This morning Defend Florida released its Interim Report On Election Integrity Risks in the State of Florida. The results of their canvassing work are shocking.
Defend Florida released an interim report of their canvassing results in Florida to date. The group of volunteers canvassed 14,631 individuals across numerous counties. Only around 60% of those canvassed verified their registrations, nearly a third didn’t validate their registrations. Of the remaining voters interviewed (5,571), 89% didn’t live at the address where they were registered at.
In addition, the report acknowledges that 800,000 registered voters in the 2020 Election should have been recorded as inactive.
We discovered that there are more than 800,000 voters who have not voted in 10 years or more. By Florida law, the Florida Supervisors of Elections are required to set a voter to “inactive” after two years of not voting and remove the voter who is inactive if they remain inactive for 4 additional years. Some Supervisors of Elections have stated that the law is unclear and that they cannot remove inactive voters from the voting rolls. This conflict between the Florida law, its interpretation, and procedures and processes will likely require legislative action to address technical fixes in the law, administrative fixes in the executive branch of the Florida government, and changes within the Supervisor of Elections offices.
Defend Florida examined the 800,000 inactive voters. We discovered that 110,000 of these inactive voters who should not be on the rolls, voted in 2020. We attempted contact with 26,453 voters. We succeeded in gathering information on 14,631 voters, which is a small percent (0.13%) of the whole. We discovered significant problems with the subset of voters who we could contact.
It looks like Florida has some work to do to address fraudulent registrations in the state. Here is the press conference from today.
See the report below. Others have warned about the Democrats using invalid registrations to steal the state.
It looks like it’s time for Florida to get rid of the ERIC voter registration system and start using something that will address the voter registration issues in the state.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.
Activists protest against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics outside the Consulate of China in Los Angeles, California, on February 3, 2022. Activists protested against the many human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party and called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. | FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
This is part 2 of The Christian Post’s series on China’s human rights abuses under the spotlight of the Olympic Games and takes a look at accusations that multinational corporations’ are complicit in such crimes. The series will also feature testimonies from religious minorities persecuted under the communist regime. Read part 1 here.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” Golden State Warriors’ minority owner and billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya told his co-host, Jason Calacanis, on their Jan. 15 “All-in” podcast. “You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care. The rest of us don’t care.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its 2021 annual report how the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic minority group native to the Xinjiang (pronounced shin·jaang) province of western China, have faced increasing persecution from the government along with other religious minorities such as Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners.
The report highlighted how the Australian Strategic Policy Institute identified at least 380 detention centers across the Uyghur region where members of the predominantly Muslim community are detained for reasons like “wearing long beards, refusing alcohol, or exhibiting other behaviors deemed signs of ‘religious extremism.’”
“Former detainees reported torture, rape, sterilization, and other abuses in custody. Experts raised concerns that the Chinese government’s ongoing actions in Xinjiang could amount to genocide under international law,” the report stated, highlighting the use of Uyghur forced labor in internment and prison camps as well as factories and industrial parks in the region.
An estimated 1 million to 3 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been imprisoned in detention camps throughout western China. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have recognized China’s actions against Uyghurs as “genocide.” Several countries have also condemned China for human rights violations. As a result, the U.S. and several other nations have announced diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Games that begin Friday.
Still, Palihapitiya defended his now-viral comments that “nobody cares” about what’s happening to the Uyghurs as a “very hard ugly truth.” And when it comes to the business community and the human rights abuses in China, USCIRF Vice Chair Nury Turkel, a Uyghur advocate born in a re-education camp in China in 1970 who fled 27 years ago, says the billionaire’s comments are honest.
“I don’t like to use the word honesty when describing this person and his despicable public admission, but what he’s saying is true,” Turkel told The Christian Post in a recent interview.
“From how much silence and pushback that we’ve been getting from the business community, it is an emblematic problem. It’s just a symptom of broader, bigger issues that as a civilization that we’re dealing with,” he continued. “What we have now is a very vibrant and powerful business lobby, business community, fighting against our own government.”
On Dec. 23, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law. The legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate and builds on previous efforts by the U.S. government to clamp down on forced labor practices and human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The law prohibits all imports from Xinjiang into the U.S. starting June 21, 2022. Getting to this point, however, was not easy.
Nike, Apple and Coca-Cola were reportedly among major companies and business groups that lobbied Congress to weaken the legislation. Nike, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, the Kraft Heinz Co., Tommy Hilfiger and others were also listed as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang in a March 2020 report from a bipartisan group of lawmakers called the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The report cited credible evidence of many products being made with forced labor — yarn, clothing, gloves, bedding, carpet, cotton, cell phones, computer hardware, noodles, cakes, shoes and tea.
Several companies, such as Nike and Apple, denied lobbying against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. But in a letter to Congress in September 2020, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the law “would prove ineffective and may hinder efforts to prevent human rights abuses.”
“Past attempts to utilize domestic U.S. securities law to combat human rights abuses provide a cautionary tale. For example, a well-intentioned effort to resolve abuses related to the mining of conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in many cases worsened the situation on the ground in that country,” the business organization wrote.
“The absence of a qualified inspection and audit systems made it nearly impossible for companies to ensure accurate disclosures. This, in turn, caused many companies to implement a de facto embargo against material sourced in the region, which then hurt legitimate miners. At the same time, the original targets of the provision simply shifted their activities to avoid being impacted.”
For Turkel, the problem isn’t just with U.S. businesses.
A protester holds up a “Boycott Beijing 2022” sign after marching across the Golden Gate Bridge during a demonstration against the 2022 Beijing winter Olympic Games, in San Francisco, California, on February 3, 2022. Activists protested against the many human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party and called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics due to be held in Beijing. United States, Britain, Canada and Australia are among countries staging a diplomatic boycott over China’s human rights record, particularly the fate of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. | JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. was recently joined by Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan in an ongoing diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics to protest China’s human rights record. Turkel believes the boycott is working to some extent but says more could have been done.
“There should have been more broader, full boycott, more pressure to postpone or relocate. If relocating doesn’t work, [it] would have been an ideal solution to the problem,” he said. “Number one, there is a historic reason. We don’t want, as a civilization, to embolden a dictatorial regime like the one in Beijing to witness us repeat history. The international community apparently has not learned a lesson from the 1936 Nazi Olympics allowing this Olympics in 2022 — the genocide Olympics — to take place.”
Turkel is concerned that no one can guarantee the safety of athletes under China’s current regime.
“It is a diplomatic boycott. We welcome the additional countries announced [last month], but the biggest problem now is who can guarantee the safety of athletes? The athletes have already been told that they should not engage in politics. So, when the Chinese make that kind of warning, you cannot ignore it. They mean it,” he said.
“One of the biggest problems that the international community keeps making is ignoring the Chinese warning, Chinese policy statements. [They say], ‘Well, it will not happen.’ China apologists, policy experts, academics, business leaders never thought, if they could be honest, that China would commit genocide on the world’s watch. And the same is true with Hong Kong. The brutality showed to upend Hong Kong’s democracy is something the people thought would not happen.”
Turkel believes China will go after athletes or businesses that speak out against the human rights abuses. He pointed to athletes like NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, who has been vocal about the persecution of the Uyghurs. But he said he doesn’t have much faith in the business community.
“I don’t hold my breath on the business community’s ability to get out on the right side of history. But athletes might because they are normal human beings just like you and I,” he said.
“We’ve seen the athletes speaking up. … So, there is some movement within the sports world, but the business world — the politicians, the consumers — have a lot to catch up with. So, I worry about the safety of the athletes taking the risk to go there in the face of the COVID surge, in the face of the naked warning by the Chinese authorities,” Turkel said. “They’ll be monitored. Their phones will be monitored. Their social media will be monitored. … And China will not hesitate to punish anyone regardless of their non-Chinese citizen status.”
How big business influences politics
While big business interests couldn’t stop legislation aimed at addressing China’s persecution of the Uyghurs, their influence is much more substantial in other countries. Turkel is convinced it’s a significant reason why more countries haven’t joined the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
“China has been doing a number of things effectively, much to our dismay and disappointment. Because the civilized world, liberal democracies, are not even investing nearly enough time and energy to push back,” Turkel added.
“So, what the Chinese have been doing, if you look at The Global Times statement in defense of Palihapitiya, that there will be consequences. So it is that explicit.”
“For anyone who has the slightest knowledge of Xinjiang, the lurid claims of human rights abuses or even ‘genocide’ in the region are pure lies made up by the US government as pretext to crack down on China. The criticism against Palihapitiya has nothing to do with his lack of empathy but with his refusal to observe political correctness and repeat the lies of the US government about Xinjiang without questioning,” The Global Times argued. It also said American businesses are likely to suffer consequences as a result.
“Specifically, US businesses will have a tough time to operate in the Chinese market where they make hundreds of billions of dollars each year, as political correctness pushes them into an impossible position of having to choose between their consumers and their government,” the publication maintained.
“We have already seen the implications in many cases, and more will likely fall into the same trap set up by the US government. The question is, when will US businesses and others stand up and say enough is enough? How much losses are they willing to take before that?”
Turkel insists, however, that these consequences from China are part of a “collaborated, systematic, orchestrated, organized bullying of the business community.”
“They are essentially telling the business community, who told us since China joined the WTO that Americans, we should just sleep at ease at night because the business community has figured out how to deal with China. But guess what? They’re caught in the crossfire,” the official for the independent commission that advises the U.S. government and Congress said.
“Even a [scenario] as major as taking down or making a public statement as H&M, Nike and Intel did, they’re suggesting that no Xinjiang suppliers were met with a state-sponsored boycott, so they backed down,” Turkel said. “There is a collaborated, systematic, orchestrated, organized bullying of the business community that has spent the last two decades to tell the consumer that everything is fine. Guess what? Everything was not fine, and everything is not fine.”
After warning suppliers last month that it had been “required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region” following restrictions imposed by “multiple governments,” U.S. microchip maker Intel had to apologize in China after significant backlash.
“We apologize for the trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners and the public. Intel is committed to becoming a trusted technology partner and accelerating joint development with China,” Intel said in a statement.
Craig Smith, chief executive of the China operation of global snowboarding firm Burton, headquartered in Vermont, recently defended his company working in Xinjiang in an interview with the BBC.
“If there are any type of human rights violations in Xinjiang … you know, I don’t know. Not my expertise by any means, so I’m not going to judge,” he said.
“The reason being is we have two choices. We can either divorce ourselves from Xinjiang and say, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything out there,’ or [what] we could do is we can try to understand what’s going on in Xinjiang better. And you know, yes, there may be some factually, I don’t know, I’m not a politician, I’ve never studied any type of aspect.”
“I can’t change that,” Burton’s CEO added. “We’ll focus on what we can change for the better. The people who live in Xinjiang, they’re fabulous people who I’ve met in Xinjiang. And that’s who I know. That’s what I know. And that’s all I can address. And I address that by sharing the fun of snowboarding and going to the mountains together, having a meal together, high-fiving each other after a fun powder run.”
Turkel was not amused by Smith’s feigning ignorance about what’s happening in Xinjiang.
“We’ve been fooled. We’ve been used as a tool for these money-making machines. We are addicted to cheap products from China, and I knew it, but most people did not, that we’ve been benefiting from slave labor,” he said. “The United States does not use slavery for making consumer products, [but] China does. So even in a competition aspect, in a basic human rights and religious freedom aspect, this is an emblematic problem in communist China that has been used for political economy and political repression.”
According to the United Nations, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
“You know, a few years ago, if somebody said, ‘American businesses are OK with slavery’ … you might think this is a person who needs to have their head examined. But this is the sad reality,” Turkel said.
“There are 152 state parties to the Genocide Convention. Only seven of them, including our own government, have spoken out. Where are the rest of the state parties? They need to get onto the right side of history by fulfilling the treaty obligations and preventing important legal tools, international legal tools, from becoming a deadbeat letter.”
When told that some critics question the application of the term genocide to what’s happening to the approximately 12 million-strong Uyghur community in China, Turkel, who has not physically seen his parents in China in 27 years, suggested it could perhaps be because they have not experienced the persecution of the Uyghur people.
The Chinese government claims that its “re-education” camps aim to combat Islamic extremism, crime and separatism.
“I don’t know if they will say the same thing if their children are taken away from them by the state to state orphanages,” Turkel said of critics of the genocide label. “I don’t know if they will say the same if their middle-aged wife, mother or sisters need to go through forced sterilization. And I don’t know if they will say the same thing, where expressing any type of skepticism when the ethnic group or religious group that they belong to are being subjected to the total destruction or destruction in part.”
“I don’t know if they will be OK to say, ‘We’ll … show this kind of push back if their government or any government says publicly that no mercy in dealing with this particular group because of their ethnicity and race.’ So at least several of the legal definitions of genocide is met in the way that China is treating them,” Turkel asserted.
“China has been purposefully and deliberately destroying, in part or whole, this proud, historical, ethnic and religious group. China has prevented natural population growth, through forced abortion, forced sterilization. In 2019 to 2020 alone, the population growth [of the Uyghurs] declined by 25 percent. So, this is a staggering number. Close to 800,000 to 1 million Uyghur kids have been taken away from their parents. So that’s my answer to those skeptics.”
Why consumers need to take a stand
A recent report from FTI Consulting showed that some 40% of Americans are no longer interested in buying products labeled “Made in China.” Nearly 80% are also willing to pay higher prices to companies that close their Chinese factories. If consumers in the U.S. and around the world want to take a stand against human rights abuses in China, they will have to speak with their dollars.
“When you look at the kind of people China sends to Western assembly lines, oftentimes they are vulnerable religious or ethnic groups. So, this is a much larger problem that’s transnational. It’s not only exclusively a matter that the United States should tackle alone,” Turkel said.
“This is a matter of conscience. This is a matter of consumer decency that the consumer should tell the American corporate executive, ‘Not on my watch. I’m not going to wear, I’m not going to let my baby wear baby pajamas made by enslaved fellow human beings. I’m not going to wrap my baby in clothes made by enslaved Uyghurs.'”
Turkey said that the consumer has “so much that they can do to pressure the businesses.”
“It is a serious problem. It has to be tackled globally, multilaterally, bilaterally, societally, legally,” he emphasized. “Business leaders need to know that there will be a reputational risk, there will be legal risks, and there will be a consumer risk if they continue the status quo.”
A Dutch reporter was physically manhandled and forced off the air during a live shot as he covered the Beijing Olympics. Sjoerd den Daas, the Greater China/East Asia correspondent for Dutch public broadcaster NOS, was pulled off camera by Chinese guards as he reported live on Friday from the Beijing Olympics. Video captured the moment Chinese guards dragged away den Daas — who was standing in front of the National Stadium — and blocked the camera.
“We are now being pulled out of here,” den Daas said while still on camera. “We have just been expelled from another area, so I’m afraid we’ll have to come back to you later.”
“Our correspondent @sjoerddendaas was pulled away from the camera by security guards at 12:00 pm live in the NOS Journaal,” NOS tweeted Friday, shortly after the video began gaining traction. “Unfortunately, this is increasingly becoming a daily reality for journalists in China. He is fine and was able to finish his story a few minutes later.”
The Daily Mail reported Friday, “The interruption came from a man wearing a black jacket and a red band around the sleeve which appears to distinguish him a ‘Public Security Volunteer,’ a citizen-led neighborhood watch established to help police maintain order.”
The opening ceremony for the 2022 Beijing Olympics is under way.
The original video has been viewed more than 200,000 times at the time of this reporting.
Onze correspondent @sjoerddendaas werd om 12.00u live in het NOS Journaal door beveiligers voor de camera weggetrokken. Helaas is dit steeds vaker de dagelijkse realiteit voor journalisten in China. Hij is in orde en kon zijn verhaal gelukkig een paar minuten later afmaken pic.twitter.com/GLTZRlZV96
NOS editor in chief Marcel Gelauff said that the incident is a blatantly “painful illustration” of how foreign press is treated in the communist state.
“Sjoerd has often told and shown that it is difficult as a journalist in China,” he told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, according to a report from Insider. “There is a far-reaching tendency to curtail freedoms, and this may be even stronger because of [COVID-19],” said Gelauff.
“I haven’t spoken to Sjoerd yet, but from what I saw on the images I didn’t get the idea that he was in the way,” Dabbled added.
The 2022 Olympics kicked off on Friday despite ongoing outrage over the genocide and crimes against humanity taking place in Xinjiang.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg scrapped two policies Friday following immense public backlash as the city sees a rise in violent crime. Bragg appeared to deflect blame onto his staff in his memo released Friday, noting his Jan. 3 memo was meant to provide “framework” with which his office should follow.
“As I emphasized in my remarks to the office, you were hired for your keen judgment, and I want you to use that judgment – and experience – in every case,” Bragg wrote.
US President Joe Biden’s motorcade drive past New York Police Department officers near the NYPD Headquarters in New York on February 3, 2022. (YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)
Under the new memo, Bragg said commercial robberies committed with a gun “will be charged as a felony” regardless of if the gun “is operable, loaded, or a realistic imitation.” Robberies committed at knifepoint or with another weapon will also be charged as a felony, according to the memo. Bragg also said “people walking the streets with guns will be prosecuted and held accountable” and that the “default in gun cases is a felony prosecution.”
“Violence against police officers will not be tolerated,” the memo continued. “We will prosecute any person who harms or attempts to harm a police officer.”
Prior to the changes, Bragg’s initial memo said armed robberies would be treated as petty larceny, a misdemeanor, if no victim was seriously injured and there was no “genuine risk of physical harm.”
Widow of slain New York Police Department Officer Jason Rivera, Dominique Luzuriaga, slammed Bragg for not keeping the city safe during her husband’s funeral service.
WATCH: Widow of @NYPDnews officer Jason Rivera slams @ManhattanDA though not by name: "We are not safe anymore. Not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he's watching you speak through me right now." pic.twitter.com/zHPQ1scMgy
“The system continues to fail us,” Luzuriaga said. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these new laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
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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.
Foreigners are voting in our elections. It isn’t just in the sanctuary city of New York, where 800,000 foreigners just got the power to vote in municipal elections. Foreigners voting occurs all over the country. Over the past few years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has uncovered government records showing foreigners voting in Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, and California.
Voter fraud deniers do not want to talk about the fact that foreigners are registering and voting in U.S. elections. They forget that the foreigners voting in American elections are sometimes victims of third-party voter registration drives that jeopardize their immigration status. These voter registration drives sign anyone up without regard to eligibility.
States are also victimizing these foreigners. Pennsylvania let aliens register to vote for more than two decades on a broken department of motor vehicles registration process. Unwitting aliens often don’t know they aren’t allowed to register and vote. Meanwhile, committing an election crime such as illegal voting subjects them to deportation. The only winner is the political party that reliably gets their votes.
Just this week, we uncovered more evidence of foreigners voting in our elections, this time in the swing state of North Carolina. In 2019, the North Carolina State Board of Elections denied the foundation access to documents relating to foreigners registering and voting, so the foundation sued the board. Following a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming that the National Voter Registration Act requires disclosure of these documents, the board agreed to settle the case. In the settlement, the board agreed to disclose the records relating to foreigners registering and voting. There have already been 38indictments of foreigners registering to vote and some casting ballots. These records will conclusively show how many foreigners have been voting in North Carolina elections.
Inspecting these list maintenance documents serves an important purpose by allowing one to identify how foreigners are getting registered to vote. That is a key first step to improve the system and ensure that these errors do not continue to happen.
Often, it is the fault of the government. For example, a voter registration form will have a question at the top asking if the potential registrant is an American. One may check “no” and, due to errors by local elections officials, still get registered to vote. The same mistakes can happen when the potential registrant leaves the checkbox blank. The mistake may also be on the part of the potential registrant, incorrectly checking the box attesting that he or she is a U.S. citizen. The bottom line is foreigners are registering and voting in states across the country.
Nobody should want this. Only Americans should be electing American leaders. States need to examine their voter list maintenance procedures and ensure they are keeping non-citizens off the voter rolls.
We will continue the effort to catalog and expose government mistakes and election malfeasance. Americans have a right to know about the vulnerabilities in our election system.
J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
It’s been less than two months since an associate professor teamed up with a pro-pedophile organization in an attempt to normalize the most repugnant crimes imaginable. Now, yet another unhinged professor has been caught advocating for pedophilia, this time even more brazenly. Stephen Kershnar is a professor at State University of New York at Fredonia, and a pedophilia apologist. Here’s Kershnar on video saying that an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.
It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”
Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.
What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.
Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids. He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.” His perspective is backed up by podcast host Thaddeus Russel, who makes an equally monstrous argument when he says, “all a child’s life is, is coercion by adults … often to make the child do something for the adult’s pleasure only.”
It’s also telling that these dangerous viewpoints have found their way into the mainstream through left-wing outlets. At one point, Russel boasts that he authored an article in The Daily Beast that argued for lowering consent laws.
If SUNY Fredonia would like to right this wrong, it can begin by correcting Kershnar’s bio, which adopts the language of child groomers by calling pedophilia “adult-child sex.” Thus far, SUNY Fredonia’s response has been swift, although incomplete. In a statement, the university remarked that Kershnar’s views are “reprehensible and do not represent the values of SUNY Fredonia in any way, shape or form” also noting that “The matter is being reviewed.”
Only one moral decision can be made following such a review. Half measures, or any other move to placate those who are correctly outraged at the situation rather than remedy the crisis, are entirely unacceptable and unbecoming of any institution that hopes to maintain a shred of legitimacy. Although SUNY Fredonia may in fact come to the correct decision, it must be recognized that these sentiments did not come out of nowhere. The institution is responding to a high-profile case that’s just now been exposed.
Some of the school’s alumni weren’t the least bit surprised. After all, we’re talking about a professor who published a book titled “Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis” all the way back in 2015. That SUNY at Fredonia is only now responding to this moral crisis in response to public outcry is disgraceful and deceptive.
Kershnar Is Not Alone
When hearing about such an outrageous situation, it can be easy to believe that it is an isolated experience, that such insane notions couldn’t possibly have taken root elsewhere. Unfortunately, this would be a misconception. As mentioned previously, it hasn’t been long since a former professor at Old Dominion University rebranded pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.” Even this instance was not unique.
A professor at Yale University by the name of Joe Fischel publicly argued that children should be shown nudity, thereby victimized by acts of indecent exposure, at LGBT pride parades. His article was replete with the same strategies that child groomers use, as I outlined previously. These handful of pedophilia apologist professors are just the tip of the iceberg, one facet of a wider campaign to normalize pedophilia. The logical results of these sentiments have trickled down into K-12 institutions, with gay pornography being featured in school libraries, while other government-run schools host LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, all while refusing to reveal if parents were required to be present on these clubs’ Zoom calls.
The crisis isn’t relegated to education, either, with similar themes popping up in a number of totally different sectors. A commercial from Twix featured child cross-dressing, just one more example of the elite attempt to groom children.
A YMCA’s LGBT center hosts youth-only events, and hosted a man who creates drawings that feature characters from children’s shows having sex. Meanwhile, a broader push to foist transgenderism on children has a dark and storied history of pedophilia, child abuse, and psychological torment. Make no mistake, there is a broad and deliberate push in nearly all areas of public life to normalize pedophilia. This push must be fought wherever it is found, without reservation.
Here’s How To Fight Pedophilia’s Normalization
Let’s be abundantly clear: this is not a complicated issue. In fact, there can be no simpler issue. Pedophilia is evil. That’s it. We shouldn’t accept the notion that pro-pedophilia sentiments are valid ideas to be contended with in the marketplace of ideas by the use of rhetorical flourish or superior philosophizing. Illiberalism is no crime when your opponent uses bad-faith arguments to justify moral atrocities that target the most vulnerable among us, victimizing them in ways they can’t even comprehend. These ideas, just like those who use their institutional positions to normalize this horrid evil, must be ostracized, shamed, shunned, stigmatized, and mocked out of any and all forms of socio-political or academic influence. This is not extreme. It’s the natural immune system response that any healthy society enacts when confronted with a rising tide of danger and evil.
Here are some simple ways you can reject it:
Refuse to use euphemistic and manipulated language.
By using euphemisms, you fight the battle against child groomers on their terms. You must completely reject phrases like “minor-attracted person,” or “adult-child sex,” both of which seek to grant sympathy and dignity to these atrocities and those who commit them. Maintain the moral high ground with terms that accurately identify evil.
Become comfortable with being intolerant.
Tolerance is a vice, not a virtue, when you are asked to tolerate unspeakable moral crimes. Our society has begun to see tolerance as the mark of an enlightened person. Reject this faulty framing, and all the degeneracy and spiritual rot that has followed closely behind it.
Fight, fight, fight.
If there was ever a time to be uncompromising, to cling to your beliefs with unrelenting zeal, this is it. The only proper response to situations such as this is action backed by righteous anger. Root out attempts to normalize pedophilia anywhere and everywhere you find it. Publicize it. Send examples like this to The Federalist. Demand that institutions that are home to these sentiments condemn it wholeheartedly in speech and in action. Fight, fight, fight.
Kershnar did not respond to a request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
(Photo by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell / U.S. Marine Corps via Getty Images)
As many as 9,000 American citizens were left in Afghanistan when the U.S. military withdrew from the country Aug. 31, according to a report released Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In public statements, Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, claimed that only 100-150 Americans remained in Afghanistan and had contacted the U.S. government with a desire to leave. The State Department and Defense Department officials stuck to that number, even as the government publicly admitted that large numbers of American citizens were still leaving the country.
The report, signed by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch of Idaho, reveals that State Department officials believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan as late as Aug. 17. In the next two weeks, only 6,000 Americans were able to escape the country ahead of the Taliban takeover. In testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, Blinken claimed that “approximately 100-150 remained in Afghanistan who still wished to depart.”
Estimating the number of Americans residing or visiting a country like Afghanistan is “50% art and 50% science and educated guesswork,” staffers of the former Kabul Embassy reportedly said, since Americans are encouraged but not required to register with the State Department when they enter a country. The staffers noted that host countries are generally able to provide better estimates than the embassy, but that Afghanistan was not capable of doing so.
Officials like Blinken and U.S. Central Command leader Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie frequently qualified their statements about the number of Americans remaining in-country by saying that they were in contact with smaller numbers who “want to leave.”
Contributing the failure was the Biden administration’s lack of preparation for the execution of the withdrawal. National security officials were still working to formulate a withdrawal plan a day before Kabul fell to the Taliban, despite the fact that Biden announced that American forces would withdraw from Afghanistan four months before the collapse of the U.S.-allied government. The National Security Council failed to coordinate withdrawal operations between the State and Defense departments, and rapid troop withdrawals exacerbated the failed evacuation process, according to the report.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Biden administration was still slow to organize contingency responses for withdrawal. The Transportation Department waited five days to issue an order allowing foreign airlines to deliver evacuees to American airports, and seven days to activate the Civil Reserve Aircraft Fleet (CRAF). The CRAF is a private airline fleet that can aid the U.S. military in a crisis, but “was barely used and did little to impact evacuation operations.”
Government officials had warned as early as 2007 that plans for withdrawal from unsafe and hostile nations would need a significant overhaul, particularly the reporting requirements for American citizens in those countries. A key factor in those plans is the reliance on the host government in providing an accurate number of Americans in need of evacuation. This issue has not been corrected across four presidential administrations.
“The lack of host nation accounting for Americans is likely not unique to Afghanistan and will be a persistent feature in countries with weak central governments and inefficient accounting systems,” the report notes. “It is exactly these countries that are most prone to rapid onsets of instability requiring the evacuation of Americans.”
Despite these logistical failures, as well as the death of 13 American service members in an ISIS-K terrorist attack, the Biden administration has claimed its withdrawal efforts a success.
“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history. With more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety, that number is more than double what most experts thought was possible. No nation – no nation has ever done anything like it in all the history,” Biden said in a speech marking the final withdrawal of American forces and embassy officials.
“The bottom line: 90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave,” he added.
An illegal immigrant accused of killing a Texas teenager in a hit-and-run car crash will be spared deportation under the Biden administration’s new rules governing who should be removed from the country.
Heriberto Fuerte-Padilla was driving while intoxicated in November 2020 when he smashed his pickup truck into a car driven by 19-year-old Adrienne Sophia Exum, expelling her from her vehicle. Exum died on the scene. Fuerte-Padilla reportedly tried to flee the area but was picked up by police shortly after and charged with a DWI and failure to render aid.
Though initially requesting that authorities deport Fuerte-Padilla after Texas issued its punishment, the Department of Homeland Security has since dropped its request, arguing he doesn’t qualify for priority deportation under new rules issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September, the Washington Times reported.
The outlet added that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers told Texas authorities that it was also “canceling deportation requests — known as ‘detainers’ — on other illegal immigrants, including some who pleaded guilty to felony charges of evading arrest or had convictions for drunken driving, drug possession or domestic assault injuring a family member.”
Those illegal aliens who were once subject to deportation are no longer considered “priority lifts” under the new rules.
On Sept. 30, Mayorkas issued a memo that outlined a dramatic shift in U.S. immigration enforcement policy. No longer would being in the country illegally be a sufficient cause for that individual’s deportation, nor would simply committing a crime. The new rules — which intended to focus in on only the most serious illegal immigrant targets — specified that an individual must be a “threat to national security,” a “threat to public safety,” or a recent border crosser to be considered for deportation.
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Mayorkas said in the memo. “We will use our discretion and focus our enforcement resources in a more targeted way. Justice and our country’s well-being require it.”
The new “public safety” criterion would prove to be the most difficult to assess.
In the memo, Mayorkas noted that someone would be considered a public safety threat if they committed “serious criminal conduct,” before vaguely adding that the determination should not be made “according to bright lines or categories” but rather “the totality of the facts and circumstances.”
It’s unclear why the department ultimately determined that Fuerte-Padilla and other illegal immigrant offenders didn’t fit the criteria. But no matter the explanations, the deportation request cancellations are undoubtedly frustrating to local law enforcement.
“Here we have a law enforcement agency handing ICE a criminal alien on a silver platter and ICE saying, ‘No thank you,’ and then the law enforcement agency saying, ‘Really?’ And ICE saying, ‘No, we really don’t want to take this person,'” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told the Times.
The Times noted that attorneys general in Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Montana, and Ohio are currently challenging the new DHS rules in court in two separate cases.
A long-term study from Vanderbilt University found that children who attended Tennessee’s state pre-k program underperformed in the sixth grade compared to children who did not attend the program.
“Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children,” the study found. The “strongest negative effects” were found in sixth graders.
The study also found a negative effect for “disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.”
The Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK) operates under the control of the state department of education and is used by low-income families statewide, according to Vanderbilt University. Tennessee has dumped $86 million worth of funding into the program since 2005, giving 15,000 preschoolers statewide access to the program and opening 786 new classrooms.
The study tracked 2,990 preschoolers from low-income backgrounds who applied for the oversubscribed TN-VPK, and researchers observed students who were accepted as well as rejected. This allowed the study to create a “statistically appropriate control group,” as all students came from families who wanted the children in pre-k, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The researchers also stated that there are “no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
President Joe Biden, along with progressives in Congress, has also been pushing universal pre-k for all 3-and-4-year-olds as part of his administration’s Build Back Better framework. The Build Back Better Act, which was set to cost $2 trillion, was blocked in the Senate after Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin stated“this is a no on this piece of legislation,” and that he would not vote for it.
Manchin stated Tuesday that Build Back Better was “dead” and that “there is no Build Back Better bill,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. However, Manchin has shown support for certain elements of the bill, including universal preschool.
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.
A now-deleted portion of the Riverside, Califonia school district’s website obtained by The Federalist displays that the district promoted an essay that attacks people based on their inborn skin color. The essay, titled “Decentering Whiteness” by Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, claimed that “attacking whiteness is not enough.” It sought to divide people on the basis of their race and argued that “whiteness” should be pushed to “the margin,”
Riverside Unified School District promoted the essay at least three separate times, under the “Professional Learning,” “Community Engagement,” and “Culture and Climate” sections of their Equity, Access, and Community Engagement resources page, according to screenshots.
The Federalist previously revealed that both Riverside Superintendent Renee Hill and Board of Education member Tom Hunt lied about the district teaching critical race theory. One parent from the district, who wished to remain unnamed, told The Federalist that the resources list that contained “Decentering Whiteness” was removed from the website following the exposé of the district’s dishonesty.
When asked why the resources had been removed, Communication Director Diana Meza stated that the district is “updating the Equity, Access & Community Engagement google site and landing page, the page should be back up soon.”
The school district has charge of nearly 40,000 students, according to federal data, and 35 percent of those students are white. School families’ median income is significantly above the national average, at approximately $73,000 per year.
Decentering Whiteness
The removed 19-page “resources” document, which can be viewed here, not only condemned “whiteness” but served as a guidebook for how institutions can fight it, so that “whiteness itself can be made more marginal.” The paper explained, “Decentering whiteness, as we envision it, is a collective process that can take place in organizations, sectors of society, personal lives, etc., over periods of days, months, years and generations.”
While launching into both anti-white attacks and blatant attempts to divide people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, the paper engaged in race essentialism. It cast race as a defining rather than incidental characteristic when it tells readers to “Assume whiteness, and race, always structures our experience, and thus needs to be consciously considered as part of any social process.”
White people are also openly villainized in the materials. One line reads, “white culture has, on balance, been based on principles of conquest and exploitation” while another says that in the attempt to marginalize whiteness, “simply attacking whiteness is not enough.”
The document did not oppose attacking “whiteness” out of an opposition to racism, nor did it express any concern over the potential fallout of seizing on racial fault lines for socio-political ends. Rather, it simply argued that openly attacking whiteness wouldn’t be strategically effective. It remarked “Simply attacking whiteness is not enough to accomplish this goal. Assaults on whiteness, depending on their nature, may have the effect of confirming and solidifying the central position of whiteness in American society.”
Lighter skin color has been and continues to be one of the prime targets of critical race theory. Noel Ignatiev, a Marxist Harvard professor who is cited in “Decentering Whiteness,” infamously claimed that “treasonous to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”
He also remarked, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”
Perhaps most sinister, “Decentering Whiteness” clearly sought to encourage racial division and even racial conflict, calling on a multiracial coalition to “displace” whiteness. It read “It will take a multiracial effort to displace whiteness, one that includes people from all racial/cultural groups.”
How exactly any of this rhetoric benefits the students or staff at Riverside Unified School District is entirely unclear. The presence of this material in a school climate is in fact both un-American and undeniably harmful, not only to the white people who are maligned by it but also those of all other racial backgrounds whom the article attempts to conscript into a race-based power struggle.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com. SPENCER LINDQUISTVISIT ON TWITTER@SPENCERLNDQST
In a recent editorial published in the Washington Post, Dr. Leana Wen — CNN’s medical expert — called for lifting COVID-19 restrictions across the country as the Omicron variant’s presence begins to wane. Dr. Wen acknowledged that many Americans are likely feeling fatigued with safety precautions that have faded in relevance, such as masking, social distancing, and self-isolating. Omicron was one of several variants that sent society into a tizzy, Wen acknowledges, and it likely won’t be the last now that COVID-19 is endemic.
The likely emergence of new variants that could very well be more lethal than Omicron is precisely why Dr. Wen encouraged relaxing COVID restrictions. She said “new and possibly dangerous variants are likely to emerge. But it is precisely because of this future threat that we need to allow normalcy now.” However, Dr. Wen, as indicated by the last word in her statement, isn’t calling for society to return to normal in perpetuity. She calls for COVID-19 restrictions to be lifted to give people a breather right before reimplementing them upon the premiere of the next variant.
Wen writes, “In areas where hospitalizations are declining, the rapid removal of restrictions with the understanding that they may need to come back if new threats emerge. Doing so could give weary Americans much-needed respite while also preserving public-health authority for when it’s needed again.”
She also calls for the local and federal government and businesses to implement rigorous vaccine requirements while allowing the vaccinated to forgo COVID-19 restrictions. Essentially, Dr. Wen is calling for those who received a COVID-19 vaccination not to be burdened by restrictions, while those who are unvaccinated must continue to deal with them.
Paradoxically, Dr. Wen writes, “Keep vaccine requirements and drop everything else. The vaccinated who have done everything right, should not have any restrictions placed on them; it’s not fair to them and it disincentivizes vaccination.”
What Dr. Wen is clearly advocating for is a tiered society in which those who are compliant with vaccination mandates are allowed to participate uninhibited while those who don’t receive the vaccine must continue to jump through hoops on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Wen wants to force the American public to receive the vaccine. She calls for an end to masking for the vaccinated while hoping for a reality where the unvaccinated are shamed into vaccination due to the embarrassment of wearing a mask.
Wen’s warped wish list for reality comes as Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admit that a lot of the protocols implemented as COVID restrictions were products of social engineering; they wanted to see what people would tolerate.
That said, a new study from Johns Hopkins University revealed that COVID-19 lockdowns and preventive restrictions had little to no effect on reducing COVID’s mortality rate while “imposing numerous economic and social costs.”
The study states that these procedures are “ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” But, considering that people like Dr. Wen are more concerned with cramming their worldview down the throats of the American people, rather than following the science, it is likely this research will not find its way into public policy anytime soon.
It’s utterly senseless. Pfizer is now asking to authorize a dangerous, outdated shot for babies and toddlers, for whom the virus does not pose a statistical risk and for a virus against which the shots have failed to show any benefit. Yet, just as taxes and death are a certainty in life, you can bank on the FDA never turning down any Pfizer request. This is where Republican governors must serve as the safety net for the people. They must actively oppose expanding the shots to the final control group against the greatest experiment on mankind.
In one of the most shocking and immoral moves since the beginning of the pandemic, Pfizer is submitting its request this week for emergency use authorization of its COVID shot for babies as young as 6 months old through 5 years old. They are quite literally pushing a shot with the hopes of ameliorating symptoms (not stopping transmission) of a virus that is a cold for young children and much less dangerous than RSV. But here’s the kicker: The trial they conducted showed that two doses failed to even produce positive results, and they are still working on a trial for a three-dose regimen. Plus, we have a new variant. So, what exactly are they seeking authorization for?
As other countries are already recommending against vaccinating those under 12, our government will likely approve this shot for babies and young children based on a failed trial. There was never any efficacy in the shot because no child in the trial got seriously ill to begin with. So, they chose a trial endpoint around levels of antibody titers. Putting aside for a moment the premise that higher antibody titers (as opposed to T cells) are necessarily a good thing and won’t cause original antigenic sin, their own trial failed to achieve these endpoints in 2- to 4-year-olds. Which is why Pfizer announced in December that it was beginning a trial on a three-dose regimen. So how can they seek authorization of the failed two-dose trial for what is essentially a new virus?
One of the precepts of the Nuremberg Code: “The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.” There is no way pursuit of an already flawed vaccine can be justified on young children, even if it still had a degree of efficacy and wasn’t outdated. A recent study from the U.K. showed that even immunocompromised children were not at an elevated risk for severe COVID. The study of 1,527 immunocompromised children and young adults found “no increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.” None of those even more vulnerable children died.
While there likely have been a tiny number of severely ill children who have died of the virus, it’s extremely hard to tell how many of the recorded deaths were legitimately caused by the virus itself. A large COVID study conducted in Germany found just three pediatric COVID deaths out of a million. The same analyst found zero deaths occurred in children under 5.
Already among older children, no positive benefit was found in the vaccine, even when the vaccine was working better. An Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found ZERO deaths or severe illnesses BOTH in the vaccinated and in the control (unvaccinated) groups of 12- to 18-year-olds in a 29-day follow-up of their vaccination. Under what pretext could the government possibly justify COVID as an emergency in this age group, and based on what evidence does this vaccine address that “emergency?”
On the flip side, the CDC, in a study in published in JAMA just conceded that the VAERS data on myocarditis was indeed an accurate reflection of an increased risk of heart inflammation following the vaccines. “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men,” concluded the CDC researchers. “This risk should be considered in the context of the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination.”
More broadly, over 22,600 vaccine deaths and over 1 million injuries have been reported to VAERS. We already know from previous studies that VAERS only captures 1% of adverse events, and no other shot has come with such a stigma against reporting it for harm, often at the threat of the physician losing his job. Medicare data seems to hint at a much broader cohort of vaccine casualties. The military’s epidemiological database also seems to indicate a very disturbing trend of neurological and cardiological disorders rising in association with the take-up of the vaccine.
How can this be foisted upon the youngest children — with no apparent benefit — when they concede, “Long-term outcome data are not yet available for COVID-19 vaccine–associated myocarditis cases”?
There are no long-term cancer studies, there are no long-term studies on what this does to one’s immune system, and there are no long-term studies on autoimmune diseases, even though the VAERS data and the Pfizer surveillance data from early 2021 raises some concerns. Plus the vaccine is for a virus that is not a threat to children.
Think about it: Monoclonal antibodies can get their existing EUA pulled based on the arrival of a new variant, yet shots that have already proven to be outdated – and are associated with greater infection rates – can secure official full approval and then EUA for babies with a new variant that was never run through a clinical trial.
As such, for a governors to merely take a neutral stance while allowing this travesty to plague the children of their states is unacceptable. Governors have a responsibility to direct their respective health departments to conduct the proper oversight that the FDA has abdicated and demand a moratorium on shots for children until a proper cost-benefit analysis can be conducted. At a minimum, they should join together in a lawsuit to enjoin the EUA because Pfizer has failed to prove the shots meet the eligibility thresholds in the EUA statute.
Moreover, Republican governors and legislators have an obligation to treat Pfizer like Planned Parenthood and cut all political ties with the company’s lobbying groups. Bio-medical fascism and the breach of informed consent is a greater pro-life cause than opposition to abortion right now, because its practitioners are encouraging all children to get something with only a potential downside. It is the equivalent of forcing abortions upon us, not just permitting them.
The final precept of the Nuremberg Code reads as follows: “During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” If after everything we have learned, they won’t even discontinue this experiment on babies, then we truly have learned nothing since that dark era of history.
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.
In debates about critical race theory and other manifestations of identity politics, Americans are being confronted with a particularly virulent form of Marxism, which some call cultural Marxism. Its adherents think they can create a new reality, because at bottom they do not believe in objective nature. Conservatives engaged in an important conversation over the exact proportion of natural law and natural rights must ensure their attention is not diverted from sworn opponents who deny the existence of either.
Very roughly, the natural-law crowd emphasizes society’s “common good,” while those on the natural-rights side stress individual liberties. They have bigger problems than each other though.
Adherents of a new left have no time for fundamental truths, but believe that each era’s conceptual framework is what creates reality. Man may apprehend natural phenomena through his senses, but he can only comprehend the world through society’s reigning concepts.
Marxist Belief
Marxists believe those in power create this perceptional superstructure. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx himself wrote in “The Communist Manifesto.” Max Horkheimer, the neo-communist who led the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and ’40s and first came up with Critical Theory, was as usual more wordy, but essentially said the same thing.
“The power of healthy human understanding, or common sense … are conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually,” Horkheimer wrote in a foundational 1935 essay.
To critical race theory, an American mutation of critical theory, that powerful conceptual framework is white supremacy. In fact, the first task of CRT, wrote the editors of the 1995 collection of essays that serves as the theory’s tablet (which they refer to as “The Big Red Book”), is “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.”
It is embedded in the “‘ordinary business’ of society,” wrote Richard Delgado in his far slimmer primer on CRT.
Man Creates Reality
The obvious implication is that, if you eliminate the conceptual framework — presto! you change nature and reality. Horkheimer says this is what happens with each passing historical era: “There are connections between the forms of judgment and the historical periods. A brief indication will show what is meant. The classificatory judgment is typical of prebourgeois society: this is the way it is, and man can do nothing about it…. Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality” (italics added for emphasis).
From this, we can extrapolate why members of this new left believe that man can change his sex, which is just “assigned” at birth: because they are both Godless and materialist, they believe man is omnipotent. Things are not as they are because God or nature made them that way. Things are as they are because we conceive them so. Man creates reality.
This turns philosophy and theory on their head. Philosophy studies the true nature of things. But since there is no fundamental truth, philosophy becomes the motor to create a new reality.
Marx himself, once again, started it, writing in 1843, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Five years later, he added in the Manifesto, “Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality.”
CRT’s Goals to Dismantle Society
About a century and a half later, Harvard University’s Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, wrote, “As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.” The works of CRT are suffused with calls for “theoretical deconstruction” and the like.
These are the true foes of those who want to conserve what is good about America (i.e., conservatives). They see all of American society as an oppressive hegemonic narrative that should be destroyed and replaced with a counter-narrative. “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,”says Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, a force that has already done a lot of cultural dismantling.
But starting in late 2020, a force has risen to push back: parents. “It didn’t take long for parents of all races to figure out that their children were being indoctrinated into a repellent ideology. Since the implementation of CRT at the school level began, genuine parental resistance to it bubbled up,” writes Abe Greenwald in a Commentary piece chronicling the counter-revolution.
Conservatives Shouldn’t Forget Common Enemy
Bright conservative minds engaged in an intellectual debate over the future of conservatism cannot forget this other fight against our common enemies. On one side of the conservative debate (and this is an oversimplification) are some who believe the emphasis should be on natural law (the eternal precepts that govern man’s action); on the other are those who stress the natural rights, or the individual rights, that man has because of his nature.
As Catholic University’s Melissa Moschella recently told me, they are tied at the hip, however. We have a natural right to free speech because our nature permits us to speak, but also because free speech is a prerequisite for discovering truth, an aspect of human flourishing. Our nature also permits us to commit murder, but we have no right to exercise that capacity because it is contrary to human flourishing, and therefore to natural law. These distinctions, let me assure you, are lost on Marx, Bell, or Garza.
I have good friends and mentors on both sides of the conservative debate. They are intelligent, patriotic, and courageous. Their issues do matter. But let’s remember who are the real enemies of fundamental truth, and not become immersed in internal debates over theological principles, as the Byzantines did in 1453 when the Ottomans were at the gate.
Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation, spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is the author of the new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.” MIKE GONZALEZ MORE ARTICLES
With Thursday’s official announcement by Justice Stephen Breyer of his impending retirement, conservatives are strategizing on the best approach to prevent confirmation of a leftist activist justice. Instead, Republicans should be praying that President Biden nominates the looniest, most far-left lawyer possible for a slot on the high court. Why? Because history has proven that a far-left justice will be no worse than a moderately liberal justice in the casting of Supreme Court votes, meaning there is no downside to a far-left pick, while the upside potential is huge, given that it is Biden appointing the new justice and not a Republican president: Thank you very much, Never Trumpers.
While over the last four decades justices appointed by Republican presidents have demonstrated a penchant to “grow” in office or have proven more moderate or pragmatic than proclaimed during confirmation, the same is not true for Democrat-appointed justices, who vote in near-perfect lockstep over their careers.
Then there are the Republican-appointed justices who do not abandon their judicial philosophy, but conclude that a faithful application of originalism requires them to vote with the leftist wing of the court. Justice Neil Gorsuch provides a perfect example of this phenomenon, providing the fifth vote in several cases in the criminal context, and before him the now-late Justice Anton Scalia.
Conversely, in close or contentious cases, Democrat-appointed justices “represent a block geared toward progressive policy outcomes.” It matters whether these justices are perceived as center-left or hard-left: The desired liberal outcome dictates the decision. So, fighting for a less leftist justice serves no purpose. On the other hand, there are many positives to the conservative cause if Biden nominates a far-left candidate to the Supreme Court. With midterm elections later this year, Biden naming an extremist to the high court positions Republicans perfectly to talk about the importance of elections—and specifically control of the Senate. The nomination of a far-left candidate will also provide an opportunity during the confirmation process for Republicans to highlight the recent public revelations of the Democratic Party’s true far-left goals. President Biden has already showcased the party’s obsession with identity politics by promising the country his nominee would be a black woman, so men and whites need not apply.
Further, if Republicans maintain decorum and respect during the process, and focus on the nominee’s judicial philosophy and policy, they can score points with a public disgusted by the left’s disgraceful treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family. And the more leftist Biden’s candidate, the more restrained Republicans will appear by comparison. Moreover, the further left the candidate, the more justified a “no” vote will be for swing-state Republicans, allowing them to vote against the nomination based on principle, and thereby avoid the obstructionist label. Likewise, moderate Republicans or Republican senators in purple or blue states could justify a “yes” vote based on their view that a president is entitled to his nomination.
The more extreme Biden’s candidate, the more this position will inure to Republicans’ benefit when a supposedly far-right candidate finds himself or herself nominated to the Supreme Court by a future Republican president. The same moderate Republicans can point to their vote for Biden’s extremist justice as proof of the consistency of their position that a president is entitled to his nominee, or if they are kicked out of office over their vote for Biden’s nominee, a stronger senator could be in that office. And should Democrat senators en mass vote against a future Republican nominee, the hypocrisy charge will strike more squarely the more extreme Biden’s leftist nominee is.
It is also not just the fight that will benefit the conservative cause: Elevation of a far-left justice to the Supreme Court will advance originalism more than if Biden were to replace Breyer with a milquetoast moderate. That premise may seem counterintuitive because we think of “moderates” in the context of politics and not precedent.
For a Supreme Court decision to be “precedential,” five justices must agree with both the outcome and the analysis. Were Biden to appoint a so-called “moderate,” her vote would tally with the far-left wing of the high court and her reasoning would likely be mainstream enough to, at times, shift Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh to join with the other two leftist justices to create a majority opinion that binds lower courts.
Conversely, a far-left justice will also vote with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan but may drag her sister justices too far to the left to entice any so-called moderate justices to join in the decision. Then, either the leftist side will lose, or the outcome will favor the leftist position, but the Supreme Court’s decision will be fractured, with several of the justices writing separately, resulting in no binding precedent and only dicta.
Of course, originalism would benefit more from the appointment of an originalist justice, but that is not an option now, as President Biden is our president and Breyer submitted his resignation effective upon confirmation of his successor. So the choice is between Justice Breyer and another liberal justice or a far-left one. Stalling in the hope of obtaining a more palatable liberal will leave us with Justice Breyer and the need to delay an appointment for three years.
Conservatism would be better served by using Biden’s appointment to remind the public that elections have consequences. The loonier left his nominee is, the better that point can be made.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Whoopi Goldberg — on the heels of her controversial comments on “The View” Monday that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race” and instead was about “man’s inhumanity to man” — appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Monday to offer further explanations about the firestorm she started. It’s important to note that while Goldberg apologized on social media for her comments just after 8 p.m. Monday — saying the Holocaust was about race after all, as well as man’s inhumanity to man — her interview with Colbert presumably took place earlier, as “The Late Show” is taped Mondays from 5:30 to 7 p.m. and then airs at 11:35 p.m.
Colbert right away brought up Goldberg’s comments from earlier in the day, and she was more than willing to explain herself.
“It upset a lot of people, which was never, ever, ever, ever my intention,” Goldberg said, adding that “I feel, being black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me. So, I said that I felt that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And people got very, very, very angry and still are angry. I mean, I’m getting … mail from folks and very real anger. ‘Cause people feel very differently. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see. So, I see you, and I know what race you are.”
After rehashing that she felt the Holocaust instead was about man’s inhumanity to man, Goldberg recounted that Jewish people disagreed with her.
“They said, ‘No, no, we are a race.’ And I understand. I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. … I don’t wanna fake apologize. … I was … very upset that people … misunderstood what I was saying,” she continued. “And so, because of it, they’re saying that I’m anti-Semitic, and that I’m denying the Holocaust, and all these other things which would … never occur to me … I thought we were having a discussion about race, which everyone I think is having.”
Colbert — calling himself the “white guy in the conversation” and a non-Jew — added, “It seems to me that whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of the colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people, and that they could apply it to all different kinds of people. That idea of race. And the American experience tends to be based on skin.”
Goldberg agreed: “Yes, and so that is what race means to me.”
“When you talk about being a racist, I was saying you can’t call [the Holocaust] racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on the skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. [The Nazis] had to delve deeply to figure it out.”
Colbert appeared to agree, adding that when the Nazis figured out who was Jewish, they made Jews wear yellow stars on their clothing to visually distinguish them from non-Jews.
“My point is, [the Nazis] had to do the work,” Goldberg said before adding an anecdote: “If the Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend … I’m gonna run, but if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who’s Jewish. … And so that’s what I was trying to explain. And I understand that not everybody sees it that way, and … I did a lot of harm, I guess, to myself, and people … decided I was all these all these other things — I’m actually not. And I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself. And you know, I get it. Folks are angry. I accept that. And I did it to myself. This was my thought process, and I will work hard not to think that way again.”
When Colbert asked Goldberg if she now understood that the Nazis indeed saw the Holocaust as a racial issue, she replied that “the Nazis lied … they had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So, to me, I’m thinking, ‘How can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?'”
Goldberg added that one of her concerns is explaining it all to children in a way that makes sense: “I said this wasn’t racial. This was about white on white. And everybody said, ‘No, no, no, it was racial,’ and so that’s what this all came from. So once again: Don’t write me anymore, I know how you feel, OK? I already know. I get it. And I’m going to take your word for it and never bring it up again.”
How Whoopi Became Today’s Hot Topic On “The View” youtu.be
Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin told reporters Tuesday that President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill was “dead” when asked about the status of renewed negotiations. Manchin preceded his remark by saying that “there is no Build Back Better bill,” adding, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The centrist Democrat came out against the bill in December 2021, criticizing its size and scope amid decades-high inflation. His lack of support effectively killed any chance the bill had of passing the evenly-divided Senate, given Republicans’ unanimous opposition to it. Though Manchin did not support the House-passed bill and was unable to reach a compromise with his Democratic colleagues, he has not shut the door to potentially restarting negotiations in the future. He has also signaled support for several individual policies in the bill, including but not limited to climate change mitigation measures and universal pre-K.
One policy that Democrats are insisting be prioritized in any reworked package is the expanded child tax credit, which the party adopted in March 2021 which expired at the end of the year. Several Democrats wrote to Biden directly, urging him to push for its adoption, while some Republicans have even offered their own alternatives if the credit remains scuttled.
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.
ArecentTucker Carlson monologue questioned the relentless narrative insisting Americans must compulsively side with Ukraine against Russia in their conflict.
“We are potentially on the verge of a land war in Europe aimed at extinguishing democracy and sovereignty, and the American right wing is on the side of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism. That’s where we’re at,” tweeted President Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who coined the phrase “DC blob,” in reply to Carlson without a hint of irony.
Another Democrat operative, who allegedly worked with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up dirt on President Trump,tweeted that Carlson should be prosecuted as a foreign agent. To top it all, President Obama’s former Russia handquite literally called for war against a nuclear rival to ensure the sovereignty of Ukraine, a proposition unthinkable during Cold War bipartisanship, when the first instinct was to ensure great power equilibrium and avoid mutually assured destruction.
They are not the only ones. A recentNew Yorker profile makes it clearer than any:
Vladimir Putin presents himself to his citizens and to the world as the standard-bearer of a modern counter-enlightenment. He has declared liberal democracy ‘obsolete,’ a political arrangement that has ‘outlived its purpose. One of his historical role models is said to be Alexander III, a reactionary tsar in the Romanov dynasty who instituted draconian restrictions on the press, sought to ‘Russify’ his multi-ethnic empire, and mobilized against internal and external threats. Four years ago, Putin expressed his deep admiration for the tsar while visiting the Crimean Peninsula, a substantial and distinctly unthreatening parcel of Ukraine that Russia invaded in 2014 and has occupied ever since.
A Rabid Response to the New Right’s Power
There is a palpable panic at Carlson arguably driving the GOP towards a more pre-war conservatism. It’s even being hysterically termedPutinism and“Russia First” by some commentators. Michael McFaul, Obama’s Russia ambassador, wasvocal on Twitter arguing that opposing Russia is amoral duty of anyone who opposes “imperialism,” alongside both prominentliberal theorists and second-tierneoconservative internationalist gadflies.
There has also been relentless fearmongering about Carlson, authoritarianism, and nationalism. Some have gone so far as to bizarrely tag Carlson a “comrade,” which is absurd because Putin’s Russia is far more Christian and conservative than the increasingly secular West.
“Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Carlson asked, provoking commentary noting Putin murders dissidents. Yet the world is full of rulers who murderously abuse power—for example, by sending drones that kill non-combatants and children.
It cannot be a matter of American patriotism to send U.S. troops to die for evils in other nations, or United States must attempt to police the entire globe. Experience has shown that is practically impossible and deeply damaging to U.S. national interests.
Thus in recent years, the ascendant New Right has led a bipartisan push for a more restrained foreign policy, one predicated on cutting down on foreign entanglements (termed as foreign policy realism in academic circles) especially from the Middle East, pushing Europe to spend a lot more for its own defense, and focusing more on domestic issues, as well as the rise of China. Carlson is perhaps the most prominent voice of that school in the right and has consistently opposed needless foreign confrontation, especially over Iran and Russia.
Matt Walsh and Sohrab Ahmari recently also opposed further confrontation with Russia over ensuring democracy and rights in Ukraine, as this conflict does not directly threaten the American landmass or way of life. Prominent next-gen Republican lawmakers and foreign policy leaders, such as Adam Laxalt, Bernie Moreno, J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, and Peter Meijer also often voice more realist rhetoric.
Is It America’s Job to Change Other Nations’ Regimes?
This realignment has also included questioning whether the ascending conservative foreign-policy realism in America, based on a narrow definition of national interest, is compatible with progressivism. Progressivism, as John Mearsheimer noted, is by definition universalist, radical, and revolutionary.
Mearsheimer wrote, “because liberalism prizes the concept of inalienable or natural rights, committed liberals are deeply concerned about the rights of virtually every individual on the planet. This universalist logic creates a powerful incentive for liberal states to get involved in the affairs of countries that seriously violate their citizens’ rights. To take this a step further, the best way to ensure that the rights of foreigners are not trampled is for them to live in a liberal democracy. This logic leads straight to an active policy of regime change, where the goal is to topple autocrats and put liberal democracies in their place.”
Consider the relentless number of tweets by a section of the commentariat about Western support for ensuring LGBT-favoring laws in Ukraine, and Mearsheimer sounds prescient. Whatever these people are, their constant revolutionary and internationalist rhetoric would make Leon Trotsky blush.
Our Job Is to Govern Ourselves First
Foreign policy realism, on the other hand, enacts a grand strategy based on amoral narrow national interest, one formulated by early American statesmen from George Washington to James Monroe to John Quincy Adams. If it ever comes back as an administrative principle, then it will become the domain solely of the right.
The aversion against great powers and spheres of influence is anegalitarian instinct claiming all states are equal, regardless of any other variable. This instinct is by definition unnatural and revolutionary. It defies geography, aggregate power, history, and most importantly, narrow nationalism.
Believing that “History” is progressive, and therefore acting on it to liberate everyone everywhere and promote rights and democracy, then becomes part of an inflated American national interest. The side that does not believe in nation-states or nationalism cannot by definition side with a narrow interpretation of national interest.
It’s Natural to Defend Yourself
Carlson is increasingly influential because he sides with something very natural: a human urge to be a nationalist, and therefore opposed to a relentless and crusading global revolution, whether promoting a borderless Marxism or an equally borderless liberalism.
The ascendant New Right believes in peace through strength, and a very narrow Jacksonian definition of nationalism, in which Europeans pay for their own security and Americans only come at the last moment if things go wrong. In this view, China is a far bigger threat to American prosperity and its land-mass than Russia or Iran will ever be, and defending porous American borders matters a lot more to Americans than Ukrainian borders.
The other side, a duopoly of Never Trump neoconservatives and liberal-internationalists, wants to continue to allegedly ensure human rights across the globe while neglecting the way of life at home. It may be a noble goal, but ultimately it’s one that the majority of Americans and an overwhelming number of conservatives are tired of after 30 years, thousands of lost lives, and trillions of dollars in deficits.
The instinct for promoting a global revolution to promote LGBT rights, liberalism, and feminism is as radical an instinct as it can get, and that argument isincreasingly opposed by amajority of Americans who simply don’t care enough to spend blood and treasure in places they cannot spot on a map.
Self-Government Means No Country Is Too Big to Fail
When Rhodes and McFaul yell about defending human rights in Ukraine, and Carlson and others on the right remind everyone of American failures in pursuing such an unlimited global policy, it’s important to rethink the priors and understand the re-alignment in foreign policy is complete. Powerful realist voices on the left such as Matthew Duss, Stephen Wertheim, Tulsi Gabbard, and Rep. Ro Khanna notwithstanding, it is becoming increasingly clear that true restrained foreign policy realism is connected to a very narrow form of nationalism, and that is fundamentally a reactionary and therefore conservative concept.
Second, as I wrote recently, “selling” such foreign policy, even to a very instinctively nationalist electorate like America, means talking in a language that most people will get. Carlson (and Donald Trump, for that matter) connected with the normal crowd, arguing about the futility of sending their sons to die for Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Libya. That has more impact than a bunch of Foreign Affairs Snapshots.
This recent debate on Ukraine, therefore, has brought forth troubling questions for those trying to sell oxymoronic “progressive” foreign policy realism, which took a hell of a beating in the last few weeks.
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.
Just two weeks after a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based spice company held a “Republicans are Racist” sale over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, it is dealing with a massive loss of business and openly begging for new customers.
Penzey’s Spices CEO Bill Penzey, who routinely uses his company’s email list to send anti-Republican screeds, sent a newsletter earlier this month in which he accused GOP voters of fantasizing about killing African Americans.
“Remember how Republicans, going against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, once again lied and said BLM [Black Lives Matter] wasn’t a peaceful movement but instead terrorists inciting violence throughout the country and then raced out to buy a crapload of guns because maybe they were finally going to get their chance to shoot a Black person?” he wrote. “What a bunch of racists.”
In a follow-up email Friday, Penzey acknowledged this allegation had cost his business a substantial number of newsletter subscribers.
“After starting the year with All Republicans are Republicans and following up with Republicans are Racists we’ve set a nice little Boycott Penzeys! surge in motion,” he admitted. “It certainly wasn’t unexpected, but if it’s within your means, you picking up a small stack of Gift Cards would help.”
Penzey informed supporters that his “Republicans are Racists” email cost his newsletter 40,005 subscribers—approximately 3 percent of its total. While this was offset by 30,000 new fans, he explained, he still needs to make up for the lost business and is offering a deal on Penzey’s Spices gift cards to lure them in “with the hope this might make it a bit easier for you to share some and possibly get a few good new customers to replace the ones we’ve lost.”
His note then took on a more desperate tone, imploring fellow leftists to support his business by appealing to their base political biases.
“If you can’t even begin to fathom how to ‘compromise’ with January 6th, or the Republican vaccine lies needlessly killing 10,000 Americans every week, if you have no desire to become half-way racist, and if their intent to destroy our climate for one thousand years to come doesn’t have you asking: ‘What if we just destroyed it for five-hundred years instead?’ we would be better off with you on this Voice Of Cooking email list,” he wrote.
Penzey has long used “A Note from Bill” emails to customers to launch attacks on Republicans, and in 2019 he spent $700,000 on Facebook ads targeting then-President Donald Trump. But his “Republicans are Racists” stunt brought him international attention and prompted tens of thousands of customers to shun his business.
Still, he told The Daily Mail that he was not worried about backlash.
“From what we’ve heard in the way of feedback a lot of our Republican customers wish we would stay out of politics but they are pretty honest about the problems with open racism in their party since President Trump took control,” he said. “So, on one hand they wish we would tone down the racism thing but on the other hand we have really good spices and they are not going to sacrifice those.”
Unfortunately for Penzey, it turns out they did.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
On Friday, a Pennsylvania court declared the state’s statute authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting was unconstitutional. Within hours, Pennsylvania officials filed a notice of appeal with the state Supreme Court, putting on hold the lower court decision and thereby leaving in place the vote-by-mail option until the state’s high court rules.
With Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices elected on a partisan ticket and Democrats currently holding a 5-2 majority on the state’s high court, Democrats are predicting the no-excuse mail-in voting law will be upheld. That forecast seems accurate given the hyper-partisan approach to legal analysis seen since the 2020 election. It’s unfortunate because yesterday’s opinion in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania reached the proper conclusion as a matter of constitutional analysis and controlling precedent.
The McLinko case consisted of two lawsuits consolidated by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. Both cases challenged the constitutionality of no-excuse mail-in voting. Doug McLinko, a member of the Bradford County Board of Elections, was the plaintiff in one case, and Timothy Bonner and 13 additional members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives were the plaintiffs in the second case.
At issue in the consolidated case was Act 77, which, as the court explained in Friday’s opinion, “created the opportunity for all Pennsylvania electors to vote by mail without having to demonstrate a valid reason for absence from their polling place on Election Day.” The plaintiffs argued that provision violates Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution provides (emphasis added):
Every citizen 21 years of age, possessing the following qualifications, shall be entitled to vote at all elections subject, however, to such laws requiring and regulating the registration of electors as the General Assembly may enact.
1. He or she shall have been a citizen of the United States at least one month.
2. He or she shall have resided in the State 90 days immediately preceding the election.
3. He or she shall have resided in the election district where he or she shall offer to vote at least 60 days immediately preceding the election, 10 except that if qualified to vote in an election district prior to removal of residence, he or she may, if a resident of Pennsylvania, vote in the election district from which he or she removed his or her residence within 60 days preceding the election.
The key language in Section 1, the plaintiffs argued, and the court held, was “shall offer to vote,” which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously interpreted in Chase v. Miller, a case from 1862. At issue in Chase was whether 420 votes received from Pennsylvania soldiers fighting in the Civil War, who had cast their ballots by mail, were valid. While Pennsylvania’s legislature had authorized absentee ballots for military members, the state Supreme Court held the Military Absentee Act of 1839 violated the state’s constitution because “offer his vote” required in-person voting, explaining:
To ‘offer to vote’ by ballot, is to present oneself, with proper qualifications, at the time and place appointed, and to make manual delivery of the ballot to the officers appointed by law to receive it. The ballot cannot be sent by mail or express, nor can it be cast outside of all Pennsylvania election districts and certified into the county where the voter has his domicile.
We cannot be persuaded that the constitution ever contemplated any such mode of voting, and we have abundant reason for thinking that to permit it would break down all the safeguards of honest suffrage. The constitution meant, rather, that the voter, in propria persona, should offer his vote in an appropriate election district, in order that his neighbours might be at hand to establish his right to vote if it were challenged, or to challenge if it were doubtful.
In other words, “to offer his vote,” required a qualified elector to “present oneself. . . at the time and place appointed” and to make “manual delivery of the ballot.” The fuller discussion in Chase, however, provides a helpful reminder of the long-understood danger of absentee voting: “a break down” of “the safeguards of honest suffrage.”
Pennsylvania’s constitution was later amended to permit electors in military service to vote by absentee ballot. Then in 1923, the state legislature again attempted to expand absentee voting to allow non-military citizens, “who by reason of his duties, business, or occupation [are] unavoidably absent from his lawfully designated election district, and outside of the county of which he is an elector,” to cast an absentee ballot in the presence of an election official.
Another election dispute, however, resulted in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1924 In re Contested Election of Fifth Ward of Lancaster City, declaring the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional. The Lancaster decision again concluded that the “offer to vote” language of the Pennsylvania state constitution requires in-person voting. Because at that time the constitution only authorized absentee voting for individuals absent by reason of active military service, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional.
“However laudable the purpose of the [1923 Absentee Voting Act], it cannot be sustained,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explained, adding: “If it is deemed necessary that such legislation be placed upon our statute books, then an amendment to the Constitution must be adopted permitting this to be done.”
In Friday’s decision in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the three-judge majority opinion found Chase and Lancaster City controlling and struck down Act 77’s authorization of no-cause mail-in voting. In holding Act 77 unconstitutional, the McLinko court rejected the acting secretary of state’s argument that Article VII, Section 4 of the Pennsylvania Constitution granted the state legislature authority to allow mail-in voting for any reason. That constitutional provision provides: “All elections by the citizens shall be by ballot or by such other method as may be prescribed by law: Provided, That secrecy in voting be preserved.”
The court rejected Pennsylvania’s argument, noting that when Lancaster City was decided, the Pennsylvania high court had quoted the entire text of Article VII, Section 4, and yet held that the “offer to vote” language required in-person voting unless the constitution expressly authorized absentee voting. Friday’s decision explained that Section 4 merely authorized the state to allow mechanical voting, as opposed to voting by ballot. (Two judges dissented from the McLinko decision, reasoning that mail-in voting is not a subset of absentee voting but a new method of voting the legislature may be approved under Section 4.)
Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state’s argument that Section 4 of the state constitution authorizes the legislature to permit no-fault mail-in voting defies logic. As the McLinko court explained, if Section 4 gave the legislature that power, then there was no need for the state’s constitution to be amended in 1997, to add as a permissible basis for absentee voting, “observance of a religious holiday or Election Day duties.”
While concluding it was bound by Chase and Lancaster City, the majority in Friday’s decision in McLinko added that “no-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient” and that, “if presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted.” “But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law,” the court in McLinko concluded, “before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.’”
The majority’s detailed analysis in McLinko was correct, both as a matter of constitutional interpretation and precedent. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, will not be bound by its decisions in Chase and Lancaster City, even though the principal of stare decisis should caution the justices against overturning that precedent.
That prudential principle is especially relevant here, where the “offer to vote” language “has been part of the Pennsylvania Constitution since 1838 and has been consistently understood, since at least 1862, to require the elector to appear in person, at a ‘proper polling place’ and on Election Day to cast his vote.”
A decision by the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court abiding by that precedent and reminding its citizens that the constitution controls notwithstanding the passions of the day would also go a long way toward healing a divided populace.
Further, striking Act 77 now, when no votes have been cast and no citizens would be disenfranchised, would do no harm to Pennsylvanians. That was the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s justification in Kelly v. Commonwealth, for refusing to consider the constitutionality of Act 77 as part of a challenge to the results of the November of 2020 based on the equitable doctrine of “laches.”
“At the time this action was filed on November 21, 2020, millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020 Primary Election and the November 2020 General Election,” the state Supreme Court explained in Kelly v. Commonwealth and striking the state statute at that point, “would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voter.”
There is no such danger, now, however. So, will the constitution control or will the partisan interests of the Democratic-majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court supplant the rule of law? Sadly, that latter danger is everpresent.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A Texas man stepped into a terrifying domestic situation unfolding outside a Waco gas station and quickly incapacitated a suspect who was allegedly repeatedly stabbing a woman. The unidentified Texan pulled out his personal handgun when he saw a suspect stabbing a woman outside a QuikTrip gas station on Friday, KWTX-TV reported. The incident took place around 7:40 p.m. local time, the station reported, noting, “Initial reports indicated that a male was actively stabbing a female and was chasing her into the gas station.”
The Good Samaritan said that he witnessed the suspect attacking the injured woman and didn’t think twice about firing on the suspect.
Authorities quickly arrived on the scene and transported the male and female to a local hospital for treatment.
Police investigating after third party steps in, shoots man who stabbed woman at Waco gas stationwww.youtube.com
The male suspect, who remains unnamed at the time of this reporting, is in custody. Police say that he will remain in custody of the Waco Police Department as he continues to receive medical care for the injuries he sustained as a result of the attack.
The Good Samaritan remained at the scene, the outlet reported, and cooperated with investigators. He is not facing any charges at this time, Waco police said.
“The third-party that was involved that did discharge a weapon, he is with us, he is being very cooperative,” a spokesperson for the Waco Police Department said. “He does have people here that are supporting him as well, and so we’ll continue to work with him throughout this investigation.”
A spokesperson for QuikTrip said that the company is grateful for law enforcement and places employee and customer safety at its highest priority.
“The safety of our employees and customers are at the peak of what we do,” QuikTrip corporate communication manager Aisha Jefferson-Smith told Newsweek. “Our stores are monitored 24-hours a day at a central location where we can see and hear what’s going on. We are working around the clock to help law enforcement resolve the case.”
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.
A bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed Friday morning hours before President Joe Biden is set to visit the city to give remarks about infrastructure. Pittsburgh Public Safety confirmed the bridge collapse, tweeting a photo of the snow-covered structure and warning residents of “a strong smell of natural gas in the area.”
The president heads to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Friday to visit Carnegie Mellon University’s Mill 19, a research and development hub incorporated into the bipartisan infrastructure plan passed in 2021.
Biden will then give remarks “on strengthening the nation’s supply chains, revitalizing American manufacturing, creating good-paying, union jobs, and building a better America, including through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” at Mill 19, according to the White House schedule.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted that Biden was made aware of the bridge collapse. “Our team is in touch with state and local officials on the ground as they continue to gather information about the cause of the collapse,” she said.
“@Potus is grateful to the first responders who rushed to assist the drivers who were on the bridge at the time. The President will proceed with trip planned for today and will stay in touch with officials on the ground about additional assistance we can provide,” Psaki added.
Pennsylvania has 3,353 bridges in poor condition, the second-highest in the country, according to ABC News. Pittsburgh Public Safety added in a tweet that there will be a news conference about the bridge’s collapse.
Desi Cuellar, a Republican running to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, says that as a member of Congress he would put forward legislation to require capital punishment for those who kill police officers.
Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez currently represents the Empire State’s 14th Congressional District.
“So-called progressives like @AOC have created a culture where it’s okay for criminals to run the streets and even kill cops. When I’m elected to Congress, I will introduce a bill to federally mandate the death penalty for cop killers,” Cuellar tweeted.
The tweet is accompanied by a video in which Cuellar declares that “Crime is rampant in this country because our spineless politicians don’t have the guts to stand up to the criminal underworld.”
So-called progressives like @AOC have created a culture where it’s okay for criminals to run the streets and even kill cops.
When I’m elected to Congress, I will introduce a bill to federally mandate the death penalty for cop killers.
Two NYPD police officers who were fired upon last Friday have died — one of the officers was killed on Friday and the other officer passed away days later.
“Nobody in politics on the left cares about holding back the criminals, all they care about is holding back the police,” Cuellar said, according to Fox News.
“The problem we face today is that the mindset of the modern criminal is one that understands that they will not face severe consequences for their violent actions,” he said, according to the outlet “And honestly, it feels like we are getting a lack of action on this crisis from both sides of the aisle. Everyone needs to wake up.”
Goldie Hawn warned that the national trauma inflicted on children by the COVID-19 pandemic is approaching and “could very well surpass” the dread brought on by the 9/11 terror attacks and the Cold War. In an op-ed for USA Today, Hawn described how she saw her “entire world get ripped apart” by the threat of all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1956 when she was in the fifth grade. After being shown a graphic and grim educational film about the dangers of nuclear war, the then-11-year-old Goldie Hawn ran home during lunch to call her mother at work and told her, “Mommy, come home quick! We’re all going to die!” Hawn said the threat of nuclear holocaust inflicted trauma on her for years.
“Even in high school, I’d hear a siren in the morning and be too terrified to go to school that day,” Hawn wrote. “This was a specific trauma that affected me, but it was a collective trauma, too – an entire generation of American children was, in some form or another, taught to think of nuclear holocaust as a real threat.”
Hawn compared the collective trauma endured by her generation to the upheaval other generations experienced – such as children who watched the Challenger space shuttle disaster happen live on Jan. 28, 1986, the kids who witnessed the Twin Towers collapse from the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the youngsters who have had their lives turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We all know how magical a child’s imagination can be – the wonderful worlds they create in their minds. But there’s a flip side to the joyful creativity that can turn a big cardboard box into a spaceship,” the “Overboard” actress articulated. “A child’s mind exposed to real-world fear, without the ability to properly process it, can go down dark passages leading to nothing less than existential dread.”
Hawn explained that the COVID-19 pandemic has robbed adults and children of critical “support structures that all humans depend on for perspective, encouragement, and love.”
“The COVID era has changed our children’s lives in far more real, tangible ways — social distancing, school closures, daily mask use,” she added. “Kids are afraid of people, spaces, even the air around them – a level of constant fear not seen in decades.”
Hawn cited a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by adolescent girls spiked nearly 51% in 2021 and almost 4% for boys. The movie star noted that U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cautioned in December that the COVID-19 pandemic has had “unprecedented impacts on the mental health of America’s youth and families.” She also linked to a declaration of national emergency in child and adolescent mental health by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association.
“As health professionals dedicated to the care of children and adolescents, we have witnessed soaring rates of mental health challenges among children, adolescents, and their families over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating the situation that existed prior to the pandemic,” the declaration stated in October. “Children and families across our country have experienced enormous adversity and disruption.”
Hawn commented on the alarming concerns about the mental health of America’s youth, “This tells us that as a nation, we have failed our children.””We are not properly funding preventive care and early interventions that normalize the mental struggles every individual has at some level,” the Academy Award-winning actress wrote. “There are everyday tools for mental fitness, just as there are for exercise and healthy eating; we just don’t teach them in any systematic way to our nation’s children.”
Hawn called for “helping children understand the chemical reactions that occur in their mind” when they hear the “latest horrifying statistic or headline on the evening news.” She said that understanding how the brain works will provide children with “the patience and confidence to put things in perspective, rather than fall victim to the emotions of the moment and end up in a helplessness that leads to depression and sometimes self-harm, the kind we are seeing in record numbers among children.”
She warned that the answer is not to allow kids to “be over-diagnosed or shuffled through a system that screens and treats extreme cases after they are too late.”
“We will survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we can survive an entire generation whose collective trauma sends them hobbling into adulthood. We need more research, more preventative care and more early intervention. And there’s still time,” Hawn concluded. “If we get it right, today’s kids could emerge as the strongest generation America has ever produced.”
Hawn also made headlines this week when she appeared on “The Megyn Kelly Show” and proclaimed that Hollywood celebrities need to entertain the public no matter what political affiliations they have. “I stay in my lane,” Hawn declared when it comes to spouting political opinions.
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.
“Marxism, Anarchism, and the Black Radical Tradition,” “Witchcraft and the Cultural Imagination,” “Trans-bodies in Horror Cinema,” “The Problem of Whiteness,” and “Transnational Queer Politics and Practices” are not course titles invented by “The Babylon Bee” to mock the state of America’s universities. Rather, they are real classes I came across this year while scrolling through the course listings for the University of Chicago’s winter quarter.
As a senior, I had flexibility in my schedule to take a class simply for the joy of learning, irrespective of whether it fulfilled a graduation requirement. This should have been an enjoyable experience. Instead, the process left me fearful of the close-minded young people being inculcated by my school and so many other academic institutions.
As a politically conservative student, I am accustomed to being in the classroom minority. To be clear, I was not looking for a course that would reinforce my conservative beliefs (even if I was, “conservative” classes simply do not exist). All I wanted was to take a class that was not explicitly partisan by its very title or course description. I desired to be in a class where I would actually learn,with the help of a fair and open-minded professor who is intellectually confident enough to include multiple perspectives in his assigned readings. Unfortunately, it was incredibly easy to find swaths of leftist courses but quite difficult to come across classes aimed at genuine intellectual exploration.
There is a reason explicitly leftist courses like “The Problem of Whiteness” are prevalent, but it is impossible to take “conservative” classes and hard to even find open-minded ones. In recent years, conservative or middle-of-the-road professors have been weeded out or forced into self-censorship by a rigid, punitive academic culture. If a professor does not agree with the majority of his colleagues or dares to depart from left-wing orthodoxy, he is threatened and punished by fellow educators and students (even in the STEM fields).
While it is demoralizing for conservative students to never have our views and ideas discussed, much less validated, we at least have the advantage of constantly being intellectually challenged. Sadly, I cannot say the same for my leftist peers, who can fill their entire course schedule with classes that reaffirm their preconceived worldviews.
Graduating after being virtually unchallenged for four years is not only a disservice to students; it’s dangerous for our country. A 2017 study by P. J. Henry and Jaime Napier showed that “education is related to greater ideological prejudice,” finding that the higher one’s education level, the stronger his political intolerance. This is the obvious byproduct of leftist thought saturating the academy—more time spent there necessarily fosters a one-sided sense of intellectual superiority. A more recent 2021 study done by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found that 66 percent of students said they supported shouting down speakers. Shockingly, 23 percent of student respondents support using violence to stop a speaker. Both numbers have spiked since 2020.
By indoctrinating and coddling young people, American universities are breeding intolerance. We are already seeing the effects of this indoctrination. Young leftists have disavowed our founding documents and fathers, and they censor, fire, harass, and publicly slander anyone who dares think differently from them.
Consider that our federal bureaucracies, the chambers of Congress, and the boardrooms of America’s most powerful corporations have only received the first wave of woke young people. Subsequent waves will be even more intolerant. Thanks to their immersion in the left-wing academic monoculture, the next generation will undoubtedly cement the downfall of the American mind and limit frighteningly more liberty in their wake.
Evita Duffy is a senior contributor to The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evitapduffy@uchicago.eduEVITA DUFFYVISIT ON TWITTER@EVITADUFFY_1MORE ARTICLES
Amid ongoing supervision from parents across America, the Episcopal School of Dallas has sought to reassure parents it is not teaching critical race theory or targeting students on the basis of their race. Despite this attempt, documents obtained by The Federalist prove that the institution is teaching critical race theory while telling parents it’s not.
The elite private school, which bears a whopping tuition price of $26,945 for kindergarteners and $34,075 for high school seniors, sought to insulate itself from backlash on its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page, which preemptively responds to common critiques. The page warns against “misinformation” before assuring parents the school is “not teaching critical race theory,” nor is it teaching “that being part of an ethnic or racial group makes a person responsible for systemic problems, or to cast blame on or shame any member of the community for actions that took place in history.” According to other school documents, however, these claims are false.
Student assignments show the school is teaching the left-wing extremism that targets children in so many government-run K-12 schools.
CRT In The Classroom
One Episcopal School of Dallas reading assignment for a middle school history class titled “This Thing Called White” exhibited the defining characteristics of CRT. The assignment claimed that “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.” It goes on to contend that race was created “with the purpose of giving power to white people.”
In an 8th grade history class taught by Ron Frankland, students were required to listen to a podcast from the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Frankland also signaled his support for CRT while bemoaning the wave of pushback from parents who’ve voiced their opposition to the ideology.
Nevertheless, attempts to turn students into leftwing activists through indoctrination appear to be working. An open letter titled “Our Turn To Rise Up,” penned by students as part of a history assignment at the school, condemned America as “diseased” and endeavored to “spark a fire of revolution.”
Faculty Members Endorse CRT
Furthermore, several faculty members, including many who are in key positions, have demonstrated an allegiance to the doctrines of CRT, as well as expressed their intent to incorporate the divisive theory in the classroom.
Jennifer Jarnagin is the chair of the school’s Classical and Modern Languages Department, as well as a sponsor of the Middle School Diversity Club and a middle and upper school Latin teacher. Several of Jarnagin’s tweets display an anti-cop and anti-white bias informed by the teachings of critical race theory. During the height of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, Jarnagin implied all police officers were violent.
She also stated that she was happy to “disrupt white nonsense,” and that she dreams of “throwing 90% of straight white men into the ocean.”
In Jarnagin’s Twitter bio, she states that she’s “dismantling white supremacy, misogyny and heteronormativity” and that she’s a “Latin teacher interested in proficiency, inclusion, and empathy.”
Tolly Salz, an English teacher and the chair of the English Department, has also signaled her support for ideas endemic to CRT. On Twitter, Salz promoted an article titled “White People’s Fear of Critical Race Theory is Based in Ignorance,” as well as one from Learning for Justice, a project of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, titled “Confronting the Weaponization of Whiteness in Our Classrooms,” which claims that white supremacy is “baked into America’s foundation.”
The article also condemned white womens’ emotions as instruments of oppression, making the claim that “Men going to war with armor is the same as white women waging war through tears.”
Salz also promoted a guide labeled “Teaching with the New York Time’s 1619 Project.”
Critical race theory also appears to have affected the Christian school’s religious leadership.
Antoni Luc-Tayengo, who recently became a chaplain at ESD, has publicly advocated for CRT. In an article titled “Predominantly White Churches & Racial Justice: Discern The Next Right Thing,” the female chaplain argues people should “look for color” and frames involvement in the openly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement as a moral imperative for Christians.
Her article also links to a “well-cultivated list of resources for anti-racism education of all ages.” The page includes the 1619 Project and work from critical race theorists Robin DiAngelo and Kimberle Crenshaw, among various others.
Rev. Nate Bostian is a senior chaplain at ESD. While his public remarks have not carried the same vitriolic tone of many others at the school, from his public remarks it’s clear that leftwing ideology influences his religious understanding. In this prayer he gave for LGBT pride month, Bostian begins by referring to God as the “God/god of Diversity and Inclusion.”
In another post, he cites infamous critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi before going on to provide a theological argument for diversity, inclusion, and equity.
ESD’s Institutional Ties To CRT
None of these examples are isolated incidents. Despite telling parents that they do not teach CRT or engage in shaming tactics against children on account of their race, ESD, as an institution, has done both. ESD sent parents a list of CRT information compiled by Elizabeth Goatley, the school’s director of diversity and inclusion. Parents were directed to a page called “Anti-Racism 102: Why Not All Discrimination Is ‘Racism.” Intended for children in grades K-4 and adorned with colorful cartoons, the page erroneously claims that white people cannot be the victims of racism, saying “reverse racism isn’t a thing. Stop trying to make reverse racism a thing.” It also claims everyone is complicit in systemic white supremacy and that “whiteness” must be “de-centered.”
The recommended reading list included Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” material from critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, Kendi’s “How To Be An Anti-Racist,” the 1619 Project, “Anti-racism for Kids 101,” and Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” among others. The list also linked to a “K-8 Racial Literacy” curriculum from an organization called Pollyanna. Pollyanna’s Conferences for School page sheds light on the type of material the organization presents to children.
Topics include “Race, Privilege, and Community Building,” “Shaping & Sustaining Safe Schools for LGBTQ+ Community,” “Intersectionality,” “Cultivating Racial Awareness and White Engagement,” and “Implicit Bias.” The organization also claims systemic racism “permeates every aspect of our society and transcends person-to person interactions,” a core belief of CRT.
The school’s DEI page explains that both staff and students frequently attend several conferences, including the People of Color Conference hosted by the leftwing National Association of Independent Schools. The POCC overtly teaches CRT. One presentation from the conference describes kindergarteners as “natural social justice warriors,” while others explicitly outline how to create a curriculum based on CRT.
Another presentation condemns the American system, telling the audience to “burn sh-t down.” It also discusses the “White People Way,” with the presenter condemning “perfectionism” and “power hoarding” as defining characteristics of white people.
The Federalist reached out to multiple school staff for comment, inquiring about the 1619 Project, racially charged statements made by a faculty member, and CRT in the classroom. The Federalist also asked why the school was present at the POCC event, where teachers were taught how to develop a curriculum grounded in CRT, if there was no intention of teaching the racially charged ideology.
In response, ESD’s Director of Communications Julie Clardy provided the following statement: “We present challenging material that asks students to consider multiple points of view. For instance, we present the 1619 and 1776 projects together and ask students to analyze and argue their merits. Students are edified, not damaged, when they are asked to examine ideas they may disagree with.”
ESD Is Not The Only School Deceiving Parents
The Episcopal School of Dallas is by no means the first academic institution to lie to parents about teaching critical race theory. Over the summer, President of the American Federation of Teachers union Randi Weingarten falsely claimed CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools despite her organization previously bragging on national television about teaching the ideology.
The Federalist reporting has revealed that officials at both Riverside School District and Los Angeles Unified School District lied to their school communities, falsely claiming they did not teach CRT. Despite the obvious parallels with previous instances, the state of the Episcopal School of Dallas demonstrates that elite private schools are not immune from the left’s push for CRT in America’s K-12 institutions.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
Democrats are quick to smear election integrity legislation as racist, but a recent discovery proves just how easy it is for people to commit fraud.
Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized 1,200 counterfeit driver’s licenses from more than 20 states, according to the agency’s website. The fake IDs were part of three shipments from Hong Kong declared as $20 worth of “Game Card,” with one labeled for a Chicago destination and the other two headed for New York.
Many of the identification cards reused photos with different names and had dates of birth consistent with people of college age. They were knock-offs of licenses from states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois and Ohio.
“Counterfeit driver’s licenses have historically been used by those under 21 years of age for the illegal consumption of alcohol, but fake IDs ……
On MSNBC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) claimed that the January 6 committee is going to “blow the roof off the house” with its findings. He even managed to get every Marxist talking point into one outrageous sentence: “We`re looking at that mob riot which surrounded a violent insurrection of domestic violent extremist, white nationalist groups surrounding a presidential coup against the vice president and against the Congress.” It’s time to push back on their Marxist narrative with the truth, and BlazeTV’s Mark Levin is ready to take them on.
On a recent episode of “LevinTV,” Mark played a video clip in which Raskin told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan that, unlike the Senate impeachment trial that was “about one guy, Donald Trump, and one crime, incitement to violent insurrection,” the mandate of the “select committee” is “much more sweeping.”
“We`re looking at all of the events of the day, all of the causes, and what needs to be done to fortify democratic institutions in the future,” Raskin said. “So, we’re looking at that mob riot which surrounded a violent insurrection of domestic violent extremist, white nationalist groups surrounding a presidential coup against the vice president and against the Congress. And we`re going to tell the story of each dimension of this attack on American democracy.”
“[Democrats] are going to destroy these people, Trump, his followers, the Republican Party, and they’re spending American tax dollars on this,” Mark exclaimed. “These guys are going out publicly saying what they’re going to do: ‘We want to get Trump indicted. We want to prevent him from being president of the United States’ … and this guy’s out there saying, ‘Yes, this is going to be a spectacular public hearing!’ Look at the smirks on their already smirk-like faces. It’s unbelievable. “
“God help us. I just hope this isn’t the narrative for the next 50 to 100 years in this country, because the Democrats are working very, very hard to make it the narrative,” he added.
Levin went on to unpack Raskin’s claims one by one, exposing the fallacies, hyperbole, and flat-out lies, before concluding, “[Democrats] can go after everybody and anybody for anything … and seek an indictment against them from our always objective and independent attorney general. The Department of Justice will go after them if they don’t submit. I am telling you, this is precisely what the framers of the Constitution rejected. This is a disgrace.”
Watch the video clip below or find more “LevinTV” here:
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Source: AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack
Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing a bill through the Florida legislature to put a stop to the modern pedagogy of making little girls cry because they’re white. The bill, called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (WOKE),” prohibits classroom instruction that contradicts these concepts:
“No race is inherently superior to another race”;
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”;
“An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”
The left has been having a sneer-fest over the proposed law, howling that it protects “white people” from feeling “uncomfortable.” SNOWFLAKES!
E.g.:
“A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel ‘discomfort’ when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past …” — The Associated Press (emphasis added)
“The right likes to talk so much about, you know, snowflakes. It seems like they may be raising snowflakes because if they think people are going to be uncomfortable by the actual facts — facts are uncomfortable.” — CNN’s Don Lemon
“Ron DeSantis and his GOP allies are pushing a bill … that would prohibit public schools [from making] white people squirm. Those poor, wittle babies.
“Their feelings are hurting. Some poor, wittle white people are uncomfortable about the hundreds of years of racism and hate that built this nation.” — Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times
(Saving the best for last …)
“[H]e’s trying to make it illegal, Governor Ron DeSantis, to teach history that would make white people uncomfortable. Does that law include saying you can’t make black people feel uncomfortable or indigenous people? The history of indigenous and African Americans could make one uncomfortable? Is that illegal too, or is it just white people?” — MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid
To know the answer to Joy Ann’s question, you’d have to actually read the bill. Or an article about the bill. Or commentary on an article about the bill. Joy Ann Reid: highly literate and well-informed Harvard graduate. But, duh: A bill prohibiting the teaching of race hatred will primarily prevent the teaching of white hatred for the simple reason that it’s the only race we’re allowed to hate. Not merely allowed to hate, but taught to hate, encouraged to hate, paid to hate.
We’re now entering the sixth decade of open, widespread, official discrimination against white people on the basis of their race. Even the Asians suing Harvard dare not stress the humungous advantage given to blacks and Hispanics. No, their beef is about white applicants getting preferential treatment over Asians.
This is odd, to say the least. According to the plaintiffs’ own expert witness, an Asian with a 25% chance of admission to Harvard would increase his chances to 36% if he were white — but to 77% if Hispanic, and to 95% if black. Asians sure have assimilated to our culture!
Everybody’s copacetic with the idea that universities discriminate against white people — in abject defiance of the clear language of our civil rights laws. They have done so, loud and proud, at least since 1973, when Allan Bakke was rejected from the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, because he was white. In fact, no one under the age of 50 has ever lived in an America where universities and other elite institutions have not discriminated against whites. Three generations of hating whites are enough.
School districts around the country teach white children that they were born racist and assign books like, “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” that portrays “whiteness” as a contract with Satan.
So yes, a race-neutral law that prohibits teaching race hatred will, in practice, prohibit teaching hatred of whites because that’s the only race-hate that’s taught.
Liberals jeer at whites who object to this constant disparagement, calling them “poor, wittle babies.” Does the left have any self-awareness at all?
A 6-year-old girl is a total pussy if she can’t take a little abuse for being white — at a school her parents are paying for. But our entire country has been turned upside down for the past half-century to prevent any other race from experiencing a fleeting moment of discomfort.
Historic Confederate statues are torn down and melted; newspapers refuse to identify the race of criminals — or even show photos of the arrestees; the Oscars will not consider a movie for Best Picture that does not have 30% non-whites. Otherwise, black people might feel uncomfortable.
Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School is routinely threatened with suspension or firing from her tenured position for stating facts about black students’ performance. Her remarks make black people feel uncomfortable.
Hey, where’s the rush to review Charles Murray’s recent book “Facing Reality” about black crime and I.Q.? Nope, might make black people uncomfortable.
A few years ago, Kansas City officials were advised not to impose a curfew in response to the violent mobs of black teenagers descending on a shopping plaza because, as the black mayor said, it would “make a lot of black kids angry.” His remark inspired the title of Colin Flaherty’s book about black crime, “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry” — a book that is currently banned from Amazon. It might make black people uncomfortable.
Anti-whiteness books are flooding the grade schools, but you aren’t allowed to spend your own money to purchase books on Amazon that make some people “uncomfortable.” Not only Flaherty’s book, but:
— Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” — might make transgenders uncomfortable.
— The Kindle edition of the widely praised 1973 dystopian novel by French author Jean Raspail, “Camp of the Saints” — might make third worlders uncomfortable.
The FBI allowed the 9/11 attack to happen by blowing off an Arizona agent’s warning that a lot of Arabs were enrolled in flight school. Three thousand Americans had to die because noticing Arabs in flight school might make some people uncomfortable.
Last week, a Muslim terrorist, Malik Faisal Akram, seized a Texas synagogue and held four hostages for 10 hours. The media universally identified Akram as: “British man.” He didn’t even call himself “British”! A week later, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt went on MSNBC and tried to suggest “Republicans” were responsible for the attack. The truth might make Muslims uncomfortable.
Before we go, here’s another “actual fact,” as Don Lemon put it, and “facts are uncomfortable” (especially for the black Harvard grad on MSNBC who can’t read a bill): By Harvard’s own admission, nearly 60% of the black students it admits are there only because they are black.
It’s so great that liberals have finally turned against snowflakes so we can discuss “actual facts” again!
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.
Wisconsin became the latest state to pass a resolution calling for an Article V convention of states on Tuesday, with the goal of proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution that would limit the power of the federal government. Passed by the Wisconsin Assembly last year, the resolution was approved by the Senate in a 17-16 vote, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition. According to the measure, Wisconsin’s legislature seeks to call a convention of states “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”
As written in Article V of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures are provided the power to call a convention to propose amendments to the nation’s founding document without the approval of Congress. Under the current process, two-thirds of states are required for a convention to be called, with three-fourths of states necessary for any amendment proposed to be ratified.
“Times like these are precisely why the Founders created the mechanisms in Article V,”said state Rep. Dan Knodl. “Federal overreach has thrown our country into chaos, and it’s time for the states to exercise their authority as granted to them in the constitution to restore order, states’ rights, and limited, constitutional government. I’m incredibly proud that our state has officially thrown its support behind this movement.”
State Sen. Kathy Bernier also expressed her excitement at the resolution’s passage, noting how thankful she is that the Constitution provides “the states and the people a framework to step in and save the Republic when Congress will not.”
“Today we sent a message that Wisconsin stands ready to rein in federal overreach,” she said.
In addition to Wisconsin, 15 other states have also passed similar resolutions calling for a convention to address federal term limits, spending, and governmental overreach.
Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Mary Washington, where he plans to major in Political Science and minor in Journalism. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A left-leaning nonprofit instructed public officials how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) guided officials to sway public opinion in favor of mail-in voting with their “2020 Election Official Communications Toolkit.” The group shared this document with public officials in Wisconsin while working with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to influence the 2020 election.
CTCL used nearly half a billion dollars from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to fund private action within government election offices. They spent most of the money in Democrat-saturated districts, which boosted Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in 2020. As a partner for the “Zuckbucks” recipient, NVAHI gave public officials advice on how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots.
“Do not repeat myths as a way to refute them,” the document says. “Instead, control the narrative by presenting information that affirms the safety, security, and reliability of mail balloting.”
Mail-in voting is not only proven to be more susceptible to voter fraud and errors than in-person voting, it is well known to favor Democrats over Republicans. It essentially functions as a get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Democrats, whose voters are less motivated to show up at the polls on election day. Republican voters far prefer to vote in person, accurately believing it is more secure.
The group also told election officials to push mail-in voting by placing articles in media outlets: “Reporters will likely already be writing up voter information guides as well as shaping their articles around how well or poorly the election is running. A proactive op-ed strategy is helpful here,” the document says.
NVAHI explained that officials should target free, popular local news publications: “For all these types of outlets, approach them about whether they would run an article on your behalf about the upcoming election,” the document says.
The organization recommended officials use public information strategies such as “playing up the security” of mail-in voting. NVAHI told election officials to dissuade concerns about mail-in ballots by claiming that they contain “over a dozen security features.”
“Voters may be reluctant to fill out a mail ballot because of concerns they’ve heard about stolen or lost ballots. Assuage those concerns without leaning into them,” the document says.
The guide also tells public officials to “instill a sense of urgency” about mail-in voting, recommending an appeal to popularity: “Voters may be unsure whether voting by mail is right for them. Social proof (showing how many people are taking up a behavior) is a powerful way of making mail-in ballots a compelling option.”
The document also recommended that government election offices use particular slogans for public information campaigns, such as “Voting by mail is easy and secure,” and “Let’s all vote safely. Choose to vote by mail.”
NVAHI partnered with the organization Ideas42 to create this toolkit. According to its website, the group is “a non-profit that uses insights from behavioral science to improve lives, build better systems and policies, and drive social change.” Ideas42 works with CTCL partner Center for Civic Design, along with several offices of government secretaries of state.
After CTCL gave a grant of $1.6 million to the Wisconsin city of Green Bay in 2020, NVAHI gained access to absentee ballots and influence over election preparations in the area. NVAHI Wisconsin State Lead Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed the elections guide to former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske in August 2020.
When reaching out to Teske, Spitzer-Rubenstein described the toolkit as “a groundbreaking resource that uses behavioral science insights from our partners at Ideas42 to help you connect with communities and get voters the information they need.”
Spitzer-Rubenstein, who worked for Democrat political campaigns in the past, emailed Teske to ask if his group could “cure” absentee ballots. This means altering absentee ballots after they are filed to allegedly fix errors, rather than counting improperly marked ballots as invalid. When Teske turned down the offer, Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed former Green Bay Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff Celestine Jeffreys, who ordered Teske to open the city elections’ ballot-curing process to NVAHI, a private special interest group.
A 2021 audit of Wisconsin elections found the state had counted enough illegal ballots in 2020 to potentially switch its Electoral College votes from Biden to Donald Trump. Vote curing in the election could have contributed to the state counting illegal votes, the audit found.
Also in 2021, a judge ruled that the state’s 2020 use of ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting, both of which are only possible with mail-in ballots, was illegal. The majority of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin were votes for Biden, who won the state by a margin of 0.63 percent, or approximately 20,600 votes.
Before election day, Green Bay elections officials gave Spitzer-Rubenstein four out of five keys to the room in which the absentee ballots were stored, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno told Wisconsin Spotlight.
After the election, Juno expressed concerns that the Central Count location was “tainted by the influence of a person working for an outside organization influencing the election,” according to Wisconsin Spotlight. Teske said she felt that third-party groups such as CTCL and NVAHI excluded the clerk’s office from the election process.
“As you know, I am very frustrated, along with the Clerk’s Office. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she emailed a colleague. “I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.
For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.
We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.
What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.
These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.
If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?
More than being restrained by a lucky court order merely from putting toddlers in masks, a person whose judgment is so corrupt shouldn’t be making any decisions about children. A person who puts a toddler in a mask, or allows teachers to shame children based on their skin color, cannot be trusted to do just about anything else important and needs to find a new and more productive line of work. Errors this bad are completely disqualifying, and they will not be rectified by merely changing a few surface policies such as the quarantining of healthy kids.
The fact that parents keep their children in schools they charge are teaching racism or delaying crucial development with Covid irrationality gives the schools all they need to keep ignoring the parents. Parents are saying one thing while doing another. They are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for what they themselves acknowledge is oppression.
So it’s no surprise that school boards, principals, and other entities disregard what the parents say. What the parents say has no, or no immediate, enforcement. And therefore it really isn’t credible. No wonder the school districts don’t take them seriously.
If the parents wanted to be truly effective — as well as truly honest — they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably. Sickouts and mass protests are highly effective forms of warfare on children waged by teachers unions all the time. But parents so far haven’t responded in kind.
Why is that? Why are parents all bark and no bite with their school complaints? Possibly they don’t know how to be effective. And possibly, many aren’t willing to make the big sacrifices required to enforce their beliefs. They can see that something very serious is wrong, but they aren’t willing or able to fix it. They’re still waiting on others to fix things for them.
They, and their children, will wait a very long time for that. They will certainly wait long past Covidtide. And that’s why public schools are as bad as they are — the people who are supposed to hold them accountable refuse to do exactly that even while claiming to.
In the end, schools and parents are basically fighting over something underneath all these disputes that almost nobody mentions: money. Schools get public education money, not parents. It gives them the power to abuse children while parents complain yet keep putting that mask on their kindergartener every single day, even after he throws up in it at school or it prevents him from being able to read or speak properly.
School boards don’t care about complaints. They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.
It’s clear that American parents have a codependent relationship with the schools they claim to despise. They are in fact enabling the very abuse they complain about. So while it is entirely legitimate to go yell at school boards and vote bad people out of office, it’s also time for parents to engage in some critical thinking about their own choices that enable this situation. As long as public schools continue to get money no matter what they do, this situation will continue, no matter how many uncomfortable meetings and lawsuits parents instigate.
If state legislatures do not yank money from America’s abusive public school systems, parents must yank their kids. Trust, me, it will work. It might already be happening.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” 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.
A newly released video appears to show Ashli Babbitt attempting to stop a violent rioter inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion. Moments after the scene was filmed, Babbitt would be fatally shot by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd.
Despite several instances of violence, including the one where Babbitt intervened, the young Air Force veteran was the only person shot during the riot. But newly released footage puts an even bigger question mark on the shooting, the investigation of which appears to have lost many of the facts while being fast-tracked.
Independent journalist Tayler Hanson released the 25-second video clip on Tuesday. In the footage, a man identified as Zachary Alam punched through a window in the Capitol as nearby police did nothing to stop him. Babbitt appeared to grab Alam’s backpack, causing him to turn and look at the 35-year-old veteran right before she delivered a punch to the middle of his face. As the impact sent his glasses falling, the camera shifted away from the encounter. According to Hansen, this was only seven seconds before Babbitt was fatally shot by Byrd while seemingly attempting to scale a hastily assembled police barricade. Footage of the encounter that preceded the shooting can be seen below.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
NEW: Ashli Babbitt punched Zachary Alam in an effort to stop him from breaching the window. This was right after the cops decided to evacuate—
She was trying to stop the attack on the windows and was visibly frustrated with Police inaction.
The Department of Justice arrested Alam on Jan. 30, 2021. A case document from the DOJ shows a mountain of charges against him, including several related to alleged assaults on police. While Alam is presumed innocent until proved guilty, video of the encounter likely will not do him any favors in court.
While Babbitt has been vilified by liberals and mainstream media hit pieces, this bombshell video appears to prove that the young veteran was not there to cause violence and chaos and instead actively attempted to stop the destruction. She did not back down when the crowd grew more amped but instead appeared to be in disbelief that police were failing to intervene.
“I believe she saw their inaction as odd or off, and was ultimately confused as to what was happening,” husband Aaron Babbitt told The Epoch Times.
“She was a take-charge kind of person,” Babbitt continued. “Her frustrations show that the cops who should’ve been taking charge — weren’t.”
Although Democrats and the Capitol Police appear to consider this case closed, emerging evidence shows the public has not been given a clear and complete picture of this year-old killing.
Jared has written more than 200 articles and assigned hundreds more since he joined The Western Journal in February 2017. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard and is a husband, dad and aspiring farmer.
Garland Favorito and VoterGA held a press conference last Thursday at 10 AM Eastern to discuss the lack of chain of custody documentation on the state’s ballot drop-box implementation. According to Garland and VoterGA at least 100,000 Georgia ballots lack the adequate chain of custody documents from the 2020 election. The number is likely much larger than this. Garland Favorito told The Gateway Pundit his investigation corroborates the True the Vote ballot box fraud investigation in the state of Georgia. Garland told us they still have no idea how many ballots came from drop boxes in 2020. That number has not been provided by the state! This is absolutely shocking that that number was never released.
During the presentation last Thursday VoterGA chain of custody team lead, David Hancock discussed the group’s findings. David Hancock pointed out in his presentation that state officials tampered with and deleted hours of ballot box video before it was turned over to investigators. The Gateway Pundit spoke with anonymous investigators who said this was a common tactic used to hide the evidence. Hancock discussed how one video that was handed over cut out 4 hours in the middle of the video.
The boxes were also not lit up for the cameras and several cameras were set up behind boxes so you could not see anything that was happening in front of the ballot box.
Several officials and their media lackeys said this was the most secure election ever. What a lie.
Via Liz Harrington.
The "secure" drop boxes were used for ballot applications, U.S. mail, library books, and DVDs pic.twitter.com/7P2euRdy3H
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.
Sports network ESPN has finally run coverage of Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. But both ESPN’s coverage and the general issue of having a transgender swimmer competing against women have sparked controversy and backlash from viewers. At first, ESPN was confronted for not covering Thomas enough and was called “cowardly” by Jason Whitlock at Blaze Media.
In mid-January Op-Ed titled, “ESPN isn’t man enough to even discuss transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas,” Whitlock called out the sports coverage leader for ignoring Thomas.
Comparing Thomas to “Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Colin Kaepernick rolled into one gender transition,” Whitlock noted that while the Ivy League and other universities had made announcements about Thomas competing in women’s swimming events, ESPN remained silent. Then ESPN finally ran an article about Thomas.
Written by reporter Katie Barnes, who is known for covering LGBT issues and women’s sports, the article highlighted how Thomas has been winning, even in the midst of protests against the fact that he was allowed to compete in races against women. Barnes looked at the policies and discussions taking place over the principles of transgender athletes in various sports and how the NCAA and other organizations are changing policies.
The NCAA revised its policy about the eligibility of transgender athletes. Instead of a blanket policy for all schools and sports, the NCAA decided to use the policies of each individual governing body, meaning that requirements will vary for different sports. The NCAA’s new policy also will require testosterone testing in the championship windows, beginning in 2022-23.
Barnes’ article also explained that, though Thomas has won individual events, he didn’t set any records.
“At Blodgett Pool, Thomas finished first in both of her individual events. But she didn’t set any records in either the 100 or 200 freestyle. She high-fived teammates and laughed with them between races. Despite the controversy continuing to swirl around her, Thomas turned in what is becoming a typical performance,” Barnes wrote.
But after ESPN ran the article, there was significant outcry on social media, as readers spoke up and many disagreed with the idea of a transgender athlete competing in women’s sports.
“Sidelining women in womens sports. Hope everyone is proud of themselves,” one Facebook commenter posted.
“In this case we have a male body racing female bodies. While I do not believe Lia Thomas switched to being a woman to dominate swimming, she has the same advantage over her competitors as a drug cheat would,” another user commented.
“ESPN cheers on the death of female sports. Shameful,” another posted.
“1st and foremost EVERYONE has the right do whatever makes them happy in regards to physical appearance and Identity. With that being said this is obviously unfair to natural born female athletes,” another Facebook user wrote. “It’s my understanding that fairness and equality for all are major pillars of the LGBTQ community. I don’t see either of these under the current format. There needs to be a 3rd division added or compete in the men’s division until we know more…”
Teammates of Thomas have also commented on the situation, though. Not all of them are comfortable with the fact that Thomas is competing against women. Speaking anonymously to the Washington Examiner, one teammate explained how the female swim team members were overlooked in this process.
Apparently, Thomas’ move from male to female swimming was in the works for quite some time and the university knew that the change was coming. But as this one Penn swimmer described, the university’s athletic department never asked those already on the team about adding Thomas.
“Lia swimming was a non-negotiable,” the swimmer said. “The school made it seem like they were trying to say, ‘Don’t even bother to come to us with your concerns or anything like that because we’re not going to help you.’ Or they don’t really care because ‘this is going to happen one way or the other.’”
The swimmer added how stressful it was to be put in this position, because if team members did have concerns, they felt like they couldn’t speak up.
“It just seems like if you say anything, everyone is just going to attack you and call you transphobic, and it’s not even true. We just want to have what we were promised by joining the swim team, which is fair competition and equal opportunities,” she said.
“It’s been really frustrating because we all agree, and I have yet to meet anyone or talk to anyone who thinks what is going on is OK. But yet somehow, these are the rules and allowed,” she added.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that though the whole team had been strongly advised not to talk to media about the issue, another teammate also came forward to complain.
As Thomas continues to compete and beat competitors by large margins (in one 1,650-yard freestyle event, Thomas beat his teammate by 38 seconds, the Mail reported), the controversy continues. From teammates to ESPN readers, there are a lot of people questioning the situation.
Abby Liebing is a Hillsdale College graduate with a degree in history. She has written for various outlets and enjoys covering foreign policy issues and culture.
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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.
In a seemingly never-ending sea of hot topics, gender equality is always near the forefront. Whether it’s called ‘women’s rights,’ ‘female empowerment,’ or ‘the feminist movement,’ it’s all pushing the same agenda. According to society, if you’re not crying ‘I am woman, hear me roar,’ then you’re not supporting other women. Well, I respectfully disagree.
According to mainstream media, to be a woman who supports women, you must be: pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and celebrate all-female life choices. You must think Cardi B grinding on Megan Thee Stallion (ask yourself why that’s her stage name) on national television is sexual empowerment. You must watch your step as to not cut yourself on the remnants of the shattered ceiling of Kamala Harris becoming the first female Vice President. Meanwhile, don’t forget to cheer while Miranda Hobbs has a sexual awakening and leaves her husband for a non-binary comedian (a female named Che, formerly known as Cheryl) on the new Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That…
To the overly aggressive agenda-pushing media and entertainment industry, I say no. No, I will not support abortion because it is murder. I will not perpetuate the LGBT movement because there are two genders and woman was made for man and vice versa. I’m never going to celebrate someone holding public office that I fundamentally disagree with regardless of their gender. I’m never going to cheer as a family is torn apart, regardless of the circumstances. (I’m aware there are valid reasons for divorce — I’m not referring to that here.)
I will not compromise my morals under the guise of women supporting women. This does not make an anti-feminist. It means that I am rooted in my beliefs and I’m not wrong for saying such.
Every religious stand in this country, great or small, is met with a deafening outcry denouncing the cause. So, where are the Christian women? Where are the fierce, Bible-believing wives and mothers? Why is it acceptable to tolerate the outcry of every opposing thought that hits the airwaves but the conservative, family-centered matriarch is expected to sit down and shut up? If the church is not influencing our nation, then conversely, one can assume the nation is influencing the church.
God created man in His image. Then from the ribs of the man, He created woman. Genesis 2:21-24 tells us how He brought the woman out of the man and now they are one flesh. This is the nucleus of the family unit. This was God’s design. When you step back and look at the many movements concurrently running through our society, you’ll discover they all seek to destroy the Biblical family unit. If you remove gender from society, then you remove the image of God. That is the ultimate goal after all — to remove Christ and His influence from the world.
Ephesians 2:2 tells us that Satan is the prince and the power of the air meaning that he rules on the earth. He has tremendous influence and reach on the earth but that doesn’t mean that Christians are expected to sit back and endure silently. Matthew 5:13-16 tells us that we are salt and light, and we are to let our light shine before others so that they may see the Father through us. Salt retards corruption and light outshines the darkness. We have a purpose and it’s to spread the message of Jesus Christ to a fallen world.
Truthfully, a God-fearing woman is the ultimate feminist. There is nothing more feminine and empowering than finding your God-appointed mate and creating life out of that love. Proverbs 31:10-31 describes a Godly wife and mother. The world has this distorted view of Christian women as lowly, meek pushovers who are afraid of their powerful husbands. While this might be the case for some, I assure you that is not what God intended. There is no gender priority according to God. One can simply not exist without the other. We were created with a specific design in mind. We were created uniquely and with specific responsibilities for home and for the body of Christ.
Christian friends, we need to be strong advocates for Christ and His design. The world’s effort to derail Christianity will only increase so now is the time to be rooted in our dedication to the Lord.
Ladies, be proud of being a Christ-centered woman. Love your husband unapologetically. Raise your children to know and love Jesus. Men, love and respect your wives and guide your families according to His Word. It takes strong men and women to boldly speak the truth in a dark world. Rise up and be proud of exactly who Christ created you to be.
Erica Caudill is a lifelong Christian who runs a blog. She is a married mother of two children. She can be reached at mrscaudill@me.com.
In a victory for the pro-life movement, Planned Parenthood has dropped a lawsuit against the largest sanctuary city for the unborn in the United States.
On Thursday, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services, an affiliate of the largest abortion provider in the country, filed a motion to dismiss its lawsuit against the city of Lubbock, Texas, the most populous sanctuary city for the unborn in the U.S. In a referendum last year, Lubbock residents voted to outlaw abortion within the city limits, making the West Texas city of more than 250,000 people the largest “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the nation.
Planned Parenthood filed the lawsuit against the city of Lubbock in May 2021, about two weeks after a supermajority of the city’s residents (62.5%) voted in favor of a referendum that made it “unlawful for any person to procure or perform an abortion of any type and at any stage of pregnancy” within the city limits.
The motion to dismiss the lawsuit comes several months after a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Lubbock Division, upheld the ban, alleging that Planned Parenthood lacked the jurisdiction to file the lawsuit. Like the Texas Heartbeat Act that has found itself in litigation since taking effect in September, the Lubbock abortion ban leaves enforcement of the measure up to private citizens instead of city officials.
Planned Parenthood initially appealed the lower court decision but has now decided to pursue a new course of action by dropping the appeal. Attorneys for Planned Parenthood cited the lower court decision in their motion to dismiss and noted that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 42(b) and Circuit Rule 42.1 gave them the right to do so. The rule states: “The circuit court may dismiss a docketed appeal if the parties file a signed dismissal agreement specifying how costs are to be paid and pay any fees that are due.”
Additionally, the rule establishes that “No mandate or other process may issue without a court order. An appeal may be dismissed on the appellant’s motion on terms agreed to by the parties or fixed on the court.” Planned Parenthood’s attorneys explained that both the plaintiffs and defendants in the case agreed that “the parties will bear their own costs for this appeal and for the proceedings in the court,” adding “no additional fees are due.”
The motion to dismiss the appeal was filed one day before the 49th annual March for Life, where pro-life protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., expressed optimism that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, would soon be weakened or overturned when the justices rule on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
Pro-life leaders in Texas cheered the apparent conclusion to the litigation against Lubbock’s pro-life ordinance.
Mark Lee Dickson, president of Right to Life of East Texas and the leading advocate for creating Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, reacted to the motion to dismiss in a Facebook post. “We have said from the beginning that the abortion bans we have drafted are bulletproof from court challenge, and we are pleased that the litigation over Lubbock’s ordinance has proven us right. We will continue our work to enact similar ordinances in other cities throughout the United States,” he vowed.
Dustin Burrows, a Republican who represents Lubbock in the Texas House of Representatives, described Planned Parenthood’s dropping of the appeal as “a major and historic victory for the right to life.” He rejoiced that the move will guarantee “that the ordinance will remain in effect.”
Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican who represents Lubbock, issued a statement congratulating “the city and the people of Lubbock on this historic victory — and for becoming the first jurisdiction in the United States to successfully defend an abortion ban in court since Roe v. Wade.”
After praising the development as “the answer to so many of our prayers,” he further reflected on the role the city of Lubbock and the state of Texas have played in the pro-life movement over the past year.
“With the Texas Heartbeat Act taking effect last September, and with Lubbock having outlawed abortion within city limits, the state of Texas is leading the way on protecting the unborn despite the continued existence of Roe v. Wade. Texas and Lubbock have shown how states and cities can ban or restrict abortion while immunizing their laws from pre-enforcement judicial review. I encourage other cities in Texas and throughout the United States to adopt similar ordinances.”
There are currently 41 sanctuary cities for the unborn in the U.S., with all but three of them located in Texas. Nebraska has two sanctuary cities for the unborn, while Ohio has one.
One shot, two shot; red shot, blue shot. The vaccines might not have been successful in slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 one iota, but they were successful in earning profits for the manufacturers. Logically, they would like to repeat this pleasurable experience with other viruses — safety, past failures, and common sense be damned.
If you like the success of the mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in stopping the virus, you will love the slate of new mRNA vaccines coming to a neighborhood near you, according to Moderna’s CEO. Once upon a time, we could rely on our government and even the pharmaceutical companies to abort efforts to pursue failed vaccines when they proved to be dangerous during clinical trials, such as with the attempted dengue fever and RSV vaccines. Now that they plan to develop more vaccines by 2023, do you really have the confidence that they will still act upon dangerous safety signals?
During a World Economic Forum panel discussion last week titled, “COVID-19: What’s Next?” Moderna CEOStéphane Bancel revealed (at 7:20) the next step of the vaccine wars:
And the other piece we’re working on is for 2023 is how do we make it possible from a societal standpoint that people want to be vaccinated. And we’re trying to do this by preparing combinations, we’re working on the flu vaccine, we’re working on an RSV vaccine, and our goal is to be able to have a single annual booster, so that we don’t have compliance issues, where people don’t want to get two to three shots a winter, but they get one dose, where they get a booster for corona, and a booster for flu and RSV, to make sure that people get their vaccine.
When moderator Francine Lacqua asked Bancel how close the company is to achieving this goal, here was his response:
“So, the RSV program is now in Phase 3, the flu program is in Phase 2 and soon in Phase 3, I hope as soon as second quarter of this year. So, the best-case scenario would be the fall of 2023, as a best-case scenario, I don’t think it would be in every country, but we believe it’s possible to operate in some countries next year.”
Judging by the past two years, this means that no number of negative safety signals will stop this shot. After all, they want to make sure there are no “compliance issues.”
The public needs to be aware of the fact that there is no effective vaccine against respiratory viruses. We now see that the COVID vaccines never stopped transmission and likely turned negative after a few months, which is why they pushed the boosters and Fauci is now floating a second booster. Flu shots as well are spotty at best. One could not possibly conjure up a worse collection of illnesses for which to pursue vaccines. Respiratory virus vaccines have always failed in the past, and now we know why. Both the RSV and dengue fever vaccines have failed because they created antibody-dependent disease enhancement (ADE), where they made the vaccinated sicker from the pathogen.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has a page on its website about ADE and its history with the failed RSV and dengue fever vaccines. “ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection,” writes CHOP. “Instead, these antibodies act as a ‘Trojan horse,’ allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.”
Sound familiar? What recent vaccine do we know failed to stop transmission and in fact, in later months, caused the vaccinated to get infected at higher rates? Oh, that’s right, a coronavirus vaccine.
CHOP explains that this is exactly what happened with the failed RSV vaccine in 1967:
“In clinical trials, children who were given the vaccine were more likely to develop or die from pneumonia after infection with RSV. As a result of this finding, the vaccine trials stopped, and the vaccine was never submitted for approval or released to the public.”
Indeed, the RSV vaccine was an utter disaster, resulting in the hospitalization of 80% of the infants and toddlers in the clinical trial. There has not been a successful RSV vaccine since then.
This was back when we actually nixed dangerous vaccines. Do you have any confidence that the company would respond in kind and be transparent about it today were the trials to pick up inchoate signs of injuries, ADE, or leaky vaccine hypothesis?
More recently, in 2016, hundreds of thousands of children in the Philippines were injected with a vaccine that made some of them very sick. Fourteen children reportedly died. The concern at the time was that those without prior infection wound up getting more seriously ill from the pathogen after having had the vaccine, which is why the shot is only available today for those who, ironically, already had the disease.
In other words, ADE is a real concern with respiratory virus vaccines, especially one of them mentioned by Bancel. Let’s not forget that on page 52 of the FDA’s “Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for an Unapproved Product Review Memorandum,” it states that there appears to be no concern of ADE in the short run (during the original strain), but “risk of vaccine-enhanced disease over time, potentially associated with waning immunity, remains unknown and needs to be evaluated further in ongoing clinical trials and in observational studies that could be conducted following authorization and/or licensure.”
Well, why is this not revisited a year later, now that everyone agrees there is waning immunity?! We see record infections across the board, a higher rate of infection among the vaccinated, waning immunity, and a need for endless boosters, and we know they never ruled out ADE, by their own admission. Yet now they want to tether this vaccine to yet another respiratory virus that already had a proven manifestation of ADE in a failed vaccine candidate!
The other candidate for the mRNA deluxe triple combo is an annual influenza vaccine. But we already know that the flu vaccine is clearly non-sterilizing, and furthermore, there is already evidence of instances of negative efficacy. A Canadian study published in Euro Surveillance just days before the start of the coronavirus pandemic found a -346% vaccine efficacy rate of the flu shot for those ages 35-54 during the 2018-19 late-season influenza A(H3N2) epidemic. H3N2 is the predominant flu circulating this season. “Clade 3C.3a VE showed a pronounced negative dip among 35–54-year-olds in whom the odds of medically attended illness were>4-fold increased for vaccinated vs unvaccinated participants (p<0.005),” concluded the authors.
Shouldn’t we have an independent audit of consumer advocates studying these vaccines before we allow the government and the people who stand to make billions of dollars foist them upon us with liability protection?
Fauci himself was also a speaker at this forum with Bancel. Let’s not forget that at the beginning of the pandemic, he warned that part of the safety concern of a rushed vaccine is that it might make the pathogen worse. “There’s another element to safety, and that is: If you vaccinate someone and they make an antibody response, and then they get exposed and infected, does the response that you induced actually enhance the infection and make it worse?” warned Fauci in an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in March 2020. In cautioning why you can’t just produce a vaccine out of thin air, Fauci explained, “The only way you’ll know that [if the vaccine makes the pathogen worse] is if you do an extended study, not in a normal volunteer who has no risk of infection, but in people who are out there in a risk situation. This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse.”
Which example did he give? The very virus for which Moderna is now working on an mRNA vaccine. “There was a history of the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine in children which, paradoxically, made the children worse,” continued Fauci. “One of the HIV vaccines that we tested several years ago actually made individuals more likely to get infected. So, you can’t just go out there and give it unless you feel that, in the field, when someone is getting infected and exposed, being vaccinated doesn’t make them worse.”
During the forum with Fauci, the Moderna CEO said he is collaborating with “Dr. Fauci’s team” on this proposed triple combo vaccine. He also said (at 44:01) that he would be working on targeting 20 other pathogens, including Nipah and Zika. All of these vaccines for respiratory viruses run the risk of causing some form of ADE and original antigenic sin, especially if the new modus operandi is to release them to the public before conducting studies that rule out these pernicious unintended consequences of imperfect vaccines. At some point you can’t blame them for wanting to make billions of dollars when they’ve so successfully gotten away with their first heist. If we allow more untransparent, rushed vaccines without any liability or proper third-party vetting to continue, then the fault is on us. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The family of a patient who is fighting for his life is speaking out after a Boston hospital removed him from its heart transplant list because he is unvaccinated against COVID-19.
David Ferguson told WBZ-TV this week that his 31-year-old son DJ Ferguson’s heart has deteriorated to the point that it will no longer work on its own. Thankfully, he was first in line to receive a heart transplant. Yet because of his unvaccinated status, the hospital ruled that he was no longer eligible for the transplant.
“My son has gone to the edge of death to stick to his guns, and he’s been pushed to the limit,” Ferguson told the outlet, adding that his son simply won’t get the shot. “It’s kind of against his basic principles, he doesn’t believe in it. It’s a policy they are enforcing and so because he won’t get the shot, they took him off the list of a heart transplant.”
In a statement, Brigham and Women’s Hospital confirmed its decision to remove Ferguson from the list, saying, “Like many other transplant programs in the United States — the COVID-19 vaccine is one of several vaccines and lifestyle behaviors required for transplant candidates in the Mass General Brigham system in order to create both the best chance for a successful operation and also the patient’s survival after transplantation.”
Man Can’t Get Heart Transplant Because He’s Not Vaccinated Against COVID www.youtube.com
The driver who stopped to assist when she saw a wrecked truck carrying 100 lab monkeys says that she now has conjunctivitis and a cough after one of the long-tailed macaques hissed in her face. Michelle Fallon of Danville, Pennsylvania, said that she was driving down a Pennsylvania highway on Saturday morning when she saw a truck in front of her crash and dump its cargo, the Daily Mail reported on Tuesday. The cargo? One hundred lab monkeys en route to a Florida lab for testing.
Fallon told PA Homepage that she immediately pulled off the road to offer assistance to the driver. She got out of her car and walked toward the accident, believing that there were cats inside the crates.
“I was close to the monkeys, I touched the crates, I walked through their feces, so I was very close,” she said. “So, I called (a helpline) to inquire, you know, was I safe? Because the monkey did hiss at me and there was feces around, and I did have an open cut, they just want to be precautious.”
Fallon said that the day after the accident, she developed a cough and pinkeye, which drove her to the emergency room for treatment. Upon arrival, Fallon recounted her incident with the monkeys, which prompted doctors to administer a series of rabies shots and antiviral drugs out of an abundance of caution. The Daily Mail reported that Fallon added that she was also being monitored for monkey herpes virus B.
“What a day!” she said in a Facebook post obtained by the outlet. “What a day! I tried to help out at an accident and was told there were cats in the crates. So, I went over to pet them only to find out they were monkeys. Then I noticed that there was three in each, with some completely broken, so I knew four had got away.”
She continued, “I came home to go to bed, and my aunt ran into a news crew, and she found out not to get too close to the monkey. Well, I tried to pet one. I touched the crates and walked in poop. I was told meet the police at the scene to talk about exposure. … I spoke with the police and a woman from the CDC I am getting a letter and I’m very low risk for I don’t know what yet. But my symptoms are covid symptoms. Like seriously. A day from hell!”
According to the report, all monkeys — which had just arrived in the U.S. from Mauritius that same day — that were said to have escaped at the accident’s onset have been recovered. Authorities immediately issued a statement telling area residents to avoid engaging with the monkeys, which were headed to a CDC-approved quarantine facility.
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