Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”
Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishmentmedia, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.
Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.
A Nationwide Trend
Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.
After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.
Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.
A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.
The Shift to Cultural Marxism
From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:
Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.
Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.
With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight
Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democratsflirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options.
Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.
Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education is expected to finalize changes to Title IX rules in the coming weeks to expand the definition of discrimination beyond sex to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. The rule changes will have seismic implications, setting off not just state versus federal showdowns over state laws barring biological males from competing in women’s sports, but also how college campuses handle sexual harassment charges and due process.
While these changes have been anticipated since Biden took office, last week the Washington Post reported the first look at a draft copy of the proposed language, which includes this key sentence:
Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The Post also reported that Biden’s DOE plans to rewrite rules established by President Donald Trump’s DOE, under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that required schools to recognize the presumption of innocence for those accused of sexual harassment or assault. Some of the DeVos era due process protections that may be targeted or revoked entirely include the right to cross-examination for both the accuser and the accused, as well as the right to full access to all evidence collected by schools in sexual harassment investigations and the opportunity to respond to that evidence.
Candice Jackson, who was Department of Education deputy general counsel during the Trump administration, told The Federalist that these two major changes, to both the definition of discrimination and the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, will overlap in severely detrimental ways.
“It’s going to affect people’s ability on campus to talk about or debate about single-sex spaces on campus like women’s sports,” Jackson said. “All of a sudden, you’re in a position where even having a discussion or even trying to advocate for keeping women’s sports single-sex could get you called a harasser.”
Jackson said loosening the definition of sexual harassment moves beyond handling alleged rapes and into the realm of academic freedom.
“You’re now talking about the ability on campus to have important discussions on what gender identity discrimination means,” she said.
But as the rules are finalized, the return of campus kangaroo courts is likely to be overshadowed by the current culture war spotlight on women’s sports. With biological males winning national women’s titles, states that have recently passed laws protecting women from unfair male competition are likely to face the pressure of losing their Title IX funding. Jackson said she thinks this time will be different. She expects states to refuse to back down, as they have on other issues where the federal government wields its funding hammer.
“There is enough disagreement at a fundamental level about whether or not it is now ever OK to provide separate comparable services and activities for boys and girls and men and women that this is this is going to be a bit of a showdown, probably needing to be revisited by the Supreme Court,” she said.
Madeline Osburn is managing editor at The Federalist. Contact her at madeline@thefederalist.com or follow her on Twitter.
As we reach a month of the Ukrainian war amid talks of possible peace, a strategic appraisal is in order. It appears the Russians thought the war would be easy and fast, the Ukrainians would simply roll over and surrender, and the common people would rise up to greet Russians as liberators. Russian strategic decision-making, worsened by ideological bubbles, turned out to be as haunting as British and American misadventures in Iraq and Libya.
The Russian officer attrition in this war is on a level rarely observed in any recent conflict, partially because this level of high-intensity, state versus state, multi-domain total war hasn’t occurred in the last few decades. Russia did not foresee that its old-fashioned special operations tactics are obsolete satellites and drones track their movements. The fact that Moscow did not calculate this in their battle plans is a sign of decline, a far cry from its prestigious officer corps training during the Soviet era. The bulk of the Russian navy and air force are still bafflingly underused and functionally unavailable given the intensity of the conflict, giving rise to the suspicion that the Russians are preserving their top-tier weaponry and platforms in case the war spirals to a continental conflict.
But, somehow, they are still grinding on. If their objective was to stop Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they have achieved it already. They have also managed to cut off the entire east and south of Ukraine. Russia might still win the war and achieve Ukrainian zonal neutrality, given Russia’s sheer weight.
The Russian rhetorical “denazification” was also recently dropped quietly from the rhetoric. But the demand for Ukrainian neutrality remains and will remain. It was the single major Russian demand. All the other demands were maximalist and malleable, aimed towards negotiation. Ukraine should have taken the opportunity to do a Cold War-era, Austrian-style “neutralitätserklärung,” which would have resulted in the country constitutionally turning neutral, in order to get funding from the European Union and NATO and flourish. Ukrainians have also swallowed their non-achievable EU and NATO membership dream and are currently just as ideologically inflexible and rigid about compromise as Russia.
Long-Term Ramifications
Unfortunately, the long-term ramifications of this war, for the west, are also bleak. Every single conservative restraint and realist gain from the last few years risks being reversed if realists continue to play defense on the rhetorical field of “values” instead of focusing on a narrow, populist interest.
The absolutely mindless idea of a no-fly zone in an active warzone with a nuclear great power was narrowly avoided by 78 experts writing an open letter against it. Incidentally, support for a no-fly zone declines among Americans the moment it is explained.
But the war hysteria in the first few weeks of the campaign, aided by the usual suspects, demonstrated just how close to power and catastrophe these ideologues were. When a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former supreme allied commander of NATO argue for a no-fly zone, one needs to remember they are one step away from real advisory power and might be so again in the future.
A conservative realist grand strategy that focuses on America’s southern borders and argues for Europeans to pay for European defense first needs a realist rhetoric and public relations strategy. It must discuss the public interest, in a language common people will understand and appreciate. Pursuing such a strategy would require a total clean-up of the administrative state and Obama-era holdovers next time Republicans are in power. The hold-outs of liberal internationalism are deeply embedded within the ever-expansive national security bureaucracy.
War Is Burying Liberal Internationalism
Rampant war hysteria has resulted in limited diplomatic maneuverability, a realization that is slowly emerging. As the Financial Times noted, “since Feb 24, the west has been galvanized into more unity than it has shown in years. Yet most of the world is on the side lines waiting to see which way it goes. Not for the first time, the west risks mistaking itself for global consensus.”
No matter how many times fanatical liberal internationalists cry about this war suddenly rejuvenating liberalism, the reality cannot be further from truth. The war proves great powers can deter other great powers and are the only actors that matter, that nationalism is the strongest social force, that interests trump values, norms, and laws. Thus, the war is quite clearly not saving “liberal internationalism” but burying it.
Two of the largest non-western powers are either neutral or tacitly supporting Russia, simply because of the idea that great powers should have their own spheres of influence. The balancing powers in Europe also argued against NATO being a co-belligerent.
Realism Isn’t Isolationism At All
Anglo-American foreign policy realists are not pacifists or isolationists. They simply prioritize a greater strategic threat in China. Wars have their own momentum. The chance of a great power being dragged into war due to foolish or overzealous mistakes of smaller peripheral allies is a far bigger threat, as the current world is functionally similar to a multipolar system prior to the First World War than a relatively binary and Manichean conflict of the Second.
Russia, bogged down in Ukraine already, is not a hegemonic threat comparable to Nazi Germany. The EU’s total population is around 450 million, more than the United States (339 million) and much more than Russia (144 million). The EU’s gross domestic product also dwarfs Russia’s, and just the top four European defense budgets combined are larger than Russia’s. Yet, instead of an actual material pivot to Asia, the United States currently has more than 100,000 troops deployed in Europe.
Globally, the biggest future rival is China. China is almost incomparable in size and power next to previous rivals such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and even the USSR. There is nothing they would prefer more than the United States being dragged back to Europe. Ultimately, the U.S. objective should be not to prolong the war, but to focus on China as a rising threat. Ukrainian neutrality would have sorted the issue for good. But Russia has already been pushed into the arms of the Chinese due to the war.
By not allowing an amoral balance of power, wherein we let Russia have a small sphere of influence as a grand bargain instead of being over-committed to Europe, Washington risks undercutting its long-term strategic interests by unknowingly accelerating China’s. In a twist of fate, President Joe Biden is now mirroring former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s old Cold War equilibrium instinct is under siege by his own activist administration, determined to defeat Russian “reactionary imperial patriarchy” and defend foreign borders, statues, and churches — instincts they would never allow at home. The almost theological focus on being a part of a conflict in the far corners of Eastern Europe to ensure the continuation of a liberal democratic revolution is fundamentally undercutting American grand strategy, which historically tried to split Russia and China. Ultimately, pushing Russia to be a Chinese satellite might turn out to be our greatest historic blunder.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at The Center for the National Interest; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.
We’re constantly told, amusingly, by the Left to “follow the science!” When we follow actual science, we get shouted down, censored, purged, and called terrorists. There are only two genders: male and female. I know this triggers those with progressive fragility. For anyone struggling with gender dysphoria, there is help and hope in counseling (as long as it’s still legal). There is an all-out assault on women, and it’s global. It’s a rhetorical, social and political attack intent on erasing objective truths such as what makes women beautifully and biologically different.
Modern feminists decry “the Patriarchy” that keeps women from being equal. Those same fake feminists then celebrate when “the Patriarchy” pretends to be a woman and eviscerates centuries-long efforts of equality. William “Lia” Thomas. Richard “Rachel” Levine. Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner. Roderick “Laverne” Cox. The list goes on and on of the co-optation of women.
These men can be “women,” but a white woman (e.g. Rachel Dolezal) can’t identify as a black woman? Why not?
If self-identity is reality and confers upon you all the rights and privileges of the co-opted identification, why did we bother even having confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson? Couldn’t she just “identify” as a Supreme Court Justice? How can a jurist claim, “I am a woman” and then infamously fail to offer any definition of what a woman is?
I’m not a mechanic, but I can define a car. No one needs to be a biologist to know what a boy is, what a girl is, what a man is, or what a woman is. Only progressives, who want to mangle language and deny basic science, pretend they don’t know the obvious. A judge must be able to rule on objective criteria. Judge Jackson calls herself a woman insisting there should be “meaningful numbers of women” on the Supreme Court, yet she has no objective definition for a “woman”?
The American Medical Association is “following the science” by insisting that our sex designation be removed from our public birth certificates. Why? Well, sex is “determined at birth” they say, defying over a century of scientific knowledge.
That fave mantra of the pro-abortion Left, “No uterus! No say!”, is now rendered meaningless because anyone can identify as a woman. Whoops. Sorry. I meant a “non-prostate owner.” At least that’s what Teen Vogue is preaching to young girls (or whoever reads the soft-porn mag targeting kids).
The leader of this erasure of women is the self-anointed “leading women’s healthcare provider,” Planned Parenthood. They’re super sciency of course. “Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl,” the nation’s leading abortion business falsely claims. You know, because our genitals aren’t based on our sex which is determined by our DNA at fertilization — the moment human life begins.
Years ago, Planned Parenthood Action — the political arm that is indistinguishable from its 501c3 parent organization — tweeted a classic erasure of women. “Menstruators in New York started to #TweetTheReceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax.”
Planned Parenthood’s web pages dealing with pregnancy have purged every reference to the biological label. The abortion giant’s president, Alexis McGill Johnson, won’t even refer to women as “women.” In warning people-formerly-known-as-women of Idaho’s six-week abortion ban (which protects mothers and their unborn children), Johnson tweeted: “it will harm pregnant people and disproportionately impact marginalized communities.”
Women are now the marginalized community.
The highly political CDC also refers to women as “pregnant people.” In pushing their distorted COVID propaganda, the Centers for Dialogue Control tweeted: “Pregnant people with symptomatic COVID-19 have a 70% increased risk of death.”
You’ve got the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine wanting to use the term “chestfeeding” to be “inclusive” of “lactating people.” I’m not making this up! They claim that fathers experience “complications while chestfeeding” too. Yes. Because we don’t lactate. That would be a definite biological “complication.”
The Senate Committee on Oversight and Reform (led by Democrats) declared that “Health equity for Black birthing people is attainable.” How can (fake) equity be attainable if a simple definition of women is so escapable?
President Biden’s FY2022 budget deleted women, too, referring to mothers as “birthing people.” I’m sure he’s used that term affectionately with the First Lady (or is it First Person?), calling the mother of his children one of those pregnant people or Jill-the-birthing-person.
Interestingly, the Left is doing what Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger accused the so-called Patriarchy of doing. She wrote in her book Women and the New Race: “Woman’s role has been that of an incubator and little more.” Well. Welcome to 2022. Where women’s biological designation is being eviscerated to appease biological men who can never share in the experience of the natural acts of pregnancy and birth.
The ACLU even changed a famous quote from the late pro-abortion Ruth Bader Ginsburg to erase the very people she was talking about. Their tweet changed the clearly offensive parts that mentioned “woman” and “her” to: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
I’m no fan of RBG or her actual quote because the undignified act of harming or killing another innocent human being never gives anyone equality. But this global progressive campaign to erase women sees binary gender as an oppressive biological reality that must be excised from our lexicon.
So, “follow the pseudoscience” or be branded a hater. Too many Americans cower in fear of being called some form of -phobic. Who cares? Love people enough to speak the truth. When did confusion become the virtue we uphold instead of clarity and compassion?
These attacks on the dignity of women are rooted in a lie. Politicians know it. Planned Parenthood knows it. And so does a dangerously leftist judge who may tragically sit, for generations, on a Supreme Court currently made up of men and, yes, women.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has doubled down on his out-of-touch messaging to Americans who are struggling to pay skyrocketing prices at the pump. Last month, “Mayor Pete” made headlines when he said (in all seriousness) that the obvious solution for dealing with insanely high gas prices is to just go buy an electric vehicle. Maybe Mayor Pete doesn’t realize that most of us can’t afford to buy a new car at all, let alone an EV that costs “roughly $10,000 higher than the overall industry average,” according to Kelley Blue Book.
Now, our tone-deaf transportation secretary has let Americans know that we all need to get used to “wild price hikes” until we “achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy.”
Watch:
BUTTIGIEG: “Until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy,” get used to price hikes. pic.twitter.com/UMWBrVPe9R
It amazes me how they never understand where their electricity comes, how or even where the parts come from for these EV cars, and what to do with the used batteries from them. By the time you pay off your solar panels you need new ones. Where do 95% of them come from? China
This past week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated that American teenagers are experiencing a steep decline in mental health in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and covid lockdown protocols.
“Thisdata echoes a cry for help,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s acting principal deputy director, said in a statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental wellbeing.”
The Washington Post reported that the CDC’s new findings draw on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021. The survey emphasized collecting data during students’ “first full pandemic school year.” Students were questioned on a range of topics that included questions on their mental health, drug use, whether they encountered violence at home or school, and if they encountered racism.
The study suggested that whereas young people were sparred “the brunt of the virus” since they were statistically far less likely to fall ill, experience serious symptoms, or die than their older counterparts, they might still “pay a steep price for the pandemic.” Children are displaying negative side effects of coming of age while “weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil, and for many, grief,” the Washington Post reported.
Implying there is a biological difference between men and women, Kathleen A. Ethier, head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health, said the recently concluded survey’s results showed male and female students having vastly different results. Reportedly, Ethier said, “Female students are far worse off than their male peers.”
The Washington Post reported that the survey “underscored the vulnerability of certain students, including LGBTQ youth and students who are being treated unfairly because of their race.” Ethier said, “All students were impacted by the pandemic, but not all students were impacted equally.”
This survey’s findings are not the first-time medical officials noted their concerns about a growing mental health crisis among America’s teenagers. This past October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health,” and said that its members were “caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, and their communities.”
In December, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said, “The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.”
A transgender female cyclist was blocked from participating in the women’s British National Omnium Championship over the weekend, as Emily Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist, the Guardian reported. In addition, a number of the race’s participants were said to be ready to boycott the race if Bridges was in it, the outlet added.
Bridges, 21, set a national junior men’s record over 25 miles in 2018, the Guardian said, adding that the cyclist began hormone therapy last year to reduce testosterone levels.
However, a number of biological female cyclists discussed boycotting Saturday’s event because they believed Bridges has an unfair advantage, the outlet said, adding that Bridges was involved with the Great Britain Academy program as a male cyclist until being dropped in 2020. In addition, Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist and can’t race as a woman until the male ID expires, according to Union Cycliste Internationale regulations, the Guardian said.
Bridges was “disappointed” with UCI’s decision, the outlet said.
“We have been in close discussions with the UCI regarding Emily’s participation this weekend and have also engaged closely with Emily and her family regarding her transition and involvement in elite competitions,” British Cycling said, according to the Guardian. “We acknowledge the decision of the UCI with regards to Emily’s participation, however we fully recognize her disappointment with today’s decision.”
A comprehensive scientific review by the five British sports councils in September said there were “retained differences in strength, stamina, and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person registered male at birth.”
Trans cyclist banned from national championships youtube
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden declared his support for allowing children and adolescents with gender dysphoria to undergo body mutilating surgeries or use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to look more like the opposite sex despite unknowns about longterm side effects. In multiple documents released Thursday, which is observed by some as the Transgender Day of Visibility, the Biden administration backed what it described as “gender-affirming health care” for children.
The document states that “early gender-affirming care” for non-binary or trans-identified minors “is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.”
The document lists “top” surgeries — elective mastectomies and breasts enhancements — and “bottom” surgeries — removal of genitals — as “gender-affirming care.”
The document states that the surgeries are “[t]ypically used in adulthood or case by-case in adolescence.”
“Gender-affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare. It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people,” stated OPA.
“Medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth.”
HHS’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network released a document titled “Gender-Affirming Care Is Trauma-Informed Care.”
The network’s document defined gender-affirming care as including so-called “evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” and proclaimed that “gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” The statement comes as officials in Texas have defined administering puberty-blocking drugs on children who question their gender as “child abuse” and experimental since the Food and Drug Administration has not approved such drugs for that use.
“There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care,” the network’s statement adds. “[Transgender, gender diverse, and intersex] youth can thrive when they are supported and affirmed in their identities and their identity development.”
An entry on Mayo Clinic’s website states that drugs aimed at blocking puberty “might” help reduce depression among youth. “However, puberty suppression alone might not ease gender dysphoria,” said the clinic, adding, Using medication to delay puberty “beyond one’s peers can be stressful,” and thus, a child “might experience lower self-esteem.”
The conservative American College of Pediatricians, an association of physicians and healthcare professionals “dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” has long voiced its opposition to using puberty-blocking drugs on children suffering from gender dysphoria.
“There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the organization said in a statement.
“This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”
“Temporary use of puberty blocker Lupron has also been associated with and may be the cause of many serious permanent side effects including osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility,” the American College of Pediatricians added. “In addition to the harm from Lupron, cross-sex hormones put youth at an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued medical guidelines that supportthe surgical and hormonal transition of trans-identified children and adolescents.
“Often, pubertal suppression creates an opportunity to reduce distress that may occur with the development of secondary sexual characteristics and allow for gender-affirming care, including mental health support for the adolescent and the family,” an October 2018 AAP guideline states.
Supporters of puberty blockers have long claimed that puberty blockers’ impact on children is reversible and are designed to give children with gender dysphoria more time to decide which gender they identify as. Proponents also claim that once adolescent users stop taking puberty blockers, their puberty resumes. The new OPA document claims that puberty blockers are reversible.
However, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service reports that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.”
“Although GIDS advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be,” the NHS website explains. “It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations.”
As teens who are 16 or over and have been on puberty blockers for at least a year are eligible to start cross-sex hormones in the U.K., the NHS warns that those “hormones cause some irreversible changes,” such as breast development and deepening of the voice.
“Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility,” the NHS website added. “There is some uncertainty about the risks of long-term cross-sex hormone treatment.”
The state of Texas has made headlines in the last year as Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton and the state’s child services agency have questioned whether prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to minors could constitute “child abuse.” In February, Paxton issued a formal opinion stating that prescribing puberty blockers or conducting sex-change surgeries on children with gender dysphoria “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Texas is also investigating whether AbbVie Inc. and Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., manufacturers of puberty blockers, have been engaging in deceptive advertising practices. Paxton’s office had issued Civil Investigative Demands against the two companies, seeking to determine “whether these manufacturers of puberty-blocking drugs deceptively advertised and promoted hormone blockers for unapproved uses without disclosing the potential risks to children and their parents.”
“Companies should never promote or supply puberty blockers for uses that are not intended or approved,” stated Paxton. “I will not allow Big Pharma to misleadingly promote these drugs that may pose a high risk of serious physical and psychological damage to Texas children who cannot yet fathom or consent to the potential long-term effects of such use.”
The Biden administration has challenged Texas, with the president claiming that his administration is putting “Texas on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.” The administration issued guidelines saying that it may violate federal law for Texas to charge doctors who administer gender reassignment surgeries or puberty blockers on children with “child abuse.”
Earlier this month, Paxton sued the Department of Health and Human Services and argued that the federal government is misinterpreting federal law and that Texas law does allow him to label such acts as “child abuse.” A state appellate court struck down Abbott’s directive instructing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures.”
The attorney general’s office has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the lower court decision blocking the directive.
As a result of the governor’s directive and attorney general’s opinion, the Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital stated earlier this month that it will pause “hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services.”
“How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”
– John Adams
Hemingway’s famous quote about going bankrupt connects with so many because it is true on a personal basis and a civilization basis. It applies to individuals and empires in decline – like the American democracy. John Adams realized two centuries ago democracy was no better than monarchy or aristocracy over the long haul. We were handed a Republic by Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries, but we failed to keep it almost from the very birth of this nation.
As we rush towards our World War 3 rendezvous with destiny, aided and abetted by politicians placed in power by globalist billionaires hellbent on the destruction of our way of life, so they own everything and you own nothing, I can’t help but ponder who is to blame and could we have avoided this dystopian outcome.
The United States has been going bankrupt gradually for the last fifty years, both financially, intellectually, and morally. Nixon closing the gold window in 1971 and opening the debt door to morally bankrupt bankers and politicians set in motion a downward spiral accelerating at hyper-speed as we speak. The American Empire was born in the shattered global debris of World War II with the Bretton Woods agreement, which left the USD as the dominant currency in world trade, specifically as the settlement currency for all oil transactions.
The empire has been sustained by currency supremacy, military might, and until 1980, manufacturing superiority. Once the most highly educated nation on the planet, decades of lowering the bar, less than mediocre union teachers, and replacing education with indoctrination, has created generations of ignorant zombies incapable and uninterested in critical thought.
The road to bankruptcy was very gradual at the outset of empire, with the national debt topping out at $269 billion, 119% of GDP, in 1946. In 1960 it had only grown to $286 billion but had dropped to 54% of GDP. Rebuilding the world and being the dominant economic power paid huge dividends. After a decade of guns, butter and welfare programs, the debt grew to $398 billion, but continued to drop as a percentage of GDP to 35% in 1971. After decoupling from gold, the national debt soared to $908 billion by 1980, inflation surged to 15%, and Volcker had to raise interest rates to 20% to avert disaster. What happened over the next forty years was mind boggling in its recklessness, shortsightedness, and acquiescence to the Wall Street cabal. These decade-by-decade increases were obscene:
1980 $908B 32% of GDP
1990 $3.2T 54% of GDP
2000 $5.7T 52% of GDP
2010 $13.6T 90% of GDP
2020 $27.8T 129% of GDP
Today $30.3T 130% of GDP
Rogoff and Reinhart postulated in 2010 that once a country passes 90% of GDP, economic growth slows dramatically, and the chances of financial crisis increase exponentially. With annual GDP growth of about 2% since 2010, their theory has proven accurate. Now we approach the existential financial crisis which could initiate the “going bankrupt suddenly” phase of our empire of debt. Larry Kotlikoff, Harvard, and Wharton educated economic professor at Boston University, estimates the unfunded welfare liabilities of the United States exceeds $210 trillion. We are a long way from when our Founders handed us a republic.
“American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.”
– Lew Rockwell
There is no conceivable way this debt can ever be repaid, therefore it will not. It’s just pure math, which the average dumbed down American chooses not to question or dispute. In their own lives they need to make enough income to make their mortgage payment and car loan payment. It’s the same for the government. The only way debt obligations can be met is for tax revenue to exceed expenses. Borrowing to make debt and interest payments is unsustainable, reckless, and an example of imperial empire arrogance. The only unknown now is whether the debt is defaulted upon, it is hyperinflated away, or some sort of debt jubilee and currency collapse makes it mute.
No matter the solution, the people will bear the brunt of the pain and drastic diminishment of their standard of living. Those in control will position themselves to benefit from whatever scheme is implemented to eliminate the debt. The current trend of running trillions in deficits per year is unsustainable and already resulting in raging inflation, declining GDP, and pushing the world towards a global depression.
There is no disputing the facts I have presented. These facts trump the willful ignorance of the masses and the false narratives of the ruling class, along with their media mouthpieces pretending all is well. Those controlling the levers of power know this shitshow can’t go on. They have fully exhausted their propaganda tools, financial derivative schemes, and monetary machinations, leaving them nothing but crashing the system and implementing a Great Reset, which would keep them in control and the rest of us in squalor and subservience.
We’ve been on the road to perdition for a long time, but we came to a peak on that highway in 2019 and the path has been straight down since, with our chariot of fire accelerating at breakneck speed towards its final destination with catastrophe and ruin. The rise and fall of the American Empire will be far more rapid than the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. With the inept and reckless leadership in place presently, I only hope we still have a nation after they successfully provoke World War 3.
The gradually part of going bankrupt is over. Since the end of fiscal year 2019, our fearless leaders have added $7.6 trillion to the national debt, a 33% increase in less than three years. Meanwhile, the duplicitous Fed has added $5 trillion to their balance sheet, a 125% increase, while keeping interest rates at zero and creating a tsunami of inflation, crushing the poor and middle class.
But at least the Wall Street bankers are raking in record bonuses, while still sucking at the teat of Fed QE to infinity. The blatant disregard for the lives of average Americans, while propping up the Wall Street cabal, billionaire oligarchs, and corrupt politicians should be met with pitchforks and torches in a just world. But that is not the world we occupy.
The last time inflation was this high (15% as measured in 1980), Volker jacked the Fed Funds rate to 20%. Spineless Jerome Powell has the Fed Funds rate at .33% today. It’s almost as if they are promoting record high inflation to make the national debt load less burdensome. Destroying the finances of hundreds of millions, creating global energy and food shortages, and instigating World War 3 as a consequence of their actions is just a minor irritation for the global elite. In fact, it appears to be part of Schwab’s Great Reset plan.
At first it seemed outrageous to think anyone would want famine, starvation, energy shortages, economic depression, and global war, but watching the insane decision making of politicians, trumpeted by the Deep State bootlickers in the media, has convinced me this is chapter 2 in their Great Reset book of horrors.
Once you wrap your head around how vile, evil, and demented those who are pulling the strings behind this Great Reset are, your eyes are open to how far they are willing to go to institute their plan. It appears they will stop at nothing, kill as many people as necessary, create maximum chaos and pain, wreck any civic cohesiveness left, and destroy all moral and legitimate norms of society, in order to increase their control, power and wealth on this earth.
They hold all the cards. They control the governments, corporations, banks, legacy media, social media, entertainment industries, military industrial complex, sickcare Big Pharma complex, and the mental processes of the masses through their mind control/propaganda technology. Their hubris and arrogance have reached peak altitude and exuberance. They believe they are invincible. That will be their fatal weakness.
The sheer cavalcade of lies, misinformation, purposely created chaos, engineered conflict, and financial market manipulation, make the daily intrigues confusing and open to misinterpretation. There are various factions competing to control the future course of history. There is not a clear good versus evil battle underway. Sometimes it is tough to distinguish the New World Order Great Reset crowd from those opposing Schwab and his Davos billionaire satanists.
I know we would like to root for the good guys, but there are no good guys running any country on this earth. Only bad guys, willing to sell their souls, are ever elevated to positions of power. They are selected by oligarchs, not elected by the people. The western propaganda spewing media machine specializes in demonizing those they are paid to demonize (Putin, Trump, non-vaxxers), while glorifying anyone the ruling elite have chosen to use to further their agenda (Zelensky, Fauci, vaxxers).
Putin is most certainly a bad guy, ruthless in his consolidation of power, serious in enforcing his beliefs through political or military measures, and willing to use any means necessary to achieve his aims. But he is only one of many bad men leading their countries across the globe. The Panama Papers show Zelinsky to be a corrupt puppet of Ukrainian oligarchs. He was a two-bit actor installed by the US, Soros, and NATO to play a role. As a reward, he has millions parked in offshore bank accounts and a $35 million mansion in Florida.
He’s such a democratic icon, he’s spent the last eight years bombing Russian speaking civilians in Donbass and Donetsk, and he outlawed all opposition political parties and media outlets last week. It seems our far-left media outlets have no problem supporting actual far-right Nazis in Ukraine, as long as they are paid to do so. They are nothing but faux-journalist whores.
The fact is Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Johnson, Erdogan, Xi, and the leaders of every country in the world are bad guys. Venezuela and Iran were evil, until our gas prices hit $4.25 a gallon because of Biden’s Russian sanctions. Now Biden is frantically negotiating with these “bad guys” to get their oil. Orwell nailed it seven decades ago with:
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
– Orwell – 1984
We have always been at war with Russia, supporting the noble democracy of Ukraine, and fully supportive of those benevolent dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and China when in our economic interest, no matter how many people they kill, imprison, or behead. Of course, if you don’t toe the line of the petrodollar, you get Iraq’d, Libya’d, or Syria’d. Those in control of the message just move from villain to villain in the their never ending narrative. First Trump, then Covid, then the anti-vaxxers, and now Putin. The real villains are the media and those who manipulate the minds of the masses to achieve their insidious aims.
Hypocrisy is not a characteristic that registers with empires in their late stages. Bribing, bullying, and bombing are what the American Empire does to enforce their waning power upon other nations. The over-the-top sanctions against Russia have accelerated the American decline into bankruptcy, while ignorant Americans remain distracted by their iGadgets, NCAA tournament pools and the latest season of American Idol.
Every conflict is manufactured to benefit the global oligarchs, the military industrial complex, and those seeking to keep the masses enslaved in debt and distracted by technology, entertainment, and hatred towards whoever they are directed to hate by the government/media propaganda machine. It’s always about wealth, power, and control.
The key financial arrangement sustaining the American Empire, even as it internally crumbles from cultural rot, institutionalized corruption, and glorified ignorance of reality, is the global dominance of the U.S. dollar in trade. This is why the empire’s bankruptcy has been gradual and to many, unnoticeable. But Dementia Joe has accidentally, or purposefully as part of the Great Reset agenda, set in motion the rapid spiral into bankruptcy and collapse of the short-lived America Empire (1946 – 2022).
By creating a global energy crisis over a border dispute 6,000 miles from our shores, with no strategic interest to our country, Biden has initiated the final countdown of the petrodollar as the global settlement currency for all energy transactions. Petrodollar warfare has been the policy of the U.S. for decades as economic imperialism has been enforced militarily against Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela.
Trying to enforce this policy against Russia will be a bridge too far. And the consequences are already being felt. Biden’s sanctions against Russian energy are backfiring and will bring an end to the petrodollar regime. Russia is demanding payment from Europe for their oil, gas, and coal in rubles, rather than USD. Any propaganda being peddled about the U.S. filling the gap is nothing but bullshit, as proven by this chart:
Russia supplies 47% of the EU coal demand, 41% of their natural gas demand, and 27% of their oil demand. They will pay Russia in rubles or have their societies grind to a halt, with starvation, chaos, depression, and revolution as the result. This doesn’t even consider Russian wheat and fertilizer exports, vital to Africa and the Middle East. Living within the propaganda bubble encasing the United States, where only the Deep State surveillance state sanctioned narrative is allowed to be broadcast by the dying legacy media and controlled social media propaganda platforms, you would be under the mistaken belief the entire world is in lockstep with Biden and his Great Reset cronies.
The vast majority of the world (countries in gray in the map below) are not supporting the sanctions imposed by Biden. As already noted, even the European countries in yellow are ignoring the energy sanctions. Biden has pushed Russia and China closer together, with the petroyuan rising as an alternative to the petrodollar. India has reached agreement with Russia regarding oil imports. Africa and South America, with all their natural resources, have told Biden to shove it. America’s bullying tactics are now giving rise to alternative currency schemes, such as cryptocurrencies and discussions about a gold backed yuan and gold backed ruble.
We stand on the precipice of a global conflagration, with talk of nuclear war bantered about by unserious low-IQ government bureaucrats, vacuous bimbo journalists and talking heads on the boob tube, and spurred on by the despicable hero worship of the textbook symbol of this farce – a sitcom actor who played a president in a TV show, funded by a billionaire oligarch, who was installed as president of Ukraine in a campaign funded by that billionaire, has ruled as a U.S. puppet, and who the Hollywood elite wanted to share the stage with the most dim-witted virtue signaling narcissists on the planet at the Oscars to call for the West to intervene in his losing battle and start World War 3. Instead they virtue signaled their support for Zelensky during the ceremonies.
The Hollywood elite ignore the actual Nazis fighting for Zelensky, his banning of political opponents and media outlets, and his government not allowing transgenders to flee the country because they are men. He belongs on-stage at the Oscars with the freaks, frauds, degenerates, pedophiles, and hypocritical scumbags who make up the American entertainment industry. He would have gotten a standing ovation for being such a glorious upstanding symbol of democracy, freedom, and the transvestite way. He could have stripped down, grabbed his guitar, and performed for a worldwide audience, while begging for missiles, fighter jets, tanks and drones.
We should all be laughing at this farce, but Zelensky and his handlers, Biden and his handlers, along with the other EU/NATO jokers and fools, have chosen to provoke Putin into war, and are now ratcheting up the rhetoric and sanctions to the point where a wider conflict is all but ensured. These reckless psychopaths clearly have not studied history or human nature when it comes to how wars can escalate rapidly with unanticipated outcomes and death on a massive scale. In a recent communication with writer Margaret Anna Alice, she described perfectly why we are headed into a horrific period in history, as the bloodiest chapter of this Fourth Turning hurtles towards its climax:
“The lethal combination of incompetency, obliviousness, hubris, psychopathy, narcissism, megalomania, and every other dark triad trait is on full display in those purporting to be our leaders.”
With it being quite apparent there are no good guy leaders in the world, trying to figure out the least worst outcome of this current episode of As the World Burns becomes difficult to grasp. I am convinced this engineered conflict in Ukraine is part of the bigger Great Reset plan of the global elites.
But writers I respect have differing viewpoints on whether Putin is playing his part in this scheme for a new world order or whether he and Xi are partnering to fight Soros, Schwab, Gates, and the Global Reset co-conspirators. Based on what I’ve observed, I don’t believe all these bad men have the exact same goals for how the world should be run and who should run it. But no matter who wins, the winners want more power, more wealth, more control, and an autocracy, with them calling the shots.
When I take into account all that has happened since 2014, who has been calling the shots, who was getting paid off, and the families implicated in this Ukrainian debacle, I conclude the Great Reset collaborators see this war as the next step (after the Covid scamdemic) in their Great Reset – purposely provoking Putin into attacking and now believing they can bleed him dry by funneling arms and cash into Ukraine. Why did the Clinton Foundation receive more “donations” from the Ukraine, prior to the 2014 CIA coup, than any country on earth?
Biden was involved in the coup to overthrow a democratically elected president, friendly towards Russia. There was no conflict within Ukraine prior to the coup. No death. No destruction. So, who is to blame for the bloodshed now? It’s not Putin. Biden’s crackhead son raked in millions from selling influence to the “Big Guy”, with the U.S. installed puppet presidents doing as they were told by Soros and his U.S. surveillance state agents.
There has been a simmering conflict since Putin annexed Crimea, shortly after the coup, and Ukraine began attacking the eastern Russian speaking provinces. The ratcheting up of attacks in those eastern provinces and the rhetoric about Ukraine joining NATO is what provoked Putin to attack. Despite the all-out propaganda campaign, Russia is winning and will win against Ukraine alone.
This is the point in history when the Great Reset acolytes have decided they can accomplish multiple goals by turning Ukraine into a nightmarish quagmire of death and destruction, fueled by a never ending flow of armaments into this war zone, as a means to overthrow Putin, create food shortages, raise the cost of fossil fuels to astronomical heights, implement further restrictions on civil rights, increase technological controls over the populace, and institute a Chinese like social credit scoring system to enforce obedience and compliance with government demands.
The Ukrainian people are just cannon fodder to these evil men. After two years of demanding submission from the peasants regarding lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates, the ruling elite believe they will be able to enforce food and energy restrictions with the same ease upon the American people.
This is where I believe their master plan goes awry. Putin will not be cowed by Biden’s toothless sanctions, empty threats, and pathetic tough guy rhetoric. He will use any means necessary to defeat his foes. Economic sanctions are an act of war. Supplying his enemy with weapons to kill Russians is an act of war. NATO and the U.S. are one miscalculation away from starting WW3.
At a minimum, Biden has pushed China and Russia into closer cooperation as a new economic bloc. Biden’s weakness and inability to comprehend global strategy has probably convinced China they can annex Taiwan without the U.S. intervening in a meaningful way, other than easily avoided sanctions and threats. The new world order may end up revolving around China, with Russia and India as strategic partners and the U.S. and EU as outcasts.
The underlying anger in the country is bubbling to the surface. The raging inflation is crushing poor and middle-class families. Food and energy are the two largest monthly expenditures for families struggling to survive in this Federal Reserve induced billionaire boom society. When diesel fuel supplies dwindle to nothing, destroying our just in time, truck dependent supply chain, and real food shortages start inflicting real pain, civil disobedience and rioting will occur which will make the BLM riots looks like child’s play.
When people no longer have anything to lose, they will lose it and start looking for the culprits who stole their livelihoods and future. I don’t believe their propaganda machine will be able to convince the masses this was the fault of Trump or right wing conspiracists. Their pain and suffering are due to Federal Reserve bankers, corrupt politicians of the uni-party, and the media who has lied to them non-stop for the last decade. Woke is going to mean something different in the near future.
Pugnacious Putin has unwittingly, or possibly purposefully, initiated the “sudden” phase of the demise of the crumbling American Empire. A PR campaign and “USD subsidies” (aka bribes) to foreign countries will not save us now. Biden lit the fuse, and it is just a matter of when it blows. And does it just blow up the remnants of our empire, or the whole world? No one knows the answer to that question, but the future of civilization on earth depends on the answer.
Most of the world continues to go about their daily lives staring at their phones, oblivious to the danger of having angry senile sociopaths and egomaniacal billionaires controlling the use of nuclear weapons. We are one rash arrogant choice by a low IQ psychopath politician from the final scene in the Planet of the Apes.
“You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” – George Taylor
Are we destined to be victims? This Ukraine war has revealed both parties fully support never ending war. Left and right media outlets have been spewing the anti-Russian propaganda in lockstep. What has been set in motion will not be fixed at the ballot box, as if voting matters anymore in this empire of lies and deceit. Armed insurrection would not prevail with the current configuration of our society.
The only option is to organize in local communities of like-minded people to try and survive the coming storm. Get out of cities. Prep as much as you are able, with enough food, water, and fuel to sustain your family for an extended period of time. Stock up on guns, ammo, cash, gold, silver, and barterable items. On whatever plot of land you occupy, try to raise some food, and if possible become friendly with local farmers. No one can escape what is coming, as it will be global in nature, but you can take steps now to increase your chances of survival.
Our republic has degenerated into despotism, we’ve willingly relinquished our freedoms and liberties for the supposed safety and security of a Big Brother surveillance state, and now we will suffer the consequences of these cowardly actions. Life in America is about to become far harder than our generations of snowflakes ever anticipated. Those with no survival skills will not survive. If you are not prepared in mind, body, and spirit for what is coming, your future will be bleak. Only those already awake are likely to read this anyway, so good luck and Godspeed to you all.
“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
– John Adams
“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
NBC News anchor Chuck Todd forecasted Wednesday that Democrats are headed for a “shellacking” in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. Breaking down the latest NBC News poll, Todd demonstrated how three key metrics squarely paint Democrats in “dangerous territory.” According to the poll:
71% of Americans believe the country is “headed in the wrong direction”;
President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is only 40%;
Republicans hold a lead over Democrats on the generic ballot, indicating more voters favor the GOP over Democrats for the upcoming election.
Todd explained the negative figures are historic for NBC’s poll, which has been running for decades.
“The current wrong track in our poll: 71%. What is really striking is third straight poll where the direction of the country has been above 70% — only been one other time where’ve had that in our poll. It is not a good time [for Democrats],” Todd said. “Look, 65% wrong track is a bad number. 71%? That’s why it is in the shellacking category.”
Poll Numbers Push Democrats Into ‘Dangerous Territory’ In Midterm Meter www.youtube.com
Regarding Biden’s job approval rating, Todd pointed to the 2006 midterm election — which resulted in Democrats winning the House and Senate — as a possible analog.
“When you start dipping below 45%, you’ve got a problem, and you’re gonna have midterms that are in the bad-to-shellacking ratio,” he explained. “President Biden is at 40. George W. Bush was at 39% in 2006. We know how that turned out. So, you see, that’s also in shellacking territory.”
The NBC poll found that voters favor Republicans over Democrats on the generic ballot 46% to 44%. According to Todd, that figure deceivingly suggests Democrats are better off than they really are.
“The bottom line is, generic ballot, if the Democrats are losing, it means they’re gonna get walloped,” Todd said.
In fact, the 2010 midterm election was the last time Republicans held a two-point lead over Democrats in the generic ballot in NBC’s poll. In that election, Republicans gained a whopping 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.
If “shellacking,”“dangerous territory,” and “walloped” are not intense enough predictions for Democrats, Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the NBC poll, had one more powerful description of what the NBC poll means for Democrats.
“What this polls says is that President Biden and Democrats are headed for a catastrophic election,” he said.
The San Francisco Federal Reserve published a study this week that appeared to contradict President Joe Biden’s narrative about inflation.
Americans are battling historic inflation and growing economic woes that appear to have no end in sight. In fact, the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the consumer price index has increased 7.9% over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, the buck does not stop with Biden. The president has blamed inflation and other economic problems on COVID-19, the supply chain, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
The study sought to understand why U.S. inflation is increasing at a much higher rate than other advanced economic countries. The reason? The economists pointed toward COVID-19 relief bills, which pumped the economy, and Americans’ pockets, full of income. In fact, they argued the stimulus bills account for about 3% of inflation.
“Since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries,” the study said.
“Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021,” the bankers explained.
This is Bidenflation. SF Fed chart literally shows the impact on inflation of Biden’s $1.9T 3/21 gov’t spending spree. It shows US inflation vs that in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, & the UK – the chart ends before Russia invaded Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/aEJyglsI0Q
Without the massive COVID relief bills, the economists suggested the U.S. could have experienced deflation, which has benefits and drawbacks. Still, they argued the impacts of deflation “would have been harder to manage,” a comment that should be taken with a grain of salt considering the government is having a difficult time managing the inflation crisis. Importantly, the study failed to conclude that Putin is to blame for inflation.
Because of inflation, Americans will spend approximately $5,200 more than last year, Bloomberg reported.
Inflation will mean the average U.S. household has to spend an extra $5,200 this year ($433 per month) compared to last year for the same consumption basket, according estimates by Bloomberg Economics. The excess savings built up over the pandemic, and increases in wages, will cushion those costs, and allow spending to expand at a decent pace this year. But accelerated depletion of savings will increase the urgency for those staying on the sidelines to join the labor force, and the resulting increase in labor supply will likely dampen wage growth.
According to a recent NBC poll, a “plurality of Americans” blame Biden and his policies for inflation, while they overwhelmingly reject Russia’s culpability for America’s economic woes, NBC News reported.
The president of the world’s largest asset management company just issued a stark warning to members of America’s “entitled generation.”
BlackRock co-founder and president Robert Kapito said Tuesday that the global supply chain and soaring inflation crises will soon have dramatic effects on the U.S. economy that will result in a noticeable scarcity of goods not experienced before by many younger Americans. That scarcity, he said, will likely be a shock to the system for many who are accustomed to an abundant and comfortable lifestyle.
“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito said, adding, “We have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”
“I would put on your seatbelts, because this is something that we haven’t seen,” he asserted, in reference to what he called “scarcity inflation.”
Kapito’s remarks, first reported by Bloomberg News, were made at the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association convention — an annual gathering of oil and gas industry leaders. The warning comes just days after Bloomberg economists advised Americans to consider budgeting an extra $5,200 this year — or $433 monthly — to prepare for the effects of historically high inflation.
Inflation under the Biden administration has skyrocketed in the past year, rising at the fastest pace in four decades. Inflation is measured by the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which increased nearly 8% over the past 12 months, according to government data released for February 2022. The dramatically inflated prices have reportedly resulted in 64% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The last time inflation rose at such a fast rate was in 1982. That year, the U.S. economy went into a recession. Now, some experts are warning that another economic recession is “inevitable.”
The Biden administration has been peddling a litany of excuses for the economic downturn — including the coronavirus pandemic, corporate greed, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but American voters reportedly aren’t buying it. A plurality of respondents to a recent NBC News poll (38%) blamed President Joe Biden for the increase in the cost of consumer goods, while just 28% blamed the coronavirus pandemic, 23% blamed corporations raising prices, and only 6% blamed Putin.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, or WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
CONTENT WARNING: This column contains graphic details of a criminal case involving a sex offender who possessed and distributed photos and videos of the sexual abuse of prepubescent boys.
Presidents are entitled to nominate Supreme Court justices who represent their party and its values. Using that as our guide, President Joe Biden picked the Democrats’ perfect Supreme Court justice: Ketanji Brown Jackson.
If you’d given me a thousand bucks to come up with a question that would stump a Supreme Court nominee, I never would have thought of: What’s a woman?
Democratic values.
As Sens. Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham amply demonstrated at the nomination hearings last week, Judge Jackson really likes defendants in child pornography cases. She’s partial to all criminals, but the child porn cases make the point bracingly.
In seven out of seven child pornography cases that came before Judge Jackson, where the sentencing was up to the judge, she imposed sentences that were a fraction of those recommended under the sentencing guidelines. In all seven cases, her sentences were also far below those requested by the prosecutor.
Not 2 1/2 years, instead of three — more like three months instead of 10 years. In United States v. Hawkins, the defendant possessed and distributed multiple images of child abuse of kids, including photos of prepubescent boys engaging in oral and anal sex, a video of an 8-year-old boy masturbating, and one of an 11-year-old boy being anally penetrated by an adult man.
The federal sentencing guidelines recommended eight to 10 years. Judge Jackson sentenced the defendant to three months.
Yes, yes, he was only 18, and he was remorseful. Good for him!
But Judge Jackson also dramatically departed downward in sentencing a couple of ripe perverts — one who attempted to travel across state lines to molest a 9-year-old girl (when his thousands of child porn images weren’t enough); and another who’d distributed more than a hundred pornographic photos and videos of his own daughter.
On average, Judge Jackson gave child porn defendants sentences more than five years below the minimum under the guidelines.
In other words, Judge Jackson is the beau ideal Democratic Supreme Court justice.
In her favor, KBJ is at least a Generational African American (GAA), i.e. Descendant of American Slaves (DOAS) — unlike Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Joy Ann Reid and approximately 90% of the “African Americans” in Harvard’s entering class this year, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Perhaps, there’s hope that, someday, the high court will acknowledge that affirmative action is intended to make up for the legacy of slavery and should be available exclusively to GAAs, as opposed to what it is now, which is affirmative action, set-asides, “plus” factors, and do-nothing diversity jobs for everyone except white Americans.
Apart from the Democrats finally promoting a legacy African American, rather than an immigrant trying to steal the experiences of Black Americans, nothing is unusual here. It’s the media’s response to the questioning of Judge Jackson that’s been hilarious.
The media take the position that it’s rude to ask Judge Jackson questions — at least any questions about her record. Republicans are welcome to ask her all the questions they like about her family or her travails.
She is the most qualified human being ever, EVER to be nominated to the Supreme Court! The bravest, the strongest, the most heroic — HOW DARE YOU ASK OUR LITTLE LAMB QUESTIONS!
The media have also issued reams of “context,” “fact checks” and “debunkings” … all to prove that KBJ is a virtual Eliot Ness on crime! Don’t believe your eyes! Forget everything you know about the Democrats! It’s all lies and conspiracy theories!
Guy Benson
We got the sneering:
No, Sen. Hawley, Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t soft on child pornography. — NBC News
We got the hysterical warnings about right-wing conspiracy theorists:
Hawley’s attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson fuel a surge in online conspiracy chatter. — NPR
And we got the sophistical “fact checks”:
Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences “pretty mainstream” — ABC News
The New York Times’ “fact check” noted she was concerned about child porn fiends who were simply motivated by “the technological or social aspects” of child porn.
Totally run on that, Democrats.
What is the point of all these “FACT CHECKS”? For the past two years, liberals have been screaming, “Defund the Police!” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “F–k the Police!” — not to mention actually defunding the police and springing criminals in Democratic-run cities around the country. We got it: You like criminals and hate the police, Democrats. You’re not exactly flying below the radar.
Of note: Sen. Joe Manchin, your regular, old-time, American values Democrat, is just like the rest of his party when it comes to crime. Same with Arizona’s Sen. Mark Kelly and Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester. Kelly can boast about being an astronaut, and Tester can walk around with that buzz-cut and a piece of hay in his teeth — but give them a guy getting off on videos of 11-year-old boys being anally raped, and they say: Three months. Max.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
Our survival instincts are going to get us all killed.
I’m specifically referring to our hard-wired conformity impulse. That’s what causes us to go along with politically correct absurdities like pronoun protocols. It also causes people to join mobs, and to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at the command of a cult leader. In primitive environments, the herd instinct serves as a means of survival. If some sense danger and rush to safety, all follow. But how does such a conformity impulse work in a high-tech society like ours? It doesn’t really.
Sure, a certain level of conformity is normal for a society to function. But an unchecked conformity impulse in a technological society like ours acts more like slow-motion suicide than a survival mechanism. We think we’re saving ourselves by conforming, but in the long run the opposite is true. In fact, our instinct to conform has become a weapon tyrants use to control us by threatening social isolation for those who don’t obey. This is especially the case when a monopoly of tech overlords can broadcast propaganda to the herd, instantly and globally. In such cases there is no “wisdom of crowds.” When the masses obey the propaganda to avoid social punishment, they only prop up propaganda and thereby spread social turmoil.
Propagandists Manipulate our Conformity Impulse
We should be aghast at the high level of American conformity to the demands of propagandists: Mask your toddler! He’s a girl and she’s a guy! Mind your pronouns! He’s a white supremacist! And so on. Nobody is safe if we can’t challenge the truth of what the elites who presume to rule us are saying.
Meanwhile, they keep pushing the envelope to get us to say things we know are false and to do things against our own interests. Demonizing those who hesitate to comply fosters a mob mindset that protects their narratives. Hence, people with different views feel alone and tend to be intimidated into silence. This is how resistance to tyranny is eroded.
Demonization campaigns are key to this process. Suddenly, you’re a bigot if you don’t celebrate men invading women’s sports. Or you’re an “insurrectionist” if you don’t applaud punishing people with 24/7 solitary confinement (without a trial date) for “parading” around the Capitol for a few hours on January 6, 2021.
Or you’re selfish if your toddler isn’t wearing a mask. Or you should be expelled as a Yale law student if you don’t take part in shouting down a conversation about free speech at Yale Law School and then sign a statement intended to abolish freedom of speech.
The Conformity Impulse Is Juvenile and Deadly
Teenage girls provide an especially clear-cut example of how the conformity dynamic works. Too many of them are notorious for engaging in relational aggression, a type of bullying that damages someone’s social status, causing others to shun and isolate the victim. This type of aggression is inherent to mob behavior.
For example, pundit Kathleen Parker’s recent hit job on Ginni Thomas in The Washington Post is infused with a smug little middle school flavor. It includes a huge dose of projection, such as Parker’s hallucination that Thomas has a sense of self-importance, when it’s obviously the Parker girl who’s infected with egotism.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the ultimate case of the “I’m important and you’re not” mentality. The subtext of Clinton’s 2021 wistful reading of her 2016 acceptance speech is that Americans were obligated to elect her because she wanted to be president ever since she was a little girl. Men with a similar mentality include MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and humorless late-night “comics” like Stephen Colbert.
Their followers imitate and repeat what they’re told by the approved talking heads. They laugh at unfunny lines on cue, regurgitate the assigned opinions, and label the non-compliant with the “eewww” factor. Many are eager to become “influencers” so they too can dictate what others must say and do on pain of being socially rejected.
The Secret Laws of Social Psychology
Far too many have been marching in lockstep with media-pushed narratives, and too few seem to be speaking out. Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
To resist this absurd state of affairs, we must first learn about the dynamics and understand our vulnerabilities. The information is out there, but it doesn’t get much circulation.
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing once observed that people are dangerously ignorant of the laws of mob psychology. In 1987 she recommended everyone be schooled in them, especially children. She speculated that power elites are invested in such ignorance. If such knowledge were widely understood, people would be insulated from the manipulations of propagandists.
A lot of the research on conformity was the result of scholars asking how small groups of fanatics could take over whole societies — e.g., Bolsheviks in Russia and Nazis in Germany — resulting in millions killed while the vast majority of the population sat back in silence and fear.
In the 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous experiments on the conformity impulse. At least 37 percent of the time people would deny the evidence of their own eyes — about the obvious fact of a line’s length — if everyone else gave an incorrect answer. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times with the same or worse results. Here’s a video of that experiment conducted in the 1970s:
Stanley Milgram later took that study to a new level with his famous “shock machine” experiments. When Adolf Eichmann said he was “just following orders” while on trial for his leading role in the Holocaust, Milgram wondered how often ordinary people would inflict harm if told to do so by an authority figure.
Participants in that experiment were told it was a study about how punishment affected learning. If the “learner” gave an incorrect answer, the “teacher” was supposed to shock him in increments. The learners were actors who could not be seen but, although not really shocked, would scream in “pain” from the next room. The “teacher” was the subject.
Sixty-five percent of the subjects gave the highest voltage shock when asked to “please continue” by the administrator. For more background, watch “The Experimenter,” a 2015 film about Milgram. Other related research includes the Robbers Cave Experiment; Robert J. Lifton’s research on thought reform and totalitarianism; and Margaret Thaler Singer’s research on cults. All illustrate how elites can manipulate our urge to conform.
Everybody needs to learn about the dynamics of conformity. Blatant censorship, hostility to free speech, and campaigns to demonize mainstream American views were all unthinkable scenarios for most Americans just a few years ago.
But here we are. When we start self-censoring because we’re afraid of not fitting in, we open the door to oppression and social chaos. That unchecked urge to “fit in” can kill us all, and we need to stop.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
While claiming its aggressive collection of confidential information on private citizens is “narrowly tailored” and without a nefarious purpose, Democrats on the Jan. 6 Committee selectively leaked communications of a private citizen to smear political opponents.
Last week, CNN and the Washington Post published text messages between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who goes by “Ginni,” and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged in the days leading up to and on the day of the Capitol riot.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ginni reportedly urged Meadows days after the 2020 contest when news organizations began to call the race for former Vice President Joe Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Out of the 29 of more than 2,300 text messages released from Meadows’ vast trove of data handed to the Select Committee, not one, the Washington Post conceded, included a direct reference to the sitting justice as the weaponized probe sought to dox a private citizen for petitioning her government.
“The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results,” the Post reported with the paper adopting Pelosi committee’s framing to indict private political views as a blockbuster scandal.
While the committee has made an open point to prosecute those who publicly sought to cast doubt on the fairness of the 2020 election results, the committee’s targeting of Ginni Thomas for privately petitioning government officials on her own marks further escalation of the probe’s assault on civil liberties, and makes Thomas case all the more unique.
CNN reported Monday the committee will now seek an interview with Ginni, who has become the latest to be dragged before lawmakers for exercising dissident views, even in private. But the probe’s latest request is just as much targeted at Ginni, a long-time conservative activist who has never concealed her activism, as it is her husband.
The left’s racist disdain for Justice Thomas has never been a well-kept secret by a virulent left frustrated by the mere existence of a black conservative, let alone one on the high bench. Attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on lenient sentencing for child sex crimes are cruel and racist. Baseless criticism of Justice Thomas is warranted, however, for his political heresy, starting with his own confirmation process three decades ago.
Publication of the text messages provoked immediate calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any cases related to the Jan. 6 investigation for the crime of his wife’s public political views raising concerns over an election with record mail-in voting and last-minute rule changes. New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even demanded Justice Thomas resign or face impeachment.
As outlined Tuesday in The Federalist by former Thomas Law Clerk Wendy Long, however, judges are never asked to recuse themselves over political views, whether their own or their spouse’s.
“Leftists in Congress and the media hyperventilate over every tidbit showing that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is involved in national conservative politics – most recently, that she pushed for integrity in the 2020 election,” Long wrote. “This isn’t news, and it has nothing to do with Justice Thomas’s ability to be a fair and impartial jurist.”
Instead, Long explained judicial recusal is about “mainly financial, legal, personal, or professional interests of the Justice or a family member.” Not personal politics. The strategy of the modern left, however, has been to intimidate the courts into submission to extremist and anti-Constitution politics. Consider the last three nomination battles: Justice Brett Kavanaugh was slandered as a serial gang rapist, Amy Coney Barrett was depicted as a character in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Stephen Breyer was pressured to retire while Democrats were in power to replace him.
Not only are the attacks on Thomas purely political, they’re hypocritical. Will Democrats calling on Justice Thomas to refrain from his official duties as a jurist similarly demand a probe into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leveraging her position in Congress to rake in millions? Will journalists married to people in power recuse themselves from coverage on any issues their spouses conduct even minor work on? Probably not. It’s all theater.
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.
Recent polling shows that very few Americans are buying the excuses the Biden administration are making for high inflation and instead blame the President Joe Biden and his policies. The NBC News poll asked Americans who they thought was to blame for the high inflation that they are suffering under and offered some of the culprits blamed by the president and his supporters as possible answers. Among the options listed, Biden and his policies were blamed by a plurality of Americans polled, at 38%. Only 28% blamed the coronavirus pandemic, another 23% blamed corporations raising prices, and barely 6% blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
Over recent months, the Biden administration has attempted to blame the invasion of Ukraine, the greed of meat conglomerates, and the pandemic for the high inflation eating away at Americans’ savings and wages. The same poll found the president’s approval rating to drop to 40% while an astounding 55% disapprove of the job Biden is doing. When asked about the economy, only 33% said they approved of the job he’s doing, while 63% said they don’t approve of the job Biden is doing.
The astonishing poll is just the latest in a long series showing devastating results for Democrats ahead of the midterms, where they would have faced an uphill battle even without horrible polling. The terrible polling has lead to greater division in the Democratic party among the centrist establishment wing, which blames progressive extremism, and the far-left progressive wing that blames Biden for not going far enough to the left.
Socialist Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Thursday said that the low polling came from progressives and young voters who were disappointed that Biden had done enough to satisfy their left-wing demands.
Here’s more about the terrible poll numbers for Biden:
Steve Kornacki: Biden’s Handling Of The Economy Numbers ‘Getting Worse And Worse’ www.youtube.com
Recent emails unearthed by the U.K. Daily Mail and the National Pulse reveal that during the last decade, Hunter Biden seemed to have a keen interest in pathogen research in Ukraine and using it as a tool for geopolitical affairs in that country. It just so happens to be that a pathogen connected to gain-of-function research destroyed the world, and then the next “big current thing” on the geopolitical stage was none other than Ukraine. Shouldn’t the American people get some answers as to why our government was so heavily involved – via the vice president’s son – in both pathogen research and Ukraine and to make sure Ukraine is not Wuhan 2.0?
Earlier this month, I detailed the known connections between biotech firm Metabiota Inc., responsible for the pathogen research in Ukraine, the DOD, and EcoHealth Alliance, along with the Wuhan lab most likely responsible for the leak of SARS-CoV-2. I also noted that Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital, gave Metabiota, a company accused of dangerous lab protocols during the African Ebola pandemic, its first infusion of cash a decade ago. Now, new emails from Hunter’s laptop demonstrate that his involvement in Metabiota and pathogen research in Ukraine was much deeper than just an initial investment.
On April 4, 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote an email to the younger Biden outlining how they could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’” with their joint venture, according to an email from Hunter’s laptop obtained by the U.K. Daily Mail. That is quite a curious goal for a company that supposedly does scientific research and analysis about emerging pandemics.
The outlet also posted another email dated April 8, 2014, from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi referring to a “science project” Hunter had pitched to him involving Burisma and Metabiota in Ukraine. “Please find few initial points to be discussed for the purposes of analyzing the potential of this as you called, ‘Science Ukraine’ project,” Pozharskyi wrote. Hunter sits on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company owned by corrupt billionaire Mikolay Zlochevsky, who fled to Monaco after he was put under investigation.
Hunter’s dad, as vice president, was in charge of our foreign policy with Ukraine in 2014 when all of this was occurring and when the U.S. government was backing the color revolution that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. It was at this time that the Defense Department began funding the Metabiota operations in Ukraine.
After receiving 18.4 million from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) between February 2014 and November 2016, with $307,091 earmarked for “Ukraine research projects,” “Metabiota has worked in Ukraine for Black & Veatch, a US defense contractor with deep ties to military intelligence agencies, which built secure labs in Ukraine that analyzed killer diseases and bioweapons,” according to the Daily Mail.
“It raises the question, what is the real purpose of this venture? It’s very odd,” said former senior CIA officer Sam Faddis in an interview with the Daily Mail. “His father was the Vice President of the United States and in charge of relations with Ukraine. So why was Hunter not only on the board of a suspect Ukrainian gas firm, but also hooked them up with a company working on bioweapons research?”
Biden was so involved in Metabiota that one email written that same month in 2014 reveals that he and his business partner Eric Schwerin discussed subletting their office space to the San-Francisco-based biotech firm.
So, what exactly were they working on? Last week, the National Pulse reported that a feature in the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine’s 2016 AnnualReportrecounts an October 2016 meeting involving U.S. military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts together with Black & Veatch and Metabiota staff to discuss the lab work. The discussion centered around “existing frameworks, regulatory coordination, and ongoing cooperative projects in research, surveillance and diagnostics of a number of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, leptospirosis, Crimea Congo hemorrhagic fever, and brucellosis.”
The National Pulse cites a 2019 paper authored by researchers from Metabiota and three Ukraine-based institutes and funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency sharing how they isolated a form of African swine flu using a pig from Ukraine in 2016. They also detail their research on Anthrax in animals in Ukraine.
Well, where else have we heard of Metabiota partners working on gain-of-function research of pathogens that typically are in animals? Oh yes, EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan. In the past, Metabiota has worked with EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The zoonotic projects being described in Ukraine sound awfully similar to the gain-of-function work EcoHealth was involved with in Wuhan. In Feb. 2016, EcoHealth’s founder, Peter Daszak, explained the company’s zoonotic pathogen work as follows:
So as an example, first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gone into people from animals. So, we narrow it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS, we found other Corona viruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So, we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells. Then we, well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work, you create the pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses [to see if they] bind to human cells. And each step you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. So, you narrow down the field, you reduce the cost and you end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers. (C-Span, 1:16:22.)
Sure sounds a lot like the coronavirus that actually broke out several years ago and destroyed the world as we know it. Less than a month later, Ralph Baric, the UNC Chapel Hill biologist who spearheaded the gain-of-function projects for Daszak, co-authored a paper warning with certitude of the emergence of this disease. “The results indicate that viruses using WIV1-CoV spike are poised to emerge in human populations due to efficient replication in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures,”concluded the authors.
How did they know? And doesn’t anyone have a concern that the same players were up to no good in Ukraine, especially given Hunter Biden’s ethical problems and the fact that his dad, the vice president and now the president, was overseeing Ukrainian affairs during that time?
Recently, the National Pulse found, based on EcoHealth’s 990 filings and analysis by ProPublica, that the company’s investment income surged by 342% in the year of the pandemic. EcoHealth received millions of dollars from Fauci’s NIAD to work on “killer” viruses with the Wuhan Institute, creating “chimeric” viruses that spread in humans at rates “equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Now consider the fact that Metabiota’s CEO, Nathan Wolfe, penned an article in Time on Aug. 1, 2014, detailing his opinion on the Ebola outbreak in Africa and then literally predicted coronavirus as the next outbreak:
While Ebola virus won’t be the next global Andromeda strain, there are viruses out there that could be. Coronaviruses (like SARS) and influenza viruses (like the H1N1 virus of 1918) for example, show that some viruses truly can spread around the world in ways that will blindside and impact our entire planet. It is notable that a novel coronavirus, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and a novel influenzavirus, the H7N9 virus, receive very little attention from the international media. Perhaps as importantly, there are millions of still unidentified viruses in animal reservoirs, among which, almost certainly is a virus that we’d have no capacity to understand, or stop were it to suddenly emerge today.
If we didn’t have a pandemic likely created by similar research – possibly by the same players – killing millions globally and injuring tens of millions of others, I wouldn’t be too concerned with these research projects in Ukraine. But given what has occurred, why is there zero concern from the media or the politicians about what we have been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere? And how does it shape our entire geopolitical worldview on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Left-wing media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, etc.) are avoiding the elephants in the room, like the Hunter Biden laptop and all the Joe Biden corruptions and disasters.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Despite the corrupt media’s best efforts to derail Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill by dishonestly framing it as “Don’t Say Gay,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law on Monday to the benefit of families across the state. The media didn’t stand down, of course. Not only did they continue to give the impression that under the new law, the word “gay” is off-limits, but they declined to mention whom the new law is intended to protect. That’s because don’t want you to know it’s for five-year-olds.
“BREAKING: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill into law,” ABC News tweeted Monday afternoon with a clip of the signing ceremony. “The bill bans lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity in some grades.”
“Some grades,” huh? Ignoring for a moment ABC’s continued invocation of “don’t say gay” (and the fact that the bill is really only “controversial” insofar as the media have been lying about it), you might be left wondering what those “some grades” are if you haven’t yet read the now-law.
Wonder no more. Here’s the relevant portion of the simple and straightforward legislation:
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
By “some grades,” ABC News meant kindergarteners through third-graders. In other words, the law is meant to protect 8-year-olds down to five- and perhaps even four-year-olds, as well as their parents by permitting the latter to decide if and when they broach sensitive sex topics with their young children. Older classes can still discuss historical events like Stonewall and health topics like sexually transmitted diseases when they’re “age-appropriate.”
ABC News’ verbiage is no accident. By framing a very narrow age group as “some grades” — something that could just as easily be referring to kids at prom — ABC intentionally diverts attention from the fact that the kids in danger of prematurely learning about “tucking” and “binding” and gay sex are children who still have all their baby teeth and wear pull-ups to sleep. They’re kids who can’t get up from the dinner table until they eat five more bites of peas and who are tucked into bed and sound asleep by 8 p.m. They haven’t the faintest notions of puberty and no idea how mommy gets a baby in her belly. But saying, “The bill bans lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity for 5-year-olds who still wet the bed and check for monsters under it,” doesn’t serve the media’s anti-parent and pro-LGBT-all-the-time function the way “some grades” and “don’t say gay” do. So, the public is served with left-wing media spin.
Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation doesn’t prevent “some grades” from “saying gay.” It prevents kindergarteners from consuming pornographic picture books at school and five-year-olds from being encouraged in the classroom to consider pronouns that don’t correspond with reality. More than that, it does exactly what the real name of the bill says: It preserves parents’ rights in the education of their own children.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
A majority of likely voters believe the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents is “important,” according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll that also found nearly half believe that efforts to discredit the story impacted the 2020 presidential election.
On Thursday, a Rasmussen poll found that 66% of “likely U.S. voters” said they believe the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was “important,” including 48% who said they think the story is “very important.” By contrast, 31% of respondents believed the story was not important, including 15% who said they believed it was “not at all important.”
Additionally, Rasmussen found that nearly half of the respondents (48%) said they think that “if the media had fully reported the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, it’s unlikely Joe Biden would have been elected president.”
For their report, Rasmussen drew from a poll conducted on March 21-22 of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
In October 2020, shortly before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a story that reported Hunter Biden had his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, meet with an executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma shortly before the elder Biden pressured officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. To back up its story, the New York Post referenced emails they reviewed that came from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a shop in Delaware and later seized by the FBI. A copy of the data was provided by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The laptop also reportedly included embarrassing images and videos of Hunter Biden, as well as details of questionable business dealings Hunter had with communist China.
Many major media outlets gave little to no attention to the story, claiming among other things that they found the source for the emails to be suspect.
National Public Radio’s Kelly McBride argued in a newsletter back in 2020 that there were “many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation” and that the claims of the story “don’t amount to much.”
“Intelligence officials warn that Russia has been working overtime to keep the story of Hunter Biden in the spotlight. Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect,” wrote McBride.
“And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered.”
Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook censored posts about the Hunter Biden laptop story in advance of the election, with Twitter going as far as to take down the New York Post’s account for 16 days, claiming that they do not allow hacked material to be tweeted.
“These responses, though they came in a fast-moving and confusing situation, were heavy-handed and arguably ill-judged,” acknowledged Vox in a recent report. “It’s also fair to be skeptical of whether social media companies would have responded so strongly if a Trump family member had been the victim of a suspected hack that October.”
Groups like the conservative fact-checking website NewsBusters argued that mainstream media outlets devoted far too little time to the controversy surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. Although left-leaning news media largely ignored the story in 2020, more conservative outlets like Fox News devoted considerable time to the story in advance of the election.
Media Matters, a liberal fact-check website, argued at the time that Fox’s focus on the Biden laptop was part of “a massive smear campaign in the final weeks before Election Day.”
“That effort, led by the New York Post and amplified by Fox’s megaphone, has sought to bury Joe Biden with a blizzard of dubious and bad-faith allegations related to his son Hunter Biden’s business interests,” stated Media Matters in October 2020.
Last week, the New York Times ran a piece about ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, saying that the emails from the laptop were likely valid.
The Christian Post was canceled last week by Twitter, over referring to Biden administration official Rachel Levine with an unsanctioned but arguably accurate descriptive pronoun. It was both unsurprising and surprising; unsurprising since CP regularly covers the controversy surrounding trans-identified individuals and surprising since Twitter thought this particular story was more “hateful” than other stories and warranted suspension.
CP appealed, and so far, Twitter has been silent. It actually brings a Pink Floyd lyric to mind: “Welcome to the Machine.”
There is much to say in arguing that our pronoun was accurate, but the larger question is: who is the hater here? Eliminating the voice of a publication because of a description that likely more than half of the world’s population would not object to is, in fact, hating that segment of the world. Granted, Twitter is a private company and can play by the rules it establishes within the confines of the law. But if we are having a conversation about hate, how is it kind to eliminate a voice that disagrees, especially if there is no rancor involved?
Consider this illustration. If an individual sees green because of a blue-yellow tritanomaly, yet many, many others disagree because they see blue, is it hate to point that out? Or would it be hate to eliminate those who see blue on grounds that the only valid standard is what that individual sees? How does that promote community, a word Twitter throws around without restraint.
What this exposes is that Twitter doesn’t believe in the U.S. constitutional protection of free speech. Even The New York Times, a bastion of liberal thought, has begun to warn that support for free speech is dangerously eroding, arguing that their own opinion polling finds only 34 percent of Americans said they enjoyed the freedom to disagree because of the threat of “retaliation or harsh criticism.” Those words connote hate.
According to The New York Times editorial board: “People should be able to forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.”
Hear that Twitterati?
We at CP suspect the vast majority of our readers — Christians who lean right or left, LGBT+ (yes, we have readers in this community), secularists, and atheists — believe it is right to stand against retaliation, harsh criticisms, and ultimately cancellation of speech, because of the hate it represents.
So now we know Twitter doesn’t believe in free speech. Here is the real question: Do you believe in Twitter?
The best remedy to speech you don’t agree with is more speech, not less, and the best way to exercise free speech is to use it. So we will continue to use it with or without Twitter. Will you join us?
Beau Biden was the Attorney General for Delaware for nearly ten years ending in 2015. While in the role some horrible child abuse cases were resolved with lenient sentences. Now the Beau Biden Foundation is spending large sums of its donations on employees and not on abused children. Why does this come as no surprise?
Beau Biden was AG in Delaware when the heir to the Dupont family was charged with child abuse of his 3-year-old. He was let off with almost no penalty. Delaware Online reported:
The du Pont family heir who raped his 3-year-old daughter has reached a tentative settlement with his former wife in a sexual abuse lawsuit she filed on behalf of their two children, according to court records…
…Richards IV, who was originally charged with two counts of second-degree rape with a minimum of 20 years behind bars, pleaded guilty in 2008 to fourth-degree rape of his daughter. Fourth-degree rape carries no minimum prison time and sentencing guidelines used by judges and prosecutors urge zero to 30 months in prison.
Despite the horrible result in the Dupont case, the Beau Biden foundation was created to help abused children. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the money in that foundation last year went to suffering children.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. Joe’s weekday radio show at Realtalk933.com has received rave reviews. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of four books. His new book: ‘The Steal – Volume One: Setting the Stage’ is out now. It addresses the stolen 2020 Election and those activities that led up to November 3, 2020 – please take a look and buy a copy.
Progressive firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged this week that Democrats are heading straight toward a bloodbath in the midterm elections unless something changes — and quickly. But the solution she offered to solve the party’s political problems is a puzzling, if not unsurprising, one. Essentially, the lawmaker urged her Democratic colleagues in Washington — including President Joe Biden — to dig their heels in on radically left-wing governance.
“We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about [the] middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen,” Ocasio-Cortez said of Biden and the Democratic Party’s cratering poll numbers in a recent interview with New York Magazine.
Recent surveys have shown what some are calling a “5-alarm fire for the Democratic Party” ahead of the midterms as Biden’s favorability rating has sunk to 40% and battleground voters increasingly see the president and his party as “out of touch,” “condescending,”and not up to the task of leading the country.
But for Ocasio-Cortez, the issue is not the party’s fierce commitment to a radical liberal agenda; rather, it’s the party’s alleged failure to push that agenda onto the American people. She does mean push, too. The lawmaker implicitly suggested that Congress is unable to legislate the types of policies the progressive base desires, and so Biden will need to use his executive authority to ram those policies through.
“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she told the magazine. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble.”
What are the policies that Ocasio-Cortez is advocating for? According to the Washington Post, they include enacting environmental protections, lowering health care costs, overhauling police departments, canceling federal student loan debts, and expanding protections for illegal immigrants.
The Post reported earlier this month Ocasio-Cortez and her 97 Democratic colleagues in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have decided to demand executive action from Biden on a range of issues in hopes that the actions will save the party from an embarrassing political defeat in November. The full list of the caucus’s executive action “recommendations” can be seen here (also see below).
If not for the damage it would do to the nation, Republicans would likely welcome such an approach from Biden. All indicators suggest it would only give the Republican base more to rally around come election time.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Recommendations for Executive Action Lower Health Care Costs Ensure Access to Health Care for Families ● Make health care more affordable by changing the current determination of eligibility for a family’s ACA premium subsidies, which is based on whether the available employer-sponsored insurance is affordable for the employee, rather than for the whole family. Fixing this “family glitch” in the Affordable Care Act would provide relief to 5.1 million people. ● Protect seniors’ ability to manage their own care in traditional Medicare by quickly transitioning away from the ACO REACH pilot program, which allows third-party middlemen to manage care without seniors’ full understanding or prior consent, and often through for-profit businesses with incentives to restrict care. Lower Drug Prices for Millions of Americans and Protect Taxpayer Investments in Research and Development ● Use existing legal authorities to dramatically lower costs of essential drugs like insulin, naloxone, hepatitis C drugs, HIV/AIDS drugs, Xtandi, EpiPens, and inhalers. ● Build public manufacturing capacity to ensure availability of critical medicines such as insulin at lower cost. ● Guarantee lower drug prices and protect taxpayer investments in research and development by requiring all government funding contracts to include a reasonable-pricing clause using a standard such as the median price in other OECD countries, as well as licensing conditions to ensure affordable global access. ● Make medications cheaper by allowing the personal importation of drugs. Decisively End the Global Pandemic ● Negotiate licensing agreements that require manufacturers to share production methods and invoke legal authorities to ensure broad technology transfer so that new manufacturing plants can be built around the world. ● Expand public manufacturing capacity for COVID-19 vaccine and therapeutic production, and future public use for critical drugs by building governmentowned, contractor-operated facilities. Publicly release all Operation Warp Speed contracts with manufacturers in an unredacted form to provide greater transparency into pricing, intellectual property, delivery and distribution, and donation terms of agreement. ● Redouble multilateral efforts to secure a global emergency waiver for monopoly rights on COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. ● Put government-owned intellectual property related to the Walter Reed pancoronavirus vaccine candidate in the public domain, and actively share technology with the World Health Organization’s technology access pool and manufacturers throughout the world to ensure that if the vaccine candidate is proven safe and effective, there will be fair pricing and adequate supply and access globally. ● Support a new issuance of International Monetary Fund global emergency reserves at no cost to U.S. taxpayers so that developing countries can purchase vaccines, treatments, protect public health budgets, and spur global demand for U.S. exports. Cancel Federal Student Loan Debt ● Put money back in the pockets of millions of Americans who are stuck in the student debt trap — preventing them from buying homes, starting families, and investing in their communities — by using existing administrative authority under section 432(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 to cancel federal student loan debt. Expand Worker Power and Raise Wages ● Give millions of workers more take-home pay by strengthening outdated overtime protections. Provide at least one-and-a-half times the regular pay for any hours worked in excess of 40 hours per workweek to millions more workers by quickly initiating the rulemaking process to update the salary threshold for w0rkers eligible for overtime, in line with the historical high point of the 55th percentile of earnings of full-timed salaried workers nationwide, amounting to at least $82,732 by 2026. Implement automatic updates to prevent the erosion of the salary threshold over time. ● Provide generous sick leave, overtime, vacation, and other benefits by strengthening Service Contract Act regulations and guidance, addressing misclassification of low-wage workers and use existing authority to ensure that bidders prioritize retention and quality staffing. ● Require that federal contractors remain neutral in union organizing campaigns; narrow the gap between CEO and worker pay; have no violations of labor union rights; divulge company and individual contributions to candidates, parties or third-party political groups in the past two years; and have not paid a penalty or settled a claim in connection with the violation of an EPA regulation in the preceding five years. ● Protect high-risk workers including farm workers, construction workers, and warehouse workers from dangerous heat and wind conditions caused by climate change by developing workplace heat and wind standards. ● Ensure high wages from federal projects by modernizing regulations related to the Davis Bacon Act, which establishes a prevailing wage for construction workers on federally funded projects. Reverse Reagan-era rules that undermined the ability of the Department of Labor to accurately collect wage data. ● Ensure that all grants for infrastructure projects, to the extent allowed by law, require the use of a trained, certified workforce and apply labor standards— particularly on projects aimed at deployment of electric-vehicle charging stations. ● Build on existing memoranda of understanding between the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division and the National Labor Relations Board that coordinate efforts to enforce labor and wage standards by creating new MOUs between other executive branch organizations like the Department of Defense. ● Promote the protection and robust enforcement of labor, employment and civil rights by ensuring that all workers, regardless of immigration status, can exercise their rights, by providing immigration protections and access to work authorizations to safeguard against retaliation. Advance Immigrants’ Rights ● Provide immediate and urgently needed relief for those coming from countries in crisis by designating or re-designating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people already present in the United States. Protect current TPS recipients, and newly designate or redesignate countries eligible for TPS or DED, such as Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Mauritania, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen. ● Ensure fairness in the immigration court system by removing nonpriority cases from the 1.6 million case backlog, expanding government-funded legal counsel for adults and children, and ending the use of expedited proceedings that compromise due process such as immigration adjudication centers that operate without oversight. ● Stop the expansion of private prisons to detain immigrants; terminate or decline renewal of all current private prison contracts; and support community-based alternatives to detention, including community-based case management. Specifically, transition ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) to alternatives to detention that are operated outside of ICE by non-profit community-based organizations with expertise serving immigrant communities. ● Provide access to a fair asylum process by ending the use of Remain in Mexico (MPP) and Title 42 expulsions and border closure, and working to re-open closed ports of entry to people seeking protection in coordination with local non-profit groups and shelters. ● Combat racial profiling while fostering greater public safety and community trust by ending all 287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local law enforcement officers to perform certain functions of federal immigration agents. Prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from entering into new such agreements, including both Warrant Service Officer and Jail Enforcement Model agreements. ● Redress the harms of Trump’s Muslim Ban and additional, related presidential proclamations, so that those unfairly burdened or rejected under Muslim Ban are able to secure status, obtain lost green cards, and secure other basic services without additional burdens. ● Raise wages and improve labor safeguards and protections so that employers can no longer use the H-2B visa program to underpay and exploit migrant workers and U.S. workers. ● Increase wage requirements in the H-1B visa program so they reflect true market rates and allocate H-1B visas by prioritizing employers seeking highly skilled workers and paying fair wages. Deliver on the Promise of Equal Justice Under The Law Judicial System Reform ● Fight cost increases for working families and protect workers by developing an inter-agency task force to investigate, prosecute, and deter white-collar crime, including anti-competitive and price-gouging business behaviors as well as firms’ exploitation of heightened inflation to pad profits; tax fraud and evasion by corporations and wealthy individuals; and employers’ workplace safety violations, wage theft, anti-union retaliation, and other violations of labor law. ● Fulfill the President’s promise of assembling a taskforce on prosecutorial discretion to collect and implement best practices and innovations at the state and local levels to reduce over-criminalization, such as ending cash bail and declining to prosecute smaller crimes to advance racial and economic justice. ● Build on the success of alleviating prison overcrowding and mass incarceration made by the pandemic home confinement program, by ensuring that the Bureau of Prisons effectively implements the Attorney General’s strong Office of Legal Counsel memo, including by granting clemency to those who have complied with the terms of home confinement regardless of the length of their sentences. The administration should also create an independent, permanent clemency board to review more than 18,000 pending clemency petitions. Police Reform ● Make police departments more transparent and accountable to the public by collecting and publishing data on the use of force in police departments across the country. ● Help reduce the use of deadly force by police officers by establishing strict national standards governing the use of force and require immediate application of these standards to all federal law enforcement agencies and condition federal grants on their adoption at the state and local level. ● Build on President Obama’s executive action to demilitarize law enforcement by directing the Department of Defense to revise its 1033 program and prevent the transfer of certain excess military-grade weaponry to federal, tribal, state, and local police, including grenade launchers, weaponized drones, long-range acoustic devices, armored military vehicles, grenades, and other explosives. Community Safety • Issue an executive order to establish a new Division of Community Safety within the Department of Health and Human Services to advance non-carceral responses to safety, including overseeing research, providing technical assistance for jurisdictions, funding grant programs on initiatives like violence interruption, mentorship, assistance for survivors and vulnerable youth; and coordinating among other federal agencies around non-carceral community safety approaches. • Build on the President’s comprehensive strategy to combat gun violence by establishing an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to streamline, coordinate, and implement relevant executive orders across federal agencies. Combat the Climate Crisis and Reduce Fossil Fuel Dependence Invest in Clean, Affordable, Homegrown Energy to Support Energy Independence • Ensure the federal government leverages its vast purchasing power to accelerate homegrown clean energy technologies that cut costs for American families by developing strong rules for implementing the Executive Order on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability. Regulations should include equity, labor, and environmental standards. • Declare a National Climate Emergency and invoke authorities under the Defense Production Act and Trade Expansion Act, mobilizing domestic industry to manufacture affordable renewable energy technologies with good paying union jobs for domestic use and international export; reinstate the crude oil export ban; and build reliable, distributed renewable energy systems in frontline communities most affected by the dirty and unjust energy complex. ● Declare a ban on new fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters and in environmental justice communities. ● Save taxpayers billions of dollars by ending both domestic and international federal fossil fuel subsidies. ● Direct the State Department, U.S. Treasury, U.S. Export-Import Bank, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, and USAID to phase out all U.S. government financing for fossil fuel projects and related infrastructure overseas and finance only clean energy infrastructure and climate mitigation and adaptation measures. Use the U.S.’ voice and vote at IMF, World Bank and IDB to advance the same goal. Ensure Clean Air and Water to Save Lives ● Protect Americans’ health and save tens of thousands of lives annually by updating and strengthening outdated standards limiting particulate matter, ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, coal ash, and tailpipe emissions, as well as lead and copper rules preventing contamination of drinking water. ● Finalize new methane standards for new and existing oil and gas operations. Make these standards strong enough to cut methane pollution at least 65 percent below 2012 levels by 2025. ● Direct the EPA to designate greenhouse pollutants as criteria air pollutants and set a science-based national pollution cap under the Clean Air Act. Advance Environmental Justice ● Ensure at least 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy go to disadvantaged communities by establishing Justice 40 implementation guidelines for all agencies, including definitions and metrics; mandatory data collection, mapping, and monitoring of distribution of funds to disadvantaged communities; and oversight of the social, economic, and environmental impacts of funds. Ensure that environmental justice communities receive the technical support needed to secure access to federal funds. ● Issue a strengthened and more robust executive order on addressing environmental justice that will hold agencies accountable for reducing disproportionate environmental impacts on frontline communities. Invest in Care Economy Jobs & Standards ● Ensure veterans’ access to home care, including by allowing veterans to use consumer-directed models to access crucial in-home care while providing directcare workers serving veterans with supports and pay to guarantee recruitment and retention of an adequate workforce. ● Grow strong child care unions by encouraging widespread adoption of strong labor standards and bedrock funding, creating opportunities for worker engagement and voice, and using rulemaking to stabilize the workforce and create a path to unionization for child care workers. ● As outlined by President Biden in his State of the Union proposals, protect nursing home residents and improve quality of care by establishing minimum staffing standards for skilled nursing facilities, with an ongoing role for labor management processes on staffing and care issues. Address workforce shortages by expanding training opportunities and tying Medicaid payments to adequate wages. Require greater transparency about ownership and financing of homes in order to ensure that public funds are used to provide care, rather than pad the profits of corporate owners. ● Robust implementation of the Medicaid Equal Access Rule to reflect the important role of the workforce in ensuring access to health services, including establishing a public process to ensure that payment levels for home care providers are adequate, and that rate increases are passed on to workers in the form of higher wages. Regulate for Economic and Tax Fairness ● Curb abuse of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s Opportunity Zone program in which wealthy investors shield capital gains from taxes by promulgating new regulations that the Treasury Department annually certify Opportunity Zone funds fulfill all the program’s requirements, including 90 percent of an investment being made in an Opportunity Zone itself and robust reporting requirements. ● Raise billions by closing the carried interest loophole that lets Wall Street executives managing other peoples’ money disguise part of their salary as investment returns to cut their taxes; currently, investment income of wealthy money managers is taxed at the capital gains rate of 20 percent, whereas their wage income is taxed at 37 percent. ● Fight unfair tax evasion by the wealthy through IRS authority to require reporting by financial institutions on large deposits related to business transactions without encroaching on the financial privacy for average account holders. ● Reverse Trump administration regulations that further expanded the offshore tax loopholes created by the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Promulgate new regulations to close transfer pricing loopholes, prevent earnings stripping, reform the abuse of foreign tax credits, and protect and expand the U.S. source taxation base. ● Advance corporate transparency through a Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring public companies to disclose information about their exposure to climate-related risks, including: the company’s direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions; the total amount of fossil fuel-related assets the company owns or manages; the company’s expected valuation if climate change continues at its current pace or greenhouse gas emissions are restricted to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal; and the company’s risk management strategies related to the physical risks and transition risks posed by the climate crisis.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview.
Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.
Among all respondents, other measured worldviews (such as secular humanism, nihilism, postmodernism, etc.) garnered even fewer adherents. Fully 94 percent subscribed to “a blending of multiple worldviews in which no single life philosophy is dominant.”
The needle scarcely moves for all self-identified Christians (not just pre-teen parents). Only 6 percent of them look at and interpret the world through a biblical lens; that number rises to 21 percent among those attending evangelical Protestant churches.
The fact that the biblical Christian worldview has become so insignificant in the culture should be of concern to all Americans because our country, including its governing principles and legal system, was based on our founders’ biblical worldview.
All around, we see the results of our abandonment of the biblical worldview. According to CRC research, more than half of the population accepts that truth is subjective.
Without objective truth, there is no way to determine what’s real and no moral absolutes to distinguish right from wrong. So we hear the popular “my truth” refrain as the justification for any idea or behavior depending upon what feels right at the time.
Why Worldview Matters
Professor Mikael Stenmark defines worldview as “beliefs, values, and attitudes that … constitute [people’s] basic understanding of (a) who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in it is, (b) what they should do to live a good and meaningful life, and (c) what they can say, know and rationally believe about these things.”
A dividing line between a secular and a biblical worldview is the belief in how the world came to exist. Secularists hold that reality consists entirely of physical matter and forces, which can only be explained through science. For the secularist, the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution explain how all things came to be.
Those with a biblical worldview believe in an all-encompassing divine mind — i.e., God — who rules over and maintains physical matter and forces. The theistic worldview is founded on the core belief that God exists and is the creator of all things.
It is easy to see why the biblical worldview is all but extinct in the culture. Every living generation — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and many of the silent generation (pre-1945) — has been educated predominantly in a secular or naturalistic worldview based on the prevailing science of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.
Science Declares God Is Dead
The only “official” science approved to be taught in the primary grades through post-graduate education is the anti-faith naturalistic one. It’s virtually illegal to teach anything that hints at creation science or intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education proudly displays ten major court cases, including a Supreme Court ruling, that essentially ban the teaching of intelligent design.
It’s not just the education system. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls the scientific establishment’s approach to intelligent design a “zero-concession policy.”
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement claiming “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”
Scientists and post-graduate students who dare to challenge naturalistic-science orthodoxy are subject to professional ridicule, or loss of jobs or research funds. Peer-review journals reject their submissions, as do scientific conferences and meetings.
It’s not in support of science that the establishment defends its official position so vehemently, but to protect its secular worldview. And the American Civil Liberties Union backs them up with legal firepower a detailed statement about why students must be protected against intelligent design at all costs.
Truth Will Come Out
Not all scientists are so didactic. But the “vital few” in control have effectively kept any serious discussion of intelligent design from the rest of the scientific community. However, when they are presented with evidence supporting intelligent design, many discover truth there.
That includes scientists like astronomer Allan Sandage, who studied under Edwin Hubble and continued his work after Hubble died. Sandage’s study of astronomy and astrophysics led him to conclude there is “evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event,” or what he called a “creation event.”
Plenty of members in the scientific community see much to challenge in Darwinian doctrine. More than 1,000 academics and scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwinism petition stating, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The number of acclaimed scientists who challenge the establishment’s orthodoxy is growing thanks to the work of places like the Discovery Institute, the research arm of the Center for Science and Culture.
Rekindling the Discussion
The education and scientific establishments have become co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one. But there is hope. Belief in God “as described in the Bible” is still held by a 54 percent majority of Americans, according to a 2022 poll reported by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.
Noting that 72 percent of Americans agree the nation’s moral compass is “pointed in the wrong direction,” she writes, “As generations age and the push for secularism and the erasure of faith continues in American establishments such as public schools, younger people are losing spiritual influence and instruction, and with it their faith.”
That is the ultimate goal of our society’s ruling institutions, including government, education, science, medicine, and business. They are determined to wipe out faith by indoctrinating all into their secular worldview using the Big Bang and evolution as the cudgel.
So far, the scientific establishment has been successful in shutting down discussion that the Bible might be true from beginning to end. But continuing research in intelligent design and more scientists who question science’s naturalistic orthodoxy will arm the public with information to support the biblical worldview and loosen the stranglehold of the secular one on our youth and culture.
“Let there be light,” God said in Genesis 1:3. “And there was light.” Jesus said in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That day isn’t here yet, but we pray it comes quickly.
Pamela Danziger is a market researcher specializing in the study of consumer behavior and motivation. Author of ten books, she shares insights as a senior contributor on Forbes.com. And as a Christian, she is co-founder of Faith Underground. She holds an M.L.S. from University of Maryland and B.A. in English Literature from Penn State.
In a recent legal settlement, Catholic Charities West Michigan successfully challenged Michigan’s decision to bar state funds to adoption agencies that do not serve same-sex couples. The settlement forced Michigan to reimburse the charity for its legal fees and other costs. Using an argument that has now become familiar to most Americans, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a lesbian mother of two and former gay rights activist, charged Catholic adoption agencies with discriminating against same-sex couples. In response, the Catholic adoption agencies used the same logic, accusing the Michigan state government of discriminating against Catholics and effectively denying them their religious freedom.
While Christians should celebrate this recent victory, it’s nonetheless sad this appeal had to be made. When gay marriage was legalized in Obergfell v. Hodges, Christians were assured that they could practice their faith and live out their values in peace, but this was almost immediately proven wrong. As the ink of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was drying, LGBT groups immediately went after Christian bakers, florists, photographers, popular chicken sandwich chains, and other Christian organizations for their religious beliefs.
Defense Based on Reason not Faith
This war will continue so long as Christians keep using the religious freedom defense. Even though this argument has the best chance of winning in legal courts, it is unconvincing in the court of public opinion. As more Americans drift away from Christianity, they increasingly view this defense for denying service to same-sex couples not as a valid objection, but as a childish copout: “The Christian God doesn’t like gay people.”
Rather, it’s important to establish that most Christian churches are established on natural law (that is, moral laws based on objective truth) as much as the Bible. To be sure, faith and reason both matter enormously, but for an increasingly secular populace, actions and policies must be defended on the basis of reason much more than faith.
This has been the case with abortion, with the pro-life position steadily gaining popular support as it has adopted more reason-based arguments. The pro-life movement has grown because it has argued that unborn babies are people, and therefore abortion is murder. Although the Bible acknowledges this argument, the argument itself isn’t strictly based on the Bible.
Reasons Against Same-Sex Couples Adopting
Similarly, in issues involving marriage and children, Christians need to appeal to reason more than their faith. In the case of same-sex couples adopting, two issues need to be addressed. First, do all couples have a right to adopt a child? Second, do children have a right to a father and mother?
Concerning whether all couples have a right to adopt, the answer is that they do not. As any couple who has gone through the process of adoption understands all too well, many screenings and conditions have to be met. Someone from the adoption agency will inspect their home, rifle through their personal information, interview them and others, and then, after so many legal hurdles, possibly allow a child to live with them. Even then, the biological parent may change his or her mind and take back the child.
As painful and expensive as this process is, it is necessary because children are human beings with rights of their own, not objects a couple acquires out of boredom or simply some charitable impulse. Consequently, adoption agencies must discriminate among couples wanting to adopt, only selecting those who meet the criteria of good caretakers.
A Right to a Mother and Father?
This leads to the second issue of whether a child’s rights include having a mother and father, as opposed to two fathers or two mothers. The science on this is mixed, both because it’s a politically charged issue and because it’s a difficult thing to measure. One may say that a loving committed couple is enough, but one may contend that a loving committed heterosexual couple is necessary.
Katy Faust persuasively argues this latter view in her excellent book “Them Before Us.” She explains that men and women represent two distinct and essential supports to a child growing up; fatherhood and motherhood are not interchangeable or dispensable. Furthermore, she argues that a child does best with his or her biological parents in nearly all cases. For Faust, adoption is an alternative that should only be considered in cases of serious abuse or neglect.
Not only does Faust support her argument with a multitude of studies, but she has both a homosexual parent and an adopted child. Even though her situation would suggest that same-sex adoption should be treated the same as any other parental arrangement, her reasoning leads her to think otherwise.
Faust’s example is a good model for all Christians trying to serve their community in accordance with their values. Whatever charitable work they do — whether it is finding homes for orphans or allowing those orphans to be born in the first place — it is done for the person in need, first and foremost. This is not a political or religious issue, but a human one.
It is not a coincidence that this means they are doing God’s will in the process. Contrary to what opponents claim, Christian values are based on objective truth, not blind faith to various Bronze Age prejudices. As such, the goal is not about winning, but about making the world a better place.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
On Friday, The Daily Mail reported that emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop show he helped an infectious disease research company pursue projects in Ukraine. Those emails confirm portions of charges Russia made the previous day that an investment group run by the now-president’s son had funded a company conducting research at biological laboratories in Ukraine. While these developments add another scandal to the long list of Biden family dirty laundry, the more urgent concern for the country should be the continuing threat to our national security posed by a compromised President Biden and the possibility that Russia has access to the catalog of compromising material contained on Hunter’s laptop.
Mere weeks before then-President Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in the November 2020 presidential election, The New York Post published emails obtained from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware. Those emails revealed that during the elder Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s vice president, Hunter engaged in a pay-to-play scandal, trading off his father’s position to strike deals with players in Ukraine and China. The venture was a family one, with Joe “the Big Guy” Biden listed in one email as set to receive a 10 percent cut of one pending deal and Hunter telling his daughter in another message that “pop” took half of his earnings.
Even after a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s confirmed the authenticity of the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism buried the scandal and social media outlets censored both the story and The New York Post. Worse still, “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials”signed a letter framing the Hunter Biden emails as Russian disinformation. Among others, former CIA directors or acting directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin, and Michael Morell signed the letter. In doing so they gave then-candidate Joe Biden cover to lie to the American public, which he did when Trump confronted him about the scandal during a presidential debate.
Are you saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Trump asked Biden.
“That’s exactly what [I] was told,” Biden countered. “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden professed to the American public before they went to the polls and elected Biden our commander in chief.
But even The New York Times has finally admitted the laptop was real and the emails were legitimate. Initially, that admission proved significant because it likewise legitimizes the scandals spawned from the documents recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop. However, the trajectory of the scandal changed Friday with The Daily Mail’s exclusive.
“Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons,” The Daily Mail announced last week. The article continued: “[Biden] also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could ‘assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’– an unusual goal for a biotech firm.”
The Daily Mail added more details about Metabiota and Hunter Biden’s role in brokering relationships for the research company in Ukraine. Included throughout the article were copies of the emails ostensibly obtained from Hunter’s laptop that confirmed The Daily Mail’s reporting. The article also added details shedding light on Hunter’s “business” dealings in Ukraine during the time his father served as vice president and America’s point person on issues related to that country. Friday’s exclusive is not the first time The Daily Mail has published never-before-seen material from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Last August, the outlet published“unearthed footage” of Hunter Biden telling a prostitute that, in the summer of 2018, another laptop went missing and he believed Russia had stolen it. At the time, Hunter also expressed concern that the laptop might prove fodder for blackmail since it contained compromising material.
What distinguishes the emails contained in last week’s Daily Mail article from those published last year is that the most recent release came the day after Russia’s State Duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin accused President Biden with being “involved in the creation of bio laboratories in Ukraine,” with Volodin claiming that “an investment fund run by his son Hunter Biden funded research and the implementation of the United States’ military biological program.”
Soon after Volodin made the charge on Thursday, the Telegraph called Russia’s accusation of Hunter Biden funding Ukrainian biological laboratories an “unsubstantiated claim” “designed to build on negative coverage about [the] president’s son in Right-wing US media.” But with Friday’s release of previously undisclosed emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Russia’s claim, at least concerning Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian biological laboratories, appears accurate.
While none of the emails released on Friday support Russia’s claim that the Ukrainian labs were used to research or create bioweapons, propaganda need only hold a sliver of truth to serve its purpose. And the cache of emails contained on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop provides Putin and his comrades enough evidence to seemingly confirm the Russian government’s earlier claim that Hunter Biden helped implement a bioweapon program in Ukraine. This false framing also provides Russia ammunition to justify its attack on its neighbor to the west.
Russia’s ability to point to the Hunter Biden emails as confirmation of its claims of a biolab in Ukraine raises a serious question with huge national security implications: How did Russia know the day before The Daily Mail’s exclusive that the Hunter Biden’s investment fund, Rosemont Seneca, had invested in Metabiota and been involved in Metabiota’s operations in Ukraine? The timing of events last week suggests Russia has access to the same emails as The Daily Mail or that Vladimir Putin’s agents might well have obtained access to Hunter Biden’s first laptop—the one the president’s son believed Russians had stolen in 2018. In either case, the Biden family corruption documented on the laptops has gone from a potential national security risk to a real one—and in the midst of a war launched by Russia on a country bordering North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.
Together, the Biden family, the intelligence agencies, and the corrupt media—social and legacy—hold full responsibility for the danger Americans now face. Biden knew full well how compromised his family was, and that there were two laptops, not one, with evidence of the corruption floating about. Yet Biden lied to the American public, with an assist from the former high-level members of the intelligence community who signed the letter suggesting the laptop scandal represented Russian disinformation.
Then there is the FBI which, by December 2019, had access to the abandoned laptop and thereby also knew that Hunter believed Russians had stolen his laptop in summer 2018. To date, there has been no indication that the FBI provided Joe Biden a defensive briefing on the national security risk posed by those laptops. Or if FBI agents did brief Biden on the risks in a timely manner, that means he nonetheless lied to the American public and ran for president knowing the propaganda at Putin’s fingertips.
Even when coupled with the complicity of former members of the intelligence community, all of Joe Biden’s lies would mean nothing if the media had done its job and reported the story when it still matter. It’s too late now, however: Biden is our commander in chief and Putin potentially holds a cache of compromising information perfect for propaganda purposes.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
As part of a social studies class, a New Jersey public middle school forced students to watch a video about a transgender man’s hormone treatment—all without notifying parents. The video, “Ten Years on Testosterone,” details the transition of LGBT activist Aydian Dowling through hormone injections. Teachers and administrators at Pearl R. Miller Middle School in Kinnelon, N.J., did not notify parents about the lesson, which included slideshows with definitions of different gender ideologies, beforehand.
“You can build up the courage to stand up for yourself in a way that this is what you want to do with your life,” Dowling says in the video after injecting testosterone.
Dowling later spoke at a school-wide assembly as part of the school’s “Stories of Adversity & Resilience Program,” about which administrators notified parents ahead of time, giving them the option to opt out their children. Concerned parents flocked to a school board meeting last Thursday, where board members admitted parents should have similarly been informed about the hormone therapy video.
“I felt as if I was blindsided,” Loren Malfitano, whose two sons were shown the video, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re learning about this ideology of gender before they even have classes on the actual biologizes of males and females.”
The school superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.
The tension over sex education in New Jersey is one of many examples across the country where concerned parents battle public schools over radical gender and sexuality curricula. Florida received national attention in March after the state legislature passed a bill that bans lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in K-3 classrooms.
New Jersey is set to enact updated health standards in September pushed by Democratic governor Phil Murphy that teach second-graders about genitalia, reproduction, and “gender expression.”Fifth-graders will be required to define masturbation and differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity, and eighth-graders will have to define gender identity, gender expression, vaginal sex, oral sex, and anal sex. The governor-appointed New Jersey Board of Education adopted the standards in 2020.
Planned Parenthood praised the state’s plan, which the group noted aligns with the updated National Sex Education Standards. These national standards, which were written by three advocacy groups that rake in tens of millions of dollars from the CDC and liberal donors, suggest that elementary students should be taught about hormone blockers.
The Center for Garden State Families, a nonprofit that aims to fight back against progressive gender curricula in schools, first spread the news of the hormone treatment video shown to middle schoolers. Josh Aikens, a father of 6- and 2-year-old sons, has pushed back against radical sex education standards as a school board member in nearby Lafayette, N.J., saying parents nationwide need to be involved in what their children are learning.
“I don’t need them to learn about sex,” Aikens told the Free Beacon in regards to his children. “The communities should determine what is taught in schools because they’re paying the bills for it.”
On Friday, Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law establishing term limits for members of Florida’s school boards and giving Florida residents increased access to educational materials available to students. Prior to singing HB-1467 into law, echoing his longstanding commitment to the rights of parents, DeSantis said, “We believe parents not only have a role, they have the fundamental role to be involved in the education of their kids, and that’s how it’s going to be in the state of Florida,” WFTV-ABC in Orlando reported.
A press release from the governor’s office indicates that the new law places 12-year consecutive term limits for members of school boards in the sunshine state and “requires school districts to be transparent in the selection of instructional materials, including library and reading materials.” The press release stated that “As a part of the Year of the Parent, this legislation aims to preserve the rights of parents to make decisions about what materials their children are exposed to in school.”
DeSantis said, “In Florida, our parents have every right to be involved in their child’s education. We are not going to let politicians deny parents the right to know what is being taught in our schools. I’m proud to sign this legislation that ensures curriculum transparency.”
Wilton Simpson, the President of the Florida Senate, said, “While teachers, school administrators, and school board members have a tremendous amount of authority over what and how our kids are taught in school, at the end of the day, parents — not schools — are responsible for raising children.”
He continued, “Florida parents are seeking greater involvement in many aspects of our education system, and this legislation speaks to that effort. The books our kids are reading in schools need to have proper vetting. Parents have a right, and a responsibility, to be involved in that process. Not all books are appropriate for every grade level. This legislation makes sure that we have a transparent and consistent process for public participation in the review of books and other materials used in school lessons and in the school library.”
“Governor DeSantis has shown time and time again that he is not afraid to fight for the rights of parents and understands the importance that they have a seat at the table when it comes to their child’s education,” the Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said. “I’m grateful for the Governor’s guidance and the voices of many parents, who have come forward and demands that parents be seen as a partner in their child’s education.”
This new law requires school districts in Florida to hold public meetings for the purpose of selecting instructional materials and provide the public with ample notice of when and where the meetings will be held. It also stipulates that the school districts must provide access to all materials no-less than 20 days before the school board takes official action on proposed instructional material. The state Department of Education is also compelled by law to publish a list of materials that have been removed or discontinued by the school board and disseminate the list to school districts within the state.
The Securities and Exchange Commission — a government agency established in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash to protect investors and maintain fair markets — may soon become a key player in imposing President Biden’s climate agenda. In a 3-to-1 vote last week, unelected Democratic bureaucrats who serve as the agency’s commissioners voted without authorization from Congress to impose sweeping new rules that require all publicly traded companies to disclose how their business affects “climate change.”
According to a press release issued by the SEC, the proposed rules would require businesses to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions along with any and all information relevant to “climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition.”
In a lengthy statement of dissent, the SEC’s lone Republican commissioner, Hester Peirce, quipped that with the move, the agency essentially re-invented itself as the “Securities and Environment Commission” without any say from the American people. Peirce emphatically argued that the new rules will hamstring businesses with unnecessary and burdensome regulations that will ultimately harm investors and the economy. And besides that, she asserted, the SEC has no authority to enact such rules, seeing as Congress never gave the agency such broad power.
“Congress gave us an important mission — protecting investors, facilitating capital formation, and fostering fair, orderly, and efficient markets — and granted us sufficient regulatory authority to achieve that mission,” she wrote. “This proposal steps outside our statutory limits by using the disclosure framework to achieve objectives that are not ours to pursue.”
Despite the clear overreach, Democrats in Washington appear happy to support the move since the rules fit with the party’s aggressive approach to the climate. Many, too, likely see pressuring corporations as an effective step in accomplishing their goals. In short, the new rules aim to expose companies’ track records in keeping with progressives’ climate change agenda in hopes that investors will pressure the companies to adopt more environmentally friendly policies and practices.
“It will make it possible for all interested stakeholders, including shareholders, to then push companies to take real action,” climate change activist Bill Weihl, formerly of Google and Facebook, told the New York Times.
Speaking with CNBC, Washington-based climate change think tank director Claire Healy celebrated the possibility that carbon-intensive companies may “lose out over time” as pressure mounts and investors are encouraged to divest.
Conservatives, however, have raised the alarm over the proposed rules, noting among other things that they would carry with them an exorbitant cost. Part of that cost would result from the need to hire third-party regulators to gather all the climate-related data the new rules require.
“No longer can a company simply disclose in free form how it imagines climate regulations or bad weather might conceivably affect its business,” author and political commentator Steve Milloy wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner. “Instead, companies will be required to have independent certified auditors, think climate accountants, attest to the veracity of the new corporate disclosures.”
“In general, this rule will be as costly and burdensome on all businesses as the impact of Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley,”TheBlaze’s Daniel Horowitz warned.
Though Milloy, for his part, seemed confident that the Supreme Court would immediately strike down the rules should they be finalized.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton blasted “Pride Week” activities at the Austin Independent School District in a letter posted to Twitter, saying they constitute “human sexuality instruction” allowable only with parents‘ consent. He also accused the district of participating in LGBTQ “indoctrination.”
Allegedly among the “Pride Week” activities are “Queer Eye” showings and “nail painting” parties at a district high school.
What are the details?
“Liberal school districts are aggressively pushing LGBTQ+ views on Texas kids! All behind parents’ backs! This is immoral and illegal,” Paxton added in a follow-up tweet. “I will work with and for parents to hold deceptive sexual propagandists and predators accountable.”
Paxton’s Tuesday letter noted that the district’s activities happening this week are “at best” an “instructional effort in human sexuality without parental consent” or “worse” the district is “cynically pushing … indoctrination of your students that … subtly cuts parents out of the loop. Either way you’re breaking the law.”
The attorney general added that he heard reports about “community circles” in which “sensitive topics” are discussed and that “students are encouraged to keep [them] confidential, presumably from parents.”
But Austin school officials pushed back, saying in a statement to the Austin American-Statesman that community circles are “confidential” in the sense that they make “students feel trusted and respected for their privacy when sharing in the conversations — it does not mean don’t tell your parents.”
Interestingly, a Libs of Tik Tok tweet said Doss Elementary’s instructions — after “parent and social media backlash” — were updated to reflect that teachers are to inform students they can tell parents about Pride Week activities:
Indeed, the American-Statesman reported that backlash to this year’s Pride Week resulted in death threats against Doss Elementary teachers and “prompted the school to move Wednesday’s pride parade indoors, with police present.” District spokesman Jason Stanford added to the paper that “we were actually worried that this political controversy could possibly threaten the safety of these kids.”
Libs of TikTok also posted video to Twitter showing what it said was an indoor Pride Parade at Doss Elementary:
The Austin ISD — in response to TheBlaze’s request for comment Thursday regarding claims that Doss Elementary’s Pride Week instructions were amended to make sure students are told they can talk to their parents, and that “Queer Eye” showings and “nail painting” parties were scheduled at James Bowie High School — said “these are all ways we are celebrating inclusion this week.” The district also repeated statements to TheBlaze that it made to the Austin American-Statesman in defense of Pride Week.
‘Political attacks’
In response to Paxton’s letter, Austin ISD Superintendent Stephanie S. Elizalde tweeted the following: “I want all our LGBTQIA+ students to know that we are proud of them and that we will protect them against political attacks.”
In addition, the American-Statesman reported that Stanford said Paxton is wrong, legally and factually, to equate Pride Week with sex education.
“Pride is about celebrating who people are, particularly members of the LGBT community who are bullied much more than the community at large, who experience suicide at much higher rates, who skip school at twice the rate of straight kids because of worries about their safety,” Stanford told the paper.
“In Austin, it’s really important to us to let all these kids know that we love them and they’re welcome and they’re safe,” he added to the American-Statesman. “It might surprise the attorney general to find out that this is a pretty normal idea here in Austin, that we love everybody.”
And while Paxton’s letter advised the Austin ISD to “rectify this situation” and warned that parents could take action against the school district, the paper said Stanford brushed aside the attorney general’s cautions.
“This is nothing our lawyers are taking seriously at all because he’s so wrong about the law,” Stanford told the American-Statesman. “We thank the attorney general for his interest, but we will continue to celebrate Pride.”
This story has been updated to reflect the school district’s response to TheBlaze’s request for comment, which was received after publication.
Teachers have declared war on capitalism. what is on full display during this strike is the anti-capitalist position taken by the nation’s teachers’ unions.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The Republican governor of Indiana has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited biological males who identify as female to participate in female sporting competitions, expressing multiple concerns about the proposed legislation.
Gov. Eric Holcomb vetoed House Enrolled Act 1041 on Monday, explaining his reasoning in a letter to Indiana House of Representatives Speaker Todd Huston, also a Republican. Holcomb expressed concern with the bill’s “wide-open nature of the grievance provisions,” believing they made it “unclear about how consistency and fairness will be maintained for parents and students across different counties and school districts.”
The governor worries about the potential for the bill to tie the state up in litigation. He noted that other states that have passed similar legislation had been sued, with some court decisions coming down in favor of the plaintiffs.
Holcomb believes that the Indiana High School Athletic Association is doing a sufficiently decent job maintaining fairness in student sports without the new law.
“I am heartened by the IHSAA which has done an admirable job to help maintain fairness and consistency in all sports,” wrote Holcomb. “Nowhere in the testimony on this legislation was a critique leveled against their model on how to govern this and other complex matters.”
“Furthermore, not a single case of a male seeking to participate on a female team has completed the process established by IHSAA’s now decade-old policy.”
Meridian Baldacci of the socially conservative Family Policy Alliance, which supported the legislation, contends in a statement that Holcomb has “abandoned young Hoosier girls” and left them susceptible to the “same fate” as female college swimmers who lost to trans-identified swimmer Lia Thomas in the NCAA 500-yard freestyle national championship this month. While Thomas finished first by 1.75 seconds in the NCAA 500-yard freestyle, the athlete finished eighth in the 100-yard freestyle championship and fifth in the 200-yard freestyle final. Thomas is now a three-time All-American by competing in the finals of all three categories.
“Every time a male is awarded a limited girls’ roster spot, competition placement, scholarship, championship title or career opportunity, a female athlete has that same opportunity taken away from her – in a contest meant just for females,” stated Baldacci.
“The Indiana General Assembly must override this misguided and concerning veto from the governor of one of the most conservative states in the nation.”
Critics contend that biological males who identify as females have innate advantages from being biologically male and, on average, are larger with more muscle mass and higher bone density. However, liberal organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have denied that any “unfair” advantage exists for trans-identified biological males who compete against women or girls because “athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes” and success often depends on techniques and training.
According to the LGBT activist group the Movement Advancement Project, 12 states have passed laws prohibiting men who identify as female from competing in sports designated for females. The others include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. Earlier this month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law requiring students to confirm their biological sex before being allowed to compete in girls’ sports.
“No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” stated Reynolds. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.”
In 2021, the NCAA threatened not to host championship tournaments and contests in states that have passed laws impacting the ability of trans-identified athletes to compete based on their gender identity.
The success of Thomas, a biological male who competed previously on the Penn men’s swim team before competing this year on the women’s team, has sparked much debate about NCAA policies on trans-identified athletes. Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy, who missed the cut to compete in the 500-yard freestyle finals, voiced her displeasure with the NCAA’s policy. She wrote a letter to the NCAA on Sunday.
“It feels like the final spot was taken from me because of the NCAA’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete,” she wrote.
“I know you could say I had the opportunity to swim faster and make the top 16, but this situation makes it a bit different, and I can’t help but be angry or sad. It hurts me, my team and other women in the pool. One spot was taken away from the girl who got 9th in the 500 free and didn’t [sic] make it back to the a final preventing her from being an All-American. Every event that transgender athletes competed in was one spot taken away from biological females throughout the meet.”
Now that Twitter has taken action against The Christian Post and The Babylon Bee over their tweets calling Rachel Levine a man, will Twitter do the same thing with every former transgender who wishes to share his or her honest story with the world? Why are executives at Twitter so afraid of allowing people to hear the truth about transgenderism on their platform? Could it be that deep down, these executives realize that the truth is what sets people free from gender confusion?
I suspect that many gender-confused women would be able to relate to some of the things Laura Perry experienced early in life. Laura’s video testimony is humble, sincere and liberating. Would Laura be allowed to tweet the truth on Twitter that she has always been a female, even during the confusing period in her life when she thought she had mysteriously turned into a man?
And what about men like Walt Heyer, who came to realize that “transitioning doesn’t fix the underlying ailments.” After pretending to be a woman for eight years, Walt says, “Had I not been misled by media stories of sex change ‘success’ and by medical practitioners who said transitioning was the answer to my problems, I wouldn’t have suffered as I have. Genetics can’t be changed. Feelings, however, can and do change … You will hear the media say, ‘Regret is rare.’ But they are not reading my inbox, which is full of messages from transgender individuals who want the life and body back that was taken from them by cross-sex hormones, surgery, and living under a new identity. After de-transitioning, I know the truth: Hormones and surgery may alter appearances, but nothing changes the immutable fact of your sex.”
Would Twitter executives allow Walt to tweet the truth about how much pain transgender propaganda has caused him? Rather than addressing his deep psychological struggles, hormone therapy and surgery simply compounded his problems exponentially. Walt said, “The reprieve I experienced through surgery was only temporary. Hidden underneath the makeup and female clothing was the little boy hurt by childhood trauma. I was once again experiencing gender dysphoria, but this time I felt like a male inside a body refashioned to look like a woman. I was living my dream, but still I was deeply suicidal.”
Twitter executives have a moral responsibility to look at these suicide statistics with their eyes wide open. Why would Twitter want to keep this critical information from the public? Are they more committed to their misguided transgender ideology than to the health and well-being of gender-confused individuals? They really need to take a hard look at what is driving them to be so reckless with the truth about transgenderism and gender confusion.
“Male and female God created them” (Genesis 5:2). Biology isn’t bigotry.
Former transgenders deserve to be heard. Justice demands that the truth be told. And if Twitter executives are too afraid of the truth about transgenderism, why don’t they just come out and tell the world about the fears they are harboring? These executives will not experience the healing they need until they address their faulty presuppositions. They must come to recognize that their fears are irrational, not to mention dangerous for anyone who experiences gender confusion. Why should the illogical and absurd fears of Twitter executives drive their platform into such a dark place?
Unless these executives choose to have an open mind on the matter, they will likely continue charging down the perilous path of transgender misinformation. And this will certainly increase the suffering of those like Walt Heyer who made monumental decisions about his body based on the lies he was hearing from the media.
In contrast to media propaganda today, Jesus never told a single lie. “To the Jews who had believed Him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’” (John 8:31,32). Jesus asked some religious leaders this important question: “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’?” (Matthew 19:4).
Unless Twitter executives look beyond their limited and flawed perspective on transgenderism, they will never come to understand the simple truth about gender. And in that case, they may never escape their self-imposed prison of “acceptable” transgender tweets that are allowed on their platform.
The question remains: Can former transgenders tweet truth on Twitter? Time will tell.
Let’s see if Twitter executives decide to deal with their biases, and address those malignant strongholds that develop within the human mind when lies are accepted as truth. Infectious strongholds, after all, are what lead a gender-confused individual to make extremely unwise decisions about his or her own body. And immoral strongholds compel social media executives to block transgender truth on their platform from reaching a world of people who hunger for truth, authenticity, and holistic health.
Dan Delzell is the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska.
During opening statements of the Senate confirmation hearings for Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which began on Monday, Democrats (one in particular) went into spin mode by testing out a talking point that went a little something like this: Republicans are saying you were nominated because of yourrace.
It was Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who said it most plainly:
“My Republican colleagues and public figures have attempted to undermine your qualifications through their pejorative use of the term ‘affirmative action,’ and they have implied you were solely nominated due to your race. … Let me be clear: Your nomination is not about filling a quota.”
"They have implied you were solely nominated due to your race…Your nomination is not about filling a quota… It is about time that we have a highly qualified, highly accomplished Black woman serving on the Supreme Court," Sen. Hirono says of Judge Jackson in opening remarks. pic.twitter.com/5CsFDDheXY
Al Sharpton employed a similar deflection on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”“I salute President Biden in this case. He made a commitment, and I don’t think it was based on some tokenism. I think it was based on him saying that the court ought to reflect the country, and a black woman has never been on the court, and you couldn’t get one more qualified,” Sharpton said, before implying that it was racist for GOP lawmakers to inquire about the nominee’s law school admission test score.
The SCOTUS hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson begin today, I underlined the importance of this nomination and this time in history on #MorningJoe. pic.twitter.com/smhrK23KmP
It’s an odd basket of claims: that it’s Republicans who made Jackson’s nomination all about race, that anything was “implied,” that describing the race-based selection as “affirmative action” is out of bounds, and that this has nothing to do with tokenism. They’re strange claims because most Americans are old enough to remember just two months ago when President Joe Biden himself stated clearly and plainly that his pick would be “the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” after making a similar promise on the campaign trail. It was the Democrat president, not Republican cynics, who announced that race and sex were deciding factors in the selection. “Y” chromosomes and fair skin were disqualifying attributes before any merits could be considered.
Other Democrats couldn’t help themselves, playing into the identity politics game and marveling at the “historic” nature of nominating a black woman to the high court — and all the while undermining Hirono’s claim that it’s Republicans who have centralized race in Jackson’s nomination.
“The appointment of a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court — let’s be very blunt — should have happened years ago. This day is a giant leap into the present for our country and for the court,” gushed Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
“The Senate is poised right now to break another barrier. We are on the precipice of shattering another ceiling,” said New Jersey Democrat Sen. Cory Booker, who is known for breaking Senate rules during the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh with his cringe “Spartacus” moment. “I just feel this sense of overwhelming joy as I see you sitting there.”
Despite Hirono’s attempted deflection to her GOP colleagues and empty media assurances that tokenism is nonexistent here, it was Democrats who fixated on Jackson’s race and sex.
Now when Republicans inquire about her academic achievements and judicial record, it’s branded as veiled racism and sexism. Jackson proponents treat it like unjust scrutiny, as if a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is supposed to be for grandstanding about “historic” moments and not for judicial vetting.
Try as they might to turn Jackson criticism on Republicans, this one is on Biden. He’s the one who announced in other terms that Jackson is an affirmative action pick, just as he did with his vice president (and we’ve seen how that’s turned out). He’s the one who invited intensified scrutiny of Jackson’s merits and ideology. He reduced Jackson’s qualifications to the color of her skin and the pairing of her chromosomes.
Nobody “implied” that Jackson was nominated because of her race. The president announced it proudly.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a bill on Tuesday that will require high schoolers to take a financial literacy and money management course in order to earn a standard high school diploma. The requirement will be applicable to students who start the 9th grade during the 2023-2024 school year, and the course will cover issues such as credit scores, calculating federal income taxes, checkbook balancing, and more.The Sunshine State governor noted that the material presented to students will benefit them regardless of the path they pursue.
The Florida legislature has passed a bill that includes a provision that would prohibit teaching kids in kindergarten through 3rd grade about sexual orientation and gender identity — DeSantis, who plans to sign the legislation, said Tuesday that “if you are out protesting this bill, you are by definition putting yourself in favor of injecting sexual instruction to five, six, and seven-year-old kids.”
Governor DeSantis signs bill requiring financial literacy class for high school students youtu.be
The governor on Tuesday also issued a proclamation recognizing University of Virginia swimmer Emma Weyant as the “rightful winner” of the 500-yard freestyle that she lost to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas during the NCAA Championships — Thomas is a biological man who identifies as a woman.
“NOW THEREFORE, since she is a native Floridian from Sarasota, I, Ron DeSantis, Governor of the State of Florida, do hereby declare in Florida that Emma Weyant is the rightful winner of the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s 500-yard Freestyle, congratulate her on yet another significant achievement, and express pride that she is a Florida resident,” the document
The governor’s move was hailed by conservatives, including U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who tweeted, “God bless @GovRonDeSantis. #TakeBackAmerica”
“MORE OF THIS!!! Stand firm on self-evident truth,” Jenna Ellis tweeted.
It is painfully obvious, as was predictable, that Joe Biden’s presidency is a dumpster fire. As demonstrated by the party’s destructive callousness towards children, the elderly, and the poor during their Covid lockdown frenzy, Democrats care about none of these real-world results of their policies. But they do care about polling, and Joe Biden’s is abysmal.
According to even heavily politicized polls, Biden is at least performing as badly as Donald Trump. Biden is between the third- and fifth-most ratings-underwater president ever in American history at this point in his first term.
Biden of course also has the advantage of a wildly favorable press and social media monopoly while Trump had the strong headwind of a wildly negative one. That factor obscured for a great many of American voters actions that easily demonstrated long before his election that Biden was unfit for the presidency.
Now that he’s president, however, and very publicly bungling essentially every major issue all the way up to U.S. national security, Biden’s weakness and incompetence have been impossible for the corrupt media to entirely cover up. Biden’s appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan may have been the first major blow to public confidence in his governing ability, and it’s been followed by blow after blow: the repercussions of ending U.S. energy independence, historic inflation caused by massive government spending, aggression by America’s foreign foes, a tacitly open border with human trafficking of historic proportions, not to mention fueling America’s legalized mass killings of unborn infants and forcing schools to inflict gender dysphoria on the children in their care.
So yes, the polls look bad. That’s why Democrat officials suddenly switched away from their Covid mania, lifting mask mandates in blue states, ending the daily falsified “body counts” on TVs and newspapers, and jumping immediately into European war hysteria. But that’s not been enough to turn those polls around. Historic indicators presently suggest a “red wave” in the upcoming midterms.
That brings us to The New York Times’s recent “limited hangout“: its highly suspicious, very late acknowledgment that, hey, that laptop containing evidence that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as his son Hunter Biden told Russian prostitutes — that laptop is real, and so is its data. Yes, the United States’s top foreign adversaries likely have blackmail material on the U.S. president, and likely paid him some very big bribes.
Oh, and yes Twitter and Facebook did use their global communications monopolies to rig the election for Joe Biden by hiding this information (and who knows what else).
Why would The New York Times do this — and Facebook and Twitter not ban this information release just like they did before? Well, one explanation is hierarchy reinforcement. As I wrote Monday, like forcing their “minions” to wear face masks, the ridiculously belated laptop confirmation also equals the ruling class “flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say.”
There’s another explanation, though. It’s that Joe Biden is no longer useful to the ruling class. After being used to win an election, he’s now making it impossible for them to credibly foist on Americans the idea that his party could win another one with him on their masthead. The donkey is showing through the lion skin, and so they need a new donkey.
So while it seems utterly legitimate to insist on accountability such as appointing a special counsel to investigate the Biden family’s apparent corruption, that also could relieve the Democrat Party of their greatest liability. They’d probably deeply appreciate that, in fact. Biden got the ruling class what they wanted, and they don’t need him any more. Getting rid of him now would in fact be highly convenient for maintaining their power.
There’s only one problem with that. Kamala isn’t at all going well for them either.
Enjoy that bed you made for yourselves, Democrats. I hope it’s at least as uncomfortable as that bed you’ve made for all the Americans whose long-term outlook is more suffering, thanks to Democrats’ criminal prioritization of power for themselves above all else.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox became the latest GOP governor to veto legislation Tuesday aimed at protecting women’s sports with a prohibition on male participation.
“I am not an expert in transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting,” Cox wrote to explain the veto. “When in doubt, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.”
The female swimmers who lost in a competition dominated by Lia Thomas last weekend, a transgender athlete who competed in the men’s league for years under the University of Pennsylvania, may take a different view of what constitutes “kindness, mercy and compassion.” The 22-year-old fifth-year senior took home the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championship in the 500-yard freestyle Thursday over a slate of female competitors.
Reka Gyorgy, a swimmer at Virginia Tech who came up short in the qualifier for the event, criticized the NCAA’s policy allowing biological males with years of testosterone-enhanced capability to compete in women’s leagues if they merely identify as women.
“It doesn’t promote our sport in a good way, and I think it is disrespectful against the biologically female swimmers who are competing in the NCAA,” Gyorgy wrote in an open letter to the collegiate athletic association post on Instagram. “It feels like the final spot was taken from me.”
Cox’s decision to allow men to compete in women’s sports came a day after Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb vetoed similar legislation. In his veto letter to lawmakers, Holcomb explained the bill left “too many unanswered questions,” a justification similar to one South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gave last year when she refused to sign a bill protecting women’s sports.
Noem eventually capitulated on the issue nearly a year later, signing a bill to bar male athletes in women’s competition without a mea culpa for her intervening crusade against right-leaning outlets that exposed her dubious reasons for the initial veto. Holcomb is known for favoring big business interests over the interests of Indiana’s majority-Republican voters.
Hours before Cox vetoed the proposal to bar male competition in female leagues, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis officially recognized Thomas’ runner-up in the 500-yard freestyle race, Emma Weyant, as the true champion.
By allowing men to compete in women's sports, the NCAA is destroying opportunities for women, making a mockery of its championships, and perpetuating a fraud.
In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota's Emma Weyant as the best women's swimmer in the 500y freestyle. pic.twitter.com/tBmFxFE3q6
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.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Last week, The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the emails recovered from the MacBook Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer store were authentic. The admission came nearly a year-and-a-half late, after the corrupt media — legacy and social — buried the scandal the New York Post broke just weeks before the November election.
Merely admitting the laptop is legitimate is not enough. Rather, by concurring in the authenticity of the laptop and the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism have also implicitly acknowledged the validity of the scandals spawn by the porn-filled MacBook. And notwithstanding the salacious source of the documentary evidence of the scandals, the scandals are not about Hunter Biden: They are about now-President Biden.
Here are the eight Joe Biden scandals deserving further coverage.
1. Pay-to-Play in Ukraine
The most obvious scandal bared by the emails and text messages contained on Hunter’s laptop concerns the influence profiteering Joe Biden apparently participated in during his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, with Ukraine featuring heavily in the pay-to-play scheme.
The New York Times, in its likely “get ahead of the story,” coverage from last week, touched on the Ukrainian angle by noting Hunter’s connection to Burisma and then quoting emails recovered from the laptop indicating the younger Biden leveraged his dad’s position — then as vice president. But the Times’ surface coverage of the Burisma scandal doesn’t nearly suffice.
Surface it was: The Times made no mention of Hunter’s appointment to Burisma Holdings Board of Directors at a reported salary of $50,000 per month during his dad’s time as vice president. Hunter Biden had no experience in energy. So, a deep-dive on the entire Biden-Burisma connection is a first step.
2. China Gets in the Game
Ukraine is but a patch on the influence-peddling undertaken by Hunter on behalf of “the big guy,” as the younger Biden referred to his dad. China also played a large role in the family enterprise, as demonstrated by, again, passing coverage in November 2021. Then, the Times reported, in brief, that Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo.
That deal gave China control over a huge chunk of the world’s known cobalt supplies — an ingredient necessary to make electric car batteries. And the role of Hunter Biden’s company, Bohai, in the transaction again connects directly to Joe Biden, as Hunter reportedly launched that new joint enterprise with Chinese business partners less than two weeks after he traveled to China on Air Force Two with his then-vice president father.
In exploring this scandal, the press needs to push beyond the emails recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and do what Tucker Carlson did when the pay-to-play scandal first surfaced: talk to Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski provides further proof that this scandal reaches the top of the Biden family.
3. Moscow, Kazakhstan, and More
While Ukraine and China likely hold the most significant revelations, once those threads are pulled, investigators should move on to Moscow, which according to a Senate report, holds another possible scandal. That report documents that Hunter also received a combined $3.5 million from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, a Kazakhstan investor, and several other individuals. After all, there is no reason to think that a person willing to let his son sell access to the vice president of the United States would close the money train to just a few countries.
4. Ukraine’s Firing of the Prosecutor Investigating Burisma
With the elite media now deigning coverage of Hunter’s laptop appropriate, the public knows the Burisma scandal was real and threatened to be spectacularly devastating to the elder Biden. That makes questions concerning then-Vice President Joe Biden’s demands that Ukraine fire the state prosecutor who was reportedly investigating Burisma ripe to revisit.
I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours.’ If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
While the Obama administration attempted to spin Biden’s push for the firing of Shokin, by claiming the international community had demanded Ukraine terminate the state prosecutor, a State Department official contradicted that claim during congressional testimony. George Kent, who worked on issues related to Ukraine at the State Department, reportedly told lawmakers it was the Obama administration that “spearheaded the efforts to have Shokin removed from his position as the top federal prosecutor in Ukraine.”
Biden needs to answer questions anew over his threats to withhold money from Ukraine unless the country removed the state prosecutor responsible for investigating Burisma. Democrats have impeached a president for less.
5. Obama-Biden Administration Ignoring Conflicts of Interest
Biden also needs to answer questions about his decision to ignore the clear conflicts of interest involved with him negotiating with the same countries Hunter was shaking down. Of course, since “the big guy” was in on the scam, bowing out over conflicts of interest is the lesser of the evils, but it is still worth investigating to assess how Biden handled the concerns raised by the Obama administration’s State Department.
Here, the testimony of the State Department official charged with issues related to Ukraine again proves significant. Kent told lawmakers that after learning Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, he raised concerns with the vice president’s office about the relationship.
“I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent testified before House members in October of 2019. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time … That was the end of that conversation.”
The question for now-President Biden, then, is whether anyone in his office raised concerns about the clear conflicts-of-interest with him personally, and if so, why did Biden ignore the problem?
6. The Intelligence Community’s Briefing of Biden
Another scandal reaching President Biden concerns his interactions with the intelligence community after the FBI, and presumably the CIA and other such agencies, learned in December of 2019, that Hunter Biden believed Russians had stolen Hunter’s laptop, rendering the Bidens susceptible to blackmail.
Here, it is important to understand that there are two separate Hunter Biden laptops at issue. The most-discussed laptop was actually the second laptop. That laptop was the one Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop. Then, after the repair shop owner discovered concerning material on the MacBook, the store owner handed it to the FBI in December of 2019. The owner of the repair shop, however, had first made a copy of the hard drive, which resulted in The New York Post’s coverage in October 2020.
But there was another laptop — one Hunter believed Russians had stolen from him when he was binging on drugs with prostitutes in the summer of 2018 in Las Vegas. While the public did not learn about the existence of this earlier laptop until August of 2021, the FBI knew about it as early as December 2019, when they took possession of the second laptop Hunter had left at the repair store.
Among other material contained on the second laptop was a video of Biden recounting the circumstances of his first laptop disappearing with some Russians. Significantly, on that video Hunter Biden said his first laptop contained a ton of material leaving him susceptible to blackmail, since his father was “running for president” and Hunter talked “about it all the time.”
It is inconceivable that the FBI and the intelligence communities did not brief Biden on this discovery and the risk of blackmail, given that former FBI Director James Comey briefed Trump on the fake Steele dossier. On second thought, that is the initial question reporters should ask the president: “Did the FBI brief you, Mr. President, on the fact that Hunter believed Russians had stolen a laptop containing compromising information?”
From there, an inquiring press should investigate to ensure that Joe Biden did not direct the intelligence community to bury this national security risk to protect himself or his son.
7. Possible Collusion to Interfere in the 2020 Election
An honest press should also investigate whether now-President Biden or anyone connected to his then-presidential campaign pressured reporters, media outlets, or companies such as Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden story. And what about the “fifty former intelligence officials” who publicly declared the laptop resembled a Russian disinformation campaign—something clearly untrue? Did Biden or his campaign coordinate with those individuals, several of whom had endorsed the Democratic candidate, in the release of the letter?
Given that polls show that 17 percent of Joe Biden voters would not have voted for him in 2020, if they had known about the Biden family scandals, the collective burying of the laptop scandal represents the most significant interference in elections ever seen in our country. So, “Did Biden or his campaign have anything to do with the decision to kill the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter’s MacBook?” And “What about the ‘fifty former intelligence officials?’”
From there the follow-ups flow quickly: “Who was involved in the push to silence the story and who were the executives or ‘journalists’ who bowed to the demands?” “Who coordinated with the intelligence officials?” “Were any threats or promises made?” “What were they?” “What did Joe Biden know?” “What about other Democrats and the Democratic National Committee?”
8. Joe Biden Is a ‘Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier’
The final Joe Biden scandal the press should push President Biden to answer concerns his lies to the American public. While there are too many to count, two merit further questioning.
First, the media should demand Biden answer for lying to the country when he seethed, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Biden not only knew of the family business deals but was part of them.
The second bold-faced fabrication from Biden came during his pre-election debate with Trump, when Trump raised “the laptop from hell.” When Trump asked Biden if he was saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” the then-Democratic candidate replied, “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”
Unlikely. Biden also countered with this doozy, which again raises the question of whether Biden had a role in the intelligence officials’ statement:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
We can now add The New York Times to Giuliani. It remains to be seen, though, whether the Old Grey Lady and the other legacy outlets will report on the further scandals the laptop revealed—the ones that reach the president of the United States.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
On March 17, 2022, The New York Times stated it had verified the authenticity of a laptop and its data as belonging to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This was the same laptop holding information that Twitter, Facebook, and other corporate media immediately suppressed when The New York Post, a right-leaning competitor of The New York Times, reported on it three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
If they had known about one of the Biden family scandals, such as the Hunter Biden laptop information, 17 percent of Joe Biden’s voters wouldn’t have voted for him, found a 2020 post-election poll. This means big tech’s suppression of this story likely made enough difference to tip Joe Biden into his low-margin win in the Electoral College.
Back in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook immediately responded to The New York Post’s publication of information from Hunter Biden’s laptop by effectively banning it from their platforms that effectively monopolize public discussion. Twitter punished the Post for reporting the repeatedly authenticated laptop information by suspending its account for two weeks.
“What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post’s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate,”commented independent investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald.
Major National Security Implications
That laptop provides evidence Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s pay-for-play schemes with foreign oligarchs, an obvious national security risk. Some of these corrupt deals involved Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country that is currently petitioning the Biden administration to engage militarily with Russia on their behalf.
Russia also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden, according to videos from his laptop, and the FBI knew about this as early as 2019, according to Federalist reporting: “This explosive revelation establishes that either Joe Biden lied to the American public, or the intelligence community lied to him,”wrote Federalist Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland in 2021.
Other Hunter Biden business deals involved China, the United States’ top security threat. Texts between business partners indicate Joe Biden was financially involved in Hunter Biden’s China deals, contrary to Joe Biden’s public claims.
China also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden and possibly on Joe Biden. All of this means major conflicts of interest for the president’s foreign policy at a time of significant global instability. It also was deliberately hidden from the voting public by collusion between big tech companies and the Democrat Party.
Hiding Democrats’ Dangerous Scandals
The same presidential administration that benefitted from Big Tech hiding damning true information is openly colluding with Big Tech to maintain and expand these information operations. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in July 2021, “We’re flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Soon after, Psaki confirmed, “We’re in regular touch with social media platforms…about areas where we have concern.” You might call it a public-private partnership.
Democrats have demanded that the Biden administration create a task force to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.” What did corporate media and big tech call the laptop information they suppressed in 2020, only for The New York Times to confirm in 2022? That’s right: “Disinformation.” In fact, as Greenwald notes, intelligence operatives immediately enacted a real disinformation campaign against the New York Post reporting in 2020, pushing the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was “disinformation.”
That’s called projection, and you should assume that’s one of the things going on every time the media runs some wild news cycle—such as accusing the Republican president of treasonous collusion with Russia when it’s actually the Democrat presidential candidate who did that.
Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy
This New York Times article, after all the lies and manipulations about the Hunter Biden laptop, is also a chilling public affirmation that the ruling class believes Americans are helpless to choose their own government. They’re even bold enough to confirm their power openly.
Just like requiring only the hired help and those under the thumb of government agencies to wear masks while their masters wine and dine mask-free, The New York Times openly revealing that corporate media including itself, Twitter, and Facebook lied and got away with it is a hierarchy flex. It’s a display of their power. They are saying, “We can lie to Americans and get away with it.”
They’re also flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say. Again, Covid is another clear example, as when Trump advisors such as Scott Atlas faced vicious media smears for pointing out facts that The New York Times finally acknowledged months later, such as that kids don’t need to wear masks and it’s perfectly safe for them to go to school. In the intervening time, children needlessly suffered, but The New York Times doesn’t care. They owned the rubes, and that matters more to them than truth or children’s suffering.
People this corrupt don’t deserve to have media platforms, control of the presidency, or any power of any kind. At the very least, those who use their power this cynically should be respected by absolutely no one.
Big Tech Is a Threat to Democracy
Big Tech is also clearly manipulating public discourse for highly partisan ends. Social media has become what the “big three” cable news networks were decades ago: falsely “nonpartisan” manipulators of elections. Like ABC, CBS, and NBC, Twitter and Facebook’s ability to control culture and politics through brain drips feeding lies into millions of Americans’ minds needs to end, yesterday. This is not a pissing contest. It’s about our continued existence as a nation.
Greenwald notes the corporate press and big tech “all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump.” That’s not a democracy, no matter how many slogans about that word propaganda outlets put out. It’s tyranny.
When elections are an elaborate charade and their outcomes are openly manipulated by giant special interests, we don’t have self-government, self-determination, democracy, constitutional government, representation, or any of the above. For those of us who love these things because we believe they are our God-given and precious rights and responsibilities, this is a dark reality to behold.
One might call this world the left wants to live in Chinese communism with American characteristics. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, and neither do at least 74 million other Americans. We’re not going to keep being abused by our own government quietly. And we’re not going to believe these liars, no matter what they say.
The top names on everyone’s mind when they hear the word “disinformation” ought to be The New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, The Atlantic, and all their corrupt, self-congratulating Aspen Institute friends. That’s something we can all work to help our neighbors see.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Nearly six years have passed since Hillary Clinton and her cronies launched their plot to frame Donald Trump as a co-conspirator of Russia to distract Americans from Clinton’s scandals. Since then, by bits and pieces, the public has learned of Clinton’s role in peddling the Russia collusion hoax to both the press and intelligence agencies. While there is still much to uncover, a recent exposé of the man the FBI tapped as the key Confidential Human Source (CHS) in investigating the Trump campaign confirmed Spygate’s method of operation: creating mythical men on whose deceitful shoulders the media and the FBI then stood.
While Stefan Halper’s name and the monikers used to identify him in government reports—“Source 2,” or merely “CHS”—appeared regularly in reporting unraveling the Russia collusion hoax, only lately did Halper’s history undergo a thorough vetting. In a recent article, Real Clear Investigations’ Mark Hemingway traced Halper’s history through archived documents and interviews with associates. He uncovered two themes girding Halper’s parallel careers of government informant and Cambridge academic.
Stefan Halper’s Recipe for Success
From his earliest days in government until his retreat from Cambridge University following his outing as a player in the Russian collusion hoax, Halper advanced his professional persona, decade upon decade, by taking creative license with his credentials and exploiting his connections. Puffery appeared in both Halper’s public biography and resumes reviewed by Real Clear Investigations, leaving unanswered the question of whether Halper ever obtained the Ph.D. he claimed later allowed him to reinvent himself as an academic at Cambridge. Before then, Halper appeared to muddle through a variety of low-level jobs in the federal government, until the mid-1970s. That’s when Halper’s career received a boost when he married Sibyl Cline, the daughter of the well-respected Ray S. Cline.
The senior Cline, who held top intelligence positions with the federal government since the second world war, reportedly arranged for the Ronald Reagan State Department to hire Halper. During the Reagan administration, Halper became close to, among others, Oliver North, but after the Iran-Contra scandal and some time in banking and D.C. think tanks, Halper transitioned to academia. He became a professor at Cambridge University in 2001, where three years later he would claim a second Ph.D.
In addition to the political and other connections Halper accumulated during his 30 years in the D.C. bubble, once at Cambridge, Halper expanded his network across the Atlantic. Halper became cozy with three other characters who later played roles—some prominent—in the Russia collusion hoax. These included Richard Dearlove, the former chief of the British intelligence service MI6; Christopher Andrew, the official historian for the domestic intelligence agency, MI5; and Christopher Steele, who worked under Dearlove at MI6.
Highly Useful Connections
While at Cambridge, the reinvented Halper leveraged his professorship, profiting to the tune of nearly $1 million by writing research papers of questionable worth for the U.S. Department of Defense. Halper added to his wallet by serving as a CHS for the FBI from 2008 until January 2011, when the FBI dropped him for aggressiveness toward a handling agent over a fee dispute. Two months later, the FBI reopened Halper as a CHS, giving him a stern warning that this was his last opportunity with the bureau.
Beyond these money-making ventures that kept Halper connected with players at the DOD and FBI, the academic apparently stayed close to elite members of the American media, including David Ignatius, the foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post. According to Steven Schrage, who completed his Cambridge Ph.D. under Halper’s supervision, “Halper knew Ignatius for decades” and “bragged’ that “Ignatius was his press contact.”
Another Cambridge student, the Russian-born U.K. historian Svetlana Lokhova who was later sold as a Russian “honey pot,” likewise connected Halper to Ignatius. Lokhova told The Federalist that in May 2018, shortly after Halper was outed as a CIA and FBI informant, she spoke with Ignatius, and when she “registered surprise about Halper’s role” as a CHS, that prompted Ignatius to say he “always found Halper reliable as a source.”
These connections all later proved key to advancing the Russia collusion hoax, but it was Halper’s role as a Cambridge academic that cemented his insertion into the scandal. As a faculty member at the British university, Halper participated in seminars and conferences, including the mid-July 2016 Cambridge University conference at which Halper first met then-Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Enter: 2016 Campaign
While initially Halper seemed uninterested in the young Trump advisor, that suddenly changed after Dearlove arrived at the conference and spoke privately with Halper. According to the conference organizer, Halper suddenly “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign.”
Hillary Clinton surrogate Madeline Albright also attended the conference, serving as a keynote speaker. While there, Albright attended a small, private dinner with Halper. Then, just days after the Cambridge conference ended, Albright proclaimed that “Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.” The Clinton booster added that “Russia was likely behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails.”
That Albright began peddling the Russia collusion hoax in late July 2016, not long after leaving Halper’s side, seems suspect given that earlier that month Halper had forecast a similar approach to defeating Trump during a Cambridge lecture series on “the phenomenon which is ‘Trump’s maverick candidacy.’” At the time, Halper told his audience that “the deficits in Clinton’s campaign” left the election “almost too close to call.” “If the media focuses on Clinton, she will lose, whereas if they continue to focus on Trump, he will lose,” Halper predicted.
Worming Into Trump Campaign Connections
Two weeks later, the FBI launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign. Soon after that, Halper’s long-time handler, Stephen Somma, visited Halper at his home to request his assistance. According to Somma, he proposed meeting with Halper because Halper “had been affiliated with national political campaigns since the early 1970s,” while Somma “lacked a basic understanding of simple issues, for example what the role of a ‘foreign policy advisor’ entails.”
During Somma’s August 11, 2016, visit with Halper, the FBI handler asked Halper whether he knew George Papadopoulos, who then was serving as a Trump campaign advisor. Halper didn’t, but agreed to speak with Papadopoulos.
Halper then volunteered that he knew a second foreign policy advisor, Page, and asked whether Somma and his team had any interest in Page. Halper also told Somma he “had known Trump’s then campaign manager, [Paul] Manafort, for a number of years and that he had been previously acquainted with Michael Flynn.”
Halper’s claim to know Flynn proved another unsupported boast. He nonetheless told Somma and the other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team of an “incident” he supposedly witnessed at Cambridge involving Flynn. According to Halper, after Flynn spoke to a small group over dinner and drinks at Cambridge, another attendee, the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova, “surprised everyone” and jumped in Flynn’s cab, then left with Flynn to London. Halper added that he was “suspicious of Lokhova” because of her Russian connections. However, contrary to Halper’s tale, Flynn had never met Halper and Halper had not attended the Cambridge gathering at which both Flynn and Lokhova were guests. Halper’s claim that Lokhova left with Flynn also proved false. Nonetheless, press reports later repeated the story and suggested Flynn had been compromised by the unnamed Russian student. Lokhova would later sue Halper for defamation, pinning him as the source of the false reports.
Somma and others, however, seemed unaware of Halper’s fabrication. They couldn’t believe their “luck” that Halper supposedly knew three of the four subjects of Crossfire Hurricane. So, over the ensuing weeks, Halper would wear a wire and question Papadopoulos, Page, and even the co-chair of the Trump campaign, Sam Clovis.
Fabricating an Excuse to Spy on Trump’s Campaign
That Halper could arrange a meeting with one of Trump’s top campaign officials mere months before the November election is a testament to Halper’s 50 years of political schmoozing and ladder climbing—further confirmed when Clovis proceeded to have an unguarded hour-long chat with Halper discussing details about Trump’s strategy to defeat Hillary.
Halper came away from these meetings with nothing of import to the investigation into Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. Nonetheless, the FBI referenced Halper and portions of his wired conversations with Page in the four FISA applications that resulted in the FBI illegally surveilling Page. Omitted from the FISA applications, however, were comments Page made to Halper that conflicted with portions of the Steele dossier.
While the FBI used only minor details acquired by Halper in the FISA applications, Halper’s cross-continental connections with the intelligence communities, political players, and the press, likely advanced the Russia collusion hoax in ways still fully unknown. This likelihood seems strong when one considers how, when the Spygate scandal began to unravel, the same media that had peddled the Russia collusion hoax began a public relations campaign for the players behind the plot, including Halper.
Running Cover for Spies
At first, the press presented the unidentified Halper as “an American academic” and as “an informant” or “source” whose anonymity had to be preserved to safeguard him. To bolster his credentials, the reporting stressed Halper’s position as a professor, highlighted his longtime work for both the FBI and CIA, and cast him as an informant who “aided the Russia investigation both before and after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III‘s appointment.” Then, in a transparent attempt to paint the still-unnamed Halper as a selflessness patriot, the media focused on the “great risks” informants take “when working for intelligence services.”
After he was outed, the Russia-hoax team continued to highlight Halper’s position as a “Cambridge professor” and long-time CHS to preserve the myth of a respected academic and dedicated and reliable informant. The Washington Post ran a puff piece on Halper soon after his name became public, telling its audience “Halper’s connections to the intelligence world have been present throughout his career and at Cambridge, where he ran an intelligence seminar that brought together past and present intelligence officials.”
The Post continued its gushing profile by highlighting Halper’s collaboration with Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, and their sponsorship of a “seminar that drew Michael Flynn, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” to attend. Also stressed was Halper’s academic work, with the Post noting that Halper had taught “international affairs and American studies at Cambridge from 2001 until 2015, when he stepped down with the honorary title of emeritus senior fellow of the Centre of International Studies, . . .”
The remainder of the article then unquestioningly parroted much of Halper’s resume, before quoting an unnamed U.S. government official saying of Halper: “He thinks well. He writes critically. And he knows a lot of people whose insights he can tap for us as well.”
However, as Real Clear Investigations revealed in its exposé on Halper, he held neither the academic cachet nor the gravitas a seasoned informant might. But what Halper lacked in pedigree, he compensated for with his arsenal of connections that allowed him to whisper into the right ears just what the listener wanted to hear.
In this respect, Halper proves no different than Steele or Rodney Joffe: They are all mythical men, molded by the Clinton campaign, the media, and those complicit in the government to sell the tale of Trump colluding with Russia. In reality, though, they aren’t the James Bond, Jack Ryan, and Jason Bourne that we were sold—they are the Three Stooges with better agents.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A group of feminists staged a demonstration outside the women’s NCAA swimming championships last week to protest transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania competing against biological women. Many of the feminists noted that they had been supporters of the Democratic Party. However, they felt betrayed since they believe the Democrats have abandoned women and girls.
Save Women’s Sports – a “coalition that fights to preserve sex-based eligibility for female sports” – organized a protest outside Georgia Tech’s athletic center in Atlanta, Georgia. Amy E. Sousa – a self-proclaimed “engaged embodiment expert” and “radical feminist” – voiced her displeasure with the Democratic Party.
“I am a lifelong registered Democrat who ultimately feels politically homeless,” Sousa told Fox News. “With the whole Biden election, I began to feel more and more disenfranchised from Democrats as a party, and I began to feel more and more that they did not represent my beliefs or my views.”
“Feminism has become so muddied, much like the term Democrat has become so muddied. It’s practically lost all meaning,” Sousa added.
Another Save Women’s Sports advocate shared a similar experience as Sousa.
“I was historically liberal,” the activist explained. “I would say I’m politically homeless now because I don’t think the Democrats care about women and girls.”
Another member of Save Women’s Sports revealed that progressives pushed her away from the Democratic Party because of her views on biological men competing against females.
“I always voted as a liberal, from 18 to 39,” the feminist said. “I registered Republican in 2020 after two politicians told me they did not want my vote because of my stance on the rights for women and girls.”
“They wanted to put men in prisons and men on sports teams and in my daughter’s school, so that’s why I decided I cannot be a part of this party anymore — that doesn’t even recognize my sex class,” the feminist declared.
One of the feminists added, “I know a lot of historically liberal people, especially parents, who have felt like they needed to walk away from the Democratic Party. I don’t know who they’re going to be voting for in the next elections. I think that we’re going to have a lot of people walking away really.”
Others have been outspoken against Thomas competing in the women’s NCAA swimming championships. Kellie-Jay Keen – head of the organization Standing for Women – went viral last week for brilliantly shooting down a pro-trans argument.
Thomas — a biological male who identifies as a female — won the women’s 500-yard freestyle event on Thursday at the NCAA championships with the fastest time this season. When Thomas went to the podium to be announced as the winner, there were several people in the crowd booing.
WATCH: Radical feminists protesting Lia Thomas say they are politically homeless www.youtube.com
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Gerald Brevard III, a 30-year-old known criminal who was released early from prison because of Democrat criminal justice policies, was arrested this week after he allegedly went on a multi-state shooting spree targeting homeless people.
The moment the suspect wanted for murdering/attacking homeless people in DC & NYC was apprehended on PA Ave SE. VIDEO: Dennis Alloy. A trusted source confirms the suspect is Gerald Brevard III. An online search shows previous charges in Fairfax for burglary & abduction @fox5dcpic.twitter.com/8xFpGHk4lR
Brevard faced felony charges in 2020 when he tried to abduct and defile one woman and burgle another in Herndon, Va. Despite the fact that Brevard had “88 prior criminal charges dating back to 2009,” leftist Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano, a former Obama-era federal prosecutor, reduced the abduction charge to a misdemeanor. This allowed the criminal to return to the streets after serving possibly as few as five months of an 11-month prison sentence.
— Virginians 4 Safe Communities (@VA4SafeComm) March 16, 2022
Because Descano was preoccupied with reducing sentences for violent criminals under his “progressive justice” initiative, Brevard walked free and used his freedom to allegedly attack multiple vulnerable people that social justice preeners such as Descano claim to prioritize.
Brevard was released because a Democrat attorney saw him as his next social justice cause. The criminal’s freedom, however, appears to have cost the lives of several innocent people.
A similar incident happened in Dallas last week when leftist Judge Chika Anyiam lowered violent criminal Julio Guerrero’s bond from $2 million to $500,000, which only requires a $50,000 down payment for release from jail.
Guerrero was arrested last year after allegedly shooting at police officers during an hours-long standoff. He was accused of killing a father of five children after they rubbed elbows at a club, and of shooting a 3-year-old girl in the head in a fit of road rage days later.
Guerro’s attorney Tom Cox, who has donated at least $5,000 to Anyiam since 2015, quickly posted the bail. After backlash from law enforcement and other members of her Texas community, Anyiam, who brags on her website about going soft on crime, raised the bond for the murder chargem but only to $600,000.
“These irresponsible decisions, do not make our cities safer,” Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia tweeted.
Unfortunately for innocent, law-abiding, and vulnerable Americans who count on the justice system to keep them safe, anecdotes like these are increasing and will only get worse. Pro-criminal attorneys and judges repeatedly lower penalties for offenders in the name of achieving “equity.”
Why do leftist lawyers and judges repeatedly release criminals who end up harming people? Because they profit from it.
In exchange for their reckless policies, many of these radical legal officials are showered with donations by leftist megadonors such as George Soros, who has poured millions through “pro-criminal justice” PACs into district attorney races across the country. Letting criminals onto the streets is now a lucrative business for leftist politicians, which makes them less likely to change their ways and risk losing funding.
These “criminal bail reform” activists plaguing the American justice system may claim it is humane and just to lower the bar for criminals, but true justice does not include the harm and slaughter of innocent men, women, and children.
Remember when Darrell Brooks Jr. allegedly used his SUV to plow over a crowd in Waukesha, Wis., killing six people and injuring 62 others just days after being let out on bail? That decision wasn’t humane, just, or equitable. Even the Democrat district attorney in Wisconsin admitted that his progressive policies were “guaranteed” to kill someone someday.
Giving violent criminals a free pass only punishes innocent Americans. It’s neither humane nor just to sacrifice law-abiding lives on the premise that releasing creeps from jail is more humane than keeping them locked up. If they truly cared about people, Democrats wouldn’t allow their failed criminal justice experiment which has already cost too many lives to continue.
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 @jordangdavidson.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
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
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
.jpg)
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.