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The 28-year-old transsexual shooter who shot up a Christian elementary school on Monday was ultimately put down by Nashville’s finest; however, that was not her first encounter with heroes that day.
A 9-year-old girl attempted to alert teachers and other children to the threat before being cut down in the Covenant School. She is now being hailed as a hero.
Evelyn Dieckhaus, described by her family as a “shining light,” desperately tried to pull the fire alarm as the shooter stalked the halls of the Christian school, reported the Daily Mail.
Clay Stauffer, senior minister of Woodmont Christian Church, which is next door to the school, told WTVF, “These are the types of situations in life where it does cause us to question and doubt our faith. But I also tell them in these situations, as horrible as they are, I believe God shows up in the community.”
Stauffer intimated that Dieckhaus made God’s presence known in her apparent love for her peers and corresponding effort to alert them to danger.
“Evelyn made an impact on this world, and she will continue to,” he said.
The minister noted that while the 9-year-old’s parents, Mike and Katie Dickhaus, are devastated, “They’re being surrounded by their family and friends.”
Dieckhaus’ grieving sister, a fifth-grader set to be baptized in a few weeks, said, “I don’t want to be an only child.”
“Their daughter Evelyn was a shining light and an amazing person. She was loved not only by her family, not just by her church. We’re surrounding them and picking them up — helping them move forward,” added Stauffer.
Dieckhaus and the two other 9-year-old victims were in the school’s chapel prior to the attack, learning about “life in Kenya and what it means to be a missionary.” Missionary Britney Grayson provided this instruction, having been invited to speak at chapel and visit with the students.
Grayson noted on Twitter that the victims had just learned the Swahili word “jambo” (i.e., “hello”) and “all the verses of Amazing Grace to sing for grandparents day next week.”
UPDATE- 3 children are confirmed dead. 3 children who learned the word "Jambo" this morning from us in chapel. 3 children who were learning all the verses of Amazing Grace to sing for grandparents day next week. 3 children who didn't have to die. Lord be with us. Lord, be with us
— Britney Grayson, MD, PhD (@britneygrayson) March 27, 2023
Grayson evidently paid no mind to leftist news-reader David Pakman’s denigration of prayer, imploring everyone to: “Please join me in praying for healing for these children. … Pray for all the little hearts that weren’t physically wounded but who will never be the same. Pray. Pray. PRAY.”
William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs were the two other children who sang “Amazing Grace” with the departed hero before being murdered.
Hallie Scruggs was the daughter of the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian, which shares a location with the school.
Pastor Chad Scruggs told ABC News in a statement, “Through tears we trust that she is in the arms of Jesus, who will raise her to life once again.”
William Kinney was described by a family friend, Rachael Freitas, as an “unfailingly kind” boy with an “unflappable spirit,” reported the Tennessean.
“He loved his sisters, adored his parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles and was always excited to host friends of every age. Sweet Will knew no strangers, and our hearts are broken for his family as they try to find their way forward,” said Freitas.
The transsexual shooter also claimed the lives of Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
Parents Mourn Nashville School Shooting Victims youtu.be
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Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
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The spokesperson for Democrat Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs appeared to call for gun violence against “transphobes” in a Twitter post just hours after Monday’s Nashville church school massacre.
Hobbs’ spokesperson Josselyn Berry late Monday posted an image on the social media platform from the 1980 movie “Gloria” depicting a woman holding a gun in each hand and pointing the firearms forward; the caption reads, “Us when we see transphobes,” the Arizona Republic reported.
Berry’s tweets are protected as of Wednesday morning, but screenshots of her tweet in question are circulating:
The Press Secretary for the illegitimate Arizona Governor posted a meme calling for violence against “transphobes”, which is just a blanket term used against conservatives
She tweeted this just a day after a trans terrorist killed Christians in school
The Nashville shooter — who was fatally shot by police — identified as transgender. A theory from the left is that the shooter may have acted out of anger against Christians and conservatives for stances against trans and LBGTQ lifestyles — as well as against recently enacted Tennessee laws banning drag shows outside age-restricted venues and banning puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and gender-related surgeries for children.
Along the same lines, a journalist who has contributed to NBC News as well as the New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post appeared to suggest in now-deleted tweet that conservative news outlet the Daily Wire — which is headquartered in Nashville — is to blame for the massacre.
Republicans and noteworthy conservatives have been fuming over Berry’s tweet.
The Arizona Republic said the Arizona Freedom Caucus called for Berry’s dismissal, saying that “calling for violence like this is un-American & never acceptable.”
The leader of the caucus, Republican state Sen. Jake Hoffman, said Berry was “threatening to shoot people Democrats disagree with less than 12 hours after the Nashville shooting,” the paper added.
Other reactions:
“Now surely this wouldn’t be a post from Katie [Hobbs’] press secretary would it?” TheBlaze’s Chad Prather wondered sarcastically. “She better not have a job tomorrow.”
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway said, “As Twitter bans anyone who does factual reporting about a planned Trans Day of Vengeance this week, note how it allows violent threats from Democrat Governor of Arizona Katie Hobbs’ press secretary against anyone who opposes radical gender ideology.”
Kari Lake, who lost to Hobbs for Arizona governor last fall, wrote that “if a conservative made light of a mass shooting & called for more violence, they’d be personally & professionally destroyed. But a member of Katie Hobbs’ staff did just that & the media is silent. We don’t partake in cancel culture — but the media’s bias has never been clearer.”
Berry did not respond to a phone call or text messages seeking comment Tuesday night from the Arizona Republic. The paper added that it was the same story with Murphy Hebert, Hobbs’ director of communications, and that an email request to the governor’s office elicited no response.
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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 Donald Trump.
Image source: YouTube video, House Judiciary GOP- Screenshot
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A prominent independent journalist who has worked doggedly to expose government overreach online received an unexpected visit from the Internal Revenue Service earlier this month. The IRS happened to darken Matt Taibbi’s doorstep the same day he testified before Congress about the weaponization of the federal government.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is demanding accountability as it pertains to this apparent statist “attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress.”
On March 9, Taibbi testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The purpose of the committee, according to its chairman, Rep. Jordan, is to investigate recent violations of Americans’ First Amendment rights by the federal government as well as the Biden administration’s apparent bias against conservatives.
Taibbi told the committee that whereas the “original promise of the internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally … what we found is in the [Twitter] files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
TheBlaze previously reported that Democrats on the subcommittee were highly adversarial with Taibbi present. In addition to belittling Taibbi and intimating that he was involved in sexcapades with his peers, House Democrats, including Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), pressured the journalist to reveal his sources.
While Democrats impotently attacked Taibbi during the hearing, other elements of the political establishment reportedly prepared to make their power known. According to Jordan, an IRS agent turned up at Taibbi’s New Jersey home on the day of the hearing, “unannounced and unprompted.” The agent reportedly left a note instructing Taibbi to call the IRS days later. When Taibbi spoke to the agent, he was told “that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had been rejected owing to concerns over identity theft.”
Taibbi reportedly provided the committee with evidence that his 2018 return had been electronically accepted and that there had previously been no word of trouble about his tax filings.
“When did the IRS start to dispatch agents for surprise house calls? Typically when the IRS challenges some part of a tax return, it sends a dunning letter. Or it might seek more information from the taxpayer or tax preparer. If the IRS wants to audit a return, it schedules a meeting at the agent’s office. It doesn’t drop by unannounced,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
“The curious timing of this visit, on the heels of the FTC demand that Twitter turn over names of journalists, raises questions about potential intimidation,” the editorial board added.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded, noting, “That’s very odd.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) reckoned it was more than odd, tweeting, “This absolutely stinks to high heaven. The IRS has a troubling history of targeting the political enemies of Democrats. The IRS should NEVER be in the business of harassing the American people.”
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, responded, “Gangster government.”
Rep. Jim Jordan penned a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel Monday demanding answers about what he indicated “could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress.”
Jordan noted that this interpretation may be apt in light of the “IRS’s history as a tool of government abuse” — citing its hounding of conservatives during the Obama administration” — and the “hostile reaction to Mr. Taibbi’s reporting among left-wing activists.”
The subcommittee chairman requested that Yellen and Werfel provide all IRS, Treasury, or executive branch documents and communications pertaining to the IRS’ field visit to Taibbi’s residence as well as to the journalist himself by April 10.
Concerning Jordan’s push for accountability concerning these “incredible” circumstances, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, “Mr. Jordan is right to want to see documents and communications relating to the Taibbi visit. The fear of many Americans is that flush with its new $80 billion in funding from Congress, the IRS will unleash its fearsome power against political opponents. Mr. Taibbi deserves to know why the agency decided to pursue him with a very strange house call.”
Taibbi tweeted on Monday, “For those asking, I don’t want to comment on the IRS issue pending an answer to chairman @Jim_Jordan’s letter. I’m not worried for myself, but I did feel the Committee should be aware of the situation.”
Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Hearing on the Twitter Files youtu.be
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House Republicans held a hearing on Tuesday, highlighting the failures of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, election officials in managing the locality’s 2022 election.
Republicans on the Committee on House Administration held a hearing Tuesday highlighting the failures by Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, election officials in managing the locality’s 2022 election.
“For years, several of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have claimed that states like Florida and Georgia — that have implemented voter integrity laws — are suppressing voters. … However, they have never produced a single voter who wanted to vote and was unable to,” said Chair and GOP Rep. Bryan Steil. “Contrast that with today, as we hold a hearing with evidence that voters who wanted to legally vote were turned away from the polls.”
On the morning of Election Day, numerous precincts throughout Luzerne County reported ballot paper shortages, leading to long wait lines and voters being turned away by election workers. In response, a local judge issued an order allowing polling places to stay open an additional two hours, or until 10 p.m. While Luzerne’s elections board originally declined to certify the election results (2-2-1), the board ultimately moved forward with certification following legal threats from left-wing law firms. Democrats, who often decry GOP-backed election integrity initiatives such as voter ID as “voter suppression,” have largely remained silent on the disenfranchisement of Luzerne voters.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Jim Bognet, the 2022 Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district — of which Luzerne is a part — referred to the Nov. 8 election in Luzerne as a “disaster” and criticized county election officials for their mismanagement of the contest and its aftermath.
“Luzerne County had to walk into court and admit that many polling places were effectively closed and had no paper to record votes on. In Luzerne County, the polls were closed on election day, disenfranchising voters,” Bognet said. “Voters across Luzerne County have called me and expressed their outrage that there has been no accountability or responsibility taken 4.5 months after the election, and officials still will not answer questions.”
Shortly after the election, Luzerne’s board of elections and registration asked the county district attorney to investigate the matter. Three Luzerne election officials declined the House committee’s invitation to testify on Tuesday after the county law office recommended they not attend due to the ongoing investigation.
In his remarks, Bognet accused Luzerne officials of using the investigation as a “shield” to avoid answering questions from constituents.
“My understanding is that the district attorney is doing a criminal investigation. Who knows if criminal activity occurred, he’ll investigate that. But what about gross incompetence? What about forgetting to order ballot paper?” he said.
During his remarks, Luzerne citizen Benjamin Herring echoed similar criticisms of county officials, noting “a complete lack of respect and understanding to what being a public servant is.”
“When does accountability and transparency become more than just a punch line or calculated posturing?” Herring asked. “I hold hope that the Luzerne County District Attorney will get to the bottom of this and present all of what is discovered to the citizens of Luzerne County. Anything less will be shameful, unacceptable, and would require more action on our part to hold the line on accountability.”
Predictably, Democrats on the committee used the hearing to play political games and advance trite talking points. During her allotted time, Alabama Democrat Rep. Terri Sewell argued that the federal government should provide more funding to states for elections. In her comments, she called on her colleagues to “look at the president’s budget,” specifically pointing to $5 billion allocated for the Election Assistance Commission “to provide grants” for state election administration.”
During the 2020 election, left-wing groups like the Center for Tech and Civic Life received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These “Zuckbucks” were poured into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsecured election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
While acknowledging the disaster in Luzerne, ranking member and New York Democrat Rep. Joe Morelle also decided to inject partisan politics into the hearing. After repeatedly questioning the need for the hearing, Morelle attempted to rehash the 2020 election by asking Bognet whether he believes Joe Biden won the contest.
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
It’s no secret many on the left love to politicize tragedies, but the reaction from some to Monday’s deadly shooting at a Christian school in Nashville has reached a whole new level of malevolent. Local authorities have identified the shooter as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who pretended to be male and had reportedly attended the school years prior. After entering the Covenant School shortly after 10 a.m., the shooter killed six people before being gunned down and killed by police. Among the victims are three 9-year-old children and three school staff members.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake characterized the shooting as a “targeted attack” and said authorities discovered “a manifesto” and detailed maps of the school showing points of entry. Drake also confirmed “there is some theory” to the idea that Hale’s transgender identity contributed to her decision to target the school but that authorities are still investigating the motive. Police said Hale was considering “another location” to target, but after “a threat assessment by the suspect [and] too much security, [she] decided not to.”
Immediately following the attack, leftists began using the horrific tragedy as an opportunity to promote their radical agenda and spew insensitive remarks.
Joe Biden
During moments of crisis, Americans should be able to count on their president to put aside politics and bring the country together. But not when that president is Joe Biden. After talking about how much he loves chocolate chip ice cream on Monday, Biden used the Nashville shooting to push for more gun control.
“The shooter … reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol. … So, I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban,” Biden said.
Biden on Nashville shooting: "It's heartbreaking, a family's worst nightmare…we have to do more to stop gun violence…I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban."pic.twitter.com/10sArjE8mC
During her remarks in Monday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not only used the shooting to call for increased gun control, but appeared to blame the tragedy on Republicans.
“How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault-weapons ban?” she asked.
Jean-Pierre weighs in on school shooting in Nashville:
"How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?pic.twitter.com/bQp6S3Q4nu
ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran wasted no time in seemingly tying the shooting to Tennessee Republicans, who recently passed legislation protecting minors from experimental transgender surgeries, wrong-sex hormones, and drag shows. After providing viewers with details on the shooting, Moran immediately segued into discussing the legislation Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee approved earlier this month.
IT BEGINS: ABC's Terry Moran ties the Nashville school shooting to Tennessee's recently-passed legislation banning the hormonization and mutilation of minors. The shooter was 28. pic.twitter.com/MfKdOpQZIf
Washington Post contributor and former New York Times columnist Mike Wise went out of his way to thank a Twitter user, who referred to Tennessee as “an intolerant state that brainwashes children through religious indoctrination.”
“This is as deep and real as it gets. Thank you,” Wise wrote.
A Washington Post contributor just thanked someone who posted that the Christian school in Nashville that was shot up today was a religious indoctrination center pic.twitter.com/U6hW9AP6C4
The Virginia Democrat blasted Republicans with an unserious and bad-faith attack, saying the GOP thinks drag shows pose a greater physical danger to children than guns do.
Benjamin Ryan
In a now-deleted tweet, independent reporter and NBC News contributor Benjamin Ryan attempted to correlate the shooting with the fact that The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, is based in Nashville.
“Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro, and @MichaelJKnowles,” Ryan wrote.
Anna Skinner
Newsweek Senior Writer Anna Skinner spent her Monday afternoon writing an article titled, “Tennessee Republicans’ Ban on Drag Shows Mocked After Mass Shooting,” in which she spun the news to be about bashing Tennessee Republicans and lamented that so-called “assault weapons” are still legal in the state.
“Tennessee Republican legislators are getting slammed after at least three children and three adults were killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville private school on Monday,” Skinner wrote. “Twitter users assailed state GOP officials in the wake of the bloodshed.”
Kyle Griffin
MSNBC Executive Producer Kyle Griffin published a tweet evoking similar absurdity.
Hayes Brown
MSNBC Opinion Writer Hayes Brown took a page from Griffin’s playbook and politicize the tragedy. In his column, Hayes bizarrely argued that “much of [America’s] gun policy is presaged on the idea that guns are cool,” and “[t]hat was the unspoken understanding behind the rapid spread of the AR-15.”
Republicans “think that their toys, their totems of masculinity, their props for playing the hero, are more important than the lives lost,” he wrote.
While now titled, “The gap between GOP gun rights fantasy and Nashville’s reality,” the article originally displayed the headline, “6 are dead in Nashville. Let’s revisit how much the Tennessee GOP loves guns.”
— James Lindsay, ultra-low social credit (@ConceptualJames) March 27, 2023
Josephine Harvey
In a so-called “news” article titled, “Gun-Loving GOP Congressman From Nashville Torched For Response To School Shooting,” Huffington Post Senior Reporter Josephine Harvey attempted to create a controversy surrounding GOP Rep. Andy Ogles — who represents the district that includes the Covenant School — by bringing up a 2021 Christmas photo of Ogles’ family holding firearms.
In her article, Harvey claimed the picture is a “gun-glorifying Christmas photo” and went on to cite tweets from leftists attacking Ogles for posting it on Facebook well over a year ago.
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
It’s difficult to fathom that several families started their day with one less precious child around the breakfast table this morning. It’s also hard to fathom responding to that reality — caused by a transgender mass shooter who left three 9-year-olds and several adults dead in a “targeted attack” at a Christian elementary school — by confessing you misgendered the murderer and blasting your political opponents over the same tired gun-control talking points.
But behind all the partisan smoke and mirrors of the Nashville story is an unmistakable and unavoidable reality: Our modern mental health crisis is out of control.
You don’t even have to dig into the glaring transgender element of the case to acknowledge this fact. No mentally healthy person blasts their way into a building of defenseless children to murder them in cold blood, much less devises a detailed plan literally mapping out how to make it happen. Transgender perpetrator or not, this sick pattern has repeated itself with unsettling frequency.
And though President Joe Biden, his press secretary, and other politicians disgustingly spun the attack to blame so-called “assault weapons” and imply conservatives are complicit in mass murder, the simple reality is that over the past handful of decades, firearms have changed very little. Meanwhile, mental illness has proliferated and our culture’s conception of it dangerously evolved.
That’s why the transgender identity of the shooter can’t be fully ignored — not for those who truly care to understand the gnarly roots of this violence. Despite the protestations of LGBT apologists, gender dysphoria and trans-related narcissism are inextricable from America’s broader mental health emergency.
A Celebration of Sickness
The psychological pendulum has swung woefully far: Illness that was once stigmatized, often to the unhelpful point of suppressing it instead of encouraging the sufferers to seek help, is now celebrated and socially encouraged. If it isn’t teachers brainwashing impressionable kids with sexual confusion and instructing them to keep it secret from their parents, it’s parents catechizing their own children in fallacies. Spend just a fewminutesonTikTok, and you’ll get a glimpse of the affected masses — self-loathing, split personalities, nonsensical pronouns and sexual identities, desperate androgyny, narcissism, bipolar outbursts, and more.
Examples of encouraged mental illness abound — even medical doctors fuel delusion by pretending sex is “assigned” and asking for patients’ preferred pronouns — but here’s one directly in response to the shooting. A group called the Trans Resistance Network made the shooter out to be a victim, blaming the “avalanche” of legislation seeking to protect minors from chemical and surgical castration and accusing conservatives of “nothing less than the genocidal eradication of trans people from society.” Many trans-identifying people suffer from “anxiety, depression, [and] thoughts of suicide,” the group correctly noted, but then associated these struggles not with broader mental unhealth but with “lack of acceptance” of gender dysphoria from “religious institutions.”
Note the group’s promotion of mental instability:
It is a testament to the inner strength and beauty of transgender people, that despite the … constant anti-trans bigotry and violence, so many of us continue to persevere, survive, and even thrive. We will not be eradicated or erased.
The same can’t be said for the innocent lives that were snuffed out in an instant in the Nashville shooting. Where derangement is considered “inner strength and beauty,” mental sickness thrives, and now children, not angry activists, are the ones who have been erased.
At least in part. There’s more to the story for these Christian families, who can cling to the assurance that for a follower of Jesus to be absent from his body is to be present with the Lord. This violent and sin-marred world is not our home, and it’s the closest to hell Christians will ever get. No religious hatred, mental affliction, or targeted attack can eradicate that sure hope.
A Call to Action
Those truths aren’t just a comfort for the broken-hearted, however. They’re a call to action for redeemed sinners. With a focus on eternity, we’re still sojourners here, surrounded by tormented souls with not only deep spiritual needs but physical and mental ones. And so we must fight.
We must fight against the spiritual forces that discourage us and tempt us to doubt and deny truth, and against agents of the devil who seduce our children with sexual fantasies. We must fight for the beauty and sacredness of human life. For the mental and physical health of those within our care. And for the glorious truth of the gospel and the immutable nature of the sexes that leads to human flourishing.
This fight requires compassion. But it also requires that we don’t forfeit the definition of that word to medical professionals who profit from carving up children, or to Marxist ideologues, or to a bad-faith press. Instead, follow the only perfect example: When Jesus saw the “helpless” crowds, “like sheep without a shepherd,” He was “movedwith compassion” toward them. He engaged. He healed.
May He be the source of our compassion as we engage our modern mental affliction, and may He provide the healing we desperately need.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
After a shooter killed three children and three staff members at a private Christian grade school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, some journalists, columnists, entertainers and activists turned their ire onto Christians and conservatives for banning drag shows for kids.
Left-wing sports writer Mike Wise seemed to agree with a tweet that sympathized with the transgender shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, whom police say attended the school as a child, for being a victim of “intolerant … brainwashing” through “religious indoctrination.”
Hale was gunned down by police during the shooting rampage at the Covenant School.
“I don’t condone Audrey Hale’s actions, though I understand their outrage against an intolerant state that brainwashes children through religious indoctrination. The reality is this human still identified as that child attending that school and carried that pain into adulthood,” a Twitter user named Kat Amarco wrote.
“This is as deep and real as it gets. Thank you,” Wise wrote in response.
Sports columnist Mike Wise tweet on Nashville shooting (Twitter / Screenshot)
A police officer walks by an entrance to the Covenant School after a shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, March 27, 2023. (AP Photo / John Amis)
Others attacked Covenant School and those praying for victims of the tragedy.
Progressive talk show host David Pakman mocked the Christian school for not “praying enough.”
“Very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school, given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren’t praying enough, or correctly, despite being a Christian school?” he asked in a since-deleted tweet.
Progressive talk show host David Pakman tweeted about the Nashville shooting.
Gun control activist Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action also seemed to blame the victims as well in her tweet.
“If prayers alone worked there wouldn’t have been a mass shooting at a school where they pray. DO YOUR F—ING JOB,” she tweeted.
Television show writer Lee Aronsohn scoffed at prayer while ridiculing the state’s move against drag shows.
“Dead, Maimed Children = Thoughts & Prayers™ Drag Queen Story Hour = Impassioned Condemnation and Priority Legislation The thing is, if we gave an assault rifle to every drag queen the GOP would make Story Hour a national holiday,” he tweeted.
ABC News journalist Terry Moran was accused of blaming Christians and Republicans after he highlighted how Tennessee “banned transgender medical care for minors as well as a law that prohibited adult entertainment including male and female impersonators after a series of drag show controversies in that state” during his report on the school shooting.
With a rhetorical wink and nudge, ABC senior national correspondent Terry Moran blames Tennessee Republicans and Christians for six of their own being murdered today by a transgender former student pic.twitter.com/od1qEP7gAj
Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake identified the two officers who fatally shot Audrey Hale at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023. (Metro Nashville Police Department)
A rifle allegedly used by Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale. (Nashville Police Department)
Civil rights attorney and Harvard law clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo mocked, “Thank god Tennessee protected the children from the so-called horrors of drag and gender affirming care so they can be shot up at school by an AR-15 instead.”
YouTube talk show host Brian Tyler Cohen agreed, writing, “In light of three children getting killed in a school shooting in Nashville, remember that Tennessee Republicans have squandered their time in office banning drag shows under the pretense of keeping kids safe.”
Thank god Tennessee protected the children from the so-called horrors of drag and gender affirming care so they can be shot up at school by an AR-15 instead. https://t.co/AH0Zh8ghgQ
— Alejandra Caraballo is on Threads/Bluesky (@Esqueer_) March 27, 2023
Kristine Parks is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Read more.
Karine Jean-Pierre calls out “Republicans in Congress” following the deadly mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., slammed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for placing blame on Republican lawmakers for the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, when a 28-year-old transgender former student allegedly gunned down three 9-year-olds and three adults.
“It doesn’t get much lower than blaming Republicans in Congress for a transgender killer who targeted a Christian school. Shameful,” Cotton wrote Tuesday in response to an appearance by Jean-Pierre on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Jean-Pierre said, “What I will say to Republicans in Congress is: ‘What are you going to say to these parents? What are you going to say to these family members?’ … We cannot sit around to allow this anymore.”
It doesn't get much lower than blaming Republicans in Congress for a transgender killer who targeted a Christian school.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
“It’s enough. Enough. Enough,” she said. “This president has taken more executive actions on gun violence safety than any president before him, and he’s done that in two years.”
“But guess what? As we’re seeing, we need to do more,” she continued. “And I’ve heard this theme throughout the show this morning, which is courage. We need Republicans in Congress to show some courage. This is what they owe these parents. This is what they owe these family members who are losing their loved ones. They need to show courage.”
“We need gun safety laws, comprehensive gun safety laws. We need to ban assault rifles. Those weapons of war do not belong in our streets. They do not belong in schools,” she added.
A mourner visits a makeshift memorial Tuesday outside the Covenant School for the six victims who were killed in a mass shooting at the school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday. (KR / Mega for Fox News Digital)
Bodycam footage shows Nashville Police Department officers responding to the Covenant School in Nashville after 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire. (Metropolitan Nashville Police Department)
How about we begin holding schools criminally responsible for NOT securing their schools when they’ve had all the opportunity to use multiple measurers to protect the children.
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 Donald Trump.
If Americans are concerned about our enemies getting bolder in their bid to disrupt the U.S.-led world order, they should thank President Joe Biden. Last week, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the meeting, the leaders outlined plans to enhance bilateral ties on issues such as trade, energy, and military cooperation. Xi and Putin furthermore agreed to support one another’s “fundamental interests,” specifically on matters concerning “sovereignty, territorial integrity, security and development.”
Most notable in the joint statement released by Beijing and Moscow, however, is the expressed goal of creating a “multipolar world order.” “The Parties confirm a willingness to … oppose all forms [of] hegemony, unilateralism and power politics, against cold war thinking, bloc confrontation and the creation of narrow formats against certain countries,” a joint statement released after the meeting reads.
The move signifies a stark challenge to the U.S., which, since the end of the Cold War, has been the world’s sole superpower. Under this unipolar system, the U.S. has utilized its economic, military, and cultural power to fashion a global community centered around Western values.
The three-day meeting between Xi and Putin comes amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last month, Beijing made headlines after calling for a cease-fire between the two nations. As part of its 12-point peace plan, China has called for all parties involved to abandon “the Cold War mentality” and “stopping unilateral sanctions.” As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials “routinely” use such language “to criticize the U.S. and other Western powers for their response to Russia’s invasion — including the supply of arms to Ukraine and the use of wide-ranging economic tools to pressure Moscow.”
But it’s not just eastern Europe where the Chinese government is looking to play dealmaker. Two weeks ago, Beijing brokered a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two Middle Eastern nations with a historically antagonistic relationship. According to a separate Journal report, Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to “re-establish diplomatic relations” after seven years of estrangement, which includes commitments to “reopen their embassies and missions on each other’s soil within two months.” The deal comes amid a breakdown in U.S.-Saudi relations — for which Biden bears the blame.
Beijing’s growing global influence is also apparent in Latin America. On Sunday, Honduras — a long-time ally of Taiwan — switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. As a prerequisite for establishing ties with its government, China has mandated nations to sever formal ties with Taiwan. Such a requirement is part of the CCP’s strategy to politically isolate Taiwan on the world stage.
Biden Cripples America
Red China’s bid to establish itself as a global power isn’t surprising. Since Xi’s ascension to party leader in 2012, he has sought to further China’s economic and military prowess as a means of expanding its influence throughout the world.
Biden’s presidency has ushered in an era of American weakness Beijing seeks to exploit. His administration threw the U.S.’ longstanding record as a buffer against the CCP’s global ambitions into the garbage. Rather than pursue policies strengthening America’s economic security and military readiness, Biden and his administration have implemented measures achieving the exact opposite.
On the economic front, Biden’s monetary policy — which includes spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on useless Democrat pet projects — resulted in decades-high inflation, causing everyday Americans to struggle to afford basic necessities such as gas and groceries. Rather than curb federal spending or increase domestic energy production, the Biden administration spends its time championing expensive electric vehicles made with Chinese batteries.
The situation isn’t any better on the national security front, either. Up until January, the administration depleted U.S. military ranks by removing servicemembers who didn’t receive the experimental Covid jab. Despite the shot’s inability to stop viral transmission and its significant risks, the Defense Department denied the vast majority of religious and medical exemptions filed by un-jabbed soldiers. Combined with forcing servicemembers to undergo racist DEI training, it’s no surprise the military is facing major recruiting problems.
Biden’s open border policies are also exacerbating national security concerns at the U.S.-Mexico border, where Border Patrol officials are facing unprecedented levels of illegal immigration. From Jan. 2021 to Oct. 2022, an estimated 5.5 million illegal aliens were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. These figures don’t even include the millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture.
Don’t worry, though. When it comes to foreign policy, Biden’s team of “experts” surely has “confront the growing threat of the CCP” at the top of their to-do list. Right?
If the U.S. had a mentally-sound president who prioritized the success of his country, it’s not crazy to imagine that the CCP would be more hesitant in pursuing its global ambitions. Under Biden’s empty-suit presidency, however, Xi smells opportunity.
With Biden crippling the U.S.’ economic and military readiness from within, China is able to methodically expand its influence throughout the world nearly unchallenged. Whether it’s securing peace agreements between rivaling powers or fostering ties with strategically important countries, the CCP isn’t slowing down in its aim to usher in a world order devoid of American hegemony.
If Biden and co. had any interest in stymying Red China’s growing influence and maintaining U.S. global dominance, they’d reverse course and implement policies that further American success. Doing so would greatly benefit the American people.
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 culture of free speech that for so long characterized American academia is dead. Increasingly, struggle sessions and violent eruptions are how the nation’s best and brightest choose to handle the ideas, individuals, and situations that make them uncomfortable.
Earlier this month, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan was invited by the Stanford Federalist Society to their law school to give a talk titled “Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” What ensued is what has become the norm. A coalition of the dysgenic and well-dressed filled a lecture hall to shout down and demean a federal judge while a school diversity administrator chastised him with prepared remarks.
Disagreement is OK and clearly would have been welcomed by Duncan, but when students feel emboldened to tell a federal judge, “We hope your daughters get raped,” as one individual allegedly did, a course correction is desperately needed.
“This is a talk about another talk,” Duncan quipped to inform those in the audience who were unaware that he would be, in part, discussing the incident at Stanford.
In a general defense of student protests, Duncan stated, “It’s a great country where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. … The students at Stanford and other elite law schools swim in an ocean of free speech. … Has any group of people ever been so privileged?”
Continuing, the judge referenced a memo published on March 22 by the dean of Stanford Law, Jenny Martinez, in which she condemned the disruptions and “threatening messages directed at members of [the Stanford Law] community” and pledged to adopt stricter policies regarding event disruption.
Martinez’s memo specifically contrasts student protests with malicious disruptions, noting that universities, as institutions, have unique obligations to curtail the latter in the pursuit of academic freedom through the enforcement of conduct codes and administrative policies. And as Duncan noted, a rigid commitment to the cause of academic freedom is absolutely vital to both the preservation of the university system and American society.
The universities that, at one point in time, were renowned for their unyielding commitment to free speech and the relentless pursuit of excellence in all things, to this day — despite the diminishing quality of graduates — still churn out leaders in every single sector.
Noting the undeniable trend of woke radicalization among young people in elite universities and the threat it poses to the maintenance of civil order and liberal democracy, Duncan asked, “What would happen if the cast of mind in that Stanford classroom becomes the norm in legislatures, in courts, in universities, in boardrooms, in business, in churches?”
“We must resist this at all costs,” Duncan continued. “Otherwise, we will cease to have [the] rule of law.”
Toward the end of her memo, Martinez also ruled out disciplining the individuals who disrupted Duncan’s lecture at Stanford Law, as it would be onerous to discern which students “crossed the line into disruptive heckling while others engaged in constitutionally protected non-disruptive protest” and that university administrators sent “conflicting signals about whether what was happening was acceptable or not.”
Instead, the offending students — along with the rest of the law school’s student body — will be required to attend a “mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.”
In the final moments of his speech at Notre Dame, Duncan mentioned he was “cautiously encouraged” by this measure as it indicated Stanford Law’s leadership was in some form committed to fighting for the foundational principles of American academia. He also noted that the point of the struggle session wasn’t purely to intimidate or dissuade him. After all, he’s a federal judge — he has life tenure; his future is secure.
The point of heckling Duncan, denying him a chance to make his case, and even wishing rape upon his children was to make an example out of him and to intimidate the students who invited him to speak. The disruptors want to destroy what is left of American civil society and replace it with an even more omnipresent woke authoritarianism, further preventing the dissemination of dissent. In order to accomplish this, they need future generations of leaders — their classmates — to be afraid, so they jeer and they threaten.
This ethos, one that is undeniably a well-established, if not the dominant, worldview on American campuses, cannot be remedied through scolding. Half-day sessions “on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession” might knock some sense into a couple of dozen Stanford Law students, but what about every other campus in the U.S.?
Days after the incident at Stanford Law, militant Antifa groups descended upon the University of California, Davis, in an attempt to prevent Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, from speaking on campus. Prior to the event, Gary May, the chancellor of UC Davis, circulated a video claiming Kirk “advocated for violence against transgender individuals.” Ultimately, the militants were unsuccessful in their attempts, but unlike at Stanford, the disruptors attempted violence and destroyed public property in the pursuit of denying an individual’s right to free speech.
NEW VIDEO: Violent leftwing agitators just smashed through windows outside of the event venue here at UC Davis. Reports are that some of this group made their way into the building before police successfully removed them. Pray for peace and safety for all involved. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/IbZd2v9pRn
How much longer can we continue to delude ourselves about free speech? There are, to be sure, legal protections for speech, but the leftists who control the institutions where these protections are most needed (academia, Big Tech, et al.) actively eschew and chip away at them in collaboration with the federal government.
A more muscular approach to protect the speech of Americans is needed.
In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring American universities “to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate [ ] through compliance with the First Amendment” in order to access specific federal funds.
But even this, as we can see, didn’t — rather, it couldn’t — address the underlying ideological issues at play.
Sure, threatening to cut off federal grants might encourage university administrators to be more vigilant in their defense of (or less hostile in their attacks on) free speech. But, at the end of the day, the left controls these institutions and interprets “free speech” in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the American founding and the First Amendment; speech must be contained within their preferred paradigm, or else it and anything descending from it is an affront to their very existence and must be eradicated.
Back at Stanford Law, Tirien Steinbach, the diversity administrator who chastised Duncan, has been put on leave, and per Martinez’s memo, an explicit role of other Stanford Law administrators moving forward “will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.”
So perhaps Duncan is right to be somewhat optimistic.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
A “Mornings with Maria” panel says the American public should be “rightly concerned” with the Biden family’s financial relations with China. As more confirmations come forth regarding the Biden family’s business dealings in China, Americans are calling on President Joe Biden to address the “significant and important” financial connection.
“When you see this kind of a connection between a sitting president, his son and the Chinese government, when people just don’t trust this and know that it’s one of the biggest threats facing us right now, that’s a really big issue that needs to be addressed,” Maslansky + Partners President Lee Carter said on “Mornings with Maria” on Monday.
Her comments come on the heels of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., revealing Sunday to host Maria Bartiromo that Chinese-American-owned Cathay Bank disclosed Biden family bank records that match U.S. regulator records.
“A bank from China, let’s face it, the Communist Party controls those types of institutions; they willingly gave us the documents that backed up the Treasury records,” Johnson said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Sen.-elect Joe Biden and wife Neilia cut his 30th birthday cake at a party in Wilmington, Delaware, on Nov. 20, 1972. His son, Hunter, waits for the first piece. | Getty Images
While Cathay Bank was founded in the U.S. in 1962 and is currently headquartered in Chinatown, Los Angeles, they also house representative offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei, according to its website. It also claims to be America’s oldest operating bank founded by Chinese Americans.
Despite Biden denying in recent weeks that his son, Hunter Biden, brother Jim, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his son, Beau, received split payments of $1 million from Hunter’s business associate, Rob Walker, Johnson claimed the new Cathay Bank records solidify the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the family’s international business ventures.
“Is that the Chinese Communist Party, is that a shot across President Biden’s bow, saying, ‘Listen, this is some of the information we have. If you don’t toe the line, if you don’t do things that displease us, we’re going to even provide … more information,'” Johnson said. “So, we obviously have a multiple-tier system of justice.”
“This isn’t just a Chinese bank, this is an American bank that was founded by Chinese Americans,” Carter said. “After everything that we’ve been through with China, at this moment, only 15% of Americans trust China … the American people are rightly concerned. They deserve to have answers. And I think at a minimum, the president needs to make a statement and address people’s concerns because they’re valid.”
Financial services industry veteran Michael Lee also joined the conversation Monday, pointing out the coincidence of U.S. banks’ reluctance to provide Congress with information now that a Democrat holds office.
After further confirmation of the Biden family’s business dealings in China, Maslansky + Partners President Lee Carter called on President Biden to address possible collusion with “one of the biggest threats facing” America on “Mornings with Maria.” (FOX Business / Photo illustration / Fox News)
“Let’s just go back in time and remind everyone: Nobody gets [$1 million] sole mandate from the Chinese government to start a private equity firm, especially one that doesn’t have any private equity experience, especially someone that doesn’t have any private equity experience and has a debilitating crack habit,” Lee said.
“So, what type of influence did they buy as the Chinese Communist Party is running around with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, setting up a new reserve currency to take out the United States of America?” he continued. “What did the Bidens give up and what is it doing to our national security?”
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 Donald Trump.
Back in July 2022, Oath Keepers member Michael Greene was charged with four felonies and one misdemeanor despite the fact that he never entered the capitol. He was convicted on a misdemeanor charge. He was found innocent on three of the felonies, with a hung jury on the fourth felony.
Michael Greene was working security for the different Trump events on January 6th. Greene never went inside the Capitol and never engaged in ANY violence.
Stewart Rhodes claims the DOJ has indicted Greene because he is a witness for several Oath Keepers. So now the regime is going to intimidate and threaten Michael Greene hoping that he changes his testimony.
And the DOJ is lying about Greene’s case. Greene never ordered any Oath Keepers into the US Capitol on January 6th. There is no truth to that claim at all.
The Biden DOJ indicted Michael Greene a year-and-a-half after the protests for standing outside the US Capitol.
Greene was convicted of standing in the wrong place outside the Capitol, a misdemeanor, but found innocent on three other charges, One other felony he was charged with ended in a hung jury. It is the first time prosecutors were unable to get a conviction on a felony count even with an extremely biased jury pool.
He was represented by Britt Redden and William Shipley.
Shipley said in a statement:
“We’ve always believed Michael Greene was indicted in order to keep him from testifying on behalf of the Oath Keepers who were targeted by the government.”
Shipley also spoke out on Twitter.
The last count against Michael Greene — obstructing Congress — ended in a hung jury this afternoon. Convicted on one misdemeanor. Acquitted on 3 felonies. Hung jury on 1 felony. pic.twitter.com/4aN6QnyZTl
A federal judge declared a mistrial Tuesday after a jury deadlocked on the question of whether a U.S. Army veteran who served as the Oath Keepers’ operations leader on Jan. 6 obstructed the joint session of Congress.
Jurors deliberated for a week before returning guilty verdicts Monday on all counts against four Oath Keepers affiliates who entered the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6. The jury returned a mixed verdict, however, on two remaining defendants who did not: Bennie Parker, of Ohio, and Michael “Whip” Greene, of Indiana. The jury returned Tuesday and convicted Parker on the remaining count of obstruction.
Greene, a U.S. Army veteran who served as the Oath Keepers’ operations leader on Jan. 6, was acquitted of two counts of conspiracy and one count of tampering with evidence. Jurors found him guilty on a misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted grounds – but remained deadlocked Tuesday on a fifth count of obstruction of an official proceeding. After hearing about the impasse, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta declared a mistrial on the remaining count against Greene.
Although other Jan. 6 defendants have been acquitted of charges – including one, Matthew Martin, who was acquitted outright by a judge last year – Tuesday was the first time the Justice Department has failed to secure a single felony conviction in one of its marquee conspiracy cases. Greene was not charged with the seditious conspiracy count that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and another defendant were convicted of in November, but had been portrayed by prosecutors as a key element of the Oath Keepers’ plan on Jan. 6. In particular, prosecutors highlighted a three-way call between him, Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, a Florida Oath Keeper who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy, as precipitating the militia’s movement on the Capitol.
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Steven Ahle My investigation into a DHS program that instructed law enforcement to treat Christians as terrorists won me the 2014 CJN Journalist of the Year award. Here is a video of Glenn Beck reading my article on his program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6asmOkdNE&t=282s I am a troll bridge. You can cross me, but you will pay a price. View all posts
After naming Richard/Rachel Levine, a man who parades around in ladyface, as one of its 2022 “Women of the Year,” USA Today is back to remind us that it doesn’t know — or doesn’t care — what a woman is.
Earlier this week, the outlet released its list of 2023 honorees, and the name getting the most attention is that of Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, a pink-haired man who dresses like a woman and has been in office for less than 12 weeks.
Nothing says “we respect women” like elbowing them out of their own awards to laud a man who makes a mockery of womanhood. Finke isn’t the only man coopting the “woman of the year” pedestal. Here are eight other men who have displaced women at their own game.
Rachel Levine
Finke’s predecessor as USA Today’s token male Woman of the Year, Rachel (formerly known as Richard) Levine, failed upward into a cushy Biden administration gig after condemning thousands of nursing home residents to die of Covid in Pennsylvania.
The Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson is still locked out of Twitter for clearly acknowledging that Levine is a man.
Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, was a recipient of one of Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year awards in 2015. Jenner, a 6’2” former Olympian who began going by “Caitlyn” in 2015, came away with the title of the magazine’s “Transgender Champion.” (One of Jenner’s co-recipients that year was the now-disgraced girlboss fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, whatever that says about the awards committee’s wisdom.)
After Glamour’s decision to name Jenner, a man, among its “women of the year,” James Smith, whose police officer wife was posthumously recognized by the magazine after she died rescuing people from the World Trade Center on 9/11, returned his wife’s award, calling Jenner’s recognition an “insult.”
“Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” he asked in an open letter to the magazine.
Laverne Cox
The year before Jenner scored Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” title, the magazine handed it to another man: Roderick Laverne Cox, who now goes by “Laverne.”
Cox’s award from Glamour followed his June 2014 Time Magazine cover, a glowing profile that openly discussed the trans lobby’s attempt to coopt the gay rights movement and boasted about “Fixing Nature’s Mistake.”
MJ Rodriguez
Among Time Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2022 was MJ Rodriguez (born Michael Anthony Rodriguez Jr.), a male stage performer who “identifies as an AfroLatina trans woman,” according to Time.
Over the course of the same year, Rodriguez was lauded as the first transgender entertainer to receive a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for lead acting.
Laurel Hubbard
Before he began taking experimental hormones, Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting. After he competed against women at the 2020 Olympics as part of New Zealand’s team, finishing dead last in the super-heavyweight category, Hubbard was nonetheless named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago. The accolade has been around since 1908.
Ebony Harper
California’s Assembly District 7 named Ebony Harper, a man, as its 2021 Woman of the Year. This year, Harper also received a “California Woman Making History” recognition from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. He’s the executive director of a group called “California TRANScends.”
Cecilia Chung
Several years earlier, in 2014, another California district honored a man who goes by the name Cecilia Chung as its “Woman of the Year.” Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assemblyman, bestowed the award on him a year after Chung successfully pressured San Francisco officials to make their city the first in the country to pay for uninsured residents’ mutilative sex surgeries.
Bonus: Lia Thomas
Lia Thomas, a man who competed under his given name, William, through his sophomore year of college, was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania for the NCAA’s 2022 Woman of the Year award. While Thomas wasn’t ultimately selected for the national recognition, his nomination kept female Penn students from being tapped — just like his national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle a few months earlier displaced his female competitors from the top of the winners’ podium.
After the controversial championship, NBC News was caught doctoring Thomas’s face to look less masculine.
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.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 were the largest and most successful shakedown in American history. These “mostly peaceful protests” — which burned more than 200 American cities and wreaked more than $2 billion in damages — achieved more than anyone could have predicted: changes in laws, private sector policies, and perhaps most importantly, a historic transfer of wealth to racial and leftwing causes. As a result, American corporations gave or pledged more than $83 billion to either BLM or BLM-related causes.
We created a database tracking contributions and pledges made to the BLM movement and related causes, which we define as organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda, and which were made in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020. To date, our data spans more than 400 companies and $83 billion in pledges and contributions.
The famed consulting firm McKinsey and Company thinks the number is far larger. They calculated that from May 2020 to October 2022 companies pledged about $340 billion “to racial equity, specifically for Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.” Our number is conservative by comparison. But unlike McKinsey, we provide details about the pledges and contributions of specific companies.
We are surprised at some of the incredulity in our calculations. So too is BLM, which suggests that objections to wealth transfers of this scale are rooted in “white supremacy,” and “a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”
BLM called for reparations. In a sense, they succeeded, as these reparations were paid out to BLM itself (approximately $122 million) and to its vast NGO archipelago and other racialized causes and schemes under various names.
While the money was given or pledged in different ways, it was unmistakable for so-called “racial justice.” Sometimes this meant cash transfers to partners of BLM, like the Color of Change, the NAACP, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the ACLU.
Sometimes it meant cash or pledges to other “reparative” initiatives including race-based, discriminatory hiring programs; race-based, sub-prime lending; race-based scholarships; and partisan voter initiatives. Sometimes it meant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are the polite versions of BLM calibrated to middle-class, middle-management tastes. The DEI ideology disagrees with BLM in few ways, if any.
DEI and BLM share one mission: to punish white America, through different means. The latter through riots and pressure campaigns, the former through preferential hiring and promotion of members of protected groups. Both aim to redistribute honor, privileges, and money to black Americans. Both are extorting special privileges and money by using white guilt.
Moreover, both are attempting to do so by cultural revolution, and both stand openly against meritocracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and individual rights. Correctly understood, DEI is an expression of BLM’s broader agenda.
We already know the exorbitant amount of money given or pledged by large banks like JPMorgan ($30 billion), Bank of America ($18 billion), and Silicon Valley Bank ($70 million) in the wake of the 2020 BLM riots to subsidized and sub-prime race-based lending, race-based investment targeting, supply chain diversity initiatives, and nonprofits advancing racial justice.
But BLM was so effective that even seemingly middle-America companies shelled out big. For example, Cargill, the Minnesota-based food producer, launched its “Black Farmer Equity Initiative,” a redistributive program that attributes declining numbers of black farmers to “the legacy of systemic racism” and seeks to “dismantle Anti-Black racism” and “operationalize equity across the food and agriculture system.” Cargill pledged $11 billion to the initiative through 2030.
Kroger, a ubiquitous neighborhood grocery chain, spent at least $13 million to advance racial division, including $5 million toward its “Framework for Action: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiative and a $500,000 contribution to LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund, a discriminatory investment fund that promotes BLM. Kroger also partnered with the discriminatory, race-based hiring platform OneTen, which aims to “hire, promote, and advance one million Black individuals who do not have a four-year degree into family-sustaining careers over the next ten years.”
Caterpillar, the producer of heavy equipment, donated $500,000 each to the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative. It too partnered with OneTen. John Deere donated $1 million to the NAACP, again, an official partner of BLM.
Defense contractors, traditionally neutral and dedicated to keeping America safe, also submitted to BLM’s demands. Northrop Grumman donated $1 million to the NAACP and an additional $1 million to organizations promoting social justice as part of an employee charitable gift matching program. It also partnered with OneTen.
Raytheon pledged $25 million over five years to “advance racial justice, empowerment, and career readiness in underserved communities.” The commitment includes donations to the NAACP, Equal Justice Initiative, and National Urban League; community outreach; public policy lobbying; and a supplier diversity initiative.
Boeing pledged a minimum of $25 million by 2023 toward racial “equity” and “social justice.” In 2020, it contributed $15.6 million to organizations addressing “racial inequity,” including $1 million to the Equal Justice Initiative.
The list goes on, and should be further explored by journalists in order to understand the full extent of the shakedown. By caving to BLM, American companies not only became the tools of radicals but also laid the groundwork for future violence and extortion.
The Center for the American Way of Life is a branch of The Claremont Institute. The mission of The Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.
The facts of life haven’t changed, but sex education is entirely different now from what you likely learned in school. Sex ed in middle school now includes graphic lessons on anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation, with stick figures to illustrate body positions. Supplemental reading in middle school libraries includes “Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff,” a book explaining foreplay and how to rub the clitoris to produce pleasure. Massachusetts’ curriculum tells seventh graders how to use cling wrap as a dental dam around their teeth for safe oral sex.
A majority of states now require sex education be labeled as “comprehensive,” thanks to aggressive lobbying by activists. Planned Parenthood, the largest producer of sex ed curriculum for public schools, argues that children are entitled to know how to “experience different forms of sexual pleasure.”
Does it bother anyone else the Planned Parenthood is so wrapped up in sex ed, and transgenderism? Remember, they are the disciples of Margaret Sanger, who was the leader of the sect that warned about “world overpopulation”. She was the mother (founder) of Planned Parenthood with the determination to wipe out societies’ “undesirables”. That could be a reason they are behind transgenderism and the destruction of children’s bodies, neutering them.
Eugene, Oregon, high schoolers were recently assigned to write a sexual fantasy featuring massage oil, flavored syrup, a candle, music, feathers or a boa. How about teaching them math and English instead?
Nationwide, these racy lessons are outraging parents. Last week, protests forced the Gwinnett County, Georgia, school board to shelve voting on a proposed sex ed curriculum. Holly Terei, a parent, explained that it’s one thing to monitor social media and the movies kids watch, and it’s another to have to worry about “our children being exposed to curriculum that teaches them how to perform sexual acts.”
Sex ed is the most controversial issue in many school board elections. Contests are nominally nonpartisan, but generally, Republicans are demanding parental controls. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is becoming the poster child for adolescent promiscuity.
Expect this to be a defining issue in next year’s national elections. In Iowa last week, former President Donald Trump warned the crowd that schools “are focused on sexualizing our children.”
Most sex ed lessons are not published by textbook companies. Instead, sex ed has been hijacked by left-wing, well-funded groups with their own agendas. These include Sex Ed for Social Change, Advocates for Youth (an LGBTQ group) and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argues that children have sexual rights. They all press for Comprehensive Sexuality Education. The word “comprehensive” is misleading. What the curriculum stresses is pleasure.
Many Massachusetts districts use Planned Parenthood’s “Get Real” curriculum. The eighth grade teacher’s manual suggests discussing a hypothetical scenario about two middle school boys who “enjoy the sexual part of their relationship.”
In Florida, the Leon County School Board tabled voting on a sex ed curriculum early this month when parents like Brandi Andrews objected. She says a cartoon video of a laughing clitoris, part of the curriculum, would encourage young girls to be promiscuous.
Michigan parents protest school board over explicit books in school library. (Fox News)
Michigan parents protest school board over explicit books in school library. (Fox News)
Advocates for CSE argue that “how-to” information about sex keeps children safer. Don’t believe it. A review of 60 studies of sex education in U.S. schools, published in the scholarly journal Issues in Law and Medicine, found that comprehensive sex education more often resulted in more harm, including more unplanned pregnancies and STDs.
Those are physical harms. Kids can also suffer emotional and spiritual harm. Educators in Fairfax County, Virginia, want to teach middle school sex ed in coed classes. Parents know better — a staggering 84 percent oppose this. What about modesty? What about embarrassment for the kids who are developing the fastest?
The backlash against extreme sex ed is exploding. Proponents insist they just want to provide information. Nonsense. When lessons include more than biology, someone’s values are being imposed.
Comprehensive sex education is an ideology or religion, stressing gender fluidity, sexual experimentation and pleasure seeking, while repudiating parents’ roles and traditional values. Some families share those views, and many don’t.
Recently, hundreds of Muslim Americans protested a Dearborn, Michigan, school board meeting, holding signs with messages such as “Keep your porno to yourself.” Christians, Jews and Muslims have all been told they must keep their religious teachings out of public schools.
Allowing CSE in school is no different from entrusting sex education to a priest or a rabbi, to the exclusion of all other views.
Parents, it’s time to take control of what our kids are being taught.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
The House voted to pass the Parents Bill of Rights Act on Friday over objections from Democrats who argued the bill is aimed at promoting “fascism” and “extreme” views of Republicans by making it easier for parents to ban books and out LBGTQ+ students.
The GOP bill is a response to growing anger across the country about access to information on everything from school curricula to safety and mask policies to the prevalence of gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom. Parents’ anger over these issues at school board meetings led to an effort by the Biden administration’s Justice Department to examine the “disturbing trend” of violent threats against school officials.
House Republicans reacted by approving the Parents Bill of Rights Act, which would require school districts to give parents access to curriculum and reading lists and would require schools to inform parents if school staff begin encouraging or promoting their child’s gender transition.
The bill passed narrowly in a 213-208 vote that saw just a handful of Republicans vote against it, along with every Democrat.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., talk on the floor after Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., earlier this year. Democrats unanimously voted against a GOP bill aimed at giving parents access to information about their children’s schools. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Democrats blasted the bill during debate this week by accusing Republicans of attacking LGBTQ+ students.
“This Republican bill is asking the government to force the outing of LGBT people before they are ready,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., argued on the House floor. “When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive value is, and that is freedom over fascism.”
Republicans rejected this argument by saying parents have a right to know what is happening to their children in school, especially if schools are promoting gender transition without their knowledge.
“The bill does not address a student’s identity or statements, but is solely focused on notifying parents about actions taken by school personnel to act on a gender transition, such as changing pronouns or switching locker rooms,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the Committee on Education & the Workforce.
The bill says parents have “the right to know if a school employee or contractor acts to… change a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name; or… allow a child to change the child’s sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the GOP bill “fascism” during a House floor debate. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Democrats also accused Republicans of trying to make it easier to ban books at school, and several Democrats said Republicans are looking to ban books across the country on a range of topics.
“Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t want the children of America to learn about the Holocaust,” accused House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. “They want to ban a book called ‘Melissa,’ a book describing, in very personal terms, the experience of a trans girl beginning to understand her identity.”
“They want to ban books, they want to bully the LGBTQ+ community, they want to bring guns into classrooms, kindergarten and above. That’s their educational agenda,” he added.
Republicans dismissed those arguments by saying the bill does nothing to ban books but does give parents the right to see a list of books in school libraries and access to those books.
“Nowhere in this bill is it banning any books,” asserted Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who said the goal of the language is to make sure parents are aware of sexually explicit books in school libraries.
House Education Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., rejected Democrat arguments that the bill requires schools to out LGBTQ+ students, and others dismissed the idea that it bans books. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Norman and others also argued that the books under attack in some states and communities are those that include explicit sexual content that they say is not appropriate for certain ages and is not a core educational requirement. Norman cited books that talk about kids who are “sexually active from the time I was 6,” or that include “explicit images of oral sex.”
“Parents, is this something you want your children to read?” Norman asked. “Parents, is this something that encourages academics and allows that child to compete in the 21st century?”
The bill passed by the House on Friday would also give parents notice if there are plans to eliminate gifted-and-talented programs for kids, alert them to any violent activity taking place at school and give them the right to speak at school board meetings.
It also provides that school districts “should welcome and encourage that engagement and consider that feedback when making decisions.”
Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.
The Biden administration announced its latest home appliance regulations this week, targeting air conditioners in an action it said would reduce the nation’s carbon emissions.
The regulations, unveiled Thursday by the Department of Energy (DOE), finalize energy efficiency standards for home air conditioning units, or window air conditioners, and portable air cleaners. The DOE said the move would cut air pollution and push consumer costs down by billions of dollars via energy savings.
“Today’s announcement builds on the historic actions President Biden took last year to strengthen outdated energy efficiency standards, which will help save on people’s energy bills and reduce our nation’s carbon footprint,”Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
“DOE will continue to engage with our public and private sector partners to finalize additional proposals like today’s that lower household energy costs and deliver the safer, healthier communities that every American deserves,” she continued.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks during a press briefing in May 2021. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
According to the DOE, the new energy efficiency standards will save Americans about $1.5 billion annually and curb carbon dioxide emissions by 106 million metric tons over three decades. The agency added that the regulations were part of President Biden’s efforts to promote innovation and lower costs for families “while tackling the climate crisis.”
The rules for air cleaners are scheduled to be implemented in 2024 and the rules for room air conditioners are slated for 2026.
Over the last several months, meanwhile, the DOE has introduced a series of energy efficiency regulations impacting various home appliances including gas stoves, ovens, clothes washers and refrigerators. Critics have blasted the rules as federal overreach and unnecessary given that the industry has improved technology without government intervention.
“What these mandates, what these standards, do is enforce a level of efficiency that doesn’t make sense,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview last week. “And they compromise product quality. We’ve already seen this to an extent with cost of clothes washer standards.”
“That’s another problem — this is a regulatory program that’s very long in the tooth and you’re getting to the point where clothes washers — this might be the fifth time they’ve been regulated,” he continued. “So we’re really chasing after diminishing or nonexistent marginal returns.”
A former senior DOE official previously told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration’s actions would inevitably result in higher costs for consumers.
“Their philosophy is energy efficiency at all costs or energy efficiency no matter the cost,” the official said. “That means we are going to see, as a result of their efficiency standards, higher-priced appliances. It’s that simple.”
“The reality is that we are not talking about saving huge amounts of energy from these new regulations.”
And the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM), the leading U.S. trade group representing appliance makers and suppliers, has warned that the actions would particularly harm low-income households and decrease overall product quality.
Jill Notini, a spokesperson for AHAM, recently told Fox News Digital that, taking into account the higher costs of appliances, the estimated savings from the energy efficiency rules “don’t add up right now during this time of high inflation.” However, she said Friday that the group supports the air cleaner rule announced this week, but remained concerned about other actions.
“Our industry puts innovative and energy efficient appliances into every home,” Notini told Fox News Digital. “We worked to advance the air cleaner rule within DOE, but we remain concerned that DOE is going too far on other products without any real savings to consumers, at a time when people are looking for relief.”
On his first day in office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order requiring the DOE to make “major revisions” to current appliance regulation standards and standards set by the Trump administration. A month later, the agency began moving forward on more than a dozen energy efficiency rules, impacting a wide range of appliances.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
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 Donald Trump.
Nobody disagrees at this point that there is a plethora of excess deaths and a dearth of births, a trend that should be the number-one alarming public policy issue. Yet when any of us suggest that the gene therapy ubiquitously given to the world right around the time of the jump in these numbers might be responsible, people look at us like we are from Mars. However, it turns out, based on newly released FOIA documents from the CDC, that our government knew about and even anticipated massive reports of injuries from these shots from day one.
Throughout the past two years, the government and media have concocted a conspiracy theory that somehow the CDC’s own VAERS reporting is scammed with fraud by people who have nothing better to do with their lives but spend hours filling out fraudulent vaccine injury reports. They pretend it’s a sort of ex post facto anomaly that nobody expected and that has no credibility in their eyes. Except, as Hebrew University Professor Josh Guetzkow reveals, not only did the CDC know about the vaccine injuries blowing up VAERS at record levels (even before the general public had access to them), the agency contracted with defense contractor General Dynamics to handle the database in anticipation of record use. Then, when the vaccines were released, the CDC had to up the contract to account for even more entries, yet showed no moral qualms about continuing with the campaign without disclosing these revelations to the public.
Guetzkow, who has secured numerous FOIA’ed documents both in the U.S. and Israel throughout COVID, posted 69 pages of FOIA’ed documents and contracts from General Dynamics Information Technology to the CDC’s immunization safety office. Thanks to his work, we already know from the previous FOIA’ed documents that the CDC’s $9.45 million contract with General Dynamics in August 2020 stated that officials anticipated 1,000 adverse event reports a day, with 40% of them being serious. Yet, like a cold serial killer soullessly counting his casualty list, the CDC was completely fine with going through with this campaign, as if it were the price that had to be paid to worship the spirit of the age – the modern-day Moloch. However, this document shows that as early as Jan. 15 – when most people still could have avoided these shots – the CDC was aware of record-setting reports that crushed even the agency’s initial cold-hearted, morbid expectations.
As you can see from page 8 of the pdf, General Dynamics warned the CDC that VAERS had blown through the expected 1,000 cases per day and even reached a level above 4,500 – to the point that GD couldn’t process the data. Mind you, they were never concerned with the human toll, just the logistics of the contract labor. They predicted a need for “reforecasting of staffing needs” to process all these reports.
Already in December 2020, when the shots were only available for select people like doctors, there were over 19,000 reports and close to 344,000 website visits. It’s hard to see how this wasn’t organic from people genuinely in pain because there was no organized campaign in the United States to inform people of VAERS at the time. I myself (who obsessively focused on this) hadn’t heard of it until two months later.
By Feb. 15, General Dynamics reported a continued record-setting pace of reports and website visits, to the point that workers had to expand their VAERS ID reports to allow for seven digits instead of six. In April, officials reported that they had to hire an additional 200 staffers to deal with the backlog and continue to process 25,000 reports per week, well beyond the threshold they originally contracted for. As eligibility for the shots expanded for all age groups, they continued to process over 30,000 injury reports a week, yet the CDC never said a word about it. Not only did officials not take the products off the market, they began mandating them over late summer 2021, with some mandates that remain in place to this very day.
It’s nearly impossible to astroturf these sorts of injury reports. Clearly, our government saw how organic they were and how they coincided perfectly with the uptake of the vaccine. Indeed, the FDA had access to the infamous Pfizer document in Feb. 2021 – before almost any younger adult was vaccinated – showing that the shot killed over 1,200 people and was associated with over 1,400 categories of serious maladies that were chronicled in a list eight pages long.
Now, keep in mind that after the government observed all these adverse events, and after officials knew about the 7.7% clinical injury rate from the CDC’s own V-SAFE program, perfectly corroborating the VAERS data, they accelerated the approval of these shots for children and then the mandates for everyone. Emails released via FOIA show that in July 2021, when the shots should have been canceled, Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, pressured Marion Gruber, then head of the office of vaccines research and review, to truncate the already accelerated timeline to fully approve the Comirnaty shot (which is still not commercially available 2.5 years later).
A copy of the July 19 email response from Marion Gruber is below:
A week after the infamous Aug. 23 approval, which triggered the mandates, Gruber resigned from the agency in protest. But notice how even Gruber couched her reticence to approve this thing in terms of not undermining “confidence in the vaccine,” rather than expressing actual concern this was already killing and maiming people in droves.
We’re at the point where at a minimum, the government doesn’t care how many people die from this experimentation. Dr. Tom Merritt, who was part of the Oxford University team who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine, best summed up the sentiment of the biomedical state toward the people when he admitted that those injured by the gene therapy were “collateral damage to the bigger scheme.” He added: “Some tragically died, a number had their lives changed forever. They believed in vaccines; now they don’t.”It’s all a matter of what the bigger scheme really is.
Republican Georgia and Iowa lawmakers sent bills banning sex-change procedures for minors to their governors’ desks this week. Iowa has passed its bill into law, while Georgia’s bill awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature. Kemp has not said whether he’ll sign it.
Georgia Senate Bill 140, which passed along party lines, prohibits injecting children with hormones and surgically mutilating their bodies “for the treatment of gender dysphoria.” Doctors may still be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs, however, as the bill only blocks “irreversible procedures or therapies.” Puberty blockers do inflict irreversible physical damage, but their proponents claim otherwise.
Parental rights advocates still welcome the bill as a step in the right direction.
“This new measure will give Georgia children the legal protections they desperately need,” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms For America, said in a press release. “Too many states continue to defend sexual mutilation of children by refusing to implement laws that would properly protect them. This must change.”
On Wednesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF538 into law, which states that Iowa medical professionals “shall not knowingly engage in or cause any” treatments “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or affirm the minor’s perception of, the minor’s gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The law also prevents doctors from removing a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue, as well as banning the prescription of hormone blockers to complicate puberty.
“Children should not be pushed to receive experimental medical treatments that can leave them permanently sterile and physically marred for life,” Jeff Edler, a Republican state senator, told The Des Moines Register. “Iowa has a duty to protect its citizens, especially our children.”
In addition to banning body mutilation surgeries for children, Reynolds also signed SF482, a law that would prevent transgender-identifying students from using the opposite sex’s public-school bathrooms.
“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp said in a press release. “By enacting this legislation, Iowa has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs. Young people deserve to live in a society that doesn’t subject them to risky experiments to which they cannot effectively consent.”
Georgia and Iowa join eight other states that have passed protections for children from sex-change surgeries, including Mississippi, Florida, Utah, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky’s legislatures have passed similar bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
An aggressive move by the Mexican military to seize an American company’s property in Mexico has sparked a fresh diplomatic incident between the two countries — coming at the same time as tensions and finger-pointing have flared over the U.S. fentanyl crisis being facilitated by Mexican smugglers.
Vulcan Materials, a Birmingham, Alabama-based company that produces construction aggregates, had its quarry facility seized by the Mexican military and state police in the early hours of March 14. The company said officials forced the company to allow CEMEX, a Mexican-owned company, to unload a cement shipment from a ship in the port.
The company said the seizure was likely due to the breakdown of contract negotiations between it and CEMEX and ongoing tensions with the Mexican government over its mining operations. Mexican President Lopez Obrador had accused the company of trying to extract minerals from Mexico without the required permits and ship them to the U.S.
Vulcan previously leased land to and provided offloading and handling services for CEMEX at the site, but the agreement expired last December and talks for a renegotiated contract broke down.
This screenshot of a security video provided by Vulcan Materials shows Mexican police and military entering the company’s facility in Quintana Roo, Mexico on March 14, 2023. (Vulcan Materials)
The hostile move by Mexican authorities had diplomatic ramifications. A spokesperson for the State Department told Fox News Digital this week the administration was concerned about the treatment of American companies in Mexico, and that they speak regularly with Mexican officials about the expectation that they are treated fairly and in accordance with trade obligations.
The spokesperson noted that such obligations provide trade and investment certainty within Mexico, and said that cases like these have the potential to impact the ability of the U.S. to achieve its shared vision with the Mexican government for improving the livelihoods of the country’s economically disadvantaged regions.
Meanwhile, Republicans in both the House and Senate have called for a strong response from the U.S. in the face of the aggression by Mexico. In the Senate, Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., called it “unlawful and unacceptable.”
In the House, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green took aim at Mexico and called on the Biden administration to “show strength” on the matter.
“Mexico’s unjustified seizure of a privately-owned American company’s facility is yet another appalling sign that the rule of law is completely absent in the country,” he said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Rather than working to stop the violent cartels and deadly fentanyl taking American lives, Mexico is using its military and law enforcement to occupy an American company’s property.”
“The perpetual weakness portrayed by the Biden administration is clearly emboldening Mexico,” he said. “I would advise President Biden to show strength on the world stage and immediately address the growingly strained relationship between our two countries.”
The incident comes amid already brewing tensions as Republicans and some in the administration have taken aim at Mexico over its handling of the smuggling of fentanyl by Mexican cartels into the U.S. Fentanyl, which kills over 70,000 Americans a year and is 50-100 times more potent than morphine, is being smuggled in across the land border after being made in Mexico using Chinese precursors.
Isn’t this akin to “aiding and abetting” these cartels? Is the Biden Administration culpable for their lake of border security? Are they being paid off by these drug cartels?
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently told lawmakers Mexico was helping the U.S. with the issue of fentanyl, but could still be doing more. He also said the epidemic is being “unleashed on purpose” by Mexico. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meanwhile, told lawmakers on Wednesday that parts of Mexico are controlled by the cartels.
Multiple Republicans have called for cartels, which conduct drug and human smuggling into the U.S., to be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and have suggested the American military be sent to take out the drug labs.
“We’re going to unleash the fury and might of the United States against these cartels,” Graham said at a press conference earlier this month alongside Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.,. “We’re going to destroy their business model and their lifestyle because our national security and the security of the United States as a whole depends on us taking decisive action.”
The focus on the cartels was also renewed after the kidnappings of four Americans by cartel members earlier this month. Two of the Americans, who were caught in a shootout, were killed.
However, Lopez Obrador reacted angrily to the increased rhetoric from Washington and falsely claimed that fentanyl is not produced in Mexico as he attempted to shift the blame onto the U.S.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” López Obrador said. “Why don’t they [the United States] take care of their problem of social decay?”
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pushed back against U.S. criticism of his handling of cartel violence and smuggling. ((AP Photo/Marco Ugarte))
He also threatened to meddle in U.S. elections by launching an “information campaign” against Republicans.
“And if they do not change their attitude and think that they are going to use Mexico for their propaganda, electoral and political purposes, we are going to call for them not to vote for that party, because it is interventionist, inhumane, hypocritical and corrupt,” López Obrador said, later adding that Mexico would be insisting that “not one vote” goes to Republicans from Mexicans and Hispanics.
This week, tensions rose further when a State Department report criticized the government’s human rights record.
Obrador responded by accusing the U.S. of trying to act like “the government of the world,” telling reporters on Tuesday that he believes his northern neighbor is “lying.”
Fox News’ Peter Aitken contributed to this report.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.
Isn’t it great to have the media complaining about what a Republican is doing, instead of what he’s tweeting?
The New York Times recently did a major investigation into Gov. Ron DeSantis’ suspension last August of a Florida prosecutor for the flimsy reason that he’d publicly announced that he would not enforce state law on abortion.
The Florida legislature had just spent nearly two months banging out a compromise bill that allowed abortions up to 15 weeks — more liberal than most European countries — and included an exception for life of the mother. An abortionist would literally have to turn himself in to get prosecuted under this law.
What kind of showboating clown would sign a public “pledge” not to prosecute a case that had about a 1 in 10 billion chance of ever landing in his office?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Florida state attorney Andrew H. Warren.
This wasn’t Warren’s first publicity stunt. Even a fawning profile on Warren in the Tampa Bay Times noted his penchant for going “out of his way to draw attention to himself,” setting him “apart from other elected prosecutors.”
During the pandemic, Warren held a press conference to announce that he was prosecuting a church pastor for violating the county’s stay-at-home order by holding services — a misdemeanor offense.
Days later, Gov. DeSantis issued an order expressly overriding the county’s shutdown rules — and Warren held a press conference to denounce the governor’s order. People will DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
He held a press conference a few months later, after dismissing criminal charges against 67 BLM protesters arrested by the police for unlawful assembly. (Luckily, congregating to worship George Floyd poses none of the health risks of congregating to worship Jesus.)
So when Warren held another press conference to announce his pledge not to prosecute abortion cases, DeSantis removed him from office. (Florida constitution: “the governor may suspend from office … any county officer, for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty …”)
You wanted to be a hero, Andy? OK, you’re a hero! My conscience demands I sign this pledge. Here I stand. I can do no other. … HEY, WAIT! YOU CAN’T FIRE ME!
An accurate headline on this story would be something like, “Governor suspends public servant for refusing to do his job.” But The New York Times’ headline was: “Inside Ron DeSantis’s Politicized Removal of an Elected Prosecutor.” (My headline: “Inside The New York Times’ Politicized Report on a Republican Governor.”)
The reporters, junior psychologists, decided to go beyond the facts and reveal DeSantis’ secret motive. It seems that the real reason DeSantis fired an insolent prosecutor was because: He thought it would be popular with voters.
I know, disgusting, right?
Hey, New York Times, how about asking why firing this preening fruitcake might be well-received by voters?
[Frantically waving my hand.]
People are sick of taxpayer-supported government officials who expect standing ovations for not doing their jobs. It’s become something of a lifestyle choice for Democrats to run for office, then refuse to enforce any laws they disagree with.
President Obama announced that he would not enforce immigration laws against so-called “Dreamers,” despite passing an amnesty being Congress’ job. Obama even gave the illegals work permits, in open defiance of federal law.
Then Trump became president, and Democrats around the country announced that they, too, would refuse to abide by federal immigration laws, declaring themselves “sanctuary cities.”
In the last few years, we got a slew of George Soros-backed, BLM-supporting progressive prosecutors showily refusing to prosecute. Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, for example, said her goal in office was to fight “mass incarceration,” which is pretty much the exact opposite of her job description. She gave a free pass to most shoplifters, about half of drug traffickers, and gang members engaging in Wild West shootouts — which she described as “mutual combat.”
Instead of “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” how about: “Don’t run for the job if you have no intention of doing it”? (I’m still working on the rhyming part.) It would be like firemen and policemen who refused to respond to calls.
That’s why, yes, New York Times, DeSantis’ firing of Warren is probably going to be a hit with voters. He’s the first guy to take these comic book heroes at their word and remove them from the offices they openly disdain. Hiring DeSantis is a lot easier than having to keep organizing massive recall campaigns — as the residents of San Francisco recently did to get rid of their anti-prosecution prosecutor Chesa Boudin.
But isn’t it great to have the Times mad at a Republican for actually scoring a win — and not for posting obnoxious tweets? If it were Trump, they’d be criticizing him for tweeting something untoward about Andrew Warren’s face.
Everyone’s worried DeSantis won’t be as “exciting” as Trump on the campaign trail. After all-talk-no-action Trump, who cares about talk? This time, we want action.
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 Donald Trump.
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In a message to students, faculty, and staff, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler said that drag performances denigrate women and declared that the school will not host a drag performance on campus. In an Instagram post earlier this month, the WTAMU “Spectrum” student organization advertised the drag event, noting, “Spectrum is working with F1RSTGEN and other orgs on campus to produce A Fool’s Drag Race, coming soon!”
While Wendler condemned drag in his message, he suggested that people send money to the Trevor Project, an organization the drag show had been slated to benefit.
“West Texas A&M University will not host a drag show on campus,” Wendler wrote. “It was advertised for March 31, 2023, as an effort to raise money for The Trevor Project. The nonprofit organization focuses on suicide prevention—a noble cause—in the LGBTQ community.”
“As a performance exaggerating aspects of womanhood (sexuality, femininity, gender), drag shows stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood. Any event which diminishes an individual or group through such representation is wrong,” Wendler wrote.
“Drag shows are derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny, no matter the stated intent. Such conduct runs counter to the purpose of WT. A person or group should not attempt to elevate itself or a cause by mocking another person or group. As a university president, I would not support ‘blackface’ performances on our campus, even if told the performance is a form of free speech or intended as humor. It is wrong. I do not support any show, performance or artistic expression which denigrates others—in this case, women—for any reason,” he declared.
“A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it. Supporting The Trevor Project is a good idea. My recommendation is to skip the show and send the dough,” Wendler wrote.
Spectrum pushed back in a statement, arguing that “Drag is not a mockery,” but “a celebration of … queerness, gender, acceptance, love and especially femininity.”
The group requested that Wendler reinstate the drag performance, apologize, and step down from his role as university president.
A petition page posted on Change.org declares, “We, the students of WTAMU … urge him to reinstate the drag show on-campus. We are holding this drag show whether we have his support or not, but his extreme lack of compassion for the LGBT+ and activist student population on campus shows with this latest e-mail.”
Back in 2020, Wendler recognized the 30-year milestone of the school being a part of the Texas A&M University System:
A hand holds up a small transgender pride flag. The blue and pink stripes represent the colors for a boy and girl, while the white stripe represents self-declared gender identities, such as transitioning, intersex, neutral and undefined gender. | Getty Images
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has implemented an emergency regulation imposing what his office calls “guardrails” on gender transition interventions for minors as the push to ban the controversial practices continues on a state-by-state basis.
In a statement Monday, Bailey said he is “issuing an emergency regulation clarifying that, because gender transition interventions are experimental, they are covered by existing Missouri law governing unfair, deceptive, and unconscionable business practices, including in administering healthcare services.”
“As Attorney General, I will protect children and enforce the laws as written, which includes upholding state law on experimental gender transition interventions,” Bailey said. “Even Europe recognizes that mutilating children for the sake of a woke, leftist agenda has irreversible consequences, and countries like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all sharply curtailed these procedures. I am dedicated to using every legal tool at my disposal to stand in the gap and protect children from being subject to inhumane science experiments.”
The new regulation “clarifies that state law already prohibits performing experimental procedures in the absence of specific guardrails.” The guardrails require medical professionals to inform patients that “the use of puberty blocker drugs or cross-sex hormones to treat gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is experimental and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and that “the FDA has issued a warning that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness.”
The Attorney General’s office characterized the move as “necessary due to the skyrocketing number of gender transition interventions despite rising concerns in the medical community that these procedures are experimental and lack clinical evidence of safety or success.”
The emergency regulation will hold the force of law for either 30 legislative days or 180 days, “whichever is longer.”
Additional mandatory disclosures outline how Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare determined in a February 2022 report that the risks associated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “outweigh the possible benefits.”
The regulation also urges providers to cite the Endocrine Society’s finding that “the large majority (about 85%) of prepubertal children with a childhood diagnosis did not remain GD/gender incongruent in adolescence.”
“One scientific study notes that an individual whose friend identifies as transgender is ‘more than 70 times’ as likely to similarly identify as transgender, suggesting that many individuals’ incorrectly believe themselves to be transgender and in need of transition’ because of social factors,” the release from the attorney general’s office states.
The regulation also bans gender transition interventions if the patient has not “received a full psychological or psychiatric assessment” consisting of at least 15 hour-long therapy sessions over a period of 18 months “to determine, among other things, whether the person has any mental health comorbidities.”
An additional requirement imposed on providers seeking to perform gender transition interventions on minors seeks to ensure that “any existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved.”
The regulation also stipulates that doctors must “adopt and follow a procedure to track all adverse effects that arise from any course of covered gender transition intervention for all patients beginning the first day of intervention and continuing for a period of not fewer than 15 years.” Doctors seeking to provide such interventions must also screen patients for autism and examine whether or not their gender dysphoria results from “social contagion” on an annual basis.
The regulation comes after the attorney general announced an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a former employee submitted a sworn affidavit stating that the clinic has sterilized hundreds of children and even lied to parents. The clinic has denied Bailey’s request for a moratorium on prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones as his office investigates the claims.
The new regulation is opposed by LGBT advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood. Dr. Colleen P. McNicholas, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, called the claims made in the announcement “medically false and harmful.”
“Scientific evidence shows — and the medical community agrees — that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, and life-saving,” McNicholas said in a statement shared on Twitter. “We denounce this government interference in the practice of medicine, and we demand politicians leave health care between providers and their patients. Shame on any politician who uses trans youth for political theatrics.”
More than a half dozen states have implemented bans on some or all gender transition interventions for minors, specifically Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.
In the absence of action by the state legislature, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Commissioner of Family and Protective Services Jaime Masters have issued formal opinions characterizing gender transition services as a form of child abuse. The moves by state legislatures and executive officials related to gender transition interventions for minors come in response to concerns about the long-term impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries.
The American College of Pediatricians has identified the potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment” as well as sterility. The organization has listed “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as some of the potential long-term impacts of cross-sex hormones.
As for gender transition surgeries to remove and/or create synthetic body parts in order to align a person’s sexual organs with their stated gender identity, graphic images posted on social media last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office reveal scars left behind from double mastectomies that remove healthy breasts from trans-identified females as well as scarred forearm tissue used to create synthetic penises in trans-identified females.
Last year, the U.K’s National Health Service proposed new guidelines warning doctors not to so easily encourage minors to socially transition by changing their names and pronouns because many children dealing with gender dysphoria may be going through a “transient phase.”
The proposed guidelines followed an independent review led by Dr. Hillary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which found that “social transitioning” is not a “neutral act” and could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning.”
“The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence, being mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for prepubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes,” the guidelines state.
Detransitioner Chloe Cole has emerged as a prominent voice for a community of young adults who formerly identified with the opposite sex but saw their gender dysphoria subside as they got older.
Cole is suing doctors, attributing the suicidal thoughts and deteriorating state of mental health she experienced as a teenager to the life-altering double mastectomy she received at the age of 15.
While Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” she discovered that her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion.
All big companies!
Really.
It sounds responsible. But it turns out DEI courses are often useless and sometimes racist.
First comes groveling.
My new video about DEI shows a conference that begins with a “land acknowledgement.” A Microsoft employee apologizes for taking land from “the Sammamish, the Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot” and more.
I guess it’s a nice gesture. But they aren’t giving the land back!
Companies go through the motions.
“They feel like they have to,” says York College professor Erec Smith. “They have to signal to the world that they’re doing something.”
They hope it will protect them from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and lawsuits.
Smith was once a diversity officer. He left the position because he thought it was “useless.”
Or worse. “It makes people less likely to interact with people unlike them,” he says. “It’s a minefield now.”
At diversity trainings, employees learn about “microaggressions,” speech that’s subtly biased.
“If you ask somebody what they do for a living, somehow that’s racist,” says Smith. “If you learn that, then why would you take a chance? … ‘I’m going to silence myself’ … not talk to Black people.”
A Coca-Cola diversity training tells employees, “Be less white.” “Being white” includes being “oppressive, arrogant, defensive, ignorant.”
“That is by no means a white thing,” says Smith. “The point is to demonize the other side.”
Worst of all, despite the $3 billion spent on DEI training by American companies today, DEI trainings don’t do what they’re supposed to do.
A Harvard professor analyzed studies of them and says, “Sadly enough, I did not find one single study which found that diversity training leads to more diversity.”
A different Harvard Business Review study analyzed data from 800 companies and found that five years after diversity training, the share of Black women managers decreased by 9%.
“It is not about data,” says Smith. “It’s about a power grab.”
One that starts in schools.
Smith attended a conference of rhetoric professors where the conference leader, Asao Inoue, declared it racist to grade students on traditional English.
“If you use a single standard to grade your students’ language, you engage in racism. … White language supremacy.”
Smith sent a group email in response, saying it’s a disservice to minority kids not to teach standard English. Instead of addressing Smith’s point, other professors attacked him, calling him racist.
“Do you enjoy using Western modes of argument to invalidate people of color?” “I hope for the day that folks like you will learn how to check their privilege.”
“We are professors in communication,” Smith told me. “I thought we could communicate. I was so wrong. … They saw in me a threat. … a Black person saying it’s OK to teach Black students standardized English.”
An academic named Eve accused Smith of “perpetuating harm.” Other academics joined in to praise the “tremendous labor” Eve spent writing the email.
“They’re victims!” I say, bewildered.
“That’s the point,” Smith responds. “Perpetuate the victimhood.”
“This isn’t even logical! Has academia gone insane?” I ask.
Smith laughs. “Yes, it has gone insane.”
Today some sensible people are pushing back. Education reformer Chris Rufo proposes a DEI alternative called “EMC.” EMC stands for equality, merit and colorblindness.
Sounds good to me, but woke college activists say “colorblindness” is evil because it denies that racism exists.
“Merit” is bad because the way it’s measured must be biased, because the results show racial disparity.
This is why some colleges have dropped admission tests and why many high schools eliminated honors classes.
“If you wanted to hold down a group of people,” says Smith, “… this ‘woke’ thing is a good strategy.”
The achievement gap between Black and white students has been widening lately.
A better solution, says Smith, is to ignore the censors. Debate.
“People don’t say what they feel because they don’t want to get canceled, get called racist. People are censoring. We have to stop doing that.”
The NYPD officers mobilized to quell any unrest in New York City upon news of a possible indictment against former President Donald Trump can probably rest easy: the grand jury isn’t meeting today and possibly tomorrow. No reason was offered, but the panel that’s to decide whether Trump broke the law regarding his hush money payment scheme to former porn star Stormy Daniels isn’t going to issue any indictment this week (via Politico):
'The DA’s office didn’t tell the court why the day off, [they] just said, ‘I don’t want them today, maybe tomorrow" – senior law-enforcement official.
The Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star won’t meet Wednesday as regularly scheduled, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The reason for the adjournment wasn’t immediately clear. The grand jury typically meets Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, one of the people familiar with the matter said, and it heard from witnesses earlier this week.
“The grand jury has been told to stay home today. They’re on standby for tomorrow,” one senior law-enforcement official said.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been facing immense pressure since Trump declared on his platform, Truth Social, that he would be arrested this week. There’s no evidence that an arrest warrant has been issued; there’s no indictment yet. Trump’s team even acknowledged that they were unaware of any development. Still, it brought the former president back into the news cycle with attacks against Bragg, who Republicans, especially Trump supporters, are accusing of playing politics with the justice system. That criticism is not unfounded, as the charges against Trump are reportedly not felony-level, but Bragg’s office is allegedly trying to finagle ways to make that case. The statute of limitations has also expired on the charges purportedly being considered, so this is another witch hunt.
Bragg’s office also could decline to charge Trump, too. That’s another real possibility. This week has been fraught with reports and sources claiming that an arrest is a real possibility, with the backdrop of mass law enforcement mobilization offering some credibility to those developments.
American media has bombarded us daily from all directions to make sure we know that Donald Trump indirectly paid a woman to shut her mouth as she and her now-convict lawyer, Michael Avenatti, shook him down for money.
In New York, false financial accounting can be a low-level misdemeanor, but it’s rarely prosecuted. Now Alvin Bragg, a municipal prosecutor, is trying to make a name for himself by charging former President Trump with that crime.
This is the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate. George Soros, Bragg’s benefactor, must be grinning from ear to ear.
Hillary Clinton Got Off For a Worse Deed
Trump’s former lawyer accounted for the payment as consulting or attorney’s fees. Allegedly, so did President Trump, and $130,000 changed hands.
For perspective, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid $1 million for the infamous fictional “Steele dossier.” They paid for this using one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent lawyers, Marc Elias, as a cutout to hide who was paying for this opposition research that falsely claimed Trump was colluding with Russia.
They then laundered the dossier through various contacts to try to destroy Trump and get Clinton elected president. Those people officially accounted for the $1 million dossier expense as “legal fees.” So, one side paid people to lie. The other paid someone not to lie, or at least not to speak.
Clinton lives in New York, the state in which Trump is likely to be charged over a $130,000 payment. She has not been charged for the $1 million payment. Do these events really sound vastly different to you?
Bragg hopes to spin that unserious charge into a federal campaign finance violation. Meanwhile, the dossier fraud, which affected two presidential elections and two presidential impeachments, was settled with a $113,000 fine.
Bragg’s Case Is a Mess
City prosecutors cannot charge people with federal crimes. Only feds can charge federal crimes, not some city prosecutor. Bragg has allegedly met with the Secret Service about how they will react to a New York City police officer approaching President Trump with handcuffs (if they can find one who will do it). Bragg is way over his head and wading into deep political waters.
New York Attorney General Tish James ran for office almost exclusively on a “get Trump” platform. She hated the man and promised to find a crime he committed, rather than responding to a crime and looking for a perpetrator. After years of not finding anything, she did not charge Trump with any crimes. Same state. Same New York laws. More investigative tools. Yet she passed on the opportunity to arrest a president.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the same alleged crime and also chose not to prosecute. Every prosecutor in the state above Bragg’s office passed on this one knowing they could not prove President Trump committed a crime. Or they realized that no serious person could charge Trump and not also indict Democrats.
Bragg is the same Manhattan DA who has publicly decriminalized crimes in the name of wokeness. This alleged prosecutor will ignore criminal violence and release people on their own recognizance after a stern talking to for beating someone half to death or attacking police. But he wants to charge Trump for this garbage after every one of his superiors has declined to do so. Why? Incompetence? Tunnel vision? Irrational hate? Why choose?
Democrats’ Hate Could Prompt a Constitutional Crisis
Many Democrats want Trump arrested for anything. They want to see him in cuffs more than they want their own kids to be happy and healthy. They have been searching for someone stupid or reckless enough to “perp walk” the man for the cameras. They might very well have found him. If Bragg does it over this fluff, it will prove to be a poor career choice for him and could have much broader implications that are rungs above his pay grade.
Some Dems even want conservatives to riot if a cop cuffs Trump, just like a lack of security made it easy for people to barge into the Capitol through open doors just to be charged and arrested. They might get their wish. And it is likely a trap. If it happens and people protest, see whether New York City will give them all “room to vent” like city officials gave lefty rioters for months. Hopefully, any protests will be peaceful. I will not be involved in any of it.
A lot of people continue to be surprised at these events and have truly had enough of the second set of rules for conservatives. If the hard left keeps pushing this kind of thing, it will eventually be deeply sorry.
Feds raided Trump’s house with a tactical team over papers a librarian wanted. Oddly, CNN was present and ran the story on a loop. Joe Biden dropped 50 years of classified documents all over the country and the feds let his personal lawyers (who lacked security clearances) sort them before giving them to the government at their leisure.
They investigate Trump from all sides. They give Biden a pass on everything. The feds investigated Trump’s sons and son-in-law for any irregularity. Yet Hunter Biden, a man in a long line of alleged Biden bag men, lives in a $40,000-per-month Malibu beach house and sells splatter paintings to anonymous purchasers for exorbitant amounts.
Wildly Unequal Legal Treatment
Everyone is supposed to just sit back and accept the different treatment and think it is okay and normal. This is far from normal—it is a thumb in the eye of half the American population.
Even apparently peaceful Jan. 6, 2021 protestors have been in pre-trial detention for two years. Black Lives Matter and Antifa got carte blanch to riot and burn courthouses with impunity with at least tacit support from the White House and open support from the vice president, who encouraged people to donate money to bail the rioters out of jail.
Firebomb a pro-life crisis pregnancy center and take credit for it, and Biden’s inept AG will give you a pass. Pray in front of an abortion clinic and you will be charged with a list of felonies. This is not sustainable. People, in large numbers, will eventually stop taking it.
The Acceleration of Dangerous Trends
In accordance with their oaths, prosecutors are not supposed to charge people with crimes they cannot prove, since doing so can ruin people’s lives even if they are eventually acquitted. The citizenry remembers the charge, not the acquittal.
Likewise, presidents are not supposed to issue executive orders they know will be overturned as unlawful, just for political gain and show. Both have been happening for the last two years at a clip never before encountered. Team Biden is daring half the country. Stand up, but do not take the bait.
Many think Bragg will charge Trump soon because he can. These people might not be ready for the fallout they will provoke. And by that, I do not mean violence. I mean turnabout.
Republicans may politically finally address Democratic Party lawfare, taking an eye for an eye. Some have recently shown backbone their predecessors lacked. Their voters will increasingly elect officials who promise to do so. Trump himself was a harbinger of this.
Republicans Need to Respond, Good and Hard
If Bragg pulls the proverbial trigger, everyone had better be really sure about his next moves. Bragg and his upstream cronies will not be able to take it back, apologize, call for calm, or put that leftist authoritarian genie back in the bottle.
If they think they are right and their ideas the best, Democrats should square up and try to beat at the polls whomever the Republican candidate is in 2024. Another round of transparent politically driven rigging, especially like this, after the ridiculous failures of their impeachment efforts and Jan. 6 show trials, will light a dangerous fuse for which the American people have lost patience.
Most countries that fail to address unequal treatment start dying from within. Every American should want to avoid that for all our sakes. Bragg staying out of presidential politics and focusing on the skyrocketing violent crime rate in his own backyard would be a welcome next step.
When Republicans take the White House, they should make sure prosecutors at every level have every resource and unclassified document they require to investigate and, if mandated, charge everyone on team leftist. No letting things slide. If the Dems want old-fashioned dirty politics, the other side might finally give it to them good, hard, and thoroughly.
Thomas Crist is a husband, father, lawyer, and political conservative who loves his country and despises all myopic hypocrisy regardless of its source.
A health-care executive who claims Jim Biden defrauded him was interviewed multiple times by the lawyer Joe Biden just nominated to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. According to two sources, while the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office is aware of the allegations, that office is not investigating the potential fraud, leaving the matter solely in the hands of the conflicted-future U.S. attorney.
On Monday, President Biden named Eric Olshan, currently an assistant U.S. attorney in the Pittsburgh office, to fill the vacancy left open when former U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung was confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
As I previously reported, Chung, whom President Biden had nominated to the federal appellate court, had been overseeing the criminal investigation into the bankrupt health-care business Americore—a business Jim Biden allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from to finance repairs for his beach house. Jim Biden is the current U.S. president’s brother.
Now, President Biden seeks to replace Chung with Olshan, raising serious concerns about a potential conflict of interest given Olshan’s involvement in the investigation of the Jim Biden-connected business, Americore.
Olshan had previously served as the lead investigator in the criminal case against Daniel Hurt. Hurt pleaded guilty to soliciting and obtaining kickbacks from the rural Pennsylvania hospital Ellwood City Medical Center, or “ECMC,” which Americore owned. ECMC had allegedly received some $25 million in fraudulent Medicare reimbursements.
According to an affidavit signed under oath by ECMC’s former CEO, Grant White, the president’s brother directed White to loan him (Jim Biden) approximately $400,000 to repay a past-due personal loan secured by Jim Biden’s Florida beach house. Jim Biden allegedly later pulled additional funds from ECMC, totaling about $250,000, but he would only repay about $25,000 to the medical center. ECMC would later go bankrupt and close, prompting a federal investigation.
To date, no charges have been filed related to Jim Biden’s alleged misappropriation of funds from Americore. Nor has anything come from the additional accusations made by Michael Frey, the president and CEO of the Tennessee-based Diverse Medical Management, against Jim Biden and his business partners.
Frey claims Jim Biden represented himself as a “principal” for Americore—even providing him a business card—and then entered into a scheme to defraud him. According to Frey, Jim Biden and his business partners promised to provide capital to implement Frey’s business model for rejuvenating failing rural hospitals.
But after Frey worked with various medical groups to put the plan in action, Jim Biden and his partners reneged on their agreement, he says. That left Frey holding the bag, forcing him to cover costs of about $1 million until he could unwind the various deals that had been put into motion.
The Tennessee business executive sued Jim Biden and the others allegedly involved in the scheme, before entering into a confidential settlement agreement with the defendants. The defendants breached the deal, however, according to Frey.
Frey plans to enforce the settlement agreement but told The Federalist he first intends to retrieve copies of the thousands of text and email messages exchanged by the parties, hoping those documents will assist in his efforts. Frey says the text and email messages will confirm his allegations against Jim Biden and the others involved in the deal.
Frey’s accusations against Jim Biden are particularly concerning because Frey discussed his allegations and evidence with an FBI agent from the Pittsburgh field office, as well as with Olshan.
“I spoke with Olshan both before and after Joe Biden became president,” Frey told The Federalist. They last spoke about six to eight months ago, Frey noted, adding that Olshan stated his office would reach back out to Frey. To date, however, he has heard nothing more.
Frey also told The Federalist he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware or Baltimore offices. This proves significant because the U.S. attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, is handling the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicate Jim Biden in some of those deals.
Further, Weiss’s status as a holdover from the Trump administration has given Attorney General Merrick Garland the only cover he has from claims that a conflict of interest necessitates the appointment of a special counsel. But according to Frey, he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware office. Nor has anyone from the Baltimore FBI field office—the FBI office covering Delaware-related investigations—contacted Frey, he says.
A person familiar with the Delaware investigation confirmed for The Federalist that while the U.S. attorney’s office there is familiar with Jim Biden and his wife Sara’s connections to the Americore case, the Delaware office is not investigating the matter. Rather, the investigation into Frey’s accusations was being handled out of the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Frey also told The Federalist that members of the House Oversight Committee have asked him to testify before Congress and he is open to doing so. “Somebody has to stop them from ruining people’s lives,” Frey said, referring to Jim Biden and his partners. “What they did to the $12-an-hour employees at these hospitals is a travesty.”
Whether Jim Biden and his partners hold any criminal responsibility related to Americore’s raiding of rural hospitals is unclear. What is clear, however, is that with Joe Biden appointing Olshan to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the entire Americore investigative record should be turned over to the Delaware U.S. attorney, stat.
The Federalist asked Olshan whether he would recuse from the investigation and refer the matter to the Delaware office now that Joe Biden has nominated him to serve as the next U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Olshan did not respond to the inquiry.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
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USA Today has named Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke as its “Women of the Year” honoree for the state of Minnesota — but Finke, who identifies as a transgender, is a biological man.
Finke, who entered office in early January after winning election in November 2022, is the first transgender individual elected to the Minnesota state legislature.
“The trans and LGBTQ community, we have to expand our understanding of what it means to be successful and happy and thriving, but also how to be creative and expansive in how we want the future to look for everyone. I think trans people are on the leading edge of that. We are here creating a path forward for everyone, and everyone will benefit from the work that we’re trying to do for our young people,” Finke said, according to the St. Cloud Times. “Trans liberation is upward flowing, all liberation movements flow outwards. Everyone will benefit from it and it’s worth committing yourself to.”
“Tell the truth and lead with your values, that’s what I tell myself. Tell the truth and lead with your values. And that way you won’t have to apologize, you won’t have to take things back, you won’t have to look back at all,” Finke said, according to the outlet.
And there it is. A clue as to why the Left is so diligent in pushing transgenderism. It’s a recruiting tool for the homosexual lobby. Transvestites (Drag Queens) entertaining children by reading to them, adds to their recruiting efforts. It has never been about making homosexuality normalized. It’s about recruiting children into their chosen lifestyle, and the poisoning their confused minds.
Some of USA Today’s “Women of the Year” national honorees this year include actress Goldie Hawn, former first lady Michelle Obama, and actress Sheryl Lee Ralph. Last year, Admiral Rachel Levine, another biological man who identifies as a woman, was named among the honorees.
Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement on International Women’s Day in which he declared that “trans women are women.”
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The contrast couldn’t be clearer. A devastating train derailment and subsequent toxic fires rock a community in Ohio that President Trump carried by 29 points. Forty days later, President Joe Biden has yet to set foot in East Palestine despite numerous pleas from residents.
A few weeks after the train crash, news breaks about a well-connected bank few have ever heard of crumbling on a Friday afternoon. At a time of the day his supporters say he usually does nothing, Biden is in front of the television cameras telling the world that the U.S. government will bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which is located in a city Biden won by almost 50 points. Biden’s climate buddies and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wine companies are no doubt relieved.
For those keeping score: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is an emergency that requires Biden to get out of bed before 9 a.m., while the people of East Palestine continue to wait for answers.
Looking at those who work with or benefit from SVB, one begins to understand Biden’s urgency. The White House may say climate is our worst existential crisis, but it looks like green dollars for leftists’ eco-friends required the quickest action.
It’s easy to wonder if President Biden’s actions are driven by the bank’s connection to climate companies. This article highlights a few, noting “Silicon Valley Bank served as a banker to dozens of climate and energy-tech companies, holding their cash on a day-to-day basis and issuing billions of dollars in loans in support of the type of large-scale, one-off projects that are essential to the sector.”
Read it again: Dozens of climate companies. Billions in loans. Holding their cash on a day-to-day basis. Now, it gets interesting.
Steyer once played a key role on a Zoom fundraiser for Biden that raised $4 million dollars. That’s a lot of money for a single conference call. Many of the donors were from Silicon Valley and have deep pockets. That’s why it should be no surprise that when it came time to find someone to oversee $369 billion in taxpayer dollars for green investments, Biden would reach back into Steyer’s world.
Another company reported to have close ties to SVB is Lowercarbon Capital. It doesn’t take long on their website to find their managing partner is a strong Biden ally. They proudly tell you the partner is not only a longtime supporter of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but “was on their 2020 campaign’s National Finance Committee and is a member of Climate Leaders for Biden.”
Wait, there’s more. According to the reports, another major company with ties to SVB is Sunrun Solar. The company saw money from SVB going back to 2014 and arranged for a loan of more than half a billion dollars less than three months ago.
All this government cheese would be bland without a little wine. Take a moment to appreciate Newsom’s tone-deaf actions about SVB. Not long after Biden’s announcement, Newsom heaped praise on the move, and now we’re starting to see why.
Newsom is the owner of some wine companies, and you’ll be shocked to hear those companies are reportedly held by SVB. And if you can handle one more vomit-inducing dose of hypocrisy, an SVB bank president sits on the board of a charity run by Newsom’s wife.
Joe Biden’s Climate Cult: Membership has its privileges. It’s too bad the people of East Palestine couldn’t get in on the ground level.
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future and has appeared on Fox News, Newsmax and One America News. You can find him on Twitter at @larrybehrens or email at larry@powerthefuture.com.
A Manhattan grand jury appears poised to indict Donald Trump, according to news reports and the former president himself. Here’s what you need to know to understand the chatter about the anticipated criminal charges against Trump—and why the move to indict a former president for the first time in our country’s history will make political prosecutions the new norm in America.
While only the grand jury and prosecutors know for certain what charges against Trump, if any, are being considered, the consensus is that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, is pursuing a criminal case against Trump for allegedly falsifying business records, in violation of Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York Penal Code.
Section 175.05 provides “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Falsifying business records in the second degree is a misdemeanor, subject to a two-year statute of limitations.
A violation of Section 175.10, however, is a felony, subject to a five-year statute of limitations. That section defines the offense of falsifying business records in the first degree and provides that if a person falsifies business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime, the offense is one in the first degree.
The underlying factual theory for charging the former president rests on Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as “legal expenses,” when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the pornography performer from publicly claiming she had sex with Trump a decade earlier. In total, the Trump Organization reported legal expenses of $420,000 paid to Cohen in 2017, at a monthly rate of $35,000. Cohen, however, had provided no legal services for the Trump Organization that year.
To bump what would be a misdemeanor under New York law to a felony, pundits are suggesting the D.A. will argue Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records to conceal the commission of one or more federal election crimes. The Manhattan prosecutor, however, might also advance the theory that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsely report the payments with the intent of committing tax fraud.
Even before reaching the merits of the legal theories being bandied about to charge Trump criminally, a public suspicious of the Get-Trump attitude seen over the last seven years will notice the statute of limitations seems to bar Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. But Bragg has two ways to sidestep the two- and five-year statutory time limits.
First, if Bragg charges Trump with a felony, the longer five-year period applies. While more than five years have passed since the Trump Organization last recorded a “legal expense” to Cohen, New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, by executive order extended the statute of limitations for one year (or thereabouts) due to Covid-19. That tolling would make a felony indictment against Trump timely.
Alternatively, because New York law provides that any time a defendant remains “continuously outside” of the state is excluded from the statutory period, an indictment against Trump would be timely. From late January 2017 on, Trump was “continuously outside” New York, first in D.C. and then in Florida, meaning the statute of limitations only ran those few times Trump was in New York. That isn’t even close to the two years necessary for the misdemeanor statute of limitations to expire, much less the five-year period applicable to felony offenses.
So, the statute of limitations won’t likely bar one or more falsifying business records counts. But what about the merits?
Cohen already pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his payments to Stormy Daniels. But to convict Trump on the anticipated state charges, the Manhattan prosecutor would need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump (1) caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records (2) “with the intent to defraud.”
From public reporting, it appears Cohen is a star witness for the prosecution, likely testifying Trump directed him to make the payments to silence Daniels and promising reimbursement from the Trump Organization. Whether a paper trail supports Cohen’s testimony is unclear, but without one, it will be Cohen’s word—the word of a convicted felon—crucial to establish the crime.
Cohen’s testimony also already appears under fire. A “former legal advisor to Cohen,” Robert Costello, reportedly testified before the grand jury on Monday, “solely to undermine” Cohen’s credibility.
But prosecutors will need to prove more than that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records. They will need to establish he also had the “intent to defraud.” Here, the defense can easily counter that Trump’s intent was to avoid embarrassment to his family caused by what he claims is a lie, rather than to “defraud” anyone.
Should prosecutors nonetheless prove their case, it is only a misdemeanor, unless they can further establish Trump intended “to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime. Proving either will be even more challenging.
First, to establish Trump intended to conceal a violation of federal election law, the Manhattan D.A. would need to prove Trump had committed an election-law crime. While Cohen alleged paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, Trump has another justification, namely avoiding any embarrassment for himself and his family, that does not run afoul of federal election law.
Proving Trump intended to commit tax fraud would likely be a difficult case to prove as well, with prosecutors needing to establish Trump’s knowledge of the intricacies of the corporation’s tax filings to show he held the requisite intent.
This inside-the-law analysis reveals an exceedingly weak case, but that is only a fraction of what the public will care about. On top of the questionable charges, the general public will see a man hounded for seven years with false claims of Russia collusion and other supposed crimes. They will see a statute of limitations that on its face appears to have run. And they will see a local prosecutor pushing charges previously rejected by a federal U.S. attorney.
Then there was the public pressure placed on Bragg to indict Trump, best exemplified by the backlash he faced after he apparently backed off charging the former president for crimes supposedly connected to the Trump Organization’s finances. At the time, “two prosecutors quit his office,” and “one of the prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, wrote a highly critical book that the media has celebrated.”
In short, the public will see a vindictive political prosecution of Trump.
Maybe there will be a time to charge a president or a former president with a crime, but the facts here do not support making that leap. While D.A. Bragg and those pushing for Trump’s indictment may seek cover behind the well-worn American proposition that “no one is above the law,” the corollary is equally important: Our political enemies are not targeted for prosecution.
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.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has issued a statement after top House Republicans demanded that Bragg testify to Congress on a possible indictment of former President Donald Trump.
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law,” a spokesperson for Bragg’s office told Fox News Digital.
“In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work,” the spokesperson added.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the other top Republicans on the Administration and Oversight committees on Monday sent a letter to Bragg to demand that he turn over documents related to his Trump investigation and testify before Congress after reports said that Trump could face an indictment this week.
(Christopher Goodney / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File | Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File)
“You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former president of the United States and current declared candidate for that office,” the letter said.
Republicans warned that an indictment of Trump over alleged hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 would “erode confidence in the evenhanded application of justice and unalterably interfere in the court of the 2024 presidential election.”
“In light of the serious consequences of your actions, we expect that you will testify about what plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.
The letter was signed by Jordan, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis.
Former President Donald Trump has denied allegations that he had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and paid her hush money to cover it up in 2016, calling Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation a “witch hunt.” (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images / File)
It marked the first official attempt by these Republican-controlled committees in the new Congress to conduct oversight of the law enforcement officials who have been investigating Trump.
The potential charges stem from the $130,000 hush-money payment that then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019, even as Cohen implicated him as part of his plea deal. The Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.
However, Bragg’s office is reportedly considering whether to bring charges against Trump by elevating misdemeanor charges for falsifying business records, for which the statute of limitations has expired, to a felony charge of falsifying those records to conceal alleged campaign finance violations — an accusation levied at Trump that the Justice Department has already declined to prosecute.
The New York Young Republicans Club held a rally in front of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in Manhattan, New York, on March 20, 2023. (Fatih Aktas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Republicans called this a “novel and untested legal theory” and insisted that Bragg was “motivated by political calculations.”
Bragg’s spokesperson pushed back against the accusation by insisting that the DA’s office follows the facts.
Are you angry yet? You should be. Our economy is slowing, banks are reeling, inflation remains scorching-high, real incomes are dropping, home prices are falling and Americans everywhere are becoming poorer by the minute. On top of everything else, now we have the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, infuriating bailouts and the resulting panic over banks. As with nearly everything that has gone wrong on their watch, including the inexcusable border chaos, the catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan and harmful inflation, the go-to response by the White House has been to blame President Trump.
Specifically, to blame Trump for signing legislation that loosened regulations on regional banks in 2018.That was Joe Biden’s message in the pitiful 5-minute address in which he tried but utterly failed to reassure the nation that our banking system is sound.
Here’s what Biden didn’t say: they knew. Regulators knew that Silicon Valley Bank was on the brink of failure. Supervisors spotted fatal weaknesses at the tech lender last summer, including some deemed “matters requiring immediate attention”; they told SVB management last fall that its model was flawed and could result in a run on deposits.
Despite the grave warning, the New York Times reports, management failed to change course and supervisors failed to act. By early this spring, SVB was in yet another review, this one on its risk management practices. Bottom line: there were none.
In other words, there were plenty of regulations and processes in place to prevent the catastrophe that occurred at SVB. Critics have assailed the San Francisco Fed, the supervisory authority, and its chief Mary Daly, for negligence. Some have rightly said that having SVB CEO Greg Becker on the overseer Fed board posed an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest.
It is hard to dismiss those who assert that the eagerness with which the Fed, the Treasury and the White House stepped in to bail out SVB and Signature Bank, caught in SVB’s backdraft, stemmed from the cozy relationships and giant political donations that Democrats receive from the tech community. It is, indeed, one big Happy Valley.
After all, the bailouts (which must not be called bailouts) infuriated our European allies, and are a great embarrassment to our globalist Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who surely resisted the rescue. Yellen has spent much of her tenure atop our financial edifice working to cede U.S. tax policy to international organizations. To that end she has lobbied financial regulators around the world promising, among other things, that the U.S. would never again bail out banks.
The Financial Times reports that Europe’s “top policymakers are seething” over the decision to cover all SVB’s depositors, “fearing it will undermine a globally agreed regime.” Those critics are reportedly shocked at the “total and utter incompetence” of U.S. authorities.
It did not have to be this way. Do not forget who brought us to this sorry state. Do not be fooled. There is one and only one reason that Americans are struggling, that we are heading into a recession, and our banks are on thin ice.
President Biden, Democrats in Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jay Powell have orchestrated a reckless trashing of our economy. In a shameless bid to buy votes, Biden and the Democrat majority in Congress spent trillions of unneeded dollars, mainly aimed at politically favored groups like the teachers’ unions and the climate lobby, driving the economy into warp speed and igniting inflation.
Jay Powell, hoping to be reappointed Fed Chair, ignored rising prices for months, continuing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds and mortgage-backed securities even as inflation topped 6%, aware that his only competition for the job was Lael Brainard, an avowed “dove.” Moving faster to tackle inflation might have cost Powell his job.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Yellen became a cheerleader for blowing up the country’s deficits, all the while dismissing inflation as “small” and “manageable”; it wasn’t until the end of 2021 that she admitted it was not, after all, “transitory”. Once a respected economist, Yellen has become a political hack.
Joe Biden and Janet Yellen lie when they say the economy was “reeling” when he became president; it was actually growing at 6% and recovering nicely from the once-in-a-lifetime shutdown caused by COVID-19. Thanks to bipartisan efforts to prop up stalled businesses and consumers who had lost their jobs, the slump occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic was sharp but mercifully short-lived. The government expanded relief programs, the Fed lowered interest rates; the system was working as planned.
Jobs were coming back, inflation was only 1.4%, and consumer sentiment, key to spending, had rebounded sharply from the low of 72 on April 2020 to 79. (Last month, even before the bank problems, it stood at 67; in February 2020, before COVID hit, it stood at 101. Bravo Biden!)
Joe Biden took office and within weeks rushed to pass the American Rescue Act, throwing $1.9 trillion onto an economy plagued with supply chain problems. The bill passed with Democrat-only support, in part because Republicans recognized that it could prove inflationary (as even Democrat Larry Summers predicted.) Inflation indeed began to climb, to 4.2% in April 2021, and to a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
The banking sector will likely calm, and inflation has dropped, but we are not out of the woods. There are recession signs aplenty and Biden has offered up a ludicrous and wasteful budget that Republicans must oppose. There will be a fight over raising the debt ceiling as the GOP pushes for needed spending restraint, which could get ugly.
But voters need to remember as the next election nears: it did not have to be this way. This was not an act of God; this was a reckless hijacking of our economy that put the entire country at risk. Voters must fire those responsible.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
“For those of y’all that don’t know what the f**k is going on in the state of Mississippi; they are trying to pass a law to reinstate the Jim Crow laws.”
Recently I was talking with a co-worker, and he mentioned that something going on in Mississippi. “You know what’s going on over there, don’t you?” he said. “I don’t,” I replied. His next statement was completely unexpected. “They are tryin’ to bring back Jim Crow laws down there.”
Right then, I knew something was off. After all, if that were true it would be worldwide news. I mean, the world would literally be on fire. I remembered how the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis had in turn sparked riots in some parts here in Arizona- this would certainly be worse. Next, he shows me a video of a random, unnamed black woman on Facebook, declaring the “news” quoted above. “For all of you who are young,” she continues, “and don’t know what the Jim Crow laws are-look up the story of Emmett Till.”
Alright, that’s enough of that.
Of all the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ floating around in the ‘metaverse,’ this should have been flagged immediately. That’s what they profess to do, right? Of course, this was a lie the left didn’t care about. This particular story is so full of mistruths, misinterpretations and revisionist history, it is a challenge just to know where to begin- so let’s start with Jim Crow and Emmett Till.
The term ‘Jim Crow’ was a societal elbow-in-the-ribs to the black populace, reminding them that their “place” as 2nd-class citizens would never change as far as some were concerned. In order to devalue the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Jim Crow laws were created to enforce racial segregation and the beratement of freed blacks, beginning in the late 1800’s, and ending with the start of the civil rights movement.
As for the Emmett Till reference, there is literally no connection between the two. Fourteen-year-old Emmett was lynched, murdered, and nearly beaten beyond recognition for the crime of flirting with a white woman. Though this horrific incident was one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement- it had nothing to do with Jim Crow.
Aside from the rhetoric and despite what has been said, at the heart of the concerns is not Mississippi itself, but rather the town of Jackson; or more specifically- House Bill 1020.
HB 1020 was designed to control Jackson’s crime rate by changing the way it has been managed. One of the ways it would accomplish this, was by adding new judges and removing the sole power to elect those magistrates from the hands of the people. With Jackson being more than 80% black, Democrats and their voters had all they needed to cry, you guessed it- racism.
Truth be told, Jacksonians had bigger fish to fry.
According to WLBT news in Jackson, this report, just two short years ago, reveals much about life in this city of 436,000:
“People are being killed at a higher rate per capita in the Capital City than any other major city in the U.S., according to a 3 On Your Side analysis of more than fifty municipalities across the country. With 153 killings thus far in 2021, the homicide rate for Jackson is 99.5 per 100,000 residents, a rate that blazes past Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore.
For this analysis, 3 On Your Side calculated per capita rates of killings for cities with a population of at least 130,000, including major ones like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and cities that had previously been ranked for high homicide rates, such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge.”
With this information in mind, Jackson’s leaders set out to change its quickly deteriorating status.
The purpose of HB 1020 was to ensure safety in ways current leadership had failed to accomplish. However, despite addendums made to the bill to appease concerns of overreach, Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba refused to admit that HB 1020 would succeed in either of its forms in areas where he himself had failed:
“The recent amendment to HB1020 still exists as an attack against black leadership. It is an effort
to strip one of the largest black communities in the nation of its voting rights, pick its leadership and deny the right to vote,” Lumumba continues. “This bill would make Mississippi a model for red states with blue capital cities. At its core, this bill is about lawmakers giving themselves the ability to outmaneuver the federal government. So, by policy or through actually preventing people to vote, it still reflects the poorest version of Mississippi. Lastly, the portion of the bill that suggests that the City of Jackson sign an MOU (memorandum of understanding) in ‘agreement’ with the CCID merely suggests legislators realize this bill is fraught with constitutional issues. Therefore, they want it cloaked as an agreement between the city and the state – as opposed to what it really is – a seizure of power over our City.”
Once again, those that seek to gain and/or hold on to power are willing to do so by any means necessary. As such, those feigning concern over racist policies and platforms employ the same in order to maintain control-even fearmongering.
Much like the early days of the KKK (and Jim Crow) when violent power grabs no longer achieved the goals, scare tactics like this video/narrative are used as a last resort. Both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X understood better than most that the greatest challenges that faced the black community, even in their time, were those within the community itself.
No group in history has done more to ensure its own genocide than black people.
Though more than 100 years have passed, the adage still applies: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat.” Clearly Black America still has a lot to learn.
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A children’s book event hosted by Chaya Raichik, a conservative author who runs the @LibsOfTikTok account, has been canceled over threats.
“We have received threats of potentially inappropriate and unsafe behavior at the NYC story hour with Chaya Raichik on Sunday,” Raichik’s publisher tweeted Friday.
“[We] have advised Chaya we cancel the event. With children involved, we don’t want to take any chances.”
The publisher also vowed to “find a way to combat this moving forward” and advised people to “stay tuned for an announcement in the coming days.”
We have received threats of potentially inappropriate and unsafe behavior at the NYC story hour with Chaya Raichik on Sunday and have advised Chaya we cancel the event. With children being involved, we don’t want to take any chances.
The event, which was to be held Sunday, was billed as a rival event to a drag queen story hour hosted by New York Attorney General Letitia James on the same day, Fox News Digital reported. Raichik’s now-canceled event was sponsored by the publisher and the New York Young Republican Club, according to its EventBrite listing.
Christian actor and author Kirk Cameron’s Freedom Island Tour book event with Brave Books was crashed by protesters at a public library in Fayetteville, Arkansas Friday, the publisher and the Post Millennial reported.
“This hateful group, dressed to disturb children, were angry when Kirk Cameron brought up God and faith with the children and parents during our BRAVE story hour,” the publisher tweeted.
The tweet includes a video where one of the costumed protesters appears to say he stepped on a “poor tiny blonde white girl.” The video cuts away to a woman confirming the person stepped on her twice and hit her with a cane.
A black drag queen nun in whiteface brags about stepping on “poor tiny blonde white girl.”
He is a part of “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence of the Arkansas Chapter of Hillbilly Harlots”.
This hateful group, dressed to disturb children, were angry when Kirk Cameron brought… pic.twitter.com/NB1jv8Xouw
Brave Books is not alone among publishers whose conservative authors have been heckled, threatened, or assaulted.
“I understand their hesitation and decision to cancel,” Bethany Mandel, co-author of “Stolen Youth,” told TheBlaze Sunday morning.
“It’s one thing to assume risk as an adult, but the equation changes when there are young children involved,” Mandel also said.
Mandel and co-author New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz had protesters at their New York City book party March 8. Mandel, who had her 2-month-old infant with her at the party, tells TheBlaze protesters violently threw glasses and screamed at attendees.
“There’s an element of danger to just putting out a conservative book,” Mandel said. “Now, the situation is that children can attend drag queen story hours in bars, but not a party for an orthodox Jewish author for a wholesome book about safety.”
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Ohio and Iowa are the latest states to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an interstate voter list maintenance group controlled by Democratic operatives, after a meeting of its board failed to deliver the aforementioned states’ requested reforms.
The two midwestern states follow in the steps of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, which withdrew from the alliance in early March over ERIC’s failure to remove its founder, Democrat operative David Becker, from its board, and its requirement that member states conduct voter registration outreach to eligible but unregistered residents in their states. Louisiana and Alabama withdrew last year.
In response to Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia’s withdrawal from the group, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent a letter to ERIC threatening Ohio’s departure if the board did not remove Becker — or “ex-officio members” — from its bylaws and cut the requirement for states to conduct partisan voter registration outreach. Instead, states should utilize ERIC’s data-sharing services “in the manner which they believe best serves their local interests,” LaRose argued.
While Becker seemingly complied with one of LaRose’s demands by tweeting that he would not seek renomination to ERIC’s board, ERIC refused to execute LaRose’s other reforms during a March 17 board meeting.
At the meeting, two proposals were put to a vote: changing ERIC’s bylaws to allow states to choose how they utilize ERIC’s data, and pairing the voter registration outreach requirement to a report that helps states catch double voting. Both proposals failed to pass because ERIC’s bylaws require an 80 percent majority before making a change.
“ERIC has chosen repeatedly to ignore demands to embrace reforms that would bolster confidence in its performance, encourage growth in its membership, and ensure not only its present stability but also its durability,” LaRose wrote in a letter announcing Ohio’s withdrawal on March 17. “Rather, you have chosen to double-down on poor strategic decisions, which have only resulted in the transformation of a previously bipartisan organization to one that appears to favor only the interests of one political party.”
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate told Politico that the failed votes prevent ERIC members from doing what’s best for their states.
“Ultimately, the departure of several key states and today’s vote is going to impact the ability for ERIC to be an effective tool for the State of Iowa,” Pate said. “My office will be recommending resigning our membership from ERIC.”
As previously reported by The Federalist, ERIC is a voter roll management system used by nearly 30 states and the District of Columbia. It was created under the guise of helping states clean their rolls — i.e., remove dead and duplicate registrants — but does more to inflate them.
As a part of the alliance, member states are required to contact eligible but unregistered residents to register to vote. ERIC creates these lists of unregistered residents and sends them to member states to contact themselves. Given ERIC’s partisan origins and alliance with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) — one of two groups that funneled $419 million in grants from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to mostly-blue areas of swing states during the 2020 election — it’s likely ERIC targets Democrat-leaning residents to register.
Despite ERIC’s obvious ties to the left, corporate media outlets are characterizing states that have withdrawn from the organization and its critics as “conspiracy theorists” who are peddling disinformation. Thankfully, states like Ohio and Iowa have ignored this intimidation campaign.
“I cannot justify the use of Ohio’s tax dollars for an organization that seems intent on rejecting meaningful accountability, publicly maligning my motives, and waging a relentless campaign of misinformation about this effort,” LaRose wrote. “Additionally, I cannot accept the board’s refusal – for a third time – to adopt basic reforms to the use of ERIC’s data-sharing services.”
Alaska and Texas are two more member states considering withdrawing from ERIC.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public.
To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:
Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video.
Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend.
Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.
In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.
Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.
Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between.
Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting.
Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.
The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.
We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.
But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth.
A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.
The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.
Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so.
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.
Even if Democrats really were concerned about our convoluted election regulations, no serious person thinks New York’s district attorney has a case against Trump.
As the saying goes: If even Never Trump Jonah Goldbergdoubts your wisdom in bringing criminal charges against the former president, then you know it’s a stupid case.
Nobody actually says that, but it’s one of many indicators that the indictment potentially coming this week from Democrat New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (yes, that’s his actual name) is so absurd as to make anyone wonder if our justice system really is a joke.
Trump on Saturday announced that he expected to be arrested soon in relation to the very old, very stale, very tiresome allegation that he violated campaign finance laws when he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment made to a porn actress in order to supposedly cover up a past affair. The accusation is that Trump did it to protect his campaign and intentionally neglected to publicly disclose the payment, as would be required by law.
I think Democrats have no interest whatsoever in campaign finance violations and really just enjoy thinking about Trump’s sex life. But even if they really were concerned with the integrity of our convoluted election money regulations, no serious person thinks Bragg has a case. That’s evidenced no less than by the fact that the people who considered pursuing this charge previously eventually dropped it— including Bragg!
While Trump was in office and Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, his office looked at this very case and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. It’s a horse that has been beaten to death, resuscitated, and beaten again. Then smacked on the rear one more time.
But persecuting Trump has no downside for Democrats chasing fame. And now is as good a time as any. The historic nature of putting a former president in handcuffs as he campaigns for another term is too good for a low-rent prosecutor to pass up.
Not so good for a republic that wants to last another year, let alone 200, but that’s never top of mind for people like Bragg.
Try to wrap your mind around it. The former president, the likely Republican presidential nominee in 2024, might be seen on live national television cuffed, placed in the back of a squad car, and taken to a police station for his mug shot. All this over campaign paperwork that would any other time be resolved with a corrected filing and, perhaps, a penalty fee.
And that’s only if you presume Trump is guilty. Rational people think he might have tried hiding an affair, but that it’s absolutely possible it was for other reasons. (I wonder if anyone has ever in American history tried hiding an affair for reasons outside of protecting his prospects to be elected U.S. president. Interesting question, but far from settled!)
If Bragg brings an indictment, that’s one up for him and another one down for faith in America.
With word from former President Donald Trump that he will “be arrested” on a criminal indictment engineered by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign, it is essential to examine what motivated the charges.
At its core, the case represents an egregious abuse of power and the corrupt weaponization of the law for political gain. Bereft of any credible evidence, Bragg is contorting the law in a brazen attempt to inflate his case. His actions constitute serious prosecutorial misconduct. It is the culmination of a years-long effort by the District Attorney’s Office to target Trump for something – anything.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the progressive DA that his case against the former president is the definition of flimsy and stale as month-old bread. Bragg is determined to hack off the mold and sell it as something fresh and new.
Former President Trump said he will “be arrested” on a criminal indictment engineered by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, (Associated Press)
Forget about the statute of limitations that expired years ago. Or that his predecessor declined prosecution because the law does not support a criminal charge. Or that the feds who investigated the case determined that the evidence just wasn’t there. Never mind that Bragg’s legal theory is novel, if not bizarre. Or that his star witness, Michael Cohen, is a confessed liar who went to prison and whose name is synonymous with sleaze and dishonesty.
In a sensible world, all of that should matter. But it doesn’t because Trump is the Democrats’ eternal boogeyman. Since he’s running again for president, he has to be stopped – by hook or by crook.
So, Bragg exhumed a seven-year-old corpse of a case and appears to have snookered a grand jury into indicting the former president. The end justifies any malevolent means.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg during a press conference in New York on Sept. 8, 2022. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In Bragg’s twisted book, Donald Trump should be treated like a hardcore criminal because money was given to porn star, Stormy Daniels, in exchange for keeping her mouth shut in the run-up to the 2016 election. Bear in mind, such agreements are legally permissible. Silence that is conditional upon payment is not against the law. Non-disclosure agreements with pecuniary benefits attached are a common method of maintaining confidentiality. Even if it involves consensual sex, which Trump vigorously denies.
The DA’s only impediment was the law and how to circumvent its narrowly defined language to trump up a case against Trump. That’s when Bragg was forced to get creative. He dreamed up a legally cockamamie plan to supercharge a misdemeanor into a felony by bootstrapping a supposed secondary crime to it.
Here’s how it works, at least in Bragg’s brain. It is a mere misdemeanor under New York law to falsify business records. But by claiming that the Stormy payment was somehow calculated to violate arcane campaign reporting laws, viola! A second crime that elevates it to a felony.
Michael Cohen leaves his apartment to report to prison in Manhattan on May 6, 2019. (Reuters/Jeenah Moon TPX Images of the Day/File Photo)
Bragg’s scrutiny of campaign laws must have been cursory. In his zeal to nail Trump, he apparently skipped over the part about “dual purpose” contributions. That is, if money paid serves a double or ancillary function then it is not a reportable expense or donation to the campaign. Hence, no crime was committed. This has been Trump’s argument all along. He did it primarily for personal and commercial reasons.
There are a few other pesky problems with Bragg’s strategy. First, it would have to be shown that Trump himself was involved in falsifying records. Second, Bragg would have to prove that Trump not only understood the complex and convoluted campaign laws that few people comprehend, but that he intended to violate them. Third, which set of campaign laws applies? There’s the rub.
It’s been reported that Bragg is considering citing New York’s campaign statutes as the “second crime.” But wait, the presidential contest was a federal election. Moreover, state campaign laws are preempted by federal campaign laws. So, that’s a stretch. What about using those same federal laws as the second crime? Can someone be charged under state law for violating a federal law? Not likely. Prosecutors would be exceeding their jurisdictional authority. The DA can only charge under state statutes.
It is obvious that Bragg doesn’t give a hoot about the law. He’s banking on the likelihood that a liberal New York judge will let the case go to a Manhattan jury stacked with biased Trump-haters anxious to ignore all the legal constraints and convict the former president despite the paucity of incriminating evidence. However, I wouldn’t bet on any conviction being upheld on appeal.
Also, don’t be fooled by the theatrics of an expected grand jury indictment. That was a cinch. There are rarely any enforceable rules of evidence because the proceedings are secret and lopsided. Double hearsay, unauthenticated documents, and all kinds of sketchy stuff that is otherwise inadmissible at trial can be introduced without objection.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels (AP)
No one from the defense is present to contest the purported evidence or to challenge the witnesses. Jurors tend to accept as gospel the pablum prosecutors spoon-feed them. It’s the equivalent of a turkey shoot. And a charade. Hence the old saying, “You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
The tortured history of trying to criminalize the Stormy episode undermines Bragg’s entire rationale. The Justice Department, as well as the Federal Elections Commission, long ago examined whether Trump violated election laws. They summarily dropped the matter after concluding there was no viable case. But Bragg won’t let a dead horse remain unbeaten. He is resolved to resurrect a feckless and moribund case.
As the chief prosecutor in a city reeling from rampant crime, you would assume that Bragg is preoccupied with public safety instead of pursuing a politically motivated case. Wrong assumption. The lawlessness that plagues New York City doesn’t seem to interest him in the least.
The great irony is that Bragg has spent most of his tenure in office downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. But now he wants to upgrade a misdemeanor to a felony because his target’s name is Trump. His selective prosecution is an affront to the principle of equal justice under the law.
I suspect that the district attorney’s real goal is to interfere in the upcoming presidential election by knocking out Trump. In a democracy, that important decision should be left up to voters, not a local prosecutor doing the bidding of his political party. Fortunately, most Americans are smart enough to see through the veneer of a sham case.
Indeed, Bragg’s actions may well have the unintended consequence of rallying even more support for Donald Trump.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His latest book is the New York Times bestseller “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History”
The United Nations (UN) published its latest climate change report Monday which doubled down on global warming-related risks and which the intergovernmental organization dubbed a “survival guide for humanity.”
The synthesis report, assembled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), represents the UN’s latest attempt to sound the alarm on the risks posed by climate change and not taking aggressive actions to halt global warming. According to the document, “unsustainable energy and land use” has caused the world to warm 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, close to the 1.5-degree emergency threshold.
“The rate of temperature rise in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Monday. “Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least two million years. The climate time-bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.”
Do you still need proof that these High Priests of Climate Change Religion thinks everyone but them are as stupid as a stump? Well, ask yourself some questions. #1) Has mankind kept climate records over the last two million years? NO? Then how could they make such an asinine statement?
#2) Is man really capable of changing the climate temperature of the EARTH? According to one source (was not able to find any other definitive answers) the total cubic feet of air space around the Earth is approximately 512,222, 461, 000, 000(?) cubic feet. Really???? By making the Draconian changes these self appointed High Priests have planned, is it going to change ANYTHING more that our freedom?
When is “ENOUGH, ENOUGH?
“As it shows, the 1.5-degree limit is achievable. But it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” he continued. “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, on April 26, 2022. (Vladimir Astapkovich, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
The report stated that every additional increment of warming that occurs will result in “rapidly escalating hazards” for humanity.
For example, it warned that climate change will spur more intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other extreme risks to human health and ecosystems. And food insecurity will increase while additional conflicts and pandemics will be harder to manage, the report said.
“Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said in a statement. “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”
“Transformational changes are more likely to succeed where there is trust, where everyone works together to prioritise risk reduction, and where benefits and burdens are shared equitably,” Lee added. “We live in a diverse world in which everyone has different responsibilities and different opportunities to bring about change. Some can do a lot while others will need support to help them manage the change.”
The IPCC report further called for a massive investment in clean energy and an immediate phasing out of fossil fuels across the world. The UN also called on Western nations to boost the amount of capital and financing they devote to climate investments.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry attends a UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 12, 2021. (REUTERS/Yves Herman)
During the most recent UN climate conference in November, nations committed to billions of dollars worth of climate finance for developing countries and rallied to call on private investors to boost climate financing.
However, fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas still account for the vast majority of worldwide energy consumption, according to the latest International Energy Agency data. The three sources produce nearly 70% of all global energy and a large majority of electricity generation which accounts for another 17% of energy produced.
“Every country must be part of the solution,” Guterres added Monday. “Demanding others move first only ensures humanity comes last. The Acceleration Agenda calls for a number of other actions. Specifically: No new coal and the phasing out of coal by 2030 in OECD countries and 2040 in all other countries. Ending all international public and private funding of coal.”
“Ceasing all licensing or funding of new oil and gas – consistent with the findings of the International Energy Agency,” he continued. “Stopping any expansion of existing oil and gas reserves. Shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to a just energy transition. Establishing a global phase down of existing oil and gas production compatible with the 2050 global net-zero target.”
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Monday as a “Soros-funded prosecutor” who is “pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office” as he reportedly considers indicting former President Donald Trump on charges related to alleged hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
“I’ve seen rumors swirl, I have not seen any facts yet, and so I don’t know what’s going to happen,” DeSantis said in Florida when asked about the potential indictment of the former president.
“But I do know this,” he said. “The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor, and so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.”
Eyes are on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, left, and former President Donald Trump when thinking about the 2024 presidential election. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images / File)
The potential charges against Trump stem from the $130,000 hush-money payment that then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorneys office for the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019, even as Cohen implicated him as part of his plea deal. The Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.
Stormy Daniels (AP Photo / Markus Schreiber / File)
“And so, you’re talking about this situation with, and like, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair — I just I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said.
“But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments, you know, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office,” DeSantis said. “And I think that that’s fundamentally wrong.”
DeSantis said “Soros-funded prosecutors” may carry out “a high-profile politicized prosecution, and that’s bad.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a press conference in New York on Sept. 8, 2022. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“But the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans and all these different jurisdictions that they get victimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that the Soros DAs bring to their job,” DeSantis said. “They ignore crime and they empower criminals, and that hurts people, hurts a lot of people every single day.”
In 2022, during Bragg’s first year as Manhattan’s top prosecutor, he downgraded more than half of felony cases to misdemeanors. He campaigned on criminal justice reform and sent a “Day One” memo to staff upon taking office to downgrade certain felonies, such as armed robberies of commercial businesses. The move came at a time when crimes were up 27.6% in New York City, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Bragg declined to prosecute 35% more felony cases than in 2019.
George Soros (Reuters / Lisi Niesner / File)
“These Soros district attorneys are a menace to society,” DeSantis said. “And I’m just glad that I’m the only governor in the country that’s actually removed one from office during my tenure.”
Last year, DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democratic prosecutor backed by liberal billionaire George Soros, for “neglecting his duties.” Warren had pledged not to bring charges against anyone who violates state abortion restrictions or bans on gender-transition procedures for minors. Warren is currently suing DeSantis.
As for a potential Trump indictment, DeSantis said, “We are not involved in this and won’t be involved in this.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gives a victory speech after defeating Democrat gubernatorial candidate Rep. Charlie Crist during his election night watch party at the Tampa Convention Center on Nov. 8, 2022, in Tampa, Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty Images)
“I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA,” he said. “He’s trying to do a political spectacle. He’s trying to virtue signal for his base. I’ve got real issues I got to deal with here in the state of Florida.”
DeSantis said there are “so many things pending” in front of the Florida state legislature.
“I’ve got to spend my time on issues that actually matter to people,” he said. “I can’t spend my time worrying about things of that nature.”
Trump, on Monday afternoon, responded to DeSantis on his TRUTH Social.
“Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!),” Trump posted, seemingly referring to an unsubstantiated claim about DeSantis that has circulated in left-wing blogs.
Trump added: “I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”
DeSantis’ team declined to comment on the former president’s post.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
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 Donald Trump.
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