Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions


Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: May 04, 2022

Read more at https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2022/05/04/alito-will-save-lives-not-biden—p–n2606784/

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.

Alito Will Save Lives, Not Biden

Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

When the draft Supreme Court opinion overruling “Roe v. Wade” leaked on Monday, my first thought was: WHY COULDN’T THEY WAIT UNTIL NEXT YEAR? (“Roe” is in quotes because Planned Parenthood v. Casey already overruled Roe, but “Roe” is still used to describe the nonexistent right to abortion.)

Yes, it’s human life we’re talking about. Millions of babies are killed in their mothers’ wombs each year — it’s a massacre. On the other hand, I thought, ending late-terms might end the midterms.

But then I read Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion and was intellectually offended all over again by the idea that one of our precious constitutional rights, enshrined in a founding document, is the right to kill an unborn baby. Anyone complaining about the decision should be required to cite the exact parts Alito got wrong. Be specific. And keep in mind, no important discussion of constitutional law has ever begun with the words, “My vagina …”

The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took a stab at it by completely misstating Alito’s argument, then saying, “the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces.” (I was planning on writing a scholarly and nuanced treatise on the framers, but Mystal just stole my title!)

I also noticed that, outside of the media, no one seems especially bothered by the decision. Or to have noticed it. In groups of liberal women, apolitical women, black and Puerto Rican women, no one is talking about the case.

They’re probably right. The end of a court-managed “constitutional” right to abortion isn’t going to produce the Roemageddon Democrats are predicting.

More than half of the country already lives in states where abortion will always be legal, subsidized and sacralized. For those who don’t, Harvard should set up an abortion scholarship program. Instead of spending $100 million “investigating” slavery, the university could buy bus tickets for girls who need to go to another state for an abortion.

The Mississippi law being upheld in this case — contrary to everything I’ve heard on MSNBC — is shockingly reasonable.

It states:

“Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.”

The Mississippi legislature provided a series of factual findings:

  • at eight weeks gestational age the “unborn human being begins to move in the womb”;
  • at nine weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”;
  • at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “hair, fingernails, and toenails begin to form”;
  • at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she “may move about freely in the womb;” and
  • at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on the human form in all relevant respects.”

After 15 weeks, the legislature found, most abortions involve crushing and tearing the fetus apart.

Laws should always err on the side against the decision-maker, and the decision-maker on the length of gestation is going to be the abortionist. (Which is also why “rape” and “incest” exceptions swallow the whole law. By the way, whatever happened to the morning-after pill?)

So we’re really talking about four to five months.

That’s not enough time? Give me a break, you freaks. I don’t think voters are going to say, Ukraine, inflation, the border, crime, transgenders in kindergarten — OH MY GOD, I CAN ONLY GET AN ABORTION FOR FOUR MONTHS???

Some states will surely roll back the right to abortion more than 15 weeks. Oh well. The abortion ladies will have to travel to other states the same way gunners do now to practice their marksmanship, shoppers do to get plastic bags, or breathers do to take off their masks.

With a patchwork of laws, we’ll be able to see which regulations do best at reducing abortion, illegitimacy (which soared in lockstep with the legalization of abortion), venereal diseases, suicides and false claims of rape when women are pressured into having sex, undeterred by the risk of pregnancy. We’ll call it “federalism.”

Watching MSNBC’s reaction also reminded me that everybody hates the feminists. The ladies couldn’t even keep the “#MeToo” movement going. How long did that last? Fifteen minutes? And a lot of the cases were egregious. But a month later, transgenders were canceling J.K. Rowling and women’s sports.

Now they’re hysterically babbling about the court banning contraceptioninterracial marriages and requiring forced sterilizations. I guess they don’t think their arguments about the abortion ruling are particularly strong, so they have to warn about scary rulings to come.

Finally, President Joe Biden has put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the response to this decision. Previously, she was put in charge of the border, and then Ukraine. Any day now, we’ll find out she was in charge of the Challenger space shuttle.

Maybe I’m just in a cheery mood, what with the imminent conclusion to this hideous chapter in U.S history. Who knows? Let’s wait nine months and see.

I have only two absolutely definite predictions flowing from the leak of the abortion opinion:

1) Liberals are about to start claiming that black people not only are incapable of getting IDs to vote, but are also incapable of knowing that they’ve been pregnant for four months. (And then: NIGHTMARE! THEY’LL HAVE TO GET A BUS TO NEW YORK OR CALIFORNIA!)

2) As for the leaker, if the perp turns out to be a conservative who was trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Neil Gorsuch, he will be ruined for life. If he turns out to be a clerk for one of the liberals, he will get a book contract and a regular spot on MSNBC.


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Ends Justify the Means

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย May 4, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ends-justify-the-means/

Who leaked the Roe vs Wade opinion? Most likely a radical leftist clerk.

01 SCOTUS Integri LA 1080
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco 2022.

A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Veterans Lives Matter

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย May 5, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/veterans-lives-matter/

Myorkas of the DHS, Ordering VA Doctors and nurses to the Border to attend to illegal Immigrants.

VA Doctors at Border
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


Reported Byย Cristina Laila | Published May 3, 2022

Read more at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/decision-abort-child-bidens-handlers-whisk-away-admits-abortion-murder-off-script-remarks-video/

Joe Biden on Tuesday admitted abortion is murder in off-script remarks to reporters. Biden spoke to reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Tuesday morning as he was preparing to depart to Alabama to visit a Lockheed Martin facility. Reporters peppered Biden with questions about theย Supreme Courtโ€™s leaked draft opinionย revealing the highest court of the land is set to strike down Roe v Wade.

Biden was a bumbling mess and was unable to make a cogent point. However, in a major flub, Biden accidentally admitted abortion is murder.

โ€œThe idea that weโ€™re gonna make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose toย abort a childย based on a decision by the Supreme Court I think goes way overboard,โ€ said Biden as his handlers whisked him away.

โ€œCome on guys! Letโ€™s go!โ€ Bidenโ€™s handler shouted to reporters as Biden walked away.

There goes the leftโ€™s โ€œclump of cellsโ€ argument.

VIDEO:

Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.


Commentary Byย Nicole Russell, Op-ed contributor | Wednesday, May 04, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/protecting-imprisoned-women-from-men-who-say-theyre-women.html/

Unsplash/Emiliano Bar

A male inmate housed in a womenโ€™s facility at New Yorkโ€™s Rikers Island jail has beenย sentencedย to seven years for raping a female prisoner. In an apparent plea deal,ย Ramel Blount, 33, who goes by Diamond Blount, pleaded guilty to attempted rape. Blount was housed in the female section of Rikers Island in February 2021, when a 33-year-old female inmate said she was raped in a bathroom after taking a shower.

On top of the seven-year sentence announced Monday, Blount must register as a sex offender.

Itโ€™s true that Rikers Island is notorious for being unusually violent, and that violence escalated in 2021. But this particular sexual assault may not have happened if facilities that house criminals did so based on biological sex, not the gender with which they criminals presumably identify. A female inmate in Illinois says this exact scenario happened to her in 2020.

For the past few years, jail and prison facilities such as Rikers Island have been under tremendousย pressureย to bend to a vocal minority and house male prisoners who identify as female with women. In New York in 2020, Steuben County officials agreed to โ€œsweeping changes to its jail and prison policiesโ€ after settling a discrimination lawsuit filed by a transgender inmate.

At the time, the ACLU in New Yorkย hailedย the settlement as one that โ€œestablishes one of the strongest jail or prison policies in the country protecting the rights of transgender, gender-nonconforming, nonbinary, and intersex people in custody.โ€

โ€œThe policy addresses housing placement, safety, access to medical care, name and pronouns use, search procedures, and grooming standards,โ€ the ACLU said.

This is happening in California, too. In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed legislation known as SB 132, which allows male prisoners who identify as female to be transferred, by a simple request, to a facility for women. Now, women are pushing back to preserve their right to safety and privacy.

Theย Womenโ€™s Liberation Front, which seeks to protect the privacy and equality of women,ย filedย a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Californiaโ€™s SB 132 is unconstitutional and creates an unsafe environment for women, for whom these single-sex facilities exist. One plaintiff in the suit says she was sexually assaulted by an inmate who transferred from a menโ€™s facility. Another plaintiff says she was inappropriately โ€œgrabbed.โ€

One of the biggest reasons that so many conservatives oppose theย Equality Actย before Congress is that it would open the door to this, and similar situations, nationwide. And few laws would be left to protect the mostย vulnerable. Under theย Equality Act, any place that receives federal funds, from schools to prisons, would be forced to banish single-sex spaces or be liable to discrimination charges.

Itโ€™s important to make clear: Most trans-identifying individuals arenโ€™t perverts or assailants-in-waiting. But under these policies, bad actors need only to identify as the opposite sex to gain access to private spaces.

In Alaska, a man claiming to be a woman tried to enter a shelter for battered women. When he was refused, he sued the organization for discrimination under a local law governing sexual orientation and gender identity.

Women serving time in prison or jail still deserve to be treated humanely and with respect. They still have a right to privacy and safety. But, intimidated by a vocal minority, local politicians and officials haveย buckledย under new definitions of sex and gender, showing they are more worried about being sued for discrimination by criminals trying to take advantage of women, than being sued for an assault such as rape.

Discrimination policies should not trump safety and privacy, whether in school or prison.


Originally published at The Daily Signal. 

Nicole Russell is a contributor to The Daily Signal. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Review, Politico, The Washington Times, The American Spectator, and Parents Magazine.


Reported Byย Jim Hoft | Published May 4, 2022

Read more at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/brandon-straka-joins-tucker-carlson-describes-horrific-treatment-suffered-hands-fbi-bidens-doj-misdemeanor-j6-charge-video/

Brandon Straka, the founder and director of popular,ย WalkAway Campaign, was arrested by federal agents following the January 6, 2021 protests and riot. Brandon did NOT go inside the US Capitol, did not participate in ANY violence, did not encourage violence, did not plan any violence, yet the corrupt and politicized federal government charged him with TWO felonies and a misdemeanor.ย  After a year of threats, harassment and abuse, Brandon Straka pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Brandon Straka was charged with crimes because Brandon Straka is EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE as a grassroots organizer!

Brandonโ€™s story is amazing. After being a dedicated liberal for years and years he started to do a bit of investigating and decided he could no longer support the viciousness and lies of the left. Todayย over 600,000ย Americans have joined Brandon and the #WalkAway movement and have not looked back! And THATโ€™S WHY Brandon Straka was targeted by the corrupt federal prosecutors for attending the rally on January 6. Brandon is effective. He leads leftists to the light. And once they Walk Away they DONโ€™T walk back!

On Wednesday, October 6, 2021,ย ย Walk Away founderย Brandon Straka pled guilty to a Class B misdemeanor for the crime of disorderly conduct inside the US Capitol Grounds on January 6th. After Brandonโ€™s hearing, the demonic media portrayed this as a victory for their cause by proclaiming โ€“ Brandon Straka pled guilty forย his ROLE โ€œin the Insurrection.โ€

Brandon was later sentenced to another three months of home arrest and three years of probation.  The government also demanded he give them access to his social media accounts during his probation.  This is wicked abuse.  The US government today is completely corrupt and broken.

On Tuesday night Brandon Straka sat down with Tucker Carlson for an exclusive one-on-one interview.ย  Brandon described the horrible abuse he received at the hands of his government.

Jim Hoft

Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.


Reported Byย Elizabeth Staufferย ย May 4, 2022 at 9:59am

Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/kamala-harris-goes-off-deep-end-declares-war-supreme-court-gop-dare/

Reminiscent of young environmental activist Greta Thunbergโ€™s bratty โ€œHow dare you!โ€ denunciation of world leaders, Vice President Kamala Harris railed against Republican leaders who she claimed are trying to โ€œweaponizeโ€ the law against women on Tuesday evening. Speaking at an event for EMILYโ€™s List, a political action committee that works to elect pro-abortion female candidates, Harris declared war on the Supreme Court over a draft opinion showing that a majority of justices are prepared to strike down the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

The document apparently was leaked to Politico, which reported on it Monday night. Harrisโ€™ speech had been scheduled prior to the report.

In her address, she expanded upon a briefย statementย she had released earlier in the day framing the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to โ€œthe rights of all Americans.โ€

โ€œWomenโ€™s rights in America are under attack,โ€ the vice president began.

โ€œRoe v. Wade, in its power, has protected a womanโ€™s right โ€” her right โ€” to make decisions about her own body for nearly half a century,โ€ she said.

โ€œIf the court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will be a direct assault on freedom โ€” on the fundamental right of self-determination to which all Americans are entitled.โ€

โ€œWomen in almost half the country could see their access to abortion severely limited,โ€ Harris said. โ€œIn 13 of those states, women would lose access to abortion immediately and outright.โ€

โ€œThose Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women,โ€ she said, her anger rising, โ€œWell we say, how dare they! How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body. How dare they! How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future! How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms.โ€

READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT AT https://www.westernjournal.com/kamala-harris-goes-off-deep-end-declares-war-supreme-court-gop-dare/


Wednesday May 4, 2022


Reported by PHIL SHIVER | May 02, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/mom-suing-school-over-daughters-transition-issues-warning/

A Florida mother suing her 13-year-old daughter’s school for encouraging her gender transition without parental consent recently issued a stark warning to fellow parents across the country: The same thing could happen to them under similar protocols in place at schools nationwide.

“This is happening all over the nation,” warned January Littlejohn duringย an interview on Fox Newsย Monday morning. “This same protocol is in place in many, many schools across districts everywhere, and even the guides being used to dictate these transgender support plans that cut parents out even have the same language.”

The Tallahassee-based mom and mental health professional, joined by her attorney Vernadette Broyles, explained to the network that her case is not an isolated one.

“This is a very systematic way that parents are being excluded from important decisions occurring with their children, and further, social transition is a medical intervention that schools are grossly unqualified to be taking these steps without parental involvement,” she said.

Littlejohn recalled that after her daughter expressed confusion over her gender during the COVID-19 pandemic, school administrators responded by enrolling her in a “transgender support plan” โ€” without seeking parental approval. When questioned regarding the plan, the school allegedly declined to disclose any information, claiming Littlejohn’s daughter was “protected by a non-discrimination law.”

“Eventually we did see the transgender support plan, which was a six-page document that they completed with my daughter, that was 13 at the time, behind closed doors, where they asked her questions that would have absolutely impacted her safety, such as which restroom she preferred to use and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips,” Littlejohn said.

Broyles added that she filed a lawsuit, arguing that Littlejohn’s parental rights were violated, and soon discovered that her client’s situation was similar to many others playing out around the country.

“We filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts, [and] there are lawsuits in Wisconsin, Maryland, Oregon, California,” the attorney said. “This is a national agenda, and parents need to recognize they have the right to direct the upbringing, education, care, medical decisions, mental health decisions of their child and they need to assert that right with their school.”

In theirย lawsuitย against Leon County Schools officials last October, January and her husband, Jeffrey, claimed the defendants “violated their fundamental rights” as parents by “implementing a protocol which explicitly circumvents parental notification and involvement in critical decisions affecting their childrenโ€™s mental, emotional and physical health.”

In filing the suit, the Littlejohns are seeking injunctive relief, a declaratory judgment, and damages for the violations. The school filed a motion to dismiss, and the Littlejohns filed an opposition in response, Broyles said. They are now awaiting a judge’s decision.

“What the school district did is tantamount to saying children need to be protected from their parents, rather than by their parents,” Broylesย told the Washington Examinerย late last year. “This guidance that they had in place and their actions convey the message that parents are presumed to be dangerous to their children.”

The Littlejohns’ lawsuit is considered to have been the catalyst for Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which was recently signed into law over and above frenzied backlash from progressive LGBT advocates and mainstream media outlets. The legislation bars discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms and assigns scaleable guidelines for appropriate discussions on the controversial subject matter in grades thereafter.

DeSantis: Education not indoctrination www.youtube.com


Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | May 03, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-5-observations-and-outcomes-from-the-supreme-courts-likely-reversal-of-roe-and-casey/

In one of the most unprecedented bombshells in political history, anย apparent draftย of Justice Sam Alitoโ€™s unreleased majority opinion overturningย Roe v. Wadeย wasย leaked to Politicoย Monday night. While this opinion will dredge up endless commentary stemming from legacy moral divisions on the issue, most of the political prognosticating will miss the mark. Moreover, as welcoming as this news is for any pro-life conservative, it does come with some potential pitfalls long-term unless we build on the momentum for other issues as well. To that end, here are some thoughts to consider about the fallout fromย Dobbs v. Jackson Womenโ€™s Health Organization:

1) The decision is a shield, not a judicial sword: Contrary to all the of the hand-wringing from the pro-abortion left, this decision doesnโ€™t directly prevent a single woman from killing her baby, if she so chooses, and it wonโ€™t practically result in anyone losing out on this โ€œrightโ€ in the scheme of things. Far from taking this issue away from the people and the states, as the left typically does in landmark court rulings, the Dobbs draft opinion actually reinstates the issue with the states. As Alito purportedly wrote in this rough draft, โ€œIn the years prior to [Roe v. Wade], about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State. โ€ฆ [I]t represented the โ€˜exercise of raw judicial powerโ€™ โ€ฆ and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half-century.โ€

Henceforth, deep red states will likely ban abortion completely, states more in the middle will place restrictions on later-term abortions and other gruesome practices, and the blue states will likely double down on promoting more abortions. Maryland and California already have bills to allow killing babies after they are born, and undoubtedly, following this decision, they will fund abortion programs for out-of-state baby-killer โ€œrefugees.โ€ Amazon is already offering to pay people to travel for abortions, and Iโ€™m sure this will become a cottage industry.

Thus, even if 20 states completely ban abortions, nobody will be too far from a place where they can sacrifice their child to Moloch. Contrast that to decisions from the court that prevent red states from enforcing immigration law, criminal statutes, defining marriage, or taking masks off kids, and we donโ€™t have anywhere to move beyond the reach of the court.

2) Red states should move forward on many other issues: For decades, red-state governors and legislatures โ€“ and sometimes even GOP-controlled Congresses โ€“ refrained from doing the right thing because of the fear of federal courts interfering based on past erroneous case law. Abortion is the one issue that unites the wretched and failed Republican Party, so the GOP actually fought for it and decided to band together and pass legislation directly against Roe in multiple states. That, in conjunction with a united front at the political level, actually swayed Republican-appointed judges. The GOP judges are merely a reflection of the GOP politicians. Like everyone else, they rule mainly based on perception of public opinion, or at least the centrist Republicans. If Republicans fight as emphatically on other issues as they do on abortion โ€“ and pass legislation accordingly in multiple states โ€“ they might see similar results.

For example, Obergefell is even more unconstitutional than Roe in that it somehow asserted that states cannot define a marriage. In recent years, courts have hampered states from giving the death penalty in many cases, prevented them from enforcing immigration law, blocked them from defining gender, and banned them from cleaning up homeless camps. There is no reason why states should take this sitting down. They should pass laws, even in opposition to those past rulings. Alitoโ€™s opinion could be used for any of those cases. One of the central points of his opinion is the affirmation of Glucksbergโ€™s test for a fundamental right โ€“ that it must be โ€œdeeply rooted in the Nationโ€™s history and traditions.โ€ So many of the liberal landmark opinions that have become sacred over time are antithetical to our history and tradition. They must all be challenged.

In fact, there is no time like the present. State legislatures should convene and pass numerous commonsense bills that were previously stymied by erroneous court precedent based on phantom substantive due process, a legal fiction that is implicitly overturned in Alitoโ€™s draft opinion.

3) Kavanaugh and Barrett will likely make us pay for this: This is somewhat counter to the previous point, but clearly Kavanaugh and Barrett are very reluctant to buck the system and likely screwed us on many other issues because they were saving their capital for this. Letโ€™s not forget that they have ruled in favor of forcing health care workers and military members to get a potentially deadly shot and have screwed us on a number of religious liberty cases, among many other issues. In fact, in many ways the COVID cases were worse, because they are the equivalent of forcing someone to get an abortion, not just making it available. We need to remember that they will likely side against us on many pending issues that, frankly, probably affect our lives a lot more directly in the coming months and years in order to โ€œmaintain the integrity of the court.โ€ Iโ€™m not saying this opinion is not cause for celebration, but this further underscores point #2 โ€“ that states need to blitz the courts by legislation against precedent on numerous other issues all at once, while building political momentum and an aura of inevitability.

4) Anti-abortion RINOs will be hard to beat: Red states are full of pro-life statist RINOs in legislatures and governorโ€™s mansions. These are people who undermine us on every other issue and do the bidding of the Chamber of Commerce and Big Pharma, but get elected based on the abortion issue alone. They will now milk this one issue to death by promising a complete ban on abortions and will disarm conservative angst against them on other issues, making them very hard to beat.

5) Pro-life is about so much more than abortion: While potential reversal of Roe is cause for celebration, we must remember that the Left has moved on to bigger and greater things. They are now essentially aborting live-born adults in Americaโ€™s hospitals with barbaric treatment, blocking lifesaving treatment, and forcing bio-medical tyranny on our bodies. The folks at the World Economic Forum want to control our bodies and minds in the most literal way in a new form of transhumanism. And unlike abortion, where we can avoid it for ourselves and our families, this is being forced upon us. Thus, we must be careful not to allow the Republican Party to use the celebration over a hard-fought victory on yesterdayโ€™s battle to obscure their treachery in being a party to todayโ€™s assault on life.

Overall, when factoring in the likely decision, as well as the politics behind the reprehensible leak of the draft, it has become clear that we cannot live together harmoniously as one people. Ironically, Alitoโ€™s draft opinion actually sets the stage for an amicable divorce. The left will stop at nothing to force their will upon us in all 50 states. We simply want at least a third of the country where we can live in peace with the values and legal system established by our Founders. They want to use the courts as a sword, while we are only using them as a shield.

Their reaction to this decision and their attempt to intimidate the judges with a criminal leak โ€“ all the while attempting to control our bodies with the gene therapy products of pharmaceutical companies โ€“ demonstrates that we need to devolve a lot more than just abortion to the individual states so that we can self-sort. They already have their states; now let us have ours.


Reported by DIANA GLEBOVA | ASSOCIATE EDITOR | May 03, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/report-justice-roberts-likely-to-order-fbi-investigation-into-scotus-leak-2657253222.html/

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Speaks At University Of Miami
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts will likely launch an investigation involving the FBI into the SCOTUS leak from theย Dobbsย abortion case,ย according to CBS Newsโ€™ Elizabeth Campbell. The apparent Feb. 10 draft opinion obtained by Politico published Mondayย showsย that the initial majority opinion of the court is poised to strike down the landmark Roe V. Wade decision granting women the right to an abortion.ย 

โ€œThis is an unprecedented leak fromย SCOTUS. It raises questions about how the institution will ever recover, and how Chief Justice Roberts will respond,โ€ Campbell tweeted.

โ€œSources tonight tellย  [CBS Newsโ€™ Jan Crawford]ย he is likely to order a full-blown investigation, involving the FBI, to determine the source,โ€ Campbell added.

This is an unprecedented leak from #SCOTUS. It raises questions about how the institution will ever recover, and how Chief Justice Roberts will respond. Sources tonight tell @JanCBS he is likely to order a full-blown investigation, involving the FBI, to determine the source.

The draft opinion showed that five justices โ€” Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett โ€” voted to overturn, while three โ€” Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan โ€” dissented, according to Politico. Roberts has reportedly not yet made his decision.

โ€œRoe was egregiously wrong from the start,โ€ Alito wrote in the draft opinion, according to the outlet.

โ€œWe hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,โ€ the opinion reportedly continued. โ€œIt is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the peopleโ€™s elected representatives.โ€

No draft opinion in modern history has ever beenย leakedย while the case was still pending, according to Politico.


Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | May 03, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/mark-levin-supreme-court-leak/

Political commentator Mark Levin said that Monday’s leak of a draft majority opinion is a “grave assault” on the Supreme Court. During Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends,” Levin addressed Monday’s leak of aย Supreme Court draft opinionย that could potentially overturn 1973’sย Roe v. Wade.

The news on Monday evening sparked heavy conversation across social media.

“When you conduct yourself in an utterly lawless way, attacking the institutions of this country, attacking the founding documents of this country, attacking the history of this country, this is what you get: lawlessness,” he insisted during “Fox & Friends.”

He added, “”It’s just a matter of time. All these institutions are going to collapse. This is a grave assault on the Supreme Court.”

Levin recalled a time when he was an intern to late Chief Justice Warren Burger while attending law school and said that he can’t fathom how the leak occurred after having seen the lengths to which the institution went to preserve the integrity of confidentiality.

“I saw how it operated, and I can tell you this institution takes its confidentiality seriously. Why? That’s the coin of the realm,” he said. “They’ve got to be able to talk about ideas freely. They’ve got to be able to discuss this without political pressure. Why do people think these are lifetime appointments?”

The political commentator later added that the Democratic Party is complicit in “destroying this country” and said that they are fighting Republicans every step of the way.

“Of course, the Democrat Party is destroying this country,” he reasoned. “Look at the confirmation process. It started with Bork. The Democrats targeted him under [Sen. Ted] Kennedy and Biden, and it moves on to others, including Clarence Thomas, including Kavanaugh. Republicans don’t treat Democrat nominees this way. They may object to them. When you say the Supreme Court doesn’t look like America, you’re undermining the credibility of the court.”


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Scary Poppins

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย May 3, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-scary-poppins/

Left-wing hack and propagandist Jankowicz is now heading Bidenโ€™s Disinformation Governance Board.

Jankowicz Misinformation Czar
Political cartoon ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


REPORTED BY:ย JOHN DILL | MAY 02, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/02/no-politics-public-school-in-colorado-sees-huge-growth-in-just-one-year/

Merit Academyโ€™s vision: students prepared for success in a free society, promoting civic responsibility, and contributing their talents in a flourishing republic.

Author John Dill profile

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It seems a lifetime ago when The Federalist introduced you last fall to Merit Academy in Woodland Park, Colorado. Itโ€™s a no-politics public school designed and overseen by local parents, opened in just one year of intense planning and work. These past seven months have seen this public contract school grow and flourish, despite many challenges.

โ€œWhen you think back to where we were a year ago, it is surreal,โ€ says Gwynne Pekron, Meritโ€™s director of development and chief action officer, beaming. โ€œThis was a dream for many, but a vision to us.โ€

Merit Academy is a classical, Core Knowledge school that opened on August 23, 2021, to 184 full-time students and more than 80 part-time homeschool students. The parents and community members who built Merit sought an education that would challenge children and build lasting friendships, without the controversial politics often found in public schools.

โ€œMerit Academy is a shining example of our virtues of valor, goodness, and perseverance,โ€ reflected local parent Heather Scholz. โ€œIt meets the demand of parents who have given up on the direction of modern schools.โ€

When we last checked in with Merit Academy, they were working hard in the classroom basement of Faith Lutheran Church, which generously opened its doors to Merit when the schoolโ€™s board struggled to find a space big enough to accommodate parent demand. Where are they now? After calling both Faith Lutheran and Mountain View Methodist churches home, Merit Academy is now in its โ€œstart-up Bear Denโ€ at a re-purposed hardware store in a local strip mall. Outside recess space was kindly offered by neighboring Our Lady of the Woods Catholic Church. Classroom walls are portable, lined with sound blankets to alleviate noise. From these walls hang childrenโ€™s artwork and school projects, ranging from idioms to drawings of George Washington to designs of engineered future cities.

โ€œFor the first time, my son doesnโ€™t ask for a โ€˜sick day,โ€™โ€ says Tarin McNeese, a sixth-grade parent. โ€œThis is not to say itโ€™s easyโ€”he works at itโ€”but when challenged, his teachers guide him. I personally appreciate the schoolโ€™s transparency with what is taught.โ€

The Merit Bears study science, English, history, reading, mathematics, Latin, language lab, and writing. In the halls, one hears lively songs of the upcoming spring performance, recitations of numbers study, and discussions of what it means to be valorous, one of the five Merit virtues. The classes are driven by Meritโ€™s vision: students prepared for success in a free society, promoting civic responsibility, and contributing their talents in a flourishing republic by pursuing beauty, truth, and good.

The desire for choice is stronger than ever, not only in this beautiful mountain community but across the nation as charter school enrollments climb. In November 2021, this school district had its first contested school board election in more than a decade, and Meritโ€™s existence, school choice, and critical race theory were all on the ballot. All four school-choice candidates swept the election, but their change agenda faces fierce resistance from the defeated minority. The new board majority is addressing the taxpayersโ€™ concerns about district facilities operating at approximately 50 percent capacity. They are committed to stopping the 20-year trend of severely declining enrollment and family exodus.

The local school district was losing families who decided to live elsewhere or place their children in public and private schools outside Teller County, a picturesque rural location encompassing Pikeโ€™s Peak and adjacent to Colorado Springs. To bring families back, the new school board members support a parentโ€™s right to know what is being taught. They support Merit Academy and school choice for parents. They plan to increase staff salaries and right a ship that has been listing for 20 years.

While holding her two-year-old, Nicole Waggoner, one of Meritโ€™s founders, said, โ€œMerit adds educational choice many people want. These families appreciate our virtues, our curriculum, and our school, so our enrollment numbers are through the roof. Weโ€™re drawing families up the pass [from Colorado Springs], which contributes to a thriving community.โ€

Image courtesy Merit Academy.

Seeing smiling faces in the โ€œBear Den,โ€ one may wonder what challenges Merit Academy has overcome. โ€œStarting a school is not easy,โ€ reflected Pekron, โ€œbut it is worth it, especially when you hear your kids talking about the War of 1812, how a catโ€™s eyes adjust at night, or how they acted responsibly that day. Itโ€™s worth every breath.โ€

So, what are the biggest challenges now? Pekron paused, then said: โ€œNo matter how deep the vision and how detailed the plan, the biggest challenge is being at the mercy of others.โ€ Glancing out the window, she continued, โ€œAs a contract school, grant foundations did not understand we were cut from the same cloth as a charter school, but different. Most said, โ€˜Come back when you are chartered.โ€™โ€

Despite those financial disappointments, the most touching and inspiring funding came from grassroots contributions and encouraging words from supporters all over the country following the September 2021 Federalist article. To you, Merit Academy is deeply grateful.

One of Meritโ€™s house mottos is โ€œFortune favors the brave.โ€ This spring, Merit Academy has had greater financial support, with grants and donations totaling more than $400,000. Merit board member Mary Sekowski said, โ€œItโ€™s wonderful to receive these blessings of needed financial support that support start-up expenses.โ€

Seed funding isnโ€™t the only thing start-up schools struggle with. โ€œThe facilities piece has been more difficult,โ€ said Waggoner. โ€œThere are few available spaces for demanded growth.โ€

Woodland Park lies west of Colorado Springs at a stunning 8,500 feet elevation. As in most mountain communities, few existing buildings could house a school. Meritโ€™s facility challenges landed it in an old hardware store, one of the only large-enough spaces open.

Pikes Peak as seen from Woodland Park, courtesy of Gwynne Pekron.

While many would view Meritโ€™s experience as a struggle, the newly elected school board recognized a community need to charter Merit and sought a win-win solution for Meritโ€™s space needs. The districtโ€™s declining enrollment leaves district taxpayers with a hefty burden to maintain partially empty buildings, costing more than $2.6 million annually.

โ€œThe more you spend on buildings, the less you spend on students,โ€ noted Sekowski. โ€œTaxpayers prefer their tax dollars support an increase in staff salary or a boost in student programming rather than pay for half-empty buildings.โ€

Due to declining enrollment, the districtโ€™s building space is at approximately 51 percent of functional capacity, according to a Denver consulting firm the district hired last fall. The capacity is forecasted to decrease to 32 percent at the middle school building and 35 percent at the high school in four years. The taxpayer cost of operation and maintenance for these two buildings alone exceeds $1.5 million per year.

Recognizing Meritโ€™s need for space to grow as a new district charter school, the district explored the possibility of offering Merit space at the half-capacity district middle school, which would decrease district facility expenditures and honor high community support for Merit Academy.

โ€œWith Merit paying the building expenses, district funds will be redistributed to students and staff, not spent on underutilized building space,โ€ Waggoner stated. โ€œBesides saving taxpayers money, it honors previous community commitments to learning by using these spaces for their original intent โ€” the education of children. This is especially timely with district consultants discussing school closures.โ€

This idea generated resistance from a minority in the community that closely resembles nationwide opposition to newly elected conservative school boards. This group has posted vitriol on social media, saying things like โ€œFโ€” Meritโ€ on Facebook, protesting at local school board meetings, yelling at and heckling the newly elected directors, using public comment periods to call directors โ€œracistโ€ and accuse them of trying to establish religion, and identifying with national efforts to stifle charter schools and school choice. One of the new school board directors even had his truck keyed during a board meeting.

Image courtesy Merit Academy.

In March, students celebrated Dr. Seuss, wearing mustaches and reading Dr. Seuss books. As if written for Merit Academy and all parent-initiated schools out there, Dr. Seuss advised, โ€œIf you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said it would be easy. They just promised it would be worth it.โ€

Yes, it is worth it. Despite its many challenges, Merit Academy thrives, with steadfast community support. The school opened in fall 2021 with nearly 200 students and a large waitlist. Its 2022-23 enrollment is forecasted to grow to more than 370 full- and part-time students, with additional students on its still-large waitlist.

โ€œWe are no longer just a hope or a dream,โ€ Waggoner reflected. โ€œMerit Academy is the school many families have hoped for.โ€

To learn more about Merit Academy or support it, please visit https://merit.academy.


John Dill is director of the Merit Academy school board and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.


Reported Byย Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editorย | Monday, May 02, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/supreme-court-rules-boston-city-hall-cant-ban-christian-flag.html/

U.S. Supreme Court buildingย |ย Nicole Alcindor/Christian Post

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were wrong to prohibit a group from flying a Christian flag at city hall. In anย opinion releasedย Monday morning in the case ofย Harold Shurtleff, et al. v. Boston, MA, et al., the high court unanimously ruled to reverse a lower court decision and remand the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Justice Stephen Breyer delivered the court’s opinion, in which he concluded that โ€œthe First Amendment prevents [the government] from discriminating against speakers based on their viewpoint.โ€

At issue, according to the court’s opinion, was whether Bostonโ€™s flag policy represented government speech; if it did, then it had the right to reject the Christian flag.

โ€œWe conclude that, on balance, Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groupsโ€™ flags a form of government speech,โ€ wrote Breyer.

โ€œThat means, in turn, that Bostonโ€™s refusal to let Shurtleff and Camp Constitution raise their flag based on its religious viewpoint โ€˜abridg[ed]โ€™ their โ€˜freedom of speech.โ€™โ€

Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored a concurring opinion, in which he wrote that โ€œa government does not violate the Establishment Clause merely because it treats religious persons, organizations, and speech equally with secular persons, organizations, and speech in public programs, benefits, facilities, and the like.โ€

โ€œUnder the Constitution, a government may not treat religious persons, religious organizations, or religious speech as second-class,โ€ he added in his brief concurrence.

In 2017, Harold Shurtleff of Camp Constitution asked to fly the Christian flag (which features a cross) outside of city hall on Constitution Day 2017, but his request was rejected by the city. Shurtleff filed suit against the city in response, with him being represented by the Liberty Counsel, a prominent conservative law firm that has handled many religious liberty cases. In February 2020, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled in favor of Boston, and a three-judge panel of the First Circuit unanimously upheld the lower court ruling in January 2021.

Judge Bruce Selya, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan,ย wrote the panel opinion, arguing that the โ€œthree flags flying in close proximity communicates the symbolic unity of the three flags,โ€ and therefore, it โ€œstrains credulity to believe that an observer would partition such a coordinated three-flag display.โ€

Shurtleff appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, gaining the support of groups including the ACLU, which filed an amicus brief in his support.

โ€œWe have long expressed concern about government endorsement of religion, and have sued often to enforce the Establishment Clause,โ€ย statedย ACLU National Legal Director David Cole last November. โ€œBut when the government opens a forum to private speakers generally, as Boston did here, it canโ€™t turn away a speaker simply because it is religious.โ€ย ย 

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook


Reported by SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | May 02, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/china-taiwan-usa-sanctions/

Stoking fears that China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan, Chinese officials are looking for ways to defend their country from economic isolation should Western nations opt to sanction China in a similar fashion to how they sanctioned Russia after it invaded Ukraine.

The Daily Mail reported that Chinaโ€™s economic regulators held emergency meetings in late April with officials from the Chinese central bank, the finance ministry, domestic banks operating in China, and international leaders in the financial sectors like HSBC.

In the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putinโ€™s invasion of Ukraine, Western nations locked arms and issued thorough sanctions on the Russian economy. These sanctions caused the Russian economy to plummet and prompted drastic retaliatory threats from the Russian government.

These Western sanctions greatly restricted Russiaโ€™s ability to conduct business with other nations by limiting its use of the SWIFT telecommunications network and making it virtually impossible for it to conduct business with the global reserve currency โ€“ the U.S. dollar.

The crippling effect these sanctions have had on the Russian economy prompted the emergency meeting between Chinese officials and financial executives. Chinese President Xi Jinping has been startled by the dollar freeze and is concerned about a similar policy being leveraged against China.

Reportedly, the U.S. is considering implementing similar packages of sanctions against China in the event that it moves forward with an invasion of Taiwan. Recent and repeated rhetoric from Chinese leadership indicates that it is not a matter of โ€œifโ€ but a matter of โ€œwhenโ€ China launches an invasion of Taiwan.

A source close to the Chinese officials who met said, โ€œNo one site could think of a good solution to the problem. Chinaโ€™s banking system isnโ€™t prepared for a freeze of its dollar assets or exclusion from the Swift messaging system as the US has done to Russia.โ€

Reportedly, one idea proposed in the meeting was to force Chinese businesses that export to other nations to part ways with their holdings in U.S. dollars in exchange for Chinese renminbi.

Other proposed solutions such as swamping U.S. dollar holdings to favor the Euro were not thought to be practical.

Some of the Chinese leaders present doubted whether the U.S. even has the capacity to issue such sanctions on Chinaโ€™s economy.

Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, said, โ€œIt is difficult for the U.S. to impose massive sanctions against China. It is like mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war.โ€


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ October 2022 Election Surprise

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 30, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-october-2022-election-surprise/

Some are afraid that Democrats will weaponize COVID to gain an advantage in the 2022 election.

COVID and the 2022 Election
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ The Sticky Fingers Gang

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย May 2, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-sticky-fingers-gang/

Joe Biden and his son hunter have received millions of dollars from China and Ukraine in exchange for what?

01 Biden Fam LI 1080
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

SUMMING UP THE WEEK


April 29, 2022


POSTED BY:ย SPENCER LINDQUIST | APRIL 29, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/the-left-is-united-by-who-they-despise-not-what-they-support/

The theories of a French philosopher might hold the key to understanding the leftโ€™s organizational success โ€“ and the means to defeat the woke regime.

Author Spencer Lindquist profile

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While the right continues to undergo a process of factional introspection, it can be easy to forget that our opponents in the culture war arenโ€™t a monolith either. And while it seems that the Cathedral pushes our society to the left via a unified front, the progressive coalitionโ€™s unity is not just sustainable, itโ€™s artificial.

The leftโ€™s ability to patch together a truly bizarre coalition is, however, undeniably impressive. Itโ€™d appear theyโ€™ve learned how to apply the Saul Alinsky-esque tactics of community organizing across, rather than just within, communities. How else can one explain the puzzling composition of the coalition? Consider just how divergent the interests and identities of so many of the Democratic Partyโ€™s supporters truly are. 

What, for example, do the drug-addled Antifa of Seattle, the residents of CHOP, have in common with old money East coast liberals with summer homes in Nantucket? What do the technocratic middle managers in the hills of Palo Alto share with illegal immigrants on the other side of Silicon Valley? What does your average attendee of the Womenโ€™s March share with an H1B recipient from China or India, and what do either have in common with a hardcore Black Lives Matter activist? Perhaps more glaring than the rest, what is it exactly that a transgender activist in San Francisco and a traditional Muslim can bond over? 

Is the progressive mythos of โ€œglobal citizenryโ€ really that binding? The reality that this coalition is maintained while leftwing messaging amplifies, not downplays, the role of identity makes it all the more intriguing. Unifying this bloc is no small feat.  

Progressivismโ€™s Enemies Provide Scapegoats

In trying to discern how the left has effectively bound together a coalition of disparate interests, it is vastly more useful to examine what they oppose rather than the policies they support. Itโ€™s much easier too. 

One would think that natural political discord would occur between those who want to โ€œeat the richโ€ and the rich themselves, or between those who abide by a patriarchal sexual ethic and a movement that endured a collective aneurysm when Florida told them teachers couldnโ€™t talk about sexuality with elementary schoolers. The natural splintering of this leftwing coalition is delayed through what the French philosopher Renee Girard referred to as the scapegoat mechanism.

Through the scapegoat mechanism, internal social conflict between groups or individuals can be deferred by identifying a villain, the scapegoat. The scapegoat is held responsible by the conflicting parties, who mutually, although not always consciously, cast the blame on those who simultaneously fulfill the role of the victim and the villain.

This scapegoat then cannot be regarded as a guiltless Christ figure who dies with the sins of its sacrificers, but is identified as the very source of the sin โ€” the inciter of conflict. Accordingly, overcoming this scapegoat is naturally regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the avoidance of conflict. 

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: โ€œthe victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished. In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.โ€

Identifying our woke regimeโ€™s scapegoats isnโ€™t difficult. Simply observe the cultural messaging from any of the institutions that are owned and operated by progressives. The regime media and their allies throughout much of the government, academia, and the non-profit complex offer frequent reminders of who you are supposed to disdain.

Masculine men are turned into scapegoats when they are dubbed toxic, sexist enforcers of patriarchy. Christians similarly face accusations of oppressing women and those who are LGBT. White people are also approved targets, thought to be inherently racist and privileged, simultaneously the beneficiaries and the managers of an intangible but ever-present system of oppression. Even stable nuclear families are to be viewed with skepticism, either for perpetuating gender roles or straining the environment by daring to have kids.

The terms for the regimeโ€™s scapegoats are many. Hostility for the โ€œdeplorables,โ€ the sexists and the racists, the rednecks and the retrogrades, the bigots, the โ€œkarensโ€ and all different stripes of -phobes, is what holds together such a fragile coalition. Party operatives blame their internal conflicts on those who are regarded as the oppressors and pit Americans against one another. The terms differ but serve the same purpose: to designate a scapegoat as a regime-approved target.

Those who fall into one of the several oppressor identity categories but align with the left are offered the opportunity to prove themselves โ€“ but never absolve themselves โ€“ as dutiful allies through ritualistic self-degradation. If theyโ€™re servile enough, they might even get promoted to the rank of โ€œco-conspirator,โ€ delaying their inevitable designation as scapegoats until their expediency runs dry. 

The grand irony is of course that none of these collectives wield significant power and are instead openly maligned by the ruling class. Nevertheless, we are constantly told that America and her institutions are engaging in organized oppression on a mass scale.

In the leftโ€™s worldview, our institutions enforce the patriarchy and the gender binary, all while they are governed by white supremacy. Itโ€™s a self defeating argument when one realizes that it is these very power structures that pay diversity consultants their exorbitant fees, fund pride parades, push transgenderism, and adopt discriminatory affirmative action policies. It is, of course, vital to note that the rightโ€™s gripe should be with these hostile institutions, not the everyday Americans who are influenced by them, to the detriment of all.

Bloc-Busting

The simplest way to expose the incongruity of the leftwing coalition is to merely ask questions that highlight the absurdity of the progressive bloc. Raise ethical inquiries about abortion or transgenderism among Democrat-aligned Muslims, or ask Austin tech workers why they support H1B visa programs that threaten their job security. Ask progressive white women if they truly believe that they and their โ€œwhite tearsโ€ will be able to maintain their rapidly deteriorating status among the oppressed and the immunity that comes with it.

Question radical feminists who rage against toxic masculinity, asking why they support mass immigration from highly patriarchal Islamic countries. Or ask a Seattle communist what the appropriate tax rate is for the millionaire who funded the neoliberal candidate he ended up voting for.

This must be done without trafficking in the same dangerous divisiveness that the left used in their ascent to power, without engaging in scapegoating ourselves. The goal is not to weaponize the coalitionโ€™s parts against itself because the coalition isnโ€™t the problem โ€” it is the institutions that sought to bind their base together by haphazardly casting blame on entire collectives. 

Done correctly, this approach will offer much needed nuance and obstruct the woke regimeโ€™s attempt at fostering conflict. It will also expose how Democrat apparatchiks and their co-conspirators across sectors have taken advantage of their constituency while they constructed it, weaponizing identities in cynical power games.

Itโ€™s a necessary step in ensuring that whatever unity our country attains is based on healthy, sustainable foundations โ€” not institutionally manufactured disdain for the regimeโ€™s scapegoats.


Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdineโ€™s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.


REPORTED BY:ย JORDAN BOYD | APRIL 29, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/u-s-special-forces-veterans-rescue-afghan-family-biden-abandoned-reunite-them-with-american-father/

family silhouette

It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

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While thousands of illegal immigrants pour across the southwest U.S. border daily, Afghan refugees abandoned by the Biden administration during the Afghanistan withdrawal are still struggling to gain legal entry to the United States.

It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Afghanistan, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month. Niazy became a U.S. citizen in 2020 through the Special Immigrant Visa program after working as a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He began translating and training recruits at the Kabul Military Training Center in 2007 after his older brother died in combat while working with special forces. When Niazy obtained his U.S. visa in 2014, he resigned from his job and flew to the states.ย 

Niazy told me he wanted to bring his family over with him, but every time he tried to initiate the immigration process, his wife was pregnant and wanted to avoid strenuous travel. Freshta and the children eventually joined the backlogged SIV immigration process before the Taliban took over the country, but their quest for permanent U.S. residency was derailed when President Joe Biden initiated the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last fall.

I first reported on Niazyโ€™s family situation inย September 2021ย when his brother, wife, and kids were all stranded in a Taliban-infested Kabul. At the time, Niazy was already in the United States, working nights and eagerly building a life for his family in Texas. But his excitement for his familyโ€™s new life in America was blunted when he realized they might not make it past theย crowdsย at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul to get on an evacuation flight out of Afghanistan.

โ€œSuddenly the Taliban took over the country and now we were like lost,โ€ Niazy told me.

Thatโ€™s when โ€œangels from the skyโ€ came in.

The Escape

After weeks of chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where some translators and their families were among the more than 200 people killed by a suicide bomber on August 26, Freshta and the kids, ranging in age from 3 to 12 years old, finally escaped Kabul at the end of September with the help of a large group of former U.S. soldiers, some trained in special operations.

Jim Young, Dan Fickel, Keye Perry, Joe Penkala, and another man named โ€œTom,โ€ who is still in active government service and declined to give his last name, all graduated from West Point in 1994. When they saw the crisis in Afghanistan, they banded together to do everything they could to rescue Americans and Afghan allies the Biden administration had left behind. They enlisted the aid of several other former service members including Ryan Timoney, West Point class of 1993 graduate Dave Abrahams, retired Special Forces officer Matt Coburn, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Helen Jbeily of California Republican Rep. David Valadaoโ€™s office to actively shepherd Freshta, her brother-in-law, and her kids to the overcrowded, dangerous airport for evacuation while avoiding the Taliban as much as possible.

I talked to Penkala, a retired U.S. Army officer, about the rescue efforts after the Niazy familyโ€™s first attempt to seek evacuation at the airport.

โ€œWe had sort of an up and down type of situation, even after we had taken over his case, and had managed to get the family back to [the airport]. And it was through no small effort on the part of some folks from the Special Operations community, one individual in particular who was retired,โ€ Penkala told me over the phone. โ€œWe actually got them to the North Gate [of the airport] so this is the second time they had made it to the airport. And even though there was an obvious way to bring them in, frankly, they were still left stranded. Nobody would open the gate for them even though at one point we only had about 25 people in front of the North Gate.โ€

At one point, Penkala told me that, โ€œthe Taliban began beating some of the local Afghans,โ€ forcing the on-the-ground rescuers to adapt as the Niazy clan retreated to their apartment.

During that time, Niazy said his wife โ€œnever lost her courage.โ€

โ€œThere was the time that I lost my hope. That was the time when my wife said โ€˜Itโ€™s okay. Whatever it takes me to get my kids to their dad, I will do that,โ€™โ€ Niazy said. โ€œSo that was a time when she gave me the courage, she gave me the hope and I needed it.โ€

Efforts to orchestrate the evacuation of the Niazys and hundreds of others from the clutches of the Taliban were largely funded by one of Youngโ€™s business partners, Zekelman Industries out of Texas, which donated $1 million out of the $1.1 million required to reunite the Niazy family and other refugees after another sponsor backed out.

After days of chaos, the Niazy family and 528 other American citizens, legal permanent residents, their spouses, and their children were finally able to flee Afghanistan unharmed.

โ€œWeโ€™re so thankful for all these great humans. From God first and then from all these humans that helped me and came into my life, me and my wife,โ€ Niazy said.

Evacuation Was Only The Beginning

Even though the Niazy family applied to permanently rejoin the head of their household in the United States, it was a long and difficult process between September of last year and early April this year, when they were finally permitted to set foot on American soil.

โ€œThis was a family who was already in the process and had paperwork prepared. And, frankly, the wife was married to a U.S. citizen. This is the immediate family of a United States citizen and it took private efforts,โ€ Penkala said. โ€œAnd once we got them out of harmโ€™s way, it took an additional five months to come into the country.โ€

During that time, Freshta and her children were at a refugee camp in the United Arab Emirates. While the family was safe from the dangers the Taliban posed to them, they were stuck in limbo and at the mercy of the American bureaucracy.

Penkala said โ€œthere were some folks who were kind enough to work through their connections to get them some additional food and supplies and that type of thingโ€ but that didnโ€™t help reunite the family.

Niazy admitted that the experience induced many โ€œsleepless nightsโ€ for him as he anxiously waited for the green light. In total, it took more than five months for Niazy, an American citizen who served with U.S. forces in combat, to legally relocate his wife and kids to Texas.

The American Dream

The Niazy family may have had to jump through multiple hoops that illegal immigrants at the Southern border donโ€™t, but a lack of help from the U.S. government hasnโ€™t hampered their enthusiasm for the American Dream.

While Niazy works as an engineering technician, Freshta and the children are acclimating to their new lives along with Niazyโ€™s parents, who also emigrated to the United States. Once the family moves to a new apartment, three of the four children will start attending school. 

In just a couple of weeks, Freshta and the Niazy children are expected to receive their Social Security numbers. But for now he is thankful that his immediate family made it to a free country where his daughters can attend school.

โ€œItโ€™s the teaching of our parents that wherever you live, treat it as your home, keep it clean, and keep the environment clean and also treat your neighbors good,โ€ Niazy said. โ€œWith this [Taliban] regime, no one is happy and everybody lost the hope that [Afghanistan] will ever be a free country.โ€

When I video chatted with the family last week, Niazy had just woken up after working a night shift at his engineering job and Freshta was preparing food in the familyโ€™s apartment kitchen. The children were happily chattering with each other as they played with toys. The youngest one gave me a shy wave.

โ€œThis is a beautiful life,โ€ Niazy said as he bounced his daughter on his lap. โ€œIโ€™m very excited and very happy. And I am praying for those who helped me, these beautiful humans in my life.โ€


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


Reported Byย Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editorย | Thursday, April 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/christian-students-sue-university-of-idaho-for-censoring-speech.html/

The University of Idaho, located in Moscow, Idaho. | University of Idaho Photo Services

Three Christian college students have sued the University of Idaho for alleged wrongful punishment for expressing traditional views on marriage and sexual ethics on campus. Students Peter Perlot, Mark Miller and Ryan Alexander of the Christian Legal Societyย sued the universityย in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, Central Division on Monday.

The defendants named in the suit include University President C. Scott Green, Dean of Students Brian Eckles, Office of Civil Rights & Investigations Director Erin Agidius and OCRI Deputy Director Lindsay Ewan. According to the lawsuit, the three students went to an LGBT event on campus seeking to represent a biblical perspective on marriage and sexuality. When a student approached to ask their views, they offered their perspectives and gave the student a note expressing an interest in continuing the dialogue. Soon after, however, the Christian students were given โ€œno-contact ordersโ€ from the OCRI, which prohibited them from communicating with the student.

โ€œThe CLS members did not receive notice that anyone had complained about them and were not given an opportunity to review the allegations against them or defend themselves,โ€ according to the suit.

โ€œInstead of allowing the students to disagree civilly and respectfully with one another and to discuss these important issues, the University chose instead to censor Plaintiffs.โ€

The students are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has argued religious liberty cases at the U.S. Supreme Court on numerous occasions. ADF Legal Counsel Michael Ross said inย a statementย released Tuesday that he believed students โ€œmust be free to discuss and debate the important issues of our day, especially law students who are preparing for a career that requires civil dialogue among differing viewpoints.โ€

โ€œYet the University of Idaho is shutting down Peter, Mark, and Ryan because of their religious beliefs. This is illegal behavior from any government official, and we urge the university officials to right their discriminatory actions immediately,โ€ Ross stated.

Jodi Walker, the university’s senior communication’s director, told The Christian Post that the academic institution โ€œcannot discuss pending litigation or specific student cases.โ€

Walker explained that the no-contact order was โ€œa supportive measure available to a student under Title IXโ€ and that โ€œthese supportive measures must be enactedโ€ when a student requests them.

โ€œWhen a complaint is made that qualifies under Title IX, the university must make the student aware of the supportive measures available,โ€ noted Walker. ย 

Walker directed CP to a July 2021 guidance document from the U.S. Department of Education titled โ€œQuestions and Answers on the Title IX Regulations on Sexual Harassment.โ€

Under the question on โ€œsupportive measures,โ€ the guidance explained that schools have โ€œdiscretion and flexibility to determine which supportive measures are appropriate.โ€

โ€œThe preamble states that a school must consider โ€˜each set of unique circumstancesโ€™ to determine what individualized services would be appropriate based on the โ€˜facts and circumstances of that situation,โ€™โ€ stated the guidance.

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook


|ย Julie Carr

Read more at https://tennesseestar.com/2022/04/08/all-star-panelist-roger-simon-discovers-gay-b-cs-on-williamson-county-kindergartner-epic-app/

person holding up a book

Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy โ€“ broadcast on Nashvilleโ€™s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. โ€“ host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist and The Epoch Timesโ€™  Editor-at-Large Roger Simon in-studio to discuss the recent finding of Woke curriculum on kindergartnersโ€™ Epic App in Williamson County.

Leahy: We welcome to our studios, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist, former head of Pajamas Media, my former boss at PJTV, and now the senior editor at The Epoch Times, Roger Simon. Good morning, Roger.

Simon: Good morning! Iโ€™m actually up this morning. I donโ€™t know why.

Leahy: By the way, I bring greetings from Jenny Beth Martin. We interviewed her. Jenny Beth Martin, the founder of Tea Party Patriots.

Of course, it was actually you set up the arrangement for the first time that all the Tea Party folks met back in April of 2009. That was 13 years ago. I know.

Simon: Everything is sounding so long ago.

Leahy: I know, but you were out in L.A. You flew us all out, and we had several programs about the Tea Party movement. Thatโ€™s the first time I met Jenny Beth Martin. She sends you her very best regards.

Simon: Where is she now? Sheโ€™s in Atlanta running Tea Party Patriots.

Simon: Not that far away. She told me that sheโ€™s given this year so far 57 speeches. So, out there and pushing the constitutional populist conservative agenda. Roger, now you are, I think, one of the most popular, if not the most popular columnist at The Epoch Times, a great news outlet.

I got to tell you, apparently, Roger, the spirit of Dr. Seuss has resurrected and youโ€™ve got a story coming out. Listen to this, folks. N is for nonbinary, T is for trans.

Simon: (Laughter) Well, that, it turns out, is a local story because it came to me by folks here in Williamson County.

Leahy: Isnโ€™t Williamson County the best public school system in the state of Tennessee?

Simon: Oh, yeah. Itโ€™s Republican heaven, except for the schools, because the thing that these folks were complaining about is that there was a book on their kindergartenersโ€™ iPads. Kids take iPads home from school now.

Leahy: I think some take iPads, some take Google Chrome.

Simon: Same difference.

Leahy: They take them home for the weekend. They use them during the day.

Simon: Sometimes it depends on what grade theyโ€™re in. Sometimes itโ€™s daily. But anyway, they opened this up and it said they had something called the ABCs. The Gay-B-Cs.

Leahy: Hold on. The Gay-B-Cs? Not the ABCs?

Simon: This is for kindergarten.

Leahy: Oh, my goodness.

Simon: So things are like N is for [non]binary and T is for trans. I know. Dr. Seuss, of course, has been drummed out of the literature by the Left. So if I ran the zoo, said Gerald McGrew, Iโ€™d be dying binary too.

Leahy: Thatโ€™s very good, Roger.

Simon: Well, I write for a living anyway. And none of the success of Dr. Seuss, although I have only been canceled by Facebook.

Leahy: More of your books are in print than his these days.

Simon: Although I was canceled by Facebook. Thatโ€™s true. It just happened two days ago, and they wonโ€™t tell me why, but I donโ€™t care. So further rhetoric in this thing is, C is, needless to say, for โ€œcoming outโ€ and D is for drag.

Leahy: This is for kindergartners, on the iPad of kindergartners in Williamson County, public schools?

Simon: All of them, yes. Until yesterday when it was discovered and they went to the authorities there and they go โ€œoops.โ€ And they removed it.

Leahy: Itโ€™s been removed now.

Simon: Yeah it got removed in a hurry I guess out of embarrassment. But why it got there in the first place is something people ought to think about.

Leahy: Wow. How did it get there in the first place?

Simon: Well, they bought an app, and the app I think itโ€™s called Epic.

Leahy: Epic, right?

Simon: The app is called Epic, and that app has 40,000 books on it so they couldnโ€™t possibly vet them. Thatโ€™s ridiculous. There may be more things just as absurd as the Gay-B-Cs on there.

Leahy: Okay, so this for kindergartners itโ€™s been removed now, but it was up there, and the Gay-B-Cs include C is for coming out. D is for drag, N is for non-binary, T is for trans. This is what every kindergartner in Williamson County was exposed to until yesterday.

Simon: Youโ€™ll never guess what B is for. B is for bi. They include a doggie along with it so when B is for bi you can shout it out loud, I like boys and girls and that makes me proud.

Leahy: This is for kindergarten?

Simon: Yes. Ages 4 through 8. It says on the book. It goes up to the third grade.

Leahy: At least they had the good sense to remove it.

Simon: Yes.

Leahy: What else is out there?

Simon: We donโ€™t know.

Tune in weekdays from 5:00 โ€“ 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo โ€œThe Gay BCs story timeโ€ by Parker Schultz.


Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | April 29, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/court-observers-believe-roberts-signals-major-abortion-decision/

Court observers suggested Thursday that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has signaled the court will significantly slash abortion rights. In December, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments forย Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case is centered on a Mississippi abortion law that prohibits abortion beyond 15 weeks of gestation.

At issueย is whetherย “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The case ultimately challenges the precedent established byย Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which both upheld the right to elective abortions underย Roe v. Wadeย and affirmed the unfettered legality of abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision inย Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller,ย ruling thatย “emotional distress damages are not recoverable in a private action to enforce either the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 or the Affordable Care Act.”

The case is completely unrelated to abortion. But what is interesting, however, is who wrote the majority opinion: Roberts. This matters because the court heard oral arguments for nine cases in December; thus each justice was most likely assigned to write the opinion of one case. Therefore, if Roberts wrote the opinion in this case, it suggests he is not writing the opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“Roberts’ authorship of this opinion suggests (but does not guarantee) that he is NOT writing the abortion decision. Otherwise, he would have two majority opinions from the December sitting and some other justice would have none,”ย observedย Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter Greg Stohr.

Michigan Law School assistant professor Leah Litman pointed out the significance of this: Because Roberts supports narrowing abortion access but not overturning Roe v. Wade completely, the fact that he may not have been assigned the Dobbs opinion hints that a consequential ruling is forthcoming, probably a rolling back of abortion rights.

Stohr, however, cautioned against rushing to assumptions, because Justice Neil Gorsuch authored two opinions for cases the court heard in November. Still, the distribution of opinion-writing is normally balanced.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board theorized recently that Roberts may attempt to recruit at least one conservative justice to uphold the Mississippi law without a wholesale nullification of abortion rights. It has happened once, when Gorsuch joined Roberts and the court’s left-leaning justices to protect LGBT rights, but whether it will happen again remains to be seen.

For what it’s worth, the Journal predicted the outcome of Dobbs will be a 5-4 ruling with Roberts joining the court’s left-leaning justices and Justice Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion.


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Up in Smoke

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 29, 2022 at | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-up-in-smoke/

Chris Wallace left Fox News to jump on the now-canceled streaming channel CNN + costing them 3oo million.

CNN plus Ends
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


REPORTED BY:ย DAN O’DONNELL | APRIL 28, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/28/this-insane-2020-time-magazine-article-explains-exactly-why-the-left-fears-losing-twitter/

Twitter app on phone

An astonishing but largely forgotten story in Time Magazine explains why there is so much leftist concern today about Elon Muskโ€™s purchase of Twitter.

Author Dan O'Donnell profile

DAN O’DONNELL

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Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Muskโ€™s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melberโ€™s was easily the most revealing.

โ€œIf you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you donโ€™t have to explain yourself,โ€ย he gravely intoned during his showย Monday evening. โ€œYou donโ€™t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one partyโ€™s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it โ€˜til after the election.โ€

You donโ€™t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitledย โ€œThe Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.โ€

โ€œFor more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up Americaโ€™s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,โ€ wrote reporter Molly Ball. โ€œTheir work touched every aspect of the election.โ€

And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, โ€œeven though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream โ€” a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.โ€

Their aim, they insisted, wasnโ€™t to rig the election but to โ€œfortifyโ€ it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.

โ€œTheir work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.โ€

The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Bidenโ€™s laptop threatened to derail his fatherโ€™s candidacy and undo the organized leftโ€™s hard work.

The New York Postโ€™s exclusive storyย dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing โ€œsmoking-gun emailsโ€ showing that the younger Biden introduced his father โ€œto a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.โ€

The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the storeโ€™s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually โ€œhacked materialsโ€ and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.

Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Postโ€™s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunterโ€™s, and the younger Bidenโ€™s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Postโ€™s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.

It didnโ€™t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials โ€œRussian disinformation,โ€ it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.

Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected,ย both The New York Times and Washington Postย confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed thatย 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votesย had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on โ€œfortifyingโ€ democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Centerโ€™s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.

โ€œTrumpโ€™s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,โ€ Ball reported. โ€œLaura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.โ€

She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly โ€œtoxic contentโ€ or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so โ€œthe solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.โ€

This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on โ€œdisinformationโ€ that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to โ€œsave democracyโ€ and defeat the โ€œautocraticโ€ Trump, it was censored.

โ€œDemocracy won in the end,โ€ Ball concluded. โ€œThe will of the people prevailed. But itโ€™s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.โ€

This reveals the real threat of Muskโ€™s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.


Dan Oโ€™Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.


REPORTED BY:ย MARK HEMINGWAY | APRIL 28, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/28/the-washington-posts-repulsive-defense-of-twitter-execs-makes-even-elon-musk-look-good/

Elon Musk

In buying out Twitter, Elon Musk is more important for what he has revealed than what he has done.

Author Mark Hemingway profile

MARK HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@HEMINATOR

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Yesterday, amid the ongoing bladder loosening that has accompanied Elon Muskโ€™s takeover of Twitter, leaks started coming from inside the tech company. Politico reported that โ€œTwitterโ€™s top lawyer reassures staff, cries during meeting about Musk takeover.โ€

The lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, has played a major role in some of Twitterโ€™s most controversial decisions, such as removing former President Trump and censoring The New York Post from the platform for reporting an accurate story about the damning Hunter Biden laptop weeks before his father was elected president amid real questions about his involvement in his sonโ€™s corruption. Gaddeโ€™s political motivations donโ€™t seem to be a mystery. Six days before the 2020 election, Politico profiled her under the headline, โ€œIs Twitter Going Full Resistance? Hereโ€™s the Woman Driving the Change.โ€ And itโ€™s pretty clear that she contributed to Twitter making at least one terrible decision. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would later admit the company made a โ€œtotal mistakeโ€ in censoring the story.

By any reasonable measure, Gadde has earned her fair share of criticism โ€” quite literally. Twitter is reportedly paying her just shy of $17 million a year, and one of the main justifications for such exorbitant executive pay, however flimsy, is public accountability. If you must fall on a sword, I imagine an eight-figure bank balance cushions the blow quite a bit. So on Tuesday, Saagar Enjeti, the co-host of the popular online political show โ€œTurning Points,โ€ tweeted a screenshot of the Politico headline about Gadde cryingย and observed, โ€œVijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who famously gaslit the world on Joe Roganโ€™s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the @elonmusk takeover.โ€ Musk himself decided to reply to Enjeti, adding, โ€œSuspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.โ€

That same day, Mike Cernovich, who has a large right-leaning Twitter account,ย noted that Twitterโ€™s deputy general counsel is Jim Baker, who was previously general counsel of the FBI. While at the FBI, Baker played a very controversial role in the FBIโ€™s discredited investigation into the Trump campaignโ€™s alleged ties to Russia. (In fact,ย hereโ€™s Baker being askedย about the process for FISA warrants, which were used by the FBI to spy on the former president: โ€œDo I need to have every one of those details? I mean these things are already quite long. Look, itโ€™s an art, not a science.โ€)

Musk responded to Cernovichโ€™s tweet: โ€œSounds pretty badโ€ฆโ€

These two interactions would be pretty thin gruel for a news story on their own merits, but Musk is the richest man in the world, and obviously what the new owner says about Twitter is noteworthy.

Anyway, you wouldnโ€™t believe what the Washington Post did next! Or maybe you will.

Stifling Dissent

At 3:03 a.m. Wednesday, the Post dropped its story on the matter: โ€œElon Musk boosts criticism of Twitter executives, prompting online attacks: The targeting of employees by Muskโ€™s massive Twitter megaphone is a major concern for workers.โ€

The horror only compounds from there. โ€œMuskโ€™s response Tuesday was the first time he targeted specific Twitter executives by using his nearly singular ability to call attention to topics that interest him,โ€ intoned the Post. โ€œSupporters of Musk, a prolific and freewheeling tweeter with 86 million followers, tend to pile on with his viewpoints.โ€

To be clear, Musk never said anything specific about Gadde, except to imply her role in the decision to ban The New York Post was wrong โ€” an opinion that isnโ€™t controversial and was publicly stated by Twitterโ€™s previous CEO. As for Baker, Musk was commenting on his previous conduct as a public official, which by any accurate assessment was defined by poor judgment. Regardless, โ€œsounds badโ€ is not exactly committing to a definitive judgment of the man, much less in his current role at Twitter.

(As for what it says that the FBIโ€™s former general counsel went from a disgraceful role in a spy scandal meant to influence the 2016 election to a lucrative gig at a tech company perhaps best known for its clumsy and dishonest attempts to influence the 2020 electionโ€ฆ well, let your imagination run wild. Thereโ€™s no explanation that isnโ€™t disheartening.)   

Neither person was โ€œtargeted.โ€ The entire story is more accurately restated by the Washington Post expressing shock and dismay that millionaire tech executives might find themselves receiving public criticism from billionaire tech entrepreneurs. Thatโ€™s a pretty questionable premise for one of the nationโ€™s most influential news outlets to endorse.

As Mike Solana, no stranger to observing the tech industry,ย put it, โ€œThis is a country of over 300 million people. If the rule for acceptable criticism of powerful executives and state propagandists is โ€˜canโ€™t lead to *someone else* saying something awful,โ€™ you effectively end all vital dissent. Then, that is of course the point.โ€

Believe me, when you learn how this story was reported, the notion the Post was trying to stifle dissent is not an outrageous assumption. The Post almost entirely ignored the substance of the criticisms leveled at Baker and Gadde and did not make good-faith attempts to include alternate perspectives.

On Wednesday, Enjeti took to Twitter and blasted the Postโ€™s story, which hinged on his interaction with Musk: โ€œWAPO says I did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Complete BS, they emailed *my producer* at 2am ESTโ€ฆ7 hours after @elonmuskย  replied to my tweet with the following RIDICULOUS questions.โ€ Without waiting for Enjeti to respond, the Post published the story in the middle of the night, less than an hour after asking him for comment.

The questions the Post asked were hilariously loaded. Essentially, Enjeti was asked to explain his villainous behavior:

Does [Enjeti] have any concern that mentioning a specific Twitter exec could result in attacks on that exec? What are the responsibilities here? For example, one of the commenters on the tweets made racist comments against Gadde, and said she should be fired.

What does [Enjeti] hope to accomplish by calling out Gadde and getting Musk involved?

Enjeti wasย rightly disgusted: โ€œThis is a great example of how the media smears you. I make a substantive point, randos say something. Now myself and @elonmusk are somehow racist/responsible for them!ย  All to cover up the fact that they substantively agree with censorship.โ€

Class Warfare

Aside from their desire to prop up an opaque regime of algorithmic censorship produced by an unholy collusion of tech executives and state propagandists, the more benign explanation for the Postโ€™s motivations โ€” and this in no way negates both motives being true โ€” was summed up by Josh Barro: โ€œThe idea that the important thing here is the feelings of Twitter employees (especially senior executives) is just so unhinged. Pure class affiliation on the part of journalists, they consider existing Twitter management to be their partners.โ€

Indeed, class affiliation increasingly explains this bizarre and indefensible media behavior, as well as their growing inability to describe basic realities. Batya Ungar-Sargon has written a very good book on the problem.

However, if thereโ€™s a line between class affiliation and class warfare, the corporate mediaโ€™s pro-censorship crusade has obliterated it. For a long time, I balked at Trump daring to call the media โ€œthe enemy of the people,โ€ but it is becoming impossible to ignore that the mediaโ€™s motives reflect an โ€œUsโ€ vs. โ€œYouโ€ mentality. In this case, asย Tim Carney notes, โ€œThe best way to understand the media is to ask who do they consider โ€˜us.โ€™ The college educated progressive high-level tech employees are โ€˜usโ€™ to the average tech reporter.โ€

As long as weโ€™re talking about class solidarity, it should also be clear that it would be foolish of anyone critical of the current censorship regime to assume that Musk will be a reliable champion of a set of particular values or whatever else you think might be necessary to preserve Americaโ€™s legacy of prosperity and ordered liberty. There is no need to go out of your way to defend him, heโ€™s just one very wealthy man, and odds are high he will disappoint you. Maybe he wonโ€™t sell his soul to China. Maybe he will get us to Mars. But here and now, Musk is more important for what he has revealed than what he has done.

By merely expressing support for a conception of free speech that Americans almost universally agreed on 15 years ago, he threatens to take a battering ram to the doors of The Cathedral. He is a threat to an existing order that corruptly benefits progressive elites, an unaccountable government, and a media too dumb and pliable to realize thereโ€™s no glory in defending someone who makes $17 million a year from mean tweets.  

Itโ€™s not that any thoughtful American doesnโ€™t have serious reservations about an eccentric billionaire presenting himself as a guardian of the right to free speech. The problem is that weโ€™ve been given a choice between Elon Musk and the demented and hostile worldview chronicled in the Washington Post, and the choice is obvious.


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


Reported Byย Samantha Kamman, CP Contributor | Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/parents-sue-school-for-helping-kids-adopt-new-gender-identities.html/

A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016.ย |ย REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Two pairs of parents are suing the staff of a Massachusetts middle school for allegedly encouraging their children to adopt new gender identities without their knowledge or consent. 

Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, alongside Jonathan Feliciano and Sandra Salmeron, filed theย lawsuitย on April 12 in a Massachusetts federal district court with the help of theย Child and Parental Rights Campaignย and theย Massachusetts Family Institute. The organizations help parents navigate issues surrounding gender identity and parental rights.ย Several school officials at Baird Middle School are named defendants in the lawsuit, including Interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth, former Superintendent Todd Gazda, Baird Middle School Principal Stacy Monette, school counselor Marie-Claire Foley and former librarian Jordan Funke.ย 

Ludlow Public Schools Interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth did not immediately respond to The Christian Postโ€™s request for comment.

Foote and Silvestri claim that they were unaware of the โ€œtransitioningโ€ of their young son and daughter, referred to as G.F. and B.F., respectively, in the filing. They say they became aware after their daughterโ€™s teacher, Bonnie Manchester, told them in December 2020 that their daughter was struggling with her self-esteem. The teacher forwarded the parents an email in which their 11-year-old daughter claimed she was โ€œgenderqueer,” citing her new name and pronouns as โ€œhe/him.โ€ย The parents contacted the school, requesting that the school refrain from discussing the issue with their children and allow them to โ€œdirect the mental health care of their children.โ€

The complaint states that Foote and Silvestri โ€œhave sincerely held religious beliefs that human beings are created male or female and that the natural created order regarding human sexuality cannot be changed regardless of individual feelings, beliefs, or discomfort with oneโ€™s identity, and biological reality, as either male or female.โ€

The parents claim they made it clear they would provide their daughter with the help she needed from a โ€œmental health professional,โ€ but they believe the school disregarded their instructions.

Foote and Silvestri claim their daughter โ€œchanged her preferred name at least twice since December 2020โ€ without their knowledge and claim the school continues to address B.F. by โ€œwhatever iteration of her name she has indicated she prefersโ€ despite their request not to do so. The lawsuit also alleges that the coupleโ€™s son has โ€œidentified as transgender and requested to be called by a female name,โ€ accusing the school of helping him hide this information from his parents.ย The lawsuit also describes an assignment given to students in September 2019 by librarian Jordan Funke, which allegedly asked students to create videos of their preferred gender pronouns. B.F. and possibly G.F. participated in the assignment without their parents knowing or consenting to their kidsโ€™ participation.ย 

The other set of parents, Feliciano and Salmeron, claim that they โ€œare deliberately hindered from ascertaining whether their children are being secretly counseled about and affirmed in discordant gender identities without their knowledge or consent.โ€

โ€œ[Efforts] to affirm a discordant student gender identity at school violates parentsโ€™ fundamental rights under the United States and Massachusetts constitutions and violates childrenโ€™s reciprocal rights to the care and custody of their parents, familial privacy, and integrity,โ€ the filing states.ย 

The parents also alleged that the school superintendent at the time, Todd Gazda, publicly referred to opposition to gender transitions as โ€œintolerance of LGBTQ peopleโ€ disguised as โ€œparental rights.โ€ Gazda also reportedly implied that school is the only โ€œsafe paceโ€ for students struggling with gender identity. The plaintiffs pointed out that the School Committee did not refute Gazdaโ€™s remarks.ย 

The lawsuit accuses Ludlow Public Schools of having a โ€œprotocol and practice of concealing from parents information related to their childrenโ€™s gender identity.โ€

Ludlow School Committee Chair James P. Harrington told MassLive that the school district’s teachers and staff are looking out for their students’ best interests.

โ€œItโ€™s a slippery slope,โ€ he was quoted as saying. โ€œWe want to support our students the best we can. But we should bring parents to the table, and hope they respond in a loving and supportive way as well.โ€

Bruce Hausknecht, a judicial analyst for the Christian organizationย Focus on the Family, told The Christian Post that “gender ideology in many of the nationโ€™s public schools is premised upon secrecy and furthered by school policies that consider parents to be the problem, not the solution.” Hausknecht noted how the secrecy in schools regarding studentsโ€™ gender identities has sparked pushback from parents in some states. He cited Floridaโ€™sย Parental Rights in Education Actย as an example, a law that requires schools to inform parents about changes in services that could impact their childโ€™s well-being. Hausknect asserted that the situation in Massachusetts is not unique and that parents โ€œeverywhereโ€ must stay โ€œvigilantโ€ when it comes to protecting their children from the โ€œharmful ideologiesโ€ their schools may be pushing.ย 

โ€œIt is our primary obligation as parents to ‘train up a child in the way he should go…’ (Proverbs 22:6 ESV),โ€ he wrote. โ€œSchool policies that set schools, not parents, as the final authority are in direct contradiction of that biblical imperative.โ€


Reported by PHIL SHIVER | April 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/sage-steele-sues-espn-disney/

Longtime ESPN anchor Sage Steele has filed a lawsuit against the network and its parent company, Disney, for allegedly retaliating against her following comments she made about COVID-19 vaccine mandates and former President Barack Obama’s racial identity during a podcast interview.

In her lawsuit, Steele claims ESPN and Disney breached her contract and violated her speech rights by sidelining her and failing to stop colleagues from disparaging her over the remarks.

The suit was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Steele โ€” who has worked as an anchor for ESPN since 2007 โ€” came under fire after an interview with former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler on his podcast, “Uncut with Jay Cutler,” in September, when she criticized Disney’s strong-arming over the vaccine.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she told Cutler. “But I work for a company that mandates it, and I had until Sept. 30 to get it done, or I’m out.”

“I respect everyone’s decision, I really do, but to mandate it is sick, and it’s scary to me in many ways,” she added. “But I have a job, a job that I love and, frankly, a job that I need.”

Steele also criticized former President Barack Obama’s decision to identify as a black man even though he, like her, is biracial.

“Well, congratulations to the president, that’s his thing,” Steele said in the podcast. “I think that’s fascinating considering his black dad is nowhere to be found, but his white mom and grandma raised him, but OK. You do you. I’m gonna do me.”

Front Office Sports reported in October that Steele had been removed from the air by ESPN over the comments, and Steele was also required to issue a public apology. Around the same time, she tested positive for COVID-19, resulting in her missing “SportsCenter” for one week. Steele also was pulled from hosting the espnW: Women + Sports Summit.

“In a knee-jerk reaction, ESPN and Disney relied on the misleading characterizations of her comments, bowed to groupthink and forced Steele to publicly apologize and suspended her for a period of time in October 2021,” the lawsuit alleges, according to the New York Post.

It goes on to say that ESPN “violated Connecticut law and Steeleโ€™s rights to free speech based upon a faulty understanding of her comments and a nonexistent, unenforced workplace policy that serves as nothing more than pretext.”

In a statement, Steele’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, said, “ESPN violated her free speech rights, retaliated against her, reprimanded her, scapegoated her, allowed the media and her peers to excoriate her and forced her to apologize simply because her personal opinions did not align with Disneyโ€™s corporate philosophy of the moment.”

ESPN responded to news of the lawsuit with a statement of its own.

“Sage remains a valued contributor on some of ESPNโ€™s highest profile content, including the recent Masters telecasts and anchoring our noon ‘SportsCenter,'” a spokesperson said. “As a point of fact, she was never suspended.”

Steele is expected to remain on air while the lawsuit goes through the legal system.


Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | April 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/dhs-creates-disinformation-governance-board/

The Department of Homeland Security was criticized Thursday over the creation of a new department whose mission is to combat the spread of “disinformation.” Accordingย to Politico, the DHS has established the Disinformation Governance Board, which will “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

The agency appointed Nina Jankowicz as executive director of the board.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkasย confirmedย the board’s creation on Wednesday after Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) asked him what steps the DHS is taking to combat the manipulation of black Americans and Hispanics, including migrants, through “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Making matters worse, Jankowicz is by no measure an objective leader. In fact, the Washington Examinerย reportedย that Jankowicz disseminated information contained in the debunked Christopher Steele dossier and repeatedly downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop story with claims that it was part of a foreign interference campaign. Sheย even describedย the laptop hard drive โ€” which has been repeatedly authenticated โ€” as a “Trump campaign product.” Jankowicz even appears to oppose free speech. Last week, sheย toldย NPR that she “shudder[s] to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.”

The announcement generated a wave of backlash, both against the creation of the board itself and against Jankowicz as its leader. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has alreadyย sent Mayorkas a letterย demanding that the board be dissolved immediately.

“I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire. Surely no American Administration would ever use the power of Government to sit in judgement on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens,” Hawley said. “Sadly, I was mistaken. Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority. This new board is almost certainly unconstitutional and should be dissolved immediately.”

Meanwhile, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (R) described the board as the “ministry of truth,” aka the government’s own propaganda office.

“Iโ€™m also going to let a cat out of the bag โ€” youโ€™re about to get a lesson in federalism because the free state of Missouri will NEVER let you administer a federal Ministry of Truth. Buckle up!” Schmitt said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)ย said, “During the worst border crisis in history, Biden’s DHS is creating an Orwellian ‘disinformation governance board’ led by a partisan Democrat who herself spread disinformation. What a disgrace. When Republicans take control, we will fix this.”


Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Apr 27, 2022

Read more at https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2022/04/27/liberal-doomsday-scenario-free-speech-on-twitter—p–n2606452/

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.

Liberal Doomsday Scenario: Free Speech on Twitter

Source: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File

I want to send flowers and chocolates to the Twitter employee who permanently suspended The Babylon Bee. Maybe a car. Apparently, it was the inanity of that decision that incensed Elon Musk, whereupon he decided to purchase the entire platform to stop the censorship.

Liberals, until five minutes ago: Elon Musk is a climate hero! Electric cars! Solar power! He loves Obama!

Liberals, five minutes ago: He believes in free speech? Fascist!

Loads of liberals are threatening to leave Twitter if Musk’s deal goes through. To those who will miss The New York Times’ Charles Blow, I understand. I will try to ease the pain by tweeting, every day for the rest of my life: “[FILL IN THE BLANK] is racist!”

If you’re wondering why liberals are freaking out over the idea of free speech on one single internet platform, it’s because their ideas are so well thought-out and compellingly argued that they must have total control of all social media, mainstream media, entertainment, elementary schools, colleges, universities, nonprofits, corporate PR departments, government funding agencies, advertising firms and on and on and on. Any interruption to Big Brother being pumped into our brains 24 hours a day, and everything falls apart.

A hysterical Twitter employee in the “toxicity and health” department (I’m not making that up) denounced Musk to a Times reporter, saying, “he doesn’t know anything about our policies and what we do … his statement about our [algorithm] was f—-ing insane … Were (sic) just gonna let everyone run amok?”

Running “amok” is defined as: calling a man in a dress a “man.” That’s the Babylon Bee tweet that led to a Twitter death sentence, with no trial, no due process, no appeal.

Twitter employees, the Times reports, are “worried that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work they have put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform.” (Yes, you are correct: These are the same people mocking 4-year-olds trapped in kindergarten classrooms with teachers telling them whiteness is evil and they can be any gender they want.)

Do Twitter employees know how Twitter works? Take a theoretical hate-speaker — a fat-shaming Klanner, an anti-vax Nazi or Dave Chappelle. Their literally murderous tweets are invisible — unless you intentionally, willfully, mindfully click their “follow” buttons. In order to avoid seeing “toxic” tweets, this is what you have to do: NOTHING!

But Twitter moderators are terrified that someone, somewhere, is laughing at a tweet. They are the mutant baby of medieval scolds and the East German Stasi.

Conservatives can only dream of a Twitter without constant, daily self-censorship, without their followers being secretly removed, their feeds hidden, their accounts being shadow-banned — or completely banned.

But what if this is all just Musk doing an elaborate troll?

Somebody should buy Twitter, as I explained last November to the richest person I know under 70. (The richest people I know over the age of 70 are giving all their money to Sen. Tim Scott and Candace Owens to prove they’re not “racist.”)

Here it is, my personal private email, names redacted:

Date: Nov. 30, 2021, at 2:04:51 a.m. EST

Subject: You should buy Twitter and I’ll tell you why …

ALL news comes from Twitter. Facebook is for getting in touch with high school friends and the “topic” groups are mostly nuts — anti-vax, stop the steal, black conspiracy theories. Same w/the newer platforms like Telegram. Snapchat and Instagram are for “influencers,” wannabe Kardashians.

Twitter is where the NYT, Politico and Fox News etc. get their stories and find their guests. Have one of your ppl read my Twitter feed and then watch XXXXX for a week. I’m his unpaid booker and content provider, except, sadly, when I get lazy and he goes off on his own with some moronic “expose” …

No one under 60 watches cable news, but YYYY, who’s about 90, calls me after XXXXX’s show every night and breathlessly tells me about stories that are 12 to 36 hours old on Twitter, half the time from my Twitter feed.

Even w/Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, the smartest right-wing pushback on the news has all come from Twitter. e.g. this week, HUGE meme on Twitter about the establishment media describing the BLM terrorist mowing down the lovely xmas parade in Waukesha as a “car crash,” or “SUV runs into parade.” There was also the msm’s decision to describe every rt-wing response to lib lunacy as “Republicans Pounce …”

There are a lot of smart ppl on Twitter (also idiots, but no one has to follow the idiots) who could never be employed by the NYT, National Review or Fox. Andy Ngo exposing antifa, the anti-CRT guy posting school teaching materials, the guy who keeps graphing mask-wearing vs. covid cases (“I.M.” on Twitter), the real-time videos of BLM riots and arson — none of this would exist but for Twitter.

Before that, the defense of Rittenhouse, Jake Gardner and Nick Sandmann — it all came from Twitter. (Recall National Review was nastily ANTI-Sandmann and anti-Rittenhouse.)

We used to have Drudge, but he’s not serving the function of vox populi anymore. Without Twitter, the only thing Fox News would talk about is the Middle East [We may now substitute “Ukraine”]. All important news comes from Twitter.

Twitter is …

1) where the action is, massively influential;

2) perfect for someone else to take it over and make it better, merely by firing the Twitter censors — Twitter aggressively banned tweets that were pro-Rittenhouse (accurate as it turned out), about Hunter Biden (ditto); plus there’s the aggressive censorship of specific popular conservatives, who are either thrown off (e.g. Gavin McInnes and Milo) or shadow-banned (me and others);

3) it would be pretty easy to turn into a money-making operation! The big issue for all news — TV, cable, Amazon Prime, and all online content is how to get ADVERTISING in front of consumers. No one wants to click through ads. The great thing about Twitter is that you could insert ads in people’s Twitter feeds — and it wouldn’t be annoying. I’ve never understood why Dorsey doesn’t do that. It doesn’t distract much, you just keep scrolling if you’re not interested.

Twitter is a fabulous product. It is, as Musk says, the nation’s public square. With a few minor tweaks — stop being Nazi block-watchers and allow ads in people’s Twitter feeds — instead of Tesla funding Twitter, someday Twitter could fund Tesla.


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Old Yeller

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 28, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-old-yeller/

Biden ending tile 42 is sending a loud and clear message that the border is wide open to all.

Ending Title 42
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | April 26, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/horowitz-tn-legislature-passes-bill-to-finally-lock-up-violent-criminals-theblaze-2657222281.html/

In recent years, sentencing for violent criminals has been like common core math. You start out with a sum of 20 years, for example, but somehow even the worst career offenders wind up turning 20 years into 8 yearsโ€™ time served. Tennessee has become the first state to finally implement truth in sentencing to make sure that a sentence is actually served.

Last week, after a decade of red states promoting the Koch/Soros jailbreak agenda, the Tennessee legislature put victims first and passed true criminal justice reform. HB2656 / SB2248, as amended, requires people convicted of one of nine criminal offense categories to serve 100% of their sentences โ€“ no exceptions. This means no good time credits or parole are available for those found guilty of homicide, vehicular homicide, attempted first-degree murder, robbery, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary, or carjacking.

Additionally, those found guilty of 20 slightly lower-level but still significant crimes, such as aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated robbery, burglary, and arson, would still be eligible for good time credits, but only after serving 85% of the sentence.

This bill has reversed the decade-long tide of weak-on-crime legislation percolating through red-state legislatures. For years, weโ€™ve been told that there is somehow an over-incarceration problem with people serving draconian sentences for nothingburger crimes. The reality is that even the most violent career criminals often serve a few months here and there and constantly get out to reoffend. With the growing crime wave in cities like Nashville and Memphis, the role of the de-incarceration agenda is hard to deny.

To begin with, most of the sentencing these days is very lenient. For example, in 2019, out of 17,355 felony convictions in Minnesota, only 3,612 were fully sentenced in accordance with the sentencing guidelines. Once you add all the parole and good time credit programs to that, even the worst career criminals are only serving a fraction of the sentence. This doesnโ€™t even account for all of the ways they plead down throughout their criminal career, thereby incurring a sentence well below the threat level of their criminal proclivities. At a minimum, this bill ensures that violent and dangerous criminals will at least serve the entire sentence they are given. This bill should serve as a model in every other state, as the crime wave continues to grow.

The American Conservative Union, which hosts the annual CPAC gathering for alleged conservatives, vigorously opposed this bill because it apparently still believes there are too many, rather than too few, criminals behind bars. However, no sane person can believe we need to let more people out of prison.

Those who think we don’t have an under-incarceration problem should consider the following statistics from the FBI in 2019. Just 61.4% of the 14,325 homicides, 32.9% of the 124,817 rapes, 30.5% of the 239,643 armed robberies, and 52.3% of the 726,778 aggravated assaults were “cleared” cases. That means that in 5,529 murder cases, 83,752 rape cases, 166,552 armed robbery cases, and 346,673 aggravated assault cases, there was no arrest. Hence, just in the four violent categories alone, there were over 758,000 violent crime cases that went without a resolution just in one year.

What about duration of incarceration? According to BJS, among the prisoners released from state prison in 2018 โ€“ before some of the recent “reform” โ€“ they only served, on average, 44% of their sentences. Even for murder, it was only 58% of their sentences. The median length of time served for murder was less than 10 years in 30% of the cases and was more than 20 years in only 42%. The median time served for rape was less than 10 years in 64% of prisoners. In total, 71% of those serving time for a violent crime category served less than five years, and nearly half served less than two years.

In reality, the bromide of โ€œcriminal justice reformโ€ for โ€œlow-level, nonviolent offendersโ€ was always a ruse. Now groups like the ACU openly admit they oppose even truth in sentencing, much less enhanced sentencing, for the most violent and career criminals.

The truth in sentencing bill passed the Senate 20-6 and the House 86-9 with bipartisan support and now heads to Governor Bill Leeโ€™s desk. The bill was sponsored by House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who made a rare speech from the well of the House chamber to present his bill. This legislation piggybacks on last yearโ€™s truth in sentencing law, which closed the early release loopholes for crimes traditionally committed against women and children, such as rape and child abuse.

Reminiscent of some of the debates over COVID, proponents of weak sentencing are demanding to see โ€œstudiesโ€ showing more jail time leads to less crime. Speaker Sexton believes no such study is needed when common sense dictates fewer criminals on the street equals less crime. โ€œThis solution creates the toughest penalties in America for violent criminals; it also establishes a firm line for criminals not to cross,โ€ said the speaker in a statement to TheBlaze. โ€œIf they do, punishment will be swift and severe under our new law. I do not need a fancy study to tell me more bad guys in jail with longer sentences reduces crime.โ€

It is shocking how red-state governors and legislatures have failed to pursue these ideas until now. Even blue-state governors are now vulnerable to defeat because of the growing crime wave. A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of Americans worry a โ€œgreat dealโ€ about crime and it ranks as the third most important issue on the minds of voters. A Pew Research poll showed that crime is the number-one issue among black voters.

With surging crime in cities like Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee had theย sixth highest murder rateย in 2020. In both 2020 and 2021,ย Memphis set new homicide recordsย and now boastsย the ninth highest homicide rateย in the country and is rankedย the most violent metro areaย in the country. The homicide rate in Tennessee has gone from a low of 5.2 per 100,000 in 2013 to 9.6 in 2020. Motor vehicle thefts have spiked from 183 per 100,000 to over 300. Even smaller cities like Chattanooga haveย become increasingly dangerous.

Kudos to the Tennessee legislature for recognizing that weak-on-crime policies plague red states just as much as blue states and need to be rectified. Along with the passage of robustย medical freedom billsย andย a new ivermectin over-the-counter bill, the Tennessee legislature is on its way to forging an agenda of freedom and public safety that should be emulated in every red state. If every GOP supermajority state would use its power to its fullest, we wouldnโ€™t have to wait for ineffective GOP majorities in the irremediably broken federal system to make a difference.


Reported by DAVE URBANSKI | April 27, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/teacher-eggs-women-doe/

A transgender high school science teacher โ€” during a video conference that included a U.S. Department of Education senior adviser โ€” declared that students should be taught that “not all egg producers are women” along with other gender-inclusive principles.

In a Twitterย videoย posted by Libs of TikTok, the teacher in question โ€” Sam Long โ€” tells other conference participants โ€” including Christian Rhodes,ย senior adviser to the secretary at the Department of Educationย โ€” that it’s necessary to be a “stickler for inclusive language” in the classroom. Rhodes โ€” who previously served as chief of staff for the DOE’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education โ€” is seen nodding as Long speaks about inclusivity. Long adds that “I mostly taught biology,” which is about “life and living things” โ€” and that “we need to be clear that we’re includingย allย living things, including all people …”

Long then says when teaching about “cell division or reproduction, a lot of textbooks, a lot of existing teaching will say, ‘Women produce eggs; males are more likely to be colorblind; the mother carries the fetus for this many months.'” Long then says “some ways we can show our support for trans and non-binary students is to clean up that language … we can be more accurate and be more inclusive.”

The teacher then declares, “I would say, ‘No, it’s notย womenย that produce eggs; it’sย ovariesย that produce eggs.’ That’s accurate. That’s precise. We’re acknowledging that not all women produce eggs, and not all egg producers are women, for example. And we’re teaching students that language matters.”

Long โ€” the only individual heard speaking in the video โ€” is in the bottom-left square in the following screenshot; Rhodes is in the bottom-right square:

Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @libsoftiktok

The date and purpose of the video conference aren’t clear, although Libs of TikTok said in the text accompanying the video that the Department of Education “held a training for teachers to learn how to be inclusive” toward “tran[s] and non-binary K-12 students.” Libs of TikTok also said the USDE is “promoting” the ideas the teacher espoused in the clip:

The Department of Education on Wednesday didn’t immediately reply to TheBlaze’s request for comment regarding its position on gender-inclusive language โ€” such as “not all egg producers are women” โ€” or the video conference’s purpose.

In the video, Long mentions a website โ€”ย Gender-Inclusive Biologyย โ€” that Long founded with “two other trans-identified high school teachers” as well as the site’s language guide that helped inform Long’s inclusive-language push stated in the clip.

Longย wroteย last month in a National Education Association member spotlight that “when students learn biology, they are entitled to see their lives reflected in this so-called study of life. I grew up learning that a baby is made when a sperm cell from the dad meets the [egg cell] from the mom and that’s not good enough. For today, that language doesn’t represent our diverse genders, sexualities, and families in our schools. So, I createdย genderinclusivebiology.com, a growing collection of resources and training on how to teach accurate inclusive and future-ready biology, and I look forward to continuing the work of creating classrooms where every student belongs.” The essay’s bio states, “Sam Long is a Science Teacher in Denver, Colorado.”


AMERICAN NEWSย | Apr 26, 2022 | Hannah Nightingale, Washington DC

Read more at https://thepostmillennial.com/california-ninth-graders-taught-that-gender-identity-is-ones-innermost-concept-of-self/

The school states that it’s important to understand sexuality so that students can “establish a culture of respect,” “reduce bullying, harassment, and violence,” and “better understand others and ourselves.”California ninth graders taught that 'gender identity' is 'one's innermost concept of self'

April 26, 2022 10:47 AM2 Mins Reading

A gender and sexuality lesson for Los Alamitos Unified School District ninth graders was recently posted to Twitter, revealing what students in the California school district are learning regarding the subject.

In a thread of screenshots posted by Ian Prior, the school states that it’s important to understand sexuality so that students can “establish a culture of respect,” “reduce bullying, harassment, and violence,” and “better understand others and ourselves.”

The slide show explains different gender identities, explaining that the term itself means “Oneโ€™s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither โ€” how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. Oneโ€™s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.”

It also explains that Gender Dysphoria is “strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with oneโ€™s own assigned sex that results in significant distress or impairment.”

The slide show notes that Gender Expression refers to outward expressions of femininity or masculinity, and notes the condition of being born intersex as one in which “a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesnโ€™t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”

The lesson also describes different sexual orientations, including heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual.

The lesson includes the popular gender unicorn graphic from Trans Student Educational Resources, which explains gender, sex, and different types of attraction. While Prior initially said that the lesson was for seventh and eight graders, he later corrected it to say that itโ€™s for ninth graders, and included aย linkย to the lessons for those earlier grades.

In one lesson, middle schoolers are taught similar concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation.

Another lesson discusses HIV and AIDS, saying students should, by the end of the lesson, be able to describe the impact of the diseases on families and individuals, and says students should be able to “Express concern for persons with disabilities or illness, including those infected with HIV.”

A following lesson teaches students about the prescriptions used to prevent and treat HIV, and teaches students about the ways to prevent catching the illness.


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Ghost of Theories Past

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 27, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ghost-of-theories-past/

Some are asking about the ghost Biden was shaking hands with, by the looks of his policies it was Karl Marx.

Biden Shakes hands with Ghost
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


Reported Byย Jack Davisย |ย April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/thousands-ballot-mules-delivered-tens-thousands-votes-biden-ny-post-publishes-devastating-claims/

A new report that analyzed the forthcoming movie from conservative filmmaker Dinesh Dโ€™Souza warns that based on the 2020 election, Democrats have a โ€œcunning planโ€ for the future.

After previewing the documentary โ€œ2,000 Mules,โ€ New York Post columnist Miranda Devine wrote that โ€œpesky evidence is starting to emerge of systematic schemes to subvert the electoral process โ€” which must not be allowed to happen again if we are to restore faith in elections.โ€

Devine called the movie โ€” which debuts next month โ€” โ€œthe most compelling evidence to dateโ€ concerning the race between then-President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden and said research conducted by the election integrity group True the Vote reveals what appears to be โ€œsuspicious ballot harvesting.โ€

The Western Journal reached out to the Biden White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

The research Devine cited relied on sophisticated tracking and surveillance video to reach its conclusions.

True the Vote acquired 3 trillion geo-location signals from cellphones that were near ballot drop boxes and election nonprofits in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3, 2020 vote.

โ€œThen they went searching for โ€˜mules,โ€™ operatives who picked up ballots from election NGOs โ€” such as Stacey Abramsโ€™ outfit, โ€˜Fair Fight Actionโ€™ โ€” and then carried them to different drop boxes, depositing between three to 10 ballots in each box before moving to the next,โ€ Devine wrote.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, said she chose the term โ€œmuleโ€ for the people involved in the operation because โ€œit felt a lot like a cartel, it felt like trafficking โ€ฆ This is in its essence ballot trafficking โ€ฆ You have the collectors. You have the stash houses, which are the nonprofits. And then you have the mules that are doing the drops.โ€

Devine wrote that the network included individuals in battleground states who collected ballots from organizations that were ostensibly out to help everybody vote and then put them in drop boxes, a few at a time.

โ€œThe extent of the operation is jaw-dropping,โ€ she said.

โ€œWhen a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life,โ€ she wrote.

Devine noted one snippet from the film.

โ€œA car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and hightails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again,โ€ she wrote.

Dโ€™Souza said the efforts of the mules could have swung the election based on his contention that at least 380,000 potentially fraudulent votes were tracked by the project.

โ€œShockingly, even this narrow way of looking at just our 2,000 mules in these swing states gives Trump the win with 279 electoral votes to Bidenโ€™s 259,โ€ he said.

Devine said thatโ€™s hard to prove. โ€œThere is no way to scrutinize those ballots now and see if they are fraudulent but if we must have drop boxes at election time, they need to be secure and under 24/7 surveillance,โ€ she said.

She said Republicans cannot spend all of their time on the 2020 election because it โ€œmakes them look like sore losers.โ€

However, she also noted an interview with Trump in which he compared the election to a diamond theft at Tiffanyโ€™s.

โ€œThereโ€™s no getting the diamonds back now. But we can stop the store being robbed again,โ€ Devine wrote.

Jack Davis

Contributor, News

Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.


Reported Byย Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editorย | Monday, April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/supreme-court-debates-right-for-football-coach-to-pray-on-field.html/

Demonstrators gathered to pray outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in support of football coach Joe Kennedy on April 25, 2022. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor

A high school football coach fired for praying on the field after games had his case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, with justices debating whether his religious practices were coercive or constitutionally protected.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, with coach Joe Kennedy being represented by former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement.

Coach Joe Kennedy at the Bremerton High School football field. | Courtesy of First Liberty Institute

In 2015, Kennedy, an assistant coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state, was punished and eventually fired by the Bremerton School District for praying on the 50-yard line after games. In his opening argument, Clement said that the coachโ€™s prayers were โ€œdoubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clausesโ€ of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

โ€œWhen the school district fired him for that fleeting religious exercise out of endorsement concerns, it not only violated the First Amendment, but it ignored a veritable wall of this courtโ€™s precedents that make it clear that a school does not endorse private religious speech just because it fails to censor it,โ€ said Clement, who served as the U.S. solicitor general and later acting attorney general during the George W. Bush administration.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed Clement about when a school officialโ€™s religious practices can be considered private and when they are considered public, such as if a teacher is reading the Bible aloud before class begins. 

Clement answered that if a teacher read her Bible โ€œbefore the bellโ€ or โ€œafter the bellโ€ and did so โ€œeither silently or barely audibly,โ€ that would be protected as โ€œprivate speech.โ€

Sotomayor argued that a teacher is โ€œon dutyโ€ while remaining โ€œin the classroomโ€ and their actions could be curtailed by their employer. Sotomayor brought in the example of Kennedy, asking why he should not be considered โ€œon dutyโ€ while remaining on the football field after games.

โ€œThe school has a fair amount of flexibility to determine what the duties of the coach are,โ€ replied Clement. โ€œHere, they did not say that his duties were an all-encompassing supervisory role.โ€

โ€œItโ€™s in the record, and I think undisputed, that the coach could do other things, other private things of a comparable amount of time because this is a fleeting religious exercise.โ€

Justice Elena Kagan expressed concern with Kennedyโ€™s prayers putting โ€œa kind of undue pressure, a kind of coercion on students to participate in religious activities when they may not wish to.โ€ Clement countered that the school district did not cite โ€œcoercion concernsโ€ when they punished Kennedy years ago but instead expressed concern over โ€œendorsementโ€ issues.

Justice Neil Gorsuch referenced the 2000 case ofย Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. Theย high court ruled that a Texas townโ€™s practice of having students holding prayers over a loudspeaker before high school football games was unconstitutional. Clement said Kennedyโ€™s practice was โ€œradically differentโ€ from the situation in theย Santa Feย case, noting that the loudspeaker and the process of determining who gave prayers involved a more blatant example of government speech.

Clement compared Kennedyโ€™s actions to professional athletes who cross themselves before a play or kneel with thanks to God after scoring a touchdown, noting that these were recognized as individual actions.

Richard B. Katskee, legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, presented oral arguments on behalf of the school district.

โ€œNo one doubts that public school employees can have quiet prayers by themselves at work, even if students can see,โ€ said Katskee. โ€œIf that were the issue, there wouldnโ€™t be a case here because the district allowed that. But that wasnโ€™t good enough for Mr. Kennedy. He insisted on audible prayers at the 50-yard line with students.โ€

Katskee said that โ€œsome of these kids were just 14 years old.”

“Mr. Kennedyโ€™s actions pressured them to pray and also divided the coaching staff, sparked vitriol against school officials, and led to the field being stormed and students getting knocked down.โ€

Justice Clarence Thomas asked Katskee whether a high school football coach taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racism was also an unacceptable form of government speech. Katskee answered that if, for example, โ€œthe coach goes to the center of the field in front of everyone during the national anthem,โ€ then it is โ€œabsolutelyโ€ constitutes โ€œgovernment speech.โ€

Thomas asked for a clarification on how it was government speech, with Katskee responding that it was a โ€œpublic act and public statementโ€ and could not be considered a private action.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Katskee if a coach was allowed to do the sign of the cross before a game, to which Katskee replied that โ€œif the coach is doing it while not making himself the center of attention at the center of the field, it’s perfectly fine.โ€

โ€œI don’t know how we could write an opinion that would draw a line based on not making yourself the center of attention as the head coach of a game,โ€ Kavanaugh countered.

Demonstrators gathered with signs outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in support of football coach Joe Kennedy, who lost his job after kneeling on the field pray. Kennedy’s case was heard by the high court on Monday, April 25, 2022. | Nicole Alcindor/ Christian Post

In 2015, Bremerton officials suspended and then fired Kennedy for his practice of praying on the football field after games, with the coach suing the school district in 2016. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Kennedy in 2017, with the Supreme Court initially refusing to intervene in 2019. In 2020, Judge Ronald Leightonย ruled in favorย of the school district, concluding that it had a right to restrict religious expression to prevent government endorsement of religion. In March 2021, a 9th Circuit panel again ruled against Kennedy, with Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. authoring the unanimous court opinion in favor of Bremerton.

โ€œBSDโ€™s efforts to prevent the conduct did not violate Kennedyโ€™s constitutional rights, nor his rights under Title VII,โ€ย wrote Smith.

โ€œIn sum, there is no doubt that an objective observer, familiar with the history of Kennedyโ€™s practice, would view his demonstrations as BSDโ€™s endorsement of a particular faith. For that reason, BSD had adequate justification for its treatment of Kennedy.โ€

Kennedy again appealed to the Supreme Court, which announced in January that it would hear arguments in the case.

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook


Reported by DAVE URBANSKI | April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/cops-converge-upon-mom-at-school-board-meeting-after-chairwoman-kicks-her-out-for-something-horrible-she-was-about-to-say-regarding-board-member-2657212014.html/

Police officers were caught on video converging upon a mother who was speaking in front of the microphone at a Florida school board meeting last week after the chairwoman kicked her out for “something horrible” she was “about to say” concerning another school board member.

Melissa Bakondy, a mother of four, called out by name a Sarasota County School Board member at Tuesday’s meeting for comments the board member allegedly made during a previous meeting, Fox News reported.

“At the last meeting, Shirley Brown was caught on the microphone talking about โ€“” Bakondy stated before board chairwoman Jane Goodwin cut her off: “Stop talking about school board members. You’re done. You’re done, Mrs. Bakondy, you’re done. Thank you, you’re done. You cannot go and expound on school board members. I’ve told you. Iโ€™ve warned you several times. Thank you very much, you’re done, move on. Goodbye.”

With that, a police officer walked to the podium and stood just a few feet in front of Bakondy.

Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @ChrisMZiegler

Two other officers soon followed and stood on either side of the mother.

Bakondy asked Godwin what the problem was, and the chairwoman replied, “You were about to say something horrible about Shirley Brown, please leave โ€ฆ Youโ€™ve said things about me that were untrue. Leave, please!”

Goodwin then asked Bakondy, “Do you have children in our school district? Do you have children in our school district?”

Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @ChrisMZiegler

Fox News said that question fired up conservative board member Bridget Ziegler: “Point of order! That is not appropriate! โ€ฆ You donโ€™t get to ask people who come to a public meeting whether they have children or not. Period! You’re way out of line.”

Soon Goodwin ordered the officers to ask Bakondy to leave, and Fox News said she was ejected from the meeting.

The cable network said Ziegler’s husband โ€” Florida GOP Vice Chairman Christian Ziegler โ€” posted the exchange on Twitter, although it doesn’t show the ejection:

Bakondy told Fox News in an interview that Goodwin is “the queen of no public input,” and Bakondy and Bridget Ziegler said Goodwin and two other liberal board members want free speech shut down at meetings.

“Every citizen taxpayer and parent has a right to speak at public meetings and share their input,” Bakondy added to Fox News. “Ms. Goodwin doesnโ€™t want to hear that โ€ฆ This is the ultimate form of censorship, and they are destroying our school district, targeting parents, and eliminating dissent.”

Bakondy also told the cable network, “I do have four children, and three of them will be going back to public school next year, and after this, I worry that they’re a target.”

Fox News said Goodwin did not respond to its request for comment.

Following the heated exchange, Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt A. Hoffman spoke on video Friday taking issue with the Bakondy getting kicked out of the meeting, theย Herald-Tribune reported. Hoffman said officers from the Sarasota County Schools Police Department were at the meeting, not Sarasota County Sheriff’s deputies, the paper said.

“The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office would never participate in preventing a citizen from expressing their First Amendment rights during public comment,” Hoffman said, according to the Herald-Tribune. “As your sheriff, I don’t condone tax-paying citizens being silenced.”

4-22-22: Statement from Sheriff Kurt A. Hoffmanyoutu.be


Reported by PHIL SHIVER | April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/virginia-dad-goes-nuclear-on-teachers-union-boss-they-require-permission-slips-for-snacks-field-trips-but-not-to-talk-about-my-sons-penis-2657212083.html/

A father in Loudoun County, Virginia, tore into American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten this week after the union boss claimed that a growing parental rights movement in Americaย could lead to civil war. Brandon Michon โ€” an outspoken parent who is also running for Congress as a Republican in Virginia’s 10th district โ€”ย told Fox Newsย on Monday that union heads and school boards across the country are the ones who started the conflict by pushing progressive ideologies in schools.

“They’ve already invaded the classroom,” Michon charged.

“When you think about it, [the union] colluded with the CDC, colluded with the DOJ and this administration on calling parents domestic terrorists,” he said.

Michon, who has four children under the age of 10, accused Loudoun County Public Schools and other progressive school districts of pushing their radical views surrounding sexual orientation, gender identity, and critical race theory on children without consent from parents.

“They have to have signed permission slips for their snacks, they have to have signed permission slips to go on field trips, but no one is asking me for permission to talk about my sonโ€™s penis,” he exclaimed. “It is unacceptable. They are pushing indoctrination on the most innocent part of the population.”

#VA10 @FoxNews

Originally tweeted by Brandon Michon (@BrandonMichon) on April 25, 2022.

Weingarten made headlines last week after going off on proponents of the parental rights in education movement in America during an unhinged radio interview.

“We’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time. This is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts,” the teachers union leader fumed to radio host Rick Smith.

Elsewhere in the discussion, she called backlash against progressive ideology being taught in public schools an “existential threat” to the country and complained that “right-wing extremists” are “exploiting” parents’ fears to accomplish political ends. Weingarten’s remarks served as a flash point in the heated battle between parents who want more control over their children’s education and the leaders of educational institutions who think they know better.

In recent months, parental outrage over transgender-affirming and critical race theory curricula in schools has culminated in legislation aiming to prevent such unwanted indoctrination. Perhaps the most popular piece of legislation is Florida’s House Bill 1557, which bars classroom discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade and establishes scaleable guidelines for discussion on the subject matter in grades thereafter.

Outraged over what his children were being taught in school, Michon decided to speak up at school board meetings last year. Now he’s running for office with a campaign focused on parental empowerment and putting children’s interests first.

“The children just want to learn,” Michon told Fox News.

“If you want to talk about the biggest equalizer in all of education, literacy. Letโ€™s get back to teaching more literacy. That [lifts] up all socio-economic classes,” he argued, adding, “Donโ€™t talk about the vocal minority of parents when there is vocal minority on the other side. We need to renew the focus on our children. Math, science, history, the things that will make them good members of society.”


Reported by CARLOS GARCIA | April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/breaking-court-temporarily-blocks-biden-admin-from-dropping-title-42-restrictions-at-the-border-2657212527.html/

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmittย saidย Monday that a court had issued a temporary restraining order against the Biden administration plan to end Title 42 restrictions at the border. The policy had been previously scheduled to end on May 23.

“In a lawsuit originally filed by Missouri, Louisiana, and Arizona, our Office just obtained a temporary restraining order to keep Title 42 in place,”ย tweetedย Schmitt.

“This is a huge victory for border security, but the fight continues on,” he added.

Title 42 prevents those seeking asylum at the border from entering the country to await their documents being processed. The policy was originally implemented under the Trump administration because of the threat posed by migrants carrying coronavirus into the country. Critics of the policy claim it wasย motived by racismย and xenophobia against migrants seeking refugee status.

The Centers for Disease Control announced that the drop in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations no longer necessitated the restrictions. The Biden administration has used the assessment by the CDC to justify ending Title 42 despite criticism that it will almost certainly lead to a massive spike in illegal immigration. In Oct. 2021, Biden administration officialsย estimatedย that as many as 400,000 new migrants could attempt to cross the border in a month if Title 42 had been rescinded at that time.

The temporary restraining order prevents the Biden administration from acting before a May 13 hearing about the policy.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich alsoย celebratedย the order on Monday.“I am so proud of the lawyers from our office who just got a Temporary Restraining Order to keep Title 42 in place,”ย tweetedย Brnovich. “We will continue to fight the Biden administration’s open border policies.”

Here’s more about the order against Biden:

Federal judge plans to block termination of Title 42www.youtube.com


Reported by willย | April 25, 2022

Read more at https://patriotfetch.com/2022/04/democrats-get-some-brutal-news-from-new-york-wiley/

New York is a blue state, right? Yes, but Democrats attempted to go too far in using their redistricting powers to make it an even deeper blue. In going so far to try and block Republicans from being able to win seats, the Democrats broke the law, so their redistricting plan just got slapped down by the state appeals court. The Hill, reporting on that decision, notes that:

The ruling noted that under the 2022 congressional map, there are four Republican-majority districts and 22 Democratic-majority districts; in comparison, in the 2012 map there were eight elected Republicans and 19 elected Democrats, indicating that the latest map was skewed blue.

Further, the court itself, describing the horribly biased nature in which the New York Democrats went about designing the map and how elections analysis expert Sean Trende was able to show that the districts were so biased in favor of the Democrats as to be impermissible, said:

Trende concluded that the enacted congressional map pressed republican voters โ€œinto a few [r]epublican-leaning districts, while spreading [d]emocratic voters as efficiently as possible.โ€ Trende analyzed the differences between his ensemble of simulated maps and the enacted map using various methods, including application of the โ€œgerrymandering index,โ€ which, he concluded, rendered it โ€œimplausible, if not impossibleโ€ that the enacted redistricting plan had been drawn without partisan intent. Trende also portrayed his results in scatterplots, which he explained showed how โ€œ[t]he only place where the [e]nacted [c]ongressional [m]ap falls within expectations is in safely [d]emocratic districts,โ€ whereas the more competitive districts were made safer by packing republican voters into other republican leaning districts.

Continuing, and giving another example of the bias involved in the district-shifting,ย said:

Specifically, Trendeโ€™s simulation reflected that the four most republican-leaning districts in the enacted congressional map were more republican-leaning than any of his initial 5,000 simulated maps. Of the next nine most competitive districts, the enacted map was, in each, more democrat-leaning than any or nearly all of the initial 5,000 simulated maps.

The court then ordered the legislature to create a new map, one that would survive its scrutiny, by April 30th, though an appeal from New Yorkโ€™s far-left leadership is expected. If that appeal is unsuccessful and the current map, which would probably take four seats away from Republicans, doesnโ€™t hold, thatโ€™s bad news for Democrats. 2022 is already predicted to be a red wave year with Democrats needing every tool available to keep the wave from turning into a tsunami. When thatโ€™s paired withย how DeSantis has gone about redistricting Floridaย and the mixed results of redistricting elsewhere, the loss of the four seats Democrats could have been handed by New Yorkโ€™s efforts is substantial.

The GOP is predicted to retake the House regardless. But the magnitude of that victory depends on a number of factors, including redistricting. With this win for the GOP in even deep-blue New York, the likelihood of the red wave becoming a red tsunami looks higher than ever.

By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.

This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Mostly Peaceful Takeover

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 26, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-mostly-peaceful-takeover/

Elon Musk buying Twitter is a huge boost for free speech in America and has the censorship Tyrants on the left going berserk.

Elon Musk Buy Twitter
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


REPORTED BY:ย NATHANAEL BLAKE | APRIL 25, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/25/democrats-culture-war-is-destroying-their-ability-to-govern-competently-enough-to-fool-voters/

donkey

The ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.

Author Nathanael Blake profile

NATHANAEL BLAKE

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New York Times columnist Charles Blow recentlyย claimedย to be โ€œtruly shockedโ€ by a poll showing President Biden with a 33 percent approval rating. I was shocked, too โ€” how could his approval rating be that high?

Blow, of course, is surprised at Bidenโ€™s unpopularity, and worried that the Democrats are stumbling into a bloodbath in the November midterms. Blow is paid to understand and explain politics and culture to his readers. That he is surprised reveals a lot about the bubble he is in. And his meandering analysis of Democratsโ€™ problems illustrates how the ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.

Blow initially blames Biden โ€” for being too much of a โ€œdecent man โ€ฆ sober and straightforwardโ€ rather than a โ€œshowman.โ€ This is a ludicrous assessment of a politician, who, until age caught up with his tongue, was one of D.C.โ€™s preeminent bloviators. Nonetheless, Blowโ€™s ordinary partisan delusion is less interesting than the ideological blind spots revealed when he turns to genuine sources of Bidenโ€™s unpopularity, such as โ€œthe fear of crime and the pinch of inflationโ€ and that โ€œRepublicans are playing heavily into culture war issues.โ€

Class and Culture Wars Merge

Although Blow does not seem to realize it, these issues combine to reinforce votersโ€™ disapproval of Biden. Democratic failures on bread and butter issues such as crime and inflation are related to the culture-war radicalism that has captured their party. Twitter, not the blue-collar union hall, is now the heart of the Democratic Party, which is controlled by the educated, urban professional-managerial class, epitomized byย woke, union-busting CEOs. This faction has merged the class and culture wars โ€” championing cultural radicalism, entrenching its own economic interests, and neglecting the common good.

The Democrats are the party of wealthy diversity consultants lecturing hourly workers about white privilege and cis-heteropatriarchy while inflation eats away at wages and investment firms buy up homes in the hope of making America a nation of permanent renters. The governing priorities of those running the Democratic Party are sending government money to their clients (from teachers unions to Planned Parenthood) and waging culture war.

Dems Are Fanatical Culture Warriors

And they are fanatical culture warriors. Consider Blowโ€™s complaint that the GOP is โ€œchallenging the teaching of Black history and the history of white supremacy in schools, as well as restricting discussions of L.G.B.T. issues and campaigning against trans women and girls competing in sports with other women and girls.โ€ He adds that โ€œRepublicans are using white parental fear, particularly the fears of white moms.โ€

This litany of whines highlights the bubble Blow and his audience at The New York Times are in. Ordinary Americans know the difference between teaching history and teaching poisonous ideology derived from critical race theory. Americans understand that it is unjust for males to compete in womenโ€™s sports, and that it is perverse to teach young children about sex and gender ideology. They are angry when educators encourage children to transition, and outraged when they hide it from parents.

Voters have also noticed that the cultural left never stops where it says it will. We were assured that the LGBT movement was about tolerance for consenting adult relationships; now it is about transgender toddlers, child drag queens, and men in girlsโ€™ locker rooms. We are also now told that being anti-racist somehow means judging people based on the color of their skin. Blow and other bubbled liberals may be okay with mastectomies for confused teenage girls, but most Americans are not.

This cultural radicalism erodes Democratsโ€™ ability to govern competently. Sometimes this is the result of neglecting the basic tasks of government in order to prioritize boutique cultural issues, other times it is a direct consequence of ideology, as exemplified in the crime wave resulting from woke prosecutors and defunding the police.

Cushioned from Consequences

In either case, wokeness is an ideology for those who are cushioned from its consequences. Indeed, wokeness is primarily a phenomenon of the college-educated, and especially the well-off; it is a niche, luxury political philosophy that thrives among the privileged and in the shelter of academia.

But though it is often a political liability, there are ways it serves the interests of its adherents. In particular, woke ideology legitimates the rule of the woke over the non-woke, and justifies economic exploitation and socio-political repression. Wokeness claims to reveal the systems of unjust oppression that permeate society; it focuses on race, sex, and gender, and relegates economic class to a second-tier concern. This allows many of the privileged and powerful to claim to be righteous allies of the oppressed without having to sacrifice economic or social power or position. Indeed, many can claim to be oppressed themselves. This is why wokeness tends to focus onย BIPoCย and LGBT representation in boardrooms and Ivy League campuses, rather than helping the working class.

The Wicked Working Class

Thus, it is to be expected that woke discourse often suggests that the working class (especially working-class whites) have it coming for their sins of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on โ€” the wicked deserve punishment, not sympathy. This is why pundits such as Blow are so quick to accuse dissenters of racism and bigotry. And it is why the woke left supports oligarchic power in pursuit of its aims, and eagerly uses economic, technological, and cultural power to suppress dissent.

This is why professors are having to submit woke loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements, and why mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training has become the norm in the corporate world. This is why the left is eager to use social media censorship to suppress โ€œmisinformationโ€ โ€” which in many cases is truth that is inconvenient to the regime (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop story).

It is also why the left cannot understand its own failures. They have isolated themselves in a bubble that has drifted so far from reality and the concerns of normal voters that even electoral disaster may not bring them back to Earth. Cocooned in privilege and ideology, they think Biden is doing just fine. But most Americans have had enough of a government that is more committed to transitioning children than to controlling crime and inflation.


Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


REPORTED BY:ย MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 25, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/25/letter-no-hillary-clinton-cant-try-to-hide-2016-oppo-research-from-the-special-counsel/

Hillary Clinton

โ€˜The Government should not permit HFA and the DNC to adopt conflicting positions in different proceedings, depending on the federal agency against which they are litigating.โ€™

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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The Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committeeโ€™s claims of attorney-client privilege in the Michael Sussmann criminal case may constitute a breach of the settlement agreements they entered with the Federal Election Commission, according to a letter sent to Special Counsel John Durhamโ€™s office on Friday. Thatย letter, obtained first by The Federalist, followed the flurry of motions to intervene filed in the special counselโ€™s pending false statement case against Sussmann. Hillary for America, the DNC, tech executive Rodney Joffe, Sussmannโ€™s former law firm of Perkins and Coie, and the investigative firm Fusion GPS all filed motions last week asking the court for permission to argue against disclosing documents to the special counsel based on their claims of attorney-client privilege.

The special counselโ€™s office had previously filed a motion arguing that the court should review 38 documents withheld in response to grand jury subpoenas to assess whether the secreted material truly qualified as protected by attorney-client privilege. The day after Sussmann responded to that motion, opposing any such in camera review by the judge, his fellow Spygate hoaxers sought to join in Sussmannโ€™s efforts to keep the documents concealed.

After the Hillary for America and the DNCโ€™s motions to intervene hit the Sussmann docket, The Coolidge Reagan Foundation penned a three-page letter to Durham and Assistant Special Counsel Jonathan Algor. That letter alerted the special counselโ€™s office to key facts about the FECโ€™s recent decision to fine the political groups in relation to a complaint the foundation had filed with the FEC. That complaint charged Hillary for America and the DNC with using the โ€œlaw firm, Perkins Coie, to hire and funnel over $1 million to โ€˜outside research firmsโ€™ such as Fusion GPS โ€˜to perform potentially sensitive, controversial, or politically embarrassingโ€™ opposition research into Donald Trump.โ€

The FEC complaint, filed in 2018, alleged that โ€œthe research was not โ€˜for the purpose of assisting Perkins Coie in providing legal advice,โ€™โ€ but to further the โ€œpolitical and campaign-related goalsโ€ of the organizations. The foundation also claimed in its FEC complaint that because the work was not โ€œfor the purpose of providing legal advice or assisting with impending or potential litigation, it was not covered by attorney-client, work-product, or other privileges.โ€

Significantly, as the foundation noted in its April 22, 2022 letter to the special counselโ€™s office, the FEC had โ€œfound probable cause to believeโ€ the political organizations had misreported the purpose of certain disbursements. The FEC reached that conclusion based on a memorandum prepared by the FECโ€™s Office of General Counsel, but under controlling regulations that memorandum โ€œwill not be made public for another week,โ€ the letter explained.

Foundation counsel Dan Backer added that while the memorandum is not yet public, the special counselโ€™s office would likely be able to obtain it directly from the FEC. That memorandum also will provide Durhamโ€™s team further details on the FECโ€™s investigation and fact-finding that may be useful to the special counsel in the Sussmann litigation, noted the letter.

In Fridayโ€™s letter, Backer also highlighted Hillary for America and the DNCโ€™s commitment in their settlement agreement with the FEC to โ€œnot further contest the Commissionโ€™s finding of probable cause to believeโ€ that the political organizations had โ€œfalsely reported their payments through Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS as being for legal services.โ€ In contrast, in the Sussmann case, Hillary for America and the DNC โ€œare nevertheless asserting materials generated by Fusion GPS and provided to Perkins Coie are protected by attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine,โ€ the letter stressed.

โ€œThe Government should not permit HFA and the DNC to adopt conflicting positions in different proceedings, depending on the federal agency against which they are litigating,โ€ the foundationโ€™s letter concluded, suggesting the trial court may find those breaches of the settlement agreement โ€œmaterial in ruling on any privilege claims.โ€

Whether the special counsel will follow the foundationโ€™s suggestion and obtain the memorandum prepared by the FECโ€™s Office of General Counsel before the judge in the Sussmann case rules on the Clinton campaign and the DNCโ€™s assertions of attorney-client privilege is yet to be seen. But what is clear is that the special counselโ€™s office intends to ensure the jury knows that both the Clinton campaign and the DNC believe communications relevant to Sussmannโ€™s efforts to peddle the Alfa Bank hoax are protected by attorney-client privilege.

On Friday we also learned just how the special counsel hopes to do thatโ€”by having representatives of both the Clinton campaign and DNC testify at trial. That revelation appeared in a response brief Sussmannโ€™s attorneys filed last week, wherein the defense team noted that they had just learned that the special counsel had issued trialย subpoenasย to both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. According to Sussmannโ€™s legal team, the special counsel requested โ€œthe testimony of witnessesโ€ from those political organizations โ€œregarding the assertion of attorney-client privilege in front of the jury.โ€ Sussmann is now also seeking to exclude that testimony and claims that both the Clinton campaign and the DNC will likewise seek to quash the subpoenas.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that the more Sussmann, the Clinton campaign, and the DNC hide behind the claims of attorney-client privilege, the more it appears that, yes, Sussmann pushed the Alfa Bank hoax, including during his meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker, on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FECโ€™s conclusion that probable cause existed to support the finding that the Clinton campaign and DNC had falsely reported fees paid to Fusion GPS as legal fees only further supports that conclusion.

The question Fridayโ€™s letter to the special counselโ€™s office raises, however, is whether the Clinton campaign and the DNCโ€™s settlement agreement with the FEC, in fact, forecloses their claims of privilege in the Sussmann case. Backer believes it does, telling The Federalist, โ€œThe Clinton Campaign and the DNC want to have their cake and eat it too, but they cannot simultaneously say they wonโ€™t contest the reasoning behind the FEC fine and settlement agreement and also run to federal court and say, โ€˜No, no, no, everything we do is privileged.โ€™โ€

That, however, is precisely what Hillary for America and DNC are doing, leading one to wonder if the real issue in play is not attorney-client privilege, but the privilege of being a Democrat.


Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prizeโ€”the law schoolโ€™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.


Reported by PHIL SHIVER | April 25, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/15-year-old-3-robberies-8-minutes/

Police in Washington, D.C., have arrested a 15-year-old boy who they say is responsible for going on a violent and extremely rapid crime spree in the nation’s capital earlier this year. The juvenile male, who has not been identified by law enforcement on account of his age, is suspected of committing three armed robberies โ€” including a carjacking โ€” in roughly eight minutes in January. In a news release, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department claimed the boy didn’t act alone and that detectives are still searching for additional suspects in the crime spree.

In each of the three incidents, the gang of suspected offenders approached victims brandishing handguns and threatening injury before making off with several personal items, which included four iPhones and a Hyundai Sonata sedan. After committing the first two robberies, the suspects fled the scene and quickly moved on to commit another armed robbery.

According to police, the crimes took place on Jan. 23. The first occurred at approximately 1:20 p.m. near 14th and T Street, Northwest; the second at 1:24 p.m. on the 1800 block of 10th Street, Northwest; and the third at 1:28 p.m. on the 1500 block of 8th Street, Northwest.

The juvenile male from southeast D.C. was reportedly arrested and taken into custody on Thursday, April 21. It was not immediately clear what charges he would face. The news comes as juvenile crimes continue to plague Washington, D.C., and many other communities around the country. In the nation’s capital, youth carjackings in particular have been on the rise over the last year.

Last March, a botched carjacking that resulted in the gruesome death of an elderly Uber Eats driverย drew national headlinesย after it was discovered that the culprits were a 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old girl. The girls reportedly used at least one stun gun in attempt to seize the car. They struggled with the victim, 66-year-old Mohammad Anwar, swerving through the streets, but eventually struck a curb, sending Anwar flying from the vehicle. The man’s death was caught on video.

At least on this case, it appears that law enforcement is hoping to clamp down on juvenile perpetrators of violent crimes.

Police have requested the public’s help in identifying additional suspects in the January armed robbery incidents and are offering a reward of up to $10,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.


Reported by PAUL SACCA | April 23, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/hunter-biden-business-partner-vice-president/

A longtime and close business partner ofย Hunter Bidenย made numerous trips to the White House whileย Joe Bidenย served as vice president, according to a new report. Eric Schwerin โ€“ president of the Rosemont Seneca investment fund firm โ€“ met with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2010, according toย visitor logs from the White Houseย of former President Barack Obama.

Rosemont Seneca was founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz โ€“ stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and Devon Archer โ€“ an American businessman who was classmates with Heinz at Yale University. Rosemont Seneca has conducted extensive business in China.

Theย New York Postย reported, “Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010, in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.”

The report added, “The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunterโ€™s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.”

“Emails from Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop show a series of exchanges between Hunter and his associates in Rosemont Senecaโ€™s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and BHR,”ย Fox Newsย reported. “In February 2017, Schwerin emailed the CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Previously, Li sent Hunter his son’s resume with a list of colleges he planned to apply to,” adding, “It is unclear if Liโ€™s son was admitted to Brown University or, if so, whether he attended.”

The New York Post report claim that Schwerin “made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015.”

According to Obama White Houseย archives, a press release from March 10, 2015, stated that Obama appointed Eric D. Schwerin as a member of the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The U.S. Commission for the Preservation of American Heritageย namesย Schwerin as a past member, who wasย sworn inย on Feb. 1, 2017. The Obama administrationย notedย that Eric D. Schwerin is “Founding Partner and Managing Director at Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC, positions he has held since 2008.” Records also show that Rosemont Seneca founders Archer and Heinz visited the White House in 2009 and 2011 for a โ€œholiday receptionโ€ and โ€œgroup tourโ€ respectively.

Of the situation involving a top Hunter Biden business partner, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, “Not everyone gets to meet the vice president of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Bidenโ€™s business associates โ€” like Eric Schwerin โ€” had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House. This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed.โ€


A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Sex, Lies, and Censorship

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 22, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-sex-lies-and-censorship/

The Mainstream media continue trying to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop Joe Biden Corruption connection.

Hunter laptop Scandal
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Common Sense Not Included

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 23, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-common-sense-not-included/

Democrats are talking about ankle bracelets and phones for illegal immigrants as opposed to turning them away at the border.

Illegal Immigrant Phones
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ Critical Race Tyranny

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 24, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-critical-race-tyranny/

Gov. Walz, Democrats, and the teacher’s union are pushing Critical Race Theory against the will of parents.

Critical Race Theory Minnesota
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

A.F. Branco Cartoon โ€“ The Tragic Kingdom

A.F. BRANCO |ย onย April 25, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-tragic-kingdom/

Disney Corp is against the Desantis bill that protects parentsโ€™ rights from radical leftist teachers.

Disney Gone Woke
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ยฉ2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons โ€“ Tips accepted and appreciatedย โ€“ $1.00 โ€“ $5.00 โ€“ $25.00 โ€“ $50.00 โ€“ $100 โ€“ it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco โ€“ 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 โ€œFox Newsโ€, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and โ€œThe Washington Post.โ€ He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh Dโ€™Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.


REPORTED BY:ย HRAND TOOKMAN | APRIL 21, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/21/mandatory-face-coverings-only-purpose-was-promoting-fear/

woman in a face mask

A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. Thatโ€™s fair, but it wasnโ€™t their primary purpose.

Author Hrand Tookman profile

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Now that a judge has stayed the federal mask mandate on public transportation, itโ€™s important to have an honest accounting of what this entire mask situation was truly all about. A lot of people will make a lot of claims. A tiny sliver will continue to claim mask mandates actually helped mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They will be the outliers because, in terms of stopping the spread of Covid or any other virus, wearing a maskย is the equivalentย of doing a rain dance: it might make you feel better, and some quacks will tell you it works, but ultimately it does nothing except make you look foolish and give you a false sense of security.ย (Vaccine mandates were the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake.)

It was all so stupid and foisted on us by people weโ€™re supposed to trust, which is why we need this honest accounting of what it was really all about. A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. Thatโ€™s fair, but it wasnโ€™t their primary purpose. The primary purpose of the mask mandates was to make every person who wore one a walking advertisement for fear. If you were wearing a mask, then you were doing your job, because you had given up your right to free expression and replaced it with one, constant sentiment: โ€œIโ€™m afraid, and you should be too.โ€

That was the main purpose of the masks. Thatโ€™s why they wanted everyone to keep wearing them. It was about control, yes, but far more than that, it was about promoting fear. Thatโ€™s why they lied about the threat Covid poses. Thatโ€™s why they inflated the number of deaths, counting so often all who diedย withย as having diedย from. Thatโ€™s why they convinced so many Americans that the threat of hospitalization or death is exponentially higher than it actually is. (For the record, the survival rate for Covid is 99.7 percent for unvaccinated adults, 99.9 percent for vaccinated adults, and 100 percent for unvaccinated children.)

All they did the entire time was work as hard as they could to promote as much fear as possible, and masks were an excellent weapon they could force on you to help spread their message of constant fear, division, and dehumanization.ย The mask stripped you of your right to free expression and replaced whatever you wanted to communicate with one single piece of speech: โ€œBe afraid.โ€

That was the primary purpose. Thatโ€™s why they were all so fired up about it. Thatโ€™s why they were all so desperate for you and everybody else to wear them.

Itโ€™s important we have our heads around that because it will help us avoid letting them do it again in the future. It wasnโ€™t just about control. It wasnโ€™t just about dividing and dehumanizing us. It wasnโ€™t just about turning us against each other and forcing us to deny science so we could devastate each otherโ€™s social, psychological, and emotional health.

All of those were welcome byproducts to the โ€œpublic health expertsโ€ and other elites who to this day claim masking provides value. But the primary purpose was to promote fear, and to stifle your speech and expression so you perpetually signaled that fear to everyone else.

You were obedient, yes. But more than that, you were afraid. That was the message, whether you wanted to send it or not. It was the primary reason they made everyone wear them, and itโ€™s important we never let them do that to us again.


Hrand Tookman is a Cleveland, Ohio native with a background in interpersonal communications. He writes with an objective of exposing media bias, and inspiring unity in defiance of so many forces today that thrive off of division.


WRITTEN BY:ย JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | APRIL 21, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/21/gov-desantis-is-right-to-attack-disney-republicans-everywhere-should-follow-his-lead/

Gov. Ron DeSantis

Woke corporations that wage war on families and target children should expect to be targeted in turn by GOP lawmakers.

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News broke Wednesday the Florida Senate hadย passed a billย to dismantle Walt Disney Worldโ€™s half-century-old โ€œindependent special districtโ€ status, an arrangement whereby Disney has been allowed, since 1968, essentially to govern itself. Gov. Ron DeSantis says Disneyโ€™s self-governing status should be subject to review, to ensure that it is still โ€œappropriately serving the public interest.โ€

Good. Disney is reaping its just reward for inserting itself into the political debate about Floridaโ€™s parental rights bill, which Disney lost in spectacular fashion. Republican governors and lawmakers across the country should be taking notes. This is how you deal with big corporations that try to throw around their weight and force woke policies on voters and families. You punish them, not just because they deserve it, but also, as Voltaire famously put it,ย pour encourager les autres.

Disney was no doubt betting that DeSantis and Florida Republicans would do what Republicans have almost always done in the face of woke corporate pressure: simply back down. Thatโ€™s what South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem did last year when at the behest of the NCAA sheย vetoed a billย that would have protected girlsโ€™ sports from trans ideologues.

Same with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who vetoed a measure banning genital mutilation and hormone treatments for minors (he was subsequently overridden by the state legislature). Same goes for then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who in 2015 infamously caved to corporate pressure and gutted his stateโ€™s religious freedom law.

Indeed, at any other time and place, with almost any other Republican governor and legislature, Disney would almost certainly not have faced any consequences for wading into the debate over the parental rights bill. After all, since when do Republicans actually wield power against the enemies of their voters and defend ordinary families from powerful woke corporations? Almost never.

By breaking that mold, DeSantis has set a clear example that other GOP governors and state lawmakers should follow. If a corporation like Disney wants to insert itself in a political battle that has nothing to do with its business โ€” in this case, a fight over whether to prohibit classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through the third grade โ€” then it should be prepared to pay a heavy cost. Simply put, corporations that do what Disney did, publicly lobbying against the rights of parents to have a say in whether their young children are exposed to sexually explicit subject matter, have marked themselves out as enemies of a free people and should be treated as such. If Disney wants to make war on families in Florida, then the proper role of a democratically elected government is to go after Disney with every power at its disposal. Maybe that means they lose tax breaks that were once justified for purely economic reasons. Same for the special status Walt Disney World has enjoyed all these years, governing a 40-square-mile area in central Florida as it sees fit.

This isnโ€™t about the economic arguments, not anymore. Whatever merit there was to the notion that Disney โ€œserves the public interestโ€ before the fight over parental rights has completely vanished. Now that Disney has taken a stand against families and parents, there can be no doubt: Disney does not serve the public interest in Florida, and Floridians owe it nothing.

Conservatives should understand this, but not all of them do. Over at National Review, Charles Cooke has decided to stand athwart history, as it were,ย and yell: โ€œIndependent special district status is complicated!โ€ His complaint with DeSantis is that there was no need to punish Disney over its opposition to the parental rights bill because the bill passed. Disney lost, DeSantis and Republicans won. Moreover, he adds, until a month ago, โ€œWalt Disney Worldโ€™s legal status was not even a blip on the GOPโ€™s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited, nor did they have any reason to.โ€

Did they not? What changed in the last month that might have prompted them to revisit the issue? Could it be that Disney came out publicly as a very real threat to Florida parents who donโ€™t want their second-graders instructed about sexual orientation and gender identity? Could it be that the fight over the parental rights bill revealed Disney as something other than an entertainment brand and Walt Disney World as something other than a beloved family theme park? Could it be, in fact, that this entire affair has exposed Disney as a malign force in Floridaโ€™s civic life?

That Cooke canโ€™t grasp this, and instead attacks DeSantis by tediously explicating the particulars of Floridaโ€™s independent special districts, shows the naivetรฉ of conservatives in general and Republican politicians in particular on woke corporations pushing extremist agendas. Cooke argues there are lots of independent special districts in Florida, and that Walt Disney World โ€œis unique not in itsย typeย but only in itsย particulars.โ€ Orlando International Airport and the Daytona International Speedway, he notes, have a similar independent status. Why single out Disney?

To ask is to answer. Did the Orlando International Airport or the Daytona International Speedway wage a public campaign against the parental rights bill, and while doing so commit to pushing a โ€œqueerโ€ agenda on children? No, they didnโ€™t. Disney did. That makes all the difference.

If the airport and the speedway had behaved the way Disney did then yes, Florida lawmakers should have absolutely punished them. (Thanks to the impending revocation of Walt Disney Worldโ€™s special status, itโ€™s unlikely the airport or speedway or any other entity in Florida with a similar status will decide to follow in Disneyโ€™s footsteps, which is part of the point.)

Cooke further laments that singling out Disney is a mistake because, โ€œWalt Disney World is deeply rooted in Floridaโ€™s soil, as a result of agreements the Florida legislature made with it in good faith. To poison that soil over a temporary spat would be absurd.โ€

But here again Cooke โ€” and really, itโ€™s not about Cooke, itโ€™s about the accommodationist strain on the right that he and NR represent โ€” misunderstands the nature of the fight. This is not a โ€œtemporary spat,โ€ asย Disney itself has made clear. Itโ€™s an ideological and cultural war that corporations like Disney will never stop waging.

For many years now, only one side in this war has been crying โ€œno quarterโ€ before every battle. The other side has pretended not to believe it and surrendered time and again, with predictable results. Finally, DeSantis and Florida Republicans have taken the enemy at their word and responded in kind. Republicans everywhere should go and do likewise.


John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.


Reported Byย Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, April 21, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/pennsylvania-school-board-votes-down-launch-of-after-school-satan-club.html/

A Pennsylvania school district has voted against a parent’s request to launch a satanic group’s After School Satan Club at an elementary school for students who want to participate in an extracurricular program that is non-religious.ย In an 8-1 vote Tuesday, the Northern York County School Board based in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, rejected the request to establish an โ€œAfter School Satan Clubโ€ at the districtโ€™s Northern Elementary School.

The agenda for Tuesdayโ€™s meetingย indicatesย that Samantha Groome sought to establish the club on a โ€œprobationary basis.โ€ Aย video clipย of the school board meeting, obtained by the York Daily Record, shows parents and others gathered in the crowd standing up and erupting into applause after the effort to create the satanic club was defeated.

Groome said she wanted her children to be able to participate in extracurricular activities, but sought a secular alternative to the Joy El Christian club, which operates at nine of the 16 school districts in the county and offers off-campus activities. 

While an After School Satan Club will not come to fruition in Northern York County, Pennsylvania, other school districts in the country have embraced the extracurricular programs sponsored by the Satanic Temple. Earlier this year, Jane Addams Elementary School in Moline, Illinois, received criticism for handing out flyers promoting the After School Satan Club. 

A logo for the After School Satan program. | Satanic Temple of Seattle

The Moline-Coal Valley School District defended its decision to allow the club to operate at one of its elementary schools. Noting that it โ€œdoes not discriminate against any groups who wish to rent our facilities, including religious-affiliated groups,โ€ the district explained that โ€œreligiously affiliated groups are among those allowed to rent our facilities for a fee.โ€ย 

The district pointed to the Good News Club, which it described as โ€œan after-school child evangelism fellowship group,โ€ as an example of a religious organization that it allows to use its facilities even though it doesn’t endorse its message.ย 

According to the Satanic Templeโ€™s website, โ€œthe After School Satan Clubs meet at select public schools where Good News Clubs also operate.โ€ Other school districts that host After School Satan Clubs includeย Lebanon City School Districtย in Lebanon, Ohio, which also faced intense pushback for allowing the Satanic Temple to host an after-school activity for elementary school children.ย 

June Everett, who serves as a minister of Satan at the Satanic Temple and is the campaign director of the After School Satan Club,ย announcedย that the club would begin meeting at William Bruce Elementary School in Eaton, Ohio, in February. Everett stressed that โ€œASSC is ONLY in schools that have a Good News Club or other religious club operating after hours.โ€ย 

Everett listed the presence of the extracurricular program LifeWise Academy, a โ€œreleased time religious instruction program focused on Bible-based character education,โ€ at the school as justification for seeking to launch an After School Satan Club there. She also posted a flyer advertising the After School Satan Club at William Bruce Elementary School.ย ย 

The flyer touted some of the activities participants would engage in, including โ€œscience projects,โ€ โ€œpuzzles games,โ€ and โ€œarts and crafts projects,โ€ and listed โ€œbenevolence and empathy,โ€ โ€œcritical thinking,โ€ โ€œproblem solving,โ€ โ€œcreative expressionโ€ and โ€œpersonal sovereigntyโ€ as concepts children will learn there. It also asserted that the United States Constitution protects the After School Satan Clubโ€™s right to distribute flyers on public school grounds.

โ€œThe United States Constitution requires schools to respect the right of all external organizations to distribute flyers to students at school if the school permits any such organization to distribute flyers. Accordingly, the school cannot discriminate among groups wishing to distribute flyers at school and does not endorse the content of any flyer distributed at school.โ€

The After School Satan Club contends that the U.S. Supreme Court precedent gives it the right to hold meetings on public school grounds after hours: โ€œThe Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in the case ofย Good News Club v. Milford Central Schoolย that schools operate a โ€˜limited public forumโ€™ and that, as such, they may not discriminate against religious speech should a religious organization choose to operate an After School Club on their premises.โ€ย 

The After School Satan Club Handbookย insistsย that the group is โ€œnot offering any materials or lectures to your child about satanism.โ€ The handbook cites โ€œfree inquiry and rationalismโ€ as the focus of the club, adding: โ€œWhile the classes are designed to promote intellectual and emotional development in accordance with TSTโ€™s tenets, no proselytization or religious instruction takes place.โ€

A video on the After School Satan Clubโ€™s website features a song titled โ€œMy Pal Satan,โ€ which includes lyrics declaring, โ€œSatanโ€™s not an evil guy, he wants you to learn and question why, he wants you to have fun and be yourself and by the way, there is no Hell.โ€ Additionally, the song maintains that โ€œSatanโ€™s not a scary guy, he wants you to share and to be kind.โ€

โ€œWhen all is said and done, Satan doesnโ€™t actually exist,โ€ the song continues. โ€œHeโ€™s an imaginary friend who can teach us how to live.โ€ย 

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com


REPORTED BY:ย JORDAN BOYD | APRIL 20, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/texas-school-defends-pressuring-6th-graders-to-protest-as-part-of-queer-week-2657187462.html/

rainbow flag

Miller Middle School in San Marcos, Texas is hosting a โ€œQueer Weekโ€ where students as young as sixth grade are urged to dress in โ€œprideโ€ colors, wear nametags with preferred names and pronouns, and โ€œprotestโ€ LGBT discrimination.

โ€œThe goal of the week is to provide a school culture that values diversity, equity and inclusion,โ€ MMS Principal Saumnya Hart told parents in an email forwarded to The Federalist by the school.

According to aย โ€œMiller Queer Weekโ€ scheduleย obtained by The Federalist, MMS set aside four school days in April โ€œto provide support for students in the LGTBQIA+ community, their allies, and the greater student and staff body.โ€

Beginning on Tuesday, April 19, students were encouraged to โ€œshare their stories on the wall in the hallway in order to stand against mistreatment.โ€ On Wednesday, students were told to โ€œdress in colors of the rainbow to support the LGTBQ+ community.โ€

Nametags designated for โ€œpronouns and preferred namesโ€ will be supplied for all students on Thursday, according to the โ€œQueer Weekโ€ calendar. On Friday, the week is scheduled to close out with a โ€œNational Day of Silenceโ€ where โ€œLGTBQ+ students and their allies protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGTBQ people in schools.โ€

Hart told parents that she approved the event after approximately 15 students โ€œwho identify in the LGTBQIA+ communityโ€ asked the administration for โ€œprotection and a safe place to learn without being belittled.โ€ She justified the school-sanctioned event by claiming that the activities โ€œare completely voluntary and will not be included as part of any lesson or instruction being provided.โ€

San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District Chief of Communications Andrew Fernandez told The Federalist that the school has received complaints from concerned parents but believes the activities are appropriate because they are โ€œnot part of the instructional day.โ€

โ€œWe have calls every day about questions or concerns that families may have and weโ€™re handling the situation as we do any other situation,โ€ Fernandez said. โ€œWe speak with the parent. Hear their thoughts and concerns and then share the reasoning behind the activities taking place this week.โ€

Texas officials have made it very clear that school-sanctioned activities dealing with sexuality violate the stateโ€™s sex education opt-out requirements for parents.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently scolded Austin Independent School District for hosting its annual Pride Week which featured activities such as โ€œwatching Queer Eyeโ€ and โ€œnail painting.โ€

โ€œThe Texas Legislature has made it clear that when it comes to sex education, parents โ€” not school districts โ€” are in charge,โ€ Paxtonย wrote.ย โ€œBy hosting โ€˜Pride Week,โ€™ your district has, at best, undertaken a week-long instructional effort in human sexuality without parental consent. Or, worse, your district is cynically pushing a week-long indoctrination of your students that not only fails to obtain parental consent, but subtly cuts parents out of the loop. Either way, you are breaking state law.โ€

It appears based on the email and the substance of the activities at Miller Middle School that this school is likewise in violation of Texas state law.


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

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