Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Know-nothing pundits and politicians have been communicating to Americans that inflation is, like the weather, a mystery they can’t control. That’s simply not true, write three economic commentators in a soon-published book, “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, And How to Fix It.” On the contrary: inflation is a direct result of governments cheating their people, and solving it is pretty simple, if politically difficult.
In the book, businessman Steve Forbes, economist Nathan Lewis, and business journalist Elizabeth Ames give laypeople a concise, readable introduction to monetary policy. They also lay out easy-to-understand policy and personal prescriptions for responding to an inflationary economy such as today’s. The book is short and immensely useful for those of us who are not economic experts or finance minds and just want politicians to stop stealing our hard-earned money and endangering our nation’s security.
It would also be useful to members of Congress and other government officials with the authority to address what especially for the poorest Americans is a frightful economic situation. The authors lay out a one-year plan for stopping inflation in its tracks based on historical and international experience.
In the course of explaining what inflation is and how it works, the authors make the important point that it’s not just about money. Inflation is deeply connected to societal flourishing in general. Societies in which inflation is rampant are often unstable, chaotic, and violent.
“Markets are people,” the authors write. “When money is no longer a reliable unit of value, not only trade but social relationships ultimately unravel. Nations afflicted by extreme inflation end up experiencing higher levels of crime, corruption, and social unrest. As we have seen throughout history, the end result can be a tragic turn to strongmen and dictators.”
After electing a socialist president, Peru hit a 25+ year record inflation rate. The result? Citizens are now rioting over unaffordable food & gas prices.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Democrat elites dismiss Americans’ concerns over 40+ year record inflation. https://t.co/X8YIHnsDc1
— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) April 8, 2022
In an inflationary economy, the winners are the rich, the well-connected, and the corrupt. The losers are the poor, the middle-class, and those who work hard and play by the rules. Thus, an inflationary economy is inherently an unjust system. This is the top reason it should be combatted.
Not surprisingly, then, the rich and powerful often insist some inflation is a good thing. Maintaining a consistent level of inflation is in fact the Federal Reserve’s open policy goal. But even a “low” level of inflation such as The Fed’s (often wildly missed) target of 2 percent a year effectively steals significant income from especially the working and middle class. For someone earning $50,000 a year, 2 percent annual inflation is a $1,000 pay cut every year. That can be the difference between saving and not saving.
Making it harder to put money aside essentially forces middle and working-class people to depend on welfare rather than their own industry. Inflation thus erodes the middle class that is the bulwark of all free societies. So when it increases, societies tend to experience chaos. More people stop working and creating, and start trying to steal from others, either through government or through crime.
It should go without saying that an unstable society and economic chaos are threats to national security. These invite aggression from foreign enemies and hinders a nation’s ability to respond. This should make policymakers take inflation seriously, but like usual, so far politicians are mostly playing the blame game instead of solving the problem.
What Causes Inflation
Inflation is not merely rising prices, even sharply rising prices. That can occur for sensible reasons, such as sudden consumer demand for some fashionable item, or a crop failure leading to natural shortages. The authors define inflation instead as “the distortion of prices that occurs when money loses value.”
That can be seen, for example, in much of the current housing spike: “If you’ve made few, if any, home improvements and the local housing market isn’t on fire, you can be sure that the near-million-dollar sale price of your house doesn’t mean that it has magically become more valuable. Its worth has been distorted by a gradual, and totally artificial, decline in the value of the dollar,” explains “Inflation.”
When people stop trusting a currency as a stable measure of value, we get inflation. This is another way inflation is not solely about economics. It’s also about the people’s faith in their government and markets. That’s why lower-trust societies are more likely to experience inflation, and inflation is likely to worsen social trust. That’s also why inflation tends to spiral until somebody steps in to restore trust in the economy.
What causes inflation? If it’s true inflation, not price shifts caused by other market factors such as fads or innovation, it amounts to “a corruption of prices resulting from the debasement of currency by governments.” In other words, inflation happens when governments decide to circulate more money without a corresponding increase in economic value. This usually happens when governments want to spend more than they have, which is what the U.S. government has been doing for decades.
Today, the Federal Reserve essentially passes on federal debts and deficit spending to American consumers by creating more money without also creating new value. It is now one of many Western central banks that “effectively financ[es] their [government] deficits by buying their debt.”
In very simple terms, inflation is the result of governments spending far more than they can openly tax from citizens, then attempting to hide their shenanigans with financial gimmicks. So it is absolutely fair to think of inflation as a tax, and as the direct fault of shady government behavior: “Moderate inflation results from short-term ‘stimulus;’ hyperinflation comes from regular money printing to pay the government’s bills…The United States has not begun directly financing itself with large-scale money printing. Unfortunately, that may already be changing.”
Ending Inflation Is a Question of Political Will
The book helpfully explains in very clear and simple detail how the Federal Reserve enables Congress’s refusal to pay for its insane spending and how that all fuels inflation. It also discusses several intricate maneuvers by which this happens and why there isn’t a direct correlation in every case between money printing and inflationary effects. I won’t go into those here, but as a non-economist I did find them very helpful for understanding what’s going on.
I also found especially insightful the authors’ observation that federal overspending is not passed on to future generations, which is what I thought previously, but is inflated away from today’s workers and savers. Inflation is a tax on a nation that is unwilling to live within its means, and it occurs not in the future but in tandem with runaway government spending.
Ending inflation is quite simple, the authors say: “Stabilize the value of money.” Yet most “inflation remedies… more often than not end up making things worse.” That’s because government officials typically either misunderstand the root causes of inflation or are unwilling to take the steps necessary to address it. Thus, governments implement price controls or “austerity” measures, which usually further destroy their economies.
Instead, what’s needed is to tighten the money supply. The authors get into the details for doing this effectively, including their recommendation for the best way to ensure reliable money, a “new gold standard that would work in the twenty-first century.” They discuss this and respond to common arguments against it, still in highly readable prose.
Our Chief Obstacle to Fixing Inflation Is Ourselves
The key obstacle to implementing the authors’ one-year plan for restoring currency stability is widespread economic ignorance cultivated by leftist economists to preserve their control over policy. Yet given these economists have been wrong time and time again, it seems it’s high time to pay attention to experts whose recommendations have a reliable track record.
Unfortunately, since the majority of people working in Congress, the Federal Reserve, and similar commanding heights are the reason we’re in a dangerously inflationary economy in the first place, it’s probably too much to expect they will do anything other than make the situation worse in the near future. That’s why you’re hearing Joe Biden and other Democrats hint at making things worse with price controls or other punitive regulations by demonizing various industries for raising prices.
Not just because such people are at the helm, but also because they’ve already baked more money devaluation into the economic pie for the next several years, expect significant inflation to continue for quite some time. We can only hope and pray that the worst disasters of historic inflationary economies will be averted for us. And obtain some backyard chickens so we have something affordable to stick in the pot for dinner.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
On Saturday, six Y-20 cargo planes from China landed in Belgrade, Serbia, reportedly carrying HQ-22 surface-to-air missile systems. (@200_zoka / Twitter screen shot)
Chinese Air Force cargo jets ferried arms to Europe on Saturday as a reminder of China’s long reach into world affairs. Six Y-20 cargo planes were first tracked as they entered European air space before landing in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, according to The Drive. The report noted one highly unusual measure, perhaps reflective of the conflict in which Europe finds itself.
“Observers noted at least some of the planes had the covers for their chaff and flare countermeasures systems removed,” The Drive reported.
“It looks very much like they may have been equipped with live countermeasures, which would be anticipatory of some sort of potential threat. What that threat would have been isn’t clear,” the report said.
Interesting find by @Prova_61 👍 … In fact I have never seen before this, what appears to be the hatch removed for the chaff & flare dispenser boxes.
The planes’ presence alone would have been notable, the report continued.
“The Y-20s’ appearance raised eyebrows because they flew en masse as opposed to a series of single-aircraft flights,” The Drive’s report noted. “The Y-20′s presence in Europe in any numbers is also still a fairly new development.”
The report said that the Chinese planes were carrying HQ-22 surface-to-air missile systems that would be used by Serbia. Serbian military analyst Aleksandar Radic said, “The Chinese carried out their demonstration of force,” according to the Associated Press.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said Saturday that he will display “the newest pride” of his country’s military on Tuesday or Wednesday.
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.
People familiar with the thought process of China’s leadership say that the Chinese government has begun to accelerate the development of its nuclear arsenal after reassessing the threat posed to mainland China by the United States.
The Wallstreet Journal said that China’s nuclear effort “long predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the U.S.’s wariness about getting directly involved in the war there has likely reinforced Beijing’s decision to put greater emphasis on developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent.”
It is believed that Chinese leaders see a stronger nuclear arsenal as a way to deter the U.S. from involving itself in a potential future conflict over Taiwan.
The Chinese government has also accelerated work on more than 100 suspected missile silos that could be used to store nuclear-tipped missiles in remote western regions of China.
American officials and independent security analysts who study nuclear proliferation say they are unsure about what is motivating Beijing’s race to develop its nuclear arsenal.
The Wallstreet Journal reported that the “people close to the Chinese leadership said China’s increased focus on nuclear weapons is also driven by fears Washington might seek to topple Beijing’s Communist government” as American foreign policy becomes more hawkish towards China.
American military officials and security analysts worry that China rapidly accelerating the development of its nuclear arsenal could embolden the Chinese Communist Party to launch a surprise nuclear strike. Reportedly, the Chinese government plans to maintain an arsenal “no larger than necessary to ensure China’s security interests.”
A person close to the leadership of China suggested that another reason Chinese leadership is rushing to strengthen its nuclear arsenal is so that the U.S. can’t push them around on the geopolitical stage. The person said, “China’s inferior nuclear capability could only lead to growing U.S. pressure on China.”
This past year, the American security apparatus was caught entirely off guard as the Chinese government launched a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile into space that circled the earth before sailing towards its target on the planet’s surface. An unnamed U.S. official said, “We have no idea how [China] did this.”
People familiar with the thinking of Chinese leadership have said that it is unlikely that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has had an impact on the Chinese government’s nuclear acceleration despite the lingering threat of Putin using a nuclear weapon against Ukraine causing immense anxiety within the international community.
The Pentagon estimates that China will have 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of this decade.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg joined Joy Behar, Sara Haines, and Ana Navarro on ‘The View” this week to talk about Florida’s new “Parental Rights in Education” law — which he absurdly claimed “will kill kids” — before going on to add inflation and high gas prices to his list of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ crimes.
“Your husband, Chasten, is a teacher and he’s been a vocal critic of what’s going on in my state of Florida when the, with the so-called ‘don’t say gay’ law, which he says will kill kids. Do you agree?” Navarro asked Buttigieg.
“Yeah, he’s right,” Buttigieg answered. “And I think every law to be judged for the effect it’s going to have on real people in real life, and I get the political reasons why they’re doing this. By the way, some of those political reasons (laughs), they don’t have a plan on anything else, right? I mean, they don’t have a plan on dealing with inflation or dealing with gas prices or dealing with the issues.”
Pete Buttigieg says that prohibiting classroom instruction of sex and gender theory in kindergarten classes will “KILL KIDS.”
From the same people that pushed forced lockdowns & school closures, causing sharp increases in adolescent depression, suicide rates, not to mention learning loss. 🤡
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials.
The Democrat governor’s office in Pennsylvania colluded with left-wing activists to secure millions of dollars in private money to run get-out-the-vote efforts in blue counties in the swing state in 2020, new, explosive testimony revealed. The Pennsylvania legislature heard this testimony, backed up by email evidence, on Tuesday during the first public hearing on two new bills seeking to block private grants.
Tuesday’s public hearing began with statements by the respective primary sponsors of the bills that seek to ban dark money from elections, with Sen. Lisa Baker speaking in support of Senate Bill 982 and Rep. Eric Nelson encouraging passage of House Bill 2044. Pennsylvania investigative journalist Todd Shepherd then testified at length on the results of his extensive probe into the insertion of private funds into the 2020 election.
With a series of PowerPoint slides, Shepherd revealed to lawmakers that beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for these private grants. While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life—an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash—emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME.
“What’s important to know about CSME is that it is not a 501(c)3, but rather it is a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund,” Shepherd told the Pennsylvania lawmakers. In turn, “the New Venture Fund is managed by Arabella Advisors,” Shepherd continued, noting that “the ‘parent’ group of Arabella, New Venture Fund — they are part of what the Atlantic Magazine identified as ‘The Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group You’ve Never Heard Of.’” In fact, in January, The New York Times called out the New Venture Fund in its article headlined, “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then they Won with it in 2020,” Shepherd added.
The CSME was not the only left-wing organization involved in lobbying blue counties to obtain grants. The emails also indicate that The Voter Project played a prominent role in this targeted cash giveaway: Following the 2020 election, the lead strategist in Pennsylvania for The Voter Project would brag that The Voter Project “was instrumental in signing up over 3.2 million people to vote by mail and leading the soft-side effort to win the swing state in 2020.”
How the Left Opened This Battlefront
A July 2020 email exposes the beginning of these efforts, with The Voter Project’s Gwen Camp introducing Delaware County’s Christine Reuther to CSME’s Solomon, saying they had “both been hearing about the other’s operations” and “want[ed] to get everyone together to talk about the potential for an official partnership.” According to the testimony, Camp copied Jessica Walls-Lavelle, a special advisor to the chief of staff on election reform in Wolf’s office, on that email, along with The Voters Project lead Pennsylvania strategist Kevin Mack.
In August, other emails show the governor’s staffer, Walls-Lavelle, reaching out to additional blue counties. Solomon passed the good news to his Delaware County contact, Reuther, telling her, “We’ve invited Chester, Montco, and Bucks to apply! They’re on it!”
Another email from August shows Camp, a consultant for The Voters Project, contacting a representative in Lackawanna County, telling the recipient that Camp is working with Jessica Walls-Lavelle, who is “with the Governor’s Office.”
Activists Push for Ballot Trafficking Dropboxes
All five counties lobbied by the left-wing activists, with an assist from Wolf’s office, ended up breaking heavily for Joe Biden, which likely explains why, when Solomon saw in August 2020 that Montgomery County had applied for a $1.2 million grant, he exclaimed, “the third largest county in the state, Philly suburbs!” Solomon then asked his colleagues whether they should turn this “into more of a plan.”
In an email response, Solomon’s cohort noted that the application “raised polling place consolidation as a possibility.” “We should ask what resources they need to make that not happen,” the email continued, suggesting: “Could we push them to use more than 5 drop boxes with more money? Maybe pointing out that Delaware County is using 10 times as many?”
While the right-to-know requests revealed the targeted lobbying of blue counties, there were no emails showing any outreach to core Republican counties until after September 1, 2020. That proves significant, according to Shepherd’s testimony, because when the summer-time targeting of Democratic strongholds took place, the Zuckbucks cash infusion to the CTCL had not yet been announced. Without that cash, there may never have been a chance for the red counties to obtain any funds. (Shepherd also questioned where the earlier CTCL funding came from—something apparently still unknown.)
But even after the new funds came in, the Democrat counties still received a substantially higher cut of the $22.5 million in grants spread across 23 counties, as Shepherd illustrated with powerful graphics, testifying, “Philadelphia had $8.83 cents that could be spent on each ‘Joe Citizen’ registered to vote there, while in Luzerne or Erie County, those counties had about 75 cents to spend on ‘Joe Citizen’ registered voter in those counties.”
Equal Protection Problems
Far from being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s experience matches the growing evidence seen in other states that the Zuckbucks and other leftist money funded state-run get-out-the-vote efforts for Biden. What makes Pennsylvania different, however, is that the emails connect the grant process to government actors and show the state’s collaboration with left-wing political activists to lobby Democrat-only counties. This evidence raises constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The Supreme Court made clear in Bush v. Gore that “the right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise.” The Equal Protection clause requires both that the right to vote be granted on equal terms, but also that the state “not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of any.” The emails highlighted in Tuesday’s hearing suggest that such “arbitrary and disparate treatment” occurred in 2020, with the governor’s office and select counties as willful participants.
Individuals representing the secretary of state’s office and Philadelphia County also testified at Tuesday’s hearing and attempted to downplay the disparity by stressing that large counties had different needs. Delaware County spent some $600,000 on “Bluecrest mail sorting equipment” one witness stressed, while an election official from Philadelphia county noted it expended huge sums of grant money to purchase modern machines to “open, sort, and tabulate” votes in that county.
But rather than support their “nothing to see here” response, Delaware and Philadelphia County’s purchase of the high-tech Bluecrest mail-sorting equipment highlights a second Equal Protection problem seen in the 2020 election.
As I reported shortly after the election, evidence shows that Philadelphia and other Democrat strongholds illegally engaged in pre-canvasing activities by inspecting mail-in ballots before election day. They did this by weighing the ballots on the Bluecrest sorting equipment to determine if the voter had enclosed the ballot in a “sleeve” as required by state law. Election workers in Philadelphia and other select counties then provided campaign workers the list of allegedly defective ballots—ones without a sleeve—allowing activists to contact the voters, telling them to cast a new vote.
While the Bluecrest sorting equipment used in Philadelphia and Delaware County can detect which ballots are defective based on their thickness or weight, smaller counties without that sophisticated equipment could not conduct such pre-canvas inspections, which in any event violate the state’s election code.
Other Evidence of Vote Mismanagement
Referencing Delaware County’s expenditures proves ironic for a second reason: Whistleblower videos have exposed extensive evidence of systemic problems with the 2020 election in the large Pennsylvania county, including violations of election law and potentially corruption and fraud. Of course, mail-in voting itself is ripe for election fraud, and as the emails show Delaware County had 10 times the number of drop boxes planned over the even larger Montgomery County.
The whistleblower videos in Delaware County also captured election workers discussing the fact that some of the voting machines were missing V-drives, or the removable memory drive that records the vote tallies, and conversing on how to recreate the missing data, which a later video confirmed the county did. Yet, even with this video evidence, Delaware County council member Christine Reuther declared at a recent public meeting, “There were no missing drives. It’s been debunked. It’s been before the board of elections. It’s been addressed in court. There’s been testimony about it. There were no missing drives.”
Reuther is the same council member involved in the early lobbying for Delaware County to apply for private grants.
This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials, especially when they target select counties. But Tuesday’s hearing suggests Democrats don’t care, with one witness opposing the new legislation by framing the bills as part of “the big lie” that Trump won the election.
Without Democrats on board, the bill will be doomed even if it passes the legislature, as last year Wolf vetoed a similar ban on outside money. And we may now know why.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
NBC News on Wednesday evening casually admitted that the “intelligence” Biden released claiming Russia was planning a false flag operation as a pretext to invade Ukraine was totally made up. There were also claims of chemical weapons or Russia asking China for help. Apparently it was all made up.
NBC’s Ken Dilanian, one of the Biden Regime’s most loyal stenographers, tried his best to spin this in a positive light.
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it. It’s more important to get out ahead of them – Putin specifically – before they do something. It’s preventative,” a US intel official told NBC News.
Truly unbelievable.
VIDEO:
NBC News: Three U.S. intel officials admit the “intelligence” the W.H. released re: Russia/Ukraine was basically just guesswork meant to “mess with Vladimir Putin’s brain" pic.twitter.com/UWJL6EkdQ9
Recall, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee called out State Department spokesman Ned Price over claims Russia was planning a false flag operation in order to invade neighboring Ukraine. In February the Biden State Department claimed there was intel indicating Russia was going to use crisis actors to carry out a false flag event before invading Ukraine – but AP reporter Matt Lee wasn’t buying any of it and ripped into the Department’s spokesman.
“We have information indicating that Russia has also already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine – so that, is an action that Russia has already taken,” State Department spox Ned Price said to AP’s Matt Lee.
Matt Lee wasn’t buying it and accused the State Department of fabricating evidence.
“You have shown no evidence to confirm that…I mean this is like crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into,” Matt Lee said.
A green energy company has pleaded guilty after it was discovered that 150 Bald Eagles have been killed by their wind farms. The Bald Eagle is the symbol of America and they are a protected species. Killing them is a serious crime.
Do you remember a few years ago when Trump suggested that this could happen and people on the left scoffed at him?
Wind energy company kills 150 bald eagles in US, pleads guilty
A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 bald eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine bald eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.
In addition to those deaths, the company acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012, prosecutors said. Birds were killed in eight states: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.
NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, bills itself as the world’s largest utility company by market value. It has more than 100 wind farms in the U.S. and Canada and also generates natural gas, nuclear and solar power.
This is perfect sarcasm:
A lot of people think you're not allowed to kill bald eagles, but you are. You just have to pay $53,333 for each one. And you have to make sure you kill them with a wind turbine. Because it's necessary to kill eagles to save them from climate change.https://t.co/AHAEkVZWMj
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 6, 2022
As previously reported, Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was critically injured last month while covering the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Details of the attack, which killed Hall’s colleagues, cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and fixer Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, are still unclear, but Hall updated the public on his injuries.
“It’s been over three weeks since the attack in Ukraine and I wanted to start sharing it all. But first I need to pay tribute to my colleagues Pierre and Sasha who didn’t make it that day. Pierre and I traveled the world together, working was his joy and his joy was infectious. RIP” Benjamin Hall said next to a photo of Pierre Zakrzewski.
Benjamin Hall said he feels ‘pretty damn lucky to be here’ after he lost limbs, one eye no longer works and his hearing is blown.
“To sum it up, I’ve lost half a leg on one side and a foot on the other. One hand is being put together, one eye is no longer working, and my hearing is pretty blown… but all in all I feel pretty damn lucky to be here – and it is the people who got me here who are amazing!” Hall said next to a photo of him in a stretcher.
The Alabama state legislature has passed a bill that would make it a felony to prescribe or administer puberty blockers or gender transition hormones to individuals younger than 19 — it would also make it a felony to conduct gender reassignment surgeries on individuals in that age range. The bill also states that teachers and others at public and private schools may not hold back information from a parent related to a child’s feelings that their gender identity does not align with their biological sex.
While many Americans would support this type of legislation as a common sense way of protecting children, not everyone shares that view. The Associated Press reported that Democratic state Rep. Neil Rafferty, who is gay, seemed to struggle to restrain his anger and keep his composure as legislators headed to the vote.
“This is wrong,” Rafferty said, according to the AP. “Y’all sit there and campaign on family being the foundation of our nation … but what this bill is doing is totally undermining that. It’s totally undermining family rights, health rights and access to health care.”
The state legislature has also approved another piece of legislation that would mandate that pubic K-12 schools require people to utilize multiple occupancy bathrooms that align with their biological sex. The measure would also prohibit teaching students about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The pieces of legislation now head to Republican Gov. Kay Ivey.
Liberals around the country have recently been in an uproar over a Florida law that includes a provision that prohibits teaching students about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Florida state Rep. Randy Fine (R) has said that in the next session he plans to push legislation to outlaw the provision of gender reassignment surgery and drugs to minors.
“I’ve had enough of this nonsense. Next session, I will help shepherd legislation to make it illegal to provide drugs or surgery to a minor for the purpose of alleged ‘gender assignment.’ The legislation will make it felony child abuse punishable by prison and loss of medical license,” Fine noted on social media.
“If an adult wants to self-mutilate their body in pursuit of the fiction that they can defy both G-d and science, more power to them — so long as they don’t expect me to pay for it. But no child should be put in the position of making fundamentally life-altering decisions before they are of the age of majority,” Fine declared.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged two (Middle Eastern?) men with posing as DHS agents, giving expensive gifts to Secret Service Agents. A dozen FBI agents busted down the door of a luxury apartment in DC and arrested Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 36 on Wednesday night.
Taherzadeh and Ali gave free apartments, iPhones, surveillance systems, drones and other tools to the Secret Service Agents. Four Secret Service officers – including one assigned to protect the First Lady, were placed on leave as the feds investigate.
Prosecutors allege Taherzadeh and Ali had falsely claimed to work for the Department of Homeland Security and work on a special task force investigating gang and violence connected to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. They allege the two posed as law enforcement officers to integrate with actual federal agents.
Taherzadeh is accused of providing Secret Service officers and agents with rent-free apartments — including a penthouse worth over $40,000 a year — along with iPhones, surveillance systems, a drone, flat screen television, a generator, gun case and other policing tools, according to court documents.
He also offered to let them use a black GMC SUV that he identified as an “official government vehicle,” prosecutors say. In one instance, Taherzadeh offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for a Secret Service agent who is assigned to protect the first lady.
The plot unraveled when the U.S. Postal Inspection Service began investigating an assault on a mail carrier at the apartment building and the men identified themselves as being part of a phony Homeland Security unit they called the U.S. Special Police Investigation Unit.
Prosecutors say the men had also set up surveillance in the building and had been telling residents there that they could access any of their cellphones at any time. The residents also told investigators they believed the men had access to their personal information.
The Washington Post admitted recently the media’s reaction to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 “is an opportunity for a reckoning.” But reporter Anne Applebaum apparently disagrees.
Applebaum, a writer for left-leaning magazine the Atlantic, was confronted with a substantive question about the media’s reaction to the story at a “disinformation” conference on Wednesday. Instead of engaging in honest self-reflection on behalf of her peers, Applebaum dismissed the story’s importance. During a Q&A panel at the University of Chicago event, a student asked Applebaum, citing a Media Research Center poll, whether the mainstream media acted “inappropriately” for suppressing and dismissing the Hunter Biden story.
“Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, and what can be learned from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?” the student asked.
“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, totally irrelevant,” Applebaum said.
“I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation — I mean, I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States,” she continued. “I don’t find it to be interesting, I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.”
When Applebaum concluded, moderator David Axelrod ended the panel.
— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) April 6, 2022
Applebaum wrote about the Biden-related controversies in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, calling them “right-wing-media smears”
Meanwhile, despite admitting that she is not interested in the Hunter Biden story, Applebaum repeatedly raisedconcerns of conflict of interestover the proximity of Donald Trump’s children to him when he was president (such as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner serving as senior advisers) and the possibility that the Trump family profited from the White House.
Thus, Applebaum’s reaction to the question was described as“arrogant” because it “perfectly encapsulates why so many distrust the media.”
The Hunter Biden laptop story is anything but irrelevant.
Despite media outlets and social media companies suppressing the story in October 2020, the New York Times and Washington Post — the nation’s biggest newspapers — recently confirmed what was already known: The laptop and emails are real, and they belonged to Hunter Biden.
In a honest editorial published on Sunday, the Post thus admitted the lesson that should be learned from 2020 is that there is “a danger of suppressing accurate and relevant stories.”
Joe Rogan took aim at his 9-year-old daughter’s California elementary school this week, slamming the institution for pushing woke “anti-racist” ideals on young children. The massively popular podcaster claimed the school, which he doesn’t name, issued a blanket statement to parents in May 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, telling them that their children “must be anti-racist.”
Rogan slammed the school’s email during Tuesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” arguing that the children were too young to understand the inflammatory message and charged that by telling them to be anti-racist, administrators were in essence introducing racism to them.
“When the whole George Floyd thing happened, one of the schools that my kids were going to back in California released this email, saying that it’s not enough to not be racist, you now must be anti-racist,” Rogan recalled.
“And my kid’s nine at the time,” he continued, asking, “What does that, what does that mean?”
“These kids are not even remotely racist. Like, they have all sorts of different kinds of friends,” he went on to say. “I’ve never heard them discuss it once. It’s just, ‘I like this person and she’s nice to me and we like to play together and we both like the same things.'”
“So, to tell a 9-year-old that you have to be anti-racist, well, then they go looking for racism, they’re gonna go looking to confront it,” Rogan argued.
Joe Rogan complains that his son's school pushed "anti-racist" rhetoric after George Floyd's death:
"These kids are not even remotely racist … To tell a 9-year-old that you have to be anti-racist, well then they'll go looking for racism." pic.twitter.com/nRvClFRobp
Rogan went on to add that if schools wanted to teach kids that “racism is stupid,” then “I’m all with you.”“But if you want to tell my 9-year-old, they have to be anti-racist. What does it mean?” he said.
The podcaster, who has recently dealt with his own controversy over past racial comments, also criticized the California educators for being “naive” in the implementation of their progressive ideology.
“They weren’t that good at teaching in the first place,” he claimed. “And now here there are saying they’re going to tackle something, not just tackle something as complex as race in America, but you’re going to establish rules that you can’t just be not racist, you have to be anti-racist.”
“And you’re going to teach this to a 9-year-old?” he questioned. “So, what are you saying? Like, what exactly are you saying, what is your f*****g end goal?”
Rogan reportedly made the comments during an interview with filmmaker and director David Mamet, during which the two discussed the current state of Hollywood.
Fed up with illegal immigration in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Wednesday that he was going to have charter buses ship illegal aliens to Washington D.C. and drop them off at the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Abbott made the comments at a media briefing announcing the steps his administration would take to respond to the Biden administration rescinding Title 42 and the expected massive wave of illegal immigrants.
“To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants who are being dropped off by the Biden administration, Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal aliens who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, D.C.,”said Abbott.
“We are sending them to the United States Capitol where the Biden Administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they’re allowing to come across our border,” he added.
Abbott said he was ordering the Texas Division of Emergency Management to operate the project. State officials said they were ready to activate up to 900 charter buses, according to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin.
Title 42 was a controversial policy put in place under the Trump administration in response to the threat of coronavirus infections among the illegal immigrant community. Experts worry that without the policy, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and refugee applicants would flood over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Illegal immigration advocates immediately excoriated Abbott over his announcement.
“This is a sick and reprehensible stunt that will increase militarization and violence against people seeking asylum!”tweeted the official account for United We Dream. “We have the resources to welcome refugees + treat people with dignity, but Abbott is choosing to meet people with violence and his twisted attempt at humiliation.”
Among those critical of the Biden administration over the rescission of Title 42 was Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
“Title 42 has been an essential tool in combatting the spread of COVID-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border. We are already facing an unprecedented increase in migrants this year, and that will only get worse if the Administration ends the Title 42 policy,” said Manchin.
“We are nowhere near prepared to deal with that influx,” he added.
Here’s Abbott’s statement:
Abbott: Texas will charter buses of illegal immigrants to DC | FOX 7 Austin www.youtube.com
A 22-year-old woman called “Diablita” — or “Little Devil” — who is accused of luring five teens to a MS-13 massacre reportedly licked the victims’ blood off her lips as members brutally murdered the young men. She is now facing charges of helping lure the teens to their deaths.
Leniz Escobar reportedly lured 20-year-old Michael Lopez and his friends, 16-year-old Justin Llivicura, 18-year-old Jorge Tigre, and 18-year-old Jefferson Villalobos, to a planned massacre in Long Island, New York, in 2017. Escobar, according to prosecutors, led the four to a local park after telling MS-13 members — one of whom was her boyfriend — that the teens had mocked them. When the group arrived at the park, Escobar reportedly crouched down low to the ground and smiled as the teens were hacked and slashed to death with machetes, knives, and tree branches. As the blood spurted and sprayed across her face and clothing, Escobar was said to grin and lick the blood from her lips.
Witness Elmer Alexander Arteaga Ruiz — a fifth teen who was lured to the park but who was able to escape — testified that there were at least eight or nine gang members involved in the bloody attack.
“They covered their faces with sweaters,” Ruiz recalled during his testimony. “They came and formed a semi-circle. They told us to get down on our knees. They said ‘Don’t move. Whoever moves, dies.'”
He added, “I ran because the first words they said was that we were going to die, they were going to kill us, and they had weapons. … I took off running and there were two people who started to follow me. Thank God I managed to escape.”
In a December 2019 ruling, U.S. Circuit Judge Joseph Bianco said that Escobar “knowingly lured the unsuspecting victims to a prearranged location in the Central Islip woods where they were murdered with machetes, knives and tree limbs.”
The New York Post reported that four other MS-13 members also accused of carrying out the brutal murder are awaiting trial in connection with the case, while two other members have been sentenced to 50 and 55 years in prison.
Escobar’s defense attorney, the Daily Mail reported, said that she did not realize that the victims would be killed when she drew them to the park.
Murder trial of MS-13’s Leniz “Little Devil” Escobar begins www.youtube.com
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
CONTENT WARNING: This column contains graphic details of a criminal case involving a sex offender who possessed and distributed photos and videos of the sexual abuse of prepubescent boys.
Presidents are entitled to nominate Supreme Court justices who represent their party and its values. Using that as our guide, President Joe Biden picked the Democrats’ perfect Supreme Court justice: Ketanji Brown Jackson.
If you’d given me a thousand bucks to come up with a question that would stump a Supreme Court nominee, I never would have thought of: What’s a woman?
Democratic values.
As Sens. Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham amply demonstrated at the nomination hearings last week, Judge Jackson really likes defendants in child pornography cases. She’s partial to all criminals, but the child porn cases make the point bracingly.
In seven out of seven child pornography cases that came before Judge Jackson, where the sentencing was up to the judge, she imposed sentences that were a fraction of those recommended under the sentencing guidelines. In all seven cases, her sentences were also far below those requested by the prosecutor.
Not 2 1/2 years, instead of three — more like three months instead of 10 years. In United States v. Hawkins, the defendant possessed and distributed multiple images of child abuse of kids, including photos of prepubescent boys engaging in oral and anal sex, a video of an 8-year-old boy masturbating, and one of an 11-year-old boy being anally penetrated by an adult man.
The federal sentencing guidelines recommended eight to 10 years. Judge Jackson sentenced the defendant to three months.
Yes, yes, he was only 18, and he was remorseful. Good for him!
But Judge Jackson also dramatically departed downward in sentencing a couple of ripe perverts — one who attempted to travel across state lines to molest a 9-year-old girl (when his thousands of child porn images weren’t enough); and another who’d distributed more than a hundred pornographic photos and videos of his own daughter.
On average, Judge Jackson gave child porn defendants sentences more than five years below the minimum under the guidelines.
In other words, Judge Jackson is the beau ideal Democratic Supreme Court justice.
In her favor, KBJ is at least a Generational African American (GAA), i.e. Descendant of American Slaves (DOAS) — unlike Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Joy Ann Reid and approximately 90% of the “African Americans” in Harvard’s entering class this year, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Perhaps, there’s hope that, someday, the high court will acknowledge that affirmative action is intended to make up for the legacy of slavery and should be available exclusively to GAAs, as opposed to what it is now, which is affirmative action, set-asides, “plus” factors, and do-nothing diversity jobs for everyone except white Americans.
Apart from the Democrats finally promoting a legacy African American, rather than an immigrant trying to steal the experiences of Black Americans, nothing is unusual here. It’s the media’s response to the questioning of Judge Jackson that’s been hilarious.
The media take the position that it’s rude to ask Judge Jackson questions — at least any questions about her record. Republicans are welcome to ask her all the questions they like about her family or her travails.
She is the most qualified human being ever, EVER to be nominated to the Supreme Court! The bravest, the strongest, the most heroic — HOW DARE YOU ASK OUR LITTLE LAMB QUESTIONS!
The media have also issued reams of “context,” “fact checks” and “debunkings” … all to prove that KBJ is a virtual Eliot Ness on crime! Don’t believe your eyes! Forget everything you know about the Democrats! It’s all lies and conspiracy theories!
Spencer Brown
We got the sneering:
No, Sen. Hawley, Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t soft on child pornography. — NBC News
We got the hysterical warnings about right-wing conspiracy theorists:
Hawley’s attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson fuel a surge in online conspiracy chatter. — NPR
And we got the sophistical “fact checks”:
Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences “pretty mainstream” — ABC News
The New York Times’ “fact check” noted she was concerned about child porn fiends who were simply motivated by “the technological or social aspects” of child porn.
Totally run on that, Democrats.
What is the point of all these “FACT CHECKS”? For the past two years, liberals have been screaming, “Defund the Police!” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “F–k the Police!” — not to mention actually defunding the police and springing criminals in Democratic-run cities around the country. We got it: You like criminals and hate the police, Democrats. You’re not exactly flying below the radar.
Of note: Sen. Joe Manchin, your regular, old-time, American values Democrat, is just like the rest of his party when it comes to crime. Same with Arizona’s Sen. Mark Kelly and Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester. Kelly can boast about being an astronaut, and Tester can walk around with that buzz-cut and a piece of hay in his teeth — but give them a guy getting off on videos of 11-year-old boys being anally raped, and they say: Three months. Max.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
“We are being treated like criminals just because we are girls. Afghanistan has turned into a jail for us.” This is how one Afghan girl describes life under the Taliban. Girls across the country had their hopes dashed last week when Taliban authorities reneged on their promise to allow girls’ secondary schools (above 6th grade) to reopen. The decision was so last minute that the students were not told until they arrived at school Wednesday morning and had to be sent home.
One girl tearfully recounted to her mother, “Mom, they didn’t let me enter my school. They’re saying girls aren’t allowed.” Instead of attending classes and progressing in their education, she and other Afghan girls will be expected to stay inside their homes and help with housework.
The pretext given by some Taliban officials is they were unable to plan for a school uniform dress code for teenage girls. This pathetic excuse is no doubt familiar to Afghans who previously lived under Taliban rule. When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, education for girls was similarly restricted. But in recent months, Taliban officials have tried to insist that they’ve changed over the last two decades. However, all pretense of modernization within the Taliban is now over; that is a deeply tragic reality for women and girls in Afghanistan who simply want to go to school and live normal lives.
While Afghan women and girls were grieving the loss of basic freedoms and opportunities because of their sex, a very different scene played out nearly 7,000 miles away in a U.S. Senate chamber. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, to define the word “woman.” Jackson responded, “No. I can’t … I’m not a biologist.” It struck many as odd that a well-educated and successful person — whom many hail as a pioneering black woman herself — was unable or refused even to define the word “woman.”
But this ambiguity on the nature of womanhood isn’t limited to a Supreme Court confirmation hearing; it’s taking our culture by storm. In recent weeks, we’ve seen biological males who self-identify as women kicking biological females off the podium in women’s sports and taking their slots in “woman of the year” designations.
Clarity on the sexes is needed now more than ever. But the truth is not that complicated. Writing in the National Review, Madeleine Kearns explains why no one needs a degree in biology to know what a woman is: “Sex is observable at birth, detectable long after death, and demonstrable in our chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive organs. We are reminded of our sex every time we go to the bathroom or look in a mirror. The sex of the vast majority of people is identifiable at a glance.”
The West’s erasure of women puts women and girls at physical risk in shared spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms and robs them of opportunities that policies like Title IX were supposed to protect. It also has the potential to undermine global momentum on women’s rights. What does it mean for international women’s rights advocacy if the West can no longer agree on a definition for “woman?”
While the West is embroiled in debate about gender identity ideology, the heart-wrenching and horrifying situations faced by many women around the world are being overlooked. Female North Korean defectors forcibly sent back to North Korea endure rape, torture, forced labor, and forced abortions in labor camps. Young Christian and Hindu girls in Pakistan are at risk of being forcibly converted and married to their Muslim kidnappers. Uyghur women are targets of China’s genocide, undergoing brutal mandatory sterilization, forced abortions, and arbitrary detainment.
Women have come a long way in gaining equal rights and protections in much of the world. Yet, the West does a disservice to those women still fighting for basic rights when it sidelines their plight in favor of trendy, dangerous, and incoherent gender identity ideology.
Women and girls around the world aren’t being helped by the West’s newfound confusion about the sexes. We shouldn’t be afraid to say what a woman is — a biological female — and defend the human dignity of women around the world. We must convey the value and goodness of women’s unique qualities — not ignore them, undermine them and certainly not erase them.
100 Percent Fed Up – Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has a reputation for exposing the Left and their radical ideology in House committee hearings. Today was no exception.
This afternoon, Rep. Matt Gaetz blasted Joe Biden’s woke Defense Secretary Lloydoor with the House Armed Services Committee Austin during a heated exchange on the House fl. Gaetz began by exposing the woke secretary, accusing him of allowing a lecture by Thomas Piketty, “Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism,”that took place at the National Defense University. The concept of the lecture was “It’s time for Socialism,” Gaetz told him, as Secretary Austin attempted to interrupt him to object to Gaetz’s assertions.
Gaetz blasted Sec. Austin, for his ineffective leadership, “You guys have been blowing a lot of calls lately on matters of strategy, Mr. Secretary.” He continued, “You guys told us that Russia couldn’t lose, you told us the Taliban couldn’t immediately win—and, so I guess I’m wondering, what in the $773 billion that you’re requesting today is going to help you make assessments that are accurate in the face of so many blown calls?”
Secretary Austin responded by telling Rep. Gaetz that he’s seen the budget and that it “speaks for itself.”
Rep. Gaetz was not impressed with his answer and continued his aggressive line of questioning. Gaetz said that the US military, under the leadership of Joe Biden and Sec. Austin has fallen behind other nations and reminded him how they have failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine and how our military is losing ground to China when it comes to “hypersonic weapons.”
Austin shot back, interrupting Rep. Gaetz, “What do you mean, we’re behind in hypersonics?” asking, “How do you make that assessment?”
Gaetz responded, “I make that assessment because China is fielding hypersonic weapons systems, and we are still developing them. I make that assessment because Russia actually used one.”
“By the way, your own people brief us that we are behind and that China is winning,” Gaetz told Austin. “Are you aware of the briefings that we get on hypersonic?” he asked.
Gaetz compared the military capabilities that “everyone else in the world seems to be developing capabilities—we’ve got time to embrace Critical Race Theory at West Point, to embrace socialism at the National Defense University—to do mandatory pronoun training.”
Sec. Austin interrupted to defend his woke leadership. He took a ridiculous swipe at Rep. Gaetz, “The fact that you’re embarrassed by your country.” Oh, no, no, no,” Gaetz responded. “I’m embarrassed by your leadership. I am not embarrassed for my country.”
“You know what? That is so disgraceful that you would conflate your failures with the failures of the uniformed service members,” Gaetz said.
Gaetz ended with a final death blow. “I saw that the Obama administration tried to destroy our military by starving it of resources, and it seems the Biden administration is trying to destroy our military by force-feeding it wokeism.”
Watch:
"I'm embarrassed by your leadership, I am not embarrassed for my country."
Rep. Matt Gaetz and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin got into a heated exchange during a House hearing looking at the 2023 defense budget request. pic.twitter.com/MaGxHSLhjL
The website of a woke church in Illinois says that during Lent the church will not utilize any music or liturgy created by white individuals. A section on the home page of the website of the First United Church of Oak Park bears the headline, “Lent 2022: Fasting From Whiteness.”
“For Lent this year, First United is doing a mix of ‘giving something up’ and ‘taking something on.’ In our worship services throughout Lent, we will not be using any music or liturgy written or composed by white people. Our music will be drawn from the African American spirituals tradition, from South African freedom songs, from Native American traditions, and many, many more,” the website states. “For Lent, it is our prayer that in our spiritual disciplines we may grow as Christians, united in the body of Christ with people of all ages, nations, races, and origins.”
Turning Point USA posted a photo of a church sign that bears the headline, “Fasting from Whiteness” — the sign includes the message, “This Lent we build our worship life around the voices of Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.”
The church is unabashedly pro-LGBT, declaring on its website, “We welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into the full life and ministry of the church, including ordination, expecting and encouraging them to share their talents and gifts in the life, liturgy, leadership, and employment positions of our congregation, as our ministers, teachers, members, visitors, and friends.”
Editor’s note: The original published version of this story contained a headline that erroneously stated that the church was avoiding liturgy created by “non-whites.” We apologize for the error.
Republican lawmakers in Ohio have put forward their own version of Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, legislation that prohibits teachers from giving lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity at younger grade levels. H.B. 616, introduced by Republican state Reps. Jean Schmidt and Mike Loychik, states that no public school community school, or private school that accepts vouchers, shall “teach, use, or provide any curriculum or instructional materials on sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. For students in grades four through twelve, discussion of these topics in “any textbook, instructional material, or academic curriculum” is restricted to material that is “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
“The classroom is a place that seeks answers for our children without political activism,” said Schmidt in a statement to the Columbus Dispatch. “Parents deserve and should be provided a say in what is taught to their children in schools.”
Her proposal uses similar language to the Florida bill that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last month, but there are important differences in how it is enforced. While the Florida legislation opens schools up to face lawsuits if a teacher or school official violates the statewide standards and settles those suits in court, the Ohio bill creates an administrative process to resolve disputes over what is taught in the classroom.
The prohibition on sex and gender education in grades K-3 is enforced by permitting an individual to file a complaint against any teacher, school administrator, or school district superintendent who allegedly violates these standards. The accused would be granted a hearing by the state board of education to defend themselves, and then the Ohio superintendent of public instruction, a political appointee, will make an evidence-based decision on whether the accused person(s) violated the law. An educator or school official found to have violated the proposed law could face suspension and the loss of state funding, depending on the severity of the offense.
H.B. 616 also bans teaching other “divisive concepts,” including critical race theory, the 1619 Project, intersectional theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion learning outcomes, and inherited racial guilt.
Democratic opponents of the bill are calling it another “Don’t Say Gay” bill, repeating false accusations thrown at the Florida law that the Ohio bill is too vague and that it will harm LGBTQ+ students and unfairly penalize teachers. State Rep. Brigid Kelly, a Cincinnati Democrat, fears that the prohibition on certain “instructional materials” will mean “there can be no books of any kind that deal with any LGBTQ+ issues.”
“We’re not giving people access to the tools, the materials, the lessons they need to prepare children for the diverse world that exists,” Kelly told the Columbus Dispatch in an interview.
Ohio teachers unions are also opposed to the legislation.
“Fundamentally, these bills are cynical attempts to use race and now sexual orientation and gender identity as wedge issues to cause division and sow conflict and ultimately to score cheap political points,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association. “Legislators that are promoting these kinds of agendas ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
The bill’s supporters maintain that discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity are inappropriate for younger children and that laws are needed to keep such discussions out of the classroom until students are mature enough to have them.
“The real question is why do people want to sexualize kids at this age,” said Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue. “Children need time to develop and grow up and parents should be guiding these discussions.”
A 22-year-old man from central Pennsylvania accused of sexually abusing children faces the possibility of a millennium behind bars for his egregious actions. In a press release issued last week, the Newberry Township Police Department reported that officers arrested Isaiah John Metz on March 30 and charged him with a whopping 115 counts related to child sexual abuse. A large majority of the charges filed against Metz are felonies — including three counts of rape of an underaged child, two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child, two counts of aggravated indecent assault, fifty counts of sexual abuse of children, and 50 counts of child pornography.
If convicted on just the 100 counts of sexual abuse of children and child pornography, Metz could face up to 1,000 years in prison, People reported. According to an affidavit of probable cause obtained by Penn Live, Metz stands accused of raping two girls under the age of 5 and posting dozens of photos and videos of the assaults online.
The outlet added that Metz was babysitting one of the victims on July 24, 2021, while her sister went to a doctor’s appointment, when he assaulted her. Court documents stated that the young girl was acting noticeably more emotional than normal when her family returned home from the doctor’s office. During bath time the next day, she reportedly told her parents that her vagina was hurting.
Police then launched an investigation into the incident, during which they collected DNA samples from a pair of underwear and from the chair that the girl and Metz were sitting on when she alleged that the assault occurred.
The outlet reported that representatives from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children later informed investigators that Metz had uploaded photos and videos of himself sexually assaulting the two girls to the internet. According to the arrest affidavit, 42 photos and eight videos of the girls were found on Metz’s Samsung Galaxy phone in February.
Penn Live did not offer details regarding other incidents of rape or child sexual abuse.
It was not immediately clear based on court records where Metz is being held or whether he had been granted bail. Police or other officials in York County, Pennsylvania, have yet to comment on the case publicly.
Biden SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has an extensive record of being lenient toward child sex crime offenders. Ketanji also holds the distinction of defending America-hating Gitmo Gitmo terrorists for free. There’s something wrong with this woman. For some reason Joe Biden thought she would be a good fit for the US Supreme Court. That’s how sick the Democrat Party is today.
On Tuesday Attorney Mike Davis from the Article III Project described how Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson beat out two other black female judges to be selected for the Supreme Court. Neither of the other two, Judge Michelle Childs and Judge Leondra Kruger, were pedophile apologists. Only Ketanji Jackson held this clear distinction over the other two finalists. The Biden regime must have seen this as a plus.
Arizona Senate Candidate Blake Masters joined Steve Bannon on The War Room on Tuesday. Blake did not hold back in attacking Mark Kelly for supporting this outrageous Supreme Court pick.
Blake Masters: He’s taken a lot of bad votes. He’ll do whatever Chuck Schumer tells him to. This guy is a rubber stamp for the Biden open borders, inflation agenda. But of all the bad votes Mark Kelly has taken I think this is the worst. Right? This one is going to be with us for a long time. This is serious, a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. I’m going to beat Mark Kelly in November. He won’t be a senator next year. But this vote, this disastrous vote will be his legacy. To put a pedophile apologist on the Supreme Court, it makes my blood boil… He puts this pedophile apologist on the Supreme Court and then he pretends to be moderate… This is what they all think now. They think that pedophilia should be normalized. They think it’s OK. They think our laws come down too hard on these people… He’s pretending to be moderate. It’s disgusting. I think he’s a liar.
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.
Thousands of ballots were trafficked in Wisconsin.
Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips from True the Vote testified Thursday before the Campaigns and Elections Committee in the Wisconsin Assembly on their investigation of ballot trafficking at ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin. According to True the Vote 7% of the ballots in Wisconsin at the ballot drop boxes were likely fraudulent votes. They estimate over 137,000 ballots were trafficked in Wisconsin. Joe Biden “won” Wisconsin by less than 21,000 votes.
Gregg Phillips from True the Vote testified that they saw similar results in all of the battleground states. And Phillips then added that at least 4.8 million ballots were trafficked in the 2020 election.
This is a stunning number. We now know how the election was stolen.
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.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will almost certainly be confirmed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, said that she does not have a position on whether people have natural rights.
“I do not hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights,” the jurist wrote in response to a written question from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Jackson pointed to the Declaration of Independence when she was asked to, “explain, in your own words, the theory prevalent among members of the Founding Fathers’ generation that humans possess natural rights that are inherent or inalienable.”
Jackson wrote that, “The theory that humans possess inherent or inalienable rights is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which states: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'”
Regarding Jackson’s lack of a position about the issue of whether individuals have natural rights, GOP Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana tweeted, “Ketanji Brown Jackson denies the first, self-evident truth of America!”
Ketanji Brown Jackson denies the first, self-evident truth of America! https://t.co/wdZN35VNPM
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) April 3, 2022
“No big deal, that’s only the fundamental creed of the republic,”tweeted BlazeTV host Steve Deace of “The Steve Deace Show.”
“There is no Constitution without natural rights. If you can’t even say they exist you have no business interpreting it,” Nate Madden, who serves as GOP Rep. Chip Roy’s communications director, tweeted on his personal Twitter account.
Roy called out Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who plans to vote in favor of confirming Jackson: “Hey @SenSusanCollins – do you believe this? Assuming not – justify your vote for her? CC: @LeaderMcConnell.”
In June 2021, GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the only Republicans who voted in favor of confirming Jackson to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Graham announced last week that he will not vote to elevate Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court, but Collins announced that she will support confirming Jackson to the nation’s high court. Murkowski announced on Monday that she will support confirming Jackson.
President Joe Biden nominated Jackson to fill the vacancy that will arise when Justice Stephen Breyer retires.
In Georgia, lawmakers advanced legislation that, if signed into law by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, will give parents more direct input over what their children are being taught in the state’s public schools. Just the News reported that on Friday, the Georgia state senate voted 31-22 in favor of House Bill 1178. The bill outlined a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that proponents of the legislation say allows parents adequate recourse if they are opposed to the curriculum being taught in their local public schools. The bill passed the Georgia house of representatives on March 4 with a vote of 98-68.
The reader summary provided for the bill by the Georgia legislature said that bill will provide a “review of removal of students in elementary and secondary education, so as to provide for the protection of the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their minor children from undue infringement by a state or local government entity, local board of education, or any officer, employee, or agent thereof.”
Frontline Policy Action, a group that according to its website, advocates for “God-honoring legislation that protects family values and advances freedom for Georgians,” took to Facebook to declare its support for the bill. The group said, “Once signed into law by the governor, this bill will codify parental rights as fundamental in Georgia law and strengthen parents’ control over their children’s education.”
It is expected that Kemp will sign the bill, now passed by both chambers of the Georgia legislature, into law.
“Parents have a right to be actively involved in their child’s learning experience,” Kemp said. “This bill will ensure transparency in education by promoting a partnership between parents [and] educators.”
This legislation has worked its way through the Georgia legislature in the midst of similar legislation in its neighboring state of Florida making national headlines. Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed the “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law much to the chagrin of liberal legacy media, leftwing institutions, and transnational corporations. These groups inaccurately characterized the legislation as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill despite the proposed law barring schools from teaching about “sexual orientation or gender identity” to students in kindergarten through third grade or “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” and not the utterance of the word “gay.”
In response to DeSantis signing the “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law, the Walt Disney Company — one of Florida’s largest employers —announced that it would work to get the law repealed or overturned by the court system.
Similarly, in 2019 after Kemp signed a bill into law that banned abortions after the detection of a fetal heart beat in Georgia, Hollywood studious and celebrities vowed to boycott the state.
Stand-up comedian and actor Kyle Dunnigan joined Megyn Kelly on “The Megyn Kelly Show” and had the former Fox News host in stitches with his uncanny impersonation of President Joe Biden. Struggling to keep a straight face, Kelly proceeded as if actually interviewing the president and asked about the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Vladimir Pukin is … not Pukin. The guy, the guy without the shirt, man. He’s a bad dude. He’s a liar, man, not to be trusted. So, I don’t believe a word that guy says. He’s like, he’s like Corn Pop,” articulated the faux-president before falling asleep mid-sentence.
“Hey! Hey! Did you, did you sh*t my pants or did I? What’s going on here?” he asked upon waking. “Kegyn Melly, the classiest gal … in the news.”
Kelly pressed on, asking about Hunter Biden’s dubious dealings with Burisma in Ukraine.
“My boy, Huntie, he lost his job over there in the Kraines. He had a great nice cushy job there working for $80,000 a week. This guy, man, he blew it all. Blew it all for self-centered reasons … Plutin, man. Pluto blew it for my boy. C’mon, you know the thing. The guy,” faux-Biden said.
Don’t miss the rest of the hilarious interview below:
After more than a decade away from electoral politics, former GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is going back on the ballot for the at-large House seat left vacant by deceased Rep. Don Young who died last month. It’s past time for the former vice-presidential candidate reclaim her stardom as a serious policymaker after the media nearly killed it in 2008.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris is everything the media frantically portrayed Palin was about to be 14 years ago. Ignorant, extreme, unprepared, and merely one 70-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency. Except while Arizona Sen. John McCain was 71 in 2008, President Joe Biden governs today at 79.
Harris offered her latest word salad this week in what’s become routine for the vice president dragging the administration down with abysmal favorable ratings. Watch what she had to say at a White House event with the prime minister of Jamaica on Wednesday:
VP HARRIS: "One of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic… we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential." pic.twitter.com/fVSr8Km6co
If it were Palin at the podium, Saturday Night Live (SNL) would lead this weekend’s program with Tina Fey returning to reprise her role as the 2008 vice-presidential candidate. In fact, Fey will probably be back on the late-night skits as Palin once again by the end of the year mocking Palin’s run for the House of Representatives as the comedian did when the conservative lightning rod endorsed Trump in 2016.
Wednesday’s nonsense from Harris at the White House was relatively tame compared to the prior 14 months of nonsensical commentary from the nation’s president on stand-by.
Just last month, Harris appeared to confuse Ukraine as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite its pending membership of the western security apparatus at the heart of the conflict in eastern Europe.
“I will say what I know we all say and I will say over and over again: the United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance,” Harris said at the annual DNC meeting.
Harris made the same mistake again in a tweet days later.
Palin, in contrast, was depicted as a dunce when she suggested governing the state closest to the Kremlin-controlled landmass along its arctic border enhanced her foreign policy credentials with Russian land visible from Alaskan territory.
“I can see Russia from my house!” Fey mocked the governor on SNL who returned to the weekly comedy program to play the part.
Just 55 miles with islands in between on the Bering Strait however, even Slate conceded that yes, Palin’s was right when she claimed on ABC “you can actually see Russia from land, here in Alaska.”
Palin was asked again later in the campaign by Katie Couric, then at CBS, how governing Alaska equipped her to navigate complex global affairs. Her response wasn’t well-articulated, but it wasn’t outright inaccurate either, certainly not on the scale of misidentifying Ukraine as a NATO state when Russia’s invasion was launched over that very issue.
Palin, the most popular governor in the country wasn’t treated fairly in 2008, whose folksy attitude on the campaign trail was the subject of mockery from reporters who often trapped her in “gotcha questions” in nearly every memorable moment of the election. The same could not be said of Harris, whose unpopularity and extremism failed to propel her own presidential campaign even to the Iowa caucuses. GovTrack rated Harris, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, as the most liberal senator in 2019.
Harris’s pattern of quotable moments, on the other hand, has almost always come unprovoked in prepared speeches, or, as shown above, in a written tweet, with few exceptions. One exception stands out below where Harris explains the crisis in Ukraine as if she were a kindergarten teacher to an audience who are not kindergarteners:
Even after the media’s hostile coverage of the former Alaska governor in 2008, Palin’s popularity never dipped below 50 percent among constituents during her time in office despite her national reputation wrecked by the beltway circus. No vice-presidential candidate ever faced the kind of viscous and sustained character assassination as Palin did, by both the media and her own campaign.
While Biden’s team protected Harris on the trail, Palin’s handlers, Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, were working to undermine the success of their own ticket selling out stories to reporters before the election was over. Wallace didn’t even vote for the campaign that employed the future MSNBC host.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”
Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishmentmedia, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.
Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.
A Nationwide Trend
Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.
After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.
Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.
A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.
The Shift to Cultural Marxism
From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:
Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.
Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.
With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight
Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democratsflirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options.
Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.
Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education is expected to finalize changes to Title IX rules in the coming weeks to expand the definition of discrimination beyond sex to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. The rule changes will have seismic implications, setting off not just state versus federal showdowns over state laws barring biological males from competing in women’s sports, but also how college campuses handle sexual harassment charges and due process.
While these changes have been anticipated since Biden took office, last week the Washington Post reported the first look at a draft copy of the proposed language, which includes this key sentence:
Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The Post also reported that Biden’s DOE plans to rewrite rules established by President Donald Trump’s DOE, under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that required schools to recognize the presumption of innocence for those accused of sexual harassment or assault. Some of the DeVos era due process protections that may be targeted or revoked entirely include the right to cross-examination for both the accuser and the accused, as well as the right to full access to all evidence collected by schools in sexual harassment investigations and the opportunity to respond to that evidence.
Candice Jackson, who was Department of Education deputy general counsel during the Trump administration, told The Federalist that these two major changes, to both the definition of discrimination and the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, will overlap in severely detrimental ways.
“It’s going to affect people’s ability on campus to talk about or debate about single-sex spaces on campus like women’s sports,” Jackson said. “All of a sudden, you’re in a position where even having a discussion or even trying to advocate for keeping women’s sports single-sex could get you called a harasser.”
Jackson said loosening the definition of sexual harassment moves beyond handling alleged rapes and into the realm of academic freedom.
“You’re now talking about the ability on campus to have important discussions on what gender identity discrimination means,” she said.
But as the rules are finalized, the return of campus kangaroo courts is likely to be overshadowed by the current culture war spotlight on women’s sports. With biological males winning national women’s titles, states that have recently passed laws protecting women from unfair male competition are likely to face the pressure of losing their Title IX funding. Jackson said she thinks this time will be different. She expects states to refuse to back down, as they have on other issues where the federal government wields its funding hammer.
“There is enough disagreement at a fundamental level about whether or not it is now ever OK to provide separate comparable services and activities for boys and girls and men and women that this is this is going to be a bit of a showdown, probably needing to be revisited by the Supreme Court,” she said.
Madeline Osburn is managing editor at The Federalist. Contact her at madeline@thefederalist.com or follow her on Twitter.
As we reach a month of the Ukrainian war amid talks of possible peace, a strategic appraisal is in order. It appears the Russians thought the war would be easy and fast, the Ukrainians would simply roll over and surrender, and the common people would rise up to greet Russians as liberators. Russian strategic decision-making, worsened by ideological bubbles, turned out to be as haunting as British and American misadventures in Iraq and Libya.
The Russian officer attrition in this war is on a level rarely observed in any recent conflict, partially because this level of high-intensity, state versus state, multi-domain total war hasn’t occurred in the last few decades. Russia did not foresee that its old-fashioned special operations tactics are obsolete satellites and drones track their movements. The fact that Moscow did not calculate this in their battle plans is a sign of decline, a far cry from its prestigious officer corps training during the Soviet era. The bulk of the Russian navy and air force are still bafflingly underused and functionally unavailable given the intensity of the conflict, giving rise to the suspicion that the Russians are preserving their top-tier weaponry and platforms in case the war spirals to a continental conflict.
But, somehow, they are still grinding on. If their objective was to stop Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they have achieved it already. They have also managed to cut off the entire east and south of Ukraine. Russia might still win the war and achieve Ukrainian zonal neutrality, given Russia’s sheer weight.
The Russian rhetorical “denazification” was also recently dropped quietly from the rhetoric. But the demand for Ukrainian neutrality remains and will remain. It was the single major Russian demand. All the other demands were maximalist and malleable, aimed towards negotiation. Ukraine should have taken the opportunity to do a Cold War-era, Austrian-style “neutralitätserklärung,” which would have resulted in the country constitutionally turning neutral, in order to get funding from the European Union and NATO and flourish. Ukrainians have also swallowed their non-achievable EU and NATO membership dream and are currently just as ideologically inflexible and rigid about compromise as Russia.
Long-Term Ramifications
Unfortunately, the long-term ramifications of this war, for the west, are also bleak. Every single conservative restraint and realist gain from the last few years risks being reversed if realists continue to play defense on the rhetorical field of “values” instead of focusing on a narrow, populist interest.
The absolutely mindless idea of a no-fly zone in an active warzone with a nuclear great power was narrowly avoided by 78 experts writing an open letter against it. Incidentally, support for a no-fly zone declines among Americans the moment it is explained.
But the war hysteria in the first few weeks of the campaign, aided by the usual suspects, demonstrated just how close to power and catastrophe these ideologues were. When a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former supreme allied commander of NATO argue for a no-fly zone, one needs to remember they are one step away from real advisory power and might be so again in the future.
A conservative realist grand strategy that focuses on America’s southern borders and argues for Europeans to pay for European defense first needs a realist rhetoric and public relations strategy. It must discuss the public interest, in a language common people will understand and appreciate. Pursuing such a strategy would require a total clean-up of the administrative state and Obama-era holdovers next time Republicans are in power. The hold-outs of liberal internationalism are deeply embedded within the ever-expansive national security bureaucracy.
War Is Burying Liberal Internationalism
Rampant war hysteria has resulted in limited diplomatic maneuverability, a realization that is slowly emerging. As the Financial Times noted, “since Feb 24, the west has been galvanized into more unity than it has shown in years. Yet most of the world is on the side lines waiting to see which way it goes. Not for the first time, the west risks mistaking itself for global consensus.”
No matter how many times fanatical liberal internationalists cry about this war suddenly rejuvenating liberalism, the reality cannot be further from truth. The war proves great powers can deter other great powers and are the only actors that matter, that nationalism is the strongest social force, that interests trump values, norms, and laws. Thus, the war is quite clearly not saving “liberal internationalism” but burying it.
Two of the largest non-western powers are either neutral or tacitly supporting Russia, simply because of the idea that great powers should have their own spheres of influence. The balancing powers in Europe also argued against NATO being a co-belligerent.
Realism Isn’t Isolationism At All
Anglo-American foreign policy realists are not pacifists or isolationists. They simply prioritize a greater strategic threat in China. Wars have their own momentum. The chance of a great power being dragged into war due to foolish or overzealous mistakes of smaller peripheral allies is a far bigger threat, as the current world is functionally similar to a multipolar system prior to the First World War than a relatively binary and Manichean conflict of the Second.
Russia, bogged down in Ukraine already, is not a hegemonic threat comparable to Nazi Germany. The EU’s total population is around 450 million, more than the United States (339 million) and much more than Russia (144 million). The EU’s gross domestic product also dwarfs Russia’s, and just the top four European defense budgets combined are larger than Russia’s. Yet, instead of an actual material pivot to Asia, the United States currently has more than 100,000 troops deployed in Europe.
Globally, the biggest future rival is China. China is almost incomparable in size and power next to previous rivals such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and even the USSR. There is nothing they would prefer more than the United States being dragged back to Europe. Ultimately, the U.S. objective should be not to prolong the war, but to focus on China as a rising threat. Ukrainian neutrality would have sorted the issue for good. But Russia has already been pushed into the arms of the Chinese due to the war.
By not allowing an amoral balance of power, wherein we let Russia have a small sphere of influence as a grand bargain instead of being over-committed to Europe, Washington risks undercutting its long-term strategic interests by unknowingly accelerating China’s. In a twist of fate, President Joe Biden is now mirroring former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s old Cold War equilibrium instinct is under siege by his own activist administration, determined to defeat Russian “reactionary imperial patriarchy” and defend foreign borders, statues, and churches — instincts they would never allow at home. The almost theological focus on being a part of a conflict in the far corners of Eastern Europe to ensure the continuation of a liberal democratic revolution is fundamentally undercutting American grand strategy, which historically tried to split Russia and China. Ultimately, pushing Russia to be a Chinese satellite might turn out to be our greatest historic blunder.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at The Center for the National Interest; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.
We’re constantly told, amusingly, by the Left to “follow the science!” When we follow actual science, we get shouted down, censored, purged, and called terrorists. There are only two genders: male and female. I know this triggers those with progressive fragility. For anyone struggling with gender dysphoria, there is help and hope in counseling (as long as it’s still legal). There is an all-out assault on women, and it’s global. It’s a rhetorical, social and political attack intent on erasing objective truths such as what makes women beautifully and biologically different.
Modern feminists decry “the Patriarchy” that keeps women from being equal. Those same fake feminists then celebrate when “the Patriarchy” pretends to be a woman and eviscerates centuries-long efforts of equality. William “Lia” Thomas. Richard “Rachel” Levine. Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner. Roderick “Laverne” Cox. The list goes on and on of the co-optation of women.
These men can be “women,” but a white woman (e.g. Rachel Dolezal) can’t identify as a black woman? Why not?
If self-identity is reality and confers upon you all the rights and privileges of the co-opted identification, why did we bother even having confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson? Couldn’t she just “identify” as a Supreme Court Justice? How can a jurist claim, “I am a woman” and then infamously fail to offer any definition of what a woman is?
I’m not a mechanic, but I can define a car. No one needs to be a biologist to know what a boy is, what a girl is, what a man is, or what a woman is. Only progressives, who want to mangle language and deny basic science, pretend they don’t know the obvious. A judge must be able to rule on objective criteria. Judge Jackson calls herself a woman insisting there should be “meaningful numbers of women” on the Supreme Court, yet she has no objective definition for a “woman”?
The American Medical Association is “following the science” by insisting that our sex designation be removed from our public birth certificates. Why? Well, sex is “determined at birth” they say, defying over a century of scientific knowledge.
That fave mantra of the pro-abortion Left, “No uterus! No say!”, is now rendered meaningless because anyone can identify as a woman. Whoops. Sorry. I meant a “non-prostate owner.” At least that’s what Teen Vogue is preaching to young girls (or whoever reads the soft-porn mag targeting kids).
The leader of this erasure of women is the self-anointed “leading women’s healthcare provider,” Planned Parenthood. They’re super sciency of course. “Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl,” the nation’s leading abortion business falsely claims. You know, because our genitals aren’t based on our sex which is determined by our DNA at fertilization — the moment human life begins.
Years ago, Planned Parenthood Action — the political arm that is indistinguishable from its 501c3 parent organization — tweeted a classic erasure of women. “Menstruators in New York started to #TweetTheReceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax.”
Planned Parenthood’s web pages dealing with pregnancy have purged every reference to the biological label. The abortion giant’s president, Alexis McGill Johnson, won’t even refer to women as “women.” In warning people-formerly-known-as-women of Idaho’s six-week abortion ban (which protects mothers and their unborn children), Johnson tweeted: “it will harm pregnant people and disproportionately impact marginalized communities.”
Women are now the marginalized community.
The highly political CDC also refers to women as “pregnant people.” In pushing their distorted COVID propaganda, the Centers for Dialogue Control tweeted: “Pregnant people with symptomatic COVID-19 have a 70% increased risk of death.”
You’ve got the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine wanting to use the term “chestfeeding” to be “inclusive” of “lactating people.” I’m not making this up! They claim that fathers experience “complications while chestfeeding” too. Yes. Because we don’t lactate. That would be a definite biological “complication.”
The Senate Committee on Oversight and Reform (led by Democrats) declared that “Health equity for Black birthing people is attainable.” How can (fake) equity be attainable if a simple definition of women is so escapable?
President Biden’s FY2022 budget deleted women, too, referring to mothers as “birthing people.” I’m sure he’s used that term affectionately with the First Lady (or is it First Person?), calling the mother of his children one of those pregnant people or Jill-the-birthing-person.
Interestingly, the Left is doing what Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger accused the so-called Patriarchy of doing. She wrote in her book Women and the New Race: “Woman’s role has been that of an incubator and little more.” Well. Welcome to 2022. Where women’s biological designation is being eviscerated to appease biological men who can never share in the experience of the natural acts of pregnancy and birth.
The ACLU even changed a famous quote from the late pro-abortion Ruth Bader Ginsburg to erase the very people she was talking about. Their tweet changed the clearly offensive parts that mentioned “woman” and “her” to: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
I’m no fan of RBG or her actual quote because the undignified act of harming or killing another innocent human being never gives anyone equality. But this global progressive campaign to erase women sees binary gender as an oppressive biological reality that must be excised from our lexicon.
So, “follow the pseudoscience” or be branded a hater. Too many Americans cower in fear of being called some form of -phobic. Who cares? Love people enough to speak the truth. When did confusion become the virtue we uphold instead of clarity and compassion?
These attacks on the dignity of women are rooted in a lie. Politicians know it. Planned Parenthood knows it. And so does a dangerously leftist judge who may tragically sit, for generations, on a Supreme Court currently made up of men and, yes, women.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has doubled down on his out-of-touch messaging to Americans who are struggling to pay skyrocketing prices at the pump. Last month, “Mayor Pete” made headlines when he said (in all seriousness) that the obvious solution for dealing with insanely high gas prices is to just go buy an electric vehicle. Maybe Mayor Pete doesn’t realize that most of us can’t afford to buy a new car at all, let alone an EV that costs “roughly $10,000 higher than the overall industry average,” according to Kelley Blue Book.
Now, our tone-deaf transportation secretary has let Americans know that we all need to get used to “wild price hikes” until we “achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy.”
Watch:
BUTTIGIEG: “Until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy,” get used to price hikes. pic.twitter.com/UMWBrVPe9R
It amazes me how they never understand where their electricity comes, how or even where the parts come from for these EV cars, and what to do with the used batteries from them. By the time you pay off your solar panels you need new ones. Where do 95% of them come from? China
This past week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated that American teenagers are experiencing a steep decline in mental health in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and covid lockdown protocols.
“Thisdata echoes a cry for help,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s acting principal deputy director, said in a statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental wellbeing.”
The Washington Post reported that the CDC’s new findings draw on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021. The survey emphasized collecting data during students’ “first full pandemic school year.” Students were questioned on a range of topics that included questions on their mental health, drug use, whether they encountered violence at home or school, and if they encountered racism.
The study suggested that whereas young people were sparred “the brunt of the virus” since they were statistically far less likely to fall ill, experience serious symptoms, or die than their older counterparts, they might still “pay a steep price for the pandemic.” Children are displaying negative side effects of coming of age while “weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil, and for many, grief,” the Washington Post reported.
Implying there is a biological difference between men and women, Kathleen A. Ethier, head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health, said the recently concluded survey’s results showed male and female students having vastly different results. Reportedly, Ethier said, “Female students are far worse off than their male peers.”
The Washington Post reported that the survey “underscored the vulnerability of certain students, including LGBTQ youth and students who are being treated unfairly because of their race.” Ethier said, “All students were impacted by the pandemic, but not all students were impacted equally.”
This survey’s findings are not the first-time medical officials noted their concerns about a growing mental health crisis among America’s teenagers. This past October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health,” and said that its members were “caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, and their communities.”
In December, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said, “The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.”
A transgender female cyclist was blocked from participating in the women’s British National Omnium Championship over the weekend, as Emily Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist, the Guardian reported. In addition, a number of the race’s participants were said to be ready to boycott the race if Bridges was in it, the outlet added.
Bridges, 21, set a national junior men’s record over 25 miles in 2018, the Guardian said, adding that the cyclist began hormone therapy last year to reduce testosterone levels.
However, a number of biological female cyclists discussed boycotting Saturday’s event because they believed Bridges has an unfair advantage, the outlet said, adding that Bridges was involved with the Great Britain Academy program as a male cyclist until being dropped in 2020. In addition, Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist and can’t race as a woman until the male ID expires, according to Union Cycliste Internationale regulations, the Guardian said.
Bridges was “disappointed” with UCI’s decision, the outlet said.
“We have been in close discussions with the UCI regarding Emily’s participation this weekend and have also engaged closely with Emily and her family regarding her transition and involvement in elite competitions,” British Cycling said, according to the Guardian. “We acknowledge the decision of the UCI with regards to Emily’s participation, however we fully recognize her disappointment with today’s decision.”
A comprehensive scientific review by the five British sports councils in September said there were “retained differences in strength, stamina, and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person registered male at birth.”
Trans cyclist banned from national championships youtube
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden declared his support for allowing children and adolescents with gender dysphoria to undergo body mutilating surgeries or use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to look more like the opposite sex despite unknowns about longterm side effects. In multiple documents released Thursday, which is observed by some as the Transgender Day of Visibility, the Biden administration backed what it described as “gender-affirming health care” for children.
The document states that “early gender-affirming care” for non-binary or trans-identified minors “is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.”
The document lists “top” surgeries — elective mastectomies and breasts enhancements — and “bottom” surgeries — removal of genitals — as “gender-affirming care.”
The document states that the surgeries are “[t]ypically used in adulthood or case by-case in adolescence.”
“Gender-affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare. It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people,” stated OPA.
“Medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth.”
HHS’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network released a document titled “Gender-Affirming Care Is Trauma-Informed Care.”
The network’s document defined gender-affirming care as including so-called “evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” and proclaimed that “gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” The statement comes as officials in Texas have defined administering puberty-blocking drugs on children who question their gender as “child abuse” and experimental since the Food and Drug Administration has not approved such drugs for that use.
“There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care,” the network’s statement adds. “[Transgender, gender diverse, and intersex] youth can thrive when they are supported and affirmed in their identities and their identity development.”
An entry on Mayo Clinic’s website states that drugs aimed at blocking puberty “might” help reduce depression among youth. “However, puberty suppression alone might not ease gender dysphoria,” said the clinic, adding, Using medication to delay puberty “beyond one’s peers can be stressful,” and thus, a child “might experience lower self-esteem.”
The conservative American College of Pediatricians, an association of physicians and healthcare professionals “dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” has long voiced its opposition to using puberty-blocking drugs on children suffering from gender dysphoria.
“There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the organization said in a statement.
“This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”
“Temporary use of puberty blocker Lupron has also been associated with and may be the cause of many serious permanent side effects including osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility,” the American College of Pediatricians added. “In addition to the harm from Lupron, cross-sex hormones put youth at an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued medical guidelines that supportthe surgical and hormonal transition of trans-identified children and adolescents.
“Often, pubertal suppression creates an opportunity to reduce distress that may occur with the development of secondary sexual characteristics and allow for gender-affirming care, including mental health support for the adolescent and the family,” an October 2018 AAP guideline states.
Supporters of puberty blockers have long claimed that puberty blockers’ impact on children is reversible and are designed to give children with gender dysphoria more time to decide which gender they identify as. Proponents also claim that once adolescent users stop taking puberty blockers, their puberty resumes. The new OPA document claims that puberty blockers are reversible.
However, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service reports that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.”
“Although GIDS advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be,” the NHS website explains. “It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations.”
As teens who are 16 or over and have been on puberty blockers for at least a year are eligible to start cross-sex hormones in the U.K., the NHS warns that those “hormones cause some irreversible changes,” such as breast development and deepening of the voice.
“Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility,” the NHS website added. “There is some uncertainty about the risks of long-term cross-sex hormone treatment.”
The state of Texas has made headlines in the last year as Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton and the state’s child services agency have questioned whether prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to minors could constitute “child abuse.” In February, Paxton issued a formal opinion stating that prescribing puberty blockers or conducting sex-change surgeries on children with gender dysphoria “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Texas is also investigating whether AbbVie Inc. and Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., manufacturers of puberty blockers, have been engaging in deceptive advertising practices. Paxton’s office had issued Civil Investigative Demands against the two companies, seeking to determine “whether these manufacturers of puberty-blocking drugs deceptively advertised and promoted hormone blockers for unapproved uses without disclosing the potential risks to children and their parents.”
“Companies should never promote or supply puberty blockers for uses that are not intended or approved,” stated Paxton. “I will not allow Big Pharma to misleadingly promote these drugs that may pose a high risk of serious physical and psychological damage to Texas children who cannot yet fathom or consent to the potential long-term effects of such use.”
The Biden administration has challenged Texas, with the president claiming that his administration is putting “Texas on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.” The administration issued guidelines saying that it may violate federal law for Texas to charge doctors who administer gender reassignment surgeries or puberty blockers on children with “child abuse.”
Earlier this month, Paxton sued the Department of Health and Human Services and argued that the federal government is misinterpreting federal law and that Texas law does allow him to label such acts as “child abuse.” A state appellate court struck down Abbott’s directive instructing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures.”
The attorney general’s office has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the lower court decision blocking the directive.
As a result of the governor’s directive and attorney general’s opinion, the Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital stated earlier this month that it will pause “hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services.”
“How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”
– John Adams
Hemingway’s famous quote about going bankrupt connects with so many because it is true on a personal basis and a civilization basis. It applies to individuals and empires in decline – like the American democracy. John Adams realized two centuries ago democracy was no better than monarchy or aristocracy over the long haul. We were handed a Republic by Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries, but we failed to keep it almost from the very birth of this nation.
As we rush towards our World War 3 rendezvous with destiny, aided and abetted by politicians placed in power by globalist billionaires hellbent on the destruction of our way of life, so they own everything and you own nothing, I can’t help but ponder who is to blame and could we have avoided this dystopian outcome.
The United States has been going bankrupt gradually for the last fifty years, both financially, intellectually, and morally. Nixon closing the gold window in 1971 and opening the debt door to morally bankrupt bankers and politicians set in motion a downward spiral accelerating at hyper-speed as we speak. The American Empire was born in the shattered global debris of World War II with the Bretton Woods agreement, which left the USD as the dominant currency in world trade, specifically as the settlement currency for all oil transactions.
The empire has been sustained by currency supremacy, military might, and until 1980, manufacturing superiority. Once the most highly educated nation on the planet, decades of lowering the bar, less than mediocre union teachers, and replacing education with indoctrination, has created generations of ignorant zombies incapable and uninterested in critical thought.
The road to bankruptcy was very gradual at the outset of empire, with the national debt topping out at $269 billion, 119% of GDP, in 1946. In 1960 it had only grown to $286 billion but had dropped to 54% of GDP. Rebuilding the world and being the dominant economic power paid huge dividends. After a decade of guns, butter and welfare programs, the debt grew to $398 billion, but continued to drop as a percentage of GDP to 35% in 1971. After decoupling from gold, the national debt soared to $908 billion by 1980, inflation surged to 15%, and Volcker had to raise interest rates to 20% to avert disaster. What happened over the next forty years was mind boggling in its recklessness, shortsightedness, and acquiescence to the Wall Street cabal. These decade-by-decade increases were obscene:
1980 $908B 32% of GDP
1990 $3.2T 54% of GDP
2000 $5.7T 52% of GDP
2010 $13.6T 90% of GDP
2020 $27.8T 129% of GDP
Today $30.3T 130% of GDP
Rogoff and Reinhart postulated in 2010 that once a country passes 90% of GDP, economic growth slows dramatically, and the chances of financial crisis increase exponentially. With annual GDP growth of about 2% since 2010, their theory has proven accurate. Now we approach the existential financial crisis which could initiate the “going bankrupt suddenly” phase of our empire of debt. Larry Kotlikoff, Harvard, and Wharton educated economic professor at Boston University, estimates the unfunded welfare liabilities of the United States exceeds $210 trillion. We are a long way from when our Founders handed us a republic.
“American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.”
– Lew Rockwell
There is no conceivable way this debt can ever be repaid, therefore it will not. It’s just pure math, which the average dumbed down American chooses not to question or dispute. In their own lives they need to make enough income to make their mortgage payment and car loan payment. It’s the same for the government. The only way debt obligations can be met is for tax revenue to exceed expenses. Borrowing to make debt and interest payments is unsustainable, reckless, and an example of imperial empire arrogance. The only unknown now is whether the debt is defaulted upon, it is hyperinflated away, or some sort of debt jubilee and currency collapse makes it mute.
No matter the solution, the people will bear the brunt of the pain and drastic diminishment of their standard of living. Those in control will position themselves to benefit from whatever scheme is implemented to eliminate the debt. The current trend of running trillions in deficits per year is unsustainable and already resulting in raging inflation, declining GDP, and pushing the world towards a global depression.
There is no disputing the facts I have presented. These facts trump the willful ignorance of the masses and the false narratives of the ruling class, along with their media mouthpieces pretending all is well. Those controlling the levers of power know this shitshow can’t go on. They have fully exhausted their propaganda tools, financial derivative schemes, and monetary machinations, leaving them nothing but crashing the system and implementing a Great Reset, which would keep them in control and the rest of us in squalor and subservience.
We’ve been on the road to perdition for a long time, but we came to a peak on that highway in 2019 and the path has been straight down since, with our chariot of fire accelerating at breakneck speed towards its final destination with catastrophe and ruin. The rise and fall of the American Empire will be far more rapid than the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. With the inept and reckless leadership in place presently, I only hope we still have a nation after they successfully provoke World War 3.
The gradually part of going bankrupt is over. Since the end of fiscal year 2019, our fearless leaders have added $7.6 trillion to the national debt, a 33% increase in less than three years. Meanwhile, the duplicitous Fed has added $5 trillion to their balance sheet, a 125% increase, while keeping interest rates at zero and creating a tsunami of inflation, crushing the poor and middle class.
But at least the Wall Street bankers are raking in record bonuses, while still sucking at the teat of Fed QE to infinity. The blatant disregard for the lives of average Americans, while propping up the Wall Street cabal, billionaire oligarchs, and corrupt politicians should be met with pitchforks and torches in a just world. But that is not the world we occupy.
The last time inflation was this high (15% as measured in 1980), Volker jacked the Fed Funds rate to 20%. Spineless Jerome Powell has the Fed Funds rate at .33% today. It’s almost as if they are promoting record high inflation to make the national debt load less burdensome. Destroying the finances of hundreds of millions, creating global energy and food shortages, and instigating World War 3 as a consequence of their actions is just a minor irritation for the global elite. In fact, it appears to be part of Schwab’s Great Reset plan.
At first it seemed outrageous to think anyone would want famine, starvation, energy shortages, economic depression, and global war, but watching the insane decision making of politicians, trumpeted by the Deep State bootlickers in the media, has convinced me this is chapter 2 in their Great Reset book of horrors.
Once you wrap your head around how vile, evil, and demented those who are pulling the strings behind this Great Reset are, your eyes are open to how far they are willing to go to institute their plan. It appears they will stop at nothing, kill as many people as necessary, create maximum chaos and pain, wreck any civic cohesiveness left, and destroy all moral and legitimate norms of society, in order to increase their control, power and wealth on this earth.
They hold all the cards. They control the governments, corporations, banks, legacy media, social media, entertainment industries, military industrial complex, sickcare Big Pharma complex, and the mental processes of the masses through their mind control/propaganda technology. Their hubris and arrogance have reached peak altitude and exuberance. They believe they are invincible. That will be their fatal weakness.
The sheer cavalcade of lies, misinformation, purposely created chaos, engineered conflict, and financial market manipulation, make the daily intrigues confusing and open to misinterpretation. There are various factions competing to control the future course of history. There is not a clear good versus evil battle underway. Sometimes it is tough to distinguish the New World Order Great Reset crowd from those opposing Schwab and his Davos billionaire satanists.
I know we would like to root for the good guys, but there are no good guys running any country on this earth. Only bad guys, willing to sell their souls, are ever elevated to positions of power. They are selected by oligarchs, not elected by the people. The western propaganda spewing media machine specializes in demonizing those they are paid to demonize (Putin, Trump, non-vaxxers), while glorifying anyone the ruling elite have chosen to use to further their agenda (Zelensky, Fauci, vaxxers).
Putin is most certainly a bad guy, ruthless in his consolidation of power, serious in enforcing his beliefs through political or military measures, and willing to use any means necessary to achieve his aims. But he is only one of many bad men leading their countries across the globe. The Panama Papers show Zelinsky to be a corrupt puppet of Ukrainian oligarchs. He was a two-bit actor installed by the US, Soros, and NATO to play a role. As a reward, he has millions parked in offshore bank accounts and a $35 million mansion in Florida.
He’s such a democratic icon, he’s spent the last eight years bombing Russian speaking civilians in Donbass and Donetsk, and he outlawed all opposition political parties and media outlets last week. It seems our far-left media outlets have no problem supporting actual far-right Nazis in Ukraine, as long as they are paid to do so. They are nothing but faux-journalist whores.
The fact is Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Johnson, Erdogan, Xi, and the leaders of every country in the world are bad guys. Venezuela and Iran were evil, until our gas prices hit $4.25 a gallon because of Biden’s Russian sanctions. Now Biden is frantically negotiating with these “bad guys” to get their oil. Orwell nailed it seven decades ago with:
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
– Orwell – 1984
We have always been at war with Russia, supporting the noble democracy of Ukraine, and fully supportive of those benevolent dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and China when in our economic interest, no matter how many people they kill, imprison, or behead. Of course, if you don’t toe the line of the petrodollar, you get Iraq’d, Libya’d, or Syria’d. Those in control of the message just move from villain to villain in the their never ending narrative. First Trump, then Covid, then the anti-vaxxers, and now Putin. The real villains are the media and those who manipulate the minds of the masses to achieve their insidious aims.
Hypocrisy is not a characteristic that registers with empires in their late stages. Bribing, bullying, and bombing are what the American Empire does to enforce their waning power upon other nations. The over-the-top sanctions against Russia have accelerated the American decline into bankruptcy, while ignorant Americans remain distracted by their iGadgets, NCAA tournament pools and the latest season of American Idol.
Every conflict is manufactured to benefit the global oligarchs, the military industrial complex, and those seeking to keep the masses enslaved in debt and distracted by technology, entertainment, and hatred towards whoever they are directed to hate by the government/media propaganda machine. It’s always about wealth, power, and control.
The key financial arrangement sustaining the American Empire, even as it internally crumbles from cultural rot, institutionalized corruption, and glorified ignorance of reality, is the global dominance of the U.S. dollar in trade. This is why the empire’s bankruptcy has been gradual and to many, unnoticeable. But Dementia Joe has accidentally, or purposefully as part of the Great Reset agenda, set in motion the rapid spiral into bankruptcy and collapse of the short-lived America Empire (1946 – 2022).
By creating a global energy crisis over a border dispute 6,000 miles from our shores, with no strategic interest to our country, Biden has initiated the final countdown of the petrodollar as the global settlement currency for all energy transactions. Petrodollar warfare has been the policy of the U.S. for decades as economic imperialism has been enforced militarily against Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela.
Trying to enforce this policy against Russia will be a bridge too far. And the consequences are already being felt. Biden’s sanctions against Russian energy are backfiring and will bring an end to the petrodollar regime. Russia is demanding payment from Europe for their oil, gas, and coal in rubles, rather than USD. Any propaganda being peddled about the U.S. filling the gap is nothing but bullshit, as proven by this chart:
Russia supplies 47% of the EU coal demand, 41% of their natural gas demand, and 27% of their oil demand. They will pay Russia in rubles or have their societies grind to a halt, with starvation, chaos, depression, and revolution as the result. This doesn’t even consider Russian wheat and fertilizer exports, vital to Africa and the Middle East. Living within the propaganda bubble encasing the United States, where only the Deep State surveillance state sanctioned narrative is allowed to be broadcast by the dying legacy media and controlled social media propaganda platforms, you would be under the mistaken belief the entire world is in lockstep with Biden and his Great Reset cronies.
The vast majority of the world (countries in gray in the map below) are not supporting the sanctions imposed by Biden. As already noted, even the European countries in yellow are ignoring the energy sanctions. Biden has pushed Russia and China closer together, with the petroyuan rising as an alternative to the petrodollar. India has reached agreement with Russia regarding oil imports. Africa and South America, with all their natural resources, have told Biden to shove it. America’s bullying tactics are now giving rise to alternative currency schemes, such as cryptocurrencies and discussions about a gold backed yuan and gold backed ruble.
We stand on the precipice of a global conflagration, with talk of nuclear war bantered about by unserious low-IQ government bureaucrats, vacuous bimbo journalists and talking heads on the boob tube, and spurred on by the despicable hero worship of the textbook symbol of this farce – a sitcom actor who played a president in a TV show, funded by a billionaire oligarch, who was installed as president of Ukraine in a campaign funded by that billionaire, has ruled as a U.S. puppet, and who the Hollywood elite wanted to share the stage with the most dim-witted virtue signaling narcissists on the planet at the Oscars to call for the West to intervene in his losing battle and start World War 3. Instead they virtue signaled their support for Zelensky during the ceremonies.
The Hollywood elite ignore the actual Nazis fighting for Zelensky, his banning of political opponents and media outlets, and his government not allowing transgenders to flee the country because they are men. He belongs on-stage at the Oscars with the freaks, frauds, degenerates, pedophiles, and hypocritical scumbags who make up the American entertainment industry. He would have gotten a standing ovation for being such a glorious upstanding symbol of democracy, freedom, and the transvestite way. He could have stripped down, grabbed his guitar, and performed for a worldwide audience, while begging for missiles, fighter jets, tanks and drones.
We should all be laughing at this farce, but Zelensky and his handlers, Biden and his handlers, along with the other EU/NATO jokers and fools, have chosen to provoke Putin into war, and are now ratcheting up the rhetoric and sanctions to the point where a wider conflict is all but ensured. These reckless psychopaths clearly have not studied history or human nature when it comes to how wars can escalate rapidly with unanticipated outcomes and death on a massive scale. In a recent communication with writer Margaret Anna Alice, she described perfectly why we are headed into a horrific period in history, as the bloodiest chapter of this Fourth Turning hurtles towards its climax:
“The lethal combination of incompetency, obliviousness, hubris, psychopathy, narcissism, megalomania, and every other dark triad trait is on full display in those purporting to be our leaders.”
With it being quite apparent there are no good guy leaders in the world, trying to figure out the least worst outcome of this current episode of As the World Burns becomes difficult to grasp. I am convinced this engineered conflict in Ukraine is part of the bigger Great Reset plan of the global elites.
But writers I respect have differing viewpoints on whether Putin is playing his part in this scheme for a new world order or whether he and Xi are partnering to fight Soros, Schwab, Gates, and the Global Reset co-conspirators. Based on what I’ve observed, I don’t believe all these bad men have the exact same goals for how the world should be run and who should run it. But no matter who wins, the winners want more power, more wealth, more control, and an autocracy, with them calling the shots.
When I take into account all that has happened since 2014, who has been calling the shots, who was getting paid off, and the families implicated in this Ukrainian debacle, I conclude the Great Reset collaborators see this war as the next step (after the Covid scamdemic) in their Great Reset – purposely provoking Putin into attacking and now believing they can bleed him dry by funneling arms and cash into Ukraine. Why did the Clinton Foundation receive more “donations” from the Ukraine, prior to the 2014 CIA coup, than any country on earth?
Biden was involved in the coup to overthrow a democratically elected president, friendly towards Russia. There was no conflict within Ukraine prior to the coup. No death. No destruction. So, who is to blame for the bloodshed now? It’s not Putin. Biden’s crackhead son raked in millions from selling influence to the “Big Guy”, with the U.S. installed puppet presidents doing as they were told by Soros and his U.S. surveillance state agents.
There has been a simmering conflict since Putin annexed Crimea, shortly after the coup, and Ukraine began attacking the eastern Russian speaking provinces. The ratcheting up of attacks in those eastern provinces and the rhetoric about Ukraine joining NATO is what provoked Putin to attack. Despite the all-out propaganda campaign, Russia is winning and will win against Ukraine alone.
This is the point in history when the Great Reset acolytes have decided they can accomplish multiple goals by turning Ukraine into a nightmarish quagmire of death and destruction, fueled by a never ending flow of armaments into this war zone, as a means to overthrow Putin, create food shortages, raise the cost of fossil fuels to astronomical heights, implement further restrictions on civil rights, increase technological controls over the populace, and institute a Chinese like social credit scoring system to enforce obedience and compliance with government demands.
The Ukrainian people are just cannon fodder to these evil men. After two years of demanding submission from the peasants regarding lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates, the ruling elite believe they will be able to enforce food and energy restrictions with the same ease upon the American people.
This is where I believe their master plan goes awry. Putin will not be cowed by Biden’s toothless sanctions, empty threats, and pathetic tough guy rhetoric. He will use any means necessary to defeat his foes. Economic sanctions are an act of war. Supplying his enemy with weapons to kill Russians is an act of war. NATO and the U.S. are one miscalculation away from starting WW3.
At a minimum, Biden has pushed China and Russia into closer cooperation as a new economic bloc. Biden’s weakness and inability to comprehend global strategy has probably convinced China they can annex Taiwan without the U.S. intervening in a meaningful way, other than easily avoided sanctions and threats. The new world order may end up revolving around China, with Russia and India as strategic partners and the U.S. and EU as outcasts.
The underlying anger in the country is bubbling to the surface. The raging inflation is crushing poor and middle-class families. Food and energy are the two largest monthly expenditures for families struggling to survive in this Federal Reserve induced billionaire boom society. When diesel fuel supplies dwindle to nothing, destroying our just in time, truck dependent supply chain, and real food shortages start inflicting real pain, civil disobedience and rioting will occur which will make the BLM riots looks like child’s play.
When people no longer have anything to lose, they will lose it and start looking for the culprits who stole their livelihoods and future. I don’t believe their propaganda machine will be able to convince the masses this was the fault of Trump or right wing conspiracists. Their pain and suffering are due to Federal Reserve bankers, corrupt politicians of the uni-party, and the media who has lied to them non-stop for the last decade. Woke is going to mean something different in the near future.
Pugnacious Putin has unwittingly, or possibly purposefully, initiated the “sudden” phase of the demise of the crumbling American Empire. A PR campaign and “USD subsidies” (aka bribes) to foreign countries will not save us now. Biden lit the fuse, and it is just a matter of when it blows. And does it just blow up the remnants of our empire, or the whole world? No one knows the answer to that question, but the future of civilization on earth depends on the answer.
Most of the world continues to go about their daily lives staring at their phones, oblivious to the danger of having angry senile sociopaths and egomaniacal billionaires controlling the use of nuclear weapons. We are one rash arrogant choice by a low IQ psychopath politician from the final scene in the Planet of the Apes.
“You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” – George Taylor
Are we destined to be victims? This Ukraine war has revealed both parties fully support never ending war. Left and right media outlets have been spewing the anti-Russian propaganda in lockstep. What has been set in motion will not be fixed at the ballot box, as if voting matters anymore in this empire of lies and deceit. Armed insurrection would not prevail with the current configuration of our society.
The only option is to organize in local communities of like-minded people to try and survive the coming storm. Get out of cities. Prep as much as you are able, with enough food, water, and fuel to sustain your family for an extended period of time. Stock up on guns, ammo, cash, gold, silver, and barterable items. On whatever plot of land you occupy, try to raise some food, and if possible become friendly with local farmers. No one can escape what is coming, as it will be global in nature, but you can take steps now to increase your chances of survival.
Our republic has degenerated into despotism, we’ve willingly relinquished our freedoms and liberties for the supposed safety and security of a Big Brother surveillance state, and now we will suffer the consequences of these cowardly actions. Life in America is about to become far harder than our generations of snowflakes ever anticipated. Those with no survival skills will not survive. If you are not prepared in mind, body, and spirit for what is coming, your future will be bleak. Only those already awake are likely to read this anyway, so good luck and Godspeed to you all.
“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
– John Adams
“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
NBC News anchor Chuck Todd forecasted Wednesday that Democrats are headed for a “shellacking” in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. Breaking down the latest NBC News poll, Todd demonstrated how three key metrics squarely paint Democrats in “dangerous territory.” According to the poll:
71% of Americans believe the country is “headed in the wrong direction”;
President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is only 40%;
Republicans hold a lead over Democrats on the generic ballot, indicating more voters favor the GOP over Democrats for the upcoming election.
Todd explained the negative figures are historic for NBC’s poll, which has been running for decades.
“The current wrong track in our poll: 71%. What is really striking is third straight poll where the direction of the country has been above 70% — only been one other time where’ve had that in our poll. It is not a good time [for Democrats],” Todd said. “Look, 65% wrong track is a bad number. 71%? That’s why it is in the shellacking category.”
Poll Numbers Push Democrats Into ‘Dangerous Territory’ In Midterm Meter www.youtube.com
Regarding Biden’s job approval rating, Todd pointed to the 2006 midterm election — which resulted in Democrats winning the House and Senate — as a possible analog.
“When you start dipping below 45%, you’ve got a problem, and you’re gonna have midterms that are in the bad-to-shellacking ratio,” he explained. “President Biden is at 40. George W. Bush was at 39% in 2006. We know how that turned out. So, you see, that’s also in shellacking territory.”
The NBC poll found that voters favor Republicans over Democrats on the generic ballot 46% to 44%. According to Todd, that figure deceivingly suggests Democrats are better off than they really are.
“The bottom line is, generic ballot, if the Democrats are losing, it means they’re gonna get walloped,” Todd said.
In fact, the 2010 midterm election was the last time Republicans held a two-point lead over Democrats in the generic ballot in NBC’s poll. In that election, Republicans gained a whopping 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.
If “shellacking,”“dangerous territory,” and “walloped” are not intense enough predictions for Democrats, Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the NBC poll, had one more powerful description of what the NBC poll means for Democrats.
“What this polls says is that President Biden and Democrats are headed for a catastrophic election,” he said.
The San Francisco Federal Reserve published a study this week that appeared to contradict President Joe Biden’s narrative about inflation.
Americans are battling historic inflation and growing economic woes that appear to have no end in sight. In fact, the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the consumer price index has increased 7.9% over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, the buck does not stop with Biden. The president has blamed inflation and other economic problems on COVID-19, the supply chain, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
The study sought to understand why U.S. inflation is increasing at a much higher rate than other advanced economic countries. The reason? The economists pointed toward COVID-19 relief bills, which pumped the economy, and Americans’ pockets, full of income. In fact, they argued the stimulus bills account for about 3% of inflation.
“Since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries,” the study said.
“Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021,” the bankers explained.
This is Bidenflation. SF Fed chart literally shows the impact on inflation of Biden’s $1.9T 3/21 gov’t spending spree. It shows US inflation vs that in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, & the UK – the chart ends before Russia invaded Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/aEJyglsI0Q
Without the massive COVID relief bills, the economists suggested the U.S. could have experienced deflation, which has benefits and drawbacks. Still, they argued the impacts of deflation “would have been harder to manage,” a comment that should be taken with a grain of salt considering the government is having a difficult time managing the inflation crisis. Importantly, the study failed to conclude that Putin is to blame for inflation.
Because of inflation, Americans will spend approximately $5,200 more than last year, Bloomberg reported.
Inflation will mean the average U.S. household has to spend an extra $5,200 this year ($433 per month) compared to last year for the same consumption basket, according estimates by Bloomberg Economics. The excess savings built up over the pandemic, and increases in wages, will cushion those costs, and allow spending to expand at a decent pace this year. But accelerated depletion of savings will increase the urgency for those staying on the sidelines to join the labor force, and the resulting increase in labor supply will likely dampen wage growth.
According to a recent NBC poll, a “plurality of Americans” blame Biden and his policies for inflation, while they overwhelmingly reject Russia’s culpability for America’s economic woes, NBC News reported.
The president of the world’s largest asset management company just issued a stark warning to members of America’s “entitled generation.”
BlackRock co-founder and president Robert Kapito said Tuesday that the global supply chain and soaring inflation crises will soon have dramatic effects on the U.S. economy that will result in a noticeable scarcity of goods not experienced before by many younger Americans. That scarcity, he said, will likely be a shock to the system for many who are accustomed to an abundant and comfortable lifestyle.
“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito said, adding, “We have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”
“I would put on your seatbelts, because this is something that we haven’t seen,” he asserted, in reference to what he called “scarcity inflation.”
Kapito’s remarks, first reported by Bloomberg News, were made at the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association convention — an annual gathering of oil and gas industry leaders. The warning comes just days after Bloomberg economists advised Americans to consider budgeting an extra $5,200 this year — or $433 monthly — to prepare for the effects of historically high inflation.
Inflation under the Biden administration has skyrocketed in the past year, rising at the fastest pace in four decades. Inflation is measured by the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which increased nearly 8% over the past 12 months, according to government data released for February 2022. The dramatically inflated prices have reportedly resulted in 64% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The last time inflation rose at such a fast rate was in 1982. That year, the U.S. economy went into a recession. Now, some experts are warning that another economic recession is “inevitable.”
The Biden administration has been peddling a litany of excuses for the economic downturn — including the coronavirus pandemic, corporate greed, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but American voters reportedly aren’t buying it. A plurality of respondents to a recent NBC News poll (38%) blamed President Joe Biden for the increase in the cost of consumer goods, while just 28% blamed the coronavirus pandemic, 23% blamed corporations raising prices, and only 6% blamed Putin.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, or WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
CONTENT WARNING: This column contains graphic details of a criminal case involving a sex offender who possessed and distributed photos and videos of the sexual abuse of prepubescent boys.
Presidents are entitled to nominate Supreme Court justices who represent their party and its values. Using that as our guide, President Joe Biden picked the Democrats’ perfect Supreme Court justice: Ketanji Brown Jackson.
If you’d given me a thousand bucks to come up with a question that would stump a Supreme Court nominee, I never would have thought of: What’s a woman?
Democratic values.
As Sens. Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham amply demonstrated at the nomination hearings last week, Judge Jackson really likes defendants in child pornography cases. She’s partial to all criminals, but the child porn cases make the point bracingly.
In seven out of seven child pornography cases that came before Judge Jackson, where the sentencing was up to the judge, she imposed sentences that were a fraction of those recommended under the sentencing guidelines. In all seven cases, her sentences were also far below those requested by the prosecutor.
Not 2 1/2 years, instead of three — more like three months instead of 10 years. In United States v. Hawkins, the defendant possessed and distributed multiple images of child abuse of kids, including photos of prepubescent boys engaging in oral and anal sex, a video of an 8-year-old boy masturbating, and one of an 11-year-old boy being anally penetrated by an adult man.
The federal sentencing guidelines recommended eight to 10 years. Judge Jackson sentenced the defendant to three months.
Yes, yes, he was only 18, and he was remorseful. Good for him!
But Judge Jackson also dramatically departed downward in sentencing a couple of ripe perverts — one who attempted to travel across state lines to molest a 9-year-old girl (when his thousands of child porn images weren’t enough); and another who’d distributed more than a hundred pornographic photos and videos of his own daughter.
On average, Judge Jackson gave child porn defendants sentences more than five years below the minimum under the guidelines.
In other words, Judge Jackson is the beau ideal Democratic Supreme Court justice.
In her favor, KBJ is at least a Generational African American (GAA), i.e. Descendant of American Slaves (DOAS) — unlike Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Joy Ann Reid and approximately 90% of the “African Americans” in Harvard’s entering class this year, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Perhaps, there’s hope that, someday, the high court will acknowledge that affirmative action is intended to make up for the legacy of slavery and should be available exclusively to GAAs, as opposed to what it is now, which is affirmative action, set-asides, “plus” factors, and do-nothing diversity jobs for everyone except white Americans.
Apart from the Democrats finally promoting a legacy African American, rather than an immigrant trying to steal the experiences of Black Americans, nothing is unusual here. It’s the media’s response to the questioning of Judge Jackson that’s been hilarious.
The media take the position that it’s rude to ask Judge Jackson questions — at least any questions about her record. Republicans are welcome to ask her all the questions they like about her family or her travails.
She is the most qualified human being ever, EVER to be nominated to the Supreme Court! The bravest, the strongest, the most heroic — HOW DARE YOU ASK OUR LITTLE LAMB QUESTIONS!
The media have also issued reams of “context,” “fact checks” and “debunkings” … all to prove that KBJ is a virtual Eliot Ness on crime! Don’t believe your eyes! Forget everything you know about the Democrats! It’s all lies and conspiracy theories!
Guy Benson
We got the sneering:
No, Sen. Hawley, Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t soft on child pornography. — NBC News
We got the hysterical warnings about right-wing conspiracy theorists:
Hawley’s attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson fuel a surge in online conspiracy chatter. — NPR
And we got the sophistical “fact checks”:
Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences “pretty mainstream” — ABC News
The New York Times’ “fact check” noted she was concerned about child porn fiends who were simply motivated by “the technological or social aspects” of child porn.
Totally run on that, Democrats.
What is the point of all these “FACT CHECKS”? For the past two years, liberals have been screaming, “Defund the Police!” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “F–k the Police!” — not to mention actually defunding the police and springing criminals in Democratic-run cities around the country. We got it: You like criminals and hate the police, Democrats. You’re not exactly flying below the radar.
Of note: Sen. Joe Manchin, your regular, old-time, American values Democrat, is just like the rest of his party when it comes to crime. Same with Arizona’s Sen. Mark Kelly and Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester. Kelly can boast about being an astronaut, and Tester can walk around with that buzz-cut and a piece of hay in his teeth — but give them a guy getting off on videos of 11-year-old boys being anally raped, and they say: Three months. Max.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
Our survival instincts are going to get us all killed.
I’m specifically referring to our hard-wired conformity impulse. That’s what causes us to go along with politically correct absurdities like pronoun protocols. It also causes people to join mobs, and to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at the command of a cult leader. In primitive environments, the herd instinct serves as a means of survival. If some sense danger and rush to safety, all follow. But how does such a conformity impulse work in a high-tech society like ours? It doesn’t really.
Sure, a certain level of conformity is normal for a society to function. But an unchecked conformity impulse in a technological society like ours acts more like slow-motion suicide than a survival mechanism. We think we’re saving ourselves by conforming, but in the long run the opposite is true. In fact, our instinct to conform has become a weapon tyrants use to control us by threatening social isolation for those who don’t obey. This is especially the case when a monopoly of tech overlords can broadcast propaganda to the herd, instantly and globally. In such cases there is no “wisdom of crowds.” When the masses obey the propaganda to avoid social punishment, they only prop up propaganda and thereby spread social turmoil.
Propagandists Manipulate our Conformity Impulse
We should be aghast at the high level of American conformity to the demands of propagandists: Mask your toddler! He’s a girl and she’s a guy! Mind your pronouns! He’s a white supremacist! And so on. Nobody is safe if we can’t challenge the truth of what the elites who presume to rule us are saying.
Meanwhile, they keep pushing the envelope to get us to say things we know are false and to do things against our own interests. Demonizing those who hesitate to comply fosters a mob mindset that protects their narratives. Hence, people with different views feel alone and tend to be intimidated into silence. This is how resistance to tyranny is eroded.
Demonization campaigns are key to this process. Suddenly, you’re a bigot if you don’t celebrate men invading women’s sports. Or you’re an “insurrectionist” if you don’t applaud punishing people with 24/7 solitary confinement (without a trial date) for “parading” around the Capitol for a few hours on January 6, 2021.
Or you’re selfish if your toddler isn’t wearing a mask. Or you should be expelled as a Yale law student if you don’t take part in shouting down a conversation about free speech at Yale Law School and then sign a statement intended to abolish freedom of speech.
The Conformity Impulse Is Juvenile and Deadly
Teenage girls provide an especially clear-cut example of how the conformity dynamic works. Too many of them are notorious for engaging in relational aggression, a type of bullying that damages someone’s social status, causing others to shun and isolate the victim. This type of aggression is inherent to mob behavior.
For example, pundit Kathleen Parker’s recent hit job on Ginni Thomas in The Washington Post is infused with a smug little middle school flavor. It includes a huge dose of projection, such as Parker’s hallucination that Thomas has a sense of self-importance, when it’s obviously the Parker girl who’s infected with egotism.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the ultimate case of the “I’m important and you’re not” mentality. The subtext of Clinton’s 2021 wistful reading of her 2016 acceptance speech is that Americans were obligated to elect her because she wanted to be president ever since she was a little girl. Men with a similar mentality include MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and humorless late-night “comics” like Stephen Colbert.
Their followers imitate and repeat what they’re told by the approved talking heads. They laugh at unfunny lines on cue, regurgitate the assigned opinions, and label the non-compliant with the “eewww” factor. Many are eager to become “influencers” so they too can dictate what others must say and do on pain of being socially rejected.
The Secret Laws of Social Psychology
Far too many have been marching in lockstep with media-pushed narratives, and too few seem to be speaking out. Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
To resist this absurd state of affairs, we must first learn about the dynamics and understand our vulnerabilities. The information is out there, but it doesn’t get much circulation.
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing once observed that people are dangerously ignorant of the laws of mob psychology. In 1987 she recommended everyone be schooled in them, especially children. She speculated that power elites are invested in such ignorance. If such knowledge were widely understood, people would be insulated from the manipulations of propagandists.
A lot of the research on conformity was the result of scholars asking how small groups of fanatics could take over whole societies — e.g., Bolsheviks in Russia and Nazis in Germany — resulting in millions killed while the vast majority of the population sat back in silence and fear.
In the 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous experiments on the conformity impulse. At least 37 percent of the time people would deny the evidence of their own eyes — about the obvious fact of a line’s length — if everyone else gave an incorrect answer. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times with the same or worse results. Here’s a video of that experiment conducted in the 1970s:
Stanley Milgram later took that study to a new level with his famous “shock machine” experiments. When Adolf Eichmann said he was “just following orders” while on trial for his leading role in the Holocaust, Milgram wondered how often ordinary people would inflict harm if told to do so by an authority figure.
Participants in that experiment were told it was a study about how punishment affected learning. If the “learner” gave an incorrect answer, the “teacher” was supposed to shock him in increments. The learners were actors who could not be seen but, although not really shocked, would scream in “pain” from the next room. The “teacher” was the subject.
Sixty-five percent of the subjects gave the highest voltage shock when asked to “please continue” by the administrator. For more background, watch “The Experimenter,” a 2015 film about Milgram. Other related research includes the Robbers Cave Experiment; Robert J. Lifton’s research on thought reform and totalitarianism; and Margaret Thaler Singer’s research on cults. All illustrate how elites can manipulate our urge to conform.
Everybody needs to learn about the dynamics of conformity. Blatant censorship, hostility to free speech, and campaigns to demonize mainstream American views were all unthinkable scenarios for most Americans just a few years ago.
But here we are. When we start self-censoring because we’re afraid of not fitting in, we open the door to oppression and social chaos. That unchecked urge to “fit in” can kill us all, and we need to stop.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.