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‘Trying to Chill Parents’: California Bill Would Criminalize Sparking of ‘Substantial Disorder’ at School Board Meetings

By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / August 10, 2023

Man holds sign reading — Critics warn of an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out” as the California State Assembly considers a bill that would criminalize causing a “substantial disruption” at a school board meeting. Pictured: A man hoists his message at a July 20 meeting of the Chino Valley school board in Chino, California. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

California already has undermined the rights of parents from out of state when it comes to experimental transgender “health care,” but the Legislature also is considering a bill that would criminalize causing “substantial disorder” at school board meetings—an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out,” critics warn.

SB 596, which the California State Senate passed in May, 30-8, would expand state law that bars adults from subjecting “a school employee to harassment.”

The bill, now making its way to the floor of the lower chamber, the California State Assembly, would expand the definition of “school employee” to cover any employee or official of a school district, charter school, and county or state education board or office.

The bill also would outlaw, as a misdemeanor, actions that cause “substantial disorder” at a school board meeting.

The law proposed in the Golden State doesn’t define “substantial disorder,” and its definition of “harassment” leaves broad room for interpretation. Under the proposal, Californians who violate the provision face a fine of $500 to $1,000, a year in county jail, or both. A second offense would mean mandatory jail time and could involve another fine; a third offense would mean more jail time and perhaps a third fine.

“It’s clear they’re trying to chill parents from speaking out,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)

“I find it curious that there’s no definition of ‘substantial’ or ‘disruption’ within the proposed text,” Perry said. “Considering that these are essential terms for the bill, it’s likely that if passed, the law would fall under a vagueness challenge.”

Parents “have a right to express themselves under the protections of the First Amendment,” she noted. “Ordinary limitations on certain speech—making a true threat of violence, for example—already apply within the context of the First Amendment, making the criminal penalty here unnecessary, legally suspect, and ideologically driven.”

“California Democrats want to increase the presence of minors’ activism while working to chill the free speech of rightfully concerned parents and taxpayers,” Kelly Schenkoske, a California mother who homeschools her two children in conjunction with a public charter school program, told The Daily Signal.

“Instead of focusing on solutions for a state riddled with low academic achievement, a drug crisis, homelessness, rising taxes, human trafficking, water storage issues, and fire prevention, this Democrat-controlled Legislature continues to propose their aggressive, anti-family, legislative pet projects,” Schenkoske added. “Their work over the years to erode parental involvement and rights has been noticed by parents who will stand courageously to speak for the protection of their children and for a better education.”

Jim Manley, state legal policy deputy director at the Pacific Legal Institute, told The Daily Signal that the state government has the prerogative to make laws regarding school board meetings, but the vagueness of the text might encourage school employees and prosecutors to chill parents’ rights to speak freely.

“The idea that the government is trying to regulate conduct at school board meetings is pretty normal,” Manley said. “What sends up potential red flags is some of the language in this bill.”

SB 596 defines “harassment” as “a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously alarms, torments, or terrorizes the person, and that serves no legitimate person.” The bill defines “course of conduct” as “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts occurring over a period of time, however short, evidencing a continuity of purpose.”

A parent or other critic “saying two things that the school official finds harassing could be enough to qualify there,” Manley said. “An email that simply torments would count as harassment under this standard.”

The lawyer noted that “to torment” merely means “to cause mental suffering.”

“If you send two emails that cause a school board official to mentally suffer, technically you fall under this definition,” Manley said.

The bill “could be interpreted in a way that chills people’s ability to communicate with elected officials,” he said.

Manley also noted that the bill includes an exemption for “any otherwise lawful employee concerted activity, including, but not limited to, picketing and the distribution of handbills.”

“Parents showing up to hand out literature would not be exempt” under the proposed law, the lawyer said. “Given how broadly this expands the coverage of the crime, I’d like to see the exemption be similarly broad. As written now, it only applies to employees who are picketing.”

Matt McReynolds, deputy chief counsel at the Pacific Justice Institute, echoed these concerns.

“I would certainly agree that SB 596 targets conservative parents who have been energized and re-engaging at the school board level,” McReynolds told The Daily Signal.

“It’s not just speaking at school board meetings; this would criminalize sending emails that seriously annoy or alarm school employees,” he said. “Note, too, the double standards, beginning with the exception in the legislation for labor union activity such as picketing.”

McReynolds also said the “larger context” of the bill is “revealing.”

“In nearly all other areas, our state leaders are stressing decriminalization and have released thousands of dangerous offenders back into our communities,” he said. “The rhetoric about mass incarceration and overcriminalization goes out the window when they’re going after their political enemies. And in the school setting itself, our legislators are moving to reduce the ability of teachers and administrators to punish kids for defiance, disruption, and disorder. The hypocrisy is unmistakable.”

McReynolds also mentioned AB 1078, which passed the California State Assembly in May. That bill, which aims to boost instructional materials regarding diversity by circumventing parents, threatens “to reduce parents’ influence at the school board level,” McReynolds argued,

State Sen. Anthony J. Portantino, the Democrat who sponsored SB 596, didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the bill.

The bill comes amid new California laws prioritizing children’s stated gender identity over parental rights. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law SB 107, a bill to turn California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care.” The measure, which took effect in January, gives California courts the ability to award custody of a child if someone removes that child from his or her parents in another state to obtain such “care” over the parents’ disagreement.

In June, a California state senator told parents to flee the state as the Senate debated a bill that would subject parents who refuse to “affirm” their children’s “gender transitions” to child abuse charges.

“In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophied, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” state Sen. Scott Wilk, a Republican, said. “I’ve changed my mind on that.”

“If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee,” Wilk urged.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Strapped

A.F. BRANCO | on August 10, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-strapped/

Biden is gaslighting the public promoting his economy as great, but the public isn’t buying it.

Bidenomics – Collateral Damage — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into 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.

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Obama’s Fraudulent Legacy Is Being Exposed, And it’s on The Wrong Side of History

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | AUGUST 09, 2023

MARK HEMINGWAY

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Barack Obama is often hailed as one of the greatest orators in modern politics. While he had undeniable gifts in that department, as someone who attended a number of his speeches in person, I never quite understood all the praise. Setting aside his career-making “red states, blue states” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention — a plea for political moderation he spent his time in office repudiating — the only memorable things Obama said were either campaign pablum such as “hope and change,” or remarks that were unintentionally revealing.

In the latter category, my personal favorite remark was this comment about congressional Republicans from 2013: “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country,” he said.

“Permission structure” is a phrase that’s been used by marketing executives for many years, and was apparently in common usage at the Obama White House. The idea is “based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behavior will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. … Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject.”

While there’s more overlap between politics and marketing than anyone would like to admit, the naked use of jargon that comes from the world of consumer manipulation betrays a remarkably egotistical approach to politics. There was no need to address honorable disagreement to Obama’s policies, which were politically extreme and consistently opposed by voters. The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.

Ironically enough, I thought of the “Permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “Permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way.

In other words, he’s pretty much the guy his critics on the right said he was all along.

MLK vs. Obama

To be clear, that’s my gloss on it, and while I don’t think it’s an unfair summation, I wouldn’t want to claim to speak on behalf of Samuels or Garrow. But I think it’s undeniable the article does real damage to Obama’s reputation because the many criticisms in the piece are rooted in factual revelations about Obama’s past and the considered opinion of Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (In addition to decades of work as a civil rights historian, Garrow is a major historian of abortion.) Garrow was considered an important enough scholar that Obama sat for eight hours of interviews with him while he was still president. And it’s clear his opinion of Obama is somewhere between dismissive and contemptuous.

Worse, Garrow’s opinion is all the more devastating to Obama because, throughout the sprawling 16,000-word interview, Garrow keeps reverting back to his extensive knowledge of MLK and making explicit comparisons between the two men to reinforce his unflattering judgments about Obama. At first blush, being compared to MLK would be an impossible standard for almost anyone to be held up to. However, as a historian Garrow is notable for deftly exposing MLK’s considerable character flaws — the degree of MLK’s womanizing and alcoholism are decidedly worse than the public wants to know — while still burnishing his historic accomplishments. It’s clear throughout the interview that Garrow is not so reverential toward MLK he can’t think objectively about him, yet he still considers him a great man.

And in fairness, Obama invited this comparison upon himself. He rode into the White House encouraging supporters to frame his election as the fulfillment of MLK’s legacy, and further invited comparisons by appropriating MLK’s rhetoric.

Speaking of memorable Obama rhetoric, I’d be willing to bet that millions of Americans are under the impression “the arc of history is long and bends toward justice” is an Obama quote rather than an MLK quote (and it appears MLK borrowed it from a 19th-century Unitarian minister). Nonetheless, Obama has used the phrase “arc of history” more than a dozen times since his first presidential campaign.

The “arc of history” soon transmogrified into another oft-used Obama phrase, which was invoked by Obama and his staff many times throughout their triumphal bullying of political opponents for being on “the wrong side of history.” Obama’s abuse of the “right” and “wrong” side of history was so absurd that even The Atlantic took a break from acting as a court stenographer to run an article fretting this language “suggest[s] a tortured, idealistic, and ultimately untenable vision of what history is and how it works.”

It’s just as well people attribute that quote to Obama, because while this progressive and Hegelian understanding of history is perfectly in sync with American liberalism, it’s not exactly compatible with common sense — history is full of injustice that comes out of nowhere and sets righteous causes back quite a ways. King himself eventually recognized this and rejected the sentiment in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

“Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills,” King wrote. “Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”

At the same time Obama expressed arrogant certitude about his own role in history, he rejected the aspects of King’s idealism that were actually productive. In 2020, Obama gave an interview to Atlantic editor and Obama superfan Jeffrey Goldberg where he said, “America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold.”

So, America is the most powerful nation because of accidents of history — not because of our historically unprecedented founding commitment to human rights and limited government. It’s telling how the arguments about being on the right side of history are casually discarded here, even though they might make sense to use retroactively. As Garrow observes, “What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. … Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?”

Regardless, that’s hardly the most revealing part of that quote. MLK offered Americans “a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Well, I don’t exactly know what Obama’s offering in response to King’s vision of the future is, but it sounds pretty pessimistic to say you’re not sure America can survive as a “multicultural democracy” — especially coming from a guy so famous for having his likeness emblazoned next to the word “HOPE” that the poster has its own Wikipedia entry.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect America ever to stamp out racism (or any other sin for that matter), but King’s call to a virtue-based vision of equality was nonetheless deeply taken to heart by most Americans. Otherwise, the fact it took just 40 years for America to go from assassinating civil rights leaders and turning firehoses on peaceful black protesters to electing a black president is just another “historical accident.”

Maybe we still have a long way to go, but the progress made on civil rights in this country is still worth celebrating — and there’s no good evidence we should abandon the belief that progress was made because, in King’s words, “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That it’s hard to tell whether America’s first black president believes that racial progress in America is because of, not in spite of, American ideals, well, that isn’t exactly reassuring for ordinary Americans looking to validate the trust they placed in him.

Of course, lots of other black leaders harbored doubts about King’s hopes for the future. Which brings us to the other startling aspect of the interview between Samuels and Garrow, where we move from the abstract realm of character judgments to disturbing historical facts. In Obama’s ballyhooed first memoir, Dreams of My Father, Samuels summarizes his description of the breakup between Obama and Sheila Miyoshi Jager, one of his serious girlfriends before he married Michelle Obama: “In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.”

But Garrow, who started writing his Obama biography well into Obama’s second term as president, tracked down Jager — now a professor at Oberlin with a formidable academic reputation — and asked her about her relationship with Obama. (That the credulous journalistic establishment was totally incurious about digging into Obama’s inconsistent and self-serving life story is a thread running throughout the interview.) According to her, what really happened was this:

In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

While it’s hard to land firmly on one side of a he said/she said account of a romantic break-up, Jager has an outstanding reputation; she’s a professor at Oberlin college. She hasn’t been outspoken about Obama on much of anything, much less publicly critical of him. She doesn’t seem bitter about a relationship that ended decades ago, where Obama asked her to marry him twice and she rejected him.

If Jager is to be believed — and I think she is, as the rest of the Samuels-Garrow interview is full of criticism of episodes where Obama has obviously fictionalized aspects of his memoirs and life story — then this just really puts an exclamation point on the narrative established by this landmark interview. Americans thought they were electing a guy who had tacitly, if not explicitly, said he would fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, a man who, in Garrow’s considered words, “did not buy into identity politics.” Instead, they got a guy invested in defending Louis Farrakhan’s vision of race in America.

Being a president in the mold of King would entail evaluating leadership failures as a matter of the content of your character and judgment. Following Farrakhan would entail blaming… well, it seems hard to believe Obama would embrace antisemitic conspiracies, but certainly there’s ample evidence that Obama and his defenders do dodge accountability by blaming a more socially acceptable villain of shadowy cabals of racists and Republicans. (On the other hand, if Obama is hoping for favorable assessments of his famously antagonistic relationship with Israel, he’s not helped by Jager’s anecdote or the fact that he had his kids baptized at a church run by a guy who even Ta-Nehisi Coates admits spews “crude conspiratorial antisemitism.”)

‘He Loses Interest’

For those of you who may think this is a little too harsh and/or a Manichean take on Obama’s nuanced worldview, I have good news. The interview is also a springboard to debate Obama’s sexuality. And large portions of the interview are also consumed with discussions of whether Obama is a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or … a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society.”

Garrow and Samuels’ conclusion on that last dilemma seems to be that the shallow narcissism of the former neuters a lot of the impulses related to the latter. Garrow concedes Obama, who frequently touted his credentials as a law professor, would be a terrible Supreme Court justice because Obama himself admits he’s “fundamentally lazy.” Elsewhere Garrow sums up much of his political career by saying, “Some things are meaningful to him, but then he loses interest.”

Samuels, however, doesn’t have Garrow’s scholarly restraint in describing Obama’s post-presidency. “I remember thinking, imagine telling Harry Truman, ‘Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?’” Samuels tells Garrow. “He’d probably sock you in the jaw.” (For what it’s worth, the yacht vacations with Bruce Springsteen, Oprah, and Tom Hanks appear pretty nauseating.)

In order to keep the Secret Service at bay, let me say for the record that neither the ghost of Harry Truman nor anyone else should sock Obama in the jaw. But it’s been seven years since the guy was in the White House, and the judgment of history is starting to come in. I think we at least have permission to say he was a bad president.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax: ‘No Such Thing as a False Idea or False Opinion’

By Eric Mack | Wednesday, 09 August 2023 03:40 PM EDT

Amid allegations President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has spied on former President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account, constitutional legal expert Alan Dershowitz chimed in on Newsmax.

“I can’t imagine there’d be anything in his Twitter account which isn’t public, but if there is something, they should have to justify that: Government can’t just go rummaging through people’s First Amendment statements,” Dershowitz told Wednesday’s “John Bachman Now.”

“But this is a First Amendment case,” he continued, rejecting former Attorney General Bill Barr’s claim to the contrary.

“This is a case all about what Donald Trump said, what he believed. Even the things he did, he did, according to him, because he honestly believed, and still believes, the election was stolen.

“He was wrong, in my view, but my view doesn’t matter under the First Amendment.”

Trump’s election challenge speech, and subsequent seeking of legal remedies, is protected, according to Dershowitz.

“Under the First Amendment, there’s no such thing as a false idea or a false opinion,” Dershowitz told co-hosts Bianca de la Garza and John Huddy.

“The remedy for false ideas and false opinions is to respond to them and write better ideas and better opinions, not to criminalize what somebody said or did consistent with his belief that the election was stolen.”

Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan cannot be trusted to give Trump his right to a fair trial, Dershowitz continued.

“I am a liberal Democrat who has voted for Democrats all my life. I do not trust her; I do not trust her to do justice,” he said. “The test is not only must justice be done, must it seem to be done. I don’t see it being done.”

Chutkan has concerning ties to a law firm “that has had the most conflicts of interest, in my opinion, of any major firm in the United States,” in addition to ties to Hunter Biden and clients and cases tied to Burisma Holdings, according to Dershowitz.

“This is exactly the wrong person to preside over this case,” he warned. “This case is going to be decided largely by the judge, by what instructions the judge gives.

“So, this case should be taken away from her. She should be recused, and she should not be deciding issues that divide the American people. Because they’re not going to trust her judgment.”

The case should be moved out of Washington, D.C., to grant Trump a fair trial, Dershowitz added.

“The case should be taken out of the District of Columbia, to which is 95% anti-Trump, and put in West Virginia or Virginia or some purple area, where at least there’s a shot at getting a fair trial, like there is in Florida, in the county where the trial is going to be taking place in Florida.

“But you know Manhattan and the District of Columbia, I can’t imagine two districts more anti-Trump and more unfair to Trump. The American public is not going to trust them.”

Even though the decision to recuse is in the hand of Chutkan, Dershowitz said keeping it under her hand will leave it open to preemptive appeal all the way up the U.S. judicial system.

“It’s her decision, but it can be appealable,” he said. “If she doesn’t recuse herself and if there’s a conviction, there could be an appeal.

“There’s also some argument that can be made — of course, today, lawyers trying to make creative arguments, they get indicted,” he added, noting the basis of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment listing Trump’s lawyers as alleged co-conspirators, “but there’s some argument that could be made that if there’s a motion to recuse her and she refuses it, that is appealable or subject to a writ of mandamus right away.

“There are cases all ways on that, and so that’s one other possibility that could be explored.”

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Trump Bashes DOJ, Biden for Obtaining Twitter Records

By Solange Reyner | Wednesday, 09 August 2023 04:03 PM EDT

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at “crooked Joe Biden’s” Department of Justice for secretly attacking his Twitter account and “making it a point not to let me know about this major ‘hit’ on my civil rights.”

“My Political Opponent is going CRAZY trying to infringe on my Campaign for President,” Trump said in a Truth Social post hours after court documents revealed that special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed and obtained a search warrant related to Trump’s account on Twitter, which is now known as X.

A federal judge ordered Twitter to turn over the documents and also fined the company, owned by Elon Musk, $350,000 for a three-day delay in complying with a court order regarding the records.

“The district court found that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation’ by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates,'” the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. noted in its ruling.

Trump bashed the move.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before. Does the First Amendment still exist? Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICA!”

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How That ‘Scientific Consensus’ on Climate Change Was ‘Manufactured’

By: John Stossel / @JohnStossel / August 09, 2023

President Joe Biden—seen here Tuesday discussing conservation near the Grand Canyon, south of Tusayan, Arizona—is the climate change alarmist-in-chief. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change. The media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.

“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”

“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.

“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”

But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.

“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research—years with low levels of hurricanes.

“Like a good scientist, I investigated,” says Curry. She realized that the critics were right. “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.“

Curry was the unusual researcher who looked at criticism of her work and actually concluded: “They had a point.”

Then the Climategate scandal taught her that other climate researchers weren’t so open-minded. Alarmist scientists’ aggressive attempts to hide data suggesting climate change is not a crisis were revealed in leaked emails.

“Ugly things,” says Curry. “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”

It made Curry realize that there is a “climate change industry” set up to reward alarmism.

“The origins go back to the … U.N. environmental program,” says Curry, adding:

Some U.N. officials were motivated by anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.

The United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Says Curry:

The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.

Then, the national funding agencies directed all the funding … assuming there are dangerous impacts.

The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about man-made climate change.

This is how “manufactured consensus” happens. Even if a skeptic did get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists.

“The editor of the journal Science wrote this political rant,” says Curry. She even said, “The time for debate has ended.”

“What kind of message does that give?” adds Curry. Then she answers her own question:

Promote the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.

That’s what we’ve got now—a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.

COMMENTARY BY

John Stossel is the creator of Stossel TV videos, and author of “No They Can’t! Why Government Fails—But Individuals Succeed.”

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$20M and Counting: Tally on Foreign Money to Biden Family Rises with Release of New Bank Records

By: Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / August 09, 2023

Hunter Biden and Joe Biden smiling in suits — Foreign funds flowing to the Biden family have reached at least $20 million, according to records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday. Pictured: Hunter Biden and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on April 12, 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

The tally of foreign money to the Biden family has hit at least $20 million, based on the third round of bank records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday–pointing to millions from oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

Foreign sources sent the money to Biden family members and business associates while Joe Biden was vice president during the Barack Obama administration.

In February 2014 Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina transferred $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a shell company owned by Hunter Biden and his partner Devon Archer. About $1 million was transferred to Archer, and the remainder was used to initially fund a new company account, Rosemont Seneca Bohai.

In July, Archer testified to the House committee that while Biden was vice president, he showed up for a dinner with Hunter Biden’s business associates that included Baturina.

“During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden sold him as ‘the brand’ to reap millions from oligarchs in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a public statement about the new bank records. “It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself.”

The Russian billionaire attended the dinner at Café Milano along with then-Vice President Joe Biden.

“Hunter Biden seems to have delivered,” Comer continued. “This is made clear by meals at Café Milano where then-Vice President Joe Biden dined with oligarchs from around the world who had sent money to his son. It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings and allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Biden family while he was Vice President of the United States.”

Comer said the committee will continue to investigate whether “President Biden is compromised or corrupt, and our national security is threatened.”

Archer referenced in his testimony that a Kazakhstani oligarch Kenes Rakishev provided money for Hunter Biden to buy a sports car. The newly-released records show that in February 2014, Hunter met Rakishev at a Washington hotel.

In April, Rakishev wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, according to the committee’s summary of the records. The next day, a payment was made from Rosemont Seneca Bohai for a sports car for Hunter Biden in the amount of $142,300.

Archer and Hunter Biden arranged for Burisma executives to visit Kazakhstan in June 2014 to evaluate a three-way deal between Burisma, a Chinese state-owned company, and the government of Kazakhstan.

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As White House Pushed Facebook to Censor COVID-19 Vaccine Content, Facebook Employees Leaked to White House

By: Katrina Trinko / @KatrinaTrinko / August 09, 2023

white house 2018 — Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Facebook staffers were leaking to the White House as the tech company and the Biden administration battled over COVID-19 vaccine content and whether Facebook should be censoring it, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal.

In an April 18, 2021, email that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, produced to the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, executive Nick Clegg told Facebook colleagues that Andy Slavitt, then a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said Facebook employees were leaking to the White House.

Clegg, who said that he had just had a long call with Slavitt, wrote that “Andy told me in confidence … that internal FB employees are leaking to his team (I assume via Rob F[laherty] accounts of disobliging remarks made about both Andy and Rob by FB decision makers.”

Flaherty was then the digital director at the Biden White House.

Clegg, who is the president of global affairs at Meta, also wrote that Slavitt said Facebook employees suggested that Facebook leadership was planning to manipulate the White House with the data it shared.

“Those remarks [by Facebook decision makers] are coupled with suggestions about how FB should ‘snow’ the White House with info/data about authoritative Covid info in order not to share the most telling/helpful data about content which contributes to vaccine hesitancy,” he added about what Facebook employees were allegedly leaking to the Biden administration.

The leaks occurred at a time when Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the government weaponization subcommittee, has been revealing the extent of the pressure in the “Facebook files” posts he releases on Twitter, sourced from documents and emails Meta shared with the subcommittee.

“These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook,” writes Jordan.

These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook.

More evidence of the censorship-industrial complex.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 3, 2023

Brian Rice, vice president of public policy at Meta, responded to Clegg’s April 2021 email, saying, “Rob made an offhand comment about conversations with ‘other people from Facebook’ during a recent conversation, this is clearly what he was referencing.”

Rice added, “I haven’t been part of any conversation that includes disparaging remarks made about Andy, or about any strategy to snow the White House[.]”

Documents obtained by the subcommittee reveal that Facebook temporarily throttled the reach of a popular Tucker Carlson video on the COVID-19 vaccine, even while acknowledging that the video did not violate any of Facebook’s rules. The White House also complained to Facebook about the reach of a popular meme suggesting that those who received the COVID-19 vaccine may later sue for injuries.

Flaherty, the then-digital director at the White House, also asked a question suggesting that Facebook might want to curb the reach of Tomi Lahren, a commentator who had announced she would not get the vaccine, and The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet. “If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see [New York Times], [Wall Street Journal], any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty wrote in an email to Facebook employees.

According to Open Secrets, Meta employees heavily favor Democrat candidates over Republican candidates. In 2020, the year Joe Biden was elected president, Meta employees gave $6.3 million to Democrats and $578,000 to Republicans.

The emails provided to The Daily Signal also indicate the White House told Facebook YouTube was censoring vaccine content more aggressively.

“Andy [Slavitt] attended a meeting of misinfo researchers (didn’t provide names) organized by Rob F[laherty] on Friday in which the consenus was that FB is a ‘disinformation factory’, and that YT [YouTube] has made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy whilst we have lagged behind,” Clegg wrote in the April 18, 2021, email.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – On A Roll

A.F. BRANCO | on August 9, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-on-a-roll-2/

Bidenomics is a colossal disaster, and many voters feel stranded and would welcome Trump economics right now.

Bidenomics vs Trump Economic — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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The left careens down the road toward totalitarianism

LEVINTV | BLAZETV STAFF | August 08, 2023

The Democrat Party is intent on destroying our nation from the inside out. And while the leftists might not come bearing physical weapons, they do have a more insidious kind of attack: ideas.

“It’s the battle of ideas. People are persuaded by socialism and Marxism. Why? Because they never produce what they say they’re going to produce. They produce horror, they produce death, they produce impoverishment. But the promises are endless,” Mark Levin explains.

Because Americans have historically enjoyed the greatest freedoms, they are also at the highest risk for giving them away.

“Liberty takes some explanation. Not to those who don’t have it, but to those who do,” Levin says.

If we’re incapable of even understanding the liberty we have, it becomes much harder to stop it from being taken away — and Levin believes that’s what’s happening right now.

“We are definitely on the road to totalitarianism,” he warns.

But he has a solution.

“We have no control over the culture, and so we need to push back. We have to claw our way back. We have to fight our way back.”

“It is important that we are successful, when it comes to the debate over ideas. It is important that we are successful in passing the word along from our family to our friends to our neighbors to our co-workers. It is important that we quietly in our churches and synagogues and mosques or anywhere else explain to the people who may not understand or even engage in debate,” Levin adds.

Want more from Mark Levin?

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‘Bidenomics’ Has Been a Disaster

BY: DAVID HARSANYI | AUGUST 08, 2023

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his “Investing in America” agenda

Author David Harsanyi profile

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After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”

It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.

Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing. Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.

“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.

The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing down the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, President Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.

All of which is to say that the president and his allies had far more to do with destroying jobs than creating them. We don’t need to relitigate the efficacy of COVID policy here, but approximately 10 million of the jobs that Biden now brags about overseeing are just people coming back to workforce after state-compelled lockdowns.

Then again, if “Bidenomics” had meant doing absolutely nothing, it would have been the president’s greatest political accomplishment. But that would have meant allowing a crisis to go to waste. Instead, what “Bidenomics” did help create was the biggest four-year inflationary spike under any president in 40 years.

By the time the “American Rescue Plan” was passed, there was already too much money chasing too few goods. Tons of people warned about the consequences of dumping more money into the economy. Even when inflation began inching up, Biden dismissed it — “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” he said. Democrats, of course, wanted to cram through a $5 trillion progressive agenda spending bill. So when inflation became a big non-transitory political problem, the Biden administration began arguing that more spending would help ease inflation.

Again, the vital to remember about “Bidenomics” is that it makes absolutely zero sense.

Only after inflation became a political issue did the Democrats rename “Build Back Better” the “Inflation Reduction Act.” It still contained all the historic spending, corporate welfare, price-fixing, and tax hikes, but, more importantly, it also still had absolutely nothing to do with mitigating inflation.

Let’s not forget that “Bidenomics” also helped initiate the highest gas prices in history. The president signed a slew of executive orders pausing government leases on public lands, shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, and stymieing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico over concocted “social cost of carbon” externalities, among other restrictions. Despite the uncertainty of the post-pandemic economy, all of this was done in the first weeks of his administration.

None of this is to even mention the hundreds of billions “Bidenomics” “invested” — the enduring euphemism for spending money we don’t have — in social engineering projects that would force us to abandon modernity in the name of “climate justice.” This brand of spending was based on a (misguided) moral prerogative, not any kind of prudent economic decision making, to say the least.

A writer in the New Yorker recently asked, “Why Isn’t Joe Biden Getting More Credit for a Big Drop in Inflation?” Probably because there is no “Bidenomics” policy that has helped lower inflation. Quite the opposite. We’re still trying to recover from the president’s economic policy. It’s the Fed that was compelled to hike interest rates at a level not seen in 30 years to inhibit economic growth partly due to government-induced inflation. It, not Biden, brought down inflation.

Presidents who oversee strong economies, often benefitting from the luck of history or existing policies, will see fewer jobs “created” during their terms because space for growth is limited. Biden was given more economic headroom than any president in history — and blew it. That’s the real legacy of “Bidenomics.”

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

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Media Gin Up Lies About Election Worker Safety To Escape Ballot-Box Accountability

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | AUGUST 08, 2023

Legacy media are once again parroting the debunked lie that there is a growing, widespread problem of Republicans threatening election workers. On Monday, Time Magazine published a melodramatic article about congressional Democrats’ “desperate[] push[]” to include provisions in the next federal spending bill they claim will protect state and local election workers. Of course, Time places the blame for this alleged problem on Donald Trump and his so-called “election denying” supporters, and warns that Congress’s upcoming budget is “likely the last chance” Democrats have to “safeguard” the 2024 election.

“It comes as election officials have faced a titanic upswing in death threats, online intimidation, and abuse,” the article reads.

There’s just one little problem with Time’s fantastical claim: It’s manufactured nonsense.

As I reported in these pages in April, the left’s insistence that there is a widespread conspiracy of Republican voters threatening election officials is simply not true. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ).

During his August 2022 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ, claimed the agency’s Election Threats Task Force — which was launched in July 2021 to address this alleged “rise in threats” against election workers — had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials. Two days before Polite’s testimony, the DOJ issued a press release disclosing only about 11 percent of those 1,000 communications “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for further investigation.

“[T]o recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation,” I wrote at the time.

So how exactly does Time justify its claim that there’s been a “titanic upswing” in threats directed toward election workers since the 2020 contest? The first is by linking to a survey from the Brennan Center for Justice — a highly partisan organization engaged in left-wing activism — claiming to show persistent fear among election workers for “their colleagues’ safety.”

The second is by linking to a November 2022 Washington Post article that includes grandiose statements from Democrat election officials pushing the same sky-is-falling narrative. Among those who commented to the Post was Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whose office proclaimed it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” The Post, of course, didn’t bother to mention whether it vetted her assertion to determine its truthfulness.

What’s equally remarkable about the article is the Post’s willingness to bury the truth from its readers. Not until the article’s 22nd paragraph are readers given the actual data from the DOJ on which I previously reported. Even then, the Post attempts to downplay the truth by regurgitating claims from unnamed election officials who say the DOJ and states’ limited number of prosecutions are “just a fraction of the threats they receive.”

Yes, there are verifiable threats made against election workers, however rare. But it also rarely rains in Death Valley, California. That doesn’t mean we should start building Noah’s Ark 2.0 to prepare for a catastrophic flood there.

What we’re seeing is a media-wide effort to take anecdotal incidents of threats and blow them out of proportion to give the appearance that election workers are under constant siege from so-called “election denying” MAGA Republicans. It’s a Democrat strategy designed to both cast their political opponents as extremists and dissuade conservatives who have legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight (such as poll watching).

Democracy does indeed die in darkness — just not in the way regime-approved media want you to believe.

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

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SINEMA ‘LIVID’ NEW YORK CITY GETS FEDERAL FUNDS TO HELP WITH MIGRANT CRISIS

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Massachusetts gov declares state of emergency due to surge of migrants; calls for federal action

Healey says there are 20,000 people in state system

By Adam Shaw | Fox News | Published August 8, 2023 1:01pm EDT

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in the liberal state over a surge of migrants that she says has left social services overwhelmed, and she called for more funding and help from the federal government.

Healey, a Democrat, announced that a state of emergency exists “due to rapid and unabating increases in the number of families with children and pregnant people — many of them newly arriving migrants and refugees — living within the state but without the means to secure safe shelter in our communities.”

The state said there are nearly 5,600 families or more than 20,000 people in the state shelter system. Healey said there are numerous contributing factors, including “federal policies on immigration and work authorization” as well as a lack of affordable housing and the end of COVID-era programs.

Venezuelan migrants board buss at Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts. — Venezuelan migrants gather at the Vineyard Haven ferry terminal on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts on Sept. 16, 2022. The group was moved to Joint Base Cape Cod in Buzzards Bay. (Boston Globe)

Massachusetts is the latest liberal jurisdiction to call for help from the federal government due to a surge of migrants, despite not being anywhere near the besieged southern border. New York City, Chicago and the state of New York have all made emergency declarations this year and called for help in response to a migrant wave.

While the numbers have been only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of migrants that hit the border each month, those areas have declared themselves overwhelmed and at capacity as migrants arrive. Healey said that in July there were 100 families a day seeking emergency shelter while the numbers leaving shelter has declined by two-thirds since 2019 — and costs are hitting $45 million a month on programs.

MAYOR ERIC ADAMS SAYS NEW YORK CITY HAS ‘RUN OUT OF ROOM’ FOR MIGRANTS: ‘IT’S NOT GOING TO GET ANY BETTER’

“Many of these families are migrants to Massachusetts, drawn here because we are and proudly have been a beacon to those in need,” she wrote in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

She also blamed “a confusing tangle of immigration laws, an inability for migrants to obtain work authorization from the federal government, an increase in the number of people coming to Massachusetts, and the lack of an affordable housing supply in our state.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey delivers her inaugural address moments after being sworn into office during inauguration ceremonies, Jan. 5, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Healey called for Mayorkas to press Congress and use executive action to remove barriers for work permits for migrants, “address our outdated and punitive immigration laws” and to provide additional financial assistance to the state.

BIDEN ADMIN SENDING SURGE OF ICE SPECIAL AGENTS TO BORDER AMID INCREASE IN MIGRANT NUMBERS

Mayorkas has echoed many of these calls himself, with the administration as a whole repeatedly calling on Congress to provide additional funding as requested at the border. The administration has urged passage of an immigration reform bill that was introduced on President Biden’s first day in office. But such calls for funding and immigration reform have met with opposition from Republicans and others. Republicans have balked at the inclusion of a mass amnesty for millions of illegal migrants included in the 2021 proposal. Instead, they want to see asylum loopholes closed and more border security, with House Republicans introducing and passing sweeping legislation earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., said last week she was “livid” that New York City was receiving federal funding to deal with migrants instead of states at the border.

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“What we’re experiencing here in Arizona is matched only by what folks are experiencing in southern Texas,” Sinema said. “Those are the two communities that are experiencing this crisis. The rest of the country is experiencing some elements of it, but we are experiencing the brunt.”

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

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

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Judge Andrew P. Napolitano Op-ed: Constitution Valueless if Gov’t Negates It

constitution shredded — (Mike2focus/Dreamstime.com)

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano | Monday, 07 August 2023 03:52 PM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Here is a pop quiz: If the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution repealing the First Amendment, would we still enjoy the freedom of speech?

That depends on which value prevails: Are our rights only what lawmakers have written down, or are they personal attributes immune from government reach?

When James Madison was crafting the First Amendment, he insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in order to manifest the Framers’ belief that the freedom of speech pre-existed the government. The First Amendment is a negative right.

It doesn’t grant the freedom of speech.

Rather, it restrains Congress from abridging a right that preexisted Congress.

So, what is a right, and where does it come from?

A right is an indefeasible personal claim against the whole world.

It does not require a government permission slip or any precondition or community consensus — only the ability to reason.

It belongs to every human by virtue of our existence.

Privileges — like voting or driving an automobile — come from the government. Rights come from our humanity. Madison included the word “the” before “freedom of speech” in order to underscore its natural — not governmental — origins.

If you accept the existence of the natural law — a body of unchanging moral principles universally knowable by the exercise of reason — you accept that natural rights are ours to exercise whether the government is expressly prohibited from interfering with them or not.

So, under the natural law, murder would still be wrong and unlawful, even if the government were to permit itself and others to kill, as, of course, governments have done and continue to do.

Under the natural law, the answer to our pop quiz is that because the freedom of speech is a natural human right, it exists and is free from government interference whether the prohibition on interference is written down or not.

Is natural law in the Constitution?

Yes.

The Ninth Amendment — Madison’s crown jewel — recognizes the existence of personal human rights too numerous to articulate, and it prohibits the government from denying or disparaging them.

The opposite of natural law is positivism.

It teaches that law is only that which has been written down and ratified by the law giver.

Under positivism, there is no natural law restraint upon the government; right and wrong are only and always whatever the government says they are.

Under positivism, the answer to our pop quiz is that the freedom of speech would be fair game for the government to abridge.

The freedom of speech — to think as you wish, to say what you think, to offer what you say — is so normal, so human, so integral to the very existence of each of us, who cares what the government thinks of it?

Yet, today, the government thinks very little of the freedom of speech, even though all in government —from the president on down to a part-time government janitor — have sworn allegiance to the Constitution.

Today, even though the First Amendment only verbally addresses Congress, the freedom of speech is protected from all government infringement —whether local, state or federal; whether legislative, executive or judicial.

President Woodrow Wilson, who infamously had Princeton University students arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud outside draft offices in Trenton, New Jersey, claiming they might deter men from registering for the draft, argued that the First Amendment only restrained Congress, not the president.

Today, such an argument is hogwash.

I offer this brief philosophical and historical discourse on the freedom of speech as background in order to address how this basic freedom is under attack by the government today.

Today, the attacks on free speech are often silent and unseen, as the government attempts to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly.

In a case involving Facebook now making its way through the federal courts in Texas, we have learned that the Biden administration pressured Facebook executives to suppress free speech about COVID-19 vaccines.

The suppressed speech offered an alternative view to that which the government preferred. Rather than competing in the marketplace of ideas, the government chose to use its bully power to suppress the speech that it hated or feared or with which it disagreed.

This is government interference with speech because of its content.

The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that, except for a state interest of the highest order — protecting the secrecy of troop movements in wartime, for example — the government is absolutely prohibited from interfering with speech because of its content.

The government claims it was just pointing out errors in scientific materials to Facebook. But that is not government’s job.

The government does not enjoy the freedom of speech; only individuals do.

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech so that individuals can decide for themselves what to say and hear.

Facebook is not the government.

It’s free to censor all it wants. But when it does so to get the government off its back, it thereby acquires an attribute of the government, and a court can impose First Amendment restrictions upon it.

Stated differently, if Facebook and the feds are in a mutually beneficial relationship, they will both lose.

The feds will be restrained by a court — as the Biden administration was — for interfering with the content of speech, and Facebook will lose its ability to censor the content of its own bulletin boards.

Why do we elect persons to protect the Constitution who end up cutting holes in it?

What value is the Constitution if the government can negate it?

Whose speech will the government undermine next?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s Reports — More Here.

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Biden’s Flip-Flops on Weapons for Ukraine Put the Flapjack Cooks at IHOP to Shame

By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / August 08, 2023

Joe Biden in a blue suit with a striped red and blue tie. — President Joe Biden’s flipping puts the flapjack cooks at IHOP to shame. Sadly, he’s not flipping pancakes, but America’s position on sending certain advanced weapons to Ukraine. Pictured: Biden speaks in Philadelphia on July 20. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden’s flipping puts the flapjack cooks at IHOP to shame. Sadly, he’s not flipping delicious pancakes, but America’s strategic positions on sending certain weapons to Ukraine. Biden’s pattern of initial reluctance to send advanced weapons, followed by a change of heart under pressure from the media and allies, sends a dangerous message to America’s allies and enemies alike that Washington lacks resolve.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Biden has repeatedly stated that the U.S. and its NATO allies would not provide Kyiv with certain weapons, lest it escalate into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, or even provoke a nuclear war with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet, time and time again, the president has changed his mind, belatedly agreeing to send Ukraine weapons that may have had a greater impact if he had done so earlier.

In March 2022, Biden said, “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say—that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK?”

Biden has not yet sent American pilots with American crews, but he has repeatedly escalated U.S. and NATO involvement beyond his previous “red lines.”

Critics, among them Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., have condemned Biden’s “‘drip-drip-drip’ approach” to arming Ukraine as costing the defense “valuable time.”

“This strategy harms American interests by prolonging the war,” Wicker said.

Here is a list of “red lines” Biden appeared to draw for himself, but later crossed:

1. Fighter Jets

On March 8, 2022, the United States rejected an offer from NATO ally Poland to transfer its Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets to a U.S. base in Germany en route to Ukraine’s air force to combat Russia’s invasion, Reuters reported. The prospect of transporting aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon said. Yet in May of this year, Biden told allies that he would support an international coalition to train Ukrainian pilots on Western fighters, clearing the way for Western jets to take the skies over Ukraine.

Russia has maintained air superiority in the meantime, and a Pentagon official reportedly told Ukraine that it would take 18 to 24 months to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16. U.S. officials said they had higher priorities to prepare for Ukraine’s spring offensive than training the pilots.

It remains unclear what difference Polish MiG-29s would have made had Biden approved them in March 2022, but it seems the U.S. and its allies could have equipped Ukraine far better for the war in the air had Biden greenlit air support more than a year earlier than he did.

2. Patriot Air Defense Systems

On March 10, 2022, the Pentagon announced it would not send the Patriot air-defense system to Ukraine.

“There’s no discussion about putting a Patriot battery in Ukraine,” a defense official said, Defense One reported. “In order to do that, you have to put U.S. troops with it to operate it. It is not a system that the Ukrainians are familiar with, and as we have made very clear, there will be no U.S. troops fighting in Ukraine.”

Yet last December, Pentagon officials told CNN that they were finalizing a plan to send Patriot systems to the embattled country. U.S. troops would train Ukrainians to use the missile systems at a U.S. Army base in Germany. The typical Patriot battery includes a radar set that detects and tracks targets, computers, power-generating equipment, a control station, and up to eight launchers, which can fire four missiles each. A group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers completed their training in March.

3. Multiple Rocket-Launch System

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” Biden said on May 30, after a Russian TV host warned that providing Ukraine with a Multiple Launch Rocket System would “cross a red line.”

Yet on the very next day, U.S. officials confirmed that America would send that type of missile system, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, to Ukraine.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told CNN that Ukraine would use the weapons only to defend his country’s territory, not to attack Russia.

4. Tanks

In mid-January, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reportedly ruled out sending U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. “We should not be providing the Ukrainians systems they can’t repair, they can’t sustain, and that they, over the long term, can’t afford, because it’s not helpful,” Austin’s policy chief, Colin Kahl, said.

Eleven months after Biden emphasized Russian tanks in his remarks on the Ukraine invasion, his administration finally agreed to send 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The Pentagon approved the first tanks for shipment on Monday.

On Jan. 25, under pressure from NATO partners, such as Germany, who took the position that they would not provide tanks unless the U.S. did, Biden finally agreed to send in the tanks. What about the concerns about maintenance or training? Apparently, they were surmountable after all.

5. Cluster Munitions

Despite Russia’s widespread use of cluster munitions and the fact that the U.S. and other nations were struggling to keep up with Ukraine’s need for artillery shells, in December, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. would not provide cluster munitions to Kyiv. “According to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions,” he explained.

Apparently, that changed, too. On July 8, the U.S. announced it would now send cluster munitions, and the same John Kirby took to the podium to praise the effectiveness of the munitions. “They’re using them effectively, and they are actually having an impact on Russia’s defensive formations and Russia’s defensive maneuvering,” he said. “I think I can leave it at that.”

Why the confusion?

“What can explain all this dithering on decisions to send weapons to Ukraine?” Tom Spoehr, director of the Center For National Defense at The Heritage Foundation, asked in comments to The Daily Signal. He attributed the dithering to “an over-fixation on worries about what Russia might do in response.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“Certainly, the administration must be mindful not to push the conflict into World War III, but it is also useful to remember who started the conflict, which party has committed so many war crimes that they are now routine, and nearly nightly uses ballistic and cruise missiles to pound non-military targets in Ukraine, such as hospitals, apartment buildings and shopping centers,” Spoehr added.

“In the midst of the Civil War battle of the Wilderness facing Gen. Robert E. Lee, General and future President Ulysses S. Grant told one of his subordinates, “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do … . Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’”

“That might not be bad advice for the White House, either.”

Alex Velez-Green, a senior adviser at Heritage, noted that Biden’s flip-flopping might undermine America’s ability to deter China, its major rival on the world stage.

“America’s priority should be to deter China even as it pushes our NATO allies to do more to defend Europe,” Velez-Green told The Daily Signal. “It’s hard to see how Biden’s decision to send certain weapons to Ukraine after previously ruling them out helps with either of those efforts.”

Tyler O’Neil

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.”

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Head Strong

A.F. BRANCO | on August 8, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-head-strong/

The More Jack Smith and the corrupt justice system hit Trump, the higher his poll numbers go.

Trump Polls Go Up — Cartoon by A.F. Branco.

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Is NPR Trying to Start a Race War?

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 05, 2023

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

The government-funded pundits at National Propaganda Radio (NPR) seem to have a toxic fixation with race.

On Tuesday, the outlet blamed the success of American country music on racial prejudice. In a podcast episode titled “How racism became a marketing tool for country music,” NPR brought on a historian to outline the myriad ways country music is a vehicle for white supremacy. The host, Britany Luse, introduces the episode by previewing questions to Amanda Martinez, a country music historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Luse wants to know “how country music became this symbol of racism” and why country music stars remain popular despite artists who currently lead the charts “peddling racist rhetoric today.”

“Is racism really what it takes make country music number one?” Luse asks. “I wanted to know how country music became this symbol of racism.”

The episode went to air over recent allegations of racism against country music stars currently at the top of the charts. Jason Aldean’s recent number-one hit, “Try That In A Small Town,” drew controversy over the suggestion that inner-city riots such as the record-devastating outbursts that erupted in 2020 wouldn’t be tolerated outside major metropolitan areas. Aldean didn’t try to hide the message, as if he even needed to.

“That sh-t may fly in the city. Good luck trying that in a small town.”

“Unfortunately, I think that these three very successful songs at the top of the charts only encourages the country music business to continue what it’s always done,” Martinez said, “which is making a product for a white conservative base.”

Aldean, Martinez added, is “calling for a suppression of those calls for greater freedoms” embedded in the 2020 riots.

According to NPR, the song is racist because of its condemnation of deadly uprisings brought about by Black Lives Matter under the righteous banner of social justice.

The podcast host also brought up Morgan Wallen, because he used the N-word one time, and Luke Combs, because the song that has him in the number three spot is apparently adapted from a black queer woman. While social justice warriors might otherwise be flattered by Combs’ tribute to 1988 Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, the cancellers have to see victimization in everything, so they manufacture a narrative about race so they can continue to label everything “white supremacist.” NPR has now decoded country music as a primary pillar of systemic racism, courtesy of the taxpayer.

“I think we’re continuing to see conservatives kind of hold up country music as supposedly morally superior to an alternative, youth-oriented black popular music,” said Martinez.

But let’s examine the obscenity that’s come to define rap music.

“Fukumean,” currently the number one rap song in the country by Gunna, is an anthem about the rapper’s own superiority and unapologetic determination to stay at the top of the social hierarchy.

F-cking this b-tchh like a perv, smack from the back, grab her perm. Ice the burr, sh-tin’ on all you lil’ turds.

In 2020, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” which stands for “Wet A– P-ssy,” topped the Billboard charts for at least four weeks. The lyrics are so obscene that they are not suitable for publication. Readers can read them here.

But more specifically, let’s examine some rap lyrics about Jews. In 1989, a militant rap group called Public Enemy released “Welcome to the Terrordome.” The lyrics read, “Crucifixion ain’t no fiction: so-called chosen, frozen/Apology made to whoever pleases. Still, they got me like Jesus,” followed by “Backstabbed, grabbed a flag from the back of the lab, told the ‘rab, get off the rag.”

In 2017, Jay-Z’s “Story of O.J.” played on Jewish stereotypes of financial dominance.

You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit. You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.

Rap music has also mocked Arabs and Asians. Ice Cube released “Black Korea” in 1991, deriding “funky little stores” run by Asian-Americans.

Every time I wanna go get a f-ckin’ brew I gotta go down to the store with the two Oriental one penny countin’ motherf-ckers that make a n-gga mad enough to cause a little ruckus … Pay respect to the fist or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp.

Now let’s look at some of the commentary from NPR celebrating the genre. In June 2020, NPR published a list of 50 songs deemed significant to black history that they claim “lift music itself” and represent the “spirit of resistance” against racial injustices. To NPR, rap music represents a revolutionary response in support of a righteous cause, and country music represents the worst elements of American racism.

NPR’s Pattern Of Divisive Coverage

The racial lens through which NPR produces coverage has driven the government outlet to produce some bizarre takes on race. In the summer of 2020, NPR flat-out invented a racist crime altogether.

“Rightwing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests erupted nationwide in late May,” NPR tweeted. The story featured an image of a Buick sedan surrounded by demonstrators. Local coverage of the incident revealed it was the protestors, not the driver, who will face charges after the altercation. It was the driver who was assaulted by armed rioters.

[READ: NPR Falsely Calls Victim Of Attack By Rioters A White Supremacist]

NPR vs reality
(HT @TimRunsHisMouth) https://t.co/TX2dHExR1E pic.twitter.com/0TPUfCRLAg
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 21, 2020

Just two weeks prior, the outlet published commentary that called on followers to begin “decolonizing your bookshelf.” NPR claimed it was “Republican leaders” the following year who were trying to “ban books.”

In essence, "decolonizing your bookshelf" is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long, says @itsjuanlove. https://t.co/pbSBx8Z4So
— NPR (@NPR) June 6, 2020

Guests on NPR in 2020 also declared the George Floyd riots “‘Acts of Rebellion’ Instead Of Riots” and authored books on the “Defense of Looting.” In the “All Things Considered” podcast that same year, host Sacha Pfeiffer characterized then-President Donald Trump’s initiative to promote patriotic education as an exercise in “cultural division.” Federalist Editor Joy Pullmann reported the comment came after Trump said this:

We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world

In 2019, an NPR affiliate also decried struggling to pronounce foreign names as “racist.”

If someone wanted to incite a race war, they would pull from the NPR playbook, inserting an element of racial animus into every story. The pattern of coverage from the taxpayer-funded outlet reveals an agenda on race that’s far more corrosive to national discourse than if Aldean had even tossed the N-word into his number-one hit.

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

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‘Facebook Files’ Part 4 Show FBI’s Censorship Liaison May Have Perjured Himself

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 07, 2023

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

Part four of the “Facebook Files” published by Rep. Jim Jordan on Monday shows a top FBI agent who was coordinating censorship strategy with Silicon Valley tech companies may have committed perjury in November testimony.

FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who serves as the bureau’s “main conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Big Tech,” according to Jordan, was deposed last fall as a central player in the government censorship case Missouri v. Biden. Chan testified that he was only aware of one meeting between Facebook employees and the FBI about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, but internal Facebook documents show him participating in an additional “secret follow-up call.”

THE FACEBOOK FILES PART 4. FBI LIED ABOUT MEETING WITH BIG TECH REGARDING NY POST’S HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

Internal FB docs reveal that an FBI Special Agent made false statements in testimony about the FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story

🧵 Thread:
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 7, 2023

In his November deposition, Chan admitted to an Oct. 14, 2020 meeting with officials at Facebook related to the first Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post. The Post revealed emails from the laptop that indicated then-candidate Joe Biden had been lying when he claimed to have never spoken about Hunter’s business with him “or with anyone else.”

At the Oct. 14 meeting, Laura Dehmlow, the FBI’s section chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, offered “no comment” when Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, Jordan explained. Facebook quickly announced it was “reducing” the “distribution” of the story until the platform completed a third-party fact check.

Dehmlow told House lawmakers in July that in a meeting with Twitter earlier on Oct. 14, someone from the FBI had acknowledged the laptop’s authenticity before other officials at the bureau switched their answer to “no comment.” That became the FBI’s official response when other companies such as Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, even though the agency had confirmed the laptop’s authenticity as early as November 2019, according to IRS whistleblowers.

In November, Chan recalled Dehmlow’s response at the Oct. 14 meeting where Dehmlow offered Facebook no comment on the legitimacy of the laptop. Chan told lawmakers that was his only meeting on the matter with the social media company. Internal records from the company made public by GOP House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, however, reveal another apparent meeting between Chan and Facebook employees.

One employee recalled having an Oct. 15 discussion with Chan as a “follow up” to the meeting with the Foreign Influence Task Force on Oct. 14. The employee asked Chan for any updates or changes on the legitimacy status of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Chan testified in his deposition that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation into the infamous laptop, records from Facebook reveal Chan told employees he “was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI.”

Those weren’t Agent Chan’s only inconsistent statements. Agent Chan also claimed in the deposition that he had “no internal knowledge of [the FBI’s] investigation” involving Hunter Biden’s laptop. pic.twitter.com/eGf4gfx3wW
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 7, 2023

Previous installments of the “Facebook Files” exposed corporate-government collusion between Facebook and Biden White House officials collaborating to censor information about Covid-19, including content that was “true.” Records show the Biden administration pressured Facebook to take down “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe,” among other claims about side effects even if they were “true.”

[READ: ‘Facebook Files’ 2.0 Reveal White House Pressured Facebook To Censor ‘True’ Content]

In July, Chief Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana delivered a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, prohibiting administration officials from collaborating with tech titans to censor dissenting speech on social media platforms. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals later issued a stay on the injunction, with oral argument scheduled to take place Thursday, leaving federal officials free to continue working with tech companies to censor Americans online in the meantime.

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

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Gas Prices Spike, Creating Headache for Biden

By: By Brian Freeman | Monday, 07 August 2023 02:47 PM EDT

The average increase in the price of gasoline was 30 cents per gallon in the past month — and could complicate President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection strategy, the Daily News reported Monday. More trouble for Biden’s campaign could come as the price hikes may also intensify as planned cuts in OPEC+ production, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Russia, take hold in international markets, with high summer temperatures also contributing to higher energy demand, which would further drive up prices.

Currently, the average gas price is $3.83 per gallon, up from $3.53 one month ago, according to AAA and an average level not seen since October. Prices are still significantly lower that an all-time high of $5.01 per gallon in June 2022.

Republicans have criticized Biden’s green policies, connecting the issue to the higher cost of gasoline, the Daily Caller reported. Biden has hoped to rely heavily on “Bidenomics” as a strong point going into next year’s election.

Rising oil prices threaten to intensify inflationary pressures that continue to be a feature of the American economy, the The Wall Street Journal reported. The rising energy prices usually cause higher prices in other sectors by making transportation and the production processes more expensive.

Biden released tens of millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) last year in an attempt to control surging gas prices before the midterm elections. That decision means that the SPR, which is generally meant to serve as a supply in case of war or some other national emergency, could now take decades to refill to peak levels, according to the Daily Mail.

Last week the Biden administration delayed refilling the SPR due to higher oil prices and unfavorable market conditions.

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Pence Blasts Biden After Report of Russia, China Fleet Spotted off Alaska Coast

By Fran Beyer | Monday, 07 August 2023 02:48 PM EDT

Mike Pence lashed out Monday at President Joe Biden after a chilling Wall Street Journal report revealed a combined Russian and Chinese naval force had last week patrolled the Alaskan coast just outside U.S. territorial waters.

The fleet — the largest such flotilla to approach American shores — was made up of 11 Russian and Chinese ships, and was shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, the Journal reported.

The former vice president in the Trump administration — now a 2024 GOP presidential contender — blamed the incident on Biden’s weak leadership.

“Under President Biden, Russia and China threaten to conquer their neighbors & their new Axis is now operating together off the American coast. China & Russia & their ‘no limits’ partnership now conducts joint blue water naval operations off the American coast & the arctic north,” Pence wrote on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter.

“America needs a new Commander-in-Chief who understands the threat and will build a much bigger navy, new shipyards and a military fitted to the widening threats of the 21st Century. The enemies of freedom only understand strength,” Pence wrote.

The blatant aggression comes amid heightened tensions between the United States and China and Russia, particularly surrounding Taiwan and Ukraine, The Hill noted.

The Journal reported a spokesperson for the U.S. Northern Command confirmed the stunning report, but didn’t provide details on the number of ships or the precise location of the Chinese and Russian ships.

“Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat,” the official told the Journal.

Alaska’s GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan applauded the U.S. response amid a “new era of authoritarian aggression,” the news outlet reported.

According to the Journal, Russia’s Defense Ministry on Friday said Russian and Chinese vessels had carried out drills involving communications training, helicopter landings and takeoffs from the decks of each other’s ships — and in a joint anti-submarine exercise in which a mock target was detected and destroyed.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the Journal the patrol wasn’t aimed at Washington.

“According to the annual cooperation plan between the Chinese and Russian militaries, naval vessels of the two countries have recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters in the western and northern Pacific Ocean. This action is not targeted at any third party and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation,” said the Chinese embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, the Journal reported.

The USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn, and the USS Chung-Hoon responded to the flotilla, tracking its movement, the Journal reported. The four destroyers were in addition to the American maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft.

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Child-Trafficking Bust Proves the Left Was Wrong About ‘Sound of Freedom’

By: Tony Kinnett / @TheTonus / August 07, 2023

Left-wing media were shown to be wrong about “Sound of Freedom” last week when the FBI announced a major child-trafficking bust, less than a month after the film was released. Pictured: The FBI and Chattanooga, Tennessee, police work together on the effort to eradicate the scourge of child trafficking. (Photo: FBI)

While 126 more suspects in child trafficking and child sexual exploitation are eating prison food today, many legacy media outlets are eating crow.

Less than a month after liberal and left-wing media outlets slammed the child sex-trafficking docudrama “Sound of Freedom” for supposedly being a rallying point for “QAnon supporters,” conspiracy theorists, and “Dads with Brainworms,” the FBI announced the arrests of 126 suspects in a massive child-trafficking investigation.

The FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and state and local law enforcement agencies collaborated in “Operation Cross Country XIII,” resulting in the rescue of “59 actively missing children,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a prepared statement on Aug. 1.

Given the increased prominence of child sex trafficking and exploitation over the past two decades in the United States, a rational individual would think that NPR (which receives government funding and passes itself off as an “independent and unbiased” news source) would mention the 22 times it had covered child sex-trafficking arrests in the past decade, but that’s not the case. Instead, NPR featured the criticism of professors who claimed that a movie drawing attention to the evils of child trafficking would make victims “more invisible and more vulnerable to exploitation.”

Is “Sound of Freedom” remotely close to a political hit piece of conspiracy and wacky nonsense that outlets like Jezebel and The Guardian built it up to be? No—not even close. “Sound of Freedom” tells the story of Tim Ballard (portrayed by actor Jim Caviezel), a man who dedicated his life to fighting child sex trafficking—by starting the organization Operation Underground Railroad.

Does NPR at least give the same treatment to other movies it considers “political advocacy” films? No, it doesn’t. NPR recently described the pro-abortion movie “Happening” as “timely and urgent,” free of the bothersome quotes of critics who might take issue with the movie’s portrayal of pro-life and pro-choice cultures.

When reporting on a subject, one might expect relevant data and statistics concerning the subject at hand to figure prominently. None of the outlets that were scathingly critical of “Sound of Freedom” cared to mention the Department of Health and Human Services’ estimates that anywhere from 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are trafficked in the U.S. annually.

While NPR endeavored to find angry professors to quote in its piece, victims of sex trafficking are noticeably absent. Perhaps a victim of the ruthless practice might have a unique perspective on Angel Studios’ portrayal of the subject.

“Fox and Friends” interviewed trafficking survivor Donna Hubbard from Woman at the Well Transition Center, who praised “Sound of Freedom” and called on lawmakers to act on the issue.

Emma Waters, a research associate with The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family told The Daily Signal that she isn’t surprised by the Left’s dismissive attitude.

The attempts by mainstream media and leftist outlets to discredit … ‘Sound of Freedom’ are less surprising when you consider four of the main areas that aggravate child sexual exploitation: the porous southern border, unaccountable social media platforms, child pornography, and broken families.

What woke ideologues don’t want to admit is that when people mock the traditional family and encourage soft-on-crime policies, it’s children who suffer exploitation and abuse.

(The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

What should be a nonpartisan issue and an open space for praising the brave men and women who rescue children from the horrors of trafficking has become a pointlessly contentious issue because a Christian film studio produced a movie that resonates more with conservatives and independents than the latest “Indiana Jones” movie at the box office.

It took less than one month for “Sound of Freedom” to prove why it was worth making, why we need to be constantly alert, and why Americans continue to lose trust in the legacy media.

COMMENTARY BY Tony Kinnett @TheTonus

Tony Kinnett is an investigative columnist for The Daily Signal.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Need Not Apply

A.F. BRANCO | on August 6, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-need-not-apply/

Teachers Unions are only for power and money and have no concern for the children.

Minnesota Teachers Union — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF AUGUST 4, 2023

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Latest ‘Facebook Files’ Confirm Biden Admin Censors Think You’re Too Stupid To Govern Yourself

BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 04, 2023

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris giggle in black and white

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

President Joe Biden’s White House demanded an increase of censorship from Facebook in 2021, new emails reveal — confirming once again that the administration believes Americans are stupid.

In part three of what he deemed the “Facebook Files,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released more communications obtained from Facebook detailing the immense pressure the Big Tech company received from the executive branch to limit what Americans saw online. Emails show Courtney Rowe, then-White House director of strategic communications and engagement for Covid-19 response, praising Facebook in April 2021 for offering the White House suppression data “broken down by region and demographics.” One sentence later, she petitioned the Big Tech company to answer, “how do we work with you all to push back on it[?]” because she believed that “if someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it’s the truth.”

Jordan said Rowe “mocked Real America’s ability to determine what’s true and what isn’t” because the Biden administration “didn’t think you were smart enough to decide for yourself.”

In April 2021, Biden’s then-Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty also sent Facebook several suppression demands to censor right-wing commentators and publications. According to Flaherty, outlets like the Daily Wire are “polarizing” and not “authoritative news source[s].”

“You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty questioned.

On behalf of the White House, Flaherty even asked Facebook to reduce visibility for the New York Post, which debuted reporting about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and Biden family corruption six months earlier.

“I’m curious – NY Post churning out articles every day… What is supposed to happen to that from Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?” Flaherty asked the censors.

Flaherty eventually concluded that his preference for controlling online speech was to convince Facebook to “kick people off” of the social media platform.

“We’re keen on what platforms are doing to reduce the spread of bad information, that platforms are not funneling people towards bad content,” Flaherty wrote. “That’s our primary concern.”

The censors at the Silicon Valley giant explained that they couldn’t “remove” every user or post deemed problematic by the White House but eventually agreed to demote certain posts even when the posts did not explicitly violate Facebook’s terms and conditions.

Facebook claimed that posts complaining about the “government overreach” of the Biden administration’s Covid jab mandates were reduced because they fed a “vaccine negative environment.”

“The company ADMITTED to the White House that it reduced content of certain posts – even if the posts didn’t violate the company’s terms and contained TRUE information,” Jordan explained.

Weaponizing the censorship industrial complex against Americans isn’t the only time Biden and his Democrat cronies have revealed their belief that Americans are stupid and can’t think for themselves. As early as 1988, Biden was telling voters to their faces that they were not credentialed enough to criticize him.

“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” then-Sen. Biden infamously proclaimed to a voter who asked him to explain his lies about his academic track record.

The ruling regime’s contempt for Americans was made even more abundantly clear during the pandemic. While Democrats demonstrated their disdain for their voters with hypocritical visits to hair salons and fancy restaurants during the height of lockdowns, Biden tried to force Covid shots on hardworking Americans who he apparently thought were not educated well enough to thoughtfully reject the jab.

BIDEN: The choice to be unvaccinated "has been fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable tv… I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now." pic.twitter.com/gVKxunkrjK
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 21, 2021

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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The Biden Administration Lost Contact With 85,000 Children. Here’s How Congress Is Trying to Find Them

By: Virginia Allen / @Virginia_Allen5 / August 04, 2023

A young girl is seen walking holding a doll on the bank of the Rio Grande. — The Biden administration has lost contact with 85,000 unaccompanied alien children within the U.S. Pictured: A Venezuelan migrant girl holds a doll while walking on the banks of the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on Dec. 27, 2022. (Photo: Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty Images)

Congressman Chris Smith is preparing to introduce legislation that will require the federal government to locate the 85,000 migrant children it has lost contact with within the U.S.

“This is all about accountability and effective interventions for these kids,” Smith, R-N.J., told The Daily Signal.

The draft legislation is focused on “locating, establishing contact with, [conducting] wellness checks, and [investigating] trafficking” of the 85,000 migrant children, Smith said.

In February, The New York Times reported that even though the Department of Health and Human Services checks on all unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally “by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors,” data obtained by the newspaper “showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children.”

“Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children,” the Times reported.

Smith expressed concern that the individuals who agree to act as sponsors for the children within the U.S. could take advantage of the lack of accountability and exploit the children. Unaccompanied migrant children remain in the custody of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement until they are placed with a parent or sponsor, but the agency “does not monitor or track the whereabouts of children after they are released from our care,” Robin Dunn Marcos, director of the office, told members of Congress during a hearing in April.

🔥🔥🔥@RepGrothman GRILLS witness about the Biden Administration losing track of 85,000 unaccompanied alien children. pic.twitter.com/Z8PzcTDkSA
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) April 18, 2023

The children with whom the Biden administration has lost contact “need to be protected from… these terrible traffickers who will exploit them, rape them, put them into forced labor of some kind,” Smith said. “And so, it’s a very real problem that’s happening all over the world, [and] happening right here in our backyard.”

Smith explained the importance of the forthcoming legislation during a July 25 screening of the anti-human tracking film “Sound of Freedom” on Capitol Hill. The bill aims to “investigate any suspicion of human trafficking related to the approximately 85,000 unaccompanied minors who were released from federal government custody and with whom subsequent contact has been lost,” he told the crowd at the film screening.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sponsored the screening of the film that drew lawmakers and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Smith says McCarthy has received a copy of the draft legislation and is confident the speaker will bring the bill to the floor of the House for a vote after it is formally introduced.

Smith worked to craft the legislation with Eduardo Verastegui, producer of and actor in the “Sound of Freedom,” and Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Severino previously served as the director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights.

Among the 85,000 children, a “percentage of those kids, we have reason to believe, were already being trafficked for labor and sex trafficking purposes,” Severino told The Daily Signal, adding that it is a “national scandal” that the people HHS handed these children over to are “unwilling to account for where those kids are now.”

The bill to fix this “scandal” is “simple,” according to Severino.

“It says that [the Department of Homeland Security], HHS and FBI must report to Congress as to the whereabouts of these children… who they are with, and whether or not the people who are taking care of them are criminals,” he said. “And third, how many of those kids have been trafficked.”

The New Jersey congressman plans to introduce the legislation soon after he ensures all lawmakers who wish to co-sponsor the legislation have the opportunity to do so, and says he hopes it will gain bipartisan support.

Smith has been a member of Congress since 1981 and says he has been working on combatting human trafficking since 1995. In 2000, Smith authored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which provided the federal government with tools to combat human trafficking.

America has “good laws,” to combat human trafficking, Smith said, but the “problem is we have not had a faithful implementation [of the laws] and the kind of aggressive work by the executive branch that it warrants.”

Customs and Border Protection reports encountering more than 423,000 unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office.

It “may be embarrassing to the Biden administration that lost the [85,000] children to shed light on that fact, but tough luck,” Severino said. “They lost the kids. They should be responsible for finding them.”

After so many Americans have watched “Sound of Freedom,” which has now grossed $155 million at the box office in one month, the “American people are demanding action,” Severino said. “This bill is the start of saving children from the clutches of some of the worst evil devised by man.”

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Know Thy Enemy

A.F. BRANCO | on August 4, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-know-thy-enemy/

Many believe that there is nothing the Deep State won’t do to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

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DEVON ARCHER CONFIRMS JOE BIDEN ‘LIED’ ABOUT KNOWLEDGE OF HUNTER’S BUSINESS DEALINGS, COMER SAYS

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Devon Archer says Hunter used Joe Biden as ‘defensive leverage’ for foreign biz partners, transcript shows

Fox News Digital obtained a transcript of Archer’s testimony before the House Oversight panel

By Brooke Singman | Fox News | Published August 3, 2023 9:00am EDT

FIRST ON FOX: Devon Archer told congressional investigators that Hunter Biden used then-Vice President Joe Biden as “defensive leverage” to send “the right signals” to his foreign business partners, while selling him as “the brand” that offered “capabilities and reach,” as well as a “unique understanding of D.C.”

Archer’s comments came during a transcribed interview before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Fox News Digital obtained the more than 140-page transcript of Archer’s interview, which took place behind closed doors.

Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, arrives at the O’Neill House Office Building before testifying to the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Monday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden used his “very powerful name” to “add value” in pitching and securing foreign business ventures.

Archer said Hunter Biden “would not be so overt,” or “overtly” say “we’re going to use my dad for this,” but instead, Archer said that he would use the name to “get leverage.”

“Defensive leverage that the value is there in his work,” Archer said.

“The value that Hunter Biden brought to it was having — you know, there was — the theoretical was corporate governance, but obviously, given the brand, that was a large part of the value,” he continued. “I don’t think it was the sole value, but I do think that was a key component of the value.”

Archer and the Bidens — Devon Archer golfing with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in 2014. (Fox News)

Archer told investigators that Hunter put his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on speakerphone while meeting with business partners at least 20 times. Archer described how Joe Biden was put on the phone to sell “the brand.”

“You aren’t talking about Dr. Jill or anybody else. You’re talking about Joe Biden. Is that fair to say?” Archer was asked.

Archer replied: “Yeah, that’s fair to say… Obviously, that brought the most value to the brand… It was Hunter Biden and him,” Archer said. “We would discuss having, you know, an understanding of D.C. and that was a differentiating component of us being able to raise capital.”

Devon Archer, a former longtime business associate of Hunter Biden, is set to testify before Congress.

He added, “It wasn’t as specific as, you know… the vice president’s son, but obviously, the brand carried.”

When asked if Archer and Hunter Biden would tell business partners they had “unique access” because of Vice President Biden, Archer said: “Yes, we would say we had unique understanding of D.C. and how it operates and how that, you know, could positively reflect on the terms of our business.”

Archer served on the board of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings alongside Hunter Biden beginning in 2014 and received $83,000 a month for his work.

Referring to Burisma, Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden used the “brand” of Joe Biden for having “doors opened,” which “sent the right signals” for Burisma to “carry on its business and be successful.”

DEVON ARCHER: HUNTER BIDEN, BURISMA EXECS ‘CALLED DC’ TO GET UKRAINIAN PROSECUTOR FIRED

“My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it,” Archer said.

When pressed, Archer clarified that he believed Burisma was “able to survive” for as long as it did “just because of the brand.”

“Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer explained.

“In what way?” Archer was asked.

“Legally.”

Joe, Hunter and Archer split image — From left: President Biden, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. (Fox News)

President Biden and the White House have repeatedly denied ever being in business with his son, and have repeatedly said Joe Biden never discussed the businesses and never had any knowledge about his son’s business dealings.

But Archer testified that then-Vice President Biden attended dinners with Hunter’s foreign business associates — including with an executive of Burisma Holdings.

One dinner, Archer recalled, took place in the spring of 2014 at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Archer, Eric Schwerin, the mayor of Moscow’s wife Yelena Baturina and other business partners attended.

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/08/67b5b2e7-Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf

That dinner took place just weeks after Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, an LLC linked to Hunter Biden and his associates.

Archer also recalled a dinner in the spring of 2015, again at Cafe Milano. This time, Archer said Vadym Pozharskyi — an executive at Burisma — attended the dinner.

EXCLUSIVE: JOE BIDEN ALLEGEDLY PAID $5M BY BURISMA EXECUTIVE AS PART OF A BRIBERY SCHEME, ACCORDING TO FBI DOCUMENT

Meanwhile, as for Burisma, Archer testified that he and Hunter Biden attended a board of directors meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015.

On the sidelines of that meeting, Archer testified that Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to make a phone call to “D.C” to address “pressure” the company was facing.”

Archer said Burisma had “several pressure issues,” saying that was “kind of a theme” of the company, noting the issues involved 23 million pounds of “capital tied up in London,” U.S. visa issues and the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the firm.

“They requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure,” Archer said. “You know, government pressure from Ukrainian government investigations into Mykola, et cetera.”

Biden and Zlochevski — Hunter Biden, left, and Mykola Zlochevsky. (Getty Images)

Fox News Digital previously reported that on Nov. 2, 2015, just weeks before the board meeting in Dubai, Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden, emphasizing that the “ultimate purpose” of the agreement to have Hunter on the board was to shut down “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” referring to Zlochevsky, who also went by Nikolay.

“The request is like, can D.C. help?” Archer said, adding, however, that the request was not specific to “can the big guy help.”

“It was always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?”

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pressed Archer, saying: “The request was help from the United States Government to deal with the pressure they were under from their prosecutor, and that entailed the freezing of assets at the London bank and other things that were going on in Ukraine?”

“Correct,” Archer said.

When asked why Burisma would ask Hunter for help, Archer said he was “a lobbyist and an expert and obviously he carried, you know, a very powerful name.”

HUNTER DEMANDED $10M FROM CHINESE ENERGY FIRM BECAUSE ‘BIDENS ARE THE BEST,’ HAVE ‘CONNECTIONS’

“That’s what they were asking for,” he said.

After the Burisma executives asked for help, Hunter “called his dad,” Archer said, adding that he “did not hear this phone call.”

When asked if Hunter Biden calling the vice president of the United States to “do something” about the pressure Burisma was facing would “cause off some serious alarm bells for influence peddling, conflicts of interest,” Archer testified: “Right.”

Archer testified that he was “left out” of “black box D.C. types of conversations.”

But just five days after Hunter Biden called then-Vice President Joe Biden from Dubai, Joe Biden took a trip to Ukraine.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

During that trip, the former vice president made a statement: “It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

Archer testified on other details related to joint ventures with Hunter Biden.

Meanwhile, Archer was pressed on an FBI FD-1023 form, which contained allegations that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden “coerced” Zlochevsky to pay them millions of dollars in exchange for their help in getting Shokin fired.

Biden has acknowledged that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and at the time, Hunter had a highly lucrative role on the board receiving thousands of dollars per month.

BIDENS ALLEGEDLY ‘COERCED’ BURISMA CEO TO PAY THEM MILLIONS TO HELP GET UKRAINE PROSECUTOR FIRED: FBI FORM

The then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.

Biden allies maintain the then-vice president pushed for Shokin’s firing due to concerns the Ukrainian prosecutor went easy on corruption and say that his firing was the policy position of the U.S. and international community.

The FBI form said Pozharskyi said the reason Hunter Biden was hired was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

Archer was not familiar with that arrangement and suggested Zlochevsky could have been referring to payments he made to Archer and Hunter Biden.

Joe and Hunter Biden at Fort McNair — President Biden and his son, Hunter. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Archer said he was not aware of a $5 million payment to Joe Biden from Zlochevsky and said the Burisma CEO could have been boasting or exaggerating to give “the impression of access.”

Archer’s testimony comes as part of the House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation, which Republicans say has yielded evidence related to the Biden family’s alleged foreign business schemes — including that the Biden family and its business associates created more than 20 companies and received more than $10 million from foreign nationals while Joe Biden served as vice president.

BIDEN WROTE COLLEGE RECOMMENDATION LETTER FOR SON OF HUNTER’S CHINESE BUSINESS PARTNER, EMAILS REVEAL

Meanwhile, the White House released a statement following Archer’s testimony Monday:

“It appears that the House Republicans’ own much-hyped witness today testified that he never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son’s associates, or doing anything wrong,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams told Fox News Digital. “House Republicans keep promising bombshell evidence to support their ridiculous attacks against the President, but time after time, they keep failing to produce any.”

In February 2022, Archer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for defrauding a Native American tribal entity and various investment advisory clients of tens of millions of dollars in connection with the issuance of bonds by the tribal entity and the subsequent sale of those bonds through “fraudulent and deceptive means,” according to the Department of Justice.

The Justice Department, over the weekend, sought to set a date for Archer’s sentence to begin.

Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.

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corruption, Crime, Law, Political

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Oregon county lost $1 billion in 2020 as residents fled crime, homelessness: ‘It’s like Portland died’

By Andrew Mark Miller | Fox News | Published August 3, 2023 3:17pm EDT

A Portland, Oregon, doctor knocked unconscious while walking in the city says her attack highlights ongoing problems with homelessness, mental illness and police shortages.

Multnomah County, where Portland, Oregon, is located, reportedly lost more than $1 billion in income between 2020 and 2021 as a result of residents fleeing the state amid surging crime, homelessness and safety concerns. Data analysis conducted by Oregon Live showed that 14,257 tax filers and their dependents left Multnomah County during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 and took a record $1 billion of income with them. The data showed that higher earners were more likely to leave since their jobs could be done remotely during coronavirus shutdowns, and the average income of people leaving was 14% higher than people who left the year before.

Before 2020, Portland had experienced 15 consecutive years of growth, Fox 12 Oregon reported.

CRIME TURNED PORTLAND INTO ‘HOLLOWED OUT SHELL.’ ITS NEIGHBORS ARE TRYING TO KEEP IT FROM HAPPENING TO THEM

tent on street with chain link fence in background — The homeless crisis in Portland, Oregon, has continued to spiral out of control and several Portland business owners have sounded the alarm about the issue and the crime associated with it. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)

The 2020 exodus came at the same time that crime in Portland began spiking and the city broke its homicide record in 2021 and then again in 2022. In addition, the homeless crisis in Portland has continued to spiral out of control and several Portland business owners have sounded the alarm about the issue and the crime associated with it.

“Our city is in peril,” Portland business owner Katherine Sealy told Fox News Digital in December. “Small businesses [and large] cannot sustain doing business in our city’s current state. We have no protection or recourse against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished.”

PORTLAND RESIDENT SOUNDS ALARM OVER CITY’S ‘SAFE REST VILLAGE’ PROGRAM: AREA OF ‘ORGANIZED CRIME AND DRUGS’

homeless tents in front of bridge — Tents cover an open space near the Steel Bridge in Portland, Oregon, on July 7, 2023. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)

Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office reported a 50% increase in homelessness from 2019 to 2022.

The flood of residents leaving Portland appears to have continued since the pandemic as Portland lost 8,308 people from July 2021 to July 2022. Census data shows that Portland lost the sixth-most residents in the country over the past year, Fox 12 Oregon reported.

“It’s like Portland died,” longtime Portland resident Larry May told Fox 12 Oregon in May.

Portland, Oregon skyline — The 2020 exodus came at the same time that crime in Portland began spiking and the city broke its homicide record in 2021 and then again in 2022. (George Rose/Getty Images)

Wheeler’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.

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AFLegal-SPLC-DOJ-FOIA Download

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CHILLING: Biden’s DOJ May Be Working With Leftist Group to Silence Parents Again, America First Legal Warns

By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / August 03, 2023

Merrick Garland in a suit with President Joe Biden towering over him — America First Legal is demanding documents from the Department of Justice related to the Southern Poverty Law Center and concerned parents. America First Legal is probing to see whether the DOJ had any role in the SPLC targeting of parental rights groups or if the DOJ is planning to use the SPLC to intimidate parents into silence. Pictured: Attorney General Merrick Garland listens as President Joe Biden appears behind him via teleconference on Aug. 3, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A conservative group is demanding answers about whether the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is repeating its 2021 strategy of targeting concerned parents after the Southern Poverty Law Center just added concerned parents to its “hate map.”

SPLC staff have met with Biden at the White House, and the administration has adopted the “book banning” rhetoric many activists use to slam parents concerned about sexually explicit books in school libraries.

“The Biden administration, including the Department of Justice, has demonstrated that it will work with outside political organizations to trample on the rights of parents who exercise their constitutional rights by speaking out on the woke takeover of America’s public schools,” Ian Prior, senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday.

“The SPLC’s move to designate parent organizations as ‘hate groups’ is eerily similar to the activities of the National School Boards Association in the fall of 2021, and America First Legal intends to fully investigate any coordination between the SPLC and the Department of Justice,” he added.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the DOJ to turn over documents related to the SPLC and SPLC staff.

Prior had referred to a letter from the National School Boards Association to Biden, in which the school board group likened parents who protest school district policies to domestic terrorists. The letter encouraged Biden to use the Patriot Act against those parents. Later documents revealed that the White House had worked with the school boards association to draft the letter. The DOJ issued a memo urging the investigation of concerned parents, following the letter.

The DOJ ultimately rescinded the memo, and the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter. But, as The Daily Signal recently reported, recent developments suggest the SPLC may be fulfilling the association’s role in another round of attacks on parents.

On June 6, the SPLC added parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty to its “hate map,” branding them “anti-government extremist groups” and part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.”

The SPLC attacked parental rights groups for opposing the leftward lurch in education that the SPLC itself supports—transgender lessons, sexually explicit books in school libraries, and critical race theory, which frames America as an institutionally racist country and blacks as inherently oppressed. The SPLC advocates such education through its Learning for Justice program.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups.” It tars religious freedom organizations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” and that smear inspired a gunman to target the Family Research Council for a terrorist attack in 2012.

Two days after the SPLC released its “hate map” and list of “hate groups” for 2022, the White House on June 8 released a strategy “to Protect LGBTQI+ Communities.” That strategy cites “federal threat monitoring” showing that LGBT individuals face threats “increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists.” The Biden administration’s strategy also announced that the DOJ will take “an all-of-Department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights,” touting the DOJ’s United Against Hate initiative.

If in fact they are “United Against Hate”, then why are they united around only one group of people? If you are united against hate, shouldn’t you be united against all hate, regardless of political affiliation?

The strategy also aims to “shield LGBTQI+ Americans from book bans,” announcing that the Department of Education would seek to counter efforts by parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty to protect children from sexually explicit books in school.

Biden personally met with SPLC staff six times since January 2021, according to White House records, and SPLC staff attended White House meetings at least 11 times in that same period. America First Legal cites these and other pertinent facts in its Freedom of Information Act request.

The legal organization cites Daily Signal reporting on the chilling threats Moms for Liberty has received after the SPLC attacked the parental rights group. Moms for Liberty received various threats, including messages such as “I will personally eradicate you from Massachusetts,” and “piece of s— fascists like you deserve to be dragged against a wall and force-fed hot lead. Eat s— and die.”

“At the behest of its leftist teacher union allies, the Biden administration has weaponized the federal domestic intelligence community and law enforcement to intimidate parents, deter them from protecting their children, and undermine their First Amendment rights,” the request notes.

America First Legal is asking the DOJ to hand over records of meetings with SPLC staff, particularly the staffers who meet with Biden officials at the White House, records of communications with SPLC staff, all records relating to the SPLC’s 2022 “hate” report, and all communications referencing SPLC, Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and terms related to parental rights.

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4 Things to Know About Obama-Appointed Judge Presiding Over New Trump Case

By: Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / August 03, 2023

People on Thursday wait to enter the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., for the hearing of former President Donald Trump on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 presidential election. (Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/ Getty Images)

The federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s case in Washington related to challenging the 2020 election outcome has a reputation for being tough on Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants.

An appointee of Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has ruled against the Trump administration in the past, as well as against Trump as an individual. After his third indictment on Tuesday, the 45th president will be arraigned in the District of Columbia on Thursday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya. However, if the case goes to trial, Chutkan would preside.

Here’s four things to know about Chutkan.

1. Hunter Biden’s Old Law Firm

Although Chutkan, 61, earned a reputation for taking a hard line on sentences for Jan. 6 rioters, her background before the bench is one of defending accused criminals – white-collar defendants and those who couldn’t afford lawyers. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she received her bachelor’s degree in economics from George Washington University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, according to her court biography. In law school, she was the associate editor of the law review and a legal writing fellow. After three years in private practice, Chutkan was hired by the District of Columbia’s Public Defender Service, where she was a trial attorney and supervisor. After 11 years with the public defender, she joined Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, a Democrat-leaning law firm, where President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, previously worked. While there, she specialized in litigation and white-collar criminal defense. She also represented clients in antitrust class-action litigation.

In late 2013, Obama appointed Chutkan to the federal district court post in the District of Columbia. The Senate voted 95-0 to confirm her nomination in June 2014. This final vote came after a more contentious cloture vote of 54-40.

2. Jan. 6 vs. George Floyd Riots

Chutkan was indignant about comparisons between the riots that broke out in cities across the country after the May 2020 police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. She even invoked the “mostly peaceful” narrative for describing the riots by Black Lives Matter and Antifa militants.

“People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent,” Chutkan said during an October 2021 court hearing. “But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

Chutkan has sentenced at least 38 people convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes to jail or prison terms, ranging from 10 days to more than five years, the Associated Press reported.

The AP has reported that Chutkan was the only judge of about two dozen presiding over prosecutions of some 600 Jan. 6 defendants who routinely imposed sentences that exceeded what federal prosecutors had asked for. She either matched or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in 19 of the 38 sentences after other judges handed down sentences more lenient than what prosecutors asked for.

Special counsel Jack Smith, the Trump prosecutor, might have been fortunate in getting the judge, as the AP reported on her reputation toward Capitol riot defendants since June 2022.

In cases where federal prosecutors didn’t even seek jail time against Jan. 6 defendants, Chutkan nonetheless sentenced them to between 14 and 45 days. Chutkan argued that jail and prison sentences would deter future “anti-democratic” factions.

“Every day, we’re hearing about reports of anti-democratic factions of people plotting violence, the potential threat of violence, in 2024,” she said when sentencing one defendant to five years, according to the AP. “It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment.”

3. ‘Presidents Are Not Kings’ Ruling vs. Trump

In November 2021, Chutkan ruled against Trump, who as a plaintiff filed an emergency motion to prevent the National Archives from providing information to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Trump lawyers argued giving records to the committee would undermine privileges aimed at protecting a president’s ability to have candid conversations. Chutkan ruled against Trump.

“His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity,’” Chutkan wrote in her opinion. “But presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”

4. Two Rulings vs. Trump Administration

In 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, Chutkan ruled that the Office of Refugee Resettlement must allow a juvenile illegal immigrant in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to have an abortion. That was in the case of Garza v. Hargan.

In 2019, Chutkan ruled that Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, illegally delayed the implementation of the “Equity in IDEA” (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act) regulations that update how states calculate racial disparities in special education.

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Parting Shot

A.F. BRANCO | on August 3, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-parting-shot/

Pence may have signed his 2024 campaign death warrant attacking Trump as above the constitution.

Pence Never-Trumper — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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Christian NBA player Jonathan Isaac launches UNITUS, an apparel company that stands for faith, family, and freedom

By: ALEX NITZBERG | August 01, 2023

NBA player Jonathan Isaac, who made headlines in 2020 when he remained standing during the national anthem even as other players kneeled, has launched an apparel company that aims to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.

“UNITUS brings people together around stylish, high-quality apparel that champions faith, family, and freedom. Together, we’re redefining greatness,” the company’s website states. “UNITUS is a movement—one that starts with U and ends with US.”

During the brand’s launch event in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night, Isaac, who is outspoken about his Christian faith, explained that “true greatness is found in none other than Jesus Christ.” Isaac said that UNITUS has “hopes of aligning ourselves with value-aligned athletes from all sports.” He also noted that the company does not have any links to the nation of China.

UNITUS Launch Event LIVE From Orlandowww.youtube.com

Later that night, during a brief interview with TheBlaze, Isaac said that he is a “Bible-believing Christian” and noted that his actions, including “standing in the [NBA] bubble” and opting not to take the COVID-19 vaccine, have “been motivated by my desire to please Christ.”

.@JJudahIsaac talks to @theblaze about his new apparel company @weareunitus: pic.twitter.com/FSK6vzyIjr
— Alex Nitzberg (@alexnitzberg) August 1, 2023

Some of the people who showed their support by attending the UNITUS launch event included former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlan, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who is a fellow and director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological man who made waves while competing against women, tied with Gaines for fifth place in the 200 freestyle final at the NCAA Women’s Championships in 2022, according to swimmingworldmagazine.com. Gaines has been an outspoken in opposing the practice of permitting men to compete in women’s sports. Scanlan, who was on the University of Pennsylvania swim team with Thomas, has also been speaking out about the issue.

At the UNITUS event on Saturday, Gaines told TheBlaze that Isaac had previously reached out to her and expressed his support. Gaines said that she believes people desire “an alternative to put their money towards that aligns with their values” and that Isaac and UNITUS are such an alternative.

.@Riley_Gaines_ spoke to @theblaze about @JJudahIsaac and his new apparel company @weareunitus: pic.twitter.com/0E1oSILaEt
— Alex Nitzberg (@alexnitzberg) August 1, 2023

Dr. Kheriaty called Isaac “an exemplary man,” describing the athlete as a person “of tremendous courage, and integrity, and faith.”

.@akheriaty spoke to @theblaze about @JJudahIsaac and @weareunitus: pic.twitter.com/ugvHmxa9Bd
— Alex Nitzberg (@alexnitzberg) August 1, 2023

The pro-faith, family, and freedom ethos of the UNITUS brand stands in stark contrast to other major companies that promote woke agendas, such as Nike, which, for example, previously tapped transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman, to advertise a bra and leggings.

The UNITUS website features items for sale, including hoodies, T-shirts, sweatpants, crewnecks, a cap, a track jacket, and track shorts. Isaac noted during remarks at the launch event that the company plans to expand its offerings to include “more technical sportswear,” which involves items such as a sports bra, leggings, and men’s tank top. “This upcoming season I will be debuting the UNITUS Judah 1 basketball sneaker,” Isaac noted.

Seen that evening… pic.twitter.com/vhIVsrf2AD
— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) July 31, 2023

Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson also attended the company’s launch event on Saturday.

“Succeed or fail, Isaac’s Unitus is one of the most significant examples we’ve seen yet of a growing commercial-cultural movement that’s rising up throughout the nation,” Peterson said in a written statement. “Mainstream media outlets are not paying attention, but most Americans are very interested. And we’re going to ramp up our coverage of it for them.”

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Political, Religion, Spiritual, Sports

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Devon Archer: Joe’s Speakerphone Calls With Hunter’s Business Associates Were ‘An Abuse Of Soft Power’

BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 02, 2023

Devon Archer interview with Tucker Carlson — Former Biden business associate Devon Archer

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

President Joe Biden abused his vice-presidential authority by joining speakerphone calls with his son’s business associates, former Biden business associate Devon Archer confirmed to Tucker Carlson in an interview on Wednesday.

In an attempt to build what Archer called “the Biden brand” and sell access to the then-vice president, Hunter Biden put his dad on speakerphone two dozen times in the presence of his various financial partners. Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman claimed mere minutes after House GOP investigators heard Archer’s testimony on Tuesday that Joe simply phoned into his son’s business meetings to discuss the “weather.” This proved to be a strong pivot from Democrats’ insistence that Joe, as he repeated in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, had nothing to do with Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Goldman’s claims were also strongly contradicted by Archer’s confirmation that Joe’s phone calls did influence the people in Hunter’s meetings.

“To be completely clear on the calls, I don’t know if it was an orchestrated call or not. It certainly was powerful, though, because if you’re sitting with a foreign business person and you hear the vice president’s voice, that’s prized enough. That’s pretty impactful stuff for anyone,” Archer confessed.

Ep. 12 Part 1. Devon Archer pic.twitter.com/ElEzAZtBcA
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2023

At the time, Archer appreciated the leg up he and Hunter’s company had because of its close relationship with the VP. But he later admitted that “In the rearview, it’s an abuse of soft power.”

“The power to have that access in that conversation, and it’s not in a scheduled conference call, and it’s a part of your family, that’s like the pinnacle of power in DC,” Archer said.

Phone calls weren’t the only means Joe used to contact Biden family associates. In addition to meeting Archer at least “20 times,” Joe penned the businessman a letter thanking him for partnering with Hunter.

“He was thanking me and thanking Hunter, I think, at the end of the day for bringing this idea of this government regulatory, strategic advisory business into the private equity world,” Archer said. “I think he was excited about the prospects for Hunter, and he was just thanking me; I think it was a nice gesture.”

“It was a nice gesture, for sure. Very polite,” Carlson said. “It gets a 10 on the etiquette scale. But he’s the vice president United States, and he’s talking about foreign business deals with you and thanking you for that.”

Archer admitted that “at the time, I think I hit the jackpot in finding the regulatory environment or company that can navigate right to the top” but eventually recognized the problems with the arrangement.

“Being a little bit too close to the sun ends up burning you,” Archer continued.

According to Archer, Hunter entered the world of influence peddling under the guise of private equity, a “complex business that takes years of training,” and “regulatory issues that you might have at the corporate level.” Hunter may not have personally had experience in this field, but Archer assured Carlson that “he led a team that had a sophisticated understanding of regulation.”

“You’ve got to be an expert in knowing the guy, and he was the guy that was the expert in knowing the guy,” Archer said, noting Hunter’s “brother, his father, some of his father’s siblings” made that list.

Archer admitted that it didn’t matter whether Hunter had experience in the field or not because “the brand of Biden adds a lot of power when your dad’s vice president.”

Carlson explained that Washington D.C., where Hunter often operated, is not known as a “money town” but a “selling access” city.

“That’s what it looked like to me,” Archer agreed. “I think that’s one of the core misconceptions. I mean, it seems like understanding a regulatory environment means selling access at the end of the day. That’s how I interpreted it. I think that’s how most people in Wall Street, whether they admit it or not, interpreted it.”

Archer said Hunter’s vast interconnectedness with government officials did benefit their company significantly.

“There are very like tactical elements that are regulatory and compliance and governance that you have to go through, and you’ve got to know the guy that worked at the old agency that now has a lobbying firm that can go back to the agency and get things put to the front of the line,” Archer explained.

“At the end of the day, he had the best advantage to do that because of where he was,” Archer added.

Hutner’s wheeling and dealing under the Biden brand, Archer admitted, was a sweet deal but deserved scrutiny.

“There are people that maybe were sons or relatives or brother-in-law’s of other high-ranking officials, but I think what we ran into and with what Hunter ran into was almost like an Icarus issue,” Archer explained. “He got a little, it was too close to the sun. It was too good to be true. And the connections were too close and the scrutiny too much. And it ended up destroying, left a wake of a lot of destruction and business over a number of years.”

Carlson said he understands why a business guy like Archer would “use every advantage” to advance financial goals but explained that the Bidens “are not business guys.”

“This is the vice president United States. He’s not allowed to be working on businesses with foreign governments while he’s vice president, I don’t think,” Carlson concluded.

“Not that I know of,” Archer replied.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Elise McCue Op-ed: LA Times Columnist Tries Desperately to Lionize Lying Kamala Harris

Elise McCue / August 02, 2023

Kamala Harris stands at a podium outdoors to give a speech — Vice President Kamala Harris — flanked by President Joe Biden and Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells — speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 29, 2022, after Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes last week disingenuously embraced Harris’ baseless implication that Republicans don’t want students to be taught about Till’s brutal 1955 murder. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

One of the most annoying ploys of liberal journalists is to advise Republicans that the truly wise path in politics is to surrender to liberals on everything, and the dumbest path is to oppose them emphatically.

The latest flagrant example of this is a column in The Los Angeles Times with the provocative headline “Republican racism has finally weaponized Kamala Harris.”

The columnist, Jackie Calmes, was falsely categorized for decades as an “objective journalist.” Moving over to the opinion pages isn’t really a significant change. Calmes begins by acknowledging Vice President Harris is deeply unpopular. But, shazam! Republicans “keep doing stupid stuff underscoring their racial insensitivity” — like Gov. Ron DeSantis and his government in Florida claiming a “silver lining to slavery” in their new African American history standards for schools.

It doesn’t matter that the Florida standards explicitly demand slavery be presented to students as a dehumanizing horror. It doesn’t matter that the original standards that DeSantis criticized also had a passage about a so-called “silver lining to slavery.” It doesn’t matter that the “silver lining” for slaves came after slavery ended or after they escaped slavery. What matters is trying to construct a spin that makes Harris less of a liability for Democrats.

Calmes touted how Harris had a “pretty good week” as “she’s put the lie to the claim that the Left is forcing a guilt trip on white children by fully teaching them about the nation’s sins as well as its triumphs.”

Calmes used to work at The New York Times, the originator of the fact-mangling “1619 Project” that forces a guilt trip on all Americans with the supposition that America hasn’t really changed much since African Americans were held in bondage as subhuman chattel.

If you want to know where identity politics leads, look no further than a stadium of South Africans calling for the murder of their fellow white countrymen.

If you want to see a majority group calling for the slaughter of a minority group.

Stay Woke.
pic.twitter.com/bvsadAGGqB
— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) August 1, 2023

🤣 🤣 🤣
This is black privilege!
— AquaEng (@DuncanKiyingi) August 2, 2023

That project was aggressively promoted to schools across America as a curriculum. Then the liberal media pretended no one was teaching critical race theory in schools.

Harris is championed as the opponent of “perilous ignorance,” as conservatives insert “both-sidesism” into teaching the history of American slavery. This sounds just like liberals finding it perilously ignorant to allow both sides of an argument in your newspaper articles. Liberals are always trying to win by intimidating anyone out of dissent.

Calmes quoted Harris asking how could anyone suggest “that there was any benefit to be subjected to this level of dehumanization.” This is why liberals mock “alternative facts.” Disagreeable facts should be shamed out of public discourse.

Calmes also embraced Harris wrapping Emmett Till into this message, that somehow the Republicans won’t teach the children about that brutal murder, or advocate that everyone forget about it. “The vice president — call her [President Joe] Biden’s attack dog, as some accounts have, or simply a truth-teller — is not going to dissuade Republicans from their attempt to rewrite history. Yet even if she’s preaching to the choir, hers is a message that must go out. Maybe she’s finally found her niche.”

When they accidentally let the agenda slip. 🫢 https://t.co/AThal8dpW1
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) July 15, 2023

It’s not “Republican racism” to oppose left-wing propaganda standards in our schools. It’s not “truth-telling” to proclaim that Republicans want to teach American history without a substantive focus on slavery and segregation and lynching and the Ku Klux Klan.

But Democrats and their media allies eternally try to hold on to voters of color by arguing that the Republicans are all undeniable racists, and never mind that inescapable historical fact that the Democratic Party was the staunchest party behind slavery and segregation.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

COMMENTARY BY Elise McCue

Elise McCue is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

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Kamala Harris

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Truth is Out There

A.F. BRANCO | on August 2, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-truth-is-out-there/

Whether it’s UfOs or more Trump indictments, they’re all to deflect you away from Biden’s pay-to-play scandals.

UFO’s and the Biden Scandals — Cartoon by A.F. Branco.

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A Humorous Look at Kamala Harris Quotes as Motivational Posters, To Help You Be Unburdened by Your Brain Cells: Part 3

BY: ELLE PURNELL | AUGUST 01, 2023

Author Elle Purnell profile

ELLE PURNELL

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

It’s that time of year again, folks. Kids are enjoying long summer days, blissfully unaware of the impending school year. Front porches creak under the burden of sluggish rocking chairs, sweat drips off of lemonade tumblers, and the list of new motivational Kamala Harris quotes we at The Federalist send around every so often to inspire greatness is getting unmanageably long, so it’s time to share them with you all.

First, we brought you our inaugural set of printable motivational posters with stirring sentiments from the woman whose ascent to the vice presidency got in the way of what could have been a promising career in naming nail polish colors.

Just a few months later, the Venn diagram aficionado proved so prolific we had to publish another set of inspirational prints with her best quotes, reminding us all to believe what we believed we believe.

Now, she’s back and better than ever, just in time to get you through the end-of-summer slump.

At the 2023 Essence Festival of Culture in early July, Harris enlightened her listeners about the meaning of “culture,” tying it back to her favorite themes about moments, time, and moments in time.

In March, Harris summarized a meeting with Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, letting listening journalists know that “we have had today, this afternoon, a wide-ranging discussion,” before expounding on the importance of the important topics they discussed.

After Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg let American infrastructure crumble while he weirdly posed in a hospital bed for the kind of photo mothers take after giving birth, Vice President Harris valiantly stepped in and fixed transportation once and for all.

In addition to helpfully defining her terms — “This issue of transportation is fundamentally about just making sure that people have the ability to get where they need to go,” she explained recently — Harris has broken down the transportation crisis in easy-to-understand language.

There’s been a lot in the news lately about AI and its dangers. If you’re struggling to comprehend this emergent technology, you’re in luck — Kamala Harris is here to help.

“AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all, it’s two letters. It means artificial intelligence,” Harris helpfully explained at an event on the White House campus a few weeks ago.

During a recent visit to Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, Harris invoked a version of her all-time favorite phrase, reminding all of us not to be burdened by things like basic English competence or the Constitution.

If you thought being vice president and Vogue cover girl was enough to keep our favorite girlboss-in-chief busy — you know, when she’s not totally fixing the border crisis or whatever — you’d be wrong. In true entrepreneurial spirit, she’s considering launching her own Converse line.

Asked, “Will we ever get a Madam VP Converse line?” Harris showed her flair for fashion.

“I’d probably want like a ‘Freedom’ line, you know? Right? Can you see that? Freedom would be on the Converse,” she proposed.

“Freedom to be. I am free. Free to march, Free to walk my talk!”

It’s worth watching the whole clip:

Kamala Harris says if she had her own Converse line, she'd "probably want like a 'freedom' line, you know?"

"Freedom to be. I am free. Free to march. Free to… to… to… walk my talk!" pic.twitter.com/xpMxJ8ezmR
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 27, 2023

At an April event, Harris made the case for understanding where and in what time we are all existing — something her presidential boss has shown some confusion about in the past.

And just to drive her point home, a few months later, she reiterated the importance of taking stock of our present circumstances (unless, of course, those circumstances are a border crisis, a government censorship regime, inflation, entanglement in foreign wars, and a president implicated in a foreign pay-for-play scheme — then it would probably be appreciated if you do not pay quite as much attention, please).

Kamala is also totally a woman of the people, a champion of small business owners. She understands that small business owners are “community leaders and are so much a part of the community’s cultural fabric,” and that small businesses rely on “community banks, which are banks that are in the community who understand the community.” (Community is very important to her, as it should be to all of us.)

She also understands that part of what makes a small business so integral to that community is that “it spans the generations, in addition to being intergenerational.”

Remember when John F. Kennedy inspired us all to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”? Harris had her own Camelot moment while campaigning for Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro in 2022. As she urged her listeners, may we all do what we do — and what we have been doing, every day, in the present moment, together.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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Republicans Deserve a Senate Leader Willing to Defend Their Interests Over Democrats’

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 01, 2023

While the Biden administration faces escalating calls for impeachment, either of the homeland security secretary, the attorney general, or even the president himself as evidence mounts over myriad scandals, Republicans’ top Senate lawmaker is distracted.

Instead of directing his ire at President Joe Biden for his influence-peddling schemes with corrupt overseas actors, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell piled onto the media onslaught against a freshman representative from Wisconsin who cussed out some teenagers at the Capitol. GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden stirred up controversy last week when he went on a tirade against some interns with the Senate page program who were lying in the Capitol rotunda, which the congressman says he considered disrespectful.

“Wake the fuck up you little sh-ts. … What the f-ck are you all doing? Get the f-ck out of here,” Van Orden said, telling the group they were “defiling the space,” according to one page’s recollection of the incident. The Wisconsin lawmaker was defiant, explaining on a local radio show, “The people who have brought this up are not serious people.”

Nor are the Republicans who have remained silent on the administration’s series of scandals but have been quick to get behind the Democrats’ latest outrage circus.

The Van Orden outburst drew swift condemnation from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “I was shocked when I heard about it, and I am further shocked at his refusal to apologize to these young people,” Schumer said.

McConnell didn’t hesitate to make the outrage bipartisan. According to Politico, McConnell was clear to “associate myself with the remarks of the majority leader.”

“Everybody on this side of the aisle feels exactly the same way,” McConnell added.

If only Republicans had a leader in the upper chamber who dared stand up for Republicans. The problem is not that Van Orden’s eruption at a couple of teenagers is excusable. The problem is McConnell’s regular participation in Democrats’ smear campaigns against other Republicans while the GOP Senate leader remains silent on the administration’s corruption scandals. Last week, McConnell declined to comment at all on House Republicans’ impeachment push.

It’s far from the first time the Republican Senate leader has peddled the Democrats’ latest political narratives. In March, McConnell condemned Fox News for the network airing the Jan. 6 tapes presented by Tucker Carlson. The tapes undermined the Democrats’ narratives of a “deadly insurrection,” the basis for their snap impeachment of outgoing President Donald Trump.

“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill following Carlson’s first installment of the J6 tapes. Hours earlier, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger had sent a memo to his department that called Carlson’s coverage “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions.”

The comments led even Elon Musk to begin to question whether McConnell was actually a Republican. “I keep forgetting which party he belongs to,” Musk wrote on Twitter.

After the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago, McConnell didn’t condemn the weaponization of federal law enforcement. Instead, the Republican Senate leader endorsed more funding for the federal bureau. This followed the octogenarian lawmaker sabotaging Republicans’ midterm efforts to reclaim the Senate. McConnell was more interested in maintaining an establishment minority he could control than in achieving a GOP majority that aligned more with Trump’s vision for the party.

Republicans have a right to expect far better from their No. 1 leader in the Senate. Considering McConnell’s recent health problems, new leadership could come sooner rather than later. His successor would be wise to adopt a new approach that puts voters first.

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.

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

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Evidence Of Biden Burisma Corruption Is Overwhelming

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | AUGUST 01, 2023

Author Mollie Hemingway profile

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@MZHEMINGWAY

A key associate of Hunter Biden reluctantly admitted details about how the Biden family business was run — and those details are shocking.

Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine. Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.

Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” Archer said, noting he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know who exactly was on the other end of the line. Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family, Archer admitted.

In this case, Burisma was paying Archer and Hunter Biden as much as $83,000 a month to serve on the Ukrainian energy concern’s board, despite the fact that neither man had relevant experience or expertise for the job outside of their frequent meetings and contact with the then-vice president. The two were hired the same month that the U.K. had opened an investigation into company officials. The money was well spent.

A mere five days after the Dubai meeting and phone call, Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian Rada, its parliament in Kyiv, attempting to lay the groundwork for firing Shokin.

It took just a few short months before Shokin was fired. Joe Biden bragged in a public speech in January 2018 that he was personally responsible for getting that firing accomplished so quickly. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted. Seriously:

And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.

What an amazing series of events that led to Joe Biden personally fulfilling what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden to accomplish. What are the odds?

Not the Weather

After Archer’s transcribed interview, Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York who previously ran some of the Russia-collusion hoax as a congressional staffer, ran to the cameras to cushion the blow of the explosive new information.

For years, the corporate press and other Democrats had uncritically accepted Biden’s preposterous claim that he had never spoken with his son or his son’s business partners about the Biden family business. Even when Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski described — in detail, on the record, and with supporting evidence — how Joe Biden served as the “chairman” of the family business, the media largely ignored the explosive claims. With Archer echoing Bobulinski’s claims, and further noting that the business wouldn’t have worked without Joe Biden’s “brand,” Goldman and others like him had to concede that Biden did in fact speak with Hunter’s business associates. In fact, they had to admit he spoke with them frequently. However, Goldman claimed, they were only talking about the weather.

While no one actually thinks Joe Biden has a secret interest in meteorology that he only shares with corrupt foreign oligarchs who happen to be in business with his son, the claim is ridiculous for another reason.

As conservative broadcaster Larry O’Connor wrote, “Understand this: Hunter getting Joe on speakerphone WAS THE DELIVERABLE. It literally doesn’t matter what was discussed. Showing that he could get the Vice President of the United States on the phone was all Hunter had to show his clients to seal the deal. He was selling ACCESS not policy. Getting The Big Guy to pick up the phone demonstrated his ability to deliver that access. Case closed. Impeach.”

Otherwise, why would Joe Biden get on the phone with his business associates at all? Why would Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine be talking to Ukrainian officials under suspicion of massive corruption who were paying large sums of money to his son? What was the point, exactly, if not as chairman of the family business?

We know Burisma was paying Biden family members for help getting powerful people in D.C. to get investigators off its back. We know Biden was the top official in D.C. related to Ukraine. Five days after Burisma made the request, Biden was laying the groundwork for the firing. And he has publicly bragged about getting the prosecutor fired.

n 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached for raising the issue of a potential corruption scandal involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma. At that time, scores of corporate media and other Democrat activists asserted without evidence that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and that it was a lie to suggest otherwise. For instance, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote in 2019, “Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014. There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”

Since that false “fact” “check,” investigators in the House and Senate have shown that the Biden family business involves oligarchs and other powerful figures from Russia, Romania, China, and even France and other countries. Joe Biden reportedly met and spoke with his son’s employers from across the globe. The corporate press and other Democrats will fight disclosure about the Biden family business every step of the way, but Archer’s transcribed interview shows how important it is to reveal the truth of that business to the American people.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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COUNTRY BOYS WILL SURVIVE THE WOKE WARRIORS

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Woke culture has pushed this mom too far

By Abby Johnson | Fox News | Published August 1, 2023 2:00am EDT

How far can you push someone before they have had enough of rampant wokeness and completely revolt? That’s the question businesses, movie makers and department stores are rightly grappling with. I can answer the question: If their target market is American families, conservative men and women who are just trying to make ends meet, the answer is that they have absolutely had enough. The silent majority is speaking, and they are doing so loudly.

When a man who claims he’s a woman is plastered onto America’s former best-selling beer, regular Joes across the country en masse stopped buying Bud Light. They’ve lost a whopping $27 billion and have been replaced as the country’s top beer seller.

When Target decided to partner with a Satanic artist and threw their pride-promoting clothing into the faces of parents shopping in the children’s section, they lost $15.7 billion and counting.

When Disney decided to push woke movie concepts on trusting parents with the likes of the films “Lightyear” and “Elemental,” they lost $890 million over their past eight films.

On the other hand, when Jim Caviezel produced a movie about a hero who rescued children from trafficking, the“Sound of Freedom”became a 2023 summer hit film with more than $125 million in revenue, outperforming films with mega budgets like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

When country music singer Jason Aldean pulled no punches in his newly released single, “Try That In A Small Town,” it quickly shot to the No. 1 song on iTunes despite the woke crowd slamming it for promoting violence – when it uses actual news footage that many in the leftist woke crowd did not speak out against.

The silent majority – those families who just want to go to the store without being accosted by inappropriate messages, who just want to spend their money on wholesome entertainment, and who are more than willing to support those who stand up for truth – have spoken.

We have had enough.

When men like Lia Thomas are allowed to compete in women’s sports and an actual female athlete, Riley Gaines, stands up for herself because literally no one else will – not her school, not the NCAA – parents of female athletes can’t help but pay attention. They are smart enough to see that the future of their own daughters in the world of sports are being wiped out and erased all because of some “inclusivity” wokeness.

When they see men and boys allowed in women’s locker rooms and restrooms, they see the safety of their daughters compromised like the horrible sexual assault in Loudon County, Virginia, where a boy forcibly assaulted a teenage girl in the girls’ bathroom. He was allowed in because he identified as a girl.

Parents are paying attention and we’re fed up. We’re fed up with gender ideology, wokeness and all the other colors of the rainbow being shoved down our throats in the name of tolerance.

I’m raising my eight children to be kind, compassionate, caring and loving individuals. I’m also teaching them right from wrong and amazingly, using science to back up a lot of biological arguments, something the woke crowd loves to ignore.

How dare they call my family and my kids intolerant bigots because we follow science and speak the truth? Not our truth, the truth. There are absolutes in this world no matter how much some people want to live in a fantasy world of their own making.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ABBY JOHNSON

I am more than happy the silent majority is standing up for what we hold so dearly and doing so where it hits the pocketbooks because, unfortunately, that’s the only way to get the attention of companies who think they can carelessly shove these kinds of inane values and morals at us and think will take it.

We won’t and we aren’t.

And you know what? We are teaching the next generation not to take it either.

Abby Johnson is CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and author of “Unplanned.”

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Gallup Poll: Confidence in Military Lowest in 2 Decades

By Fran Beyer | Tuesday, 01 August 2023 02:19 PM EDT

Americans’ confidence in the U.S. military is at the lowest point in two decades, new data from Gallup has found. When asked how much confidence they had in the military, 60% said they had a great deal or quite a lot. The last time confidence in the military was this low was in 1997, and it hasn’t been lower since 1988, when 58% were confident, according to Gallup.

Republicans have been the most likely to express confidence in the military, though the rate has declined by over 20 percentage points in three years, from 91% to 68%, Gallup reported.

Independents’ confidence has dropped nearly as much — by 13 points, from 68% to 55%. Democrats’ confidence rating rose after President Joe Biden assumed office, but the gains to 68% have disappeared in the past year, and now stand at 62%, the pollster found.

“Public perceptions of the U.S. military have fluctuated dramatically over the past five decades,” Gallup’s Mohamed Younis wrote in an analysis of the findings.

“The aftermaths of the Gulf War and 9/11 were followed by resounding upticks in confidence in the military,” he added. “The latter of these surges ushered in an era of elevated confidence lasting nearly two decades.

“Now that the U.S. has completely withdrawn from both Iraq and Afghanistan … confidence in the military has continued to decline among the public.”

According to Gallup, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s — during the Cold War and amid threats to U.S. power, including the Iran hostage crisis — between 50% and 58% of Americans were confident in the military. Confidence generally improved during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. It then surged after the Gulf War victory to a record-high 85% in 1991, and again after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Confidence generally held above 70% for the next two decades, until dipping to 69% in 2021 and declining since then after the United States’ disastrous exit from Afghanistan. The military had retained public trust — despite its decline — even as other institutions like the police, public schools, and organized religion saw steep drops, according to Gallup.

The margin of error in the Gallup Poll Social Series was not released.

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Comer on Archer Testimony: Today Was a ‘Bombshell’

By Jeffrey Rodack | Tuesday, 01 August 2023 09:36 AM EDT

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., told Newsmax the congressional testimony of a former associate of Hunter Biden was a “bombshell” and said the “walls are closing in” on President Joe Biden and his family. Comer is chair of the House Oversight Committee, where Devon Archer testified on Monday. The congressman made his comments during an interview on “Greg Kelly Reports.“

Asked what he thought about Archer, Comer said: “I think that he was under a lot of pressure today. We know that the Biden attorneys have threatened him and intimidated him. We know the Department of Justice sent him two letters over the weekend, which is unheard of. But despite that, I think he answered a lot of questions that needed to be answered, specifically that Joe Biden did in fact talk to numerous people that his son was receiving wires from while Joe Biden was vice president.

“And that is something that Joe Biden has consistently lied about. That’s what the Democrats have consistently taken Joe Biden’s positions saying he never spoke with anyone Hunter Biden was doing business with. But yet we learned today that over 20 times, in fact, Joe Biden, while he was vice president, spoke with people who were sending the Biden family members these suspicious wires that the banks, or anyone else in America, knew what the purpose of the wires were for.

“Another thing that Devon Archer testified today was the Biden family, in fact, was influenced peddling. We know that Devon Archer has violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That’s a very serious law.”

Comer said Archer’s testimony calls into question whether Joe Biden violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act “because his family was receiving millions of millions of dollars from these foreign nationals.”

“None of these people that he [Hunter] put his dad on the phone with are reputable businesspeople,” Comer said. “They all are under some type of investigation or on the flee in the countries where they originate from. The people that Hunter Biden was putting on speakerphone with his sitting vice president father were some of the worst people on the planet, but yet they were paying the Biden family millions of millions of dollars.

“Every day, we get more and more evidence that points to Joe Biden directly. All roads lead to Joe Biden. And today, we’ve learned without a shadow of a doubt that Joe Biden has been lying to the American people when he said he never spoke with anyone his son was receiving money from.

“Devon Archer testified that the owners of Burisma were pressuring Hunter to call Washington to get [Viktor] Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor, fired. And we know because we’ve seen on video — Joe Biden bragged, in fact — firing the prosecutor in Ukraine that was investigating his son’s corrupt energy company, and he wasn’t going to give them our tax dollars our foreign aid unless the Ukrainian president fired the prosecutor.

“And that’s what Devon Archer said that those guys were pressuring Hunter to do —call Washington, get this Shokin fired. I mean, this was a bombshell today. This is more evidence that points directly to Joe Biden. I mean the amount the number of crimes that the Biden family has committed continues to grow. And more and more evidence shows that Joe Biden knew exactly what was going on.”

Comer maintained “the walls are closing in on the Bidens.”

“We’re going to continue to bring more associates in. We’re going to continue to publish more bank records, and we’re going to continue to move forward. I think the evidence will continue to mount. This is a snowball. It’s rolling downhill. It’s not going to stop.”

Asked about a possible impeachment of Biden, he replied: “Well, I know how I would vote. But again, that’s a decision for Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy. But, I’ll tell you this, right before I came on the show, McCarthy called me, and I gave him a rundown of what was said today, and we talked about steps moving forward.

“So, you know, stay tuned.”

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Rasmussen Poll: Most Suspect Biden Covered for Son

By Peter Malbin | Tuesday, 01 August 2023 12:43 PM EDT

Devon Archer testified to Congress on Monday that he was on a speakerphone multiple times with Hunter Biden and President Joe Biden when the latter was vice president. But Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, said they only discussed pleasantries, not business dealings involving Ukraine and China. Archer testified that Joe Biden was put on the phone to help Hunter Biden sell what he called “the brand,” according to Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

According to reports, Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars as a consultant to Ukraine gas company Burisma and other entities overseas, allegedly to gain access to the vice president.

According to the latest Rasmussen Reports poll taken just before Archer’s closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committe, 60% of likely voters say Joe Biden has been part of an illegal cover-up to hide his involvement in his son’s foreign business deals; 45% think such a cover-up is very likely; 34% say it’s not likely Biden has illegally covered up his role in his son’s foreign business, including 18% who believe it is not at all likely.

Joe Biden has said he never discussed Hunter’s business affairs with him.

Archer’s testimony “confirms Joe Biden lied to the American people when he said he had no knowledge about his son’s business dealings and was not involved,” said Comer, the The Wall Street Journal reported.

In the Rasmussen poll, 61% of voters think this is a serious scandal, including 44% who say it’s very serious. But 29% don’t believe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s foreign business is a serious scandal, including 13% who believe it is not at all serious.

Last week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Biden had done “something we have not seen since Richard Nixon: Use the weaponization of government to benefit his family and deny Congress the ability to have the oversight.”

Over half — 58% — of voters agree with McCarthy’s statement, including 43% who strongly agree; 35% disagree, including 26% who strongly disagree.

Democrats are far less likely than other voters to view the president’s purposted involvement in his son’s foreign business deals as scandalous. Just 20% of Democrats believe that this is a very serious scandal, compared to 66% of Republicans and 49% of voters not affiliated with either major party.

Similarly, only 18% of Democrats say they strongly agree with McCarthy comparing Biden to Nixon, whereas 69% of Republicans and 46% of unaffiliated voters strongly agree.

While 69% of Republicans and 48% of unaffiliated think it’s very likely that the president has been part of an illegal cover-up to hide his involvement in his son’s foreign business deals, just 20% of Democrats believe such a cover-up is very likely.

By race, 63% of white people, 56% of Black people, and 62% of other minorities think Biden’s reported involvement in his son’s foreign business deals is at least a somewhat serious scandal. Fewer black voters (27%) than white (49%) or other minorities (42%) believe it’s very likely that the president has been part of an illegal cover-up.

More men (67%) than women voters (57%) say Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s business deals is at least a somewhat serious scandal.

Older voters are much more likely than those under 40 to deem the Biden scandal very serious, and to strongly agree with McCarthy comparing Biden to Nixon.

Only 30% of self-identified liberal voters think Biden’s reported involvement in his son’s foreign business deal is at least a somewhat serious scandal, compared to 54% of moderates and 87% of conservatives.

In terms of income categories, voters earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year are most likely to say Biden is facing a very serious scandal.

The survey of 1,027 U.S. likely voters was conducted on July 26-27 and July 30 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is plus/minus percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.

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Franklin Graham warns Christian broadcasters of ‘coming storm’

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor | TUESDAY, MAY 23, 2023

The Rev. Franklin Graham speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, May 22, 2023. | Mark Barber

The Rev. Franklin Graham warned members of Christian news media organizations and others about the “coming storm” headed toward churches and ministries in the United States. Graham, who serves as president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and head of Samaritan’s Purse, gave the keynote speech Monday evening at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando, Florida.

“I believe there is a coming storm that we all need to be ready for,” Graham said. “The world has deteriorated so quickly. We cannot be deceived, and we can’t be fooled. We need to get ready and be prepared.”

Graham said believers in the United States are “living in a cancel culture that wants to destroy Christian organizations,” adding that “we cannot back up, we can’t retreat, don’t apologize for the Gospel — just declare it, just preach it.”

“They want us to shut our mouths, they don’t want to hear from us. If you’re not going to preach the Gospel, you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said.

“If you’re not going to talk about sin, you’re not going to have anything to worry about; but if you’re going to proclaim the Gospel, they’re going to try to shut you up.”

NRB describes itself as “the world’s largest gathering of Christian communicators and ministry professionals,” adding that it “is where everyone gets together under one roof to talk about advancing the gospel.”

“Countless partnerships and important connections have been formed at NRB Conventions over the years,” said NRB. “As the largest marketplace dedicated to Christian media professionals, the NRB Exposition is filled with resources and connections to help expand and grow your organization or ministry.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely Republican presidential primary candidate, was also in attendance and gave remarks before the Christian media and ministries gathering.

“Had a great discussion at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention on the importance of supporting families, protecting children and defending religious liberty,” DeSantis posted to Facebook later on.

Earlier this month, Graham gave the keynote address at the commencement ceremony for graduates of Liberty University, the prominent Evangelical academic institution based in Lynchburg, Virginia. In his remarks to graduates, Graham said that he was praying that “this class will stand for truth,” giving a warning that “our world is changing” for the worse.

“It has changed so much, just in the time since you set foot on this campus a few years ago,” said Graham. “Think how much it has changed. The increase in violence, the moral decline.”

“I can’t help but think that the heart of God is grieved as He looks at our world today. Our country. Oh, I love our country, but it’s in a downward spiral morally, spiritually, economically, politically.”

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

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Art of the Scam

A.F. BRANCO | on August 1, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-art-of-the-scam/

Big Guy Biden is now using Hunder’s finger paintings in an all-new pay-to-play scheme for political appointments.

01 BiddenMob DT 1080a — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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Exclusive: Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Voter ID, Limited Mail-in Voting

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 31, 2023

New polling provided exclusively to The Federalist shows a vast majority of U.S. voters support election integrity initiatives such as voter ID requirements and limitations on the use of mail-in voting.

Conducted by the Honest Elections Project (HEP) from July 13-16, the survey reveals widespread support among the American electorate for common-sense election integrity policies. According to the poll, 88 percent of Americans support laws mandating voters show a form of ID in order to cast their ballot, including the vast majority of black (82 percent) and Hispanic voters (83 percent). Only 9 percent of those polled opposed ID requirements.

The survey’s findings paint a vastly different picture than the one crafted by legacy media and Democrat politicians, who for years have maliciously smeared voter ID laws as Republican-sponsored tools designed to “suppress” the votes of racial minorities. Two years ago, for example, Democrats and their propaganda press allies used this tactic to smear Georgia’s passage of an election integrity law that contained a provision mandating voter ID for absentee voting. President Joe Biden went so far as to label the bill “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Not only did Georgia experience record early voter turnout ahead of its Nov. 8 general election and Dec. 6 Senate runoff, but a poll conducted after the 2022 midterms revealed zero percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting in the elections.

The HEP survey also found overwhelming opposition to noncitizens and minors voting in U.S. elections. In recent years, Democrat-controlled cities such as Washington, D.C., have passed measures permitting foreign nationals to vote in their respective municipal elections. Meanwhile, blue localities in states such as Maryland and California have passed measures allowing kids as young as 16 to vote in local elections.

According to HEP’s polling data, 89 percent of voters “think that American elections should only be for American citizens, including 82% of Democrats, 80% of Black voters, and 78% of Hispanic voters.” The survey also found 72 percent of voters oppose dropping the voting age to 16.

But it’s not just voter ID and eligibility where Democrats are out of touch with voters. Among the poll’s notable findings is support for limiting the use of mail-in voting.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, numerous states used the Covid lockdowns as a pretext for expanding the use of vote-by-mail and other nonsecure election practices. Attempts by GOP-led states to return their respective elections to pre-Covid election rules have predictably been met with pushback from Democrats, who have falsely accused Republicans of “rolling back” so-called voting rights.

Contrary to Democrat claims, HEP’s survey shows over three-fourths (76 percent) of voters believe “voting in person is better than voting by mail.” The data also reveals that 73 percent of Americans “reject automatically sending ballots without a voter’s request,” and 74 percent think practices such as ballot harvesting “should be illegal.” Meanwhile, 89 percent think “every ballot should be received by Election Day.”

The data also indicates two-thirds of voters (66 percent) support terminating no-excuse mail voting “as long as states offer two weeks of early in-person voting, including weekends.” This includes 69 percent of Hispanic voters and 55 percent of black voters, who support limiting the use of mail-in voting to groups such as people with disabilities, elderly citizens, people serving in the military, and those who “will be absent on Election Day.”

The poll additionally found widespread opposition to foreign nationals influencing U.S. elections and support for transparency in the elections process.

“Despite what the far left and many in the mainstream media would have you believe, election integrity measures continue to boast wide support among the American public,” HEP Executive Director Jason Snead said in a statement. “When it comes down to it, election integrity measures that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat are just common sense.”

The HEP survey was conducted among 1,600 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2.45 percent.

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

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Are The DOJ And Hunter Biden Attempting to Commit Fraud in Federal Court?

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 31, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

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One sentence — 13 words — out of the thousands spoken last Wednesday over the course of the three hours that federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, Hunter Biden, and Judge Maryellen Noreika discussed the president’s son’s plea agreement suggests the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden are attempting to commit fraud on a federal court.

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden appeared before a federal court in Delaware prepared to enter a guilty plea on two misdemeanor tax counts. The hearing, however, did not go as planned when Judge Noreika, rather than rubberstamping the sweetheart deal the Biden administration had entered into with the president’s son, quizzed the attorneys and Hunter Biden on the terms of the agreement and their respective understanding of the government’s promise not to further prosecute Hunter.

When Noreika questioned Hunter Biden about the $1 million Patrick Ho paid Owasco LLC on March 22, 2018, purportedly for legal representation, the president’s son was cornered. With the government and the defendant both telling the court that money represented fees for legal services, Hunter Biden had to explain how: “I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah.” That’s how Hunter replied initially, but then immediately equivocated: “I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

Hunter’s hedge was a tell that what he had just told the court was not the truth. But it was imperative that the president’s son caveat his prior statement that his law firm entity was retained to provide legal services for Ho because the judge had made clear that Hunter Biden was under oath and that “any false answers may be used against [him] in a separate prosecution for perjury.”

While Hunter’s backtracking may have saved his backside from a perjury conviction, it may well blow up his plea deal because it highlighted that the “Statement of Facts” the government incorporated into the plea agreement contained a near-certain false representation: that the $1 million Patrick Ho transferred to Hunter Biden was “payment for legal fees.”

Statement of Facts?

While the government did not file the plea agreement or the exhibits incorporated into that deal on the public docket, during last week’s hearing the prosecutor and the court read excerpts on the record. Among other things, in the plea agreement, Hunter Biden “admits to the information contained in the Statement of Facts,” which was attached as Exhibit 1. And the Statement of Facts, as read by the prosecution, declared:

On or about March 22, 2018, Biden received a $1 million payment into his Owasco, LLC bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho, and $939,000 remained available as of tax day. Over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of this balance on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment.

After commenting that having the U.S. attorney’s office read the Statement of Facts “into the record” “is not common in my experience,” Judge Noreika proceeded to question Hunter Biden on the facts to which he was admitting, engaging in this colloquy:

COURT: All right. In the third paragraph, which is actually the second full paragraph, it says on or about March 22, 2018, you received a million-dollar payment into your Owasco bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho.

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor.

COURT: Who is that payment received from, was that the law firm?

DEFENDANT: Received from Patrick Ho, Your Honor.

COURT: Mr. Ho himself?

DEFENDANT: Yes.

COURT: Were you doing legal work for him separate and apart from the law firm?

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor. Well —

MR. CLARK: That wasn’t through Boies Schiller, Your Honor, Mr. Biden was engaged as an attorney.

COURT: Right. So that’s why I asked. You were doing work for him —

DEFENDANT: My own law firm, not as counsel.

COURT: So you had your own law firm as well?

DEFENDANT: I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah.

COURT: OK.

DEFENDANT: I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.

The court then moved on to the next section of the Statement of Facts, and the hearing continued. It shouldn’t have, however. Rather, Judge Noreika should have questioned Hunter Biden more fully to ensure the representation attested to by both the government and the defendant and incorporated into the plea agreement — that Ho paid Hunter $1 million as payments for legal fees — was true. For the overwhelming evidence indicates that was a lie and that the money, at best, represented payment for influence peddling and, at worst, was a bribe.

Doesn’t Add Up

Of course, President Biden’s DOJ didn’t tell that to Judge Noreika nor provide her any evidence related to the $1 million payment. Instead, the DOJ declared the payment was for “legal fees,” and Hunter’s legal team enthusiastically nodded. But that’s not what the evidence indicates.

First, there’s the problem that the $1 million payment on March 22, 2018, was made not to Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, but to Owasco LLC. And if you are going to pay $1 million for legal representation, you kinda want to pay the law firm supposedly providing those services.

Second, not only did Ho not pay Hunter’s law firm, Owasco PC, Ho didn’t even pay Owasco LLC. Rather, Ho paid Hudson West III LLC $1 million on Nov. 2, 2017 — mere weeks before federal prosecutors charged Ho with bribing foreign officials to advantage the Chinese communist energy company CEFC. Then on March 22, 2018, Hudson West III LLC transferred that $1 million to Owasco LLC with a notation that it was for “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation.”

According to a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs finance report, Hunter “Biden stated that the incoming wire amounting to $1MM on 11/2/2017 from CEFC Limited foundation should have gone to Owasco LLC, however, he provided the wrong wire instructions, and due to the large amount the transaction was not corrected until 3/22/2018, which consisted of an outgoing wire for the same amount benefiting Owasco LLC.”

The Senate report further explained that Biden had stated that “Boies Schiller Flexner is co-counsel for Dr. Patrick Ho’s case. Hudson West III LLC has no involvement with Patrick Ho Chi Ping[’s] case and won[’t] expect further transaction related to Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping trail [sic] for Hudson West III LLC. Owasco LLC and co-Counsel Boies Schiller Flexner will represent Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping [at] trial.”

But again, Owasco LLC was not Hunter Biden’s law firm; Owasco PC was. And even in hedging to the court last week, Hunter Biden claimed, “Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity.”

Saying he made a mistake during last week’s plea hearing and that it was actually Owasco LLC that acted as the law firm, however, won’t extricate Hunter Biden from the mess. As the president’s son stated in response to the court’s question of whether he was “doing work for [Ho]”: “My own law firm, not as counsel.”

So, who was part of Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC law firm at the time, if Hunter did not serve as counsel? And how did Owasco LLC pay its lawyers given that the government said over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of the $1 million “on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment?”

Then there is the Attorney Engagement Letter reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, dated September 2017, between Patrick Ho and Hunter Biden, which provided for a $1 million retainer for legal representation. Significantly, this agreement was not entered into between Ho and any of the Owasco entities, but with Hunter Biden personally. Yet on Wednesday, Biden told Judge Noreika his law firm was doing the work for Ho. But what law firm that was, Biden seemed not to know.

Of course, Hunter didn’t know because no “legal” representation was provided to Ho and none was expected. Yet that’s precisely what the government and Hunter Biden represent as true in the Statement of Facts, and they may have gotten away with the deception had Judge Noreika accepted the plea agreement without question. But she didn’t.

Instead, the judge asked the parties to brief the issue of whether the government could include its promise not to prosecute Hunter Biden for other crimes in a side diversion agreement, stressing she needed to make sure the plea agreement got Hunter Biden what he believed it got him, but also to make “sure that I do justice as I’m required to do in this court.”

There will be no justice, however, if the court allows the government and Hunter Biden to pretend the $1 million payment from Ho was for legal representation. At the next hearing, Judge Noreika must question both Hunter Biden and the government on this representation — because if it is false, as the overwhelming evidence indicates, it would be a fraud on the court and the country to accept the plea agreement.

In advance of that hearing, the House of Representatives should consider filing a supplemental brief detailing the above evidence because the U.S. attorney’s office has proven itself unwilling to provide an honest assessment of the evidence to the court. While neither the legislative nor the judicial branch has the power to force the executive branch to charge Hunter Biden with any specific crimes, the executive branch also lacks the power to force the judicial branch to blindly accept a false plea agreement.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated since publication

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Devon Archer interview ‘very productive’ in Biden family probe, Jordan says

By Jessica Chasmar , Houston Keene , Elizabeth Elkind | Fox News | Published July 31, 2023 2:11pm EDT

Devon Archer arrived Monday morning for a closed-door, transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee, where he was expected to expose details about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and then-Vice President Biden’s alleged involvement. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told reporters Monday that the House Oversight Committee’s hearing with Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime friend and fellow Burisma board member, was “very productive.” Jordan said during a lunch recess that he looked forward to discussing the revelations of the hearing with the committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky.

The congressman also said, “Yep,” when asked if he heard any new information from Archer.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, arrives for closed-door testimony with Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, before the House Oversight Committee at the O’Neill House Office Building on July 31, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, arrives for closed-door testimony — Devon Archer, center, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, arrives for closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee at the O’Neill House Office Building on July 31, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Archer, who co-founded Hunter Biden’s now-dissolved investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, ignored questions from reporters upon entering the hearing Monday morning. Archer smiled as he was peppered with several questions upon entering the O’Neill House Office Building, where he was expected to sit down for an interview before the House Oversight Committee on President Biden’s involvement with Hunter Biden’s business deals, including that he sat in on more than two dozen business calls with his son as vice president.

Devon Archer gets into an elevator — Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, gets into an elevator as he arrives for closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee at the O’Neill House Office Building on July 31, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor, recently reported that Archer is expected to tell committee members that Hunter Biden would routinely introduce his father to foreign business partners and prospective investors.

The Republican-led committee invited Archer to attend the interview – he was sentenced last year to one year in prison for his role in a $60 million bond fraud involving various clients.

At least three previously planned appearances before the committee were canceled by Archer for personal reasons.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on Saturday wrote to U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams, requesting her to schedule a date for Archer to report to prison. However, a DOJ letter says Archer’s counsel argued it was “premature” to set a sentencing date, citing Archer mulling further appeals.

Archer was sentenced in 2022 to one year behind bars, but the sentence has been repeatedly postponed amid a series of appeals.

Fox News’ Landon Mion contributed to this report.

Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.

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RESEARCHERS HORRIFIED, DECRY RISE OF ‘FASCISM’ AS STUDENTS SEND MOCKING RESPONSES TO WOKE SURVEY

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Jay P. Greene Op-ed: Supreme Court Justice Jackson’s second error reveals another industry gone woke

Jay P. Greene | Fox News | Published July 31, 2023 4:00am EDT

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s defense of racial discrimination is falling apart. It’s now well known that Jackson repeated an embarrassing falsehood while defending affirmative action in college admissions. In her Students for Fair Admissions dissent, she asserted that matching Black physicians with Black patients doubles survival rates for newborns, a claim that’s equally unbelievable and factually unsupported.

But this is not the only mistake Jackson made. Her second error shows the diversity-industrial complex’s deep corruption of medicine – and its threat to Americans’ health.

Jackson wrote, “research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly,” for instance, “prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication.” A footnote refers to an amicus brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the same source that led to Jackson’s first mistake.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was unable to define the word “woman” when asked at her confirmation hearing last year, made a telling error during her affirmation action decision. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The AAMC brief refers to four studies in support of this claim. Yet none of them examine whether Black doctors are better at treating the pain of Black patients. All four document Black patients’ problems with pain management, but crucially, not one examines the efficacy of doctors of different races. The AAMC either failed to read the research or deliberately created this claim out of whole cloth.

It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization. The AAMC, which represents every accredited medical school in the U.S. and Canada, has elevated diversity to an absurd level. It holds, as an article of faith, that medical schools must recruit more Black students, even if that means discriminating against students of other races and lowering standards for admission.

Not only does the AAMC brook no arguments to the contrary, but it also misreads research and perhaps manufactures evidence to support its position. These are the actions of a radicalized organization – one that puts political demands above its stated goal of improving medical education. The AAMC’s faulty justification of race-based admissions, seen in its amicus brief, is bad enough. Yet the association’s extremist turn doesn’t end there.

The AAMC has quietly graded its member schools’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Through freedom of information reports, we have found reports from 34 medical schools, detailing their implementation of 89 AAMC-approved DEI initiatives. The list includes hiring and promoting professors based on DEI metrics, creating a permanent DEI bureaucracy, lobbying for DEI policies at every level of government and making DEI a “key learning outcome.” The average medical school has complied with 85% of the AAMC’s wishes.

It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.

The corruption of curriculum is especially concerning. Last summer, the AAMC released new “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies,” which effectively dictate what medical schools teach. Future physicians must now master “intersectionality,” describing “how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” Other mandatory topics include “colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation.” The AAMC sponsors medical schools’ accrediting body, so institutions that don’t teach these medical divisive concepts risk losing their ability to issue degrees.

The AAMC’s actions are lowering, not raising, the quality of medical education, which in turn lowers the quality of future medical care. By repeating the organization’s false claims about racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Jackson has shined a light on the deeper danger that DEI poses to Americans’ health and well-being.

Jay P. Greene is a Senior Fellow at Do No Harm.

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