the source of strength that has made this nation great.”
The demands by Democrats in Congress for absolutely censorship of those with viewpoints contrary to the political party’s ideology have become “insatiable,” as evidenced by the actions of a party member from Pennsylvania, according to recognized constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.
Turley, a professor at George Washington University, often has testified before Congress on constitutional issues, and even has represented members in court.
His conclusion is that, “Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints” that has become “insatiable,” after Rep. Summer Lee, that Pennsylvania Democrat, lost her cool during a hearing.
She demanded that a witness statement, because it referenced her personally, be censored, even though Lee had barely finished attacking that witness.
It happened like this: Lee insulted witnesses scheduled to make statements as transphobic and hateful, with, “Madam Chair, I ask that while we sit through this hearing and the hateful misinformation I’m sure is coming our way, let us not forget the children at the core of this issue.”
Waiting to testify on the issue of Joe Biden’s agenda to promote transgenderism, no matter the injury to other innocent people, was Riley Gaines, famed as a college athlete after racing against Lia Thomas, a man portraying himself as a woman in college swim competitions.
Thomas responded to Lee’s attack with: “Of course, there is a place for everyone, regardless of gender identity, regardless of sexual orientation, regardless of race or what sports you play. There’s a place for everyone to play sports in this country. But unsafe, unfair and discriminatory practices towards women must stop. Inclusion cannot be prioritized over safety and fairness, and ranking member Lee, if my testimony makes me transphobic then I believe your opening monologue makes you a misogynist.”
Turley reported, “Lee than pounced and demanded that Gaines remarks be struck for ‘engaging in personalities.’”
He reported, “What followed was hurried consultation and presumable a few explanations for Lee on why witnesses are allowed to respond to such attacks by a member. Lee then withdrew her demand.”
He noted Congress has a rule that bans members from engaging in “personalities,” apparently to prevent personal attacks.
“However, Lee was attempting to use this against a witness who was defending herself against her own personal attack. It is a dangerous extension,” he warned.
He explained, “The fact that Lee’s immediate response was to censor a person who she had just attacked is telling. After labeling Gaines a hateful bigot, Lee did not believe that she should be allowed to denounce Lee’s own comments as an attack on women. It shows the slippery slope of censorship. Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints. That desire becomes insatiable even as citizens seek to rebut personal attacks from members in a congressional hearing.”
“That would create a nightmarish combination if members are protected from actions in defaming witnesses but then can censor them when they defend themselves.”
The commentary pointed out, “Democrats and their bureaucratic allies already believe they have the right to shut down speech they don’t like. It’s just a matter of whether the courts allow them to get away with it or not.”
The commentary’s conclusion? “The Democratic Party is made up of entitled wannabe tyrants who believe they should be immune from the very things they do. They don’t want to live by their own standards, and that’s not a tenable position for a functioning society. The problem is especially acute among younger Democrats like Lee. She does her ‘yas queen’ rantings for the camera, accusing others of bigotry but can’t take the slightest bit of pushback. Meanwhile, she wouldn’t dare say that stuff outside the halls of Congress because she knows she’d be legally liable. It’s cowardly and pathetic.”
Sometimes, former President Donald Trump’s political opponents tell you what they want to hear rather than what is actually said, all the while embracing the vice they seek to level upon him.
Speaking to supporters at Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Dec. 2, Trump accused his opponents of waging a war on democracy, stating, “From that day on our opponents, and we had a lot of opponents, but we’ve been waging an all-out war in American democracy. You look at what they’ve been doing, and becoming more and more extreme and repressive. They have just waged an all-out war with each passing day.”
Taking that rather clear statement about his opponents’ campaign to see him jailed, Salon.com’s Kelly McClure misquoted him in a Dec. 3 piece “Trump’s ‘war on democracy’ fumble sparks backlash” claiming he “said the quiet part out loud…” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday threatened Hunter Biden with contempt of Congress charges if he fails to appear for a Dec. 13 deposition before the oversight panel. Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, earlier in the day sent Comer a letter to reiterate that Hunter Biden is willing to testify before the House panel in a public hearing, but not for a deposition.
Lowell said Hunter Biden was “making the choice [to appear publicly] because the Committee has demonstrated time and again it uses closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public — a hearing would ensure transparency and truth in these proceedings.”
“Contrary to the assertions in your letter, there is no ‘choice’ for Mr. Biden to make; the subpoenas compel him to appear for a deposition on December 13,” Comer wrote to Lowell.
“If Mr. Biden does not appear for his deposition on December 13, 2023, the Committee will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings.”
Last week, Hunter Biden offered to testify publicly as Republicans investigate his foreign business dealings as they pursue an impeachment inquiry into his father, President Joe Biden. Comer, on X, then accusedHunter Biden of “trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else.”
House Republicans have not initiated contempt proceedings against anyone this year. They threatened both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and FBI Director Christopher Wray with charges after unsuccessful attempts to obtain certain documents from them, the Washington Examiner reported. Blinken and Wray averted contempt votes by reaching 11th-hour agreements with Republicans.
If the full House votes to hold someone in contempt, it is referred to the Department of Justice, which then has discretion over whether it wants to begin criminal proceedings against the person. There have been contempt votes since 2008, with the DOJ pursuing indictments against Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both aides to then-President Donald Trump.
We as a society need to assert that healthy families build human flourishing in every nation and culture, and we are not being honest with people when we don’t, said the CEO of what has been called the most influential free-market think tank in Britain.
“There are some logical steps to what leads to human flourishing, and we need to be open about these things,” Legatum Institute CEO and member of the British House of Lords Baroness Philippa Stroud told Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. She said that people should get a job, get married, and then have a child, in that order, to promote success for themselves and their families.
Good social policy (that which promotes healthy families) makes for good economic policy, she said.
“If we don’t have good social policy, we end up spending a huge amount of money on picking up the pieces of a breakdown. Whereas, actually, if we could get ahead of it [the breakdown of individuals and families] in our community to support people properly, then actually it wouldn’t—it doesn’t cost so much money later on,” Stroud asserted.
For the younger generation, there must be an effort to make it possible for them to have “hopes of owning a property” and “ensuring dignified work for all,” according to Stroud.
Success for Stroud would be about changing the narrative to one that is “filling our children’s minds with the facts that they can—they do—have a future.” She said she believes in the importance of young people knowing that their efforts and agency can build and support a future for their families.
“We might have limited resources, but when you take those resources and you match them with human ingenuity, then actually, the potential is unlimited,” Stroud said.
To inspire the next generation, there should be a pathway for good leaders to be embedded in a community, working alongside others to inspire them, she said.
However, sometimes leaders may be reluctant to step forward. “One of the things we’ve seen is great leaders who say what everybody is thinking and then get mobbed on Twitter, and it damages people,” Stroud said.
“The isolated leader standing on a hilltop on their own I don’t think in today’s world will make it. But communities of leaders building this vision, they will make it,” she said.
She said that leaders need to be clear about the problems we have and a vision for addressing them. The challenge with politics is creating clarity about the issues, according to Stroud: “If you don’t create the clarity about the nature of a problem, why would people accept a solution?”
Politicians oftentimes don’t “cast a vision of the possibilities and the future that we can build together. Or if they do, they don’t then actually implement the journey towards that solution. So, people are just left with the nature of a problem,” said Stroud.
“The only way to progress forward in my understanding … is [the] founding principle on the dignity of the human being … and that is a founding principle of this nation [the U.S.]” She said that gives her hope for the future.
Watch this video. Elon Musk, in his first interview with mainstream media since his antisemitic post on X earlier this month, apologized for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media post. During the New York Times DealBook Summit interview with MSNBC’s Aaron Ross Sorkin, Musk said repeatedly he was sorry for publishing a tweet on Nov. 15 that agreed with an anti-Jewish post which claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people. Musk in his post said the user, who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, was speaking “the actual truth.”
In the interview Musk said he had “handed a loaded gun” to both detractors and antisemitic people, describing his post as possibly the worst he had made during a history of messages that included many “foolish” ones. Reuters
But he lashed out at advertisers leaving his platform because of rising antisemitism on X.
“I don’t want them to advertise,” he said. “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money go f**k yourself. Go. F**k. Yourself,” he said. “Is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel”.
The “Hi Bob” was targeted at Disney CEO Bob Iger who is in the audience and has paused advertising on X.
This image of Elon Musk telling the CEO of Disney to "f*ck himself" is one for the ages: pic.twitter.com/P72EzsPrgP
X users were quick to rush to support Elon. Like Disney’s Star Wars’ Obi Wan Kenobi, he is our only hope for free speech. And when free speech is encouraged mistakes can be made.
Elon Musk is my favorite African American! He just told the all the woke advertisers to go F** Themselves!
Elon Musk is really incompetent at bring antisemitic.
He is sitting here next to prime minister of Israel 🇮🇱, watching Hamas' atrocities, expressing unequivocal support for Israel and calling for annihilation of Hamas.@elonmusk, this is not the way antisemitism is done! 🤡 pic.twitter.com/xN2WsWaS5o
Incidentally, Musk visited with the relatives of captured Israelis after his gaffe and later in this interview showed a symbolic dog-tag given him by the father of an Israeli taken captive by Hamas in Gaza which he has promised to wear until all the hostages were free.
“Our hearts are hostage in Gaza,” reads the metal tag he received from Malki Shem-Tov, the father of hostage Omer Shem-Tov.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – In response to Disney pulling ads on X-Twitter, Elon Musk told them, “Go F*** Yourself. I won’t be blackmailed with money over free speech.” See Video Clips here
The owner of X, Elon Musk, had some choice words for advertisers trying to blackmail him.
Musk, while speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York, shared, “If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—yourself.”
Musk continued, “Don’t advertise.”
The founder of Tesla concluded his statement by saying, “Hi, Bob,” which was a shot at the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger.
Disney previously decided to pull ads off X after hit pieces written by Media Matters, CNN, and CNBC falsely painted Musk as antisemitic.
Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday, Elon Musk, the owner of social media site X (formerly Twitter), scoffed at advertisers boycotting the platform because of antisemitic posts he amplified there… REED MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The FBI interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond as part of an agency probe of “radical-traditional Catholics” as “potential domestic terrorists,” according to a new congressional report out Monday.
The interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed the FBI under President Joe Biden “abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans” and “relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment.”
“The FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership,” House investigators wrote.
The violent rise in antisemitism from supporters of Hamas terrorists’ fight against Israel, meanwhile, has escaped the same “domestic terrorism” treatment that President Joe Biden’s administration applied to traditional Catholics, as well as to parents who protested Covid lockdowns and inappropriate content in their kids’ schools. (A separate interim staff report from the Weaponization Committee in March found the Biden administration had “no legitimate basis” for investigating parents as terrorists.)
The White House was asked in October if the administration that directed counterterrorism resources toward concerned parents at school board meetings would apply the same “domestic terrorist” label to terrorist sympathizers who cheer violence against Jews.
“The people in this country making violent antisemitic threats. Are they domestic terrorists?” inquired Fox News’ Peter Doocy at a White House press briefing.
“I don’t know that we’re classifying people as domestic terrorists for that,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “I mean, that’s really a question better left to law enforcement. I’m not aware that there’s been such a characterization of that.”
Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel that killed upwards of 1,200 civilians, violent and explicitly antisemitic demonstrators showing solidarity with Hamas have terrorized Jewish Americans. In late October, Jewish students at a Manhattan science and art school were compelled to take shelter at a campus library as anti-Israel protesters stormed the building. Demonstrators in Times Square even presented Swastikas at a rally celebrating the massacre of Jews.
Jewish students at Cooper Union College have been locked inside the library for their own safety as a mob of anti Israeli protesters block the doors.
Anyone could easily predict what the FBI protocol would be had recent anti-Israel demonstrations been full of right-wingers waving Confederate flags. The federal intelligence agency kicked into high gear six years ago to prosecute those involved in Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, even raiding an organizer’s Discord chats.
After carrying a Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a 53-year-old man was sentenced to three years in prison. The presence of a few Confederate banners at the rally that day earned endless headlines in nearly every major publication.
And eight years after the Confederate banner was taken down at the South Carolina state house, the Palestinian flag is now being raised over one town in Massachusetts.
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.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, there has been an uptick in antisemitic activity on college campuses. Across the country, students, faculty, and administrators have expressed their support for the Islamist slaughter of civilians, participated in pro-genocide marches, and physically accosted Jewish students. Campus antisemitism has gotten so severe — with more than 800 reported incidents as of Nov. 20 — that the Department of Education has opened up a series of investigations.
During the first third of November’s Republican presidential debate, candidates discussed how, if elected, their administrations would handle the ongoing eruption in antisemitism both on and off campus. Each condemned anti-Jewish bigotry, while some — notably former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Tim Scott — offered more nuanced insights as to how they would directly combat the issue. Possible solutions included threatening to freeze federal funding for universities allowing for antisemitism and collaboration with terrorists to go unpunished, deporting foreign students who openly support terrorism, and disbanding student organizations providing material support for Islamic terrorist groups.
All of these would be fantastic solutions. Not a single cent of taxpayer money should be sent to a university that tolerates racial bigotry or allows its membership to collaborate with foreign enemies. No foreign individual hostile to the American nation ought to be granted access to its institutions or resources, let alone allowed entry. And no one should be permitted to provide material support to terrorist organizations, Mohammedan or otherwise.
This is pretty basic stuff.
It appears there is a unified Republican front in opposing campus antisemitism, and this is good. But why can’t Republicans similarly coalesce around the systemic anti-white bigotry that is all too present in higher education?
Since the mid-20th century, leftist academics worked to proliferate and mainstream Marxist theories of social revolution and cultural subversion. Race was often the subject of their studies. In these instances, their goal was to exacerbate already existing resentments while inculcating new ones to overcome sociological and anthropological divides. European Marxists animated the masses by agitating socioeconomic frustrations. In the old world, the social order was rigid and limited economic mobility, but intranational ethnic conflict was generally less of an issue. In the U.S., social mobility was economically achievable while race remained a sore topic into the 20th century, so these academics opted to exploit it, seeing it as their best chance to immanentize the eschaton and bring about revolution.
These leftist ideologues viewed less-affluent black people as an exploitable lumpenproletariat with whom they could form a revolutionary vanguard alongside middle-class liberals. The demographic disparities in social and political outcomes this coalition sought to overturn were said to be the fault of bigoted institutional power differentials. Thus, the coalition pushed for radical change in America’s institutions through protest, subversion, infiltration, and, of course, violence.
Outcomes were not equivalent for people of different races. This was attributed to our no-good-very-bad racist progenitors’ fundamental flaws, so these intellectuals created a framework for revolutionary reconstruction.
It is here we find the genesis of critical race theory, DEI, and cultural Marxism. These ideologies are now thoroughly embedded in every major American institution but have made their home in higher education. For instance, for every 100 tenured faculty members on a college campus, DEI staff hold an average of 3.4 positions.
Universities teach people to think in terms of an “oppressed-oppressor” dialectic. World events and their inherent contradictions and resolutions are increasingly viewed exclusively through this lens. The oppressed are the revolutionary class with whom the intersectional coalition aligns itself, and the oppressors are whichever entity most closely resembles Western civilization and its “colonial” tendencies. In this framework, Western civilization and “colonialism” are further wrongly conflated and used interchangeably with “whiteness” to conveniently lump all the left’s enemies into one category.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, adherents of this view identify Israel as the oppressor and Jews as its avatar. People opting to justify Hamas’ actions in the name of global revolution subsequently target them.
And this is why Republicans at the national level — and those who seek the highest office in the land — are sounding the alarm. This worldview leads to some pretty dark conclusions. Taken to its natural end, this worldview culminates in people getting killed. Its proponents are explicit about this. They applauded Hamas for slaughtering civilians, and they cheered on the rioters and looters who pillaged the country three summers ago. “Decolonization” is the focus of the intellectual movements justifying both events.
Just look at South Africa where, in August, Julius Malema, leader of the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters Party, led thousands of his followers in chanting “Kill the Boer” amid skyrocketing Boer-murder rates. The corporate press merely brushed off his rhetoric as anti-colonial sentiment. After all, the Boers are the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa. Therefore, a prominent political figure calling for their slaughter, while they’re already being murdered, is simply a sign of the oppressed sticking it to the oppressor. An ethnically European population that had no active participation in the colonial era is nevertheless wrapped up in a dialectical power struggle. Their existence is associated with “whiteness,” which is associated with “colonialism,” which is associated with Western Civilization, so calling for their annihilation is morally justified within this framework.
While campaigning for the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential nomination, Rev. Jesse Jackson led members of Stanford’s Black Student Union in chanting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Since then, millions of people — students, faculty, and staff — have been subjected to virulent curricula and trainings where Western civilization is denigrated as an oppressive and parasitic colonial force, “whiteness” is treated as a malevolent sociological scourge, the history that ought to unite us is dishonestly rewritten to incite racial animus, and students who deviate from this toxic identitarianism are disenfranchised while others are encouraged to shame white students for the sin of their birth.
Leftist student organizations routinely engage in this activism by inviting speakers to peddle hateful anti-white rhetoric, and left-wing luminaries like Ibram X. Kendi use campus facilities while raking in tens of millions of dollars for “antiracist” research to try to “solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.”
Frankly, there are innumerable examples of anti-white racism on college campuses. An exhaustive list would hardly be worth anyone’s time. We all know it exists, is systemic, and is supported with our tax dollars.
To add to this discussion, check out the following posting.
Blind tribal resentment will always exist to some extent; some people will always hate others merely for the crime of existing — that’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature. But the systemic anti-white racism and the outpouring of antisemitism in higher education are largely outgrowths of the same schools of thought.
It is good that Republicans are willing to take action against antisemitism, but that’s only one part of this problem. Bigotry should be condemned across the board, and universities should suffer for their role in it. But if the GOP is truly serious about tackling campus discrimination, it needs to rip it out at the roots and address anti-white racism as well.
Leftists will play semantic games, they’ll disingenuously moan about freedom of speech, but enough is enough. A smattering of red-state governments have shown how to root out “divisive topics” that install this worldview through public school K-12 curricula, but they must follow up at the college level. This can be done by reorganizing universities with trusted, ideologically aligned allies. And should a Republican win the White House in 2024, the president should direct the Department of Education to withhold federal funds from academic institutions that disseminate this worldview.
It may be impossible to eliminate bigotry from the hearts of man, but Republicans have the power to stop it from being rammed down our throats at taxpayer expense.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
During a 2020 campaign event, then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden was asked by an Iowa man if the former’s son Hunter Biden had ever had “access to the Obama administration.” The future president, who had vowed to bring decorum and decency back to the White House, called the man a “damn liar” and “fat” and told him he was “too old” before insulting his IQ. This act of projection from Biden should have been a warning. It was modus operandi for Joe, whose preternatural dishonesty was impressive even for a politician, to question the mental fitness of those who caught him in a lie. Biden had done much the same to a reporter during his 1987 failed presidential run.
Biden would go on to contend on numerous occasions that he never once even spoke to his son Hunter about the family’s influence-peddling business. Joe claimed never to have “discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine. That’s a fact.”
As a Chicago ABC affiliate and the AP reported in an October 2019 story — helpfully headlined, “Joe Biden defends himself, son Hunter on Ukraine during Democratic debate following Trump accusations” — the former veep said he “never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have. We’ve always kept everything separate.”
Not a single thing.
When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, indicating that Joe had lied, virtually the entire left-wing media regurgitated the claims of former intelligence officials — including known liars like James Clapper and John Brennan — that the story smacked of Russian “disinformation.” The story, allegedly discredited, was then censored by Big Tech and big media companies. Even Joe noted that the “vast majority of the intelligent people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.”
Well, we soon found out there was plenty of basis to the story. Hunter had hosted a dinner in a private room at Café Milano in D.C. with his dad and an executive from Burisma, the company that had enriched the Biden business. And in an email dated the next day, the Ukrainian exec thanked Hunter for the meeting with his dad.
In scores of other emails and texts, Hunter talks about his dad helping him secure payments and taking a cut. One of Hunter’s former business partners contends Joe was involved in the family business, as does Hunter’s former close friend, who testified under oath that Joe was on upwards of 20 calls with business associates.
At this point, there was overwhelming direct evidence that Joe was a willing participant, at the very least, in creating the impression that influence trading was happening and plenty of circumstantial evidence that the elder Biden was getting a 10 percent cut for the troubles.
As evidence of the president’s lies about his family’s influence-peddling business mounted, “fact-checkers” and the media began struggling to calibrate their defenses to correspond with the fresh information. While at first there had been “no evidence” that Biden knew anything — to say differently, was to peddle misinformation — suddenly there was “no evidence” that Biden had personally benefited from Hunter’s scheming (as if enriching your entire family wasn’t personal).
And this is when the partisan defenses of Joe began to see a dramatic decline in quality. One of my favorites was The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who was not alone, arguing: “We know how important family is to the president. So, do you hang up on your son?”
It was probably familial love that induced James Biden to write brother Joe a personal check for $200,000, that — by complete happenstance – was the exact amount James had received from the failed Americore family venture on that very same day. Talk about crazy coincidences.
It was around this time, as well, that White House language began subtly shifting from blanket denials to finely tuned Clintonesque turns of phrase about Joe never being “in business with his son.”
This week, the House Oversight Committee released financial documents illustrating that Hunter signed off on monthly transfers to Joe through Owasco PC, a Biden shell company that pulled at least $5 million from the Chicom energy concerns in 2017 and 2018. The Daily Mail reports there were at least three payments, from September to November 2018, or a few months before Biden announced he was running for president.
Listen, the Biden family operated through at least 20 shell companies — as one does when running a completely above-board legit business venture. It’s not easy to keep up. Or, as Jon Hamm’s character quipped in “The Town,” you need a Venn diagram for these people.
You might recall that in 2020, Biden had claimedHunter never “made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about — China.” But Hunter had not only tagged along on an Air Force Two trip to China in 2013, he’d introduced his dad to the Chinese banker he was teaming up with for a private equity fund.
So, I eagerly look forward to fact-checkers, media, and the White House clarifying why this is all just fine. It’s been a wild ride so far, so I bet the explanation is going to be amazing.
A new set of anti-Trump talking points has been cropping up in the corporate press recently, warning of the horrors that will come to pass if Trump wins the election. Most of it is shameless fearmongering, but there’s something else going on too.
Democrats are afraid that if Trump is elected he’ll do to them precisely what they’re currently doing to him. When Trump fearmongers in the media cry out with one voice that Trump will weaponize the Justice Department and the courts, rig our elections, and shred the Constitution, it’s pure projection. Because that’s exactly what they’re doingright now in a desperate bid to prevent Trump from winning office again.
It should go without saying that this suddenly ubiquitous media genre is extremely dangerous. As my colleague Mollie Hemingway aptly put it in response to a hysterical Trump-as-dictator piece by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, you might as well call it “assassination prep.”
That’s according to their own logic. After all, these people claim the republic itself is at stake and that we’re about to descend into autocracy. Liz Cheney went on NBC News over the weekend to flog her new book and warn in dire tones that in a second Trump term there’ll be “no guardrails that can stop him.” She says if Trump wins, he’ll become a fascist dictator, never leave office, and plunge the United States into tyranny.
She’s not alone in this absurd belief. The prospect of dictator Trump is more or less the entire theme of a new special edition of The Atlantic, ominously titled “If Trump Wins,” for which the magazine’s writers dutifully churned out two dozen essays fantasizing about the hellscape America will become if Trump is ever allowed back into the Oval Office. Nearly every facet of our national life would be left in ruins, they say, and America will be changed forever.
CNN’s Jake Tapper was apparently so scared out of his wits by these essays, he brought some of the writers and editors onto his show to talk about their prognostications of doom for the republic under Trump — including, Tapper said with a straight face, “how women could be targeted” under a Trump “retribution presidency.”
Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg replied to Tapper that a second-term Trump would be “bent on revenge,” because he “knows how he was thwarted” the first time. Well, yes — but not necessarily in the way Goldberg means it.
Trump was certainly thwarted the first time around — not thwarted in some dictatorial scheme but in the normal exercise of his office. A deeply corrupt media establishment — including the likes of Tapper and Goldberg — worked hand-in-glove with anti-Trump elements in the federal bureaucracy to peddle the Russia-collusion hoax in an unprecedented attempt to oust him from office or, failing that, undermine his presidency. During the 2020 election, many of these same elements succeeded in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. And after Jan. 6, 2021, they have cheered on the blatant weaponization of the justice system unleashed by Biden and the Democrats.
You almost have to admire the audacity of Democrats actively doing to Trump everything they say Trump will do to them if he regains the White House. You can’t get more on-the-nose in this regard than a triple-bylined piece that ran in The New York Times on Monday warning, “Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.”
It’s almost like the Times is trolling its readers with this. Surely the reporters and editors behind this laughable piece of agitprop know that this is exactly what the Biden Justice Department and powerful Democrats nationwide are now doing to Trump. The idea that Merrick Garland is some sort of straight-shooting attorney general is a joke. Not one person in America really believes it.
So, what do Democrats and their media courtesans do? They lean into the gaslighting, claiming over and over in the most outlandish terms that a second Trump term will bring about everything that’s happening now under President Biden. Why? Because they’re desperate. They know that owing to the weakness and corruption and unpopularity of the current president, there’s a chance Trump just might win next year. That’s why Democrat attorneys general and federal prosecutors want so desperately to convict him of a crime, any crime, and why editors and writers at the Times and The Atlantic will say almost anything to scare voters with horror stories about what will happen if Trump wins.
They also crave power. For people like Cheney and Kagan and Goldberg and every other establishment player, Trump’s great crime wasn’t anything he did or said on Jan. 6, it was that he won the election in November 2016. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Democrats and the permanent regime in Washington were supposed to remain in power forever. Trump had the audacity to win, and they can’t let it happen again.
In that effort, they’re willing to do and say almost anything. Throughout Trump’s stint in office, Democrats, establishment Republicans like Cheney, and nearly every major media outlet worked overtime to trample norms, bend the rules, break various laws, and undermine a duly elected president simply because they were incensed that they weren’t in power.
Remember that when they say what Trump will do in a second term. They’re doing it right now.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Sen Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday said he no longer will block military promotions three-stars and below. Tuberville since February has refused to allow the Senate confirmations of hundreds of U.S. military service members to protest the Defense Department’s abortion policy. He said he would continue to block four-star general nominees, multiple media outlets reported.
Tuberville told Politico that he had “no control over anybody else putting a hold on somebody. But for myself, they are released as we speak.”
“We fought hard,” Tuberville said, the Washington Examiner reported. “We did the right thing for the unborn and for our military, fighting back against executive overreach and an abortion policy.”
The senator had been pressured for months to end his hold, and even frustrated some Republican colleagues.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., threatened to force a vote on a resolution that would allow military nominations to be confirmed en masse, but it wasn’t clear whether he had the votes to pass it, NBC News reported. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Tuesday morning that he “hopeful” Tuberville would end his hold on military promotions.
“I was involved in a lot of conversations over the weekend on this subject, and I think that I’m hopeful,” Thune told reporters, NBC News reported. “I’m hopeful that today, we’re going to–keep your fingers crossed, we’ll see, I hope we have a breakthrough but time will tell.”
The Examiner reported that Tuberville’s office had announced a hastily called press conference for Tuesday afternoon. However, the presser was canceled because Tuberville wanted to tell his GOP colleagues in person over lunch before a public announcement. Earlier in the day, Tea Party Patriots Action Chair Jenny Beth Martin released a statement in support of Tuberville.
“Sen. Tuberville deserves our full support, full stop,” Martin wrote. “If his Senate Republican colleagues go behind his back and make a deal with Democrats, they will be making a fateful error.”
FBI Director Chris Wray admitted Tuesday that he has not fired anyone over the anti-Catholic memo. Pictured: Wray testifies during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Nov. 17, 2022. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)
FBI Director Chris Wray admitted to Sen. Josh Hawley that he has not fired anyone at the FBI’s Richmond office over the memo urging the FBI to investigate “radical traditional Catholics.”
“You haven’t fired anybody,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said to Wray in a Senate hearing Tuesday.
He pressed Wray on the FBI Richmond office’s Jan. 23 memo citing the Southern Poverty Law Center in urging an investigation of “radical, traditional Catholic hate groups.” After a whistleblower published it in February, the FBI rescinded that memo, saying it did not reach the bureau’s standards. Hawley cited a report that the House Judiciary Committee and the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released on the Catholic memo Monday.
“In fact, what the House found is what is it, you admonished them,” Hawley said. Mockingly, he added, “Oh I feel much better. They’ve been sent to bed without food.”
“Good heavens, director! This is one of the most outrageous targetings,” the senator added. “You have mobilized your division, the most powerful law enforcement division in the world, against traditionalist Catholics—whatever the heck that means—and you have just told us you have not fired a single person.”
He went on to cite the House report, which found that key staff at the Richmond office did not see a problem with the report.
“What are you going to do about this? Are you going to fire these people or not?” the senator pressed.
“Those individuals have all been admonished and it is all going into their… annual performance reviews, which has direct impact on their compensation, among other things,” Wray responded.
BREAKING: @HawleyMO slams Wray: "This is one of the most outrageous targetings. You have mobilized your division against traditionalist Catholics—whatever the heck that means—and you have just told us you have not fired a single person" responsible. pic.twitter.com/JA1PPrpscv
The FBI memo urged agents to probe the supposed nexus between “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and “radical-traditional Catholics,” citing the Southern Poverty Law Center and including a list of SPLC-designated “hate groups” for agents to target.
The FBI told The Daily Signal that it was rescinding the memo after FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin published it on UncoverDC.com on Feb. 8. The national FBI office claimed that the memo “does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI” and promised to remove the document from its systems and “conduct a review of the basis for the document,” but it refused to answer further questions about the move.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents. The SPLC places conservative groups on a “hate map” with KKK chapters.
After the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former staffer claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.” Critics across the political spectrum have voiced opposition and alarm at the organization’s hate group smears. A terrorist even targeted an SPLC-designated “hate group” in Washington, D.C., in 2012, and he told the FBI he used the “hate map” to find his target. The SPLC condemned that act of terror, but kept the target on the list and the map.
The SPLC has also suggested that the Catholic Church itself holds a position on human sexuality that would qualify it as a “hate group.”
Hell hath no fury like a leftist woman’s scorn if you’re Donald Trump, but Hamas raping and murdering innocent Israeli women on October 7th, 2023? No outrage and lame justifications.
In the current Through-the-Looking-Glass world, absurdity has become the norm. Israel has been accused of the unspeakable crimes of . . . protecting LGBTQ rights (you can’t do that – that’s #pinkwashing!), substantial participation by Arab citizens in all walks of civil life (you can’t do that – that’s #democracy), and protecting the environment by being a leader in environmental sustainability (you can’t do that – that’s #greenwashing!), all to cover up its alleged crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.
The absurdity has reached peak levels since October 7 with the timely re-emergence of the Queers for Palestine bloc, marching alongside Hamas supporters who justify terrorist atrocities as a response to the “occupation.” Putting aside the fact that Gaza has been Judenfrei with Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, the lack of self-awareness is staggering.
It is, of course, a well-known fact that Arab countries, and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in particular, are Edenic paradises to LGBTQ-identifying individuals and other minorities…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Career Democrat and ABC host George Stephanopoulos completely emasculated Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma this weekend on his Sunday show. Right at the beginning of the interview, Stephanopoulos advanced a flurry of disinformation and lies, to which Lankford, who purports to be a conservative senator of the burgundy-red state of Oklahoma, bowed down in complete supplication:
Stephanopoulos: Your party’s leading candidate for president was on the stump yesterday repeating lies about the 2020 election. He’s called those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection hostages. He faces 91 separate felony counts himself. He’s raised the prospect of executing the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and terminating parts of the Constitution. In the face of all that and more, are you prepared to support Donald Trump if he’s your party’s nominee?
Oh, for crying out loud. What an absolutely preposterous line of questioning. Any Republican elected official with a room-temperature IQ and even a modicum of self-respect would be livid at the propaganda and lies and immediately push back. But not Lankford. Here’s how he responded:
Lankford: Yes, we haven’t had a single vote yet, George. This is still weeks and weeks away from our first votes that are happening actually in Iowa, then New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there are a lot of people that are going to make that decision. That’s not going to be me making that decision, that’s going to be the American people that actually make that decision.
Stephanopoulos pressed him, and Lankford remained impotent in the face of the questioning. In fact, he was so bad throughout the interview, he even quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s controversial homeland security secretary, as a role model on immigration enforcement. The entire state of Oklahoma looked worse as it went on.
Now, Lankford is more than welcome to stay out of the Republican primary or endorse whomever he thinks is the best candidate, but what he should not feel free to do is allow the corrupt media and other Democrats to destroy the country through propaganda and lies. Americans are absolutely desperate for even the tiniest bit of Republican backbone and leadership, not mealy-mouthed kowtowing to the press.
When you claim to be a conservative senator of a state so Republican that two out of every three voters in 2020 voted for Trump, and a lifelong Democrat operative in the media asks you a completely loaded agitprop question, you should hit it out of the park. Like so:
“First off, George, your audience should know that you just regurgitated back a diatribe of lies, mistruths, and Democrat propaganda. I’m not surprised, given your professional background and track record of maliciously pushing the false and dangerous Russia-collusion scam for so many years during and after the 2016 election, but I can’t allow your lies to go uncorrected.
“Second, the public is also wising up to the fact that what the corporate media have spun to them about Jan. 6 hasn’t exactly been the complete truth. Yes, we know your line that this was the worst moment in the history of the world, requiring our FBI to do nothing other than arrest people who were anywhere near the event. Well, that, and arrest pro-lifers who are praying and parents who are attending school board meetings.
“But most Americans know that we have not gotten good answers about why Nancy Pelosi turned down security provisions ahead of what intelligence suggested would be a very contentious day, or what exactly was being done by the federal informants and federal agents who were present for the day’s events. They’re extremely worried about how left-wing rioters and criminals seem to be able to do whatever they want with very few repercussions, even when they’re attacking the Supreme Court, federal courthouses, the White House, churches, homes, and police precincts. And now with the release of some of the videotapes from that day, we see that most of the activity that day was not in any way what was hyped up and presented by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial.
“Finally, the Biden administration is at this moment doing everything in its power to put their leading political opponent in prison. They raided Mar-a-Lago, George. When other countries do things like this, when Putin does stuff like this, we say that means they don’t have free and fair elections. It seems the Democrats’ main strategy this election cycle is to attempt to put effective Republicans in prison, to bankrupt them, and to prevent them from speaking out about what is being done to destroy this country. I’ll note this isn’t working with the American people, as Trump now leads widely in almost all polls against Biden, a strong renunciation of what’s going on.
“So I ask you, George, are you prepared to start focusing on the major policy issues facing the country, or will you continue to push lies and propaganda to help put your political opponents in prison?”
You know, something like that.
To state the obvious here, using small words so that even the absolutely feckless and embarrassingly lame Senate Republicans can understand, praising Mayorkas, failing to correct lies about Republicans, and mumbling about how you’ll vote Republican if you are forced to is not a way to win elections. Yes, I’m sure it’s what Mitch McConnell told Lankford to go out and do, but it yields nothing but failure. The people of Oklahoma deserve an actual man to represent them, not whatever it is they’re getting in Lankford.
You win elections by saying truthful things, not being sad and scared like Lankford and most other Republican senators are. He should be lambasting Stephanopoulos for not covering the major issues facing the country in an even remotely evenhanded or honest way.
That’s how you go from being a party full of absolute losers who are on their back heels constantly to one that makes people want to vote for you.
Gustavo Torres, the executive director of CASA De Maryland—seen here rallying with open-borders activists outside the White House on Dec. 30, 2015—is effusive in his apologies for voicing support for Hamas, but only because CASA’s state funding has been jeopardized by it. (Photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/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.
Trouble is brewing in the deep-blue state of Maryland, where Democratic state senators are discovering that—gasp!—an “immigrant advocacy” group they have coddled for decades is really full of Hamas supporters who compare Palestinian terrorists to the experience of Hispanics in the Old Line State.
The group is CASA de Maryland. State lawmakers have been forcing weary taxpayers to underwrite this far-left group since it was first incorporated in Maryland’s radical chic neighborhood of Takoma Park in 1985. The Washington Post reported as far back as 2011 that “nearly half of CASA’s $6 million budget comes from local, state, and federal appropriations.” A reason for that is, as The Post put it, it successfully sells itself as an “immigrants’ rights” lobbying group.
That the people CASA de Maryland represents are mostly not immigrants at all, but illegal aliens who have willfully broken the law didn’t bother reliably lefty voters in tony Montgomery County, where many of the denizens of the federal permanent bureaucracy and the nation’s media and academic elite sleep, play, and more importantly, vote.
But just as CASA has moved out of its original modest Takoma Park church basement and is now headquartered in multimillion-dollar Langley Mansion, a former plantation restored to the tune of $13.8 million in nearby Langley Park (a rehab that The Post reported was partly footed by taxpayers), the organization’s political reach has expanded.
It is now, according to its website, a nationwide community organizing giant. “With over 155,000 lifetime members across 46 U.S. states, CASA is a national powerhouse organization building power and improving the quality of life in working-class: Black, Latino/a/e, Afro-descendent, Indigenous, and Immigrant communities.”
Things were going swimmingly well until this comfy status quo was shattered, as many things have been in America, by Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians and the gang-rape of Jewish women on Oct. 7. The fascination that the “woke” Left has shown for the terrorists (a Cornell professor said he was “exhilarated” by the killing spree) has shocked old-fashioned liberals. They are now suddenly finding it hard to overlook some tough realities.
Enter CASA, which chose to make clear on which side it belongs when its longtime executive director, Gustavo Torres, stated in a since-deleted post on X that “CASA stands in resolute and steadfast solidarity with the people of Palestine in their relentless fight for freedom. We stand shoulder to shoulder with countless Black and brown freedom activists from around the world. We specifically condemn the utilization of U.S. tax dollars to promote the ongoing violence.”
“We deeply acknowledge the interconnectedness of the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people and Black and brown communities in the United States,” Torres added.
That set off all nine state senators from Montgomery County, who issued a letter that did not mince words. The statements by CASA and Torres, the senators’ letter said, “are hurtful, divisive, and antisemitic. It reflects a complete lack of understanding of the complex geopolitics of the Middle East, the indigenous roots of the Jewish people, and the long and painful history of antisemitism in its myriad forms.”
More to the point, the senators reminded Torres, “We have provided CASA with millions of taxpayer dollars intended to support our new Americans and help provide them with necessities and shelter.”
Then came the kicker: “We cannot and will not allow taxpayer money to subsidize hate speech. In light of CASA’s recent postings and statements, this might be an appropriate time to reevaluate the state’s mechanism for providing financial aid and support to our immigrant community.”
Clearly terrified that Maryland may withdraw its taxpayer teat, Torres has tried to backpedal as fast as he can, dignity be damned. “I want to profoundly apologize to the Jewish community in Montgomery County and beyond,” Torres told MoCo360. “We were not experts on this [crisis], and members of the Jewish community have been educating me.”
On X, CASA said, “We write to acknowledge that our words have caused hurt.” CASA, it said, is working to “refine our message and clarify our values.” Torres pleaded further, “We will do whatever is necessary to repair these relationships. We want to apologize not only with words, but actions.”
On our latest statement: We write to acknowledge that our words have caused hurt. We have received feedback from our dear and trusted partners, who have expressed their concerns about the impact of our language.
Boy, what the threatened withdrawal of millions will do. But apparently, the unseemly retreat is to no avail. Democratic state Sen. Cheryl Kagan said, “It’s unforgivable, and I choose my words carefully. It doesn’t matter if [Torres] says ‘I’m sorry’ 10 times. I cannot forgive statements that essentially say he wants to murder my people. It’s not OK.”
Torres’ words of regret do indeed beggar belief. He and CASA are hardly new to revolutionary struggle.
“Casa” is Spanish for home, but CASA is an acronym for the Central America Solidarity Association. The group has since registered under “CASA” to, as former Reagan official James Simpson put it in 2012, obscure any links with other “solidarity committees” set up in the 1980s to lobby for the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador, which were funded and guided by the Soviets and the Cubans.
The Colombian-born Torres earned his chops in Marxist Nicaragua, where he worked for a newspaper that was a mouthpiece for the Sandinista regime, according to the always reliable Influence Watch. Later, Torres popped up in Venezuela, where, according to the Militant,he spoke at a 2007 panel titled “United States: A Possible Revolution.” His co-panelist, Antonio Gonzalez, said, “What does a revolutionary do in the U.S. today? Take power wherever you can by electing Latinos to city, state, and federal offices.” Later, Citgo Petroleum, which Venezuela’s Marxist government uses as its piggy bank, gave CASA $1.5 million.
Many in the audience said that wouldn’t work, chiding Hispanics for buying into the “American dream” and not pursuing social and political change. But one of CASA’s beliefs under Torres is that Central Americans immigrate because the U.S. destabilizes its region and that their mass immigration, in return, will change the U.S.
This is at least the third example of a direct payment to Joe Biden that stems from a family-owned business entity. The difference is that these monthly payments came directly from a Biden company. Pictured: Biden departs Ireland’s Dublin Airport on Air Force One on Aoril 14 with his sister Valerie and son Hunter. (Photo: Julien Behal/Irish Government/Getty Images)
A Hunter Biden business entity tied to China made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden in the months leading up to the former vice president’s announcement that he would run for president in 2020, according to newly released subpoenaed bank records from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. The monthly payments came from Owasco PC, which Hunter Biden set up as a business entity.
Biden, the president’s 53-year-old son, is under federal investigation for using Owasco PC’s corporate account to commit alleged tax crimes. Owasco PC has links to Chinese energy company CEFC, where the younger Biden was a partner. This is at least the third example of a direct payment to Joe Biden that stems from a family-owned business entity. What appears to be different here is that the payments came directly from a Biden company. Two previous payments appeared to filter indirectly through the president’s younger brother, James Biden.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., noted in a video statement that the president previously claimed there was an “absolute wall” between his official government duties and his family’s business; claimed his family didn’t receive money from China; and claimed he didn’t talk to his son about his business dealings.
On each, Comer said, “This was a lie.”
🚨BREAKING🚨
Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. The bank records don't lie.
Owasco PC received payments from Chinese-state linked companies & other shady entities. Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his family's business schemes. pic.twitter.com/MfvtA4yEZU
“Now, Hunter Biden’s legal team and the White House’s media allies claim Hunter’s corporate entities never made payments directly to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “We can officially add this latest talking point to the list of lies.”
“Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” the Kentucky Republican said.
“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” Comer added.
The oversight panel is one of three House committees leading an impeachment inquiry into the senior Biden’s activities for evidence of influence peddling. The committee subpoenaed the financial records of Hunter Biden and of James Biden in September.
The House-obtained records show that Hunter Biden’s business account, Owasco PC, received payments from companies linked to Communist China and from other foreign nationals and companies.
Records released by the committee show one monthly payment in September 2018 for $1,380. Also that year, James Biden wrote two separate checks to Joe Biden for $200,000 and $40,000, respectively. The checks were marked as “loan repayments,” but Comer’s committee has tied the payments directly to Biden family business transactions.
An FBI confidential informant said in a formal document that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and another $5 million to Hunter Biden in 2016 when Biden was still Barack Obama’s vice president.
While he was vice president, Biden met with or communicated with several of his son’s business partners, records show.
State Office Building renovation, called ‘fiscal insanity,’ to begin next month.
House Republicans and DFLers have argued over the scope of the project and price tag, which could approach $729 million after interest accrues.
Despite repeated complaints from several Republican legislators over the last year on the size and scope of what will turn out to be the costliest Minnesota Capitol renovation in state history, work on the State Office Building project is expected to begin in just a matter of weeks. While the project is expected to have an impact on the daily tasks of those engaged in legislative activities for the next three sessions, some lawmakers want to make sure the cost to taxpayers doesn’t go unnoticed. READ MORE…
Here are the 105 RINOs who Voted to Remove Fellow Republican George Santos from Congress – BUT NOT ANY DEMOCRAT! – PRIMARY THEM ALL OUT OF OFFICE!
The US House of Representatives voted Friday morning on Resolution 878 – the expulsion of House member Representative George Santos. They voted him out.
RINOs and Democrats have been gunning for this day since Santos entered Congress.
This is the third time the US House has voted to expel George Santos.
George Santos has not been CONVICTED of a crime. He was indicted by the House Ethics Committee led by Republicans.
Meanwhile, Democrat Representatives Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Mad Maxine Waters and others accused of much more serious crimes will never face such a vote.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Steve Bannon (R) speaks with Tucker Carlson (L) in an interviewed aired on Nov. 27, 2023. | YouTube/Tucker Carlson
“War Room” host Steve Bannon warned Tucker Carlson on Monday that the critical tensions afflicting Ireland over unrestrained illegal immigration and other issues are also simmering in the United States and could lead to political upheaval.
Bannon spoke to Carlson on the recent episode of the former Fox News host’s show on X to discuss the unrest in Dublin, where riots erupted last week after an Algerian immigrant stabbed three children and one adult care worker outside a Catholic primary school.
A 5-year-old girl remains in a serious but stable condition as of Tuesday, according to the BBC.
The suspect in the stabbing, whom Irish police have yet to identify, is a man of French Algerian origin in his 50s who has lived in Ireland for 23 years and was previously arrested in 2003, according to the Sunday Times. He reportedly became a naturalized Irish citizen in 2008 after his deportation order was revoked following a review by Ireland’s High Court.
Carlson opened his interview with Bannon by noting that The Washington Post suggested the Algerian man was not an immigrant because he had lived in Ireland for over 20 years. The outlet also quoted police who blamed the riots that flared after the attack on a “lunatic faction driven by a far-right ideology.”
The host said that the suspect has been living in Ireland for 23 years “at public expense.”
“He has never had a job, and then last week, he stabbed children,” Carlson said.
Carlson also claimed that Irish authorities are using hate crime legislation to crack down on anyone “who questions government policy.” MMA fighter Conor McGregor and a “large number” of other people are being investigated for allegedly inciting people to hatred by their speech, according to The Irish Independent.
Carlson and Bannon agreed that profound resentment among native citizens toward the effects of mass illegal immigration is seething not just Ireland, which Bannon described as a “powder keg,” but throughout the Western world, including the U.S.
Bannon, who served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump, predicted that the U.S. is also headed toward “political revolution” in the coming years as younger Americans realize they are “Russian serfs” who effectively own nothing and never will because of the nation’s ruinous financial situation.
“We are beyond broke,” Bannon said. “We are technically at bankruptcy right now.”
Citing Center for Immigration Studies statistics that suggest an additional 6 million illegal immigrants are slated to cross the border before the next presidential election, Bannon predicted that the country’s political situation is “only going to get worse in the confrontation with the invasion of this nation by illegal aliens, exacerbated by radicals and globalists.”
Carlson questioned how the average American could not be radicalized as elites encourage things that drive people to despair and give up on reproducing while simultaneously pushing for millions of immigrants to pour in.
Bannon replied that “every Maoist, every Marxist revolution [focuses] on breaking down the nuclear family” and that the corporate class wants unrestrained immigration “because they want to drive down wages at the lowest possible level and, quite frankly, they want bigger markets. They want more consumers.”
“And so, this situation is going to cause a political revolution in this country,” Bannon predicted, claiming that the financial and immigration situations are “five times worse” than when Trump ran in 2016.
The two also discussed the potential crackdown against dissenting opinion amid political unrest.
“If you have a different opinion from the state, they’re trying to criminalize that,” Bannon said. “They’re trying to do that every day here in the United States. If they can’t criminalize it to actually use the courts and the police state like the FBI to come after, they’ll basically partner with Big Tech, either deplatform you or to ‘other’ you. We’re seeing this here in the United States.”
Bannon concluded by reflecting on how the “complexity” and “viciousness” of the political problems afflicting the U.S. have increased in recent years.
“People have to understand this is like Damocles’ sword over the head of this nation,” he said. “It is going to take at least a decade of tough decisions, tough people — tough, but fair people — to sort this out.”
Thursday night’s debate between Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom was a total crapshow for Newsom — literally.
When the Democrat darling wasn’t getting lambasted for violating his own Covid restrictions and allowing homelessness and human feces to plague California’s major cities, Newsom was justifying the presence of pornographic materials in school libraries and defending the surgical mutilation of minors, even without parents’ knowledge. Meanwhile, DeSantis stuck to the facts and tackled major culture war issues most Republicans are often too afraid to mention.
Things got so bad for Newsom that his wife reportedlystepped in to prevent the debate from continuing beyond the original 90-minute discussion agreed upon by the governors.
But Thursday’s back-and-forth wasn’t just a heated discussion between two high-profile politicians. It was a symbolic display of the stark spiritual divide encapsulating the country. While DeSantis represented positions of truth, logic, and common sense — like protecting kids from disfiguring transgender surgeries, for example — Newsom embodied the lies, deception, and propaganda of his fellow leftists.
Even when confronted with facts — some of which were displayed in front of him — Newsom simply lied or pivoted to launching ad hominem attacks against conservatives. Such is the way of the modern left.
In a sane world, DeSantis’ beatdown of Newsom and the Democrat Party’s extremist agenda would end the California governor’s prospects for higher office. But America doesn’t exist inside a sane world anymore, and the sad reality is that many of the leftists who watched Thursday’s debate probably came away believing Newsom’s falsehoods — or worse, knew he was lying but simply didn’t care.
If Newsom were to run for another statewide office in California today, there’s no reason to believe the vast majority of Democrats in the state wouldn’t vote for him. Even if it means having to pay higher taxes, subsidize illegal immigrants, and dodge human feces, used needles, criminals, and homeless encampments on the streets, Democrat voters will not abandon their dystopian belief that the state is almighty.
For the left, politics is religion. It’s what drives them, shapes their nonsensical worldview, and permits them to justify the most demonic policies imaginable, such as murdering innocent unborn babies and conducting irreversible surgeries on minors without parental knowledge. There is no belief in objective morality or truth on the left because Democrats’ view is that morality and truth are whatever they want them to be, facts and logic be damned.
Leftism is a heck of a drug, and no matter how much pain and suffering it causes, Democrats won’t stop taking it.
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
During his debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday night, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was at his strongest on contentious culture-war issues, such as the merits of transgender medical interventions for kids and parental rights.
The governors from two of the nation’s most populous states offered Americans a preview of a 2028 White House showdown on Fox News, debating red and blue state governance. Both are popular two-term governors presiding over colossal coastal states with overwhelming control of their respective state legislatures, and both are also relatively young (Newsom is 56, DeSantis is 45) and well-funded, with presumably long careers ahead. So, while only one of the men on stage Thursday night is officially running for higher office, both eagerly capitalized on the opportunity to frame up a presidential race that’s still five years out. DeSantis was at his best when topics landed on hot-button cultural issues, from parents’ rights in education to California’s endless sexualizing of children.
Fox moderator Sean Hannity brought up Florida’s parental rights bill — which Democrats dishonestly branded as “Don’t Say Gay” — that DeSantis signed last year. The new law bans teachers from bringing mature sexual topics and transgender propaganda into kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.
“Should schools be focused on reading, writing, math, science, history, computers — and maybe leaving values, considering parents might have different values than teachers at school?” Hannity asked. “What is the role?”
“The role of the school is to educate kids, not indoctrinate kids,” DeSantis said. “It’s not to impose an agenda, it’s to do the basics.”
“What we’ve said in Florida is it’s inappropriate to tell a kindergartner that their gender is a choice, it’s inappropriate to tell a second grader that they may have been born in the wrong body,” DeSantis added. “California has that. They want to have that injected into the elementary school.”
DeSantis went on to highlight a book used to teach kids about gay sex called Gender Queer.
“Some of its blocked out,” DeSantis said with an image held up of a graphic illustrated porn scene. “You would not probably be able to put this on air.”
Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) and Gov. Newsom (D-CA) debate parental rights and book bans.
DeSantis: "This is a book that's in some of the schools in California … This is pornography, it's cartoons"
Newsom: "I don't like the way you demean and humiliate people you disagree with, Ron." pic.twitter.com/Vw63cD0OFq
Newsom sought to justify the salacious content in K-12 classrooms, calling DeSantis’ efforts to sanitize leftist activists’ curricula a “banning binge.” The West Coast governor went on to list a series of authors Democrats falsely claim are prohibited in Florida.
A moment later, DeSantis called out California’s radical efforts to become a refuge for trans-identified kids. Last year, Newsom signed a bill allowing gender-confused teens to seek irreversible medical interventions in the Golden State without parental consent.
“How in the heck is that honoring parents’ rights when you’re bringing people in from out of state to go around their parents’ backs and getting life-altering surgeries?” DeSantis asked. “It’s not for you to decide. It’s for the parents to decide.”
Ron DeSantis SKEWERS Gavin Newsom over his "radical" and "extreme" policy overriding parental rights in the name of "gender-affirming care." His bill prioritizes sterilizing drugs that will medicalize kids for the rest of their lives. #Debatehttps://t.co/PGdw9oRDSLpic.twitter.com/spEvUuGaQe
Newsom turned to emotional blackmail, citing the debunked left-wing talking point that transgender-identifying children are more prone to suicide. The data points to the contrary, however, with individuals more likely to suffer mental anguish when given easier access to transgender medical interventions.
Transgenderism and parental rights in education are winning issues for Republicans. The twin topics let the party go on offense just as the Virginia GOP did in 2021 with statewide triumphs in what had become a blue state.
Recent polls suggest more and more Americans are with Republicans on transgenderism and parental rights. A March survey from Parents Defending Education found, “75% of registered voters support legislation requiring schools to get parental consent before helping a student change their gender identity at school, while only 18% oppose this policy” (emphasis theirs).
A Gallup poll in June found that 55 percent of Americans believe it is “morally wrong” to attempt to “change” one’s sex, up from 51 percent two years ago. An overwhelming majority opposed bending sex requirements for athletic competitions.
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.
The biggest loser of Thursday night’s debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom was us, the voters. For far too long party officials have had a stranglehold on how candidates are vetted, presented, and nominated. If the “Red vs. Blue State” debate was successful, it could have been the jumping-off point for other networks, third-party candidates, or donors to sponsor and create better opportunities for voters to see candidates in more diverse settings and formats. Sadly, it was unsuccessful for everyone involved.
Kudos to Sean Hannity for making it happen and kudos to Newsom for showing up to a forum he knew would be tilted toward DeSantis. Despite his actual performance, Newsom is the only person in his party that would have agreed to debate in that environment in the first place. Could you even imagine Vice President Kamala Harris in place of Newsom last night? It might have ended her political career. The reality is we know the White House would have never, ever allowed her to appear.
It’s hard to be critical of Hannity’s handling of the debate chaos because, short of cutting their mics off, there wasn’t much he could do besides appeal to both men several times to stop behaving like toddlers. It is unbecoming of governors, let alone presidential candidates, to talk over one another, and keep repeating the same statistic or practiced line. Still, Hannity deserves credit for pulling it off despite the fact that Trump and those around him aren’t thrilled he gave DeSantis the prime-time opportunity. Hannity has spoken openly about his personal relationship with Trump and his family, but he gave DeSantis airtime and a unique venue anyway.
Wearing the Hat vs. the Jersey
If you watch sports or attend games in person, you know the difference between a fan who is wearing a hat and the one who is wearing a jersey. A hat doesn’t have your favorite player’s name on it, just the team. A jersey has a specific player’s number and (with few exceptions) their last name. Fight in the stands? Most likely between fans who have jerseys on, not hats. In primary season, political pundits, donors, and early supporters have jerseys on, but regular voters who are living their lives mostly have hats on, or are willing to switch jerseys when the primary dust settles. How you think this debate went for DeSantis largely depends on whether you are wearing a DeSantis jersey or a GOP hat.
If you are wearing the DeSantis jersey, you think he crushed Newsom and embarrassed him with several references to the French Laundry incident and Newsom’s kids going to in-person private school while the rest of his state’s children were at home. You thought it was a nice touch when he talked about San Francisco police officers approaching him and thanking him for his support of law enforcement because they don’t get that in California. You were giddy when he pulled out both his paper props from his suit jacket to shame Newsom over the graphic nature of a book and a print-out of a San Francisco human feces map. If you have a DeSantis jersey on, it was a good event, even if all he got was major screen time without Nikki Haley zinging bad one-liners at him all night.
If you are wearing the GOP hat, maybe you didn’t see it the same way. You saw a presidential candidate that had some shades of Marco Rubio circa 2016 getting wrecked by Chris Christie. The repetitive talking points and stats in the face of a full-on frontal assault by Newsom is troublesome. You saw a guy who practiced all the stories he was going to tell last night (father-in-law, French Laundry, Newsom kids in person at private school) and still couldn’t tell them well.
You were thinking: if Trump told these exact same stories they would have landed with such force that Gavin’s White House dreams might have died on that stage last night. You also might be thinking that if Nikki Haley told those same stories she would have raised millions more dollars for her campaign. You saw a guy with a friendly moderator not be able to shift on the fly and bury Newsom when everything (data, history, and truth) was on his side. You also know that Donald Trump wouldn’t need to pull out crumpled paper to embarrass Newsom. He could have told those exact two stories without the props just as effectively.
A friend of mine who wears a GOP hat, not a jersey, texted me, “I don’t think he is good on his feet” during the debate, and he isn’t alone in that assessment. GOP hat-wearers are very perceptive and watched DeSantis Thursday night wondering if he has the stand-up skills to go to metaphorical war with whomever is occupying the other podium.
I am not sure last night moved the needle for DeSantis but how it’s perceived is very different by those wearing DeSantis jerseys versus those wearing GOP hats. It was a wasted opportunity for some much-needed change of the political process and for both participants.
Aaron DeCorte has worked in sales and marketing for more than 25 years. His wife is a 9-1-1 operator for their local police department.
Rep. George Santos, or, now-former Rep. George Santos, has denied allegations that he moonlighted as a drag queen named “Kitara Ravache.” But maybe he would have been smart to embrace it — no Democrat could have voted to expel a drag queen from the lower chamber!
On Friday, House Democrats voted nearly unanimously along with 105 Republicans to expel the freshman representative from New York. It’s worth noting that Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, meanwhile, received a mere censure over her antisemitic activism and solidarity with Hamas terrorists.
Santos became the third member removed from the House since the Civil War. Rep. James Traficant of Ohio was removed by the lower chamber in 2002 after a conviction of 10 felonies and Rep. Michael Myers was kicked out in 1980 following a bribery conviction. The New York lawmaker was ostensibly removed over a potential scandal involving fraudulent campaign activity that was detailed in a report from the House Ethics Committee last month. Investigators found substantial evidence that Santos committed federal crimes, and the freshman lawmaker was handed a 23-count indictment in October. To date, however, Santos has yet to be convicted of a single crime after voters elected the Republican to replace his Democrat predecessor.
Tlaib, on the other hand, openly called for the destruction of Israel and spread lies about an explosion near a Palestinian hospital, blaming the Israeli military. The rocket that terrorist officials claimed killed hundreds of civilians at the hospital was actually a Palestinian device that misfired and landed in a nearby parking lot, killing dozens, not hundreds.
“Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that,” Tlaib wrote on X. “POTUS this is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire & help de-escalate.”
In November, the Michigan congresswoman defended her use of the terrorist slogan “from the river to the sea” demanding the creation of a Palestinian state on Israeli land.
“From the river to the sea,” Tlaib claimed on X, “is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”
“‘From the river to the sea’ is the least ambiguous phrase imaginable,” explained Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi last month. “It quite literally and geographically lays out the genocidal aims of its chanters — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including all of the Jewish state, not just ‘occupied’ territory.”
That 105 Republicans joined Democrats to expel Santos, in an effort actually led by Republicans, is bad enough. But two of the Republicans who voted to expel Santos simultaneously voted against censuring Tlaib three weeks ago. Retiring Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, who is gunning for a gig at CNN, and freshman California Rep. John Duarte, apparently didn’t think their antisemitic colleague from Michigan deserved censure but voted to boot Santos from Congress despite his reliably red voting record.
Voters: please, Republicans, help the country Republican House: best we can offer is a continuing resolution Democrats love, tons more Ukraine funding, and ousting this liar because corporate media demanded it https://t.co/BZeUTjrRb9
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.
House Administration Committee Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., speaks at a news conference about the American Confidence in Elections Act at the Capitol on July 12. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
House Republicans have advanced measures to prevent noncitizen voting and curb foreign influence in American elections, with some even gaining bipartisan backing. The House Administration Committee on Thursday sent eight election-related bills to the full House for consideration, most of which still face an uncertain future.
House Administration Committee Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said the bills bring the United States “one step closer to blocking election insecurities.”
“From preventing federal funds from going to states that allow noncitizens to vote, to blocking the Biden administration’s attempts to weaponize our federal agencies,” Steil said in a public statement after the committee meeting. “Each measure we passed today will increase voters’ confidence and ultimately lead to greater participation at the ballot box.”
The No Vote for Non-Citizens Act was reported out of committee on a bipartisan vote of 8-2. The bill would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as “the Motor Voter law,” and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to ensure that only eligible American citizens may participate in federal elections.
This measure, sponsored by Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., requires localities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections to print separate voter lists and separate ballots from any federal elections.
Another bill repeals the recently passed District of Columbia law to allow noncitizens to vote in D.C. elections. While Washington, D.C., has limited home rule, it is still subject to Congress as nation’s capital. The committee approved the bill by Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., on a partisan 6-3 vote. The D.C. law gives noncitizens who are at least 18 years old and have resided in the District for 30 days or more the right to vote in any D.C. elections for mayor, city council and other local offices.
“Allowing noncitizens, like [foreign] embassy staff, to vote in D.C. elections is inappropriate and contrary to our system of democracy,” Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., said during the committee meeting.
However, Democrats defended the D.C. law.
“The comments are so insulting here about D.C.’s ability to elect their own elected officials with their own voters,” Rep. Norma Tores, D-Calif. “It’s so outrageous and offensive. It’s bullies bullying the D.C. residents.”
The Citizen Ballot Protection Act, which cleared the committee on a 4-3 party-line vote, allows a state to include as part of the federal voter-registration form a requirement that applicants provide proof of citizenship. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, sponsored the Protecting American Voters Act, which cleared the committee on a 6-3party-line vote. The bill requires the Homeland Security Department and the Social Security Administration to provide upon request information to states to verify the citizenship status of individuals registered to vote.
Committee Democrats opposed allowing local election officials to check the citizenship information with the federal agencies.
“This bill is another attack on elligible voters of color disguised as fraud prevention, for which this committee has shown no evidence exists,” Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., the committee’s ranking member.
Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., defended the measure.
“It is paramount that we enforce that American citizens are the ones who vote, not individuals who came into this country illegally,” Murphy said during the committee meeting.
Less controversial was the Stop Foreign Funds in Elections Act, which passed by a unanimous voice vote. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., sponsored the bill, which would prohibit contributions by foreign nationals in elections or in connection with ballot initiatives or referendums. Existing federal laws prohibit direct contributions from foreign nationals to political candidates, parties or political action committees, noted Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y.
“However, federal law does not prohibit foreign nationals from making contributions or donations in connection with state of local ballot initiatives or referenda,” D’Esposito said of the bill during the committee meeting. “This legislation rectifies that problem. American elections are for the benefit of American citizens and not foreign nationals.”
The popular measure was a unanimous recommendation of the three Republicans and three Democrats on the Federal Election Commission-recommended bill and likely could have enough bipartisan backing to pass the House and Senate and be sent to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature into law.
Three other measures did not pertain to noncitizens or foreign influence, but were about election security.
The committee voted unanimously to advance the Confirmation of Congressional Observer Access Act. The proposal just codifies the long-running Congressional Observer Program, which, under constitutional authority, deploys designated congressional election observers to observe federal election administration procedures. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Mike Carey, R-Ohio.
The committee reported the Federal Election Audit Act out on a party-line vote of 8-4. That bill, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Murphy, R-N.C., allows federal election assistance dollars to fund postelection audits for federal offices in a state.
The committee also voted 5-4 along party lines to repeal President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which requires federal agencies to engage in get-out-the-vote activities, and working with independent nonprofit organizations to turnout voters. Sponsored by Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., the Safeguarding Electoral Integrity Act not only repeals the Biden order, but also requires every plan made under it to be submitted to Congress for review.
Why are millions of people around the world supporting Hamas, the reincarnation of the Nazi SS? Hamas targets civilians for murder and rape; uses its own civilians as human shields; and hides beneath hospitals, schools, and churches. Pictured: Members of the Palestinian Youth Movement gather outside of the President’s Park to stage a pro-Palestinian demonstration and demand a ceasefire in Gaza during the National Christmas tree lighting in Washington D.C., on Nov. 30. (Photo: Celal Gunes, Anadolu/Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
Oct. 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation. During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass-raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly. The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza—to cheers from the Gaza street.
Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard Left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.
When the Israel Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar. From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the Israel Defense Forces and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails. Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen. It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.
Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent. They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal antisemitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel. They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police. The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of antisemitic Klansmen.
Why did the doctrinaire Left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their antisemitic venom toward Israel? For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protesters suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war. But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle East Arab cities about the same time do not.
The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from northern Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee” status either.
Few protesters knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there was Muslim Turks who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost in World War I and were expelled.
How exactly did it happen that the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?
The pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.
They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to—“settled?”—supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.
As far as “disproportionality”—it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.
What protesters are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.
Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world. It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.
The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms so as not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.
Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?
Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?
Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?
Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?
Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?
Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?
Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur; Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uyghurs; Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine; or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims. Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protesters falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish—and that explains the pass given them by our antisemitic, pro-Hamas street.
Millions of Twitter accounts that interacted with former President Donald Trump’s online profile appear to be under the purview of special counsel Jack Smith’s search warrant from January of this year, according to a government transparency suit.
The court-authorized warrant on Twitter, which the tech company fought and even attempted to warn Trump about, sought “all information from … the [Trump] account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).” The highly specific request potentially implicates millions of users on the platform, now known as X, just because they liked or retweeted a Trump post.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
According to the corporate media, hundreds of high schoolers are taking it upon themselves to walk out of school to protest Israel’s right to defend itself. In New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and more, the nation’s budding humanitarians are banding together with the hope of ushering in a new era of peace, the stories say. As is the case with so many stories surrounding Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s response, the prevailing narrative is wrong.
These walkouts are not the result of well-meaning teenagers choosing to take a stand. These protests are being conceived of and then planned and executed by radical left-wing groups using children as political props.
The largest of these was the “#schools4Palestine” walkout, which disrupted learning in an estimated 100 New York City public schools on Nov. 9. A coalition of far-left groups, including New York Collective of Radical Educators, NYC Educators for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Teachers Unite, authored a “toolkit” — a handbook aimed mainly at adults to show them how to turn students into pro-Hamas activists. The document purports to be for “students, teachers, and parents,” but its content is less relevant for students than for teachers who seek to influence them. Another far-left group in the San Francisco Bay Area created a toolkit of its own, full of the same hateful lies about Israel.
Though the New York City toolkit’s writers claimed, “High school students are organizing walkouts,” they don’t seem to believe their own words. The document, created by left-wing adults, provides a ready-made plan for students, with poster templates, instructions for identifying chant leaders, and even a sample schedule. The students are being organized by adults.
NYC high school students walking out from across the city in the hundreds today to demand a #CeasefireNow in Gaza!
They were showing up, at the behest of their teachers, to support a cause probably very few of them understand. The toolkit contained a sample script for teachers to encourage their students to participate, and it notes that teachers may “show support for their students … canceling tests or major paper deadlines or making the lesson more flexible to accommodate students who walk out.” Teachers who followed this advice placed their own radical politics ahead of learning and committed a major violation of professional ethics. They abused their positions of responsibility for the sake of their own agenda.
The toolkit put words in the mouths of children with a recommended chants list, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here.” When they took to the streets, some of the students chanted, “F-ck the Jews,” thus flaunting their hatred and abandoning the façade that this protest was ever about peace.
Students Aren’t Being Taught the Truth
Students are being taught that it is good and noble to walk out in support of Hamas. What they are not being taught is that there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and it did not stop Hamas from slaughtering Israelis and taking hostages. They’re not teaching students that so many Palestinians live in poverty, not because of Israel, but because Hamas would rather spend money on rockets and tunnels and their own plush hideaways in Qatar than on basic infrastructure. They’re not teaching that supporting the Palestinian people means opposing Hamas, an enemy of peace and prosperity and the reason that Gazans are suffering today.
Some meager accountability for this indoctrination has come from parents who are angered about what their children are being taught. A principal in Montgomery County, Maryland, emailed the entire school community to “make them aware” of a walkout, noting that all absences due to the protest would be excused. Backlash was so swift and severe that the principal has since resigned.
These protests do not happen in a vacuum. In many schools, Jewish students are seeing their peers cheerlead for terrorism with their teachers’ encouragement. No student should be forced to face this kind of hostility and harassment. No parent should be forced to send his or her child to a school where this sort of teacher-sponsored bullying is allowed or encouraged.
As Hamas tightens its death grip on Gaza, pro-Hamas protesters will desperately attempt to appear thoughtful and mainstream. But not unlike the group these protesters are supporting, they’re experts at using children as pawns.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on Wednesday. He was 100.
The German-born American served as a diplomat, academic and presidential adviser, and continued to impact American politics in the private sector after leaving office. His stamp on U.S. foreign policy spanned decades and he was responsible – for better or worse – for systematically changing the standing of the U.S., China, Russia and others.
After the news of his death broke, dignitaries from around the world commented on his life and legacy, including current and former secretaries of states, presidents and foreign diplomats.
Henry Kissinger holds the Bavarian Order of Maximilian during celebrations marking his 100th birthday. The highest honor in the Free State was presented to him earlier by Bavaria’s Minister President Söder. Fürth. Kissinger’s birthplace held the celebration to mark the 100th birthday of its honorary citizen. (Daniel Vogl/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the man currently in the position that Kissinger held across two presidencies, said Kissinger “set the standard” for being the senior U.S. diplomat.
“Secretary Kissinger really set the standard for everyone involved in this job,” Blinken said in Israel, during a meeting with Israel President Isaac Herzog. “I was very privileged to get his counsel many times, including as recently as about a month ago. He was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice. Few people were better students of history. Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly said Kissinger “left an incredible mark on America’s history and the world.”
“Henry Kissinger was a model of service and a great American,” Pompeo said. “From the day he came to the United States as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger dedicated his life to serving this great country and keeping America safe.”
He added: “He left an indelible mark on America’s history and the world. I will always be grateful for his gracious advice and help during my own time as Secretary. Always supportive and always informed, his wisdom made me better and more prepared after every one of our conversations.”
Henry Kissinger was a model of service and a great American.
From the day he came to the United States as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger dedicated his life to serving this great country and keeping America safe.
Former President George W. Bush also commented on Kissinger: “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices of Henry Kissinger. He worked in the Administrations of two Presidents and counseled many more.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement after the death of Kissinger, who he called “a great statesman, scholar, and friend.”
“Dr. Kissinger’s departure marks the end of an era, one in which his formidable intellect and diplomatic prowess shaped not only the course of American foreign policy but also had a profound impact on the global stage,” Netanyahu wrote.
It is with a heavy heart that I mourn the passing of a great statesman, scholar, and friend, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who left us at the age of 100.
Dr. Kissinger's departure marks the end of an era, one in which his formidable intellect and diplomatic prowess shaped not only the… pic.twitter.com/JdUEoHbA6e
The Israeli leader also described meeting with Kissinger just months ago in New York.
“I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Kissinger on numerous occasions, the most recent being just two months ago in New York. Each meeting with him was not just a lesson in diplomacy but also a masterclass in statesmanship,” Netanyahu said. “His understanding of the complexities of international relations and his unique insights into the challenges facing our world were unparalleled.”
He continued: “Henry Kissinger was not just a diplomat; he was a thinker who believed in the power of ideas and the importance of intellectual capital in public life. His contributions to the field of international relations and his efforts in navigating some of the most challenging diplomatic terrains are a testament to his extraordinary capabilities.”
“His legacy will continue to inspire and guide future generations of leaders and diplomats,” Netanyahu concluded.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People, Nov. 8, 2018 in Beijing. (Thomas Peter – Pool/Getty Images)
Chinese President Xi Jinping and senior Chinese officials commented on Kissinger’s death and sent messages of condolence to President Biden and others after his passing, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Thursday, Reuters reported.
Kissinger visited China more than 100 times, most recently meeting with Xi during a surprise trip to Beijing in July.
“During his lifetime, Dr. Kissinger attached great importance to Sino-US relations and believed that Sino-US relations were crucial to the peace and prosperity of China, the United States and the world,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin. “China and the United States must inherit and carry forward Dr. Kissinger’s strategic vision, political courage, and diplomatic wisdom, adhere to the important consensus reached by the Chinese and American presidents at their meeting in San Francisco, adhere to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, and promote the sound, stable and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations.”
During a news conference, the spokesperson said Kissinger made “historic” contributions to the legacy of early China-U.S. relations. He said China would remember him for his “sincere devotion and important contribution.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People, Nov. 8, 2018, in Beijing, China. (Thomas Peter – Pool/Getty Images)
Kissinger’s impact across the globe is evident decades after he left office and his foreign policies continue to shape global relations.
Hungarian President Katalin Novák described Kissinger, after his death, as “one of those who shaped international politics and so, history, in the second half of the 20th century.”
She added: “A great life, a great legacy. His call to end the war in Ukraine through a peace deal crafted in negotiations remains pertinent even today. Rest in peace.”
A formal vote by the full House to authorize an impeachment inquiry will make “for a stronger case” against President Joe Biden for peddling influence through his family’s foreign business dealings, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Thursday. Jordan chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which is helping the Oversight and Accountability Committee probe the Bidens’ business dealings.
It was reported Wednesday that House Republicans are considering holding a formal vote next month to authorize the impeachment inquiry as the party looks to legitimize its investigation into wrongdoing.
“We would like to go to a formal vote for an impeachment inquiry. You don’t have to do that. We’re in an impeachment inquiry,” Jordan told “Wake Up America” co-host Rob Finnerty. “
“The speaker of the House said that there’s no requirement, but it’s a stronger case if you have to go to court to fight these things.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed some caution about the impeachment push, warning against a rush to judgment. But he says the evidence already uncovered by Republican chairmen is “alarming.”
Jordan told Finnerty that work remained before the House could consider an impeachment vote.
“We learned so much when we actually had Devon Archer, one of his [Hunter Biden’s] business partners, under oath in a deposition earlier this year … there’s a handful of key people that I think we do need to talk to, and then we make a decision based on all the facts, and what we may learn from those individuals, and how that squares with other testimony we’ve received and the documents.”
Jordan stressed that getting to a vote on impeachment “depends on the facts” and must be done properly.
“I do think this impeachment inquiry vote that we want to take in the House, and I think we’re gonna have the votes for it,” he said, “I think will be helpful when we inevitably have to go to court to get documents and to get these depositions done in the sequence that they need to be done,” the chair said.
Before his appearance concluded, Jordan was asked whether embattled Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., should be expelled from the House. The chamber is expected to vote Friday on whether to expel Santos, who faces criminal corruption charges and new accusations that he misspent campaign money.
“I’m against it,” Jordan said. “I think that’s always a decision between the person in office and the voters back in his or her district. That’s how our system works, and we have due process. I’m against it.”
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“We’re talking about the Seventh Amendment and the right to a jury trial, and that—that is an important and ancient right, too,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said Wednesday during oral arguments in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy. (Photo: Rich Legg/E+/Getty Images)
Jack Fitzhenry is a senior legal policy analyst in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies of The Heritage Foundation.
Will ill-advised precedent or fundamental constitutional principles prevail when the right to a jury trial is at stake?
After two hours of oral argument Wednesday morning in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, that was the important issue confronting the Supreme Court. That, and whether the modern desire to empower the administrative state overcomes yet another constitutional check on the growth of an invasive central government. That’s because, as Alexis de Tocqueville aptly said, “The institution of the jury … places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed … and not in that of the government.”
The case arises from the SEC’s efforts to prosecute hedge fund manager George Jarkesy. The SEC alleges that he overestimated the value of his assets and made false claims to investors.
Tort of Fraud Under Common Law
The wrongs Jarkesy allegedly committed are strikingly similar to the centuries-old tort of fraud under common law. Had the commission or anyone else sued Jarkesy for his misrepresentations in court, the Seventh Amendment would have guaranteed Jarkesy the right to have a jury decide his case. Yet, the SEC chose not to go to court. Instead, it pursued its enforcement action under federal law through an in-house proceeding, in which an administrative law judge appointed by the commission would decide all questions, including whether Jarkesy was guilty of securities fraud.
To no one’s surprise, the commission enjoys a decidedly better win rate when one of its own is deciding the dispute.
Jarkesy challenged the commission’s decisions in court, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor on three grounds: First, the agency proceeding violated Jarkesy’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial; second, Congress had impermissibly delegated lawmaking authority to the commission; and third, the SEC’s administrative law judges were unconstitutionally protected from removal by the president.
The government appealed all three rulings to the Supreme Court, but it was the jury question that dominated nearly the entire oral argument.
‘Public Right’
Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher of the U.S. Department of Justice, representing the commission, maintained that the Seventh Amendment imposes no restriction on the executive branch’s ability to enforce federal law through administrative tribunals so long as the executive is enforcing a “public right,” one created by Congress and integrated within a federal regulatory scheme.
Here, Fletcher argued, federal law doesn’t protect the right of an individual to recover for losses caused by fraud, but rather, the public’s right to securities markets free from deception.
If the distinction sounds too fine, Fletcher at least had solid support in the Supreme Court’s past decisions; specifically, the 1977 decision in Atlas Roofing v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
There, the justices blessed both Congress’ creation of statutory rights closely related to the common law tort of negligence and the decision to have these new federal rights adjudicated in juryless administrative courts.
Yet the availability of that precedent did little to assuage the justices’ concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts posed hypotheticals searching for some limit on the government’s ability to create public rights and thereby avoid the Seventh Amendment’s jury right.
What About Car Crashes, Medical Malpractice?
Would the government’s interest in the interstate highway system allow it to implement legislation requiring all cases arising from vehicle accidents to be adjudicated in an administrative court? Would the government’s interest in regulating health care permit Congress to send all medical malpractice cases to a juryless tribunal?
Fletcher conceded that under Atlas Roofing, those scenarios were constitutionally permissible if Congress decided that the traditional tort claims covering accidents and medical injuries did not adequately protect the public.
Justice Neil Gorsuch took the theme further. In his hypothetical, the government had revived the long-reviled Sedition Act, a 1798 statute that criminalized criticism of the government and was enacted by the Federalist-controlled Congress to target members of the opposing Democratic-Republican Party.
The hypothetical Congress had assigned all defamation claims under the new Sedition Act to an administrative judge, who would decide them without a jury. Gorsuch asked Fletcher whether the lack of a jury for persons accused of defaming the government raised a constitutional problem.
Answering by Evasion
Palpably uncomfortable with the question, Fletcher sought to evade it by insisting that the First Amendment would prevent the hypothetical. But an audibly frustrated Gorsuch would not permit that evasion: “Forget about the First Amendment … too easy. We’re talking about the Seventh Amendment and the right to a jury trial, and that—that is an important and ancient right, too.”
Lacking further avenues for retreat, Fletcher fell back on Atlas Roofing and insisted that the Sedition Act scenario raised no Seventh Amendment problems because the jury right applies only in courts, not in administrative tribunals.
In answering one question, Fletcher raised another, however.
Justice Samuel Alito asked:
Doesn’t that seem like a pretty patent evasion of the Seventh Amendment to say this protection, which was regarded at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights as sufficiently important to merit inclusion in the Constitution, can be nullified simply by changing the label that is attached to a tribunal?
Fletcher resisted Alito’s concern, noting that Article III of the Constitution as well as the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment set some (indeterminate) limit on Congress’ ability to consign claims to juryless forums.
But Alito commented that whatever protections Article III and the Due Process Clause provide, the Constitution’s ratifiers found them inadequate because they insisted on adding the Seventh Amendment’s jury requirement.
Arguments Unmade Are Forfeited
The questions Fletcher fielded from the bench indicated a broad skepticism about the correctness of Atlas Roofing, but Jarkesy had not asked the court to overrule that case.
Arguments not made in the lower courts are typically forfeited. Constrained by that omission, Michael McColloch, counsel for Jarkesy, had to argue that Jarkesy could win even under Atlas Roofing.
McColloch maintained that Atlas Roofing permitted juryless decisions of new federal rights, whereas in this case, Congress simply codified a right closely analogous to common law fraud.
He argued further that the court had undermined Atlas Roofing in subsequent decisions, leaving Congress less leeway to avoid jury trials by creating public rights.
Two possible answers arose from McColloch’s colloquy with the court.
The first is that securities law allows the federal government to pursue conduct that would not meet the definition of fraud, but the specific conduct for which it pursued Jarkesy was quintessential fraud. Therefore, the commission could pursue non-fraudulent misrepresentations internally, but it must bring traditional fraud claims in courts, where jury rights attach.
The second possibility was posited by Alito, who mused that the elements of the federal cause of action may be a logical subset of the common law claim. If so, the logical connection between the federal right and the common law would be close enough to require the protection of the Seventh Amendment.
Questions Not Always Indicative of Votes
The court is still months away from a decision in this case, and the tenor of questions are not always reliable indicators of a justice’s vote. Roberts and Alito, as well as Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas, sounded consistently skeptical of the government’s arguments. Jarkesy’s failure to ask for the overruling of Atlas Roofing, however, may leave them without an avenue for channeling those frustrations into doctrinal change.
Meanwhile, questions from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated an inclination to hold that Atlas Roofing resolves Jarkesy’s case in the commission’s favor.
Several justices, including Kagan, were concerned by the apparent ease with which the federal government can avoid the right to a jury trial. Still, it’s uncertain that Jarkesy has distinguished his case from Atlas Roofing, and it is unlikely the court will risk overruling that case when it was not asked to do so.
But counterbalancing the regard for precedent is the regard for the judiciary’s traditional role as defender of the guarantees integral to American liberty. The founding generation placed the utmost importance on the guarantee of jury rights even in civil cases. That the federal government can so easily render that right nugatory would surely have dismayed them.
Perhaps the current court, sharing that dismay, will reconsider its approach in Atlas Roofing and ensure that the Seventh Amendment cannot be so easily evaded.
Bidenomics is a colossal disaster, yet the Democrats continue to try and pull the wool over Americans’ eyes, but it’s hard to hide the high cost of living. The average family has to come up with an additional $11,400 a year to have the same standard of living they had in January 2021. Biden brags about job growth but fails to reveal that many folks have to work 2 to 3 jobs to keep up in his economy.
Like in this cartoon, Biden’s Christmas tree falling over is symbolic of his entire presidency.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Not a week goes by in which America’s ethically bankrupt media aren’t pushing lies about the state of the country’s elections, and their latest attack on Republican voters is no different.
On Wednesday, Stateline joined its fellow leftist “news” outlets in fomenting a Democrat-manufactured conspiracy theory that U.S. election workers everywhere are facing constant harassment from constituents. The insinuation, of course, is that these threats are coming from conservative voters who dared to raise questions about the conduct of the 2020 election.
At the center of Stateline’s hit piece is the recent spate of letters filled with fentanyl and other substances sent to local election offices in states such as Washington, Nevada, and Oregon. Instead of disclosing to its readers the evidence indicating the letters were potentially sent by far-left radicals tied to Antifa, Stateline immediately pivoted from reporting on the issue to advancing the left’s “election workers are under attack” narrative and pinning the blame on former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“Since the 2020 presidential election, state and local election officials nationwide have been bombarded with threats, as lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies around ‘rigged’ elections have fueled conspiracy theories and inspired violent reactions to the bureaucrats and temporary workers who run the United States’ democratic process,” the outlet claimed in hyperbolic fashion.
JUST IN: Video emerges of woman testifying that multiple absentee ballots we’re being received in sequential order with the date of November 0, 2020..
As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. In November 2022, for example, The Washington Post published an article containing assertions by Colorado Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office that it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” Unsurprisingly, the Post gave no indication that it bothered to fact-check these claims.
Just like the Post, however, Stateline was forced to include data from President Biden’s own Department of Justice showing that Democrats’ sky-is-falling elections narrative is total bunk.
In its article, the outlet discloses that, “As of late August, the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 people with making threats to election workers and political candidates since the task force was created in 2021, so far leading to nine convictions that came with yearslong criminal sentences.” August 2022 testimony from a DOJ official and a subsequent agency press release further revealed that out of roughly 1,000 communications directed toward election officials that were deemed “threatening and harassing” by the Election Threats Task Force since the force’s inception, only about 11 percent of those contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.”
Got that? In a country with a population of more than 335 million people, only about 100 individuals have been investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them have been officially charged. That doesn’t exactly sound like a widespread crisis.
For a corporate press that loves to toss around the term “conspiracy theory” whenever reporting on legitimate Republican concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections, leftist media outlets such as the Post and Stateline are perfectly fine with fomenting their own conspiracy theories to dishonestly smear their political opponents. In reality, Democrats couldn’t care less about the “security” of American elections. All they care about is acquiring and maintaining power.
The media-wide effort to cast Republicans as threats to “democracy” isn’t just designed to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. It’s to disincentivize conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.
From elections to lawfare, Democrats have no interest in playing by the same rules as everyone else. And if that means they have to recruit their media allies to push debunked propaganda about Republicans, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.
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
Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday.
According to the heavily redacted document issued to then-Twitter in January, the court ordered the social media giant to forfeit a bevy of information regarding Trump’s account, including “advertising information, including advertising IDs, ad activity, and ad topic preferences,” as well as IP addresses “used to create, login, and use the account” and privacy and account settings.
The warrant also demanded information such as Trump’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.
Though the warrant was first covered in August, it was again released as part of a court order after numerous media organizations filed to obtain the document to shed light on the Smith-led special counsel’s “investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol,” according to the New York Post. Smith previously indicted Trump in August on several bogus charges related to the former president’s challenging of the 2020 election results in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021.
But it wasn’t just Trump’s Twitter account that Smith and his cronies were targeting. The special counsel’s warrant also sought data on Twitter users who interacted with the former president’s account. Among the information Smith sought was a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” during the aforementioned timeframe. Smith similarly demanded that Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, fork over a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account.
Smith and his team went even further, seeking to acquire data on Twitter users who engaged with Trump’s tweets in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. This included “all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump], as well as all tweets that include the username associated with [Trump’s account] (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”
According to the Post, Smith’s warrant was issued to then-Twitter “along with a nondisclosure order, instructing the company not to notify Trump about the search.” Twitter initially bucked Smith’s demand, arguing that to forfeit such information to the government constituted a violation of the First Amendment. The social media giant ultimately complied with the warrant but was fined $350,000 for failing to meet the special counsel’s demands by deadline.
In the heavily redacted court filing opposing Twitter’s legal attempts to notify Trump of the search, Smith baselessly claimed that telling the former president about the unprecedented seizure “would result in a statutorily cognizable harm,” as Trump is “a sophisticated actor with an expansive platform.”
“The [Non-Disclosure Order] was granted based on facts showing that notifying the former president would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial,” said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Nearly every other word listed under “The Non-Disclosure Order” section of the filing is redacted.
Smith’s seizure of Trump’s personal social media information and those who engaged with the then-president’s posts isn’t all that surprising given the special counsel’s weaponization of the government against Trump thus far. In addition to indicting Trump, Smith filed a motion in September to institute a gag order on the 45th president, effectively stifling his First Amendment right to criticize the very government attempting to silence him. That gag order was ultimately approved by D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, a left-wing Obama appointee with a track record of highly partisan court rulings.
Trump’s legal team has since appealed the order to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and has threatened to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court given the “unconstitutional” nature of the mandate.
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
A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. (Photo Illustration: Paul Bradbury/Getty Images)
Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called academic achievement gap by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.
As Evanston, Illinois, School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.”
Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, it offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.
Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.
Of course, federal nondiscrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.
“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”
Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about 1 in 9 black students and 1 in 7 Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.
Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.
“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand.
In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights nondiscrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.
“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”
Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the City Council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past … ”
Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists—the backbone of the abolition movement—and incorporated in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.
Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”
Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”
Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students—white, black, and Latino—who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.
“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”
“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”
“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told The Washington Stand. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years.
“Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”
“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”
America’s educational establishment—such as national teachers unions and education training programs—is pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. It instructs students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.
Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.
Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”
This article is part one of Crisis in New York, a series examining the effects public policies have on the city’s already strained housing, law enforcement and drug services.
NEW YORK CITY — Frank Tammaro, a 94-year-old Army veteran, loved the senior center he’d called home for five years until he was told to find somewhere new to live.
“I felt horrible,” Tammaro told Fox News. “It’s no joke getting thrown out of a house.”
Months later, after two moves and an injury that put him in the hospital, the senior was living with his daughter when he learned migrants were moving into his old residence, free of charge.
A lifelong New Yorker, Tammaro says he grew up in the “slums” of the Lower East Side during the ‘30s and ’40s. “I do get upset when I see them handing out all this money and all these things, and I’m paying taxes and getting kicked out,” he said. “I’ve never got anything from the city. Or the state.”
Tammaro planned to live out his years at the Island Shores Senior Residence when notices went up in September 2022 informing residents the facility was shutting down and they needed to pack up and leave by March. Many of the 53 seniors living there, including Tammaro, ignored the letters for months until it was brought to their attention that they only had weeks to find somewhere else to live.
“It was scary,” Tammaro recalled. “Very scary. Especially when I don’t get around like I used to. I didn’t know where I was going.”
The facility’s owner, a New York City nonprofit called Homes for the Homeless, said in a statement that it intended to sell Island Shores “to focus on its core mission of serving homeless families” and the preferred buyer “would be another senior operator.”
Staff assured the upset seniors that Island Shores would likely be sold and reopened. However, Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, was skeptical of the claim and reached out to the building’s management for answers.
Frank Tammaro lived in Island Shores Senior Residence for five years before he was told he and all the other residents needed to move out by March 1. (Fox News/Megan Myers)
“We knew something was going to go in there,” Annunziata said. “They kept saying, ‘oh, they’re going to sell it. They’re going to sell it.’ That’s what they kept telling me.”
During the Korean War, Tammaro served stateside for two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps fixing telephone lines and improving communication between military camps. He was one of eight veterans who lived in Island Shores before it shut down.
“I was not in combat,” Tammaro said. “But these boys that went over and went into combat — and now they’re all settled in there with their lives and everything else — and they’re all disrupted, it isn’t fair.”
When he was evicted from Island Shores, the 94-year-old had difficulty finding a new assisted living facility that suited his needs.
“I was pretty slow getting out,” Tammaro said. “I figured they were gonna have my luggage on the curb.”
The 94-year-old veteran was living with his daughter just a few minutes from Island Shores when he learned the senior center was being converted into a temporary shelter for migrants. (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers )
Shortly after moving to another senior residence, Tammaro had a fall that landed him in the hospital. He told his daughter he didn’t want to return to the new facility.
“He hated it there,” Annunziata said. “And for somebody his age, why should he live the rest of his life someplace he didn’t like?”
In the end, Annunziata moved her father into her home in Midland Beach, New York, where she cares for him around the clock.
“I can’t leave him home alone. … I raised my kids already. They’re all grown up,” she said. “I mean, he’s a piece of cake, but still he’s 94 years old.”
In August, Tammaro found out along with the rest of the community that Homes for the Homeless had made an arrangement with city hall to move migrants into Island Shores.
The facility was one of 200 buildings converted into emergency shelters to house some of the 130,000 migrants that landed in New York City after crossing the southern border since October 2022. The influx of asylum seekers has stretched the city’s budget and many of its services to their limits, with Mayor Eric Adams saying they are in “a desperate environment” during his trip to Mexico in October. And with 10,000 new refugees entering the city each month, he said there is “no end” in sight.
In September, 15 asylum-seeking families moved into the Island Shores. As the news spread, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the facility, and 10 people were arrested for trying to block a bus with migrants from reaching the building, according to law enforcement.
Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, is still angry that her father was kicked out of his home and said the situation is “not fair to anybody.” (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers)
“I don’t understand it at all. It’s not fair to anybody,” Annunziata said. “These migrants, they’re getting everything. They’re getting everything and I can’t get nothing for [Tammaro]. It angers me.”
She said she’s struggled to get help for her father. His insurance rejected any long-term request for care.
“I can’t even get him an aide. I only could get him an aide for 30 days and then they cancel it,” Annunziata told Fox News. “So what, he has to pay for it then?”
“Meanwhile, [migrants] get everything. And he’s not entitled to anything,” she added
After the “horrible experience,” Tammaro has settled in with his daughter, only a few minutes away from his old home, which is now called the Midland Beach Migrant Center.
“I felt bitter at the beginning,” Tammaro told Fox News. “But I’m satisfied where I am now.”
“I was satisfied where I was until they threw me out,” he added. “But making the best of a bad situation, that’s what we’re doing.”
Annunziata remains angry about how her father was treated.
“They’re worried about the migrants more than they’re worried about the U.S. citizens,” she said.
Homes for the Homeless declined to comment.
Megan Myers is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals.
Democrats and Biden are in a bit of a panic as more Black votes are shifting to Trump, according to the latest polls. Some, because of Biden’s mental deterioration and his age, but also because of how badly Biden has handled his job with the economy, crime, foreign affairs, and the border. One mantra expressed by some in the black community is “the more they Indict, the more we unite,” which could also explain their shift toward Trump.
The Left labeled Larry Elder “the Black face of white supremacy. but how will they label whole communities, that have left the Democrat party?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Since 2021, the Biden Department of Homeland Security has abandoned efforts to deter, detain, and deport illegal aliens in favor of letting in as many as possible. This continues to cost America, from our border towns to our biggest cities. Pictured: Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., speaks at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol to call for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Feb. 1. (Photo: Tom Williams, CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)
Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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The Biden administration would have you believe that its purportedly “safe, orderly, and humane” immigration policy comes at no cost to you, the American citizen. But the truth is just another casualty of its open border agenda.
Joe Biden has presided over an unprecedented degradation of U.S. sovereignty, as our laws no longer determine who gets in. Instead, aliens do—just by showing up. This loss of sovereignty at the border can literally apply to territory as well: Recently, the Texas Department of Public Safety had to move Mexican cartel gunmen off Fronton Island in the middle of the Rio Grande.
Since January 2021, the Biden Department of Homeland Security has abandoned the effort to deter, detain, and deport illegal aliens in favor of letting in as many as Congress will fund. This “Mayorkas Migration Machine” (I named it after our feckless secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas) grinds away nationally and locally, from the border town of McAllen, Texas (which I just visited), to up north and our failing big cities. And the bills are coming due.
In New York, the homeless shelters are full and city officials are running out of makeshift places to put the relentless stream of illegal aliens. Mayor Eric Adams has announced cuts to city services on which citizens rely—including police, education, and libraries—to pay to feed and house them, and the City Council seems likely to approve them.
Chicago plans to build a giant tent camp to hold 2,000 of the illegal aliens waiting for free housing. This will cost over $30 million, on top of the $250 million the city already spent this year on illegal aliens, such as those who are housed in a K-12 school.
Locals are outraged—maybe because, according to Fox News, other migrant shelters in the city have been prone to “loitering, engaging in late-night partying, prostitution, littering, and even fighting with community members.” Chicago’s budget for 2024 is already half a billion in the red, but taxpayers, not illegal aliens, will pay this cost. When the city says “equity,” it means treating newly arrived aliens who’ve never paid taxes better than Chicagoans.
Massachusetts, a “sanctuary” state nicknamed “Taxachussetts” for its historically high taxes, finally capped its free housing of illegal aliens at 7,500 people. But they keep coming. Boston’s Logan Airport has been informally housing families flown from the border for months.
The airport’s manager gave the excuse that “they’re paying passengers”—but who’s paying? All of us are, through FEMA and numerous other government grants paid to nongovernmental organizations that transport, shelter, feed, advise, and provide other “wrap-around” services to illegal aliens coming to the U.S.
Local Texans used to swim, boat, and recreate on the Rio Grande near McAllen. No longer. On a recent fact-finding mission, I visited the Hidalgo County water pumping station, which owns property on the river. Its employees have been shot at by cartel thugs on the other side.
The river was devoid of civilian traffic. Cartels battle each other for control of the Mexican side and the lucrative payoffs from illegal aliens crossing through their turf. Dead bodies—executed victims of the narco-traffic wars—regularly wash up on the banks. The water authority had to install a screen to keep the corpses out of their pumps.
Drug cartels have sabotaged Border Patrol boats by stringing cables underwater to destroy outboard engines and at head height to kill or injure American officers. The Border Patrol boats now use water-jet engines and are equipped with twin wires from the bow to the top of the command box to divert strung cables.
At the airport in McAllen, I saw several families who appeared to be from Haiti camped out on the floor, waiting for their free flight north. Sources at the airport told me that 100 such people go through security and board flights every day with nothing more than their Notice to Appear—a letter from DHS telling them to go to immigration court at some point in the future—as identification. The Transportation Security Administration is required to accept this worthless document from foreigners, although you and I need a “Real ID” such as a state driver’s license or passport to board a plane.
An airline employee told me that her early morning flight to Dallas is usually half full of women and children from the border. That plane holds about 160 people. That’s just for one flight, one airline, one border airport, one day.
On my early afternoon flight to Dallas, I sat across from two young men with neat clothes, Puma sneakers, and fashionable haircuts, both incessantly on their late-model phones. They had Haitian passports and the telltale folders of travel itineraries and documents given by nongovernmental organizations to released illegal aliens for their onward journeys further into the U.S.
Who were they? What did they do back in Haiti?
I have no idea, and neither does DHS. Haiti’s government is feckless, and civil order has given way to high levels of murder, theft, and kidnapping. But although many poor Haitians are victims of all this, someone is doing the murdering, too. So how does DHS know the two guys on my plane and thousands more like them who they let in each week are average citizens or victims and not the perpetrators fleeing the consequences of their own crimes?
They don’t.
Lacking any way to verify identities and check foreign criminal records in most cases, DHS is forced to trust the information provided by people who have everything to gain and nothing to lose by lying. It is a statistical certainty that some of the millions paroled in or released at the border will have committed acts at home that render them legally ineligible to be admitted into the United States. The high risk of this percentage of aliens re-offending is now borne by the American communities into which DHS is sending them.
To take but one example, in July 2023, Border Patrol caught a 25-year old man entering the U.S. illegally in Hidalgo, gave him his Notice to Appear, and let him go. Three months later, Boston police arrested him for assaulting a member of his family—probably before he even made his first immigration court appearance. Did he have a criminal record in Haiti that could have warned DHS or Boston police that he had a history of violence? It’s too late to ask now.
In recent testimony before the Senate, Mayorkas claimed that he had paroled into the U.S. over 240,000 aliens on a “case-by-case” rather than blanket basis. This is simply not credible. He’s just rolling the dice on the safety of the American people.
The cold hard truth is Biden’s policies have surrendered control of our borders to Mexican cartels and illegal aliens and foisted all the ensuing costs and risks onto our taxpayers.
Maryland’s attorney general suspends Zainab Chaudry from the state’s hate crimes commission after she compareds Israel to Nazi Germany in Facebook posts. Pictured: Chaudry, center, joins others from the Council on American-Islamic Relations for a press conference outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 25, 2015. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Maryland’s new commission to “prevent and respond to hate crime activity” has met only once, but one member already has been suspended—for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. This incident seems to echo a trend: Many of those on the Left who rush to police “hate” often spread their own kind of hate.
Zainab Chaudry, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Maryland chapter and one of the commission’s first 10 members, described the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7 as an “uprising” and condemned the state of Israel as oppressive and worse.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, last week suspended Chaudry from the newly launched Commission on Hate Crimes Response and Prevention.
The Maryland Legislature passed HB 1066 in April and Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, signed it into law in May. The law established the Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention to prevent and respond to hate crimes and “evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.”
“The commission has only met once, with its inaugural meeting on Sept. 6, 2023,” Brown noted in a Nov. 21 press release. “Ms. Chaudry’s posts on her personal social media since Oct. 7, in these very early days of the commission, have challenged the commission’s ability to do its work.”
Brown said he determined that Chaudry’s “social media posts risk disrupting the work and mission of the Commission,” so he temporarily suspended her, assigned staff to write a values statement to protect the commission from similar scandals, and urged members of the panel to “exercise great care in their communications and conduct.”
What led Brown to this conclusion?
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists slaughtered about 1,200 Israelis, including women and children, and took more than 240 hostages. Horrific videos of terrorists bragging about killing Jews hit social media. Hamas terrorists slaughtered parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They raped women before killing them and mutilating their bodies. Terrorists bragged about this in horrifying detail when questioned after the fact by Israel Defense Forces.
On social media, Chaudry described these horrific events as “the uprising in Palestine,” urging readers to “keep in mind that they are a people who are illegally occupied.” She added that “the thirst for freedom is an innate instinct we’re born with.”
“Resistance is a reminder that it can’t be quenched through might and force,” she wrote.
Chaudry did not condemn the Hamas terrorists or lament the Israeli dead. Rather, she apparently praised the attacks in Israel as an “uprising” of freedom.
Chaudry’s later posts echoed the same ideas.
On Oct. 9, she compared “Palestinian freedom fighters” to “Ukrainian freedom fighters.”
She also suggested that a focus on the Israeli victims of the terrorists amounted to centering “white pain” in “global consciences.”
After appearing to celebrate the terrorist attacks that killed the most Jews in one day since the Holocaust in the 1940s, Chaudry compared the Jewish state to Germany’s Nazi regime during World War II that sought to eradicate Jews from the face of the Earth.
She shared two photos of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany: a 1936 photo of a Nazi parade and a 2023 photo of the gate lit up in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.
Chaudry posted the photos with the message: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”
Chaudry has not shown remorse for these posts, which remain public on her Facebook page. The Council on American Islamic Relations has not condemned them either. Instead, it mobilized nearly 4,000 petitioners to demand Chaudry’s reinstatement to Maryland’s hate crimes commission.
“There is no conflict between condemning the Israeli government’s war crimes overseas and standing up against all forms of hate here at home, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism,” Chaudry said in a formal statement after her suspension by Brown, the Free State’s attorney general. “False smears from anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim extremists will not stop me from standing up for justice here and abroad.”
Supporters wrote in a Nov. 22 letter to Brown that they “completely agree” with Chaudry’s quote.
“As the only American Muslim on the Attorney General’s Hate Crimes Commission, Zainab Chaudry’s voice was critical in representing our community’s concerns to your office,” the petitioners wrote. “Even a temporary suspension of her role is harmful and completely unjustified. Like Zainab, many members of the Maryland community have been critical of the Israel government’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Since last night, dozens of Maryland Muslim organizations and over 3,800 petitioners have called on @OAGMaryland Anthony Brown to reverse his decision to temporarily suspend our MD director Dr. Zainab Chaudry from the Hate Crimes Commission under pressure from anti-Muslim &… pic.twitter.com/eob0t9FFSL
Chaudry may disagree with Israel and condemn its actions, but in what world is it acceptable to compare the world’s only Jewish state with the genocidal regime that sought to eliminate all Jews?
Rather than condemning Hamas for slaughtering women and children, she blamed Israel. She did not even acknowledge that Israel’s military takes key steps to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas deliberately stages terrorist activities in civilian buildings such as hospitals to use civilians as human shields.
Israel’s military objective, stated from the beginning, has been the eradication of Hamas’ military capabilities, to prevent another Oct. 7 pogrom. A Hamas terrorist infamously called his parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed 10 Jews!” Israelis do not call their parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed Palestinians.”
Although Chaudry is correct that criticizing Israel is not ipso facto a form of antisemitism, this blatant double standard, and the extreme hyperbole of comparing Israel to the Nazis, is absolutely antisemitic. Yet the Left’s intersectional ideology gives Chaudry a smokescreen for her hatred.
As Chaudry’s statement about “white pain” reveals, she considers Israelis part of the “white” oppressor class, putting the Jews—the No. 1 example of an oppressed people group throughout history—in the same category as the Nazis. The Marxist lens of analyzing every conflict along oppressor-versus-oppressed lines leads her to moral insanity, a moral insanity that inspires hatred.
This moral insanity reminds me of the perverse accusations of the Southern Poverty Law Center. As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC began as a noble civil rights nonprofit, helping poor people in the South. It later expanded its operations to suing truly hateful groups such as the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, and then expanded that effort to “monitor” conservative groups as if they were themselves hateful.
Now, religious freedom groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Freedom Law Center, and the Family Research Council find themselves on the SPLC’s “hate group” list alongside Klan chapters and plotted on a map with neo-Nazis. Groups that call for the enforcement of immigration law, such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Dustin Inman Society, find themselves on the same map. So do parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
In the name of fighting hate, the SPLC has inspired hate—and even terrorism. In 2012, a man used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Family Research Council for a mass shooting. After a brave security guard foiled his plan, the gunman confessed to the FBI that he planned to slaughter everyone in the building.
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former SPLC employee revealed that the organization’s “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam,” but that hasn’t stopped government agencies from relying upon those accusations.
The FBI infamously used the SPLC to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in a since-rescinded January memo. In 2019, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced a hate crimes unit “to fight against hate crimes and the many hate groups … in our state.” Her announcement cited the SPLC hate map and highlighted an area of the state that includes the headquarters of the Judeo-Christian group American Freedom Law Center.
The American Freedom Law Center sued Nessel, arguing that the announcement violated the group’s rights to free speech under the First Amendment. The center, a nonprofit public interest law firm, principally defends the First Amendment rights of conservative Christians and Jews.
Robert Muise, the center’s co-founder, recounted how the SPLC attacked him.
“I was on active duty in the Marine Corps for 13 years as an officer. I’m a father of 12 and a devout Catholic,” Muise told me in 2019. “They had me listed as an antisemite when my co-founder is a yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew!”
Much of the Left’s “hate” monitoring boils down to an excuse to demonize conservatives and exclude them from the conversation. This ideological policing often seems to miss antisemitism when it doesn’t outright enable it.
Many civil rights commissions and hate crimes commissions are slanted heavily to the Left, leading to perverse outcomes. Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who refused to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding, found himself prosecuted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Phillips won his case because members of that commission had demonstrated hostility toward Phillips’ faith.
The Maryland hate crimes commission shows a clear leftward tilt. It includes left-leaning organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Pride Coalition of Maryland, but not any right-leaning organization.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, Chaudry’s organization, has worked with the SPLC to urge charitable institutions to blacklist “Anti-Muslim hate groups,” including the American Freedom Law Center.
Until hate crime commissions start including conservative members, conservatives rightly will view these efforts with skepticism. Brown not only should refuse to reinstate Chaudry, but also take the opportunity of the vacancy to find a conservative voice for the commission.
The Hamas mantra is “from the river to the sea” to the Jews in Israel, but with Biden and the Democrat’s open border policies, how long before it comes to America? Many people on the terrorist watch list have already been apprehended at the border, and they suspect many more than that have escaped into the country. So, more than likely, it isn’t a matter of if it is a matter of when the mantra will be “from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” with terrorist attacks happening on a grander scale than what happened on 9-11
Biden and the Democrats seem to be so blinded by their Globalist Leftist ideology they don’t care or can’t see the danger.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A teacher allegedly attended a pro-Israel rally in Queens on Oct. 9. Students at the Hillcrest High School in Jamaica – where the teacher is employed – reportedly found out that the instructor participated in the pro-Israel demonstration. Someone purportedly found the teacher’s Facebook profile that had a photo of the instructor at a pro-Israel rally in Queens holding a sign that read: “I stand with Israel.”
Just after 11 a.m. on Monday, the students reportedly stormed the hallways of the school to protest the teacher having a pro-Israel viewpoint. The pre-planned protest allegedly deteriorated into a riot. The pro-Palestinian students reportedly attempted to barge into the teacher’s classroom despite school staffers guarding the room.
The New York Post reported, “School administrators and the NYPD, which responded to the school at about 11:20 a.m., got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door, another educator said.”
A senior told the outlet, “Everyone was yelling ‘Free Palestine!'”
A ninth-grader said, “Everyone was screaming ‘(The teacher) needs to go!’ They want her fired.”
A student said that teens had found out where the teacher lives, her phone number, and other personal information.
A video of the unrest at the school was posted on social media.
One comment on a TikTok video called the teacher “cracker ass bitch.”
The NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau was reportedly asked to investigate possible threats against the school.
City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Queens) said, “Whether it was one student or multiple students who did or said something, whatever the trigger was, something happened. And I know from my many years on the City Council that the counterterrorism task force is not engaged unless they believe it is potentially a serious situation.”
The teacher – who didn’t want to be identified for her own safety – told the New York Post, “I have been a teacher for 23 years in the New York City public school system — for the last seven at Hillcrest High School. I have worked hard to be supportive of our entire student body and an advocate for our community, and was shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week.”
The teacher added, “No one should ever feel unsafe at school — students and teachers alike.”
“It’s my hope in the days ahead we can find a way to have meaningful discussions about challenging topics with respect for each other’s diverse perspectives and shared humanity,” she continued. “Unless we can learn to see each other as people we will never be able to create a safe learning community.”
New York City Mayor reacted to the anti-Semitic unrest by saying:
The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated in any of our schools, let alone anywhere else in our city. We are better than this. NYC Schools is already conducting a full investigation into how this incident took place, and, this week, Project Pivot teams will begin outreach with students at Hillcrest to ensure they understand why this behavior was unacceptable. No student, teacher, or staff member should fear for their safety in our schools.
Democratic Councilman Robert Holden said, “I don’t know why these students are so misinformed, so intolerant and so radicalized. They don’t even know the history of the Middle East. They haven’t been taught that.”
(WARNING: Explicit language)
The scene at Hillcrest High School in Queens as a Jewish teacher hid in her locked office for hours while students demanded she be fired for attending a pro-Israel rally. pic.twitter.com/jzVCEofvJS
As Americans celebrate the holidays with their families, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork to destroy families by taking children away from their parents in order to sterilize and sexually mutilate them.
The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser. The public comment deadline is today, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a bureaucratic middle finger to the public it is supposed to serve. The proposed regulations state that “to be considered a safe and appropriate placement, a provider is expected to utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.” In short, those who don’t believe the superstition that a child can somehow be born into the wrong body are, per the Biden administration, unfit to be foster parents.
This won’t stop with foster parents.
Cutting Christians and other dissenters from the sexual revolution out of the foster care system is only the start. Given the government control of the foster care system, this is a convenient place for the left to establish the precedent that rejecting gender ideology and the rest of the LGBT movement’s dogmas is abusive and harmful to children and that those who do so are unfit parents. Once they have set this point, they’ll expand it to everyone else — after all, if it’s abuse for foster parents, it’s abuse for biological parents as well.
This should not be a surprise. Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from “non-affirming” parents for years now, but they have thus far been too scared to go through with it. But the folks in Biden’s administration — led by Babylon Bee “Man of the Year” Rachel Levine — are going to see if they can get the ball rolling this time.
The justification for these new rules is based on the usual junkscience, created and pushed by activist organizations and those whose reputations and livelihoods depend upon validating transitioning children. For example, the Biden administration repeatedly cites a survey by the activists at The Trevor Project. This survey consisted of a self-selected online sample. The Biden administration wants to keep kids away from loving homes because the science told them to — the science of a self-selected online survey created by an activist group.
These sorts of garbage studies are necessary for the LGBT movement to justify itself, especially as it has shifted to an obsession with “LGBT youth.” They long ago dropped the pretense that this is about consenting adults, or that they seek some sort of live-and-let-live settlement. Rather, they are determined to claim other people’s children for themselves and their movement.
Trying to take children away from “non-affirming” parents is the predictable result of the lies that children are born LGBT, and that sexual and gender identities are the essential core of our being. The belief that nothing is more authentic or important than sexual desire and “gender identity” is what lies behind the LGBT movement’s fanatical drive to groom other people’s children. It is why educators are eager to push sexually explicit material onto even very young children. It is why schools fill kids’ minds with gender ideology, and then encourage them to transition without telling their parents. And it is why the left has wholeheartedly embraced medically “transitioning” children, sometimes starting before they are even teenagers.
This wrongly termed “gender-affirming care” is incredibly abnormal medicine. It attempts to treat psychological distress by radically remaking the patient’s body in a way that is completely medically unnecessary, indeed, medically harmful. As the proposed Biden administration rules make clear, there is no objective physical or psychological diagnosis for being transgender; rather, it is a purely subjective, self-diagnosed identity — a “self-identified gender identity and expression.” And there is never any medical need to transition.
When someone who identifies as transgender does not chemically and surgically transition, his or her body continues its natural, healthy development and functioning. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm, which is why the transgender movement has become totally reliant on threats of suicide. This suicide narrative is used to rush children into transition, with almost all the power centers of our nation pushing them on. But studies show that children overwhelmingly desist from transgender identification if given time and counseling. The Biden administration nonetheless relies on threats of self-harm in making its case for the proposed rules for foster care. It is pure hostage-taking, done to enable the sterilization and sexual mutilation of children on the superstition that they are being born into the wrong bodies.
In short, the Biden administration plans to treat parents who object to this grotesque medical malpractice as child abuse. They are coming for your children, and they aren’t bothering to hide it anymore.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
A voter arrives at a polling place on March 3, 2020, in Minneapolis for that year’s presidential primary. Legitimate voters shouldn’t have to worry about whether their votes are canceled out by fraudulent ones. (Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
You can see it with your own eyes. But Democrats and their left-wing media allies call it a “fantasy.” What is it?
A Lawrence, Massachusetts, voter who had been turned away from the polls on Election Day and told he had already voted found out he was the victim of fraud. He checked the footage on the video camera outside his front door and saw that a woman had removed mail-in ballots from his mailbox. He called police.
It’s happening in many places. On Tuesday, Fight Voter Fraud Inc., a nonprofit voter rights group, appeared in Connecticut Superior Court to demand the arrest of a woman alleged to have been caught on video committing mail-in ballot fraud in the 2019 Bridgeport Democratic mayoral primary and again in the 2023 primary. The group, protesting that city officials pretend there’s no problem, also called on the Connecticut legislature to appoint a special prosecutor.
A staggering 60% of likely voters nationwide consider election cheating a problem, according to Rasmussen Reports. Yet the Left denies it’s happening. The Washington Post calls it a “myth” and a “fantasy offense.” Worst of all, the federal government is suppressing the evidence and censoring anyone who complains about election cheating.
Never-before-seen emails released by the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 6 reveal that a government-sponsored task force is muzzling public figures, thousands of ordinary Americans, and media outlets like Newsmax and The Babylon Bee when they report election irregularities. The emails show that officials within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department—”the deep state”—organized the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, recruiting academics at Stanford University and the University of Washington to question election honesty and then instruct social media companies such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube to label the postings as “misinformation” or take them down entirely.
Don’t be fooled by the name Election Integrity Partnership. This task force does the opposite, silencing concerns about election integrity.
In 2020, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich objected when the state of Pennsylvania adopted new election rules during the COVID-19 pandemic that, in his view, invited cheating. He tweeted, “Pennsylvania Democrats are methodically changing the rules so they can steal the election.”
When Nicole Malliotakis was running for Congress in 2020 from Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, N.Y., she posted on Facebook: “Be sure to vote tomorrow because we’re not only taking on Max Rose, Nancy Pelosi & Bill de Blasio. We’re taking on Dead Democrats, too!”
The Election Integrity Partnership disagreed and instructed Facebook to remove Malliotakis’ post, which it did. Even if Malliotakis were wrong about dead people voting, she has a right to raise the issue. In fact, Malliotakis was correct. A Staten Island grand jury subsequently identified numerous instances of fraud in the race for City Council there, including a ballot submitted on behalf of a dead person.
The emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud just when Democrats were pushing many states to adopt new election rules in the face of COVID-19. Americans were entitled to hear the pros and cons of those rules. They still are.
The First Amendment bars government from censoring. So, what did the government do? It outsourced the censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership. All the same, it was government calling the shots, telling third parties to censor on its behalf. Louisiana and Missouri are suing to stop the federal government’s censorship scheme, and that case is now in the Supreme Court.
Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, told NPR she regrets the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, and the lawsuit will dampen the Election Integrity Partnership’s future censorship operations.
No worries. Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to be running for reelection in March 2024. Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, and other dictators who don’t tolerate complaints about election rigging will find the Election Integrity Partnership very handy.
It has no place in America.
Tell our leaders to crack down on election fraud, instead of censoring its critics.
Flag redesign commission member blasts process as ‘absurd’ and a ‘colossal waste of time’
Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds. A lengthy deliberation Tuesday among 13 Minnesotans tasked with selecting a new state flag and seal at times devolved into argument and confusion among some, with one member of the State Emblems Redesign Commission calling it “a colossal waste of time” for those who submitted the designs.
Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds. Read More…
The film is based on Liz Collin’s Amazon bestseller, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd,” which exposes the holes in the prevailing narrative surrounding George Floyd’s death, the trial of Derek Chauvin, and the fallout the city of Minneapolis has suffered ever since.
The documentary features more than a dozen interviews with the people directly involved, including exclusive interviews with former officers Derek Chauvin and Alexander Kueng who spoke to Liz Collin from prison. The families of Chauvin and Kueng also speak out publicly for the first time.
The film also features current and former Minneapolis police officers who tell their harrowing stories from the riots, recount the planned surrender of the Third Precinct, and explain why so many of them left the job. Read More…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded city streets across Spain since October in sustained demonstrations opposing a socialist takeover of the Spanish government. Protesters are showing their opposition toward an amnesty deal between Spain’s socialist President Pedro Sánchez and treasonous Catalan separatists, who violated the Spanish constitution in 2017 by attempting to secede from Spain. By striking a deal to free incarcerated and exiled Spanish criminals, Sánchez was able to secure a third term in power.
The protests are organized by Spain’s conservative People’s Party and Vox, its further right, populist party. In an interview between Vox President Santiago Abascal and Tucker Carlson last week, Abascal explained that the amnesty deal is a crime “against the constitution” and “national unity.”
Ep. 40 Spain’s descent into tyranny seems eerily familiar. Opposition leader Santiago Abascal is one of the few people standing up to it. We traveled to Madrid to talk to him.
TIMESTAMPS: 1:11 Santiago Abascal 2:23 The end of democracy in Spain 8:43 “Are you ready to go to jail… pic.twitter.com/fE4zrYrqAC
But the massive demonstrations are not just in defense of the Spanish Constitution, Abascal explained; they’re about what an illegal third Sánchez term means for Spain, namely a failing Spanish economy, two-tier justice, mass illegal immigration from Muslim countries, speech policing, globalism, the demonization of Spanish history, and loss of Spanish identity.
Where Are the American Demonstrations?
The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.
The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.
All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?
Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.
Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media.
Conservatives aren’t just afraid — they’re also hopeless.After witnessing the Marxist race riots of 2020 and the erasure of their civil liberties during Covid, many Americans no longer recognize their homeland. A recent Harvard Harris poll shows that 80 percent of GOP voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, a July 2023 poll reported that 86.92 million Americans find “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay their household expenses, with the middle class being the most affected income bracket.
How many times have we heard friends and family members say, “The country is lost?” This fear and despair are understandable, but the stakes have never been higher. Bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary to defend a nation against forces wishing to destroy it. As Abascal explained to Tucker:
“The nation isn’t just made up of all the Spaniards here today, it’s not just the people you can see walking down the street. Our nation is our history. It’s in the cemeteries where our forebears rest. The nation is the sum of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born… I think that what we do today, even if we aren’t victorious as we hope, can make it so that others in the future, our children, future generations, can achieve that victory. [Then] it will have all been worthwhile.”
Spain Understands The Stakes
Spain has first-hand experience with communism. When communists controlled Spain, both in the lead-up to and during the civil war in the 1930s, it resulted in the persecution of Spanish intellectuals, clerics, and Christian laypeople. Spanish communists began their anti-Christian hate by banning all religious schools, removing crucifixes from classrooms, and deeming all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state. Eventually, they started burning Catholic Churches and mass executing Catholic religious and laypeople. Property rights were thrown out, and conservatives were unjustly convicted in kangaroo courts and executed. By the end of the war, a reported “13 bishops, 4,172 priests, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns and sisters,” and an unknown number of laypeople were killed.
The wounds inflicted by Spanish communists are still raw. The memory has not died. So, in 2022, Spain implemented its “Democratic Memory” law, an Orwellian piece of legislation that mandates a pro-leftist view of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. Through “criminal and economic sanctions for dissidents,” the law effectively eradicates “academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of education,” writes Hermann Tertsch, a Vox Member of the European Parliament.
Like in America, Spanish leftists brand anyone who contradicts their history narratives as thought criminals. According to Abascal, leftists have also created a two-tier justice system and “are now arresting young people for protest[ing] … saying they don’t have permits.” Unfortunately for the left, these fear tactics have not been entirely effective, as the ongoing protests demonstrate, perhaps because too many Spaniards know what communist control looks like.
In America, we are blessed not to know. However, that blessing is also a curse. We don’t appreciate how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny. Unable to oppose or even recognize tyranny, younger generations have lost touch with the American revolutionary spirit after sending generations of Americans to spend their formative years in reeducation camps run by cultural Marxists (aka public school and the university system).
Perhaps a way to regain America’s lost fortitude is by watching conservative freedom fighters in Spain. We may not have the national memory of communists burying priests alive or defiling and decapitating nuns, but we can look to Spain for motivation.
Indeed, the Spanish protests should inspire Americans, and Spanish history should be a warning.If we resign ourselves to failure or allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence, the consequences will be nothing short of complete national destruction.
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.
Non-“affirming” adults would be barred from becoming foster parents under the Biden administration’s proposed rule. Pictured: Thousands of New Yorkers take to the streets of Manhattan on June 25 for the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s fifth annual Queer Liberation March. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Transgender orthodoxy may soon become a litmus test for parenthood, according to the logic of a new policy working its way through the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden.
A new rule in HHS’ Administration for Children and Families would apply the idea that any lack of “affirmation” constitutes a form of child abuse to foster care placements. Once that idea takes root in foster care, child protective services agencies might start applying it more broadly.
The rule would reinterpret the Social Security Act, which requires agencies to ensure that each child in foster care receives “safe and proper” care. The rule would lay out steps agencies must take to meet that requirement for “LGBTQI+ children,” defined as kids who “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, as well as children who are non-binary, or have non-conforming gender identity or expression.”
Why is our government so interested in grooming America’s children to become homosexual? Are these efforts Gestapo in function? Why? Is it Eugenics? Are the disciples of Margarett Sanger that powerful in America’s Deep State?
Before agencies place a child with a foster parent, known as a “provider,” that person must “establish an environment free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status;” receive training “to be prepared with the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression;” and must be able to “facilitate the child’s access to age-appropriate resources, services, and activities that support their health and well-being.”
As the Federalist Society’s Rachel Morrison pointed out, the rule does not define “hostility,” “mistreatment,” or “abuse.” However, it does clarify that “a provider who attempted to undermine, suppress, or change the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression of a child, including through the use of so-called ‘conversion therapy,’ would not be a safe and appropriate placement.”
The proposed rule cites medical associations such as the American Psychological Association to claim that efforts to “undermine, suppress, or change” sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression “are not supported by evidence and have been rejected as harmful.”
The rule does not acknowledge that gender ideology has infiltrated these medical associations and that many doctors—including those who once embraced gender ideology—have warned against confusing children on their gender and putting them on a path to mutilating their own bodies.
Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist and early proponent of transgender medical interventions, joined and briefly helped lead the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the central medical group that organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association rely upon.
A member from 1974 to 2001, Levine served as chairman of the eight-member International Standards of Care Committee that issued the fifth version of the standards. He ultimately resigned his membership in 2002 upon concluding that the organization “had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific progress.”
In a document opposing the use of Medicaid funding for experimental transgender medical interventions for children, Levine explains that “there is no consensus or agreed ‘standard of care’ concerning therapeutic approaches to child or adolescent gender dysphoria.” He notes that gender identity “is not biologically based” and “empirically not fixed for many individuals.” Levine also warns that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes” and makes it far less likely that young children will “desist” from a transgender identity.
Contrary to the transgender activists’ claims, many doctors have raised serious concerns about the long-term effects of “gender-affirming care.” Cross-sex hormones can weaken children’s bones and make them more prone to heart disease. So-called puberty blockers, often billed as fully reversible, involve introducing a disease into a child’s body and make puberty harder to start again, should the child change his or her mind.
European countries, long considered more “progressive” than the U.S., have found a lack of evidence for medical interventions on children and are recommending a “watchful waiting” approach for minors.
Ultimately, gender ideology rests on the claim that a nebulous gender identity is more important than an individual’s biological sex. If a biological male claims to identify as female, society must consider him a woman and allow him to enter women’s restrooms, prisons, and sports teams, even though some men pose a threat to women in intimate situations and enjoy biological advantages in many sports. Similarly, this ideology encourages bodily alterations to make a male appear female and vice versa, despite the lack of evidence that such interventions actually improve well-being over the long haul.
This idea is particularly harmful for children who are just learning what it means to be male or female. If a boy likes to play with Barbie dolls, that does not mean he is really a girl. If a girl likes to play with G.I. Joes, that does not mean she is really a boy. Yet the ideology behind transgender identity urges parents to abandon all sanity and declare that such kids are transgender.
Before you object, think about how nebulous “gender identity” actually is. It doesn’t rely on a specific set of standards that may be verified objectively. Instead, it relies on an individual’s claim that he or she experiences painful and persistent dissonance between an “identity” and his or her biology. Any attempt to resolve this dissonance through mainstream talk therapy is ipso facto a form of “conversion therapy” to be condemned as “harmful.”
Yet Levine argues that “affirming” a transgender identity is a “powerful psychotherapeutic intervention” that will set kids on the path to mutilation and sterilization—long before they have any concept about what their own fertility means.
Under Biden’s proposed new rule, any potential foster parent who aims to protect a child from this confusion and damage may soon face expulsion from the program. That means the process will be designed to weed out guardians who actually would take good care of the kids and enable guardians who would assist in harming them.
In this topsy-turvy world, biology takes a back seat to a child’s insistence that he or she is really the opposite sex, even if the child might just as well identify as Queen Elsa of Arendelle or a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The rule justifies this by claiming that kids in the foster care system are more likely to identify as LGBTQI+, i.e. to face gender confusion. This means they are more vulnerable to the damage of gender ideology, not less. They need someone to protect them from “gender-affirming care,” and Biden seems dead set on preventing that.
Sadly, the HHS rule is not the first time Americans have faced this type of policy. In my home state of Virginia, state Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a Democrat, supports a bill to expand the definition of “child abuse” to include disagreement with gender ideology.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill turning California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care,” which the law defines as an absolute right. The law gives California courts the ability to award custody over a child if someone removes the child from his or her parents in another state in order to obtain such “care” for that child despite the parents’ disagreement.
Ultimately, Americans cannot have it both ways. Either it is child abuse to deny a child’s transgender identity, or it is child abuse to encourage experimental medical alterations that will leave that child stunted, scarred, and infertile.
Those on the Left seem hell-bent on forcing gender ideology in the name of safety, and Americans need to stand up and say, “No.”
Thankfully, HHS’ Administration for Children and Families must read every single written comment that concerned Americans send in on the rule. Americans may make their voices heard by submitting comments at this link.
It is hard not to see the difference between Thanksgiving in 2019 with low inflation, cheap gas, no new wars, low food costs, and an excellent overall economy compared to Thanksgiving 2023. Trump’s Horn-of-Plenty vs. Biden’s Horn of Disaster.
This Thanksgiving, I’m giving thanks that Trump has a good chance of being elected back into the White House to clean up Biden and the Democrats’ mess they have perpetrated on the American people. But, having pointed out the obvious, I hope we can ignore the Biden/Democrat disaster for one day and focus on what’s really important: God, Family, and Friends.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
U.S. senators led by John Fetterman, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders would turn unemployment insurance into something closer to a universal basic income program — with predictably awful results.
Hard work has always defined our nation, fueling our rise as a global economic superpower. The American workforce used to be synonymous with American greatness.
But our workforce was devasted in 2020, when even the casual observer came to understand that the federal government couldn’t pay people to stay idle and out of work forever.
So why are Democrats in Congress so eager to repeat the one of the most glaring pandemic-era policy blunders?
With a breathtaking disregard for lessons learned, Senators John Fetterman (D-Penn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and others are seeking to expand state-run unemployment insurance programs, transitioning them into something more closely resembling a federally mandated universal basic income scheme than an emergency safety net program. Their new plan would replace up to 100% of workers’ wages for more than a year. That’s not insurance — that’s a new entitlement paid for by the employers taxed to fund the program.
Senate Bill 3140, the Unemployment Insurance Modernization and Recession Readiness Act, could be forgiven as merely naïve if it hadn’t arrived so soon after pandemic policies cost taxpayers billions of dollars and encouraged millions of able-bodied Americans to exit the workforce even as employers struggled to find workers. With the COVID experience so recent, the senators’ plan is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the moral and economic dignity afforded by a job. It represents a final neutralizing of the once-great American work ethic and, with it, the civic virtues of independence, individual responsibility, and self-government.
It’s clear that big-government types like Sanders and Warren find work antithetical to their aims of cradle-to-grave dependency. They’ve been trying to mainstream socialism for decades. Now they’ve turned their sights on the worker safety net program as a vehicle to destroy work itself. Unemployment insurance has always been about providing limited, temporary assistance to workers who lose a job through no fault of their own. Funded by employer taxes, the largely state-run program has served as a rapid on-ramp to the workforce, ensuring the unemployed have some immediate support as they look for their next job. The arrangement has worked well, allowing states to devise innovations that result in higher rates of re-employment, shorter periods of unemployment, and lower taxes on employers. But all of that would change under this new proposal. In place of state innovation would come federal standardization — and not in a good way, either.
In 2020, Democrats pushed successfully for an expansion of unemployment benefits as part of federal pandemic relief spending. Stopping just short of a federal takeover of the unemployment program, Congress increased weekly benefit levels up to $600 per week above existing limits, expanded benefits to individuals whose employers (if they had one) did not pay into the program, and paid benefits for more than a year and a half. The results were disastrous.
Billions of additional dollars flooding the system became a magnet for fraudsters. The Department of Labor’s inspector general estimates at least $35 billion in unemployment benefits was lost to fraud. State programs took a hit as well, losing more than $12 billion to fraudulent and ineligible claims. Perhaps worst of all, the fact that an unemployment claimant could replace most — if not all — of his income by remaining unemployed slowed the pace of the post-pandemic recovery. While tens of millions of hardworking Americans returned to work as quickly as possible, millions of others stayed on unemployment. It wasn’t until a year after the federal benefit expansion ended that U.S. employment returned to its pre-pandemic level.
So, what do Democrats want to do now? Their new bill would force states to pay unemployment claims for up to six months and make an additional federally funded year of benefits available after that. Those benefits would be expensive, replacing 75% of a worker’s salary at minimum. But under certain circumstances, a worker could receive up to 100% of his former wages.
And, naturally, labor unions and nongovernmental organizations are thrilled at the prospect of compelling employers to pay striking workers — an idea so ludicrous that even California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar proposal in the Golden State.
Substituting government dependency for the dignity and upward mobility work provides is not a formula for American prosperity and success. For American greatness to endure, let’s hope Congress never takes this plan seriously.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is calling on “intelligent speed assistance technology” (ISA) to be mandatory “in all new cars” after a fatal accident in Nevada killed nine people.
In a press release last week, the federal agency outlined how ISA “uses a car’s GPS location compared with a database of posted speed limits and its onboard cameras to help ensure safe and legal speeds.”
“Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through visual, sound, or haptic alerts, and the driver is responsible for slowing the car,” the agency explained. “Active systems include mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit and those that electronically limit the speed of the vehicle to fully prevent drivers from exceeding the speed limit.”
The NTSB board issued the recommendations last week after a 2018 Dodge Challenger rammed into a minivan at 103 mph in North Las Vegas in January 2022. The driver, however, was high on cocaine and PCP.
“This crash is the latest in a long line of tragedies we’ve investigated where speeding and impairment led to catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in last week’s press release. “We know the key to saving lives is redundancy, which can protect all of us from human error that occurs on our roads. What we lack is the collective will to act on NTSB safety recommendations.”
While legal speed limits are capped at 85 mph in the U.S., vehicles are designed to go far faster to allow safe passing and escape in emergency situations. The capacity to go faster also puts less strain on vehicles at lower speeds.
The NTSB released the proposal weeks after the Republican House majority helped Democrats preserve their “kill switch” mandate for new vehicles earlier this month. All cars produced in 2026 and onward will be required to implement technology that can automatically disable the vehicle “if impairment is detected” after 19 Republicans joined Democrats to kill an amendment defunding the mandate.
During debate last night on my amendment to defund the 2026 kill-switch mandate for cars, some Democrats claimed the technology wouldn’t monitor or disable cars. Here’s the actual law I had to read to them:
The NTSB’s ISA mandate, combined with the “kill switch” requirement embedded in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, lays the groundwork for corporate and government access to monitor and interfere with personal movement.
In California, activists have cited climate change as justification for new standards limiting transit. The California Air Resources Board released new regulations last summer banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The following week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom begged residents not to charge electric vehicles during a heat wave so the power grid would not become overwhelmed.
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.
Last week, newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly released 90 hours of Jan. 6, 2021, security footage featuring protesters peacefully walking through the Capitol, often with the encouragement or indifference of Capitol Police officers.
The footage further delegitimizes the Biden administration, corporate media, and Jan. 6 Committee’s insistence that the 2021 Capitol protest was on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It also exonerates countless peaceful protesters who have been slandered by the media and J6 Committee, harassed by Biden’s Department of Justice, and held in solitary confinement without due process.
Many protesters were severely punished because federal courts stressed a “need to deter others, especially in cases of domestic terrorism.” In other words, they made examples out of Jan. 6 protesters for daring to question the results of the rigged 2020 election. Some Jan. 6 protesters crumbled under the Biden DOJ’s political persecution. Four of them took their own lives. Here’s what we know about those victims.
Matthew Perna
According to journalist Julie Kelly, Matthew Perna reportedly “graduated at the top of his class at Penn State University and traveled the world teaching children in southeast Asia how to speak English.” Perna had become interested in holistic medicine after his mother’s death and worked as a CBD distributor.
Surveillance video shows Perna entered the Capitol through an open door and peacefully walked through the building for about 20 minutes. Perna “did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property,” Kelly reported.
NEW JAN. 6 FOOTAGE: Matthew Perna (seen in red sweatshirt) committed suicide after being targeted by the DOJ for going into the Capitol.
Video shows him calmly walking through, guided by police.
Perna initially plead guilty to charges believing he would only be facing up to one… pic.twitter.com/iCONNjLEDs
Nonetheless, after getting in touch with his local FBI and “voluntarily submitt[ing] to questioning,” he was arrested by six FBI agents at his home and was “indicted by a grand jury on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors.”
Perna pleaded guilty to all four counts, and given his previously clean record, he expected a prison sentence of less than a year.
In a letter to the judge, Perna’s father begged him to be lenient, writing, “This past year cost Matthew his income, the love of his life, his friendships, and his standing in the community. He will never be the same, and I ask that you take all of this into consideration before sentencing him.”
However, “Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling every January 6 prosecution, intervened and asked the court to delay Perna’s sentencing,” wrote Kelly. This was devastating news, as Graves’ office is famous for throwing the book at J6 defendants in order to “deter others in cases involving domestic terrorism.”
Before he could receive his sentencing, Perna took his own life at 37 years old. In his obituary, his family wrote:
Matthew Lawrence Perna died on February 25, 2022 of a broken heart. His community (which he loved), his country, and the justice system killed his spirit and his zest for life. He attended the rally on January 6, 2021 to peacefully stand up for his beliefs. He entered the Capitol through a previously opened door (he did not break in as was reported) where he was ushered in by police. He didn’t break, touch, or steal anything. He did not harm anyone, as he stayed within the velvet ropes taking pictures. For this act he has been persecuted by many members of his community, friends, relatives, and people who had never met him. Many people were quietly supportive, and Matt was truly grateful for them. The constant delays in hearings, and postponements dragged out for over a year. Because of this, Matt’s heart broke and his spirit died, and many people are responsible for the pain he endured.
Jord Meacham
According to his obituary, Nejourde “Jord” Meacham “worked on the family’s ranch, and enjoyed riding horses, hunting, fishing, and doing anything outdoors. He was a big history buff and was a good cook — soup being his specialty.” Kelly reported that Meacham was one of 10 children and came from an apparently “tight-knit family.”
At 19 years old, he attended the Jan. 6 protest with his uncle. Meacham did not appear to be violent nor destructive. Surveillance footage shows him simply walking through the Capitol with a Trump flag. Yet the Biden DOJ charged Meacham with disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.
On Aug. 28, 2021, just hours after a judge scheduled his arraignment, Meacham died from “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” at just 22 years old.
Mark Aungst
Mark Aungst was a gas field well service technician, practicing Lutheran, father, and soon-to-be grandfather. “A loyal and dedicated man, Mark showed tremendous pride for God and his country,” stated his obituary. “Above all else, Mark loved his daughter and any time they spent together, as she was truly his world.”
Aungst traveled to Washington, D.C., on a chartered bus from Pennsylvania for the protest on Jan. 6, 2021. He was initially in the Capitol for only 30 seconds. Then, 20 minutes later, he reentered the Capitol, spending 10 minutes inside taking pictures and video.
Aungst was arrested in February of 2021 and reportedly pleaded guilty to a charge of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. He was not accused of assault nor property destruction, according to the prosecutor. His sentencing was set for Sept. 27, where he reportedly could have faced “up to six months in prison and [been] fined $5,000.” But he took his own life on July 20, 2022, at 47 years old.
Christopher Georgia
According to Christopher Georgia’s LinkedIn profile, he was a regional portfolio manager at a bank holding company. Georgia’s neighbor reportedly told The Sun that Georgia was a “loving father” and someone “who always had a smile and loved cutting his own grass.”
According to court documents, Georgia was accused of violating the city curfew and trying to “enter certain property, that is, the United States Capitol Grounds, against the will of the United States Capitol Police.” He was arrested on the day of the J6 protest. Three days later, on Jan. 9, he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at 53 years old.
The DailyMail reported that Georgia’s wife called 911 that Saturday morning, saying there was “blood everywhere.” The police reportedly described Georgia’s family as “extremely distressed” when officers arrived.
Aftermath
The hopelessness, demonization, and fear felt by Georgia, Aungst, Perna, and Meacham are not isolated. More than 1,100 people present in our nation’s capital on Jan. 6 are targets of Biden’s Justice Department.
The Jan. 6 footage should have been released immediately for the benefit of J6 defendants and clarity for the American people. Since it wasn’t, Democrats have been able to destroy lives and freely lie for nearly three years about what truly transpired.
Biden and the corporate media claim that these protesters, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, are domestic terrorists and a threat to the nation. But these four men who felt hopeless and took their own lives weren’t terrorists; they were regular citizens who just wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights by protesting what they believed was a stolen election.
Questioning Democrats and their blatant election-rigging tactics, such as mass mail-in balloting or Big Tech censorship in favor of their preferred candidates, was deemed unacceptable by the tyrannical Biden administration. The feds made examples out of J6 defendants like Georgia, Aungst, Perna, and Meacham as part of their crusade to paint all conservatives as domestic terrorists and to instill fear in the hearts of all Americans. Now there’s blood on their hands.
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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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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