It’s been a good year for classical Christian education. New school starts are up threefold, a book on classical education became No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and on Jan. 26, Fox Nation will release season two of a popular series on classical Christian education, “The Miseducation of America.” Of course, with growth comes attention. What is unusual this time is that someone with ties to our movement — one of our own — draws focus to a growing divide.
On Jan. 12, in the online journal Current, Jessica Hooten Wilson asked, “Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education?” It should come as no surprise that, within her mainstream academic ecosphere as a scholar at Pepperdine University, she gets pressure. “I experience regular pushback from those who perceive [classical Christian education] as white, Western-only, and male-dominated.” She proceeds to cast aspersions on a few people and organizations — including, indirectly, mine. Her accusations become a pretext for her thesis: “If the classical Christian school movement is to survive — let alone flourish — we must oppose all forms of racism and misogyny and stand with the beauty, goodness, and truth that we hold up for our students.” I’ll take her up on that charge.
Hooten Wilson is a staccato note at the end of a new tune within our circles. Her article praises those groups she believes are taking the right steps. So far, I’ve heard no one publicly state the thesis so clearly as she does: “We should peruse the authors of the works and, if applicable, the editors or introductory writers to ensure an assortment of voices … as well as an equality of both sexes. If we look at the table of contents of a textbook or a reading list for a semester and find not a single woman or person of color in that list, then that curriculum is misrepresenting the classical Christian tradition.”
Choosing the Classical Canon
For the better part of three millennia, philosophical, theological, and literary authors labored to create the classical canon, representing countless cultural influences. Over much of this same time period, learned scholars have made lists of those that deserve “canon” status. It is unclear if there are minorities or women in Cassiodorus’ list of authors (400 A.D.), or Leonardo Bruni or Battista Guarino’s lists (humanists from the 1400s) — they don’t use those categories. Mortimer Adler and his team of about 40 renowned scholars chose the most widely recognized list of books in our time based upon their contribution to “the great conversation.” Adler’s merit-based criteria required a work to have changed the course of history and to have developed the collective Western mind. What Adler’s team did not do is look to race or sex as criteria.
The Western classical tradition has long included people of every race and sex in a particular way: The tradition deals with a body of texts that address the universal truths about the human condition, rising above our culture’s current quest to silo everyone into an intersection of identity.
Whatever your identity may be, the long journey toward Aeneus’ destiny amplifies the tension between duty and desire. The hilarity of twins unknown to each other, living in the same city, begets “A Comedy of Errors,” no matter your race or sex. Would Hooten Wilson tell the young women and minorities in our schools that they cannot fully converse with these texts because their voices are not represented in them? Shall our schools sacrifice universal human dignity on the altar of token inclusion? Hooten Wilson limits her criteria to women and minorities. Some, like Kimberle Crenshaw, will not be satisfied with this attempt to diversify our reading lists — there will always be one more disaffected group.
Duped into Old-Fashioned Racism and Sexism
By Hooten Wilson’s standard, we must scrape and scrape until we find a “fair” representation of “diverse” contributors. “I am especially excited about the number of women that we added to the Middle Ages list. … Classical schools should look through their reading lists to make sure women and persons of color are not excluded from their curriculum.” Classical Christian education should not be duped by the spirit of our age into old-fashioned racism or sexism. This spirit was cultivated not by our tradition, as Hooten Wilson claims, but rather by the Frankfurt School.
During the 1930s, a group of cultural Marxist scholars set up shop at Columbia University. The Frankfurt School set out on a mission to end the influence of Christianity in our culture. Their thickly veiled product called critical theory deliberately divides us by whispering one small lie, presented in two axioms: For a person to relate to anything, or gain from anything — in this case an intellectual tradition — it must have elements that “look like them” and match their “identity.” And, a second axiom follows: Thus, if something does not contain “diverse and inclusive” elements, it is racist or misogynist. These fruits of critical theory travel down a circuitous path from the Frankfurt School, to Hooten Wilson’s proposal, to a few classical educators who take incremental steps toward critical theory — all of this under the trendy label of “inclusiveness.”
True Liberation Through Classical Christian Education
Classical education was created to, and has, liberated the minds of countless people groups in history, and it is capable of doing the same in America today — and beyond. It has been at the forefront of the march for freedom and education; for individual rights apart from race or class or sex. If we let the very toxin that infects progressive education get into our classrooms, we’re doomed. This toxin was created and propagated by those who hate our tradition. Should we voluntarily drink it?
My daughter recently graduated from New Saint Andrews College. This is one of the institutions that those in Hooten Wilson’s camp label “misogynist.” The college seeks to uphold and respect traditional Christian femininity, which displeases feminists who seem to hate femininity. Misogyny? When my daughter brought her friends to our home over Thanksgiving, I remember listening to the conversation and thinking, “Where do these women come from? They’re strong, bright, extremely well-read, fluent in ancient languages, and honoring of Christian truth — including their God-given womanhood.” None were weak women. All seemed faithful, happy, and confident. I don’t think any of them would want Hooten Wilson’s prescription for their reading list.
Is Racism a Bug or a Feature in Classical Christian Education?
The Frankfurt School’s purpose was to deconstruct. To do so, they inserted a “bug” in our educational system: critical theory, and all of its descendent forms. Some in our movement now offer a batch of code that has this bug embedded deeply within it — in the form of reading lists. By Hooten Wilson’s reckoning, these groups are heading in the right direction. The rest of us are not. Will our institutions continue to follow her lead by adopting coded terms like “Kingdom Diversity”? Or will we recognize the code as a virus and say, “No thank you. The classical Christian tradition is above all that nonsense — and the nonsense of white nationalists, by the way. May a plague be on all your racist houses.”
If classical Christian education is to survive, it has to reject the foolishness of our age and embrace Christ’s way alone. Christ’s church favors neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.
The humanities are great because they unite. They are universal. Women and non-Europeans are now, in our present time, contributing to classical Christian education in spades. I work so that all children can rise up and join the great conversation without barriers.
“Identity,” however, won’t fit here. Check it at the door. We are Christ’s. We are classical. Those who want to be loved by the spirit of our age will become intoxicated by it, and slowly die of its poison.
David Goodwin is the editor of The Classical Difference magazine, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and the co-author of The New York Times no. 1 best seller “Battle for the American Mind.” You can find him at Substack.
Adam Schiff and a group of Democrats introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision, one of the greatest free-speech victories in history.
It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens United was a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”
Recall, however, that Citizens United decision revolved around the federal government’s banning of a documentary critical of 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before the Democratic primary elections. At the time, McCain-Feingold made it illegal for corporations (groups of freely associating citizens) and unions (ditto) to engage in “electioneering” a month before a primary or two months before a general election. It was outright censorship. In oral arguments, then-Solicitor General of the United States, now-Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan initially contended that the federal government had the right to censor books that “express advocacy.”
Also recall that “campaign finance” laws — speech codes, in reality — were written by politicians and defended by a media encumbered by any limitations on their own free expression. These detestable laws prohibited groups of citizens from assembling and pooling their resources to engage more effectively in what is the most important kind of political expression at the most vital time, right before an election.
Schiff’s amendment would overturn Citizens United, and thus the First Amendment, and empower state and federal governments to enact “reasonable, viewpoint-neutral” limitations on speech that “influences” elections.
For one thing, even a wholly neutral restrictions on political speech were possible, they would still be restrictions on expression. It doesn’t matter one whit if you find those restrictions “reasonable” or “neutral.” The right of free speech isn’t contingent on fairness or outcomes or your good faith limitations. It is a free-standing, inherent right protected by the Constitution, not prescribed to us by the state in portions. It’s amazing that this has to be said.
Moreover, do Democrats trust Kevin McCarthy’s conception of “reasonable”? Because I don’t. Nor do I trust Hakeem Jeffries or that weasel Schiff, who has already personally engaged in censoring dissent. As Lois Lerner could tell you, any law empowering bureaucrats to define political speech will be arbitrarily enforced and, inevitably, abused. The only “viewpoint-neutral” position on speech is that it’s none of the state’s business.
Then again, not even the amendment is neutral. Section 4 of Schiff’s proposal offers an exemption to the “press.” Who is the press? Bureaucrats, no doubt, will make that determination. Schiff knows that most large communication companies already work for Democrats. The big studios produce movies and documentaries with one ideological viewpoint; and major news outlets give one side billions in in-kind contributions. The amendment would strip one group of its power to compete in the marketplace of ideas. “By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in Citizens United, “the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice.”
Schiff’s amendment could also be used to strip people of anonymity. “Dark money” has been a bogeyman of the left for years, treated as one of the most corrosive elements in contemporary politics — even though leftists are more reliant on anonymous big-dollar money than conservatives. Of course, the expectation that private citizens have any responsibility to publicly attach their names to political speech — as Publius might tell you — is destructive nonsense.
“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority,” the 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission famously noted. It “exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society.” There are entire genres of mainstream “reporting” that exist to dox heretics and punish dissent and engage in struggle sessions. Leftists want to create as many Brendan Eichs as possible to chill speech.
Schiff claims he wants to “return power to people” by allowing the state to prescribe the way they can participate in political debate. Schiff’s amendment includes restricting corporations from spending “unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.” Corporations have been banned from donating directly to candidates since 1907. But why shouldn’t private entities, groups of people, be allowed to “influence” politics? Anyway, you can already imagine the malleability of the word “influence.” Will California ban corporations from influencing green policy? Or only from influencing cultural policy? Boy, I wonder.
A decade ago, politicians would give us some perfunctory words about the importance of free expression. Those days are gone. The bogus panic over “disinformation” — without free will, you guys are far too susceptible to bad ideas — has given them the excuse to wring their hands over the dangerous excesses of the First Amendment.
These days a person can contribute as much money as they please to any independent group that shares their values. The notion that there should be restrictions stopping you from airing those views, whether you’re a billionaire or a poor student, is fundamentally un-American and authoritarian.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A Christian charity worker in Malta could face jail time after he claimed that his faith enabled him to turn away from a homosexual lifestyle he no longer wanted.
Matthew Grech, 33, faces potential fines and imprisonment for allegedly falling afoul of his country’s ban on “conversion practices” when he explained to a local media outlet last year how he left homosexuality behind because he came to believe it was wrong.
“I was invited by this new emerging platform in Malta called PMnews to share my story and to discuss sexuality in general,” Grech told Fox News Digital, noting that he was “surprised” when police later called him early on a Sunday morning and ultimately served him with a prosecution order summoning him to court on Feb. 3.
Legal counsel for Grech maintains that his case is the first of its kind and threatens to set in motion a legal “domino effect” that could endanger freedom of speech and religious liberty throughout the Western world.
Matthew Grech, 33, faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly advertising “conversion practices” when he gave an interview about his life. (Christian Concern)
‘Domino effect’
According to a transcript of his interview with PMnews Malta, at no point did Grech invite anyone to attend therapy to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, though he was critical of the Maltese law and explained how he came to believe that homosexuality is not an identity, but rather a practice that was incompatible with his Christian faith.
“They knew my stance around homosexuality and sexuality in general, so they wanted to hear a little bit more about it because many shun the other side of the story,” Grech said. “But these guys wanted to explore it because they’re for freedom of speech, and they don’t like it when viewpoints are shut down simply because they are unpopular.”
Grech said that after LGBT activists with ties to the Maltese government and the Malta Gay Rights Movement (MGRM) reported him to police for the interview, he now faces up to €5,000 in fines or up to five months in prison if convicted of violating Article 3, Section 3 of Malta’s Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender and Gender Expression Act, which makes it “unlawful for any person” to “advertise conversion practices.” The journalists who interviewed him also have upcoming court dates and face potential criminal sanctions for their part in conducting the interview.
MGRM did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment by time of publication.
Grech faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly running afoul of the country’s ban on advertising “conversion practices.” (Sylvain Sonnet via Getty Images)
Grech is slated to appear before the Court of Magistrates in Valletta on Feb. 3, where he will be assisted in legal defense by the Christian Legal Centre (CLC), a London-based nonprofit that focuses on cases of religious discrimination against Christians.
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the CLC, said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital that Grech’s treatment by Maltese authorities is discriminatory and violates “his Christian freedoms and fundamental right to free speech.”
Grech’s lawyers plan to argue that his prosecution is a violation of his right to freedom of expression guaranteed under both the Constitution of Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
“The domino effect of ‘conversion therapy’ bans began in Malta,” said Williams, who warned that the case threatens to set a precedent that could spread to other Western countries “unless robust action is taken.”
European Commission headquarters lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag in support of the LGBT community in Brussels, Belgium, on May 16, 2020. (NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images)
Malta, an island nation between Sicily and the coast of North Africa, was the first country in the European Union to criminalize practices that would seek to “change, repress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity and/or gender expression.”
The legislation, which passed unanimously in 2016, resembles conversion therapy bans throughout the world, including in 20 states and more than 100 municipalities in the U.S.
Many such bans in the U.S. apply only to minors and carve out exemptions for religious counseling, though some in other countries prohibit consenting adults from seeking help from anyone for unwanted sexual attractions and behaviors.
“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion. They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else.” — Matthew Grech
In Canada, therapists who provide any form of counseling to repress or reduce “non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behavior” or “non-cisgender identity” could face up to five years in prison, according to a law put in place last year that prompted protests from thousands of churches throughout North America because of its scope.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in the annual Pride Parade in Toronto, Ontario, in 2016. (Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
The Conservative Party-led U.K. government announced this week a plan to debate legislation to add transgender identity to Britain’s conversion therapy ban, which before applied only to sexual orientation.
The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy as tantamount to torture, and U.N. Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz called for a global ban on it in 2020.
‘Simply barbaric’
During a 2020 interview similar to that which led to his prosecution, Grech recalled how his gentle personality and boyhood musical interests made him a target growing up among other boys, who bullied him and mocked him as gay. He said he would assume that label as an identity and go on to become involved in sexual relationships with other men in an attempt to find male acceptance, but that he began to desire a new lifestyle upon becoming a Christian.
Grech became involved with the U.K.-based International Federation for Therapeutic and Counseling Choice (IFTCC), an organization that aims “to promote a caring, nonjudgmental environment where people who choose to move away from their unwanted feelings and behaviors can find the support they’re seeking,” according to its website.
He is also a trustee of Core Issues Trust, a group that works closely with IFTCC and supports “men and women with homosexual issues who voluntarily seek change in sexual preference and expression.”
Grech believes activists worldwide are using conversion therapy bans to silence dissenting opinions. (Christian Concern)
Grech says there many others like him who have “very valid reasons” for seeking to move away from unwanted sexual feelings, but fears such individuals are increasingly being marginalized and driven underground by the effects of overbroad conversion therapy bans.
“To deny people access to spiritual or secular support in any context is barbaric,” he said. “It’s simply barbaric.”
Grech believes the activists propelling the sort of conversion therapy ban enforcement he is facing “don’t just want to ban forced help or support, they want to ban our views altogether.”
“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion,” he said. “They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else. They do have a belief system, they do have a very specific vision.”
LGBT campaigners join Gay Liberation Front veterans marking the 50th anniversary of the first U.K. Pride march in 1972 on July 1, 2022, in London. (Mark Kerrison/Contributor via Getty Images)
Despite its small size, Grech noted that Maltese culture is seen as a “forerunner” and “pioneer” in Europe, consistently ranking at the top of ILGA-Europe’s list of most progressive countries.
Parliamentary Secretary Rebecca Buttigieg announced last week that Malta is strengthening its conversion therapy law by adding an amendment to redefine the advertising clause “to include the publishing, advertising, displaying, distributing, referral and circulation of any material promoting the practice,” according to the Times of Malta.
“So it is concerning the other countries will follow suit, but we need to alert other nations and to show them what the real face of a conversion therapy ban is,” Grech said. “It’s just a foothold for these LGBT lobbies to get into churches and to get the pastors and get the gospel ministers to shut up and conform, and it’s just simply not sustainable.”
‘The idol of our generation’
Grech noted the irony that the first case of his kind should be in Malta, which has a notable position in the history of his faith. One of the first Roman colonies to convert to Christianity, the island featured in the New Testament as the place where the apostle Paul was shipwrecked and left unharmed from the bite of a venomous snake that emerged from a fire.
“That story speaks to us to this day, because when Paul arrived in Malta, a fire was set because it was cold, and a snake fastened itself against his arm,” Grech said, referencing the story in Acts 28. “He shook it off, told it where it needs to go, and it went back to the fire.”
“People at first thought he was being judged by the gods because that snake fastened itself around his arm, but when they saw that nothing happened to him, they changed their minds,” he said.
The apostle Paul shakes a viper off of his arm into the fire, as recounted in Acts 28. (ZU_09 via Getty Images)
Grech likened the biblical story to his legal battle and the spiritual struggles of people like him who fight to maintain their faith despite their feelings amid what he sees as the tightening grip of opposition from government and the culture.
“I believe that as we survive this snake that is trying to poison us and harm us, as we look toward God, who is able to save us and redeem us, people will shift their perspective,” he said.
“We believe in the best for our nation, but there has been an idol that has been set up, and it needs to come down,” Grech added. “We are facing the idol of our generation, and we’re saying, ‘We’re not going to bow down to you, no matter what the cost.'”
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
So now CNN wants to look into The Big Guy? This is the beginning of the end for Biden and “the Biden name”.
Things are heating up for the Bidens. What you will note is how the Democrats begin distancing themselves as a Party from the Bidens, and start to leave Joe and Hunter swinging in the wind. Watch for the small signs.
Just recently CNN actually mentioned that Joe Biden lied about not knowing any of Hunter’s foreign business partners.
Soon, Biden’s blind eye will be declared a bona fide lie. Things will only get worse from there. Democrats will pretend to be outraged by these “new revelations”, and game on.
For now, one has to speculate at what made CNN finally jump ship like rats fleeing the Titanic. It seems unlikely that the Network decided to join in some journalistic integrity. But there are plenty of other ideas. Perhaps Obama finally gave the kill order for his old bro.
CNN Handlers gave the directive….Ruin his career….We can't have him run in '24…. Republican led House is going to dig up DIRT. . Drive it home to all viewers…..all 10 of them….ratings down the drain. .
Are we supposed to congratulate CNN for finally telling the truth, albeit in the face of way too much proof to remain in denial? Or do we just welcome them to the show?
Either way, Biden’s name will never ring quite the same!
“I Give You My Word, As a Biden!”
I’m pretty sure that catch phrase started with Biden’s first big lie, which coincidentally was told on Biden’s first day in Congress. That’s when Biden’s first wife was killed in a tragic accident, most likely a form of vehicular homicide and suicide. It’s quite believable that Mrs. Biden turned into traffic on purpose in an effort to kill herself and her children. Her newborn daughter was also a casualty of the accident.
The lie wasn’t centered around Mrs. Biden’s postpartum depression. In fact, it was glossed over because Joe Biden blamed the other driver, claiming his wife and daughter were murdered by a drunk driver! Boy, did that lie gain traction over the years. So much so that it ruined the life of the truck driver. He spent decades trying to clear his name, fighting off death threats, and being publicly crucified. To this day, his daughter speaks out in defense of her father. But I digress.
Here’s what CNN says about Biden’s word:
For years, as Joe Biden has sought to assure the American public he deserves their trust, he’s relied upon a go-to phrase meant to underscore his credibility: “I give you my word as a Biden.”
But that’s not the only way the Biden family name has been used. The president’s brothers have invoked it in their private business pursuits over the years to suggest access to power and influence, according to a CNN review of court documents, emails and video recordings as well as interviews with former business acquaintances.
A year after Biden was elected, for example, his youngest brother, Frank, boasted in a speech to medical professionals gathered in Boston of the “bully pulpit” he was afforded due to “my brother Joey,” and vowed to help attendees “get federal dollars.” Just three months ago, Frank Biden was an invited keynote speaker at a medical conference in Venice, Italy, where he gave advice to a group lobbying the federal government – a trip he acknowledged he did not pay for but declined to say who did.
Biden’s son, Hunter, meanwhile, has bluntly acknowledged in a memoir that his last name was a “coveted credential” helping him land a lucrative and controversial gig as a board member for a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice president. That company, Burisma, “considered my last name gold,” Hunter Biden wrote.
With Republicans taking charge of the House of Representatives this month, the Biden name and what it stands for are expected to be at the center of a wide-ranging oversight inquiry into alleged influence peddling and potential conflicts of interest, even as the GOP has turned its immediate attention to Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The partisan probe is likely to delve deeply into the contents of a laptop computer that Hunter Biden purportedly discarded at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. A digital copy of the laptop’s hard drive has been broadly shared among right-wing operatives and was provided to CNN by Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show. It appears to contain a massive trove of information detailing, among other things, how Hunter Biden worked to put his business associates in the same room as his famous father. Hunter Biden has not confirmed or denied that the laptop was his.
At least one email from the laptop – cited in a November report released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee – shows Hunter Biden acknowledging that his family lineage was one of his major selling points. As he discussed a Chinese business deal in September 2011, Hunter Biden told a colleague that a potential business partner’s apparent fondness for him “has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name.”
Of course, Hunter is exactly right about that.
The Biden last name is the underlying tie between all of this corruption. But for some reason, CNN still wouldn’t give Republicans the satisfaction of acknowledgement. Instead, they continued to promote this narrative that Republicans don’t have all the facts.
When it comes to modern politics, I think it’s fair to say that 90% of fact is fiction, and 90% of fiction is actually fact. Think about it, what are some of the facts, according to the left? Global warming, the ‘advantages’ of green energy, the idea that babies aren’t living beings before they are born… we could go on. But the point is, leftists do not present these ideas as opinions, but rather as hard core truths.
On the flip side, how many Republican “conspiracy theories” have panned out to be the facts? The vaccine is dangerous. The virus is benign without underlying factors. The pandemic was a scam. Hunter’s laptop links the Big Guy to China. Again, the list goes on. Which makes it no surprise that CNN still tried to paint Republicans as out of touch.
CNN adds:
Republicans have suggested that Biden’s son and brothers illegally used their family connections for profit but have so far offered scant evidence to support that claim. Joe Biden has repeatedly said he never discussed his son or brothers’ business dealings with them.
“The President has pledged to restore ethics to the White House and has established the most rigorous ethics guidelines of any administration in history, consistent with his commitment to ensure government works for the American people,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson. “Unlike in the previous administration, no family member has or will serve in the administration or be involved in government decision making.”
Hmmm. Funny. I’ve yet to see an email from Don Jr. working out the terms of selling his father to China. And trust me, if it existed, Democrats would have presented it by now.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing wide-ranging probes into his business dealings, once noted that he and other family members “quarantined” at his father’s home, where classified documents were recently found.
In his memoir published in April 2021, the president’s son said he and other close family members spent election night on Nov. 3, 2020, at the Wilmington, Delaware, home. Hunter Biden wrote that he, his children, his wife Melissa Cohen, and his half-sister Ashley Biden and her husband Howard Krein watched coverage of the presidential election together as votes were counted.
“You would have loved the scene on election night, too, even though the night would’ve driven you nuts, not least because the vote counting dragged on for days,” Hunter Biden wrote in the memoir.
“Yet one of the benefits of waiting so long for the race to be called was that we all waited it out together, at Mom and Dad’s house — Melissa and the baby, my girls, Natalie and Hunter, Ashley and Howard,” he continued in the passage. “More than waiting together, we were also quarantined together. There was no escaping one another.”
President Biden with his son Hunter Biden after attending Mass on Johns Island, South Carolina, on Aug. 13, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to the revelation that Hunter Biden quarantined at the home during the 2020 presidential election, additional evidence has surfaced showing he has spent time at the home on numerous other occasions. Hunter Biden was notably seen traveling with his father from the White House to Delaware on Dec. 16, 2022, just four days prior to the search of the residence that yielded the classified documents. According to the White House, the president’s attorneys searched the Wilmington home and found the documents on Dec. 20.
Hunter Biden also spent time in Wilmington on at least five other instances since his father took office, according to various media reports of his whereabouts. For example, on March 26, 2021, Daily Mail reporter Rob Crilly tweeted footage of Hunter Biden traveling with the president to Wilmington.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that it had obtained photos placing Hunter Biden at the Delaware home on July 30, 2017, shortly after his father departed the White House with documents from his tenure. The pictures showed Hunter Biden driving in his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray, which the president told reporters was parked next to where the classified documents had been found last month.
President Biden and his son Hunter Biden celebrate at an election rally in Wilmington, Delaware, after it was announced that he had won the presidential election on Nov. 7, 2020. (Reuters/Jim Bourg)
The White House first revealed last week that a series of classified documents, including some marked “top-secret,” dating back to Biden’s time as vice president had been discovered at the Penn Biden Center. Later in the week, the White House acknowledged a second batch of classified documents was found in the garage of the president’s Wilmington residence.
“As the President said, he takes classified information and materials seriously, and as we have said, we have cooperated from the moment we informed the [National] Archives that a small number of documents were found, and we will continue to cooperate,” the president’s lawyer Richard Sauber said Thursday in a statement.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” he added.
Hunter Biden, Melissa Cohen and Baby Beau with POTUS on trip to Wilmington today pic.twitter.com/MhwEiZAY79
Then, on Saturday, Sauber disclosed that yet another batch of five documents were discovered at the home despite earlier assurances from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that the search had been completed.
Republicans, meanwhile, have zeroed in on whether Hunter Biden had access to the classified information — which included intelligence regarding Ukraine, Iran and the U.K. — in the aftermath of the discovery of the documents in the president’s home. Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation and faces congressional inquiries regarding his business dealings.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed career prosecutor Robert Hur to serve as a special counsel to investigate the president’s handling of classified documents.
Fox News’ Pat Ward contributed to this report.
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.
The 2022 midterms were the first major elections to occur in California after the Golden State approved all-mail voting in September 2021. Under the new system, all registered voters in the state are automatically mailed a ballot for each election cycle (Californians can still opt to vote in person if they wish). But during California’s first foray into mass mail-in balloting for the 2022 midterms, 226,250 mail ballots were rejected and more than 10 million remain unaccounted for, according to a new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Per the report, the most common reason for rejection of mail ballots in the 2022 cycle was late arrival (48 percent of rejects). Under California law, mail ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day and arrive at the tabulation center within seven days. For the state’s 2022 general elections, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after Nov. 15 (the seven-day mark). Largely as a result of the switch to mail-in balloting, more than 57,000 Californians were disenfranchised. Such voter disenfranchisement is sure to continue as long as the state keeps its vote-by-mail system.
“Mail ballots disenfranchise,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
Another concerning figure coming from California’s midterm election cycle is that 10 million ballots still remain unaccounted for, after processing all polling place votes and rejected ballots. The assumption by election officials is that the majority of these ballots were ignored or thrown out by recipients. But such an information gap increases the risk of fraud. As the report notes, “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
Unaccounted mail-in ballots are a serious liability for states with all-mail voting. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. While there is no way of knowing whether these missing mail-in ballots were used fraudulently, they still pose a risk to election integrity.
Take ballot harvesting — the practice of third-party organizers collecting ballots from voters and returning them to election offices — for example. States that approve all-mail voting greatly incentivize ballot harvesting, since Democrat doorknockers can coax potential voters to fill out their ballots and hand them over to their newfound Democrat friends on the spot, rather than having to convince voters to do the legwork themselves. Partisan activists may take advantage of such a lax system. And they already do.
All-mail voting also creates more opportunities for chaos, which in turn undermines voters’ confidence. Under a traditional system where voters cast ballots in person, poll workers must account for all election materials and have a log of the number of ballots cast. When problems occur, such as ballots disappearing, the issue is resolved quickly due to the data trail. Not so with all-mail elections.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple states switched to mail-in balloting under the guise of protecting public health. These voting systems were put in place with hardly any safeguards or scrutiny of the risks posed by all-mail elections. Currently, there are eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — that primarily conduct their elections by mail.
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.
Soon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he gave a few reporters access to the tech giant’s internal communications, resulting in scandalous revelations about Twitter’s routine collusion with and censorship direction from the FBI — revelations you likely haven’t heard much about from the corporate media.
“The Twitter Files” showed that this symbiotic relationship between the feds and a so-called private company involved the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election, the silencing of Covid dissenters, and even the squelching of regime-challenging journalists, among other bombshells. According to the communications, the federal government paid Twitter some $3,000,000 for its assistance.
Notwithstanding these explosive revelations, backed up by the internal communications of high-level Twitter executives, the corporate media have ignored the scandals. But why?
Here are five reasons the corrupt press has refused to adequately cover “The Twitter Files.”
1. Giving Credence To Trump’s 2020 Election Claims Would Be Unforgivable
Accurate coverage of “The Twitter Files” would require the media to report on the FBI’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election. Among other things, “The Twitter Files” revealed the FBI met monthly and then weekly with Twitter’s team, warning them of various foreign efforts to interfere in the election. Those internal communications, when coupled with an earlier statement Yoel Roth, the then-head of Twitter’s site integrity, provided to the Federal Election Commission, establish the FBI was behind Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
“Since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security,” Roth stated. “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said, adding that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Roth then explained that those “prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” led Twitter to conclude “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”
When Roth’s statement is read together with the internal emails establishing that Twitter banned the New York Post’s blockbuster reporting under the guise that the materials had been hacked, the FBI’s responsibility for causing the censorship of this politically explosive story is clear. And because the FBI knew Hunter’s laptop had not been hacked and that the materials on it were authentic, by prompting the censorship of the story, the FBI knowingly interfered in the 2020 election.
Or as Donald Trump put it on Truth Social after “The Twitter Files” broke: “The biggest thing to come out of the Twitter Targeting Hoax is that the Presidential Election was RIGGED — And that’s as big as it can get!!!”
For the press to honestly cover “The Twitter Files,” then, would require it to give credence to Trump’s “RIGGED” claims — something it just cannot stomach. Instead, the corrupt media have responded to “The Twitter Files” with silence or spin.
2. Being the Press Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
A second reason the press refuses to cover “The Twitter Files” stems from the corrupt media’s inability to acknowledge its own bias, wrongdoing, and hackery. To report on the many scandals exposed by the files would require media elites to face their own involvement in censoring news and their failings as so-called journalists.
While historically, journalists stood in unity with their fellow reporters, when Twitter and other tech companies censored and then deplatformed the New York Post, the press — in the main — remained silent. In contrast, when Musk temporarily suspended reporters’ accounts who had posted location tracking information in violation of Twitter’s new rules, a thud sounded as the same journalists collectively collapsed on their fainting couches.
Not only did these supposed standard-bearers of journalism not condemn the censorship, most ignored the story. Those that did not ignore it, such as NPR, discussed not the details of the scandal, but their justification for ignoring it. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR intoned.
Covering “The Twitter Files” now would be an implicit admission that they were wrong not to report on the laptop story and that they were equally amiss in failing to condemn the censorship of the Post.
“The Twitter Files” also raise an uncomfortable set of questions for news outlets, namely: Did the FBI warn legacy media that supposed Russian disinformation, in the form of potentially hacked materials involving Hunter Biden, would drop? Is that why they ignored the story and allowed the censorship of the Post to go unchallenged?
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would force legacy outlets to confront the potential reality that the FBI had played them and that they were willing to trust the government rather than be a check on its abuse.
“The Twitter Files” also vindicate Musk and counter the media narrative that his Twitter takeover spelled the beginning of the end for the tech giant. Not only did the avalanche of predicted hate speech not materialize, but under Musk’s leadership, Twitter’s newfound transparency has served both the public interest and a (functioning) free press. Reporting on these facts, then, would require the press not only to acknowledge its own failings but to apologize to Musk and admit their own complicity — things they are apparently unable to do.
3. Condemning the Feds Would Shut Down Sources and Hurt Their Heroes
The media are likely also ignoring “The Twitter Files” to protect their sources — both literally and figuratively.
Many of the same FBI agents and governmental officials, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who pushed for Twitter to censor speech probably serve as regular sources for the legacy media. This scenario is especially likely if the FBI pushed for the press to censor the Hunter Biden story, as it had with Twitter and Facebook. Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would thus force the media to hammer some of the same individuals who give them valuable leaks. Condemning those individuals could shut down various source networks the corrupt media can’t risk.
The media likely also don’t want to “hurt” their sources or the FBI agents who pushed the Russia disinformation lie to tech companies because they see themselves on the same anti-Trump team.
Just as the media refuse to condemn the Department of Justice and FBI agents involved in pushing the Russia-collusion hoax because the press favored the unwarranted attacks on Trump that hamstrung his administration, the leftist media silently applauds the FBI’s interference in the 2020 election because it helped deny Trump a second term.
In this regard, the legacy media and the deep state share the same worldview — that the ends justify the means. The media will thus keep mum about what the FBI did because they’re grateful that intelligence agencies destroyed Trump’s chance to defeat Biden by prompting the censorship of the October surprise.
4. The Russian Bogeyman Must Be Preserved at All Costs
Ignoring “The Twitter Files” also helps the media preserve their Russia, Russia, Russia narrative.
The various “Twitter File” threads revealed several damning details concerning Russia’s supposed interference in American politics. First, they exposed how the FBI and federal intelligence agencies used Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election to push for more resources and collaboration with tech giants. Second, the files revealed that, notwithstanding federal agents’ claims, there were no systemic efforts by Russia to use Twitter to interfere in the U.S. elections. To the contrary, the internal communications showed the FBI pushing for evidence of Russian interference and Twitter executives countering that they weren’t seeing issues.
Third, as detailed above, “The Twitter Files” exposed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only not Russian disinformation but that the FBI used that excuse anyway to prompt censorship of the story.
Fourth and finally, the internal Twitter communications showed that the trending of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was not prompted by Russian bots or Russian-connected accounts and that Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Schiff’s claims to the contrary were false. Those communications also revealed that even though Twitter negated the Russian-interference theory — telling politicians point blank that the evidence showed #ReleseTheMemo was trending because of organic interest in the hashtag — Democrats and the media continued to push that false storyline.
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would require the media to first acknowledge they were wrong in their #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag coverage. But what’s more, covering Twitter’s internal communications would force the press to dispel the notion that Russia is the bogeyman behind every Republican candidate and every negative story about Democrats.
Corrupt media need to maintain Russia as the bad guy for future elections, however, and to counter future scandals affecting Democrats. Accurate reporting on “The Twitter Files” would lessen the effects of any later resort to a Russia, Russia, Russia narrative — and the press can’t have that.
5. Reporters Prefer Their Role as Propagandists to Journalists
While there are many practical reasons the press refuses to report on “The Twitter Files,” as a matter of principle, it all comes down to one: The legacy media have none.
The so-called journalists working at outlets that were once the standard by which all journalists were judged today value politics more than they do their professional obligations. Informing the public and providing a check on the rich, the powerful, and the politicians are no longer the end goals of corrupt reporters; rather, they seek to use their power to advance their own personal beliefs and agendas.
In short, the reporters refusing to cover “The Twitter Files” prefer their role as propagandists to journalists.
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.
While the GOP and conservative media have largely moved on from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the systemic failures that occurred in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, court testimony and eyewitness reports from the Lake trial include allegations that Arizona’s largest county violated state law by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation for Election Day ballots, resulting in a mysterious 25,000 extra votes added to Maricopa County’s official tally within a 24-hour period — more than the margin of victory between Lake and gubernatorial victor Katie Hobbs.
It was about 10:00 on election night when Maricopa County’s ballot tabulation vendor, Runbeck Election Services, received its first truckload of Election Day drop box ballots. While Runbeck received seven truckloads total (the last was completed about 5 a.m. the following morning), Runbeck staff thought it odd the deliveries did not come earlier throughout the day. But that wasn’t the only glitch. There were no chain-of-custody forms delivered with the ballots, a stark departure from typical procedure.
According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie, prior to Nov. 8, drop box ballots were “delivered in red bins with a chain of custody form” from the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC), which listed how many ballots were delivered.
But on election night, “instead of receiving the ballots in red bins, the ballots from the drop boxes had been placed in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages. MCTEC did not include the Maricopa County Delivery Receipt forms with any of the Election Day drop box ballot deliveries. There were no chain of custody forms with the ballots and no count of the number of ballots that were delivered,” Marie wrote in a sworn affidavit.
Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela even testified that while the county’s election workers count drop box ballots and record the counts on documents as required by law prior to Election Day, they did not count the ballots retrieved from drop boxes on Election Day itself. During the Lake trial, Valenzuela was asked whether Maricopa County election officials know the precise number of drop box ballots on Election Day, and he told the court, “On Election Day, no, because we’re not doing drop box courier process at that time. It’s a different process for Election Day.”
According to Lake attorney Kurt Olsen, this is in direct violation of Arizona state statute, which requires the county recorder to maintain records that log the chain of custody for ballots “during early voting through the completion of provisional voting tabulation.”
Per Arizona’s Election Procedures Manual, when ballots are taken from drop boxes, they must either be counted at the local vote center or be placed in secure ballot transport containers to be taken back to the county for tabulation. When the county recorder or elections official opens the container, he or she must count the number of ballots inside and note it on a retrieval form.
Because Maricopa County tabulators received more Election Day drop box ballots than they had ever received before, as County Recorder Stephen Richer testified, they removed the ballots from the ballot transport containers without counting or recording the number on a retrieval form for each drop box, as witnessed by Republican poll watcher Leslie White. This is a violation of the chain-of-custody requirements the county recorder is tasked with implementing.
The ballots were then put in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages, which were then put on trucks and delivered to Runbeck to be scanned and counted, according to supply-chain auditor and Lake trial witness Heather Honey. And notably, according to Marie’s sworn affidavit, this loading of ballots into the trucks also occurred without any documentation or record of the number of ballots on each.
Since Maricopa County failed to create its own chain-of-custody documents for the Election Day drop box ballots, Runbeck made its own (called “MC Inbound Receipt of Delivery Forms“), which logged the seven truckloads of drop box ballots on election night. On the delivery forms, Runbeck estimated the total number of Election Day drop box ballots to be 263,379 by multiplying the maximum number of ballots a mail tray can hold by the number of trays received, as Honey explained to The Federalist.
Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington gave his staff a similar estimate of the number of ballots received via an email on Nov. 9, saying, “we started getting mail packets dropped off from Maricopa around 10pm last night and received mail packets about every hour through sunrise this morning. Likely between 250 and 275K packets were dropped off at the polls yesterday.”
At a press conference that evening, Richer affirmed Runbeck’s estimate by saying the county had received an unprecedented 275,000 drop-off ballots on Election Day. That same day, Maricopa County reported the total number of ballots cast in the 2022 general election to the Arizona Department of State: 1,136,849 ballots, with 407,664 ballots left to count — 1,544,513 ballots total.
However, on that same day, around 5:30 p.m., Maricopa County asked Runbeck to calculate the total number of Election Day drop-off ballots received, according to Marie, who was tasked with running the tabulation herself. Marie found that Runbeck’s records showed 298,942 drop box ballots had been received and scanned on Election Day.
As a result of such a discrepancy between the estimate and the official tally, Maricopa County sent a new vote tally to the Arizona secretary of state’s office on Nov. 10 (earlier that day, Richer had sent an email to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors admitting he could not reconcile the differences between the county’s numbers and the secretary of state’s listing, demonstrating that even the supposed expert official in charge of the counting process couldn’t figure out where the extra ballots came from). Instead of the original 1,544,513 total ballots reported for the 2022 general election in Maricopa County, the secretary of state’s website now listed 1,569,603, a more than 25,000-vote discrepancy with no explanation. That same day, Maricopa County gave another press conference, stating it had received 292,000 Election Day drop box ballots without batting an eye.
What This Means
Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained. According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie and Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela, Maricopa County violated state law by failing to create any chain-of-custody documentation for the drop box ballots received on Election Day. Because of this failure, no records exist to dispute or reconcile the discrepancy between the number of ballots Runbeck first reported (263,379) and its final tally (298,942), a more than 35,000-vote change. As Olsen remarked in his closing argument for the Lake trail, “If you don’t have a count from MCTEC when those ballots are being transported to Runbeck, how do you know whether that count is secure?”
Nor do there appear to be chain-of-custody documents, a violation of Arizona law, showing how Maricopa County was able to add more than 25,000 ballots to its final tally. That addition is more than Hobbs’ margin of victory, which was about 17,000 votes.
“On November 9th, the reported count is 25,000 ballots less, which is beyond the margin here, than on November 10th,” Olsen said. “So the day after the election, they put out what the count is and then magically 25,000 ballots appear on November 10th, and well, hey, that’s the race.”
While part of the argument Lake’s attorneys used in their lawsuit seeking to challenge Arizona’s gubernatorial election was that Maricopa County violated its own Election Procedural Manual by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation, Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson rejected the claim due to the county’s assertion that such chain-of-custody documents exist, even though it failed to produce them. At the time of the trial, Maricopa County hadn’t fulfilled a public records request for the documents.
But while such documents do exist for drop box ballots counted prior to Election Day, no such chain-of-custody paperwork exists for the Election Day drop box ballots themselves, Honey reiterated to The Federalist. The judge did not consider this alleged violation of state law and ruled against Lake’s challenge, saying she failed to present clear and convincing evidence of widespread misconduct.
Arizona has an impossibly high bar for overturning elections on the grounds of misconduct, as the judge himself noted. Lake not only had to allege misconduct but intentional misconduct, such to affect the outcome of the election. Lake has since filed two appeals — one with an appeals court, the other with the Arizona Supreme Court. The appeals court agreed to expedite her case.
When asked about its alleged failure to implement chain-of-custody documentation for the Nov. 8 election, Communications Manager for the Maricopa County Elections Department Matthew Roberts told The Federalist: “There are robust tracking and security procedures in place to document and ensure proper chain-of-custody of early ballots on Election Day. These policies and procedures were followed on Election Day, as well as throughout the early voting period. At no point during the process were chain of custody policies broken or procedures not followed and documented.”
The Maricopa County Elections Department did not respond to The Federalist’s request for documentation of the chain-of-custody process for the Election Day drop box ballots.
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.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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A Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Department of Defense failed its fifth audit in a row after it could not account for at least $220 billion in government-furnished property, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
The DOD has been mandated by federal law to complete audits since 1994; however, the mandate was ignored for decades due to the agency’s massive size, according to Military.com. Since launching its first independent audit in 2017, the Pentagon has never passed. The Pentagon failed its fifth audit in November after the agency could not prove expenditures for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. To perform this year’s overall audit of the DOD, which was expected to cost $218 million, the agency aggregated 27 separate audits conducted by approximately 1,600 auditors. According to Military.com, the auditors performed 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits.
The GAO’s study reported that auditors first alerted the DOD in 2001 that the agency failed to keep track of its government-furnished property.
“DOD’s lack of accountability over government property in the possession of contractors has been reported by auditors for decades,” the GAO report stated. “This longstanding issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements.”
In 2014, the Pentagon reported that the estimated value of its GFP was at least $220 billion. However, according to the GAO’s study, that figure is likely “significantly understated.”
“For example, in fiscal year 2016, we reported that the Army indicated the actual number of these GFP assets is unknown and that actual quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect,” the GAO report noted.
The GAO claimed that the DOD is the “only major federal agency that has been unable to receive an audit opinion.” Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord stated that he is “disappointed” the agency only made slight progress toward a clean audit this year.
“I would not say that we flunked. The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want,” McCord said.
The DOD did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
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A graphic sex education program endorsed by Planned Parenthood continues to be promulgated in some Idaho middle schools, despite outrage expressed by parents, according to the Idaho Freedom Foundation. The program, entitled “Reducing the Risk,” is meant primarily for ninth-graders, according to its website, and it consists of a 16-part curriculum that aims “to help high school students delay the initiation of sex or increase the use of protection against pregnancy and STI/HIV if they choose to have sex.” The website later claims, “The major focus is the development of attitudes and skills that will help teens prevent pregnancy and the transmission of STIs, including HIV,” hinting that the program subordinates abstinence and prevention education in favor of mitigating the risks associated with promiscuity.
The sexual behaviors the program mentions are laid out in minute detail. One video included in RTR is called “Condom Sense,” which was produced by the Trojan Condoms brand ten years ago. The cartoon video features an unmarried man and woman engaging in a series of sexual activities and a disembodied narrator who warns against condom misuse.
“Keep your condom on until you ejaculate,” the narrator advises at one point, as a cuckoo bird suggestively shoots out of a nearby wall clock.
The video even shows the fornicating couple engaging in sex underneath bed covers and inside a car with obscured windows. The bed and car are rocking rhythmically to assure all viewers that the two are having sex, in case there was any doubt.
Both “Condom Sense” and RTR in general subtly endorse LGTBQ+ lifestyles. The logo Trojan opts to use for its YouTube account features the silhouette of a trojan helmet colored to match the latest gay and transgender flag, and screenshots of slides included in the fifth edition of the RTR program indicate that it encourages students to participate in “roleplay activities” that may make them uncomfortable, especially for those who are “sensitive” to same-sex relationships or who are gay, “transgender or gender nonconforming.”
The program also manipulates language to confuse students and mislead parents. In perhaps the most egregious example, “Reducing the Risk” does not use “abstinence” to refer to refraining from sex until marriage. When used in the program, “abstinence” refers to avoiding pregnancy and guarding against sexually transmitted diseases. The Idaho Freedom Foundation claimed that creators of the program changed the definition of “abstinence” so that RTR would comport with Idaho law and standards, which require schools to teach “abstinence-only” or “until marriage” sex ed curricula.
The Center for American Education, affiliated with IFF, also made other observations about the language used in “Reducing the Risk.” According to a slideshow presentation CAE obtained via information request, the word “marriage” was used only once in 120 slides. However, the presentation freely used terms like “vaginal sex,” “oral sex,” “anal sex,” “dental dams,” “condoms,” and “masturbation.” It also suggested that behaviors such as “anal sex using a condom and water-based lubricant” and “having sex while drunk or high” carry only “some risk.”
🚨🚨 Idaho school children are being shown graphic simulated sex videos produced by Trojan Condoms, which are part of the Planned Parenthood sex Ed curriculum. This curriculum has been adopted by Moscow Public Schools. @MattWalshBlog
When parents in Potlatch, Idaho, a small town of about 800 people located an hour south of Coeur d’Alene, discovered the contents of RTR, they became outraged and expressed their concerns at a school board meeting last November. That night, the board voted to remove the program for eighth-graders for this semester. It also voted to permit parents to opt their children out of such programs going forward and to have access to all materials that will be taught.
While Potlatch parents scored a small victory in the fight to keep graphic sexual material from their young children, other Idaho districts are still continuing to implement the program. As of last fall, the “Condom Sense” video and other RTR material are still being shown in 14 different Idaho schools, and the program website boasts that it is being taught in other supposedly conservative areas of the country, such as Montana; Duval County, Florida; Wyoming; San Antonio, Texas; Sedgwick County, Kansas; and West Virginia. Idaho is likewise a solidly red state, with a Republican governor, a Republican state legislature, two Republican U.S. congressmen, and two Republican U.S. senators.
IFF did not say whether any of the state or federal officials in Idaho had a comment about RTR. The “Supporting Education” initiative listed on the official website for Gov. Brad Little (R) makes no mention of “Reducing the Risk” or sex education at all. While it does claim that the state has a “moral obligation to our students in Idaho,” it did not specify what that “moral obligation” means or what it might look like in practical form.
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Geraldo Rivera, a left-wing Fox News Channel personality, suggested on “The Five” that the “AR” in “AR-15” stands for “automatic rifle” — he gave the answer after Greg Gutfeld asked Rivera what “AR” stands for. Rivera suggested that owning an AR-15 is about people being macho and claimed that there is not a legitimate purpose for owning one, aside from perhaps being used in sport clubs.
“Those most passionate about ‘gun control’ tend to know the least about guns,” the Daily Caller tweeted when sharing a clip of Rivera.
Greg Gutfeld: "What does 'AR' stand for?"
Geraldo Rivera: "It is automatic rifle."
Greg Gutfeld: "No, that's not what it is."
Geraldo Rivera: "All I know is AR-15s have no place in American society."
“Heard the Daily Caller and fellow travelers are ranting about my incorrect definition on-air of ‘AR’ as in AR-15. Whatever. Point is, there is no place (other than sporting clubs and similar skilled settings) for assault rifles. They’re substitute appendages,” Rivera tweeted.
NPR has indicated that the “AR” traces back to, ArmaLite, Inc. and stands for ArmaLite Rifle. The modern AR-15-style weapons made by gun manufacturers are semi-automatic — the guns have become a significant point of societal debate, with opponents often referring to them as “assault weapons” and calling for them to be banned.
Back in 2021, Rivera suggested that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York “outshines every other member of Congress in eloquence and passionate sincerity.”
And last year, the left-leaning TV personality described then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican, as “a once-in-a-generation stand up hero.” Cheney, who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, lost her 2022 GOP primary and departed from office earlier this year. She was one of the two Republican lawmakers who served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 episode.
The use of DNA to arrest Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four college students in Idaho reminds me that it’s time to bring the death penalty back in a big way.
Notwithstanding the absence of a single example, the possibility of executing the “wrong man” has been the left’s main line against the death penalty for decades. It’s the only argument that has ever lessened Americans’ support for capital punishment.
Well, guess what? Thanks to the miracle of DNA, now there’s no risk! The murderer can usually be identified with greater than 99.99% accuracy.
Good news, right? Nope! As we now know (also with 99.99% accuracy), liberals never cared about executing the innocent. They just want to spring killers.
Until fairly recently, DNA was a one-way ratchet, used to free criminals, but rarely to catch and convict them.
Recall that DNA fingerprinting was only invented in 1984. The first time DNA was ever used as evidence in a U.S. court was in 1987. Courts weren’t sure what to make of this “novel” technology, and of course, it was treated like witchcraft by the O.J. jury in 1995.
Back then, genetic evidence was used primarily to overturn jury verdicts from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s by poking holes in the prosecution’s theory of the crime.
The media whooped about every overturned conviction, falsely claiming the prisoner had been PROVED INNOCENT.
Hardly.
Suppose a child molester/murderer was convicted in 1998 based on the following evidence:
— Witnesses saw him abduct the child;
— Tire tracks by the body matched those on the defendant’s truck;
— His knife blade corresponded to the victim’s wounds;
— The child’s teddy bear was found in the defendant’s truck bed;
— When arrested, the accused had a written suicide note in his pocket, confessing to the crime;
— A strand of hair found on the defendant’s shoe was “consistent with” the victim’s hair.
If DNA testing later proved that the hair was not, in fact, the child’s, the conviction could be overturned. Who knows? The jury might have put a lot of stock in that strand of hair! Throw in allegations of “prosecutorial misconduct” or “ineffective assistance of counsel,” and stand back for the celebrities and nuns holding candlelight vigils!
The DNA didn’t prove “innocence”: It proved a strand of hair “consistent with” the victim’s did not belong to the victim after all. An overturned conviction may be “legal innocence” — like a Bronx jury refusing to convict — but it’s not “factual innocence.” Least of all did it warrant the words “proved innocent.”
The party ended when DNA began being used against criminals.
In 2018, investigators finally caught the Golden State Killer, who’d terrorized women across California in the 1970s and ’80s, murdering at least 13 people and raping dozens of women. Law enforcement ID’ed him by putting his DNA into two genealogy databases, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. It turned out to be Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former cop.
Normal people: Hurray! We got him!
Liberals: WE MUST PREVENT THE POLICE FROM USING DNA TO CATCH MURDERERS!
Wait a second! Weren’t you the ones worrying yourselves sick about the possibility of executing the innocent?
Until very recently, The New York Times op-ed page fairly bristled with columns insisting — in defiance of the evidence — that there were innocents on death row.
GUESS WHAT, NEW YORK TIMES? You can relax! There’s no danger of an innocent person being “strapped into an electric chair, or walked into a gas chamber, or injected with poison,” as Bob Herbert put it in 1994.
Forget human fallibility: We’ve got scientific infallibility. Trust the science, liberals!
Of course, as soon as DNA started being used to catch criminals rather than release them, the ACLU threw a fit, demanding that genealogy websites like Ancestry.com cease cooperating with law enforcement. No fair locking up killers!
As the Times explained: “Privacy advocates … have been worried about genetic genealogy since 2018.” Since 2018 … hmmm, why … oh, I see. That’s the year DNA was used to catch the Golden State Killer. Yeah, that sucked.
Google and Facebook know when we’re menstruating, we’re forced to undergo proctological exams at the airport, self-driving cars are careening onto sidewalks and killing pedestrians, but WE MUST PROTECT THE SERIAL KILLER’S PRIVACY!
This is the left’s specialty: Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. So now law enforcement has to face another pointless hurdle to solve heinous murders.
What possible explanation is there for this mentality other than that liberals want murderers on the streets? (Just not their streets.)
Genealogical websites merely allow forensic scientists to identify distant relatives of the person who left DNA at a crime scene — such as on the knife sheath lying next to one of the four murdered students in Idaho — in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out. There’s no danger of getting the wrong man. To the contrary, DNA steers investigators away from the wrong man.
True, it will make life much harder for rapists, child molesters and murderers. It will put an end to “serial killers,” who will now get caught after their first kill. I’m trying to fathom who else would have a problem with it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Four Republican Texas state representatives asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday to review new transgender student policies for public schools. State Representatives Bryan Slaton, Brian Harrison, Tony Tinderholt, and Mark Dorazio signed a letter calling on Paxton to examine the Texas Association of School Boards’ (TASB) 2023 “radically pro-transgender” guidance, according to a copy of the letter tweeted by Slaton.
The representatives accuse TASB of disseminating legal advice that seems to discourage schools from reporting child abuse, denies parental rights, and claims female students don’t have legal protection to a private restroom or locker room, the letter stated.
“This radically pro-transgender legal advisory appears to encourage school districts to refrain from reporting child abuse and obscure information regarding children exhibiting gender dysphoria from their parents,” the four congressmen stated. “This document also makes a bold declaration that says young girls would have no law protecting them from having a school district permit a biological male to enter their restroom or locker room.
The TASB legal advice is “highly concerning” as it “may be effectively creating state policy,” they said.
The school board association said that having a transgender child use separate gender-neutral facilities could make some students “feel that such an arrangement negatively singles them out and isolates them from their peers,” according to the document.
“Consequently, the transgender student may request to use communal sex-specific facilities that match the student’s gender identity. There is no law that prohibits a district from granting the transgender student’s request to use these facilities,” TASB advised. “If other students or their parents object to the use of a sex-specific facility by a transgender student, a school district may be able to amicably address the competing interests by making individual-user facilities and private areas available for all students.”
The decision on whether students should play on sex-specific sports teams is in murky waters, according to the TASB letter. Despite Texas law requiring students to play on teams separated by their biological birth, TASB advises school districts to “assess each request individually and determine the best course of action based on a thorough evaluation of all of the issues and potential risks, and in consultation with the district’s attorney.”
TASB also counseled schools on the legality behind preventing unsupportive parents from knowing about their child’s gender dysphoria and choosing a different name or pronoun.
“Texas educators typically work with parents to decide on appropriate accommodations for transgender students. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that transgender students are at particular risk of harm, including self-harm, when a parent disagrees with the student’s gender identity,” the document stated.
“As such, a student may request that a district employee not tell his or her parent about the student’s gender identity. School officials should proceed with caution in this case, in accordance with district policy regarding student counseling, crisis intervention, and child abuse,” TASB added.
Demonstrators lead the way at the 2022 March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2022. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
For those of us who have been working for years on the pro-life cause, this is a very special and joyous Sanctity of Human Life Month.
It’s the first one since the Supreme Court in June 2022 struck down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Instead of the latest protest against Roe’s cruelty and unconstitutionality, this month-long observance and the annual March for Life on January 20 will be celebrations.
We still have much to do to protect innocent human life from the abortion industry. The battle is underway state by state and even city by city.
But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a game changer. The highest law of the land as interpreted by the highest court in the land is no longer hostile to the pro-life viewpoint. It’s no longer defensible to pretend that a baby in the womb is not human and is therefore disposable. Those who continue to advocate for abortion must make the immoral case that some human lives are not worth protecting. That should be a steep hill to climb in a nation with a Christian heritage.
Like slavery, abortion violates the moral law given us by our Creator. God’s law states that all human life is sacred because we are made in His image. Many of America’s founders, including Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, predicted that slavery’s inherent conflict with God-given liberties would one day end it. It took a terrible civil war, but slavery was finally abolished.
The arguments for abortion are also unsustainable. That’s why the pro-life movement has never given up. Pro-life doctors, nurses and scientists have been reminding everyone that at the moment of conception, a new human life springs into being with his or her unique genetic code.
So what if academia, Hollywood, the media and corporate America use their enormous clout to push the fiction that human life is not in fact human? Proverbs 31:8 admonishes those of us who have voices to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
We must tell the truth, promote adoption, provide more help to mothers who keep their babies, and shore up marriage, the surest family structure in which a child can thrive.
We need to make sure that the legal system, as the enforcement arm of the representative democratic republic in which we live, is no longer abused to justify the taking of innocent human life.
This means persuading millions of our fellow Americans that abortion is not the answer to an unwanted pregnancy. It means letting women who have had abortions know that Jesus offers forgiveness, peace, and new life.
I recall vividly the day that my wife, Bonnie, and I saw the film “Silent Scream” at a theater in Orlando around 1990. This powerful movie depicts a fetus — a tiny human being — desperately trying to avoid the abortionist. Few people can watch it and walk away unaffected.
Our growing faith and clarity about abortion were driving forces in the creation of an investment fund, in 1994, for Bible-believing Christians, Timothy Plan, which pioneered Biblically Responsible Investing.
Other powerful films have also carried the pro-life message. In 2018, Timothy Partners, Timothy Plan’s advisor, bought out a theater in Orlando to show the movie “Gosnell” to our local community. Starring Dean Cain, the film exposes the evils committed by Kermit Gosnell. He was a West Philadelphia-based doctor convicted of murdering infants who were born alive and of manslaughter for the death of a woman patient.
In March 2019, our firm bought out seven theaters in Orlando to show the movie “Unplanned.” It’s about the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life champion. We gifted 500 tickets that were snapped up within 24 hours. At the movie’s conclusion, we asked the audience to remain for a couple of minutes while we introduced the directors of 11 pro-life, crisis pregnancy centers that we support.
I am sharing this to encourage others to use whatever tools and influence they have to steer us toward a truly pro-life culture in which all lives are deemed sacred.
The end of Roe is a huge victory we should celebrate. It is also a clarion call to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
Art Ally is the founder of the Timothy Plan family of Biblically Responsible Investing funds.
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Andrew McCabe, a former top FBI official, is advising the Biden administration not to cooperate with congressional inquiry into President Joe Biden’s improper retention of classified documents. Such obstinance, McCabe boasted last Friday, “could drag things out.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan announced last Friday an investigation into President Joe Biden’s alleged “mishandling” of classified documents. The investigation will focus on “conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions” regarding the discovery of the classified documents. Jordan wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland:
It is unclear when the Department first came to learn about the existence of these documents, and whether it actively concealed this information from the public on the eve of the 2022 elections. … It is also unclear what interactions, if any, the Department had with President Biden or his representatives about his mishandling of classified material. The Department’s actions here appear to depart from how it acted in similar circumstances.
Speaking with Anderson Cooper on CNN, McCabe said that Garland should not cooperate with congressional oversight.
“I certainly would advise them, if they were willing to listen to my advice, I would advise them to take a very hard line against that,” McCabe said of cooperating with congressional oversight.
“There is a clear precedent here of not sharing information, from an ongoing criminal investigation, with Congress. And I think the DOJ is in a very strong position to resist on those grounds,” he continued. “Who knows what comes of that resistance? Maybe DOJ leadership starts getting subpoenaed. And ultimately, that fight will end up in the courts. And that could drag things out.”
Ironically, what McCabe said is the exact reason why Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) admitted he is “not a fan” of special counsel investigations.
“I think the way we handle these investigations of wrongdoing — I’ll call it that — in the political realm is we just do it completely backwards. I think Congress ought to be able to have access to all the information — do their oversight,” Johnson said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
“If there is evidence of wrongdoing, then we should refer that to the Justice Department. Then the investigation should take place,” he explained. “What happens nowadays is the investigation begins, Congress never gets access to the information, and as a result, the American public never understands the truth of these situations.”
For seven decades, Miss Universe has been owned by men — and it will continue to be owned by one. The new male owner, however, attended the latest contest in a sparkly, floor-length gown showcasing after-market cleavage.
The new transgender-identifying owner of the worldwide beauty pageant made a backward speech about empowering women during the televised contest over the weekend (where Miss USA R’Bonney Gabriel was crowned). Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, a man who purports to be a woman and the CEO of Thailand-based media distribution company JKN Global Group, which bought the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million last year, dolled himself up as a woman on stage and framed his new ownership of the organization as a win for feminism.
“It has been 70 years that Miss Universe Organization run by men. But now, time is up, is the moment really, for women to take the lead,” Jakrajutatip said. “Welcome to the new era of the global women’s empowerment platform. Welcome to the Miss Universe Organization. From now on is going to be ran by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women, for all women really around the world to celebrate the power of feminism.”
Anne Jakrajutatip, the new owner of Miss Universe, delivered an empowering speech yesterday: “Welcome to the new era. From now on it’s gonna be run by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women around the world.” pic.twitter.com/TJXV8EPkAv
Jakrajutatip’s new ownership of Miss Universe is no win for feminism. Rather, it’s completely the opposite. A man parading around as a female and telling women they should feel empowered because their femininity can be worn as a costume or replicated based on a man’s whims is a slap in the face to women everywhere.
Beauty pageants exist to showcase the unique embodiment of women, which naturally excludes men. When organizations such as Miss Universe allow for those biological differences to be reduced to theater or “womanface,” then traditionally women-only spaces and contests are eradicated — as even the concept of womanhood is chipped away.
Whether it’s a local YMCA pool, a high school bathroom, a state prison, or college athletics, female safety, privacy, and competition are being sacrificed to appease males, many of whom are mentally ill. Pretty soon, beauty pageants will crown men instead of women — as already happened in New England. And “Miss” Universe herself might soon be a “Mr.”
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.
Last week, conservative journalist Andy Ngo published screenshots of the singer’s Instagram page. On the left, Smith is seen handsomely seated with his prestigious Oscar. The ensuing photos highlight his attempt to transition into someone who is “non-binary,” or a person who believes he was born a third sex or above the sexes altogether. The logic defies everything we know about human biology down to the binary nature of our chromosomes.
British pop star Sam Smith has been documenting their powerful transition from being a gay man to becoming a #trans nonbinary person. pic.twitter.com/TckztWIT4H
No one seems to know what a woman is these days, but does anyone even remember what a man is? Smith’s progression in Ngo’s photos underscores the erasure of cultural masculinity declared “toxic” by millennials. When you lose sight of what it means to be a man — what it means to look like a man, act like a man, and live like a man — you de facto lose the values that form the foundation of healthy masculinity. But our culture doesn’t even know what a man is.
Around this time last year, my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson provided a definition.
“If we’re going to defend manliness as good and virtuous and necessary for a healthy republic, then we need to be clear about what it is and what it is not,” he wrote, continuing:
Yes, men should be physically strong. They should also exemplify traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence, and assertiveness. But why? Not so they can sh-tpost about how ripped or good-looking they are compared to libs, but so they can protect and defend those who are weak.
That is the organizing principle behind the entire concept of manliness: it is not a style or a pose or an adornment. It is a way of being, of living according to the principle that you are responsible for the welfare of others, and should sacrifice yourself for their sake.
What does that mean in practice? It means stepping in to help those in need, whether it’s a woman being harassed or a stranger whose car has broken down. It means risking your own safety to protect someone being attacked, instead of just filming the attack on your phone and posting it online like a beta.
It also means marrying and remaining faithful to the same woman your entire life, and raising a family with her. It means working whatever hours and at whatever job in order to provide for that family. It means going to church every Sunday, whether you feel like it or not, to pass your faith on to your kids. It means getting up in the middle of the night to feed a colicky baby. It means taking your two-year-old daughter to swim class and singing all the songs — your own sense of dignity be damned.
I’m not sure I could write a better definition, amplifying the stoic virtues of physical strength, mental fortitude, and sacrificial living driven by a desire to strengthen the weak and protect the vulnerable.
Where we break is sexuality, and writing as a gay man, I know we don’t see eye to eye on certain fundamental differences. I may never live up to the picture of masculinity Davidson’s worldview prescribes, and I may never have children, but we can agree to disagree like adults. And that’s where the left has gone mad.
Gay men are often allergic to any kind of conversation surrounding masculinity because they’ve been mocked by a class of macho men as “queer,” a slur-turned-term-of-endearment that now qualifies one for the left’s privilege points. True masculinity, however, extends safety for the victims. Those who vilified it never truly understood the concept.
Before Davidson’s column, I’m not sure I remember even thinking critically about manhood — perhaps during a conversation with my father in high school. But beyond that, these discussions seem to have been choked out by a culture eager to dismiss masculinity as universally toxic.
If you question Smith’s regression — the legitimacy of it, the integrity of it, and even the consequences of it — you’re a heretic to the woketopian ruling class that’s hellbent on dictating acceptable speech.
But it isn’t just Smith. There’s a deeper mentally disturbed current pulsing beneath the decline of healthy masculinity and femininity. Consider that nearly 60 percent of people who call themselves “non-binary” report having a mental health issue. And that’s despite both difficulties in diagnosing mental illnesses and the fact that gender dysphoria itself is a mental sickness included in the latest psychiatric manual of mental disorders, meaning the real percentage is far higher.
See for yourself. How is this not a mental illness? Why are we not allowed to call it that? And why on Earth is it unacceptable to ask questions about the twisted state of the sexes?
These people are obviously struggling with a pain that’s very real. Their so-called gender identities might be made up, but their pain undeniably exists. Contrary to parental blackmail by family therapists, data shows gender-confused people are even more likely to commit suicide if they move forward with some kind of transgender transition.
The intolerance of questions surrounding gender dysphoria is baked into the elimination of masculine virtues, which promises peace and coexistence — or the allure of a projected $5 billion surgical industry by the end of the decade. But we need to understand what in the world is going on with men, and we need to be able to ask these questions.
Men today are not working. Their suicide rates are rising as high as their testosterone levels are falling low: While men make up nearly half the population, they represent 80 percent of suicides, and testosterone levels have dropped by double digits since the 1980s.
Men’s low testosterone levels reflect a population that’s not eating right, not exercising right, and not acting on their underlying ambitions. They’re becoming apathetic pot smokers stuck in the pursuit of cheap dopamine hits through Netflix and porn. And these low “T” levels are threatening fertility, which is already on the decline, in the long term, while guaranteeing a generation of fat, lazy men with no hormonal motivation in the short term.
The death of masculinity — its public execution brought about by its supposed toxicity — is the existential crisis nobody’s talking about.
Note: this is the first post in the author’s new conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness.If you liked this post and the topics addressed, consider subscribinghere.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
FIRST ON FOX: A government watchdog filed a federal complaint over the involvement of the White House Counsel’s office in President Biden’s growing classified documents scandal. Fox News Digital has learned that government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed their complaint with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on Tuesday.
“The American public will not tolerate a two-tiered system of justice – with well-connected insiders subject to a lower standard of scrutiny than the normal citizen,” PPT director Mike Chamberlain said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog, filed a federal complaint over the White House Counsel’s Office’s involvement in President Biden’s growing classified documents scandal. (Screenshot)
“President Biden promised the most ethical and transparent administration in history,” Chamberlain said. “If the White House compounded a scandal involving possible mishandling of classified documents by improperly using taxpayer resources for his personal benefit and putting White House attorneys in positions that created conflicts of interest, we could be witnessing a serious betrayal of the public’s already-plummeting trust.”
“It also creates the spectre of possible obstruction of a congressional investigation, depending on the legal basis for the intervention and any future privileges claimed by the White House on this escalating scandal,” he added.
In the complaint, which was first obtained by Fox News Digital, PPT alleged that “taxpayer resources may have been inappropriately used by senior White House lawyers, including Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber, to personally benefit Joe Biden.”
In the complaint exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, PPT alleged they “believe taxpayer resources may have been inappropriately used by senior White House lawyers, including Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber, to personally benefit Joe Biden.” (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital)
“We further believe that the apparent representation of Mr. Biden by the White House Counsel’s Office in this matter creates an untenable conflict of interest for that office,” the complaint reads.
“The result, intended or not, could be to reduce transparency into the mishandling of state secrets and foreclose disclosure of communications between White House Counsel staff while acting on behalf of Joe Biden in his capacity as a citizen facing the prospect of criminal prosecution,” it continues.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, weighed in on the complaint, asking why the president’s special counsel was with Department of Justice (DOJ) officials gathering the classified documents.
“Why was White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber accompanying DOJ officials while they collected classified documents at the Biden residence?” Jordan asked. “Mr. Sauber’s role raises serious concerns about the integrity of the Justice Department’s investigation.“
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
The complaint comes as Biden weathers the growing classified documents scandal that saw the discovery of two batches of documents in the Penn Biden Center and the president’s Wilmington, Delaware garage next to his Corvette. (Joe Biden for President)
The complaint comes as Biden weathers the growing scandal that saw the discovery of two batches of documents in the Penn Biden Center and the president’s Wilmington, Delaware garage next to his Corvette.
The White House has also been under fire for the lack of visitors logs at the president’s Delaware home. They told Fox News Digital on Monday that the logs do not exist.
George Washington University (GWU) law professor Jonathan Turley says that President Joe Biden’s lawyers are “likely witnesses in a criminal investigation” as the probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents continues.
Houston Keene is a politics writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Houston.Keene@Fox.com and on Twitter: @HoustonKeene
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.
It may be MLK Day, but Democrats aren’t here for all that “content of character” stuff.
Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, long in the running for being the vapidest member of Congress (oops, did I just commit a crime?), has introduced legislation that could make political criticism by white people against minorities a federal crime.
In what can only be called a convoluted mess, the bill proposes that a white person who “vilifies” any non-white person and has their words end up on social media, accessible by “persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime,” would themselves be committing a federal crime.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced a House Bill to criminalize “conspiracy to commit white supremacy,” which includes any criticism of non-white people that influences (such as something published or said online) someone who commits a hate crime. https://t.co/QD93bVJmA9pic.twitter.com/ROwLtvYIha
The provision is so broad that you could drive a Mack truck through it. What is a “white supremacy-inspired hate crime” under this statute? How is “replacement theory” defined? Because what Democrats call “replacement theory” as a way to silence Republicans is often not replacement theory at all but is just a reiteration of Democrat-admitted aims to use immigration to influence elections. Further, the use of “or” in section (B) is important because it leaves “vilifies” as a stand-alone qualifier. What is the limiting principle there? If I post on social media that Shelia Jackson Lee is an incredibly ignorant, abusive person who has a long history of treating her staff like dirt, does that mean I’ve “vilified” her under this proposed law? It would certainly seem so.
Then there’s the conspiracy angle to deal with. It does not appear that there’s actually any requirement that the “two or more persons” targeted under this statute have any real connection to one another. If someone commits a “white supremacy-inspired hate crime” against a person and I’ve likewise been politically criticizing that same person on social media, even justifiably, I would have now committed a federal crime myself.
This law, if it were to pass, would be used to quash valid political criticism against any non-white person or group (the Black Lives Matter organization, for example) because such criticism could leave those levying it liable to federal charges. Forgetting that such would be a blatant breach of the First Amendment, it also exposes a wild totalitarian desire by Lee and those who think like her.
And that’s exactly why Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy should put it up for a vote. Put this ridiculous, reductive garbage on the floor, and make every Democrat go on record.
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson called out NBC News anchor Chuck Todd on Sunday for his contentious attitude toward the Wisconsin lawmaker’s suggestion that Hunter Biden may be guilty of any wrongdoing.
On “Meet the Press,” Todd first asked Johnson whether he agrees with the special counsel investigation of President Joe Biden. After Johnson explained why he is generally “not a fan of special counsels,” the conversation quickly turned to the merits of a Hunter Biden investigation.
“Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed, because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name,” Todd told Johnson.
When Johnson did name potential crimes, Todd quickly shifted the conversation to Jared Kushner, implicitly accusing Johnson of being one-sided. He also accused Johnson of “targeting” Hunter Biden. At that point, Johnson had enough.
“Chuck, you know, part of the problem — and this is pretty obvious to anybody watching this — is you don’t invite me on to interview me, you invite me on to argue with me,” Johnson said. “You know, I’m just trying to lay out the facts that certainly Sen. Grassley and I uncovered. They were suppressed. They were censored. They interfered in the 2020 election. Conservatives understand that.
“Unfortunately, liberals in the media don’t. And that’s part of the reasons our politics are inflamed is we do not have an unbiased media. We don’t. It’s unfortunate,” he added. “I’m all for free press. It needs to be more unbiased.”
After crosstalk between Todd and Johnson, the NBC anchor took a shot at his guest.
“Look, you can go back on your partisan cable cocoon and talk about media bias all you want. I understand it’s part of your identity,” Todd accused.
Full Johnson: ‘There is nothing [for the special counsel] to interview me about’ www.youtube.com
At the end of the interview — after Todd attempted to connect the riots in Brazil to Jan. 6 and Donald Trump — Todd said he looked forward to hosting Johnson for an in-studio interview.
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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A third batch of classified documents was found at the Delaware home of President Joe Biden, according to the White House. The president’s lawyer revealed on Saturday that more classified documents were discovered at Biden’s Wilmington home. Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, issued a statement that six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library at his house.
Previously, Biden’s personal lawyers – who do not have security clearance – discovered one page of classified documents in the library on Wednesday and abandoned the search of the room. On Thursday night, Sauber – who does have security clearance – found five additional pages with classified markings while he was accompanied by Department of Justice officials.
“Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document the President’s personal counsel found on Wednesday to the Justice Department,” Sauber said in the statement.
“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber revealed. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”
Earlier this week, Sauber said, “We have cooperated closely with the Justice Department throughout its review, and we will continue that cooperation with the Special Counsel.”
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” he added.
Previous batches of classified documents were discovered in Biden’s garage in December and inside his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington in November. The documents were handled when Biden was the vice president for former President Barack Obama.
An investigation into the documents is being led by former U.S. attorney Robert Hur – who was appointed as a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre proclaimed that the search for classified documents was completed.
“And the search is clearly complete, and therefore we shared the information with all of you,” Jean-Pierre said during the press conference.
Jean-Pierre added, “Look, I can just refer you to what his team said: The search is complete. He is confident in this process. And I will leave it there.“
TWO DAYS AGO, Karine Jean-Pierre insisted “the search [for classified documents] is complete. He is confident in this process. And I will leave it there.”
TODAY, Biden’s White House announced they found 5 more classified documents in Biden’s home in Wilmington. pic.twitter.com/xyyUtBY4j8
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Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has beaten one form of cancer. In her new role as Arkansas governor, she plans to tackle another.
Sanders issued an executive order on Tuesday designed to prevent leftist doctrinaires from peddling racial identity politics and leftist activism in schools. Within hours of being sworn in to office on Tuesday, Sanders issued multiple executive orders countering leftist speech codes and conventions in the state, including one removing the use of the controversial term “Latinx” in government documents. In another order “to prohibit indoctrination and critical race theory in schools,” Sanders emphasized that the role of schools is to educate, not indoctrinate students. Similarly, teachers are tasked with teaching students how to think, not what to think.
Accordingly, schools’ and teachers’ days of peddling critical race theory are over.
Christopher Rufo noted in the New York Post that critical race theory was “formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism.”
“Identity is the means; Marxism is the end,” wrote Rufo. “Critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.”
Sanders, who secured over 63% of the vote in the November gubernatorial election, will not allow Arkansas schools to be further weaponized against America. She noted in her executive order, “Critical Race Theory (CRT) is antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness. It emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values, which America has fought so hard to reject.”
Critical race theory has no place in Arkansas schools, she suggested; particularly not when “the Constitution of the State of Arkansas and the Constitution of the United States of America recognize the equal value of every individual, and provide equal protection under the law, regardless of color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, familial status, disability, religion, and national origin.”
The governor’s executive order requires that Arkansas’ education secretary, Jacob Oliva, ensure that his department and its employees, contractors, guest speakers, and lecturers are in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Furthermore, any and all department rules, regulations, policies, materials, and communications must be reviewed to ensure that leftist discriminatory practices and critical race theory are expurgated.
Sanders’ executive order echoes Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law on April 22. The act prohibits “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students or employees to believe the core tenets of critical race theory and comparable identitarian theories.
Sanders tweeted Thursday, “Under my leadership, schools will teach reading, writing, math, and science—and our children will learn that the identity that truly matters is the one we all share: our identity as children of God and citizens of the United States of America.”
Under my leadership, schools will teach reading, writing, math, and science—and our children will learn that the identity that truly matters is the one we all share: our identity as children of God and citizens of the United States of America.
In her inaugural address, Sanders stated, “As long as I am governor, our schools will focus on the skills our children need to get ahead in the modern world, not brainwashing our children with a left-wing political agenda.”
News broke late yesterday that a search of the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, uncovered additional classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president, stored unsecured in the family garage and separately in another room of the house. And I still haven’t stopped laughing.
Since August of 2022, when the FBI launched an unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the entirety of the anti-Trump universe insisted — insisted — that the recently departed commander-in-chief’s possession of documents marked classified was a big f-ing deal.
Never mind that Trump had declassification authority as the president of the United States, or that the documents were stored at his home under the watchful eye of his Secret Service protection. Ignore too the fact that the National Archives could have worked with Trump to coordinate the storage of the documents under the technical possession of the government, but at a location of the former president’s choosing, just as was done with former President Barack Obama.
But because the loony left couldn’t resist one more sequel in their get-Trump franchise, as Trump exited the Oval Office, a backbench bureaucrat at the National Archives launched another hoax meant to finally, finally destroy Trump. Several leaks and a year-plus later, the plot culminated in the raid of Trump’s home followed by the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump.
And because the National Archives and the Biden administration went nuclear against Trump for possessing documents at Mar-a-Lago marked classified, they have no option but to pretend to treat Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents in an equally serious way. So, the National Archives referred the matter to the Department of Justice, just as it had with Trump, even though when it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mishandling classified documents, no criminal referral followed.
Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed a U.S. attorney to investigate Biden’s mishandling of the classified documents, to create the impression of equal justice under the law. Of course, given Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump, a plain ol’ ordinary U.S. attorney doesn’t level up, and for that, the attorney general is already receiving heat.
But the heat comes from the hypocrisy, not the gravity of the situation.
The Biden classified documents scandal is not a serious scandal. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is a serious scandal. Biden’s refusal to faithfully execute his duties as president of the United States by securing the southern border is a serious scandal. The Biden family pay-to-play escapades are a serious scandal. And the weaponization of the FBI and the intelligence community to interfere in the 2020 election and hand Biden the presidency is a serious scandal. This is not.
Laughable. Delicious. Outrageous. It is all those things and becomes more so by the day, with news that more classified documents are reposed in a residential garage, in addition to the closet at a D.C. think tank. And the story just becomes funnier the more the corrupt press tries to distinguish Biden’s possession of classified documents from Trump’s because Biden himself on video declared the possession of classified documents in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home to be “just totally irresponsible.”
But a garage, Joe? Seriously? And is not knowing there were classified documents there, as Biden claims, any better?
The bottom line here is simple. This entire scandal is a joke. And now, thanks to the get-Trump franchise, irresponsible Biden will be forever cast as a laughingstock — and so will the propagandists in the press.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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Two CBS News anchors called out White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday for refusing to answer basic questions about the discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s private office and residence. Over the past two days, Jean-Pierre has faced a barrage of intense questions about the documents. She has frustrated reporters, however, by repeatedly dodging the questions.
CBS anchors Errol Barnett and Lana Zak slammed Jean-Pierre for having “not answered a single question” about the discovery of the documents.
“For a second straight day now, the White House struggling to answer any questions related to classified documents discovered at locations associated with President Biden, citing Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, simply reading a statement, where she says the president was surprised by the discovery, takes this matter very seriously, the documents were inadvertently misplaced, and he doesn’t know what’s in them,” Barnett began.
“She has not answered a single question outside of a prewritten statement by the president’s lawyers,” he said.
“Exactly,” Zak agreed. “And continuing then to say the same thing again and again. Even in response to very simple questions about the timeline, about the specific location, clarifying questions, and continuing to use the word ‘transparent’ and saying that they did things in a transparent manner.”
“You heard our own CBS’ Ed O’Keefe really trying to pin her down on what she means by transparency when she’s saying that she has been transparent. Does that mean legal transparency? Governmental transparency as required by law? Or public transparency?” Zak asked.
Reporters are now directly questioning the Biden administration’s narrative that officials have been “transparent” and forthcoming about the classified documents. At one point in Thursday’s White House briefing, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked what the Biden administration is trying to “hide.”
“Nothing,” Jean-Pierre claimed.
But that is almost implausible. Not only did the White House not tell the American public about the first discovery of classified documents until two months after the midterm elections, but when officials admitted to the first batch, they neglected to say anything about the second batch that had already been discovered.
In just the past few days I have been bombarded, as I am sure many of you have, by negative reports and studies about the state of American society. There are clearly causes for great concern for our nation’s future.
We have legions of college students who have evidently drunk the woke Kool-Aid and believe that any opinion that does not coincide with their liberal, “woke” agenda is hate speech and is a legitimate target for being censored, silenced, or shut down by woke mobs exercising a “heckler’s veto.”
There is nothing “liberal” about such philosophies or the behaviors they generate. In fact, they are far more similar to, and reminiscent of, fascist mobs and McCarthyite red-scare tactics.
As I have read these reports and watched them online, I have become increasingly resolved that we must exercise our freedom of speech despite the possible consequences, or we will lose the right to that very freedom of speech.
For example, two publications I have been reading since the age of 12 (Decision, a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) and the age of 18 (The New York Times) presented me with information that both thoroughly alarmed me and helped to explain our current cultural malaise at the same time.
Seventy-five percent of America’s teenagers had now viewed pornography online “by the age of 17 with the average of first exposure at age 12, according to the report by Common Cause Media.” Many of the young people surveyed did not seek out pornography, it sought them out on the internet. Many of them reported that they were at first disturbed by the images they viewed although less than 50% had discussed the issue with a parent or trusted adult. One measure of the growth of this cancer on society is the fact that in 2012 the porn business was earning $5 billion a year and today it is estimated to be a $15 billion a year blight on society.
Why such a rapid increase? The moral laxity of the culture brought on by the decline in moral clarity and intestinal fortitude of the American pulpit is one leading contributor.
This became more clear to me as I read my copy of Decision magazine, which I first remember reading as a boy of 12 when it came to our home on a regular basis (my father had been saved at a Billy Graham Crusade in Houston in 1952 when I was 6 years old).
The issue which arrived in my mailbox earlier this week (the January 2023 issue) contained an article, “What’s Wrong with America’s Pulpits?” by Lee Weeks.
The article was based on “The American Worldview Inventory, 2022,” researched and published by George Barna, the director of research with the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. Barna and his team surveyed and analyzed bedrock doctrines of the Christian faith to measure the doctrinal orthodoxy of America’s Protestant Clergy, as well as the general population.
The result of Barna’s research makes for devastating reading for Americans who are traditionally orthodox Christians. For example, Barna’s seven bedrock biblical beliefs constituting a biblical worldview were:
God is the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and just Creator.
Humans are sinful by nature.
Jesus Christ grants forgiveness of sin and eternal life when sinners repent and profess their faith in Him alone.
The Bible is true, reliable, and always relevant.
Absolute moral truth exists.
Success is defined as consistent obedience to God.
Life’s purpose is to know, love, and serve God with all one’s heart, mind, strength, and soul.
When Barna had sifted through the results, the portrait that emerged was chilling, and this was nowhere more true than among the clergy — the shepherds of the flock.
According to Barna’s results, only 37% of pastors of churches of all Protestant denominations have a biblical worldview. If the pastors, the shepherds of the flock, have sub-biblical doctrinal beliefs, who is going to lead the people and “teach them all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:16-180.)
Barna’s research reveals that among Evangelical pastors 30% reject salvation by faith alone and 39% reject belief in absolute truth (some things are always right and some things are always wrong). If people are not hearing a sure, certain, and uncompromising word from the pulpits, where will they find truth in this increasingly secular milieu in which Americans live and breath. When the pulpits are sounding forth an uncertain sound, the people are increasingly at the mercy of the roving packs of spiritual wolves on the prowl for new sheep to apostatize.
I have experienced this doctrinal confusion and spiritual apostasy in my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I have had perhaps a half dozen former seminary classmates and ministry brethren who have said to me in one form or another, “I’ve decided that God permits monogamous, same-sex relationships” or “I believe a loving God won’t send anyone to hell.”
My response has been, and will continue to be, “You’ve decided! When did you become God?”
In His Holy Word. God has answered these questions! In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” (John 14::6). In the original Greek the article the is implied or assumed. When it appears it is for emphasis as it is here in the Greek New Testament text.
Similarly, in Romans (11:24-28) and 1 Corinthians (6:9-11) God made it clear that a same-sex sexual lifestyle was rejected utterly.
As Evangelical Christians, we must face the unpleasant fact that while there has been an Evangelical revival in the last half of the 20th and the first fifth of the 21st centuries, the secularizing society has influenced Evangelicals more than the other way around. Instead of being salt and light (Mtt. 5:13-16), we have been salted and lit by society at large.
For America to experience the great spiritual awakening we must have, we will need a deep and lasting spiritual recommitment to the eternal truths of the Gospel.
As George Barna himself puts it,
“to see American culture transformed will require a time of Christians and pastors devoted to repentance and the Scriptures unlike anything we have seen in more than a century.”
May God give us the strength, devotion, and wisdom to commence that journey and to never flag or surrender until we have let God make us the salt and light Jesus commanded each of us to be.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
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.
To this day, President Joe Biden denies his long history of involvement in the lucrative Biden family business, but the corrupt corporate media are finally admitting the president’s participation in the financial dealings spearheaded by his son Hunter Biden.
The New York Times published an article this week claiming, “a close look at [Hunter’s] story shows that it differs in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans,” who, with their newfound majority in the House, are investigating the Biden family’s “deliberate, repeated deception of the American people, abuse of the executive branch for personal gain, [and] use of government power to obstruct the investigation.”
The article merely acknowledges what conservative media outlets have reported for years about Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s overseas business dealings. Yes, then-Vice President Biden, who was tasked with “overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine,” met with Hunter’s “main point of contact” at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a charity dinner event, the NYT confessed, but waved off Biden’s visit with Pozharskyi as the U.S. leader’s attempt “to spend time” with his addict son.
Followers of the unraveling Biden family corruption story have already known for over a year and a half that Pozharskyi confirmed this interaction in an email thanking Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together.”
Biden, The New York Times conceded in a paragraph buried deep in the article, also met with Hunter’s Chinese business partners. He even authored an optimistic note to Devon Archer, arguably Hunter’s closest associate, on White House letterhead to congratulate him on snuggling up to China’s then-head Hu Jintao.
The Times also reported that Biden “met regularly with Eric Schwerin, his son’s business manager,” and even handed over management of the then-VP’s personal finances. Schwerin, the Times admitted, would occasionally “pay a bill for Vice President Biden out of one of his son’s accounts and then assure that he was repaid.” Biden’s ties to Schwerin are no surprise considering that he reportedly rubbed shoulders with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates, sometimes in the West Wing of the White House. Yet The New York Times argues that the 2010 emails evidencing the existence of these shared accounts and entanglement of finances shouldn’t matter because anonymous sources reportedly close to the Biden family said Hunter and his dad never “had joint bank accounts or direct access to each others’ money.”
Over and over and over and over and over, Biden and his White House denied not just wrongdoing, but an association of any kind with Hunter’s money-making schemes. Apparently at the behest of the FBI, the regime’s allies in the corporate media have long accepted and helped amplify Biden’s lies, forming a bogus “fact-checking” and election-meddling apparatus for tech giants to censor anyone who exposed Biden family corruption.
Now, as mountainsof evidence point to Biden’s deep ties to activity that’s at best unethical and possibly illegal, the Times, even in admitting Biden’s involvement, is once more writing off Hunter as “a man battling with personal demons against the background of family tragedy,” with his dad merely getting caught in the crossfire. In predictable spin, the NYT instead tries to make the story about Republicans, whom it says merely “intend to intensify their scrutiny of Hunter Biden in a bid to inflict damage on his father as he prepares for his likely 2024 re-election bid.”
An inquiry into the Bidens, however, is long overdue and an unsurprising development given the GOP’s newly acquired majority in the lower chamber. House Republicans’ investigation seeks to finally expose how the president’s proximity to his son’s twisted and likely illicit bargaining may have compromised the security of the United States. After all, Hunter didn’t just exchange access to his father, the then-second-highest executive officer in the United States, for cash to fund the family’s lavish lifestyle. He was paid off by oligarchs and businessmen in countries with a vested interest in meddling with U.S. affairs.
The New York Times’ attempt to write that off as “complex” is just further evidence of its allegiance to the Biden administration instead of the truth.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.
How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook
In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.
One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”
Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:
The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.
The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”
While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.
Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.
Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.
5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy
The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.
Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.
Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.
Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”
“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”
Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”
The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.
After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”
Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.
Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“
Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.
A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.
Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.
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.
Every president probably stashes away classified documents. The chances of any president being successfully prosecuted for pilfering them are infinitesimal. Nevertheless, now that we’ve learned Joe Biden has engaged in the same behavior as Donald Trump — perhaps worse, considering vice presidents are afforded less leeway on classified documents — precedent and transparency, our very democracy, demand Attorney General Merrick Garland name a special counsel to investigate (I get results!)
Right now, none of the rationalizations offered by the media for Biden’s actions over the past few days are operational. When the story first broke, outlets stressed that one of the vital “distinctions” between the two incidents was that Biden was in possession of fewer documents than Trump. Biden aides, we learned, had been utterly shocked to discover only a “small number” of classified documents “locked” in the personal offices of the president’s “think tank” — as if the location or the number of documents, or the alleged lock, rather than the contents, were the most newsworthy aspect of the story.
Today, we learned that a second “batch” of classified documents was uncovered at an “undisclosed” location. Suddenly, everything got incredibly vague. Biden aides, we are told, began diligently rummaging through boxes to ensure they were in complete compliance with the law. A completely independent source told collusion-hoaxer Ken Dilanian that the “search was described as exhaustive, with the goal of getting a full accounting of all classified documents that may have inadvertently been packed in boxes when Biden cleared out of the vice president’s office space in January 2017.” It’s heartening to know that the Bidens are such diligent, law-abiding folk.
Yesterday, we were told that classified documents that are found in a serious office setting, rather than just “lying around” in a home, was an important difference between the two cases. Today, Biden’s lawyer says that “small number” of classified documents was also found “locked” in Biden’s garage and an “adjacent” room of his Wilmington home. (Don’t worry, the president assures us it was safely stored next to his beloved Corvette.) You know, if we find another “small number” of documents, we might just have ourselves a full cache.
No doubt, journalists are super curious to know how those classified documents got into Joe’s garage. I mean, the guy had a think tank office at his disposal in D.C. Moreover, the initial documents were alleged to have been discovered before midterms, and yet we’re only hearing about new ones months later — and in convenient dribs and drabs.
Soon after CBS’s initial story, a four-byline puff piece from CNN reported that the documents found in the think tank were related to Ukraine, Iran, and the U.K., so not just keepsakes and letters and such. This week we also learned, in another soft-peddled report by The New York Times, that Biden, despite his insistence that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s foreign entanglements, had met with a liaison from the Ukrainian energy interest Burisma, among many other revelations. Recall, Obama officials had also raised concerns about the Biden family business. Is there any chance those Ukrainian documents would have been embarrassing to the president? Seems a reasonable question.
What’s important now, we’re going to be instructed, is that Biden “immediately” contacted the authorities and is fully “cooperating.” Is it possible, and I’m just theorizing here, that Biden and his aides are lying? For one thing, cooperating is fine, but it’s not everything. Trump has every right to hire a lawyer and fight the Archives over documents. Maybe he’s got a case, maybe he doesn’t. But perhaps Biden also simply picked an opportune time to cooperate with his own administration in an effort to avoid any transparency. Far from “immediately” handing over this material, the president’s been in possession of classified documents for nearly seven years. How does the DOJ know there aren’t more documents stashed away? How does it know Biden, like Trump, didn’t put them in his garage on purpose? Because he says so?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s entertaining watching the comically obvious attempts to mitigate the damage. But if Biden hasn’t done anything wrong, he has absolutely nothing to fear.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
An Ontario high school teacher who wears giant prosthetic breasts, which some have deemed to be “obscene,” may be causing a new dress code policy change for more professional attire.
On Jan. 3, the Board of Trustees passed a motion requesting the director of education develop a professionalism policy “to maintain appropriate and professional standards of dress and decorum in the classroom,” according to the Halton District School Board.
When Fox News Digital reached out for comment about the teacher’s giant breasts potentially bringing about a policy change, the education director reaffirmed the importance of human rights for “underserved and underrepresented” groups.
“The HDSB’s commitment to human rights remains rooted in our core values and commitment to each and every student and staff who identifies as a member of an underserved and underrepresented group, and our approach is informed by opinions from leading employment law firms with human rights and equity advisors. This commitment and approach will continue to be applied as the HDSB looks to fulfill this motion,” the director stated.
The teacher, whom the district has refused to identify, went viral in September after videos of the giant prosthetic breasts and nipple. The Canadian teacher works at Oakville Trafalgar High School. Some have argued that the district was required by Canadian law to allow the transgender teachers to dress as they please, while others have said the attire is sexual, and therefore extremely inappropriate to be worn around minor children.
AP Photo/Alik Keplicz (The Associated Press)
The trustees have requested the policy be presented in a report by March 1, 2023, with an interim report in February 2023.
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.
When young people die, Leftists say they died from SADS: sudden adult death syndrome. Here’s the reason:
Leftists love their euphemisms, and SADS works out perfectly when you don’t want to admit that people died from a big Covid lie. In this case, the lie of the vaccines. With everything we now know about vaccine deaths and vaccine injuries, no one should be surprised that Moderna, Pfizer, and their financial enablers wanted the data about deaths and injuries hidden for 75 years.
The recent heart attack suffered by Damar Hamblin illuminated the need for investigation in this mess. While Leftists scumbags promoted these death pokes as “safe and effective”, others sounded the alarm bell.
Green Bay Quarterback Aaron Rogers spoke out against vaccinations. In light of what happened to Hamblin, you can bet that he feels vindicated. However, there are many examples of great athletes who suffered mightily after getting the jab.
Little coverage was given to 38-year-old pro-vax ex-Baltimore Raven Uche Nwaneri. The former offensive lineman collapsed in the bedroom of his wife’s home in West Lafayette, and he never recovered. The cause of his collapse was an “enlarged heart with acute heart failure.” Sound familiar? For those who wonder if his death was Covid-vaccine-related, check out this tweet from Nwaneri:
I wonder if his family realizes who the “stupid ass” is now?
The “dewormer” works and the vaccine kills. But don’t expect much media coverage on the death of this outspoken vaxxer. In fact, as I read multiple articles about his untimely SADS death, I saw nothing about his death being related to Covid.
This despite Nwaneri’s obvious mocking of the unvaxxed in his tweet.
What professional athletes do you know who die at the age of 38 and from issues we know to be those from which people die from after taking Covid vaccines? “Enlarged heart with acute heart failure.”
Nwaneri fell for the BS of Anthony Fauci and his boss Joe Biden. His death is on their hands.As for Hamblin, his NFL career is over. And he too has Fauci, Biden, et al to blame for this.
But how many other non-descript people’s lives have been ruined, all because Leftists don’t have the balls to tell the truth about Covid vaccines?
While House Democrats’ first act of the 118th Congress was to demand a vote on their unsuccessful abortion up-until-birth in all 50 states legislation, House Republicans, keen to defend the nation’s most vulnerable, committed to using their newfound majority to pass two pro-life measures.
Neither of the legislative acts limits abortion in any way as the GOP’s previously proposed 15-week abortion ban would have done. Yet, Democrats and their allies in the corrupt corporate media, still reeling from the end of Roe v. Wade, shunned the legislation and smeared Republicans for daring to use their congressional power to curb Democrats’ abortion for all agenda.
“House Republicans turn their attention to restricting abortion rights,” the Washington Post wrote.
“Republican-controlled House pushes for new abortion restrictions,” the Guardian reported.
“House Republicans Are Already Voting On Anti-Abortion Bills As GOP Eyes Even More Restrictions,” one Forbes headline blared.
The first, a bill dubbed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, doesn’t just seek to mandate life-saving medical care and legal protection for babies who survive botched abortions. The legislation also criminalizes abortionists’ failure to administer proper care and treatment for infants who are born alive.
The GOP’s belief that “Every baby is a precious life that must be protected,” however, was not shared by their Democrat colleagues. Instead of agreeing with Republicans’ attempts to give newborns who survive abortions proper care, Democrats defended the gruesome act of dismembering a delivered baby. Despite claiming the bill is unwarranted because infanticide is illegal, talking heads and leftist mouthpieces smeared the legislation as “extremist, dangerous, and unnecessary” and committed to obeying Democrat leadership’s orders to vote against it.
Democrat Sheila Jackson defends partial birth abortions, in which the abortionist “deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until…the entire fetal head is outside the mother’s body” before snipping the baby’s neck.
The second GOP-led action is a resolution designed to condemn the more than 100 attacks, firebombings, and violent acts of vandalism that plagued pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Additionally, the resolution urges the Biden administration, the FBI, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the politicized Department of Justice, which focused on targeting peaceful pro-life protestors instead of violent pro-abortion vandalists, to “take action now to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“Who could be opposed to that?” the resolution’s proponent Rep. Mike Johnson asked from the House floor on Wednesday.
My @HouseGOP resolution on the floor today is simple and important.
Congress must condemn the recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches following the Dobbs decision. pic.twitter.com/brCe2l7JJE
Yet, Democrats were more than willing to brush off the history of political violence against pro-lifers in exchange for pushing more support for abortion.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D), arguing against a resolution condemning attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers:
"We have to make sure that people who are pro-life and pro-people who support abortion rights, and we support life, are included in opposing violence." pic.twitter.com/9uwhISGUlJ
Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe last summer, pro-life laws all around the nation have saved more than 10,000 lives. Despite House Republicans’ best efforts to pass pro-life legislation on the national level to expand life-saving measures, the Democrat-controlled Senate does not plan to advance the legislation.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
As different states and municipalities across the country adopt ranked-choice voting, it’s become obvious this mind-boggling election system deserves a new name: rigged-choice voting.
After nearly two months of tabulation, Alameda County, California, — one such ranked-choice voting (RCV) adoptee — announced it got the count wrong for its Nov. 8 election. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the California county admitted it made systemic errors while tabulating ballots. As a result of the snafu, an Oakland School Board race flipped: The top vote-getter (and certified winner) must now hand his board seat over to the third-place finisher.
While gross negligence on the part of some Alameda County election officials is not only probable but likely, RCV’s Byzantine election system must also take the blame. In it, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his voters are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. The process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes. For the Oakland mayor’s race, it took nine baffling rounds of RCV for one candidate to receive the narrow majority. The local NAACP chapter demanded a manual recount but scrapped it due to the expense.
In the case of the Oakland School Board election, officials blame a software configuration problem for the error (even the machines were confused about how to count the RCV-way). But is it right for a candidate who receives a plurality of votes on the first go-through to eventually lose to someone who finishes last? Often, the victors that emerge from ranked-choice voting are not the candidates a majority of voters favor. Case-in-point: Democrat Mary Peltola won Alaska’s lone congressional seat despite nearly 60 percent of voters casting their ballots for a Republican.
What’s behind the RCV takeover? As The Federalist has previously reported, partisan Democratic activists and moderate Republicans are pushing RCV as a legal mechanism to push out more revolutionary (read: populist) candidates in favor of establishment-backed contenders. As Project Veritas has documented, the moderate, nominal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was behind the campaign to change Alaska’s primary to an RCV system, ensuring the defeat of her Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka. Had Alaska not implemented RCV, Tshibaka likely would have defeated Murkowski in the primary.
There is a myriad of problems with RCV, as the Alameda County debacle shows. The Foundation for Government Accountability notes that ranked-choice voting causes ballot exhaustion (when a ballot is cast but does not count toward the end election result), diminishes voter confidence, and lags election results. It can take weeks or even months for a ranked-choice race to be counted, threatening the security of the process.
If Americans desire democracy and election integrity, rigged-choice voting is clearly not the way to go.
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.
Arecession is coming in 2023, concluded more than two-thirds of the economists at big financial institutions recently surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. Inflation is also likely to remain high. Measuring year-over-year inflation by the U.S. government’s 1980s methodology put it at 15.23 percent in November 2022 instead of the government’s claimed 7.11 percent, according to economist John Williams.
Many commentators, including me, were wrong when we previously claimed our grandkids will be paying off America’s massively unaffordable welfare state. We are all paying for it right now and are likely to be for much of our lives in inflation and other economic devastation.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s maxim that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” — meaning, inflation is always caused by government overspending — predicts continued inflation for at least the next five years, if not longer.
That’s because government entities are continuing to engage in seriously inflationary actions. They’re doing this partly because of ideology, partly to buy votes, and partly because they prefer eating away Americans’ savings to paying off the unprecedented government debt that politicians have accumulated in the last 70 years enriching their friends and buying off voters.
Inflation Means Politicians Stealing from You
A 2021 Politico profile of a former U.S. Federal Reserve member noted, “Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years.”
That dissenting former Federal Reserve committee member, Thomas Hoenig, “was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else,” the profile says. “He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.”
Essentially, the Federal Reserve has been helping Congress manufacture money to buy up the public debt they contracted by promising Americans more stuff than we can pay for. That’s been ongoing since the 1960s Great Society, which basically paid Americans with unaffordable entitlements to shut up about the steady loss of their constitutional freedoms, according to scholar Christopher Caldwell.
The Borrowing Will Go On Until It Can’t
In 2021, 41 percent of federal spendingdependedon borrowing. In 2022, 22 percent did. This means raising the cost of debt by hiking interest rates, as the Fed is now doing, could provoke a crisis because it would make Congress’s unsustainable behavior even more painful.
As a Manhattan Institute analysis by economist Brian Riedl notes, “rising interest rates risk pushing government interest costs, annual budget deficits, and total government debt to unsustainable levels … once the debt surges, even modest interest-rate movements can impose stratospheric costs.”
This would call years of government bluffing about the state of federal finances and institutions. It would require Congress not only to stop spending but to cut programs, which means angering voters. It would usher in the unavoidable and painful new era of managing America’s decline.
“Once a debt-and-interest-rate spiral begins, it is nearly impossible to escape without drastic inflation or fiscal consolidation,” Riedl notes.
However this ends, it is likely to include a lot of economic pain, one way or another. Here are just a few of the many indicators that inflationary times are not going away fast.
1. ‘Covid’ Overspending Continues Until at Least 2024
The funds for the sixth waste-packed “Covid relief bill” will be distributed to big-government donors, states, and local governments through the end of presidential election year 2024. Yes, the American Rescue Plan Act from Covid-tide sends states and local governments $350 billion that is still being rolled out — by design.
That law’s total spending comprises more than 100 times states’ 2020 budget shortfalls, and many state and local governments can hardly figure out what to do with all the money. As they take years to spend it, that money will keep juicing inflationary pressure. A similar effect is occurring with all the so-called Covid relief bills, which together sent $6 trillion spinning through the economy, devaluing our currency. Much of this wild inflationary deficit spending has been electronically printed through the Federal Reserve.
Together, 2020s federal spending allegedly in response to Covid was more than double the inflation-adjusted federal response to the 1930s Great Depression. We’re already seeing the inflationary effects of all this so-called Covid spending, and it’s not over yet.
2. Democrats and Republicans Recently Went on Even More Inflationary Spending Binges
In conjunction with Democrats’ mega-spending “infrastructure” and “green energy” bills soon after Covid that also helped them win Congress and the presidency in 2020, all this extra spending is projected to increase the federal debt by an unprecedented $6.5 trillion, costing more than the 20 years of U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Riedl.
“In other words, the U.S. government is in the early stages of what is projected to be the largest government debt binge in world history,” Riedl notes.
That doesn’t even include the massive federal spending expansions to support a large army of grifters profiting off the human suffering of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Congress spent more on the first four months of Ukraine’s war than it did on the first five years of its undeclared war in Afghanistan.
Atop all this, more deficit spending is likely to come. In August 2022, Democrats confirmed yet again that historic levels of inflation that year were no impediment to their big-spending aims when Biden announced that he’d force taxpayers to assume up to nearly $1 trillion in student loans taken on by largely higher-income professionals. That spending is tied up in court and could be allowed at any time.
This all means that the source of inflation — government overspending — is at an unprecedented rate and pace, and even with the House Freedom Caucus’ negotiated limits on congressional spending activity, trillions in new spending is already locked in.
3. Build Back Bankrupt Shoveled Yet More Out the Door for Years to Come
In 2022, the Biden administration managed to get its top-priority grab-bag of increased government spending signed into law. By spending more money the government does not have and imposing more taxes, the ridiculously named Inflation Reduction Act is likely to increase inflation, said a Tax Foundation analysis.
“By increasing spending, the bill worsens inflation, especially in the first four years, as revenue raisers take time to ramp up and the deficit increases,” the foundation’s analysis says. “We find that budget deficits would increase from 2023 to 2026, potentially worsening inflation.”
Continuing to shovel money to cronies while ignoring major structural problems in the U.S. economy and federal budget process has become a hallmark of Congress in the 2000s. This has to end at some point, but until that point comes reasonable people can only expect such legislation to continue to pass, and to continue to worsen inflationary pressures.
Given how reckless both parties have been for decades on fiscal matters, it is likely this norm of spending money Congress can’t actually appropriate will continue until a major disaster ends their ability to fake.
4. Federal Officials Are Destroying the People’s Trust
Inflation happens “When money is no longer a trustworthy measure of value,” note Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames in their 2022 book, “Inflation.” Inflation is at least partly about a crisis of confidence in government — a warranted one, usually, because major inflation occurs as a result of politician malfeasance. Unfortunately, U.S. government officials are doing nothing to restore the people’s lost confidence in them — in fact, just the opposite.
In 2022, federal officials spent months denying inflation was happening. They also denied the United States was in a recession, insisting the traditional definition of two economic quarters in contraction was false when it was applied under Democrat rule. They’ve switched how they measure inflation to hide a large part of it.
U.S. leaders also refuse to stabilize our currency, instead taking actions that further erode Americans’ ability to put food on the table and get ahead through legitimately productive honest labor (as opposed to bullsh-t jobs). This does the opposite of what is needed: restore confidence in our markets by announcing strong steps to strengthen the U.S. dollar. They are also engaging in other activities that only erode confidence in the U.S. financial system, such as monetizing the federal debt and refusing to stop massive deficit spending.
Because politicians have created this situation and keep refusing to actually address it, Americans increasingly don’t trust their government or our debt-driven financial system. Polling shows public trust repeatedly hitting new record lows for every social and political institution. That’s an economic problem as well as a political and cultural problem, because a lack of confidence in markets can trigger economic growth, recession, and panics.
Usually, such crises build under the surface for a long time and then burst out into the open all of a sudden. As Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane said during a panel discussion, “Debt crises are like the Spanish Inquisition; no one expects them to come. If you knew they were coming, they would have already happened.”
5. The U.S. Federal Government Is Effectively Bankrupt and Inflation Helps It Hide That
The on-books U.S. national debt of $31.5 trillion is just the tip of the iceberg. Our entitlement systems are about to start going bankrupt, adding trillions in additional financial burdens on taxpayers. Riedl notes, “The U.S. government is projected to run a staggering $112 trillion in budget deficits over the next three decades, driven mostly by Social Security and Medicare commitments that are already set in law.”
If one adds unfunded and other liabilities that government officials keep off the books such as Federal Reserve debt, the amount the U.S. national government owes is more than $200 trillion. That doesn’t include what state and local governments owe, and many of them are also bankrupt or getting there.
“No matter what interest rate you use, the U.S. needs to immediately and permanently raise every federal tax by at least one third to pay, through time, for what our government plans to spend,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff wrote with fellow economist John Goodman in 2021. “The alternative? Massive spending cuts. And, no, the Federal Reserve can’t make this problem go away by printing the money needed by the Treasury. This would end where it always does — in hyperinflation.”
U.S. debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities — which together form a total picture of U.S. national economic entrapment — are the largest ever measured in world history. Besides Japan, which isn’t spending the majority of its debt on entitlements like the United States is, “Greece and Italy are the only other OECD countries with a total government debt exceeding that of the United States,” Riedl notes. Greece and Italy have had major sovereign debt crises that have destroyed their standards of living and brought their economies into long-term decline.
“When you look at these numbers, you realize we’re Argentina in 1910,” Kotlikoff told CNBC in 2018, before the alarmist Covid response and Biden presidency made things much worse. All it will take for these scary structural problems to become visible and impossible to ignore is a financial panic or another major event like a war. Oh, look, Congress is also pushing us ever-toward open war with Russia instead of toward peace. Brilliant.
6. Child Scarcity Will Drive Higher Prices
In March 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported the opinion of retired British central banker Charles Goodhart that global structural factors will drive higher inflation for years to come. Goodhart helped Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher break inflation in the 1980s. He told the Journal that the rising global crisis of child scarcity will also push inflation up for decades.
As labor becomes more scarce, he maintained, workers will push for higher wages, in turn driving up prices. At the same time, businesses will manufacture and invest more locally to help offset both labor shortages and the nationalist and geopolitical pressures curbing globalized supply chains. That will increase production costs and local workers’ bargaining power. Global savings will fall as older people consume more than they produce, spending particularly on healthcare. All that will push up interest rates, he predicted.
A meeting of global central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2022 for the first time since 2019 found the bankers publicly reflecting a similar assessment, the Journal reported. “I don’t think that we are going to go back to that environment of low inflation,” European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on a panel.
7. The People Who Did All This Are Still in Charge
This reality applies to nearly every major political problem: The same people who have created these messes are the same people who largely retain the power to respond to them. The same people writing massive spending bills that divert our economy away from productive labor and into rent-seekers’ pockets are still largely in charge of government spending.
There might have been a slight shift of power in the House, but there hasn’t in the Senate, nor in the presidency. The same guy who claims the power to “pen and phone” a trillion dollars in student loan bailouts is in office, and all his K Street and Wall Street buddies still have gleefully effective access. You can be sure this cabal of crooks isn’t going to be looking out for your best interests now that we’re about to have a potentially dangerous recession.
That may be the most significant systemic reason to expect our markets to be heading for an even rougher ride in 2023 than we’ve had from 2020 to 2022.
Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed legislation Tuesday night that will enact a statewide ban on so-called “assault weapons” and place a limit on magazine capacities, according to CBS Chicago.
The bill, HB 5471, will outlaw the sale, manufacture, possession and purchase of “assault-style” weapons, assault weapon attachments and .50 caliber cartridges, while also limiting magazine capacity to 10 rounds for long guns and 15 rounds for handguns, according to the legislation. Pritzker signed the legislation late Tuesday night after the Illinois House of Representatives voted on revisions passed by the state Senate. (RELATED: Federal Judge Rules That Parts Of New Jersey Gun Law Are Unconstitutional)
“For a long time now, I and many other leaders in the Illinois General Assembly have prioritized getting the most dangerous weapons off our state’s streets. Today, honoring the commitment we made, we passed one of the strongest assault weapons bans in the nation, one I will be proud to sign.” Pritzker said in a press release before signing the bill.
“No Illinoisan, no matter their zip code, should have to go through life fearing their loved one could be the next in an ever-growing list of victims of mass shootings,” he continued.
The House voted 68-41 to approve the ban Tuesday afternoon, according to CBS Chicago. The bill passed 34-20 in the Illinois Senate on Monday.
Illinois residents who own guns that are now restricted under the law all be able to keep them, but will be required to register the firearms with the state police, according to the legislation. Magazines owned before the new capacity requirements take effect can also be kept, but the now illegal magazines and firearms must be used on private property.
Republican representatives urged Democratic lawmakers to vote against the bill, which was approved during the last day of the lame duck session, saying the law will penalize legal gun owners, according to speeches given during the state House’s session Tuesday.
Some Republican lawmakers suggested waiting until Illinois’s 2023 legislative session starts Wednesday.
All communities deserve to live free from gun violence. Banning assault weapons upholds our commitment to building true public safety for all, and will undoubtedly reduce the ways dangerous people can obtain weapons of war. Read more here. ➡️ https://t.co/IIN4YGLZERpic.twitter.com/n63QkuSj53
Republican state Sen. Chapin Rose said that the state already has gun legislation that mitigates gun violence, and the new law would penalize citizens who are already following the law, according to The State-Journal Register.
“Enforce the laws that already exist. We’re going to make felons out of taxpayers. Put the bad guys behind the bars, not the good guys,” he said, according to the outlet.
State Sens. Darren Bailey and Neil Anderson said the bill was an “affront” to the Second Amendment, and Bailey predicts that the Illinois Supreme Court will rule the new law to be in violation of the Constitution, according to the The State-Journal Register.
“You’ve got to know the actions that you are taking are tyrannous. You also must know that I and millions of other gun owners in this state will not comply,” Bailey said, the outlet reported.
Anderson called the bill “hypocritical,” saying Democratic lawmakers believe they are banning “weapons of war,” but fail to mention weapons used in war such as the M1 Garand and 1911 handgun, according to the The State-Journal Register.
“The hypocrisy that we are trying to ban so-called ‘weapons of war,’ but yet the weapons of war that you actually speak of are not weapons of war,” he said, later suggesting that those who are in favor of the bill should resign, according to The State-Journal Register.
Democratic Illinois Senate President Don Harmon countered Anderson, saying that the M1 Garand and 1911 were not included because they have small magazine capacities, according to The State-Journal Register. “The weapons on this list are designed to do one thing and one thing only: kill people in a horribly brutal, vicious way,” he said.
Pritzker did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Republican Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.) shot down MSNBC host Joy Reid on Tuesday for diminishing his accomplishments and reducing him to a mere “diversity” pick for House speaker.
A faction of 20 Republicans who opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid briefly coalesced around Donalds for speaker. Across several ballots, Donalds earned 20 votes. Had he won the speakership, Donalds would have been the first black House speaker.
But Democrats have attacked Donalds, who is conservative. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), for instance, called him a mere “prop” who sides with white supremacy.
During a lengthy interview in which Reid repeatedly interrupted Donalds, the MSNBC host suggested that Republicans only supported Donalds to bolster their diversity push.
“Do you not believe that the idea was to make a diversity statement by nominating you?” Reid asked.
Donalds, just a two-term congressman, fiercely pushed back.
“That was not the idea, because I was in the room when the decision was made by people who chose to nominate me,” Donalds said.
“The reality is that a lot of members actually do believe in my ability to lead. They do,” he continued. “Am I to be despised for my youth because I served one term when members know I have the ability to engage other members? Listen, we were at an impasse in our speakership elections. We got that done. Kevin McCarthy is now speaker of the House. At the same time, I was working with members on both sides of our conference to make sure that we can get the job done, and we did. That’s the only thing that matters.”
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds and Joy Reid debate his House speaker nomination after one term youtu.be
Reid premised her inquiry by questioning Donalds’ “qualifications” for leadership. When Donalds told Reid his history of serving in leadership at the state level, she questioned his knowledge about the role of House speaker. The motive for Reid’s condescending questions was to criticize the Republican Party for not being as demographically diverse as the Democratic Party.
“I don’t know that you said it, but [Republican] members have said is they wanted to highlight the diversity of the conference. There are four African-American members in the House caucus, the Republican caucus. There are 56 members in the Democratic caucus,” Reid said.
“So just — it’s more diverse,” she gleefully declared.
DNA evidence has now shown with greater than 99.9998% probability that Bryan Kohberger was the man who murdered four University of Idaho students in the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, beautifully illustrating why there will be no more serial killers. As the world gets worse in so many ways, here’s one way it’s better. (Unless the ACLU gets its way.)
Between the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and DNA, any budding Ted Bundy can commit one hideous murder, but then he’ll get caught. No more victims cut down in the prime of their lives, destroyed families or terrified communities. Monsters like Kohberger get one shocking crime, not a series.
It’s nearly impossible not to leave your DNA on something, particularly in the middle of a frenzied attack. It seems that Kohberger, a Ph.D. student in criminology, left his DNA on the button of a knife sheath, found next to one of the dead bodies. By following Kohberger and examining his trash, forensic scientists were able to establish that his father was 99.9998% likely to be the father of the person who committed the murders.
Good luck poking a hole in that, ACLU!
There were loads of other clues, but those would have gone unnoticed without the DNA pointing to Kohberger in the first place. Moreover, the other evidence might be enough to convince any non-O.J. juror, but would have led to decades of law professors, nuns, chubby coeds, New York Times reporters and other murder activists howling that Kohberger was “innocent.”
E.g.:
— Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra was seen on camera speeding away from the crime scene on a quiet residential street shortly after 4:20 a.m. on the night of the murders.
Thousands of people in Idaho drive white Hyundai Elantras!
— Cellphone data showed Kohberger going past the murder house a dozen times in the three months before the crime and, most suspiciously, again at 9 a.m. the next morning, before the police had even arrived.
So? He’s a driving enthusiast.
— Kohberger started wearing surgical gloves after the murders.
Duh! Heard of the pandemic? He’s just a dutiful citizen.
— Police observed him fanatically cleaning his car after the murders — he didn’t “miss an inch.”
He’s tidy.
— He put his family’s garbage in the neighbor’s bin.
Anyone could get confused about garbage bins late at night. That doesn’t make him a murderer.
But with science proving beyond doubt that Kohberger’s DNA was on the knife sheaf found next to the corpses, the fantastical excuses of the murder lobby are so much hot air.
So why aren’t the police and FBI bragging their heads off about the forensic genealogy that got them to focus on Kohberger?
Sure, they were looking for a guy with a white Hyundai Elantra, but there are 22,000 white Hyundai Elantras registered in Idaho alone — and Kohberger’s wasn’t one of them. He lived 10 miles away, across state lines in Washington. Why were the police looking at his cellphone data, his behavior and his trash, and not that of the other 22,000 Elantra owners?
As Heather Tal Murphy writes in Slate: “Though multiple news outlets, including CNN and ABC News, reported that forensic genealogy helped with the case, none have explained exactly how it was used or why it did not appear in the affidavit.” (Emphasis mine.)
I think I know why they haven’t explained! Law enforcement doesn’t want to sic the murder lobby on whichever genealogy service helped catch an infamous murderer.
In a sane world, these genealogists would be taking a bow, accepting the eternal gratitude of the victims’ parents and everyone living in Moscow, Idaho, as well as the dozens of future victims this butcher will never be able to kill now.
Instead, they’re about to have the murderer lobby screaming at them for violating a psycho killer’s “privacy.” The pro-murder crowd has already intimidated the largest DNA database, Ancestry.com (owned by Blackstone Group), into refusing to help law enforcement solve murders. 23andMe also refuses to cooperate with murder investigations.
All this so that some jackass on a law faculty can say, Hey, congratulate me! I just hamstrung the police in their ability to catch the provably guilty!
Just know that, while you are sleeping peacefully tonight, secure in the knowledge that a thrill killer has been taken off the streets, liberals are hard at work to make sure the next one gets away.
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.
The Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to newly released White House emails.
President Joe Biden’s administration actively pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to internal White House communication records obtained by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
In an email dated April 14, 2021, then-senior adviser to the president’s Covid response team, Andrew Slavitt, voiced dissatisfaction to a Facebook official that a video of Carlson questioning the left’s universal demand that people get the Covid jab was “Number one” on the platform, to which said official responded that they’d look into the matter. Later that same day, the Facebook representative informed the White House that while the “Tucker Carlson video does not qualify for removal under [Facebook’s] policies,” the company would label the clip with “a pointer to more authoritative COVID information” and work to limit its reach on the platform.
Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.
“How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,” Flaherty claimed. “Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?”
“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added in an apparent reference to the platform’s handling of claims pertaining to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.
“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
In addition to Facebook, Twitter was also a major player in the collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech to further squash free speech online. In an email dated August 11, 2022, Flaherty admonished Twitter for allowing posts contradicting White House claims to circulate on the platform, writing that “if your product is appending misinformation to our tweets[,] that seems like a pretty fundamental issue.”
Flaherty separately accused Twitter in a December 2021 email of “Total Calvinball” and “bending over backwards” to tolerate disfavored speech after the company refused to comply with demands from the administration to censor a video.
“This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with social media companies [to] suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Missouri AG Andrew Bailey in a statement. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
The bombshell emails come as a result of an investigation launched last year by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and then-Missouri AG and now-U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt to uncover collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech companies to censor Covid-related posts they deemed misinformation. In addition to obtaining communication records unveiling such corruption, the investigation has scored numerous legal wins allowing Louisiana and Missouri to depose high-ranking administration officials such as Anthony Fauci under oath about their role in these efforts.
According to a transcript of Fauci’s November testimony, the man claiming to “represent science” somehow couldn’t recall relevant information about his role in the federal government’s disastrous Covid response “at least 174 times.” The deposition ranged from topics such as Fauci’s bid to smear authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” to his role in attempting to “discredit any theory” that Covid resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
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
Minnesota’s teaching licensure board will soon require all teachers to be card-carrying Marxists. The card will literally say “licensed teacher,” but recently approved revisions redefine state licensure in expressly Marxist terms: Academic knowledge is out, and power struggle among the classes is in. To be licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must not merely teach about, but personally advocate, the core tenets of critical race theory and transgender ideology.
The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.
A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).
The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.
Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.
The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.
Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.
A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”
It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.
The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”
Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”
But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.
The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.
If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.
A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.
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CNN reporter Rosa Flores called out President Joe Biden on Monday for not actually seeing any migrants when he visited El Paso on Sunday. Biden visited the border city, an epicenter of the migrant crisis, on Sunday. It was his first official visit to the southern border. Still, the visit earned swift criticism because Biden did not actually witness any of the chaos that has plagued El Paso since migrants began flooding into the city. The areas where Biden visited were even cleaned up.
Speaking on “CNN This Morning,” Flores confirmed that Biden did not interact with migrants during his visiting and explained why it generated criticism from “both sides.”
“That’s why the president is being criticized by both sides, because of what he didn’t see,” she said, pointing to a “migrant camp.”
“You know, the immigration advocates here in El Paso and Gov. Greg Abbott usually don’t agree on much, but they do raise the same question,” Flores revealed. “If President Biden came here to El Paso to see the reality on the ground about the border, and he didn’t come here, what’s considered the epicenter of this crisis — did he leave with a clear understanding?”
Hear why Biden’s border visit is receiving bipartisan criticism www.youtube.com
According to Flores, the Biden administration excused his failure to interact with migrants by claiming there weren’t any with whom Biden could interact. But that’s not true, Flores explained.
“My colleague, M.J. Lee, asked the White House about the president not interacting or meeting with any migrants, and a senior administration official told her that it was because there were no migrants at the respite center at the time that the president visited, and that it was coincidental,” Flores said.
“But I checked the migrant dashboard that the city of El Paso has, and at the time when the president was here, there were nearly 1,000 migrants who were in federal detention,” she pointed out. “So, if the president really wanted to see conditions, I kind of doubt that the president of the United States would have been denied access.“
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser (D) denied the city was “sanitized” ahead of Biden’s visit. Rather, he claimed the cleanup was routine.
“The areas in which the migrants have gathered have been routinely cleaned by the City as a matter of practice. If we hadn’t been doing that we would have created a health hazard,” Lesser said in a statement.
“The difference wasn’t the President’s visit; the difference was the decrease in numbers of individuals crossing,” he added. “We’d seen days with crossings as high as 2,500 a day, and we are now seeing 500. The decrease in numbers leads to less crowded areas which optimizes our cleaning efforts.“
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Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) was denied the gavel on a key committee he had long hoped to lead. The House Homeland Security Committee will instead be led by a member of the House Republican group Crenshaw branded as “enemies.” Crenshaw rebuked Republican members of the House Freedom Caucus last week, rhetorically condemning some as “enemies” for having leveraged their House speaker votes in exchange for concessions over how Congress would be run.
He told Fox News Radio host Guy Benson, “We cannot let the terrorists win,” referring to the 20 members of the Freedom Caucus who initially resisted voting for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Crenshaw also told Benson that the “terrorists” wanted “more places on committees.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw on the 20 Republicans who oppose McCarthy:
With McCarthy winning the speakership in the 15th vote on Friday night, Crenshaw’s remarks appear to have amounted to an unforced error.
TheBlaze previously reported that Tucker Carlson called out the Texas congressman on his Fox News show, accusing Crenshaw of engaging in “Soviet-style politics.”
Crenshaw apologized on Sunday, telling CNN anchor Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that “things get heated, and things get said. … I don’t want them to think I actually believe they’re terrorists. It’s clearly a turn of phrase that you use in what is an intransigent negotiation.”
The Houston Chronicle reported that Crenshaw couched his remarks within the broader context of “vile things” allegedly said by “the very same wing of the party that I’m fighting.” Despite the apology, the damage was done. On Monday, Crenshaw was denied the gavel for which he campaigned over the course of several months.
The Houston Chronicle reported in November that Crenshaw was regarded as a front-runner for the top spot on the Homeland Security Committee. He certainly thought so.
“I am uniquely positioned to lead the Homeland Security Committee,” Crenshaw said in a letter to his Republican colleagues, noting that having lived in a border state and served in the military provided him with the requisite experience and insights to “persuasively communicate our positions with the public.”
Crenshaw may also have won some favor after raising roughly $1 million for the House GOP campaign arm in the latest cycle. Despite the Texas congressman’s bona fides and contributions, the chair will instead go to fellow combat veteran Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), a 58-year-old member of the Freedom Caucus — the group that bore the brunt of Crenshaw’s turns of phrase.
Both Green and Crenshaw previously served together on the panel.
Politico previously reported the political significance of Green’s appointment, stating, “Green is also an interesting candidate because picking him would give Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy the opportunity to say he has seated another HFC member in a senior leadership position, following only HFC Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).”
Extra to expressing gratitude to McCarthy, Green wrote in a tweet, “@RepDanCrenshaw ran a spirited race. I’m grateful for his friendship and leadership. I look forward to working with him, a fellow veteran who understands our national security challenges, to secure our homeland.
.@RepDanCrenshaw ran a spirited race. I’m grateful for his friendship and leadership. I look forward to working with him, a fellow veteran who understands our national security challenges, to secure our homeland. /3
In a Jan. 9 release, Green noted that his priorities as head of the committee will be: “ending the border crisis Biden created”; stopping the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.; empowering Customs and Border Patrol personnel; and countering Chinese cyberwarfare.
Signaling the direction he might take, Green told Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in November that he should resign, indicating that failing that, he would be held accountable by House Republicans.
It is unclear what Crenshaw’s rejection will mean for intraparty politics.
Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, told Houston Public Media last week, “Crenshaw has been waiting his turn, being the good soldier, and if he were to lose it to someone who jumps the queue because they are threatening McCarthy’s speakership, that would estrange him, perhaps, from McCarthy for quite some time.”
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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