WASHINGTON, D.C. – Several Republican female lawmakers assembled to promote the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023″ on Capitol Hill Thursday ahead of its passage in the House of Representatives.
The legislation, introduced by Rep. Greg Steube R-Fla., aims to prevent biological males from participating in women’s sports. Educational institutions that receive Title IX funding from the federal government would not be allowed to “permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designed for women or girls.” The bill passed the House in a 219-203 vote, with all the “no” votes coming from Democrats. President Biden has pledged to veto the bill should it reach his desk, blasting it as “discrimination” against transgender student athletes.
“The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 734,” the White House said in a statement. “For students nationwide, participating in sports and being part of a team is an important part of growing up, staying engaged in school, and learning leadership and life skills. H.R. 734 would deny access to sports for many families by establishing an absolute ban on transgender students—even those as young as elementary schoolers—playing on a team consistent with their gender identity.”
“This is not discrimination against anyone,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told Fox News Digital in response. “That is the most ridiculous thing to be saying… All we’re saying is, biological women should be competing against biological women. And biological men should be competing against biological men. The bill is very short. It has nothing in it about discriminating against anyone. That’s a red herring if there ever was a red herring.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., pushes back on President Biden calling the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 “discrimination.” (Fox News Digital)
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., accused Democrats of spearheading a “radical gender fluidity agenda,” while reflecting on her own career as a student athlete.
“The 118th Congress, we are so proud to be in a House Republican Majority, but I am personally proud that America elected the highest number of Republican women ever,” Stefanik said at Thursday’s press conference. “They are strong leaders in our Conference and, particularly on important days like today, we are so grateful for their effective advocacy to get this bill across the finish line. Today, we will pass this historic legislation to protect women and girls in sports. Thank you so much to the incredible work.”
“I know that there are so many personal stories, and in addition to these wonderful women members of Congress, we have tremendous women athletes who are here with us today, who have talked about the unfairness when it comes to biological males competing in women’s sports,” she added. “If you talk to women leaders today, so many had opportunities when it came to sports growing up. I myself played varsity lacrosse, I also rowed crew in high school. To have that opportunity to learn leadership, to learn discipline, to learn teamwork is so, so important. This is about protecting women’s sports, now and into the future. We anticipate this will be passed today. It is a winning issue across America — standing up for the future of women and girls.”
Several GOP members blasted the administration’s agenda to allow transgender females to compete against biological women as backwards.
“Who would have thought all these years later, we would have our Democratic women colleagues, join with a male president, who is fighting against women’s rights?” Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., said at Thursday’s press conference. “This is outrageous. This is crazy. This is dangerous. This needs to stop.”
At a recent hearing for the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Foxx garnered some attention for declaring there’s “no way” to change one’s biological sex.
Foxx: "[HR 734] says that if you're a biological male, you cannot participate against biological females. It's as simple as that."
— House Committee on Education & the Workforce (@EdWorkforceCmte) April 17, 2023
“There’s not a good definition of what a transgender girl is,” Foxx expanded to Fox Digital. “One cannot change one’s gender. It’s not possible to do. Certainly people can change what they say about who they identify as, but they cannot change their gender. So the term ‘transgender’ is ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous. You can’t go from one gender to another.”
Foxx mused why the idea of there being two biological genders now seems out of the mainstream.
“The Democrats pretend to be the party of science,” she added. “But to just completely dismiss science makes no sense. Why is it a farfetched idea? Partly because the media keeps using the term and acting like it means something.”
Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee business meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., also highlighted the dangers of letting biological males compete against women, sharing how she was raped multiple times as a teenager.
“Before a woman even sets foot in a locker room,” she said. “Before she even sets foot on the court, before she ever dives from the first swim meet, she’s already in a vulnerable position. And we need to protect our women and girls in sports because of these vulnerabilities.”
Mace said she’d be “remiss” if she didn’t drop some expletives.
“We’ve worked too damn hard to put up with the bulls— of the left that wants to take our achievements away from us,” she said.
“I’m a girl mom also, my girl is an athlete,” Mace added. “I cannot imagine her having to be put in that position where there is a biological male in her locker room. Or if she’s trying to compete for a college scholarship where it gets taken away by a man who’s much stronger and much greater physical capabilities than she does. It’s complete and total bulls—. It’s cruel.”
The office of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., scolded a reporter who insisted the Republican lawmaker’s rhetoric “makes political violence more likely” in the wake of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Democrats, meanwhile, have blasted the Republican-led bill as “bullying.”
“This bill is about bullying children,” Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, said. “Stop bullying children.“
“House Republicans are choosing to bully and belittle trans children,” Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif added. “This is about attacking a small group of children, and it is shameful.“
Fox News Digital’s Brandon Gillespie and Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.
Cortney O’Brien is an Editor at Fox News. Twitter: @obrienc2
EXCLUSIVE: The White House on Thursday dismissed allegations from a whistleblower who claims the Biden administration has mishandled the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and said President Biden has upheld his commitment to ensure the investigation is “free from any political interference.”
“Since he took office and consistent with his campaign promise that he would restore the independence of the Justice Department when it comes to decision-making in criminal investigations, President Biden has made clear that this matter would be handled independently by the Justice Department, under the leadership of a U.S. Attorney appointed by former President Trump, free from any political interference by the White House,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“He has upheld that commitment,” he added.
The White House comment came after an IRS criminal supervisory agent seeking whistleblower protections said the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. The whistleblower is claiming “clear” conflicts of interest, including by giving the president’s son “preferential treatment,” and says politics are “improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y., on Feb. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018. The federal investigation into his “tax affairs” began amid the discovery of suspicious activity reports (SARs) regarding funds from “China and other foreign nations.” In 2020, it became known that the FBI had subpoenaed the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden in the course of an existing money laundering investigation.
Hunter Biden confirmed the investigation into his “tax affairs” in December 2020, after his father was elected president. The investigation is being led by Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
Since taking office, the White House has maintained that the president never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. Officials also say the president has never discussed investigations into members of his family with the Justice Department.
Ahead of his presidency, Biden’s campaign proposed a plan to “prevent the president or White House from improperly interfering in federal investigations and prosecutions.”
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington from a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach, Del., on July 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
On the first day of his administration, President Biden issued an executive order establishing an administration-wide ethics pledge, which required officials to commit to conduct that “upholds the independence of law enforcement and precludes improper interference with investigative or prosecutorial decisions of the Department of Justice.”
But the IRS whistleblower is alleging the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, wrote to lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to say his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
Lytle informed lawmakers that his client has “already made protected disclosures internally at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.”
Lytle said the protected disclosures “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and involve “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.”
Since President Biden took office, the White House has maintained that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Lytle also said his client has also detailed examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” he wrote, offering to meet in person to provide more detail on his client’s testimony.
The letter was sent to top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as well as business dealings and ventures involving other members of the Biden family. The committee is investigating whether those business arrangements pose a risk to U.S. national security, and whether President Biden is involved.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
IRS Whistleblower on Hunter Biden Wants Protection
As predicted, Republicans turned up the heat on the Biden Crime Family. So, America and the world will soon learn just how far the tentacles go in the Biden family’s corrupt business.
Remember when Barack Obama’s IRS targeted conservative organizations? Lois Lerner got a wrist slap, and all was well with the Leftist world. Oh the irony.
An IRS special agent involved in the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes is seeking whistleblower protections to provide what are said to be sensitive disclosures about the probe to Congress.
Sensitive disclosures. The same sensitive disclosures the Bidens with help from Fed Chief Janet Yellen fought to conceal, perhaps? But thanks to the Chinese-owned Cathay Bank, the Republicans got a peek under the kimono.
The story continues,
Attorney Mark D. Lytle, a lawyer for the unnamed IRS employee, wrote in a letter Wednesday to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he represents a “career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent who has been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high profile, controversial subject since early 2020” and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.
While Lytle did not name Biden in the letter obtained by NBC News, a source familiar with the matter who also verified the authenticity of the letter said the investigation in question refers to the federal probe into the finances of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Did not name Biden? How funny is that. Who else could it be that one would ask for whistleblower protection. Certainly not Trump or his kids. If you “drop dime” on the Trump, you get a medal. But if you drop dime on a Democrat, you need witsec.
As for authenticity, MSN isn’t the only source. The letter was previously reported by CBS News and the Wall Street Journal.
What does the IRS agent want to disclose?
Things will get ugly for Hunter Biden and the Biden Syndicate. Because according to Lytle, the IRS special agent is prepared to provide information that would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee”. Let be honest: this testimony will burn more than a “senior political appointee”. I can only imagine the conversation happening with the people involved in the coverups for the Bidens. Which goat will be selected for this suicide mission?
Along with burning at least on Biden appointee, the information provided will reveal failures to handle “clear conflicts of interest” in the case, as well as detail instances of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols.”
FBI Director Chris Wray: Is this thing on?!
We know the DOJ, and specifically the FBI helped the Bidens. But given the potential forensic cavity search this agent may have performed, who knows where this will lead. As one might expect, the Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department and IRS declined to comment.
Stay tuned boys and girls. The dam is about to break.
Whistleblower Disheartened: Hunter Biden Still Pulling Strings
It’s hard to grapple how the Bidens continue to get a hard pass for the MANY scandals they’ve orchestrated. Yet, that’s exactly what happens again and again.
In the months before the 2020 election, news of Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. Of course, leftists and the mainstream media branded the scandal a form of Russian disinformation.
Why would Hunter want to admit his drug binges, orgies with Russian hookers that were sometimes financed by dear old dad, Burisma payments, selling access to the Big Guy, or the many other scandalous behaviors the abandoned laptop unearthed? Taking ownership of one’s own wrongdoing is not a leftist skillset.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green just issued a statement regarding more proof of the unethical and often illegal behaviors the Biden family engaged in. Yet, we haven’t seen a Biden indictment, impeachment, or cancellation.
From Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
We just finished reviewing the financial records in the treasury. What I saw was over 2000 pages of jaw dropping information. There’s basically an enterprise wrapped around Joe Biden involving not only multiple family members, more than we thought there were, but other people as well. Just a complete conglomerate of Lies. These shell companies where money was passing through from foreign countries. China, Ukraine, but many more countries than just those.
There’s a lot of information the American people deserve to know of the Biden family and the crimes they’ve been involved in. And the Oversight Committee has a much bigger investigation to do than we ever thought was possible.
I just saw evidence of human trafficking that involves prostitutes not only from here in the United States, but foreign countries like Russia and Ukraine. This is unbelievable that a President and a former Vice President, not only his son Hunter Biden, but many more family members extending past Hunter Biden and his immediate family.
We’re going to have to really get to work. This is an investigation that needs to be revealed to the American people. And not only do we have questions about Hunter Biden himself, but this is going to extend into developing a web of corruption, a web of fake companies that’s going to reveal money that came in from many foreign countries and went directly into the personal bank accounts of the Biden family where they have financially benefited directly from Joe Biden’s seats of power. We look forward to investigating, exposing for this for the American people and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The Biden crime family participated in human trafficking by soliciting prostitutes from the United States and abroad in countries like Russia and Ukraine.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 18, 2023
Pulling Strings
Of course, at this point we know what the crimes are. The only question is ‘why aren’t these crimes being prosecuted?’. It’s a disheartening situation, to say the least. Especially if you happen to be the whistleblower who stuck your neck out to hold these crooked leftists accountable.
An IRS Criminal Supervisory Agent seeking whistleblower protection claims the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. In a letter dated April 19, 2023, attorney Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP tells members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate that his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News has since confirmed the story through a source familiar with the investigation that the subject at issue is Hunter Biden.
In Wednesday’s letter, Lytle said his client has already made legally protected disclosures internally at the IRS. The protected disclosures, Lytle notes, “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”
Lytle also said his client has information that the investigator failed to mitigate “clear conflicts of interest,” adding that the investigator allegedly allowed preferential treatment and politics to infect decisions and protocols normally followed by law enforcement professionals if the subject was not politically connected.
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” Lytle said in the letter. “Thus, I respectfully request that your committees work with me to facilitate sharing this information with congress legally and with the fully informed advice of counsel.”
Representatives for the first son did not immediately respond to questions regarding the alleged mishandling of the investigation. The president’s son has been under federal investigation since 2018, which is being led by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a prosecutor appointed by former President Donald Trump.
Fox News first reported in December 2020 that Hunter Biden was a subject/target of a grand jury investigation, which was prompted, in part, by Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regarding suspicious foreign transactions.
He has not been charged with ANY crimes.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox that efforts by the Biden administration to block efforts to charge Hunter were “deeply concerning.”
“The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has been following the Bidens’ tangled web of complex corporate and financial records. It’s clear from our investigation that Hunter and other members of the Biden family engaged in deceptive, shady business schemes to avoid scrutiny as they made millions from foreign adversaries like China,” he said. “We’ve been wondering all along where the heck the DOJ and the IRS have been. Now it appears the Biden administration may have been working overtime to prevent the Bidens from facing consequences.”
We’ve heard a lot lately about how Republicans don’t care about dead kids — just keep your hands off their guns! The bullhorn insurrection staged by Tennessee legislators, for example, was justified on the grounds that they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIVES!!!
As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put it, the bullhorn episode showed “who is trying to protect the children of Tennessee and who isn’t.”
The amazing statistic that’s supposed to make us give up our guns PRONTO is that since 2020, gun violence has become the leading cause of death for American children.
You’re supposed to be thinking of the little kids killed in school shootings, like in Uvalde or the Christian school in Nashville. In fact, the odds that a child will be killed in a mass school shooting are 1 in 10 million.
The trick is that “children” includes 16-to-19-year-old gang members. Exclude 16-to-19-year-olds, and the number of kids killed by guns every year plummets from 2,811 to a few hundred.
It turns out, black teenagers are using guns to kill a lot of other black teenagers.
This will come as a surprise to most people because black-on-black violence is not considered newsworthy. (By contrast, anywhite-on-black violence, even the sort of thing that wouldn’t make local news if the perp were black, will get front-page coverage at The New York Times, international headlines and a call from the president.)
Based on arrests reported in the local news, here are a few recent examples of “children” being killed by gun violence. You will notice that none of these suspected homicides would have been prevented even if Republicans gave up all their guns.
And consider that, in most urban areas, the huge majority of murders never result in any arrests at all. For example, the “clearance” rate for murder — which is much higher than the “arrest” rate — is only 22% in Chicago, 43% in Baltimore and 37% in Philadelphia.
According to police arrests:
— On March 29, 2023, 16-year-old Vincent Lee Bradley III and 17-year-old Devonte J. Pool fired at least 33 shots, gunning down a 16-year-old high school student, Larry Marshall III, in Tacoma, Washington.
— A few days earlier, 16-year-old Lorenzo A. Brooks and 19-year-old Aaron Randolph Carter allegedly shot and killed 18-year-old Jasiah Smith in a Fredericksburg, Virginia, parking lot.
— A week before that, 19-year-old Adrian Daeshawn Granville and 24-year-old Teonjenique Elizabeth Lashay Hudson Howard were shot and killed at the Embassy Suites hotel in Portland, Oregon, by an unknown suspect — the same hotel where 15-year-old Deandrae Barber fatally shot 18-year-old Parnell Badon Jr. on Nov. 19, 2022. (Can’t wait to read the Yelp reviews.)
— On March 7, 2023, two brothers, Jacob Tobias Bryant, 18, and John Aalen Bryant Jr., 20, along with an unnamed 16-year-old juvenile, fatally shot a 17-year-old in Georgetown, South Carolina.
— On Feb. 23, 2023, Keith Melvin Moses, 19, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl, T’yonna Major, and her mother in a shooting spree in Orlando, Florida, that left several others wounded or dead.
— On Jan. 23, 2023, 18-year-old Preston Walls removed his ankle bracelet before gunning down rival gang members, 18-year-old Gionni Dameron and 16-year-old Rashad Carr, at a violence reduction program in Des Moines, Iowa.
— On Jan. 4, 2023, 18-year-old Jakari Harps fatally shot 17-year-old Breck Gerard Williams Jr. and 14-year-old Adrian Daniels in west Fort Worth, Texas.
— Right before Christmas last year, 17-year-old Lavon Semaj Longstreet and 18-year-old TaeShawn Adams-Wright killed 19-year-old Johntae Raymon Hudson at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, standing over Hudson’s body and firing “multiple rounds into his body.”
— Earlier in December, 17-year-old Tejuan Johnson and 18-year-old Jaylan Dubose shot and killed 15-year-old Nonaisha Jones and 19-year-old Logan Lawson in the Roselawn neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio.
All these incidents of “children” dying by gun violence consisted of black teenagers killing other black teenagers — and a 9-year-old.
More than half of all black teenagers who died of any cause in 2020 were killed by guns. Black males 15- to 34-years-old were more than 20 times more likely to die by gun homicide than white males that age.
Unfortunately, there is probably no story of less interest to our media (or the president) than the epidemic of black teenagers killing one another. In Jill Leovy’s acclaimed book, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” there’s a full page of racist quotes explaining why, historically, “black-on-black killing drew so little notice.” This one is from a white Tennessean during Reconstruction: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”
Or, as Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney Kim Foxx put it in declining to prosecute a gang shootout, it’s “mutual combat.”
Far from highlighting the crisis of black teenagers shooting one another and declaring a national emergency, the media, corporate America and Democrats mightily egged on black violence after the death of George Floyd. It’s fun for them. They get to watch riot porn from the safety of their lily-white neighborhoods.
The only people who actually give a damn about black people getting killed are the police. And who have the bien-pensants declared war on? You guessed right.
Propose anything that would actually reduce the plague of black-on-black crime, such as arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning criminals, and liberals scream, STOP PUTTING BLACK BODIES IN PRISON!
Needless to say, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the Tennessee representatives who attacked democracy because they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIIIIIVES, are huge BLM supporters. They prattle about “ending police violence,” blacks being “lynched by police officers,” and accuse the police of running a “system of white supremacy.”
Jones told Teen Vogue that “more policing does not lead to community safety.” (The thousands of black men who are still alive thanks to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s more policing policy would disagree.) Instead, Jones proposed “more funding to social workers, public education [and] ending poverty.” (Why didn’t anybody else think of that?)
On NPR, Pearson blamed “white supremacy” for the death of Tyre Nichols. (“White supremacy” is such an awesome force, it even infected the five black Memphis police officers charged with Nichols’ death.)
You want to know who doesn’t care about “our children’s lives,” MSNBC? You, the rest of the media, George Soros-supported prosecutors and the entire Democratic Party. Their motto: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”
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 Presiden
Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
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.
Conservatives who ran on culture war issues won dozens of school board elections in battleground and Democrat-controlled states last week, but you wouldn’t know that from Politico’s coverage of the races. The outlet claimed pro-parent candidates who ran against racist curricula in classrooms, lockdowns, and radical gender ideology “flamed out.”
Politico not-so-subtly concluded, based on recent school board election results in Illinois and Wisconsin, that “leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign” won’t bode well for 2024 front-runner Republicans including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not yet announced his candidacy.
Not long after publication on Monday, the article gained traction with leftist talking heads and organizations such as Rachel Maddow, the Lincoln Project, the nation’s largest teachers union, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who were thrilled to share about the potential demise of the issues that made them a target of public scrutiny for the last three years.
“Parents, educators, and community members are all looking for candidates who are committed to strengthening public schools, not abandoning them,” the National Education Association’s elections arm tweeted.
The public school activists were specifically thrilled that the publication’s education reporter, Juan Perez Jr., pointed to Democrat wins in recent school board elections as evidence that the right’s culture war issues were a brief and unsustainable phenomenon.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” Perez Jr. asserted.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” For your information Mr. Perez Jr., in 2023, The Federal Government is funding $45 BILLION for public schools. With approximately 49.7 million students enrolled in public schools in 2023, that’s a whopping $9,375.00 per child. How many PRIVATE SCHOOLS COST LESS, WITH SUPERIOR SCHOLASTIC RESULTS AND SUPERIOR SECURITY?
He evidenced this claim by noting that Democrats and teachers’ unions in both Wisconsin and Illinois celebrated the wins of many of their preferred candidates in the more than 100 races they endorsed. Many of those wins came in districts in or near Democrat stronghold cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but that didn’t stop the author from concluding that Republicans “lost big.”
Perez Jr. included data from political action committees that clearly showed candidates on the right claimed several victories but discounted those results by claiming that at least “two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record.”
Just seven paragraphs into the article, Perez Jr. included a half-sentence quote from 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky — “We lost more than we won” — that seemingly backed up his belief that these results “offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.”
“We had an hour-long conversation. [Perez Jr.] left it to one edited half sentence,” Girdusky told The Federalist.
Poorly framing quotes from Girdusky wasn’t Perez Jr.’s only mistake.
Leaning in
Leftist school board wins may have dominated corporate media coverage, but there’s no denying they were rivaled by dozens of triumphs by conservative-backed school board candidates who ran on fighting the radical racial and LGBT indoctrination infecting the nation’s government schools.
Overall, school board candidates endorsed by Girdusky’s 1776 Project PAC won 30 out of their 63 races.
Our endorsed candidates also won 6 races in Illinois last night.
“The seats that we did lose in Illinois were because of a third-party conservative candidate. So it wasn’t that conservatives lost, we split the vote,” Girdusky explained. “It wasn’t a rejection.”
Politico’s article fails to mention this nuance — likely because it would undermine the article’s purpose.
Winning nearly half of the elections it participated in is not “losing big,” especially when readers consider that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Democrats, and their teachers’ union allies in both Wisconsin and Illinois outspent conservative challengers by hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also got a helping hand from corporate media, which gave supporters of left-wing school board members plenty of TV time to help protect eligible seats from pro-parent candidates.
Handpicking the results from one off-year election and selling it as gospel truth about the future of culture war issues in local and national politics isn’t just incredibly ignorant. It’s deliberately deceitful and helps teachers’ unions keep their monopoly on making decisions about children’s lives that should fall under parents’ jurisdiction.
Whether corporate media like it or not, conservative messaging on education resonates with voters and has done so for years now. In 2021, dozens of parents concerned about the rise of racist curricula in government schools curried enough support to secure landslide victories against left-wing incumbents in states such as Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and many more. The same momentum was found in 2022 in states like Wisconsin.
Perez Jr. can repeat the prevalent lie that conservatives simply “seized on transgender students to rejuvenate a social agenda,” but the truth is even he couldn’t deny that parents’ frustration with the education bureaucracy is responsible for changing the course of countless elections including Virginia’s gubernatorial race in 2021.
Contrary to what Perez Jr. and his sullen quotes from “GOP activists” would have you believe, the organizations propping up pro-parent candidates aren’t backing down from the culture war. As Girdusky said: “I think that there’s clearly a message there that education is an important issue that Republicans can overperform in substantially.”
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.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused on Tuesday to define a “woman” under oath at a congressional hearing.
At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) highlighted that Cardona’s job includes enforcing Title IX, which prohibits discrimination — including on the basis of sex — in education programs that receive federal funding. But the Biden administration is seeking to alter Title IX to punish states that protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“Since Title IX prohibits discrimination between male and female to ensure that each gets appropriate funding, I think it’s important that the country sees that [the government] understands the difference,” Clyde began.
Then he asked, “So can you please tell me, or can you please define for me: What is a woman?”
But Cardona refused to answer the question.
“Our focus at the department is to provide equal access to students including students who are LGBTQ, access free from discrimination,” he responded.
“So what’s the definition of a woman?” Clyde shot back. “You haven’t given me that. You haven’t answered my question.”
According to Cardona, the issue of what differentiates a woman from someone who is not a woman is “secondary” to his job, yet he praised Clyde for rightly establishing the importance of Title IX.
The two men then went back and forth over whether, in Clyde’s words, “a biological male who self-identifies as a woman” should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and whether allowing such students to enter women’s private spaces — such as bathrooms and locker rooms — ensures the safety of female students.
But Cardona repeatedly dodged the questions. Instead, he said that the “perspective of all students should be taken into account when decisions are made around facilities.”
Cardona never provided a definition of a “woman.”
‘What Is A Woman?’: Miguel Cardona Doesn’t Answer Question From Andrew Clyde During Tense Exchange www.youtube.com
The Biden administration is proposing a change to Title IX that would not allow schools that receive federal funding to segregate sports solely based on biological sex.
“Under the proposed regulation, schools would not be permitted to adopt or apply a one-size-fits-all policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity,” the Department of Education explained in a statement.
Ironically, the proposed rule ignores how it discriminates against female athletes by possibly forcing them to compete against biological males, a nearly impossible task even for the world’s best female athletes.
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Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images
Transgender activists and their allies are expressing outrage after restrictions on “dead-naming” and misgendering were deleted from Twitter’s Terms of Service. The policy was enacted in 2018 before tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the popular platform for $44 billion. On Sunday, Musk opined that declarations of preferred pronouns were “virtue-signaling” that could be used as a shield by bad people. Two days later, the policy against misgendering was changed.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, told the Associated Press that the change in policy would lead to violence against transgender people.
“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said Ellis.
“This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real-world discrimination and violence,” she added.
Others attacked Twitter with their tweets.
“Twitter lifts it’s policy on targeted misgendering and deadnaming and the freaks are out gleefully misgendering and deadnaming every prominent trans person as an achievement. It’s not about speech, it’s about bullies wanting to harass people because of who they are,” said activist Alejandra Caraballo.
“Every decision Musk makes is bad for free speech, safety, business,” tweeted attorney Nora Benavidez.
“This is absolutely exhausting. Every day something else happens to show just how much people despise trans people and don’t care about what happens to us and it’s really f***ing overwhelming and frightening,”said a user who identifies as a bisexual.
At least one other account called the policy change a “genocidal move.”
Some public schools have changed their policies to include dead-naming and misgendering as “slurs” and threatened to suspend students who refuse to follow the new rules.
“DEAD-NAMING”, is defined as, “Deadnaming is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name. “
Here’s more about Twitter under Elon Musk:
Elon Musk Stuns Hosts with His Brutally Honest Answer About Running Twitter | @RubinReport www.youtube.com
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Screenshot taken from video on the Matt Walsh YouTube channel
The Twitter account of conservative commentator Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire was apparently hacked. The hack was quite obvious because wildly inappropriate content was reportedly posted to the account. According to screenshots shared by journalist Andy Ngô, one of the tweets posted to Walsh’s account referred to Shapiro as “A Closeted Homosexual” who hides “Behind Being Jewish.”
Another post read, “My Pronouns Are That/N****.”
“My Twitter Isn’t Hacked, This Is Just The Real Me Coming Out,” another tweet claimed.
While the tweets have apparently been removed from the account, there is still a link on Walsh’s profile that directs to a song on Spotify called “Sassy Shooters,” and it appears that the banner photo on Walsh’s account has been changed.
Walsh is a prominent and outspoken opponent of radical leftist gender ideology. His Daily Wire documentary “What Is a Woman?” delves into the issue, and he has also authored a children’s book meant to push back against the woke ideology.
“Over the past few months, my friend @mattwalshblog has been threatened to the extent that he’s had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he’s been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crowd are celebrating, of course,” Shapiro tweeted. “They tell you who they are. Believe them,” he added.
Shapiro screenshotted a few tweets, including one in which Alejandra Caraballo wrote, “Matt Walsh’s account has been hacked. Couldn’t have happened to a more miserable piece of s***.”
“RT IF YOU THINK THAT THE HACK COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED TO A ‘NICER’ GUY!” the Occupy Democrats Twitter account tweeted.
Over the past few months, my friend @mattwalshblog has been threatened to the extent that he's had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he's been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crowd are celebrating, of course. pic.twitter.com/JvIrsJyvW4
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.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) purged its website of numerous videos and documents related to its pediatric gender clinic following public outrage over gender transition procedures being offered to minors there.
Clinic staff encouraged school employees to keep children’s gender identity secret from parents and promoted biomedical interventions for young children in some of the since-removed online resources, which have been saved in online archives.
“In research conducted with colleagues at CHOP, we examined the experience of chest dysphoria and top (masculinizing chest) surgery in transmasculine youth ages 13–21 … Top surgery can vastly improve the lives of transmasculine youth and is critical to their health and well-being,” one document read.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which operates a gender clinic, removed numerous videos and posts discussing childhood gender transitions, including irreversible surgeries, from its website amid public backlash, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
The CHOP Gender and Sexuality Development Program came under scrutiny in September 2022 after some of its training videos on childhood gender transitions were circulated online, and the clinic said it was tightening its security that October due to threats. Resources including videos in which clinic staff promoted cross-sex medical interventions for minors and advised school workers to keep children’s gender identity secret from their families have since disappeared from CHOP’s website; these pages are saved in online archives, but their links either redirect to error pages or go to pages that have been heavily altered with certain links removed. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: School District Donated To Gender Clinic That Gives Kids Puberty Blockers, Refers Them For Trans Surgeries)
A CHOP webpage linking to a document that promoted “gender-affirming care” for youth, including mastectomies for girls as young as 13, was saved to online archives in June 2022, but that page had been removed from public view by November. The document was produced by CHOP’s PolicyLab, which conducts research and makes public policy recommendations on health care issues.
“Many transmasculine youth … experience chest dysphoria, which is physical and emotional distress caused by the presence of unwanted breast tissue,” the document read. “In research conducted with colleagues at CHOP, we examined the experience of chest dysphoria and top (masculinizing chest) surgery in transmasculine youth ages 13–21 … Top surgery can vastly improve the lives of transmasculine youth and is critical to their health and well-being.”
The CHOP website also removed the public’s ability to download annual reports on the clinic’s achievements in medicine, outreach and advocacy, which were publicly available as of June 2022 but needed to be requested by email as of January 2023, according to online archives. One such report previously obtained by the DCNF revealed that the clinic had hired a social worker to help minors access “gender-affirming” surgeries by gathering letters of support and requesting that insurance companies cover the procedure.
CHOP’s “Professional Resources for the Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic” web page featured an LGBTQ Education Program section and a video resources section as of September 2021, according to online archives, but neither exist on the current website. An hour-long webinar on adolescent medical transition that advised puberty blockers as young as eight and hormones and surgeries as young as 14 was among the links scrubbed from the page, along with videos titled“Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Students” and “Discussing Sexuality and Safer Sex with Trans Clients;” the videos are all currently unlisted on YouTube.
Screenshot/YouTube/The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
A family support and education specialist for CHOP urged school counselors to keep students’ preferred names and pronouns secret from their families and other school staff in the now-removed video on supporting trans students. The same webinar said school bathrooms, locker rooms and sports should be organized based on gender identity rather than biological sex.
CHOP’s Gender and Sexuality Development Program was one of several child gender clinics to come under fire in late 2022 as online activists publicized videos and documents detailing cross-sex medical treatments being offered to children.
Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago came under scrutiny for promoting a “LGBTQ sex shop for teens” that sold sex toys including dildos, vibrators, harnesses and anal toys in its “Beyond the Binary” lessons for local schools, and Boston Children’s Hospitalreceived a bomb threat after unearthed documents and videos revealed the hospital had performed dozens of “gender affirming” mastectomies on children.
The CHOP gender clinic did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Netflix subscriptions. Marriage. Terms of service agreements. Text messages. Social media posts. Pregnancy. Amazon purchases. Aging.
According to our consumerist social catechism, each of these actions is reversible. Click “cancel.” Get a divorce. Dig through your privacy settings and revoke permissions (even though you know you’re never going to). Unsend. Delete. Get an abortion. Return for free with a preprinted label. Get plastic surgery.
For young people raised in this “Ctrl-Z” world, unfamiliarity with the irreversible breeds suspicion, which translates to avoiding commitments. It’s no surprise few of my generational peers are getting married and having kids — although the culture tells us those commitments are still changeable, they’re actually messy to get out of and necessarily close other doors.
We are taught to believe limitations are inherently oppressive and therefore bad. Keeping your options open, on the other hand, is liberating and therefore desirable.
Some limitations, like those of becoming a parent, we choose to enter into and therefore can choose to avoid — which young people increasingly do. Other limitations are innate and unalterable. But to the restriction-averse, that inescapable nature makes those even more threatening. One of those fearsomely unchangeable limits is our biology: We are afraid to be limited by our natural sex.
Here’s how Amelia Blackney, a 13-year-old girl who decided to start going by the plural pronouns “they/them” and identifying as “non-binary,” explained her decision to CNN:
That way it’s like I’m not a part of any gender or I can be both genders at the same time. My pronouns now put me at a place where I can decide between different genders. That feels right.
If limitations are to be avoided — or overthrown — why would you tie yourself down to being either a girl or a boy? Why limit your prospects to growing up to be either a man or a woman? If you could be gender-fluid, all doors remain open to you. You don’t have to choose to be a she or a he, you can be they! Your options become unlimited. Subscription to being a woman, canceled.
Another child, 14-year-old Sylvia Chesak, described how she was “uncomfortable” thinking of herself as “just” a “she,” and chose to use “any pronouns” as a result.
These children, or the adults who egg them on, revolt against the sex they say was “assigned” in infancy. The nonsense language of “assigned at birth” doesn’t only make the wrong assumption that sex is nonexistent until it’s decreed by a doctor. It also makes the subtle implication that by doing the “assigning,” a doctor is imposing a category — a limit — on an infant that is inherently restrictive and must be abolished. Physical limitations like a man’s inability to get pregnant don’t matter, just like the physical limitations of a kid with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to become a pilot don’t matter to the adults telling him he can “be whatever he wants to be.”
One mother wrote in Time magazine about choosing not to call her child, named Zoomer, either a boy or a girl because she didn’t want to impose the “chains” and “restrictions of the gender binary.” Even after her child expressed a desire to be treated as a particular sex, the woman insisted on calling her child “they” in the article.
Elsewhere, she says, “The aim isn’t to create a genderless world; it’s to contribute to a genderfull one.” In other words, rejecting the sex binary isn’t about erasing sexuality, but removing all of its categorical limits.
A Swedish mother similarly explained that she refused to acknowledge her child’s sex “just as I don’t want to decide what they grow up to do…”
Telling children they can be and do “anything” helped create a generation petrified of narrowing their own options. They date around indefinitely to keep options open in case something better comes along. In the same way, kids learn to keep open the “option” of being a boy or a girl or a xe. Your natural sex is bad because it limits your possibilities.
Of course, your possibilities become far more limited when a doctor chops off your breasts or genitals or pumps you with hormones that may permanently alter your voice and body and keep you from ever having children. But just examine the messaging those hormones are marketed by: They’re reversible. You can just stop taking them. Here’s what Google would tell a curious teen, though the fine print is far more complicated than the highlighted answer suggests:
The messaging for puberty blockers is even more overt. Delay puberty, St. Louis Children’s Hospital tells kids, if you want “more time to explore [your] options.” What teen wouldn’t want that?
The reality is, of course, that some limits are outside our control. As for the limits we choose by the commitments we make, it’s far more paralyzing to artificially keep every option open than to choose wisely and live within the natural limitations of an ordered life. For kids getting transed into oblivion, that paralysis may be literal. But for all of us, refusing to commit to decisions worthy of our commitment will leave us lonely, exhausted, and bitter. Eventually, people who don’t want to limit their “options” by getting married usually realize one day that they don’t like any of the options left. Those who never put down roots typically end up adrift.
Thankfully, accepting our finitude is liberating. By recognizing the divine order that confines us, we are freed from struggling against it, and freed to do well in the things that are within our power.
In that latter realm, we have the gift of making choices and commitments, not so that we will avoid ever making them, but so that we may choose what is good. From choosing to work hard, to be loyal friends, to profess our faith, to raise children, to be faithful to our spouses, good choices place obligations on us, many of which are permanent. The fulfillment of those obligations enriches our lives, offering a depth of meaning and satisfaction that “keeping our options open” can never provide.
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.
A sane person who prefers living in a clean, safe, and prosperous city would see that news and say things are going in the wrong direction, and the people who are responsible for it need to be held accountable.
That’s how popular TikTok user The Blaq Mamba reacted in a video she posted Sunday. “What really saddens me about this,” she said, referring to the closure of one Walmart location in the South Side, “is that this Walmart was built in a predominantly black neighborhood. This is probably about the only major resource as far as like, shopping and access to groceries and access to pharmacy within a 10-block, maybe even a 10-mile radius.” She added, “And what’s really sad to me is how us black folks, we done stole and robbed ourselves out of a f-cking resource that even the elderly people of this community will not be able to have access to.”
She said she was “ashamed and saddened” because “We blame everybody else for our sh-t but then when we are tapped out of resources in our own community, we don’t ever want to look at ourselves and point the finger back at ourselves, and say, okay, maybe we f-cked up. Maybe we shouldn’t have been going in there stealing TVs and going in there stealing electronics and all this other sh-t … We need to do better.”
A person who is perhaps not sane or who is, at minimum, a societal parasite sucking the life and goodness out of everything would react just the opposite. He would excuse the ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and fiends. Instead, he would direct blame at those who refuse to tolerate anti-social behavior.
That’s how deadbeat incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson reacted. (I assume you don’t need me to tell you he’s a Democrat.) Following a weekend of street thugging and mayhem around the once-cherished Millennium Park, during which two teens and a six-year-old boy were shot, Johnson saw no urgency. “I’m saying that people are acting out of desperation,” he said in a remote TV interview, dialing in from what looked fittingly like a jail cell. “We don’t want a society that is acting out of desperation. But you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.” Asked if he condones the rampant looting that has forced countless businesses to close, he said, “What I’m saying is that you can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown, white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit.”
Johnson said in a separate statement that it’s “not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
I don’t know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see a teen snatching a handle of Hennessy before climbing a street light is definitely “a society that is acting out of desperation.”
What is there really left to say at this point? There appear to be more Brandon Johnsons than there Blaq Mambas. It’s too bad. Chicago could be a nice place. It used to be. Now it’s another ghetto for people like Johnson to further plunge into squalor.
How many voters understand that the Democratic Party supports legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy on demand for virtually any reason? How many voters know this position aligns with only six other countries in the world — three of them, not incidentally, being North Korea, Vietnam, and China?
Indeed, Democrats want to pass a federal law overturning the democratic will of states that ban sex-selective abortions or the dismembering of the post-viable unborn or require parental or guardian notification for minors before getting abortions. Democrats want to allow non-doctors to perform abortions (probably because it’s not medical care) while at the same time stripping real medical workers of their conscience rights by compelling them to participate in the procedure or lose their jobs. Democrats want to eliminate the popular Hyde Amendment that stops the federal government from funding abortions with taxpayer dollars. They believe abortion is vital in ensuring that poorer Americans have fewer children.
Now, maybe a majority of voters aren’t aware of Democrats’ maximalist positions because the media endlessly lies and obfuscates them. And maybe pollsters rarely ask useful questions on the topic — offering absurdly vague queries like “do you support abortion access” or should “abortion be legal” rather than should it be legal until the “due date” or “for any reason” or “after the baby is viable” or “for sex selection” — because the answers are a lot more complicated than they’d like.
And, maybe, after the shock of Roe being overturned — treated by Democrats as if it had been chiseled into magical stone tablets over the past 50 years — the energy and passion of the debate will temporarily reside on the pro-abortion side. And, maybe, if every voter knew all the facts, it still wouldn’t matter. Abortion is a complex and emotional issue.
None of that excuses the inability, or aversion, of national conservatives to make a coherent and compelling pro-life case. Sometimes it feels like Republicans are more terrified by the Dobbs decision than pro-abortionists. Even if pollsters were right about the unpopularity of abortion restrictions, there is this crazy thing that politicians occasionally engage in called “persuasion.” Rather than just chasing around voters for approval, this entails convincing them with arguments.
The problem, it seems, is that too many in the GOP accept the media’s concern trolling or listen to risk-averse advice of the consulting class. Take Wisconsin. On the same day Republicans took a supermajority in the legislature, Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by 10 percentage points to flip the state’s Supreme Court. Virtually every outlet treated the race, in which 36 percent of Wisconsin voters showed up, as a national referendum on abortion. Anonymous consultants were recruited to offer off-the-record comments voicing their deep concern about the deleterious effects of the abortion issue. “The drubbing Republicans took in Wisconsin this week revealed how harmful the issue of abortion still is to the party — and will likely remain through 2024,” Politico explained. “Wisconsin Supreme Court election sends message on abortion rights,” says the Washington Post. And so on.
Weird how this dynamic only works in one direction. In 2020, Brain Kemp, who signed a heartbeat bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks a year earlier, easily defeated media darling Stacey Abrams to win the Georgia governorship (in a state that Donald Trump also lost.) Abrams made abortion, along with guns, the central issue of her campaign, carpet-bombing the state with ads. In 2018, Terry McAuliffe also attempted to make abortion the dominant issue of his campaign against Glenn Youngkin. At the time, two of the Washington Post’s most dedicated partisan flaks promised that the race was “our first big test of the new politics of abortion.” Well, Youngkin, who supports 15-week abortion limits, won. Alas, there were no four-bylined handwringing deep dives from the Post about abortion undermining Democrats.
Georgia and Virginia are swing states. Ohio, where Mike DeWine signed a six-week ban in 2019 and won the state by 10 points in 2022, was one not long ago, as well. This is the same state in which pro-life JD Vance easily beat “moderate” Tim Ryan. But Ohio and Virginia teach nothing about abortion. Only the Wisconsin Supreme Court race matters.
This week, the governor of Florida and prospective presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, signed a six-week ban on abortion. One imagines DeSantis will be just as popular among Republicans in his state since the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Florida Assembly. Of course, conventional wisdom says this hurts his presidential chances.
Every GOP president since Ronald Reagan has taken a pro-life position. Even in a post-Dobbs world, the idea that abortion is going to be the determinative factor in the presidential race is likely wishful thinking. Now that Roe has been overturned, the president has even less say over the future of abortion. Abortion has become a state issue. That’s what irks Dems.
Whatever the case, the Republican nominee doesn’t need to impress California voters. They need to convince social conservatives in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida to go out and vote. Does anyone really think DeSantis would be better off politically if he vetoed a pro-life bill? Running from the abortion conversation, as so many Republicans seem to do, creates the impression they don’t really believe in their own stated position. Quite often, that’s probably the case. If you’re going to run as a pro-lifer, allowing the opposition to define your beliefs makes little sense. Especially when making a rational and moral case for protecting viable life, at the very least, isn’t particularly difficult — certainly not when contrasted with the left’s extremism.
Then again, if every Republican lost every race in the country over abortion, it still wouldn’t make killing human beings for convenience any less of a moral abomination or the fight to stop it any less important. A majority position isn’t, by default, moral or decent — quite the contrary. And meaningful political fights aren’t predicated on short-term gains. Overturning Roe took 50 years. The political fight over abortion might take even longer.
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. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Riley Gaines, a former All-American swimmer from the University of Kentucky, didn’t hold back when reacting to President Biden’s promise to veto a bill that would prevent biological males from participating in women’s sports. Speaking with Fox News Digital on Monday just hours after the White House released a statement slamming the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, or H.R. 734, Gaines said Biden’s veto promise was evidence he was putting a “radical minority” ahead of women across the country.
“The President has declared that science, truth, and common sense no longer matter. In opposing this bill, President Biden is catering to a radical minority at the expense of women, who are 51% of the population,” Gaines said.
President Biden (left) and former All-American University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines (right). (Getty)
“Equal opportunity, privacy, and safety in our sports shouldn’t be controversial. The women who once advocated for Title IX should be outraged as this goes against everything they fought for. Female athletes of all ages, levels, and sports deserve better,” she added.
H.R. 734 has not yet been passed by Congress, but is expected to come to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives sometime this week.
In a statement, the White House said it “strongly opposes” the bill on the grounds that it would “deny access to sports for many families by establishing an absolute ban on transgender students.”
Members of the House of Representatives participate in the vote for Speaker on the first day of the 118th Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 03, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
It went on to call the bill “discriminatory,” claimed such a law was “unnecessary,” and that it “hurts families and students.”
As part of the bill, educational institutions that receive Title IX funding from the federal government would not be allowed to “permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designed for women or girls.”
The bill says that the sex of an athlete would be recognized only by their “reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The legislation would allow transgender female athletes to train or practice in a girls’ athletic program, but only if no biological female athlete is deprived of a roster spot.
University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines reacts after finishing tied for 5th with transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas in the 200 Freestyle finals at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 at the McAuley Aquatic Center in Atlanta Georgia. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Democrats have made it clear that most or all of them will oppose the bill on the floor. The House Education and Workforce Committee approved the legislation in a 25-17 vote — every Republican voted for it, and only Democrats voted against it.
Fox News’ Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.
Brandon Gillespie is an associate editor at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @brandon_cg.
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 Presiden
Hundreds of teenagers flooded into the streets of Chicago on Saturday night. In response to the chaos, hundreds of police officers were dispatched to the downtown area after there several cars were damaged by the teenagers. Around 8 p.m., the mob of teens attempted to storm into Millennium Park. However, people under 21 are not allowed access to the park without being accompanied by an adult.
The horde of teens forced police to escort tourists and locals back to their cars at the Millennium Park garage. Teens also reportedly attempted to force their way inside the Art Institute of Chicago in an attempted “teen takeover.”
Officers from the Chicago Police Department, Chicago Fire Department, EMS, and SWAT teams were dispatched to the area. Rowdy teens smashed the windows of several cars by jumping on the vehicles – including a police cruiser. Video shows a vehicle being set on fire.
A man sitting in the driver’s seat of his car was injured and taken to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital after a group of teens beat him as they smashed his vehicle.
Video shows teens standing and dancing on the roof of a Chicago Transit Authority bus. There were reports of bottles being thrown at CTA buses. The CTA said some public transportation was disrupted on Saturday night because of police activity.
Police noted that there were social media posts encouraging teens to fight in the Loop.
🚨#BREAKING: Chaotic Scene Unfolds in Downtown Chicago as Teenagers Vandalize Cars and Gunfire Erupts
📌#Chicago | #Illinois ⁰ There is currently a significant police response taking place in downtown Chicago due to a large group of teenagers causing chaos. They have been… pic.twitter.com/n7xhBpsTKs
WFLD reported that gunfire erupted near the crowds at the corner of Madison and Michigan. Two teenagers were shot. The teens, ages 16 and 17, were shot and rushed to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Both boys are said to be in fair condition with gunshot wounds.
A witness told WMAQ-TV, “It’s heartbreaking, kids fighting, chasing each other, some of them got guns. It’s really heartbreaking when one of them actually gets hurt, and that’s unfortunate, happened last night.”
CBS News reported that “multiple teens” were arrested – all were under the age of 18.
The Chicago Police Department said in a statement, “Last night, CPD monitored activity happening across the city and officers were in place to quickly respond to active incidents and large gatherings. We will continue to have sufficient resources in place as we work to strengthen safety in every neighborhood.”
This was the second night of a crowd of teens taking over Chicago. On Friday night, a mob of teenagers gathered at the 31st Street Beach on Friday night. A 14-year-old boy was shot near the crowds.
WLS-TV reported that at least 29 people had been shot, six fatally, in weekend violence in Chicago.
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Piers Morgan shut down Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) on Friday for accusing female athlete Riley Gaines of using her platform to seek attention. Gaines made national headlines last week after she was accosted by a mob of transgender activists after she delivered a speech at San Francisco State University. The school later praised the transgender activists.
During an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time,” Porter said she “strongly” disagrees with Gaines for advocating against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Morgan immediately challenged Porter.
“What has she actually said that is wrong?” he asked.
“I think that what she has done is try to turn this — we talked about people becoming — using things to kind of get likes and get clicks,” Porter responded.
“That’s not what she’s doing,” Morgan shot back. “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights to fairness and equality. She actually competed against Lia Thomas, and it was obviously unfair. Lia Thomas won one of the races in the NCAA Championships by 50 seconds against a bunch of biological females who simply couldn’t keep up. That cannot be right. It cannot be fair.”
Instead, Porter said that sporting bodies should decide who gets to compete and said that Gaines is speaking only for herself.
“I think she’s speaking for pretty much every female athlete in the world,” Morgan fired back.
Piers Morgan and Bill Maher say Riley Gaines is standing up for female athletes worldwide, Lia Thomas has no place in women's swimming, and it's wrong to allow transgender athletes to decimate women's sports records:
The former All-SEC swimmer made it clear on Saturday that she is not simply speaking for herself and she is definitely not speaking out to gain attention.
“Hey @RepKatiePorter I’m not speaking up for myself,” Gaines responded on Saturday.
“I’m done playing sports. I’m not fighting for me. I’m actually supposed to be in dental school this year,” she explained. “But I’ve changed my life plans because I see what’s at stake if someone doesn’t fight for the present and next generation.”
Gaines added that she is confused as to why women fight against “sex-based protections.”
“Why is it always women fighting against sex-based protections? That will forever be beyond me,” she said.
Hey @RepKatiePorter I'm not speaking up for myself…I'm done playing sports. I'm not fighting for me. I'm actually supposed to be in dental school this year. But I've changed my life plans because I see what's at stake if someone doesn't fight for the present and next generation https://t.co/4QrPvPbnCC
Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe there is a two-tiered justice system. Last week’s courtroom episodes only validate the public’s perception.
On Friday, President Joe Biden’s allegedly “non-binary” nuclear waste expert, Sam Brinton, was sentenced in a grand larceny case over stealing women’s luggage from U.S. airports. Police say Brinton stole a bag from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas with an estimated worth of around $3,670. Authorities also charged Brinton with stealing luggage at a second airport in Minnesota.
The former Energy Department official took a plea deal over the Las Vegas bag theft Friday, agreeing to pay a $3,670 fine to the victim and a $500 criminal fee — no jail time required. The Minnesota theft remains an open case, with the next hearing scheduled for Monday, according to Fox News.
Contrast Brinton’s slap on the wrist to a pro-Trump meme creator convicted of illegal election influencing last month, and it’s no wonder Americans see a two-tiered justice system. Douglass Mackey faces 10 years behind bars over a 2016 post mocking how low Democrats want to set barriers to the ballot box.
“Save time Avoid the line Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 and we’ll make history together This November 8th,” the post read. Fine print at the bottom added, “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”
Federal prosecutors didn’t care that most online users played into the prank by texting the number “Hillary for Prison.” The DOJ indicted Mackey in January last year, 74 months after the 2016 presidential contest.
Brinton’s crime, meanwhile, inflicted real harm on those who lost their luggage.
Asya Idarous Khamsin is a Houston-based Tanzanian fashion designer whose luggage was allegedly stolen by Brinton in 2018. Khamsin went on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” three weeks ago to discuss what happened after her bag went missing. Khamsin said she and her husband saw Brinton wearing clothes resembling the custom-made designs matching the apparel in her lost bag when the pair turned on Fox News in December.
“Oh my God, I was shocked,” Khamsin said. “For more than 40 years, I work[ed] hard. All my work, it’s very paining.”
“I was asking myself how this person got my custom-made designs because it’s one of a kind, and wear them without fear and display in public,” Khamsin added. “I don’t accuse him as a thief, but there is [a] question to be answered here.”
The Texas-based fashion designer went on to share how the lost luggage caused her to miss a show and “let down my people.”
Mackey, on the other hand, is faced with a decade in prison over an online joke.
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.
If Americans want to understand how genuine “voter suppression” works, they should take a look at the widespread disenfranchisement of voters in Harris County, Texas, during the 2022 midterms.
On Election Day, county election officials’ misadministration of the contest led to ballot paper shortages, delayed openings and temporary closures of voting centers, and an untold number of disenfranchised voters.
“I have never seen anything so egregiously, grossly mismanaged as the elections in Harris County this past year,” said Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel during a recent Texas Senate committee hearing.
For context, Harris County is the third-most populous county in America. While historically favorable to Republicans, county residents have increasingly voted for Democrats in recent election cycles. During the 2020 election, for instance, Joe Biden won the county by 13 points, with Democrats also expanding their majority on the county’s governing commissioners court last fall.
Not long after the polls opened on Election Day, local media outlets began reporting that several Harris County voting centers were experiencing ballot paper shortages, delayed openings, and problems with voting machines.
What Happened in Harris County?
Nearly two months after the election, Harris County released an “inconclusive” assessment detailing the reported problems election workers and voters encountered on Election Day. In addition to ballot paper shortages, the report confirmed that some voting centers “did not open on time,” with reasons ranging from staffing problems to election officials not receiving the keys to their center’s voting equipment prior to polls opening.
The report further revealed that during the early part of Election Day, the county’s ePollbook server “lost replication,” which “prevented the wait time tool from updating the website, prevented the supply team from seeing real-time check in and disabled the sample ballot look up feature.” Such circumstances “had a direct impact on the ability [of county election officials] to see how many voters were being checked-in and what the wait times were” at any voting center.
While the assessment says that 68 precinct election judges “reported running out of their initial allotment” of paper ballots, an investigation conducted by local news outlet KHOU 11 indicates the problem was more widespread. According to the investigation, 121 of the county’s 782 voting centers “did not initially receive enough ballot paper to cover voter turnout.”
“The county allotted each of the locations six ballot paper packets, or enough for 600 ballots. But the total votes cast exceeded that amount, sometimes by hundreds of ballots,” the KHOU 11 report reads.
At the committee hearing, Siegel testified that one of the Harris County GOP’s precinct chairs developed a “heat map” purportedly showing that “the majority” of the 121 polls were in “Republican voting areas.”
The KHOU 11 investigation also found that on Election Day, 52 voting centers “received less paper in 2022 than ballots cast in 2018.” Harris County has not disclosed why voting centers ran out of ballot paper. It also remains unknown how many voters were disenfranchised as a result of such issues.
Investigations and Continued Cover-Up
Following the Nov. 8 contest, leading Texas Republicans began demanding answers from Harris County officials over the locality’s Election Day problems. On Nov. 14, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement calling on the secretary of state, attorney general’s office, and Texas Rangers to “initiate investigations into allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County,” adding that voters “deserve to know what happened.”
Not long after, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced her office had launched an investigation into the county’s Election Day problems following a request from the Texas secretary of state’s office to help with an inquiry into “possible criminal activity relating to shortages of paper ballots.” After receiving backlash from Texas Democrats, a bureau chief in Ogg’s office defended the investigation, saying Ogg was following state law.
Despite the seriousness of the matter, leading Harris County officials have attempted to stonewall efforts to uncover what led to the administrative failures on Election Day. When pressed by Harris County’s commissioners in January about the ballot paper shortages, Clifford Tatum, Harris County’s election administrator, refused to provide any details, using a lawsuit filed against his office by the Harris County GOP as justification for remaining mum.
County officials have displayed similar evasiveness with local media. Last year, KHOU 11 and a local ABC affiliate filed open records requests with Harris County over records related to the Nov. 8 election. After the Texas attorney general denied a request from Harris County to dismiss the requests last month, the locality filed a lawsuit against the AG’s office last week to keep the records hidden.
Texas Republicans Offer Solutions
In response to Harris County’s extensivetrack record of failed election administration, Texas Republicans have introduced numerous bills this year seeking to enhance the integrity of the state’s elections. If passed and signed into law, SB 1911 would allow any county official responsible for acquiring election supplies who “intentionally fails to provide an election precinct with the required number of ballots” to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Said officials could also be charged under the same statute for failing to “promptly supplement the distributed ballots upon request by a polling place.”
Individuals convicted of a Class A misdemeanor are subject to a fine of up to $4,000, a maximum of one year in jail, or both.
Also introduced is SB 1039, which mandates local election officials address inquiries related to election irregularities and provide “explanation[s] and “supporting documentation” when such information is requested by local and state party chairs, candidates, or election judges.
“This is about a catastrophic lack of performance in Harris County,” said bill sponsor and Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt during last month’s State Affairs Committee hearing. “It’s too big to ignore. The state can’t afford this type of problem in Harris County and neither can the residents.”
Additional election integrity bills introduced by Texas Republicans would make illegal voting a felony, withdraw Texas from the leftist-controlled voter-roll management system known as ERIC, and grant the secretary of state the power to suspend and replace an election administrator, among other reforms.
The kinds of Election Day failures displayed in Harris County are notably problematic because of the partisan difference in how Americans vote. While Democrats have made unsupervised, mail-in voting a key facet of their electoral strategy, Republicans prefer in-person voting on Election Day.
If this trend grows, it means that any election misadministration on Election Day will continue to disproportionately harm GOP voters over Democrats. Such circumstances would only further contribute to Americans’ waning confidence in U.S. elections, making accountability for what happened in Harris County all the more necessary.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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
The mother of a New York City murder victim shouted down Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., during a House Judiciary Committee field hearing on Monday, warning the lawmaker not to “insult my intelligence.”
The mother, Madeline Brame, was one of many witnesses to testify before the committee during Monday’s hearing highlighting the crime problem in Manhattan. Goldman attempted to use the time granted to him to question Brame to instead criticize the hearing itself, arguing it was a “coverup” for Republicans attempting to defend former President Donald Trump.
Goldman, who served as impeachment counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, sought to explain his view of the situation to Brame after other Democrats had stated that Republicans were using the witnesses as “props” to defend Trump.
“We’re not insulting you. Your experiences are devastating, but the problem is, is that this is a charade to cover up for an abuse of power. [Republicans] are going around incessantly, outside of this hearing, about Donald Trump, and the purpose of this hearing is to cover up for what they know to be an inappropriate investigation [into District Attorney Alvin Bragg],” Goldman said.
Madeline Brame shouted down Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman during a House Judiciary field hearing in Manhattan on Monday.
Rep. Dan Goldman got more than he bargained for when questioning witness Madeline Brame during Monday’s congressional field hearing in Manhattan.
“Can I respond to you, please?” Brame asked as Goldman attempted to move on.
“Not right now, because I only have 20 seconds, I’m sorry. But I, I do–” Goldman said.
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Brame interjected as Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, attempted to maintain order. “You’re trying to insult me like I’m not aware of what’s going on here. I’m fully aware of what’s going on here, OK? That’s why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”
Brame had testified earlier about Bragg’s mishandling of her son’s murder case. Her son, Army Sgt. Hason Correa, was beaten and stabbed nine times by multiple people in 2018. The prosecution for the cases dragged on for more than four years, and Bragg ultimately removed the indictments against two of the suspects in favor of lesser charges. Two others ended up receiving life sentences.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has sued House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan for opening an investigation into his office. Jordan held a hearing highlighting New York City’s crime problem on Monday. (Associated Press)
Brame argued that Bragg’s office has only served to escalate the city’s crime problem, showing no “measurable results” in lowering the city’s violent crime rate.
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
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 Presiden
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 Presiden
To support their left-wing agenda, corporate media occasionally allow members of the conservative movement or Republican Party to appear for a few moments on camera to give an illusion of balance. These select few are always significantly outnumbered by the legion of left-wing activists who dominate these programs and have to really use their time smartly and effectively to fight the propaganda and agenda-pushing that dominate our press.
In the case of Brendan Buck, the corporate media are engaged in a deliberate disinformation operation against the public. They have mislabeled him as someone representative of Republican voters when, in fact, he parrots some of the most preposterous Democrat talking points and ignores obvious facts to push back against those talking points.
Buck trades on the fact that he was a longtime top aide to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Like many of the old-guard GOP establishment operatives, he has had to deal with the widespread voter rejection of the Romney-Ryan era he helped craft. For him, this has included joining with left-wing critiques of those who supplanted the former GOP leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Democrat activist Chuck Todd frequently uses Buck on his Sunday morning news panel for NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The panel this past week also included Democrat activist and NBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend; Valerie Jarrett’s daughter Laura, who is a legal analyst at NBC; and an anchor from the left-wing PBS “NewsHour.” Buck was ostensibly supposed to balance out those three and the hard-core partisan Todd.
Instead, he allowed every single left-wing talking point to pass by without even a slight reproach. In some cases, he joined in enthusiastically.
For example, Todd led a subliterate discussion about Tennessee on Sunday. In the real world, the situation was that a trans-identified shooter in Nashville murdered three Christian children and three of their caregivers. Left-wing activists, including three elected Democrats, responded by orchestrating a takeover of the legislature in an attempt to restrict self-defense rights. The manner in which they led this takeover of the legislative assembly included violations of rules for which they were removed from committees and, in two cases, the legislative body. Many in the propaganda press have willfully lied about these facts to push a left-wing narrative.
So, in Chuck Todd’s world, this story meant there were “loud echoes from our recent past in the south and in the ’60s,” and it “felt like a whole bunch of people who just don’t deal with dissent.” He allowed Sanders-Townsend to falsely claim, “What is happening in Tennessee, and frankly across the South, is in fact Jim Crow.” She even said the potential pardon of a man convicted in a self-defense shooting of a Black Lives Matter demonstrator “is an assault.”
Now, I’m no fancy-pants Republican media strategist, like Buck’s bio claims he is. I don’t have a single day, much less decades, of experience in Republican messaging, as Buck has. And I certainly don’t get paid the big bucks to fight four left-wing activists on NBC while posing publicly as the representative of the majority of the country that is not represented by those activists. But I know literally any Republican on Earth could have done a better job than Brendan Buck did in this circumstance.
He said, and I quote, “Yeah. Well, this is again a situation where there’s no infrastructure. There’s nobody calling the shots. We are being defined as extreme, and it’s why Republicans are on the run in just about everywhere across the country.”
By the way, he said “again,” because earlier in the program he had joined with his left-wing buddies as they spouted falsehoods about which party’s abortion views are, in fact, extreme.
Are you kidding me? Now, do I expect Todd or Sanders-Townsend or any other Democrat activist to push a narrative of Republicans being extreme and on the run? Of course, I do. But why is Brendan Buck, Paul Ryan’s longtime aide, pushing this falsehood?
Just a cursory review of the most recent news shows this is simply not true. The Associated Press wrote just last week in an article headlined “North Carolina state lawmaker switches parties, gives GOP supermajority,” that, “A Democrat in the North Carolina state House switched to the Republican Party on Wednesday, giving the GOP veto-proof control in both chambers of the legislature and handing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a setback in trying to block hardline conservative policies in his final two years in office.”
Buck may agree with his super-duper best friend Todd that Republicans are just so extreme for supporting safe streets, biological reality, protection of children, sane foreign policy, constitutional order, and the like, but outside the confines of that NBC studio, there’s a very different world he should probably think about visiting. A world with Republicans, for one thing, but also a world where Democrats are forced to flee the party that Buck thinks everyone is running to:
Cotham, a former teacher and assistant principal who had served in the House for nearly 10 years through 2016 before returning in January, announced her decision at a news conference at North Carolina Republican Party headquarters. ‘I will not be controlled by anyone,’ Cotham said as she announced she would switch her party registration to the GOP. She said the Democratic Party is no longer a big tent party and tries to bully its members. She said that she was considered a ‘spy’ and a ‘traitor’ and that the turning point was when she was criticized for using the American flag and praying-hands emoji on social media and on her vehicles.
The range of topics corporate media are eagerly dishonest about is reaching a level that is a serious threat to the republic. In service of a Democrat agenda, they lie with alarming frequency about nearly everything — including crime, abortion, radical gender ideology, racism, taxes, foreign policy, gun rights, civil liberties, free speech issues, freedom of religion, the right to protest, due process, dueling standards of justice, and other important issues.
Those lies affect political and policy outcomes with devastating effects on the American people.
The GOP establishment from the past may be having a temper tantrum about how unpopular the views of the Romney-Ryan era are, but they need to have that tantrum on their own time, not during these limited opportunities to push back against the vile lies of the corporate media.
Democrats and their media organs have enough tools for disinformation. There is no need for Brendan Buck to be one of them.
The suspect facing charges of leaking U.S. military intelligence documents searched classified intelligence reporting for the word “leak” after the story broke.
Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking documents the Department of Defense says contain “sensitive and highly-classified material,” was charged Friday with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents.
Selfie of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old National Guard Airman accused of leaking classified information. (Facebook)
According to an FBI affidavit, Teixeira used his government computer to search for the word “leak” not long after news about the disclosures first broke.
“According to a second U.S. Government Agency, which can monitor certain searches conducted on its classified networks, on April 6, 2023, TEIXEIRA used his government computer to search classified intelligence reporting for the word ‘leak,'” the affidavit reads. “The first public reporting regarding the Government Information appeared on or around April 6, 2023.”
Teixeira was looking for classified reporting on intelligence agencies’ assessment of the identity of the leaker, the FBI indicated.
Relatives of Jack Teixeira leave John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse following his arraignment on April 14, 2023, in Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
A criminal complaint obtained by Fox News on Friday says the FBI on Monday interviewed a member of a social media platform who told a special agent that an individual – later identified to be Teixeira – began posting on the platform “what appeared to be classified information” starting in December 2022. The postings, the person said, appeared on a group aimed at discussing “geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars.”
Media outside John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse before the arraignment of Jack Teixeira on April 14, 2023, in Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Teixeira, wearing handcuffs and khaki prison jumpsuit, was read the charges against him on Friday shortly after 10 a.m. local time during an appearance in federal court in Boston. He did not enter a plea and was ordered detained pending a detention hearing set for Wednesday, April 19, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Relatives of Jack Teixeira leave the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, in Boston, on April 14, 2023. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The appearance at the federal courthouse comes after Teixeira was taken into custody by the FBI Thursday at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts.
President Biden said Friday he has directed military and intelligence agencies “to take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information, and our national security team is closely coordinating with our partners and allies.”
Fox News’ Greg Norman and Marta Dhanis contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at timothy.nerozzi@fox.com
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 Presiden
Those of us that remember this classic scene from the 1987 film “Raising Arizona,” still laugh when we think about the convict uttering those ridiculous words. Ridiculous, we said. Crazy, we thought. Common sense and a little 7th grade biology told us that men could not get pregnant, have periods, let alone experience menstrual cramps. However, that was then- this is now.
Somehow, the invention of the internet that provided billions of people with limitless information daily has now replaced what was once ‘elementary knowledge’ with what equates to a panel discussion. Contrary to what was once believed, common sense is not so common.
At a recent University of Pittsburg event in March, Former University of Kentucky swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum spokesperson Riley Gaines addressed a group concerning winning her competition against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological man. During her speech, Gaines directed a question to the school’s anthropologist, Professor Gabby Yearwood.
The exchange was recorded in an article in the Washington Examiner:
“I actually have a question for you. You being an anthropologist, which anthropology is the study of human civilization,” Gaines said as the anthropologist noted that his area of study includes a focus on biology.
“So, if you were to dig up a human, two humans, in 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?” Gaines questioned.
The anthropologist said, “No,” as those in attendance burst into laughter.
“I’m not sure why I’m being laughed at if I’m the expert in the room,” the anthropologist said. “Have any of you been to archaeological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data. I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at.”
As Gaines began to explain that she had “put a lot of research into this,” the anthropologist cut her off to say: “I have a Ph.D.”
The crowd once again began to laugh. Video of the interaction went viral as Twitter users responded, suggesting the anthropologist was “either incompetent or lying.”
The Buried Truth
The thing to remember here is that Gaines isn’t engaging a student or simply a bystander or even a visitor- Yearwood was a certified University anthropologist- Pitt’s gold standard of academia. In most cases, such a degree generally takes about four years of study to complete, certainly covering basic human biology and bone structure. One might wonder how Gabby would still have a job- and one would be correct to wonder. Regardless of the clear picture of this “expert’s” obvious ineptitude, the Left never says die.
One week later, Gaines was invited to speak at the San Francisco University chapter of Turning Point USA, once again sharing her experience of competing against Thompson. Almost immediately things took a turn for the worse. The New York Post records Gaines’ harrowing experience this way:
“Swimmer Riley Gaines on Saturday threatened to take “legal action” after saying she was assaulted by trans-rights protesters during a speech about protecting women’s sports at San Francisco State University.
“The campus police did nothing. The dean of students was there and did nothing. There will be no repercussions unless I have something to do with it,” Gaines told “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
“I will be pursuing legal action. These people need to face repercussions.” The former NCAA swimmer and 12-time All-American champ said a mob of demonstrators attacked her while she spoke about including trans athletes in women’s sports during Thursday’s Turning Points USA event at SF State.
Dramatic video Gaines shared on Twitter shows her being ushered out of a classroom and into a hallway by security as protesters chase after her. One of the activists gets in front of her and shouts, “Trans rights are human rights” and “Yeah, you f–king transphobic bitch — I f–king see you!”
“The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU…I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man,” she tweeted. Additional footage shared on social media shows security blocking Gaines from a mass of protesters before she was escorted to a safe room, where she said she was barricaded “for three hours.”
“Truthfully, I think these people resort to anger, both verbally and physically, and violence because they know they don’t have reason on their side,” Gaines told Campos-Duffy. “They cannot debate me with logic or science or any kind of data that supports their argument, so they resort to personal attacks.”
It seems that in the blink of the societal eye everything has changed.
It was only back in 2005 when we were introduced to the TV series “Bones” about the cases of a well-known female forensic anthropologist. Running for nearly 11 years, episodes centered on FBI case files surrounding mysteries concerning often limited and/or badly degraded human remains. In episode 8 season 1, an FBI agent she works with brings her an old freezer he claims contains a human body. Upon prying open the door and seeing the body, the agent asks, “he or she?” Within seconds of looking at the body’s pelvic region, the anthropologist replies, “she.” To be clear, this deduction was not based on years of case study, or even the acumen that led to her notoriety. This was in a nutshell, basic human biology.
It appears we collectively knew these basic truths like ten minutes ago; only now, the same group collectively denies what we all once professed to know. Despite that, there are still many that consider acknowledging ‘preferred gender’ instead of ‘confirmed gender’ to be a hill worth dying on. Oddly enough, it is those very same individuals that during the Pandemic reminded us ad nauseum to “follow the science,” that now choose to ignore that same “science” when it is no longer politically expedient or beneficial.
Yet, if we’re being honest, “they” do not shoulder all the blame.
Many of us elected to heed the “science” rhetoric despite available truths and data to the contrary. Wearing masks and sheltering in place was no more substantiated science then, than mutilating children is “gender-affirming” care, or men playing God over their bodies by pretending to be women is now.
When that husky man in “Raising Arizona” complained of menstrual cramps, we certainly thought it was funny. If we knew then what we are seeing now, we would have never laughed. Brave men and women like Riley Gaines, Matt Walsh and others are discovering what is truly an inconvenient truth: the Trojan Horse dismissal of films like “Tootsie” and “To Wong Foo”, the Caitlyn Jenner’s, the RuPaul’s and those men lamenting over their bodies challenged with what only women can experience has led us to this. The only way to exterminate this “transfestation” is to combat it with truth. The first inoculation must begin in our own homes. America, we have work to do.
Oh the irony. But real women need to “grow a pair”. Yes, BALLS.
I know this action flies in the crotch of what real women might find necessary. But I say to these ladies, at times real women must “man up”!
If that concept challenges your sensibilities, then real women in America should understand that the competition–the hairy underarm crowd–manned up. Literally.
Feminists have enlisted the help of “former men”. And the two factions have joined to wage war against real women. Which brings up an interesting point.
Can trans-men be real toxically masculine?
Imagine is real men chased a feminist into a bathroom and held her hostage for a couple of hours? I would consider that behavior toxically masculine.
That reality happened to Riley Gaines, a real woman. She was ambushed last week when a trans-activist, aka LGBT thug attacked her. She ran for her life and was forced to hide until authorities rescued her.
I don’t have a toxicity meter. But I’m betting this action by the so-called “trans-activist” would damn near peg that meter. As for masculinity? Well, I suspect both the trans-activist thug and that male swimmer who beat Gaines are both loaded with masculinity.
Yet, not a single outcry from the vagina-hat wearing #MeToo crowd over these obvious cases of toxic masculinity. Apparently, as long as you pretend to be a woman you can keep your balls and not be considered toxically masculine. Even when you behave toxically masculine.
To be clear, fake women target real women with no repercussions.
Gaines felt the wrath of the LGBTQIA simply because she fights to protect the rights of real women. While Gaines finished second to a fake-female swimmer, she fights for women in almost all sports. How does the feminist movement ignore the obvious? Fake-women will destroy real women in sports, if they allow this to continue.
So one must ask, what is the real agenda of feminists? Because if helping women is the goal, they suck at it.
Real men to the rescue.
While Leftists accuse real men of being toxically masculine, it is we who fight for the rights of women. Real men have always valued real women, even before having to use the adjective “real” to separate actual women from the brain-damaged body-dysphoric. Real men exalt women; always have and always will.
I suspect that fake women and feminists hate that they can’t be real women. Thus, subject to the adulation of real men. Further, I have always contended that feminists take girly men as their boyfriends, but they seek real men for physical pleasure. But I digress.
Real women to the rescue?
Olympic legend Sharron Davies is leading calls to boycott Nike over its campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney — which she ripped as “literally a kick in the teeth” to women.
“We can protest,” the retired UK swimmer told GB News late Thursday of the divisive campaign she says reflects the “total disdain that women are being treated with.”
“It’s what’s left for us at the moment because nobody really seems to be listening to the general public,” she said.
Three years ago, my office, the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor, learned through a whistleblower tip that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds may have been misspent by the Mississippi agency handling that money. Several months later and after an investigation by my team, we revealed the startling truth: Tens of millions of welfare dollars had been embezzled.
TANF funds were used in Mississippi to pay for drug treatment at a luxury Malibu resort for the friend of the head of the agency dispersing the funds. It paid for an investment in an experimental concussion drug company. It financed religious concerts with no proof they were attended by the needy, nice cars for the heads of an influential local nonprofit — along with paying off a speeding ticket for one of them — and excessive rent for property owned by the people handing out the money.
And of course, national outlets from ESPN to the late-night comics picked up on our discovery that Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre was paid $1.1 million on a contract requiring him to give speeches he never gave. He also successfully lobbied for $5 million in welfare funds to be spent on a volleyball court at his alma mater where his daughter played.
All told, this was the largest public fraud in state history. Local and federal prosecutors took our findings and indicted six of the culprits. We arrested them, and five have pleaded guilty. The FBI continues to investigate the case, working with our entire case file and my team to get to the bottom of everything.
Nationwide Problem
Sadly, large fraud schemes in poverty alleviation programs have streamed across the headlines of newspapers around the country lately. In the last couple of months, federal prosecutors indicted two nonprofit executives in Minnesota for stealing $250 million from a program to feed hungry kids. In June of 2022, the New York Post reported the head of a New York nonprofit was paid millions in taxpayer funds to house the poor while living in an expensive high-rise and funneling taxpayer money to his for-profit businesses. The list goes on.
Now that Republicans have taken the majority in the U.S. House, they have a fresh opportunity to explore why the billions taxpayers spend on the poor are so prone to this sort of abuse. In November, House Republicans sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arguing, “The Mississippi case is emblematic of a systemic problem: TANF lacks necessary guardrails making it susceptible to fraud.” They asked HHS to describe what they were doing to prevent the problem in the future.
This was a great start, and Republicans should double down on efforts to extirpate fraud from these kinds of programs. Connected powerbrokers who happen to run a nonprofit should not be the primary beneficiaries of our government’s spending for the poor. The House Ways and Means Committee should hold hearings to identify the best policy changes for these programs.
Proposals for Improvement
Here are a few ideas to get them started: Federal monitors should ensure state agencies are policing the nonprofits that take funds, tighter restrictions should be placed on how TANF can be spent (poverty programs should be focused on getting people into the workforce — period), and state agency heads should sign documents under penalty of perjury attesting to the number of poor people who were helped by their spending.
Finally, HHS should regularly report improper TANF spending to Congress. As House Republicans have noted, “Nearly every government assistance program is required to report improper payments on an annual basis, TANF is not.”
Voters expect government to act quickly to stop fraud in these programs. The belief that influence peddlers have rigged government spending for their benefit is bipartisan. Putting a stop to these sorts of schemes in poverty programs would appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans. Billions of dollars are spent across hundreds of these programs, so the savings could be massive if Congress gets this right. And most importantly, hard-earned taxpayer dollars might actually benefit the poor in our country.
Shad White is the 42nd State Auditor of Mississippi.
The trove of recently leaked intelligence documents related to the Ukraine war should prompt Americans to start asking tough questions about our involvement in that conflict, which one of the documents, a Feb. 23 overview of fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, describes as a “grinding campaign of attrition” that has reached a “stalemate.”
U.S. taxpayers have poured nearly $80 billion into this war over the past 14 months. At what point are we allowed to ask whether a “stalemate” in a “grinding campaign of attrition” is a good deal for Americans?
Above all, Americans should demand the bipartisan Washington consensus that supports indefinitely funding the war explain what our strategy is, define what the American interest is in it, and detail how they plan to achieve something beyond an interminable war of attrition that risks pulling us into direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. At the very least, the American people deserve more than inane platitudes from Antony Blinken about “Ukrainian victory” and “standing united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” as if total Russian defeat and withdrawal is a realistic outcome.
The classified documents lend some urgency to these questions because they reveal, among other things, a severe shortage of air defense weapons in Ukraine — so severe it could mean the difference between an ongoing stalemate or a Russian victory in the coming weeks or months. Without adequate air defenses, Russian warplanes will be able to bomb Ukrainian positions at will, which in turn might make Ukraine’s planned spring offensive impossible. No wonder, then, that earlier this month the Biden administration pledged $2.6 billion to rush air defense systems to Ukraine.
What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe. It rather seems like chaotic and indecisive butchery on both sides, with weapons and cash pouring in not just from the U.S. but from all over the world sustaining a large-scale war of attrition with no end in sight. Behind the scenes, according to the leaked documents, U.S. officials are predicting only “modest territorial gains” from Ukraine’s big spring counteroffensive, the recent surge of U.S. weapons and air defense systems notwithstanding.
One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.
What is the plan if (and really, when) Beijing decides to invade Taiwan? No one seems to have an answer — or even seems willing to acknowledge there’s a problem. Nor do our political leaders have an answer to the increasingly obvious reality that U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine is pushing Moscow into Beijing’s arms and helping to accelerate a China-led coalition to challenge the U.S. dollar reserve currency status and usher in a truly multi-polar world.
Meanwhile, economic uncertainty prevails here at home, with inflation continuing to hit American families hard, U.S. banks failing, and talk of an impending recession setting markets on edge. As mentioned above, since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, American taxpayers have given Ukraine about $80 billion — and counting. That includes nearly $50 billion in direct military assistance, many orders of magnitude more than we give even our closest allies like Israel, which got just $3.3 billion in military aid in 2020.
Setting aside the larger question of how this war will end (spoiler alert: it’s almost certainly going to end with a negotiated political settlement), there’s the narrower question of what, exactly, the American taxpayer has been purchasing with all this largesse. The Ukrainian state is famously corrupt, which hasn’t changed under President Zelensky and indeed might be far worse now given the sheer volume of U.S. dollars washing through the country. Is Ukraine going to emerge from this as a functioning democracy allied with the West, a reliable partner and not a dangerous welfare case? Is there any reason so far to think that will be the case?
And why isn’t there any transparency about the aid and cash we’ve sent? We’re told by White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby that, yes, there are indeed a small number of U.S. special forces operating inside Ukraine, but they’re only there “to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” and are not “fighting on the battlefield.” Presumably, that should mean we have more clarity about where weapons and cash are going inside Ukraine. But if that’s the case, no one in Washington will talk about it.
From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.
The only real question, at this point, is how many more tens of billions will American taxpayers have to spend to find out how this ends?
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The vote to expel two Democrats from the Tennessee House of Representatives last week reminds us of one of the immutable laws of politics: Whenever Democrats accuse anyone of racism, demand to see the videotape.
Hey — remember the 2016 racist bus attack on three black coeds at the University at Albany that caught Hillary Clinton’s attention? They claimed a group of white men shouting racial epithets started hitting them, but no one on the bus cared! Foolishly, in retrospect, they didn’t check to see if the bus had cameras. It did. Rallies, hysteria, a Hillary tweet … and then it turned out theywere the ones beating up a white girl.
Or how about the Princeton professor who claimed she’d been the victim of a vicious racist policeman in 2016? “Many women who look like me,” she wrote on Twitter, “have a much more frightening end to such arrests.” After a hue and cry, the police released the officer’s dashcam footage. The officer had been almost comically polite to her, despite her going 20 mph over the speed limit, as well as driving on a suspended license.
In 2015 in Connecticut, another BIPOC lady professor decided that, instead of simply paying a small traffic fine, she’d wreck a cop’s life. In a blizzard of letters to government officials, she accused the policeman of racism and demanded that “action be taken against the officer.” The police released a recorded transcript of the entire interaction — and guess what? The officer never said any of the racist things she’d alleged. He, too, was a model of professionalism.
The list goes on and on and on. And on and on. And on and on … (Though it’s important we avoid reflexive cynicism. Only the most callous among us would doubt Jussie Smollett.)
In any case, the moral of the story: Democrats say RACIST!!, you say “Show me the video.”
Which brings us to the allegedly racist Tennessee Republicans who expelled two of their colleagues this week just because they were black! (Didn’t Republicans notice these guys were black before now?)
MEDIA: The expelled lawmakers did nothing that others didn’t do!
MEDIA: Trust us, these lawmakers were the picture of decorum.
Normal people: Show us the video.
MEDIA: We must have left it in the car. We’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.
There’s a reason Tennessee Democrats frantically tried to prevent the playing of the video.
What it shows is two black Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, on the Tennessee House floor carrying on for more than an hour, shouting into a bullhorn, waving protest signs, banging on the podium like a drum, and leading chants with protesters in the gallery:
Power to the people! Power to the people!
No justice, no peace! No action, no peace!
Whose house? Our house! Whose house? Our house!
Gun control now! Gun control now!
Please explain how the Jan 6 QAnon Shaman showed more contempt for the democratic process than Jones and Pearson did. How about compared to a representative sending naughty texts to female colleagues outside of business hours — the casus belli of the last expulsion in 2016.
But according to MSNBC, the only reason Jones and Pearson were expelled was because the “predominantly white, predominantly male” lawmakers refuse to “coexist with representatives who are female or young or black” — as Nicole Wallace put it. (Nicole: Relax. You’ve got the job.)
In bafflement, Wallace asked, “Why did they have to be expelled? Why did this come to this?”
Idea: Show the video, Nicole!
Rep. Gloria Johnson, the body-positive white representative, begged not to be expelled, pointing out with some justice that, unlike Jones and Pearson, she broke no House rules — never shouted, pounded the podium, displayed a protest sign or used a bullhorn.
But as soon as her argument succeeded and she wasn’t expelled, Johnson rushed to MSNBC to say racism was the only reason she wasn’t. The sole deciding factor, she said, was “the color of our skin.”
If so, then why did she flap her gums about not breaking any House rules? Why not just say, Hey, guys! I’m white! (Amazon is now accepting pre-orders for her forthcoming memoir, “Profiles in Craven.”)
Some conservatives say the Republicans should have expelled the white lady just to avoid (false) charges of racism. Yes, and innocent whites and Asians should be sent to prison so no one can say our criminal justice system is racist.
I’m sorry if black people break rules out of proportion to their numbers in the population, but we don’t punish the innocent to achieve some childish idea of “equity.”
Rep. Johnson is a liar, but she didn’t break any House rules. Jones and Pearson did.
Johnson defended the assault on democracy by her black colleagues, saying, “The younger generation has a different way of speaking. They have a different way of addressing things.” So get used to bullhorns during legislative sessions, America! It’s just black style.
Apparently, we’ve returned to the Treating-Black-People-Like-Children phase of “Diversity.” I just wish liberals would state their racism plainly: We simply can’t expect black people to abide by white norms of dignity and decorum.
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 Presiden
Why do brands like Bud Light make marketing decisions — like promoting transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney — that will lose customers and money?
While it may seem like a mystery, Steve Deace has some answers.
He says people “still believe there’s this neutral mechanism in our culture called ‘the marketplace’ where eventually these things get sifted and filtered, right? And the people decide if they want this or they want that or they don’t want that and they do want this, right?”
He continues, “I don’t think that’s true anymore.”
As worship of God wanes, a new religion has begun to take its place. Deace believes that this is why brands like Bud Light are completely ignoring the desires of their target demographics.
He says, “The idea that it will just be a religionless society — oh no, it will not. There will be another religion. Another religion will emerge to take the place of the one that vacated said space. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will emerge to take that place.”
And according to Deace, the left’s new religion of wokeness is a tight-knit one.
“They have built a fellowship. May I say a church? They have each other’s backs. They go to the end. This is where the real religious commitment and conviction exists in America.”
“America is not devoid of real religious commitment and conviction. It is replete with the wrong religious commitment and conviction.”
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Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as good men and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men.
The report of a mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2018 was more than a news account of a crime. It was also a story about two young men.
The killer was 28-year-old Ian David Long, a college dropout, divorced former Marine who was unemployed and living with his mother.
He knew the Borderline Bar and Grill held a weekly college night when it would be crowded with young people. He entered the bar dressed in black, a hood pulled over his head. Tossing smoke grenades into the crowd to create confusion, he drew out a pistol with a laser sight and started shooting. A sergeant from the sheriff’s office rushed over to help, but the shooter was waiting for him. After killing the sergeant and 12 other people, Long shot himself.
In the crowd that night was another young man, 20-year-old Matt Wennerstrom, who emerged as the hero of the hour. Sporting a backward baseball cap and a scruffy beard, Matt looked like a typical college student. But what he did was not at all typical.
As soon as shots began booming through the bar, he and about seven other young men grabbed as many people as they could and pushed them under a pool table for cover. Then they piled their own bodies over them to protect them from the hail of gunfire.
One woman, who was celebrating her 21st birthday at the bar that night, told reporters afterward, “There were multiple men who got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back toward the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us.”
When the shooter paused to reload, Matt and his friends threw bar stools through a back window and began shepherding people outside. Repeatedly, the young men rushed back into the bar to steer more people to safety.
How did Matt have the presence of mind to respond so quickly to danger?
When a reporter at the scene of the crime asked that question, the young man replied, “My life is taken care of. I know where I’m going if I die, so I was not worried to sacrifice.”
Two young men. One used his masculine strength to take lives. The other used his masculine strength to save lives.
‘Toxic Masculinity’
When the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first-ever guidelines for counseling men and boys in 2018, it denounced “traditional masculinity ideology” as “psychologically harmful.” Groups like the APA have injected the phrase “toxic masculinity” into the bloodstream of America’s public discourse. The phrase has become a catchall explanation for male sexism, dominance, aggression, and violence.
Few people are claiming all masculinity is toxic. Yet the message men often hear is that there is something inherently defective in the male character. Many men today feel discouraged, devalued, and demoralized.
When I told my class at Houston Baptist University that I was writing a book on masculinity, a male student shot back, “What masculinity? It’s been beaten out of us.” When masculinity itself is portrayed as a problem, the implication is that the solution is emasculation.
“Are men being held hostage by culture war labels and stereotypes that blame them rather than help them?” asks the Christian Science Monitor. In a culture that increasingly blames men, it’s time to find ways to help them instead.
Because of testosterone, men are typically larger, stronger, and faster than women. In general, they are also more physical, more competitive, and more risk-taking. We need to affirm these God-given traits as good when used to honor and serve others.
The APA guidelines make a point of noting that most mass shooters are male, but they overlook the controlled power and aggression used by the heroic men who have stopped mass shooters.
Masculine traits are not intrinsically toxic; they are good when directed to virtuous ends. In a fallen world, the lawful application of coercive force is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent.
Yet we all know that the male strength that makes a man a protector can be distorted and turn him into a predator. The drive to achieve can become egoism and self-seeking. The leadership impulse can be twisted into an impulse for domination and control.
In “Play the Man,” Washington, D.C., pastor Mark Batterson says, “The image of God is our original software, sin is the virus.” The challenge is to sort out which definitions of manhood are part of the original software and which are the virus. Which belong to God’s original design and which are products of sin?
Masculinity: God’s Software or a Sinful Virus?
We might say there are two competing scripts for what it means to be a man. Sociologist Michael Kimmel highlighted the contrast with an ingenious experiment. He started by asking cadets at West Point what it means to be a good man. If someone delivers a eulogy and says, “He was a good man,” what does that mean?
The cadets had no trouble answering: “Honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, stand up for the little guy, be a provider, be a protector.” Be responsible, be generous, and give to others.
“Where did you learn that?” Kimmel asked. The cadets answered, “It’s everywhere. It’s our culture … it’s the Judeo-Christian heritage. It’s the air we breathe.” Men seem to be innately aware of the software God has coded into the male character.
Kimmel then asked a follow-up question: “What does it mean if I tell you, ‘Man the f-ck up! Be a real man.’”
The cadets shouted, “Oh no, that’s completely different.” To be a real man means to be “tough, strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid.”
Kimmel has posed the same two questions to thousands of boys and young men in countries across the globe — from single-sex schools in Australia to a police academy in Sweden to former soccer stars at FIFA — and he virtually always gets the same answer.
Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as the goodman and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men. They sense the contradiction between the software and the virus.
The Good Man vs. the ‘Real’ Man
Borrowing from Kimmel’s experiment, let’s give them labels: the Good Man versus the “Real” Man.
It’s not that every trait listed as the “Real” Man is necessarily bad. In a crisis, for example, we need men (and women) who can stand tough and not collapse in tears. But that is meant to be a short-term strategy, not a way of life.
The problem with the stereotype of the “Real” Man is that it is one-sided. When separated from a moral vision of the GoodMan, it can easily degenerate into sexism, dominance, entitlement, and contempt for those perceived as weak — traits we can all agree are toxic.
Of course, men do not respond well to being accused of being toxic — who would? A better course is to ask, “How can we support men in aspiring to live out the ideal of the Good Man?”
Because men are made in God’s image, even those who are not Christian seem to understand that their unique masculine strengths are not intended to enable them to get whatever they want but to protect those they love — to provide, sacrifice, and, if necessary, fight for them.
As a result, when Christians promote a biblical moral vision — the Good Man — they are not imposing an alien standard on men. They are encouraging them to follow their own conscience, to be uncompromising in doing what they instinctively know is right.
As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, people everywhere “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them” (Romans 2:15).
Our goal should be to support men in living out their innate sense of the biblical software — God’s original design for manhood.
In “The War Against Boys,”feminist philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers writes, “History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.”
But how did there come to be two competing scripts in the first place? Over the course of Western history, society has grown more secular, and so has its concept of masculinity. As a result, men increasingly feel pressure to live by the secular script of the “Real” Man. The most important conversation is not the one between men and women but the one carried out within men’s own heads between these two competing versions of manhood. Ideally, the Good Man should also bethe “Real” Man. But in today’s secular culture, the two have become decoupled.
My goal is to ask how the two scripts were split apart. We will be effective in countering the secular script for men only if we understand where it came from and how it developed. By recognizing that there are two competing scripts, we can cut through many of today’s contentious debates over masculinity. The word “masculinity” has become a trigger word that sets people off in all directions, making it difficult even to discuss the topic objectively.
But a Christian worldview gives us the means to think critically about cultural trends. It provides a perspective that is “in the world but not of it” (John 17:14–19).
A transcendent perspective empowers us to rise above the polarization — to push back against both extremes and consider a dispassionate account of the issues facing men today.
Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has written several bestselling books, which have been translated into 19 languages. The story of Brandon is adapted from her book “Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Live and Sexuality.”
According to the contemporary left, it’s “authoritarian” for local elected officials to curate school library collections but fine for a powerful centralized federal government to issue an edict compelling a major industry to produce a product and then force hundreds of millions of people to buy it.
President Biden is set to “transform” and “remake” the entire auto industry — “first with carrots, now with sticks”— notes the Washington Post, as if dictating the output of a major industry is within the governing purview of the executive branch. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing draconian emissions limits for vehicles, ensuring that 67 percent of all new passenger cars and trucks produced within nine years will be electric. This is state coercion. It is undemocratic. We are not governed; we are managed.
In fascist economies, a powerful centralized state — often led by a demagogue who plays on the nationalistic impulses of people — controls both manufacturing and commerce and dictates prices and wages for the “common good.” Any unpatriotic excessive profits are captured by the state. All economic activity must meet state approval. And crony, rent-seeking companies are willing participants. Now, I’m not saying we already live in a fascist economic state. I’m just saying the Democratic Party economic platform sounds like it wishes we were.
The coverage of Biden’s edict has gone exactly as one might expect. “Biden makes huge push for electric vehicles. Is America ready?” asks Politico, for instance. The conceit of so much modern media coverage rests on the assumption that the left’s ideas are part of an inevitable societal evolution toward enlightenment. The only question remaining is when will the slaw-jawed yokels in Indiana and Texas finally catch on.
I’m sorry, EVs are not a technological advancement — or much of an environmental one — over vehicles with internal combustion engines. Most of the comforts EV makers like to brag about have been a regular feature of gas-powered cars for decades. At best, EVs are a lateral technology. And, as far as practicality, cost, and comfort go, they’re a regression. If EVs are more efficient and save us money, as administration officials claim, manufacturers would not have to be compelled and bribed into producing them.
The problem for Democrats is that consumers already have perfectly useful and affordable gas-powered cars that, until recently, could be cheaply fueled and driven long distances without stopping for long periods of time. Fossil fuels — also the predominant energy source used to power electric cars — are the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have a vast supply of it. In recent years, we’ve become the world’s largest oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of fossil fuels here at home and vast amounts around the world. By the time we run out, if ever, we will have invented far better ways to move vehicles than plugging an EV battery — which is made by emitting twice as many gases into the air as a traditional car engine — into an antiquated windmill.
“I want to let everybody know that this EPA is committed to protecting the health and well-being of every single person on this planet,” the EPA’s Michael Regan explained when announcing the edicts. No one is safer in an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. The authoritarian’s justification for economic control is almost always “safety.” But the entire “safety” claim is tethered to the perpetually disproven theory that our society can’t safely — and relatively cheaply — adapt to slight changes in climate. If the state can regulate “greenhouse gases” as an existential threat, it has the unfettered power to regulate virtually the entire economy. This is why politicians treat every hurricane, tornado, and flood as an apocalyptic event. But in almost every quantifiable way, the climate is less dangerous to mankind now than it has ever been. And the more they try to scare us, the less people care.
So let the Chinese communists worry about keeping their population “safe.” Let’s keep this one innovative, open, and free.
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. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A New York City law firm with “strong ties” to Democrats and the Biden administration, and a big-time fundraiser for both, lent the Manhattan district attorney three lawyers to help him take down Donald Trump. This cohort included former Special Assistant District Attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, whose leaked resignation letter appears responsible for the Manhattan prosecutor’s decision to indict Trump.
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former president when he moved forward last week with the arraignment of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The pathetic, barebones indictment was quickly denounced by pundits on both sides of the political aisle. Then on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee raised additional concerns about the role Matthew Colangelo, the former No. 3 man in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, played in the targeting of Trump.
While Bragg’s hiring of Colangelo to reportedly “jump-start” the investigation into Trump further indicates the indictment was politically motivated, the Manhattan D.A. office’s unprecedented use of outside, Democrat-connected lawyers to investigate Trump pre-dates Colangelo’s arrival by nearly a year.
A Pattern
In early to mid-February of 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Pomerantz, whom The New York Times noted was to work “solely on the Trump investigation,” took a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he had defended former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., against alleged campaign finance violations. But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly “been helping with the case informally for months…”
According to the Times, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” One must wonder, then, how much more unusual it is for the Manhattan D.A.’s office to receive the “informal” assistance of a private criminal defense attorney. The legacy news outlet, however, justified the hiring of Pomerantz based on the “usual complexity” of “the two-and-a-half-year investigation of the former president and his family business.”
A few months later, the D.A.’s office welcomed two more outsiders, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, who also both took leaves of absence from the New York powerhouse Paul, Weiss to work on the Trump investigation as special assistant district attorneys.
For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden. During Biden’s White House run, the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests.
The chair of the Paul, Weiss law firm, Brad Karp, also topped the list of Biden fundraisers, bundling at least $100,000 for the then-candidate. “As someone who cares passionately about preserving the rule of law, safeguarding our democracy and protecting fundamental liberties, I’ve been delighted to do everything I possibly can to support the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket,” Karp wrote in an email.
Karp’s support of the Democrat presidential ticket isn’t surprising given that his fellow Paul, Weiss partner Robert Schumer is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s brother.
Biden’s connection to the firm, however, dates much further back, with the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama-Biden administration, Jeh Johnson, also heralding from Paul, Weiss. Once elected president, Biden nominated Jonathan Kanter, a former partner of Paul, Weiss, to serve as the top antitrust enforcement official at the Justice Department. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Paul, Weiss has “emerge[d] as Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center.”
A Resignation
The three Paul, Weiss alumni sent to the Manhattan D.A.’s office to bolster the Trump investigations would all make news, but for different reasons. Pomerantz first garnered headlines when he resigned as a special assistant district attorney in early 2022, after Bragg became Manhattan’s D.A.
In his resignation letter, leaked to The New York Times, Pomerantz said that in late 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, Vance, had “concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.” But after replacing Vance as D.A., Bragg decided “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time,” Pomerantz wrote, adding, “The investigation has been suspended indefinitely.”
What Pomerantz’s letter did not say, however, was that in late 2021, “at least three career prosecutors asked to move off the investigation,” reportedly “concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges.” Instead, in his resignation, Pomerantz declared he believes “Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations,” that “the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump,” and that “such a prosecution should be brought without any further delay.”
Pomerantz later rejoined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and authored a book about the Trump investigation.
Pomerantz’s letter and his claims that Bragg had suspended the Trump probe triggered a political firestorm, which the Manhattan D.A. sought to quell by telling the public the investigation was ongoing.
Criminal Charges
Meanwhile, the Manhattan D.A.’s office pushed forward in its criminal case against the Trump Corporation. A grand jury had indicted the Trump Corporation in late June of 2021 on charges it engaged in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on the salaries of high-level executives by instead funneling compensation through perks, such as luxury apartments and cars. A second Trump corporation would later be added to the criminal case that went to trial in late 2022.
The trial team that prosecuted the case included the other two Paul, Weiss attorneys on loan to the Manhattan D.A.’s office: Abuhoff and Williamson. Bragg borrowed a third outside attorney, Gary T. Fishman, from New York’s Democrat Attorney General Letitia James. Along with three regular members of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, the three “special assistant district attorneys” helped convict the Trump-related business entities in early December 2022.
After securing convictions of the two Trump corporations, Abuhoff and Williamson ended their “special assistant district attorney” relationship with Bragg’s office in December 2022 and went back to Paul, Weiss — a return that would be short-lived. Abuhoff rejoined the Manhattan D.A.’s office in February 2023, and Williamson returned the next month, but now both as regular members of the staff.
So short was their time back at Paul, Weiss, in fact, that one must wonder if the firm paid them bonuses following their departure from the Manhattan D.A.’s office. The Federalist posed this question to Paul, Weiss, but the inquiry went unanswered. Paul, Weiss also did not respond to questions concerning whether the lawyers received any compensation or Paul, Weiss benefits while on leave to the D.A.’s office.
Abuhoff and Williamson’s return to the D.A.’s office followed the news that in early December, Bragg had hired Matthew Colangelo from the Biden DOJ to “jump-start” the office’s investigation into Trump. Upon his inauguration, Biden had appointed Colangelo to serve in the No. 3 slot at the DOJ, showing the trust Biden has in the lawyer now charged with taking down his opponent Trump.
Colangelo had also previously worked in the Obama-Biden administration and as chief counsel and executive deputy attorney general in A.G. James’ office, where he and Fishman reportedly investigated Trump. As noted above, James would later lend Fishman to the Manhattan D.A.’s office, keeping with her campaign promise to “be a real pain in the -ss” to Trump. It’s no wonder House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is concerned about Colangelo’s role in the unprecedented indictment.
Connecting the Dots
But the issue goes much beyond Colangelo, for it seems likely Bragg never would have hired Colangelo had Pomerantz’s resignation letter never been leaked to The New York Times. It’s outrageous that Pomerantz was reportedly “informally” advising the former Manhattan D.A. while working for the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center” law firm with extensive connections to Democrats. Equally outrageous is the fact that the same law firm lent the D.A.’s office three lawyers to bolster the Trump investigation.
It seems Bragg was swayed by New York politics to alter the communist boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” The Manhattan D.A. had the man but couldn’t find the crime.
“Lend me your top attorneys to show me a crime,” is the new motto of the political machine New York Democrats built to purge the country, communist style, of Trump. That should horrify every American.
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.
EXCLUSIVE: Two dozen Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon after Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) sent a “cease and desist” letter to Catholic priests to stop providing care during Holy Week, slamming the move as a violation of the First Amendment.
Twenty-four Republican members of Congress penned a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In the letter, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the lawmakers blast the Biden administration’s “attack on the Christian faith.”
“Last week, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Holy Name College Friary, a group of Catholic priests, ordering them to stop providing pastoral care at their facility,” the letter reads. “The same group of priests have served at Walter Reed for almost 20 years, and this order came days before Easter.”
“Forcing priests to stop providing care during Holy Week is not only morally wrong, but also a violation of the First Amendment,” the members of Congress wrote.
The entrance of Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., is seen on Nov. 19, 2021. (OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
The lawmakers praised the Catholic priests who have “stood alongside our service members through the darkest days of our history.” “They joined American service members on the battlefield and provided care to all in need,” the letter says.
The lawmakers are demanding answers from Austin on why the Biden administration sent the “cease and desist” letter and why the administration chose to “terminate the contact” with the Holy Name College Friary.
The lawmakers also claim that the Archdiocese of the Military informed them that the contract for providing pastoral care was “awarded to a for-profit, secular company that does not provide pastoral care.”
“awarded to a for-profit, secular company that does not provide pastoral care.” A “SECULAR” company??????? What kind of BIBLICAL care are they going to get? Sounds like an attack on Christianity to me.
“Who was awarded the contract and why?” they asked, requesting further contract terms, applications, review comments, the award letter and all internal emails and documents related to the contract.
“This attack on the Christian faith by the Biden administration during Holy Week is unconscionable,” the lawmakers wrote, demanding answers by April 21.
The Defense Health Agency told Fox News Digital that there “was no cancelation of Catholic services at Walter Reed, especially during Holy Week.”
“Palm Sunday mass was conducted by the Catholic priest assigned to the hospital and there were services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, confessions were offered as well as mass celebrated by a Catholic priest,” the Defense Health Agency spokesperson said.
The Defense Health Agency also told Fox News Digital in an email that “a contract was NOT terminated.”
“As with most contracts they have a beginning and an end. This contract originally ended on December 31st and was extended until March 31st. The contractor was aware of the contract end date,” the spokesperson said. “A new contract was awarded to a different company effective April 1st.”
“When the previous contractor continued to provide services after April 1st, a cease and desist letter was sent stating the former contractor could not perform services since they were not under contract,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added: “The current contract is under review to ensure the right services are being provided. But there was absolutely no loss of Catholic Services to the community.”
Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., gives remarks after receiving an endorsement during a Save America Rally with former President Donald Trump at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Illinois, on June 25, 2022. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
The letter to Austin was sent by Reps. Mary E. Miller, R-Ill.; Jim Banks, R-Ind.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.; Scott Perry, R-Pa.; Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.; Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; Warren Davidson, R-Ohio; Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.; Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; Bob Good, R-Va.; Keith Self, R-Texas; Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz.; Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.; Josh Brecheen, R-Okla.; Brian Babin, R-Texas; Ben Cline, RpVa.; Andy Harris, R-Md.; Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn.; Michael Cloud, R-Texas; Eli Crane, R-Ariz.; Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.; and Alex X. Mooney, R-W.Va.
“Priests and pastors guided our troops through the darkest days of our toughest battles. The Biden administration chose Easter weekend to kick Catholic priests out of Walter Reed, violating their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion,” Miller told Fox News Digital. “I am proud to lead this letter to Biden’s Defense Secretary to demand answers on this unconscionable attack on Christian service members and the First Amendment.”
The Pentagon, though, said there was an active duty Army priest providing Catholic coverage for Holy Week and Easter at Walter Reed after the cease and desist letter.
But two senior U.S. defense officials told Fox News that the decision surrounding the renewal of the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was not handled by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and did not involve the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The officials said the decision was not made by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, D.C., on March 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Instead, an official said the contract was handled by the Defense Health Agency.
The letter from the lawmakers came after the Catholic archdiocese said in a statement that Walter Reed issued the cease and desist order against Holy Name College Friary, a Franciscan community of priests and brothers that has served at the center for nearly 20 years.
Walter Reed said the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was terminated at the end of March, just as Holy Week was about to begin. Walter Reed replaced the contract with a secular defense contracting firm that the Catholic archdiocese argues will not be able to provide adequate care.
Walter Reed, though, defended the move over the weekend, saying that Catholic Easter Services were provided to those who “wish to attend,” and included a celebration of Mass and the administration of Confession by an ordained Catholic priest.
“For many years, a Catholic ordained priest has been on staff at WRNMMC providing religious sacraments to service members, veterans and their loved ones,” Walter Reed said in a statement. “There has also been a pastoral care contract in place to supplement those services provided.”
“Currently… the pastoral care contract is under review to ensure it adequately supports the religious needs of our patients and beneficiaries,” the Walter Reed statement said. “Although at this time the Franciscan Diocese will not be hosting services on Sunday parishioners of the Diocese while patients at our facilities may still seek their services.”
The AMS was created by St. Pope John Paul II to provide the Church’s services to veterans and service members in the U.S. and overseas. The archdiocese, which does not have geographical boundaries, is responsible for the care of 1.8 million Catholics across the globe.
“Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was blasted as a “total fraud” online after her infamous “accent” video re-emerged. Ocasio-Cortez caught flak in 2019 for appearing to use an “accent” at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention that year. The Democratic socialist congresswoman was responding to critics who pointed to her past employment as a bartender that she called attempts at delegitimizing her as a lawmaker.
Ocasio-Cortez caught flak in 2019 when she used an “accent” at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention that year. (RepAOC/Youtube )
The footage of her speech made its way around the internet again on Tuesday when the Twitter account End Wokeness reposted the video cut with a recent video she made about former President Donald Trump where she was not using the accent.
End Wokeness blasted Ocasio-Cortez as a “total fraud” and pointed out her “accent before and after.”
“When Donald Trump tapped into this idea of Make America Great Again, there was times of economic opportunity,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the recent video. “Wages rose until the 1970s.”
“I’m proud to be a bartender. Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019. “There’s nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy. There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work. There is nothing wrong with being a working person in the United States of America and there is everything dignified about it.”
She added that she feels “encouraged” when people remind her of her past because it shows that if she can “work in a restaurant and become a member of the United States Congress, so can you.”
Other users defended the congresswoman, with NK News editor Oliver Jia tweeting that he is “no AOC fan but this is petty nonsense to be making a case about.”
“Politicians from both parties change the cadence of their voice all the time depending on the audience,” Jia wrote. “It’s also common for people from certain backgrounds to code switch depending on who they’re with.”
I'm no AOC fan but this is petty nonsense to be making a case about. Politicians from both parties change the cadence of their voice all the time depending on the audience.
It's also common for people from certain backgrounds to code switch depending on who they're with. https://t.co/kAowSRMFzd
Fox News Digital reached out to Ocasio-Cortez’s office for comment on the video but received no response.
Ocasio-Cortez’s speech was not well-received in 2019, with the congresswoman being compared to failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose dialect appeared to change for different audiences on the campaign trail.
Amid the negative reaction to her speech, Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to respond to the criticism, pointing to her upbringing in the Bronx and explaining that she talks differently when she’s “fired up.”
“As much as the right wants to distort & deflect, I am from the Bronx. I act & talk like it, *especially* when I’m fired up and especially when I’m home,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “It is so hurtful to see how every aspect of my life is weaponized against me, yet somehow asserted as false at the same time.”
Fox News Digital’s Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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 Presiden
When it comes to transgender ideology, Dr. André Van Mol says simply being a board-certified family physician in today’s political climate could be considered controversial.
Speaking at The Christian Post’s Generation Indoctrination conference last month, Van Mol, who is also the co-chair of the American College of Pediatrician’s Committee on Adolescent Sexuality, said if he was to give testimony in a court of law, attorneys for the other side would work to get his testimony thrown out, claiming he is not an expert. But if he worked for a gender clinic, he would be considered an “expert.”
“If I were a family physician working for the gender clinic, now I’m an expert,” he noted, pointing to what he described as the “ideological capture of medical organizations, legislators, media as a whole, [and] the academic world” by gender politics.
Van Mol called the trans movement “ideology masquerading as science, reinforced with emotional blackmail — ‘You have to support them or they’re going to kill themselves’ — which is also not true.”
That dynamic, he added, is perhaps best encapsulated by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which Van Mol calls an advocacy group.
“All roads lead back to WPATH,” he explained, using the acronym for the organization formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.
Under WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, said Van Mol, all age restrictions for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery have been removed. The latest version of WPATH’s SOC now includes “eunuch” as a gender identity, which it describes as “individuals [who are] assigned male at birth and wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals or genital functioning.”
Van Mol’s response to the change was brief but to the point.
“This cannot be science,” he said.
“There’s always a more honest answer to gender dysphoria or confusion in a minor than chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation in what is otherwise a very healthy young body,” he said. “What they need is to address those underlying issues.”
Oftentimes, said Van Mol, much of the controversy stems from a toxic mix of mainstream media headlines and low-quality scientific research. He pointed to the familiar trend of media outlets chasing headlines rather than following the science.
“You’ll notice that whenever there’s a new study singing the praises of transition, magically, immediately, it’s covered in the media from coast to coast, with pretty much the same talking points, and that can’t be coincidental,” he said.
Van Mol also said studies that support sex-change procedures “uniformly show that those studies are of low to very low quality.”
“By definition that means they fail to show what they claim they are showing,” he added.
He also pointed to the closure of the Tavistock Clinic, Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, set for later this year following six comprehensive literature reviews out of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland and Florida.
“What we see now is … four nations that were leading the world in ‘gender-affirming transition medical interventions’ have done a complete turnaround, a complete 180, again, they were leading in it, and now they’re like, ‘No, this is not supported by good data,’” he said.
According to recent data, the number of minors in America receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria tripled from 2017 to 2021, with more than 42,000 receiving the diagnosis in 2021. On the social media platform TikTok, which is especially popular among younger people, the hashtag “trans” has logged 50.2 billion views, nearly doubling within the space of a year.
More European nations, he added, are turning away from this “junk science” and instead telling minors who are experiencing gender dysphoria to undergo comprehensive psychological evaluation and therapy — both for the patient and the family.
“There’s decades of literature showing overwhelming probability in a gender dysphoric minor of underlying health problems of adverse childhood experiences, bad family dynamics and a way over-representation of autism spectrum dysphoria, and that these all predate the gender dysphoria,” Van Mol explained.
This approach, said Van Mol, is a more holistic method of addressing what tends to be a deeply complex condition.
“And there’s absolutely no way that happens in a 40-minute visit to Planned Parenthood that gives you hormones,” he added.
One of the biggest challenges presented by China as compared to the USSR is the depth of the Chinese penetration of America’s economy, politics, culture, and society.
“It is time to acknowledge reality: The United States is in a New Cold War with the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote, expressing a sentiment espoused throughout the report.
For decades, America has followed a bipartisan and naïve policy of unfettered engagement with China, which has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to entrench and enrich itself within the international system while facing no consequences for its aggression abroad or totalitarianism at home. China now uses its wealth and technology to supercharge a policy of civil-military fusion, linking economics and military strategy.
One of the biggest challenges presented by China as compared to the USSR is the depth of the Chinese penetration of America’s economy, politics, culture, and society. The Heritage plan leaves no stone unturned when discussing these malign activities, advocating a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society effort” to counter them.
1. Ban Dangerous Chinese Apps
TikTok and other CCP-linked apps are incredibly popular, especially among American youth. These apps threaten personal privacy and national security. Heritage recommends an outright ban of TikTok and a more aggressive, risk-oriented approach to assessing foreign-owned information technologies in the U.S.
This would take very little in terms of new law, and the federal government has processes in place to monitor or ban these apps. Congress is already debating this issue, so the prognosis looks good.
2. Ban the Import and Sale of Chinese Drones
Although a lesser-known issue, CCP-linked drone manufacturers, specifically Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI), dominate the commercial and recreational markets. As with TikTok, all information collected by those drones is stored on CCP-accessible servers.
Local, state, and federal agencies have used DJI drones — some given as free “gifts” during the pandemic — to “monitor every aspect of life in these cities,” including “the precise location of critical infrastructure and other sensitive information.”
Bans on these drones can be included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) or implemented via executive order. Educating non-federal officials about the drones could reduce the threat at the state and local levels.
3. Risk-Manage Inbound Investment
China’s direct investment in American firms peaked in 2015, but its national security implications remain. Often funneled through middlemen who camouflage Chinese involvement, CCP-linked investment still reaches into the billions annually.
The federal government has the tools to properly manage and review this. The 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) enabled the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to scrutinize these investments more.
Expanding definitions in FIRRMA can empower CFIUS to address all forms of Chinese investment, even through intermediaries, while direct legislative language can force reviews when agencies decline to use the power granted by law.
4. Reject Damaging ESG Policies
So-called environmental, social, and governance policies have been a debacle for investors and a sop to Chinese-linked firms, which control the supply chains for ESG-mandated renewable energy. ESG weakens the U.S. while strengthening its greatest foe.
Congress can end this damaging strategy through legislation, which it indeed did before President Biden vetoed it. Congress should continue pushing to end ESG through law and work to advance the understanding of ESG’s danger in the corporate sector.
5. Increase Munition Production and Arm Taiwan
This issue is paramount to countering China, particularly as the CCP has advanced its aggression toward Taiwan. The Heritage report acknowledges the trade-offs inherent in the decisions about arms sales and transfers and proposes an augmentation of our defense-industrial base to overcome these scarcity issues going forward.
Today, we can prioritize Taiwan by sending critical munitions, ensuring that capabilities sent elsewhere do not overly affect the defense of Taiwan, drawing down our own stocks in accordance with the law, and facilitating arms purchases from other nations.
6. Foster Innovation in the U.S. Maritime and Shipping Sectors
America’s “uncompetitive and outdated shipbuilding and shipping sector diminishes U.S. competitiveness, undermines the resilience of the economy, constrains the nation’s ability to mobilize and sustain a wartime economy, and meet the U.S. Navy’s global responsibilities,” according to the report.
The major stumbling block to reform is the restrictive Jones Act, which should be repealed and replaced with a law focused on promoting innovation in the maritime sector. The Jones Act, or the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, mandates that U.S.-made and U.S.-owned vessels transport goods between American ports, and that U.S. citizens operate the vessels.
Free-market solutions will allow the creativity of American industry to excel, developing novel methods of transportation, growing our shipbuilding and shipping capacities, and backstopping American naval power.
7. Expand Export Controls
The U.S. policy of engagement with China had allowed the chronic export of technologies used to advance China’s military aims. Legislation has since limited certain “foundational technology” exports, but the federal bureaucracy has failed to implement controls by refusing to label these technologies.
Congress must exercise its oversight power and force executive branch agencies to make these determinations in line with the law, so as to cease the transfer of critical security technology to the CCP.
8. Hold China Accountable for Covid-19
Regardless of the pandemic’s specific origin, a great deal of evidence has shown the CCP deliberately covered up the virus, allowing it to spread unchecked. Since then, the CCP has stonewalled investigations into its behavior, using its leverage at the World Health Organization to avoid accountability.
The U.S. government should cease funding the WHO until it conducts a thorough investigation of China’s involvement in the pandemic, end all financing of Chinese biomedical research, and propose unbiased international standards by which pandemics can be detected and limited without interfering with national sovereignty.
9. Prioritize the Pacific Islands
The Pacific Islands are often overlooked in the geopolitical competition with China. Many small island nations comprise the region, but it is strategically important to maintain a U.S. presence in the Pacific, especially through its links to Asia and Australia.
China has focused on this region, seeking to cut off the U.S. from its Indo-Pacific allies.
“Winning the New Cold War” suggests the U.S. compete on the same turf by renewing existing diplomatic and security agreements, exploring the expansion of those accords to other nations, and engaging diplomatically through high-level visits and summits.
10. Establish a Quad Select Initiative
The Quad — the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan — is one of America’s most important initiatives to counter China. It links the key players in the Indo-Pacific and builds bridges for future cooperation.
Expanding this multilateral format by selectively inviting other nations to join for military, economic, or planning purposes would allow the U.S. to enhance regional alliances and foster broader anti-CCP cooperation.
This would not require any legislation but merely a change in the executive posture. Creating a more open architecture for the Quad would serve as a significant counter to Chinese regional aggression.
These 10 points are the plan’s low-hanging fruit, and the federal government could adopt these policies tomorrow if it had the will. Heritage’s “Winning the New Cold War” aims to bolster that resolve. Time will tell if it succeeds, but the plan is an excellent start.
Mike Coté is a writer and podcaster focusing on history, Great Power rivalry, and geopolitics. He has also written for National Review and The National Interest, blogs at rationalpolicy.com, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.
The federal government peddled technology to Big Tech companies to assist them in censoring Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up to the 2020 election, according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. Specifically, the State Department marketed this censorship technology through its Global Engagement Center. In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime’s narrative. They also paid for government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.
I’ve been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” Samaruddin Stewart, then a senior adviser for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or “GEC,” wrote in an early-February 2020 introductory email to LinkedIn, allegedly requesting a meeting. According to the lawsuit, his email also suggested he would be reaching out to other social media companies interested in “countering disinformation.”
On March 9, 2020, Stewart again contacted LinkedIn, referencing an earlier verbal discussion and writing:
I’ll send information [to LinkedIn representatives] about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.
These two emails are explosive. Yet because they were revealed in two passing paragraphs of the 164-page complaint filed by Missouri, Louisiana, and a handful of other plaintiffs against the Biden administration, they — and their enormous significance — have been overlooked.
‘Cold-Calling’ Big Tech
The Stewart emails establish that in 2020, federal government actors contacted social media giants to promote GEC’s Disinfo Cloud. GEC represented that this government platform provided “companies, technology, and tools” to “assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.” Then it gave private tech companies access to Disinfo Cloud.
Almost identical to how GEC described Disinfo Cloud in congressional testimony, the State Department’s webpage marketed it as a “one-stop shop” to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.” “Fact checking” and “media authentication” are just a couple of the types of technologies available through the dashboard.
GEC didn’t just promote Disinfo Cloud or give Big Tech access to what GEC called“the U.S. government’s online repository.” Government employees at GEC also offered to help private companies identify tools to suit their specific needs. Just “write” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division about “what your office needs to counter propaganda and disinformation,” the State Department instructed on its webpage, and the government will “assist” in finding “a technological solution.”
‘Testbed’
Access to Disinfo Cloud, according to the State Department’s webpage, also provides “a gateway” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division’s “Testbed,” allowing users to review and test the technology against their unique needs.
While Stewart’s emails don’t expressly mention the “Testbed” feature, the State Department boasts that the “private sector” uses both Disinfo Cloud and Testbed. The GEC’s webpage also invites Disinfo Cloud users to ask “for assistance in identifying a technological solution or draft a test proposal for a tool.” If Disinfo Cloud users can’t find a tool that works for them, the GEC Technology Engagement team stresses it “is open to insights and is here to help implement ideas to move the counter propaganda and disinformation mission forward.”
Infomercials
Deposition testimony by FBI Agent Elvis Chan suggests GEC’s marketing of the censorship tools went beyond making cold calls (or emails) to LinkedIn and other Big Tech companies. It also seemingly went further than providing product advice and samples on Disinfo Cloud: The GEC’s Technology Engagement Division apparently hosted infomercials to help the private vendors market their censorship software.
Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, was “one of the primary people” communicating with social media companies about supposed “disinformation,” and thus is one of the named defendants in Missouri v. Biden. As part of that litigation, the plaintiffs deposed Chan. During questioning, Chan testified that ahead of the 2020 election, he periodically spoke with Stewart, who would meet with the social media companies separately from Chan.
According to Chan, Stewart met with policy individuals with the various social media companies about “different initiatives.” Those initiatives included various kinds of vendor-made software “that they would pilot to see if they could detect malign foreign influence on social media platforms.”
Chan further testified that Stewart and GEC “would provide webinars” from these vendors. As Chan explained, “[T]he State Department was just providing a venue where different vendors could show off their products.” The presentations were open to the general public, said Chan, but the GEC “would invite all sorts of audiences, to include researchers, employees from State Department counterparts, so typically Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The intended audience, according to Chan, was “State Department-equivalent personnel, social media companies, and researchers.”
Chan said he attended only a couple of the webinars because the companies took only a “surface-level” look at the content, and thus he didn’t consider the technology useful to the FBI. But apparently, it was fine for the State Department to market the same tools to social media companies.
From Chan’s deposition testimony, it appears Stewart, the GEC’s then-senior adviser, made the equivalent of sales calls and hosted infomercials, all for the purpose of pushing various censorship services to social media companies.
It is unclear whether these webinars were in addition to the GEC’s “Tech Demo Series” — at which private vendors showcased their knack for fighting so-called disinformation for “U.S. government counterparts and foreign partners” — or whether, after the GEC sent a full-time representative to Silicon Valley in December of 2019 (presumably Stewart), the Tech Demo Series was opened to the public. However, given that the official Disinfo Cloud Twitter account promoted the Tech Demo Series, it seems likely that GEC expanded its target audience for the series to include the private sector and other Disinfo Cloud users.
Either way, Chan’s deposition testimony reveals our government marketed censorship technology to social media companies through “webinars.” And while Chan claimed he didn’t think GEC endorsed the products, the government expressly represented the Disinfo Cloud technology as tools to “assist” with attacking so-called disinformation.
The Tools
So what exactly were those tools?
From open-source material, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify the entire dataset of tech companies featured on Disinfo Cloud or participating in the Tech Demo Series. That’s because Disinfo Cloud has “been retired as [a] GEC-sponsored effort,” according to the State Department. The DisinfoCloud.com webpage has also been shuttered.
But because GEC ran various “tech challenges,” giving winners State Department “sponsorship” on the government’s Disinfo Cloud Testbed — advertised as worth $25,000 — among other things, several censorship companies involved can be identified, including NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas.
NewsGuard’s censorship technology includes “its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes,” as I detailed in March. NewsGuard’s winning tech-challenge entry built upon those databases and used“AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.
The second winner, PeakMetrics, offered a dashboard for tracking mentions of a topic across multiple media channels with social listening technology. The third winner, Omelas, developed tools to visually map online information.
The government gave these winners the ability to pilot their technology on Disinfo Cloud’s Testbed. Then it promoted Disinfo Cloud to social media giants as offering “access to companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.”
So were NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas among the companies GEC marketed to Big Tech? Did they participate in the government-run Tech Demos and present infomercials to the private sector? Did GEC help these vendors test their products for private companies on the Testbed?
In Practice
Consider the implications, using NewsGuard to illustrate.
NewsGuard rates various media outlets on a 100-point scale and provides a red “unreliable” rating if its “experts” score the news source below 60. The company rates The Federalist “red” and claims it is one of the top-10 “most influential misinformers.” Conversely, some of the outlets that botched the biggest political stories of the century maintain a 100 percent reliability score.
The government awarded NewsGuard a $25,000 prize to develop new technology on Disinfo Cloud, using, in part, that ratings system as a backbone. NewsGuard would later receive an additional $750,000 from the government to advance the development of its censorship technology. PeakMetrics and Omelas also both scored additional government funding of $1.5 and $1 million respectively.
But think about the government’s other behind-the-scenes censorship entanglements. The government, via your tax dollars, funded both Disinfo Cloud, which provided the technology necessary to pilot the program, and the outside contractor, Park Advisors, that managed it.
The State Department’s GEC promoted the companies and technology featured on Disinfo Cloud, and a government liaison working for GEC personally contacted social media companies to encourage them to use the platform. The government also hosted Tech Demo Series for the vendors to market their products to the private sector.
Disinfo Cloud regularly promoted private censorship technology on its official Twitter account and retweeted NewsGuard’s announcement of its partnership with Mediabrands to “bring NewsGaurd’s rating work to TV news programming.
Then beyond promoting the censorship tools, government employees working with GEC helped social media and private-sector businesses identify, test, and tweak the most “appropriate” technology for their “needs.”
And what are those “needs?” Censoring the speech of you and your fellow Americans.
A Scandal Like No Other
This scandal far surpasses the one that formerly ensnared GEC, when it was revealed the State Department awarded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — another “ratings” company that blacklists conservative outlets — $100,000 as part of the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. GDI also reportedly received money from other government-funded organizations. Those taxpayer funds helped finance GDI’s blacklist of conservative media outlets, which advertisers relied upon to defund dissenters.
But what Stewart’s emails now reveal is that the government is not merely funding censorship research. It is acting as a sales rep to market censorship technology to private companies.
The State Department isn’t skirting the First Amendment. It is driving a stake through its heart.
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.
Republicans have an abortion problem, and there is only one Party leader who can fix it: Donald Trump.
Let me explain. Like the proverbial dog chasing the bus, the GOP spent years campaigning on the promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would repeal Roe v. Wade but when finally successful, had no idea how to navigate the resulting political landscape. Democrats have used the reversal of Roe and Republicans’ subsequent anti-abortion initiatives to paint the party as extreme, thereby winning over women and younger voters.
The overturning of Roe handed abortion policy back to the states, where it will stay for the foreseeable future. Our country is so divided on the issue that Congress is unlikely to pass a nationwide law any time soon.
Given that power, some red states like Texas have enacted draconian laws banning all or nearly all abortions, a position that is unpopular with the majority of Americans. Other states have had long-standing restrictions on the books that were not enforceable because of Roe; now, some of those are in play.
Wisconsin, for instance, has a statute from 1849 that banned most abortions. That law is under review by the state’s Supreme Court. Just recently, Badger State residents voted to fill a seat on that court; a Democrat who favors abortion rights won that race by a shockingly wide margin after the contest became the most expensive such match-up in Wisconsin’s history. Because of that win, liberals now hold a majority on the state court, for the first time in decades.
Remember that Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, and then lost it in 2020 to Joe Biden, both by narrow margins; it is truly a “swing state”. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans actually gained seats in Wisconsin’s state legislature. So, the recent loss of the court seat, driven by the dispute over abortion, should be a wake-up call to Republicans.
Red states, too, have delivered warning shots to Republicans. Last year in Kansas, voters soundly defeated a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would have banned abortions. Even in conservative Kansas, about 60% of voters shot down the measure. As in the Wisconsin senate race, turnout was extremely high.
Polling shows very clearly that Americans want abortion to be safe, legal and also to be restricted to the early months of pregnancy. Some 61% of Americans in a Pew survey last year said abortion should be legal in all or most cases – about the same number that defeated the Kansas resolution.
Polling also shows strong support (70%) for the kind of referendum offered voters in Kansas. There are 14 states currently that have a total or near-ban on abortions, including some swing states like Wisconsin and Georgia – states which could determine the outcome of future presidential elections. Other swing states, like Ohio and Arizona, have bans that are on hold pending court rulings.
How can Republicans be faithful to voters who firmly oppose abortion but also appeal to the majority, and win elections? By demanding that every state put abortion laws before voters, instead of allowing governors and state legislatures to dictate policy. In some states, that would likely result in a continuation of broad restrictions; in others, it would not. That’s called democracy, with all voters having their say. The GOP needs a leader to declare this the Party’s policy. The only person able and perhaps willing to do so is Donald Trump.
First, remember that abortion was not an issue central to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Indeed, he was barely familiar with party orthodoxy when he claimed early on that women who had abortions should be “punished,” a position he quickly reversed when admonished from the right and the left. Banning abortion ranks below China’s threat, a strong military and solid economic growth for the former president, and a lot of Republicans would agree with him.
Second, Donald Trump has been blamed for post-Roe election losses in the midterms and in special elections. He would relish, instead, pinning those losses on the GOP’s abortion policies.
Third, Trump can remind voters that the Republican Party is supposed to be the party of freedom and liberty. How can the GOP claim that mantle while denying half the country one of the most personal freedoms that exists – how to manage their own bodies and their families?
Fourth, Democrats have taken an extreme position on abortion by passing offensive laws in states they dominate. In New York, abortion is allowed up to and including at nine months, if “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.” The law does not specify what the health threat might be; depression might satisfy the “health care provider” who does not even have to be a doctor. It is time the GOP turned the “extremist” weapon on Democrats.
Fifth, Republicans need to broaden their appeal if they want to win elections. In the recent Chicago mayor’s run-off race, Paul Vallas, easily the more accomplished of the two competing Democrats, was defeated partly because his opponent ran ads featuring a 2009 clip in which Vallas describes himself as “more of a Republican than a Democrat.” Imagine: the Republican brand is so tarnished that in a troubled city bleeding residents, the “R” word elects a man with virtually zero credentials.
Any Republican candidate who comes out with a balanced abortion policy, even one that channels the majority of voters, will lose support among Evangelicals and the powerful pro-life movement. On the other hand, Trump is in an extremely strong position currently, notwithstanding his many legal issues, has been a champion of religious freedom and should be uniquely able to withstand the tempest. He can remind pro-lifers that he delivered a conservative Supreme Court, without which voters would not be able to choose. And, it is worth noting that not that long ago, the GOP, including then-Governor Ronald Reagan, were leaders in liberalizing abortion policy.
By siding with the American majority, Trump could do something powerful for the GOP: make it great again.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
The Biden administration involved itself in the raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home despite reports that its officials were “stunned” to find out about the news on social media, according to the group America First Legal, which obtained internal government documents related to the raid through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“The evidence further suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations, in a post on social media Tuesday. “This government, it seems, acknowledges no limits on its power to harass, intimidate, and silence its political opponents.”
Rubinstein’s comments come after a Freedom of Information Act request by America First Legal found the FBI initially obtained access to Trump records through a “special access request” from the Biden White House.
The new information confirms Fox News reporting from August, when NARA acting head Debra Wall wrote a letter to Trump’s attorney alluding to the administration’s involvement.
Records show that John Laster, “the Archives’ official responsible for administering all access requests for Presidential records,” was involved in the request despite the Archives’ previously claiming it had “not been involved in the DOJ investigation.”
“On October 25, 2022, Acting Archivist Wall wrote to then-Ranking Members James Comer and Jim Jordan, claiming ‘NARA received the 15 boxes from President Trump on January 18, 2022, and then discovered that they contained classified national security information. Shortly after the discovery, NARA consulted with its Office of Inspector General (OIG), which operates independently of NARA. As DOJ has disclosed publicly in court filings, NARA’s OIG subsequently referred the matter to DOJ on February 9, 2022,’” America First Legal wrote.
“If the OIG acted independently in making a referral to the FBI, then Mr. Laster would not have involved himself in the FBI’s review of the 15 boxes in his capacity as the Director of the White House Liaison Division ‘responsible for all access requests for Presidential records.’”
Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
According to America First Legal, the special access statute “authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House.”
“Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House,” the organization said.
The August letter from Wall to Trump attorney Evan Corcoran also seemingly hinted at President Biden’s involvement.
Local law enforcement officers are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Florida on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
“NARA informed the Department of Justice about that discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them,” Wall wrote. “The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege.”
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 Presiden
San Francisco State University endorsed the erasure of women this week when its top student affairs administrator released a statement reaffirming the transgender activists who attacked women’s rights speaker Riley Gaines.
Gaines, who rose to fame after speaking up about the unfairness of men masquerading as women to gain an advantage in women’s sports, was assaulted last week after she attempted to address a crowd at a Turning Point USA event about the necessity of female spaces, especially in athletic settings. The chaos ensued mere hours after White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre encouraged radical gender ideologues to “fight back” against people who called for sex-specific spaces.
Footage of the attack on SFSU’s campus shows the former NCAA swimmer being chased by a crowd yelling “trans rights are human rights” and calling the swimmer a “transphobic b-itch.”
Gaines reported that, during the chaos, she was assaulted by at least one man and trapped in a room for three hours. The mob also attempted to extort money from her in exchange for her freedom before she was finally able to escape. Gaines said neither campus police nor attending school administrators took steps to stop the violence.
“This is proof that women need sex-protected spaces,” Gaines tweeted.
Instead of punishing the hysterical students who “ambushed” Gaines, the school and alumni cheered on the angry mob.
Shortly after Gaines was attacked, SFSU’s Vice President for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management Jamillah Moore released an official statement encouraging the students who harassed the speaker.
“Today, San Francisco State finds itself again at the center of a national discussion regarding freedom of speech and expression. Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University,” she wrote.
Moore also claimed that the students that are seen on footage roughhousing Gaines chose to “protest peacefully.”
“Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments when we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully,” Moore said.
Gaines quickly condemned Moore’s statement and confirmed that she plans to sue the school for failing to protect her from violence.
“I’m sorry did this just say PEACEFUL….,” Gaines replied. “I was assaulted. I was extorted and held for ran[s]om. The protestors demanded I pay them if I wanted to make it home safely. I missed my flight home because I was barricaded in a classroom… We must have different definitions of peaceful.”
Just last month, an angry mob of Stanford law students shut down a talk led by Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan with profane insults and threats of violence and death. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez eventually apologized but the students and administrators who participated in the chaos were left largely unpunished.
Stanford Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, who confronted Duncan about the “harm” she claimed he caused to students, doubled down on their defiant challenge and refused to apologize even after she was put on administrative leave.
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.
The facade of “safety” around hormonal birth control continues to crumble: Researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit have recently shown that progestin-only hormonal contraceptives, long billed as the “safest” birth control option because of their lack of estrogen, definitively raises one’s risk of breast cancer, similarly to combined hormonal contraceptives (which contain both synthetic estrogen and progestin).
Furthermore, the Oxford researchers found that breast cancer risk, while it declines after discontinuation of hormonal birth control, still remains elevated for ever-users of hormonal birth control (when compared to never-users). Of course, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still won’t cop to increased risks for breast cancer for ever-users of birth control — just for current users — and they are also currently evaluating whether to make a progestin-only pill the first-ever over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, in another instance of “nothing to see here, folks,” headlines abounded with the results of the Oxford study for a few weeks, carefully emphasizing the “slight” or “small” increase in breast cancer risk. And the experts, of course, were quick to chime in with all the benefits of hormonal contraception, insisting women shouldn’t see this as a reason to go flushing their pills.
So listen, I talk to women about this every single day. You have to talk about risk vs benefit. It is clear that hormonal contraception lowers the risk of ovarian and uterine cancer, but it increases the risk of clotting. When you put that head to head, it’s about individualizing that risk-benefit and option-risk for the woman. If you talk to any OB/GYN, they will say, we have a line, ‘pregnancy is much higher risk than any associated risk with birth control pills or hormonal contraception.’ So you have to have that conversation based on you and your health-care provider.
While I agree that health-care decisions should be made between a woman and her doctor, is it really true, with everything we know about the risks and side effects of birth control (and we know an awful lot), that it’s really that much “safer” than a nine-month pregnancy? Women, after all, tend to be on birth control for years — perhaps even decades — at a time. And the oft-touted benefits of hormonal birth control reducing ovarian and uterine cancers? Well, Dr. Ashton might be surprised to learn that pregnancy has those, too.
It’s also worth mentioning that while ovarian and uterine cancers can undoubtedly be devastating diseases, the average woman’s baseline risk for breast cancer is far greater than her risk for ovarian or uterine cancer; in fact, breast cancer is now the world’s most commonly diagnosed cancer. In other words, elevating the average woman’s risk of breast cancer even a little bit should be a serious consideration for doctors and health-care institutions indeed. In fact, one might argue they have a moral imperative to help women lower their risks for breast cancer.
Unfortunately, despite increasing, high-quality evidence of the harms of birth control (of which breast cancer is only one among a lengthy list of risks), health-care organizations such as the FDA are loath to give women true informed consent about these drugs. In 2019, the Contraceptive Study Group (CSG) submitted a Citizen Petition to the FDA requesting they add a black box warning to hormonal contraceptives given the mounting evidence for breast cancer risks for ever-users of these drugs (evidence the Oxford study has yet again corroborated).
Yet in a partial response to the CSG’s petition, published a full three years later in 2022, the FDA refused to supply women with this warning. One wonders what leg they have to stand upon now, and if they’ll continue to ignore these significant risks to women — which can be entirely avoided through the use of highly effective, drug- and side-effect-free measures for family planning known as fertility awareness-based methods.
With the publication of the Oxford study, the FDA has once again proven itself at odds with the best scientific evidence on this matter, which even the National Cancer Institute acknowledges. Again, this is largely because of the “benefit” of preventing pregnancy, which evidently trumps all other considerations — even ones that could take the lives of women.
Grace Emily Stark is a freelance writer with published work in multiple outlets, and she is the Editor of Natural Womanhood. Grace is also a current Ramsey Institute Fellow at the Center for Bioethics & Culture, and a former Novak Alumni Fund Journalism fellowship recipient. Follow her writing at GraceEmilyStark.com.
In his 67-page straight-talking opinion, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
“Unborn humans.” “Eugenics.” “Head, hands, and legs, with defined fingers and toes.” “Shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts.”
Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s Friday decision freezing the FDA’s approval of the abortion-pill combination, mifepristone and misoprostol, included these phrases and more. And while the left is already attacking Kacsmaryk’s 67-page straight-talking opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA by framing it as filled with anti-abortionrhetoric, the Trump appointee stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
After a brief introduction in which Kacsmaryk highlighted the FDA’s two decades of stonewalling that delayed a legal challenge to the 2000 approval of the abortion drugs, the court opened with the basic facts. The plaintiffs — doctors and medical associations that provide health care to pregnant and post-abortive women and girls — sued the FDA, challenging several administrative actions related to the approval of the chemical abortion drugs.
‘Unborn Humans’
The court then explained the drugs and their functioning: “Mifepristone — also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex — is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, halts nutrition, and ultimately starves the unborn human until death.” But “because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion,” the court continued, “the FDA mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.”
Calling an unborn human an “unborn human” immediately triggered abortion activists, but as Kacsmaryk explained in a footnote, such terminology is scientifically correct, whereas the lawyers and courts “often use the word ‘fetus’ to inaccurately identify unborn humans in unscientific ways.”
“The word ‘fetus,’” Kacsmaryk explained, “refers to a specific gestational stage of development, as opposed to the zygote, blastocyst, or embryo stages.” And because the FDA’s approval of the abortion drugs applies at multiple “gestational stages,” the word “fetus” would be inaccurate.
It is understandable that abortion activists want to hide the humanity of unborn humans, but that doesn’t make the science less real: It just means girls and women who have bought the “clump of cells” narrative will suffer when faced with the truth, which chemical “at home abortions” force.
“The mother seeing the aborted human ‘appears to be a difficult aspect of the medical termination process which can be distressing, bring home the reality of the event and may influence later emotional adaptation,’” the court wrote, based on the record evidence. “For example, one woman was surprised and saddened to see that her aborted baby ‘had a head, hands, and legs’ with ‘[d]efined fingers and toes.’”
Another woman alleged that “she did not receive an ultrasound or any other physical examination before receiving chemical abortion drugs from Planned Parenthood.” According to the record, “The abortionist misdated the baby’s gestational age as six weeks, resulting in the at-home delivery of a ‘lifeless, fully formed baby in the toilet,’ later determined to be around 30-36 weeks old.”
Harm to Women
Beyond exposing the reality that abortion kills an unborn human, Kacsmaryk’s opinion also refuted the “popular belief and talking points” that using the abortion pill is “as easy as taking Advil.” Here, the federal judge detailed the factual evidence. Among other things, “bleeding from a chemical abortion, unlike surgical abortion, can last up to several weeks,” and by being done at home, “without physician oversight,” it can lead “to undetected ectopic pregnancies, failure of rH factor incompatibility detection, and misdiagnosis of gestational age — all leading to severe or even fatal consequences.”
The opinion also countered the claim that side effects are rare by highlighting evidence that “over sixty percent of women and girls’ emergency room visits after chemical abortions are miscoded as ‘miscarriages’ rather than adverse effects to mifepristone.”
The evidence also shows emotional and psychological injury, Kacsmaryk stressed, with 77 percent of women who underwent a chemical abortion reporting “a negative change” after the at-home abortion, and 38 percent of women reporting issues “with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion.”
While the abortion industry prefers to cite its own evidence, as Kacsmaryk noted, those studies are flawed both because of the miscoding of chemical abortions as miscarriages and because the FDA stopped requiring the reporting of non-fatal adverse reactions.
Eugenic Roots
The left also didn’t like Kacsmaryk exposing the eugenic beliefs of the Population Council, which had sought FDA approval for the abortion drugs. John D. Rockefeller founded the Population Council in 1952, “after he convened a conference with ‘population activists’ such as Planned Parenthood’s director and several well-known eugenicists,” the court wrote. Attendees of that conference discussed “the problem of ‘quality,’” and concluded that “[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.”
“[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.” …….. “Natural Selection”????? Can you say, “disciples of Margarete Sanger”?
Many Americans remain oblivious to the historical backdrop eugenics played to the abortion movement, and activist groups prefer they remain in the dark. The sunlight Kacsmaryk shined upon that truth infuriates them.
Political Pressure
Judge Kacsmaryk also exposed the political pressure placed on the FDA to approve the abortion drug — something Americans are likely to appreciate more today in the aftermath of the FDA’s hasty approval of the Covid mRNA shots.
In the case of the abortion pill, the FDA took the unprecedented step of arranging a meeting between the French pharmaceutical company that owned the patent rights and the eventual drug sponsor, the Population Council. “The purpose of the FDA-organized meeting was ‘to facilitate an agreement between those parties to work together to test [mifepristone] and file a new drug application.’”
Evidence further shows the Department of Health and Human Services “initiated” another meeting to determine how the Clinton administration “might facilitate successful completion of the negotiations” between the French firm and the Population Council to ensure the group secure patent rights and eventual FDA approval.” In fact, Clinton’s HHS secretary “believed American pressure on the French firm was necessary.”
Then after the Population Council submitted a new drug application, the FDA proposed detailed restrictions to address safety concerns, including that the drug be administered by doctors “trained and authorized by law” to perform surgical abortions; trained in administering mifepristone and treating adverse events; and able to provide treatment at a medical facility that had the equipment necessary to perform surgical abortions, resuscitation procedures, and blood transfusion, within one hour’s drive. The FDA’s restrictions were leaked to the press, prompting a political firestorm.
So Much for Safety
The FDA later abandoned the above safety mandates and approved the drug for use to kill unborn humans aged seven-weeks gestation or younger. The FDA further required three “in-person office visits: the first to administer mifepristone, the second to administer misoprostol, and the third to assess any complications and ensure there were no fetal remains in the womb.” All adverse events were also required to be reported.
In 2002, the FDA removed even more of the safety restrictions, increasing the maximum gestational age from seven-weeks gestation to 10-weeks gestation, reducing the number of office visits from three to one, increasing the drug dosage, allowing non-doctors to prescribe and administer chemical abortions, and eliminating the requirement for non-fatal adverse reactions to be reported. Then in 2019, the FDA approved a generic version of the abortion pills, and on April 12, 2021, the FDA announced it would allow abortion pills to be dispensed through the mail.
“Whether FDA abandoned its proposed restrictions because of political pressure or not,” the court wrote, “one thing is clear: the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or threatening adverse reactions.” But “due to FDA’s lax reporting requirements, the exact number is not ascertainable,” Kacsmaryk stressed.
Straight Facts
But it was not on politics that Kacsmaryk based his decision to freeze the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill. Rather, in his methodical opinion, the federal judge explained that the FDA lacked the authority to accelerate approval of the drug under what is called “Subpart H” of the FDA. That subpart only allows for accelerated approval of drugs that treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses” — something pregnancy is not.
Kacsmaryk also concluded the evidence the FDA supposedly relied upon to approve the abortion drugs failed to support the conclusion that they were “safe and effective under particular conditions of use.” And finally, Kacsmaryk held the FDA’s approval of mail distribution violated the 1873 Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to use the mail to deliver any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
The Biden administration has already filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in issuing his opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, Kacsmaryk entered a temporary stay, which he or the court of appeals will likely make permanent pending resolution of the case. Thus, abortion pills will remain available for now.
How the Fifth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court will rule remains to be seen, but what is clear now is the abortion-loving left is desperate to keep the truth about abortion from the public and is furious that Kacsmaryk dared to expose the reality: Abortion kills unborn humans.
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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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
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