The Electoral College is meeting today to formalize the 2020 election results. The Trump campaign is contesting election results in several states due to massive voter fraud and irregularities so Republican Electors are stepping up and casting procedural votes to preserve the legal challenges.
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So far Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania electors cast their votes for Trump and Pence today.
President Trump was way ahead of Joe Biden in Michigan on election night when a massive ballot dump 100% for Joe Biden appeared at 4:30 AM the day after Election Day.
A group of GOP electors on Monday arrived at the Michigan state Capitol to cast their votes for President Trump.
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But the Michigan state police blocked the GOP electors from entering the building.
“The Electors are already here, they’ve been checked in.” the police said as they blocked access to the Capitol.
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“If you have a problem, you can contact the Governor’s office.”the police said giving no reason for why the building is locking down.
The Trump elector asked for the Sergeant at Arms, but the police officer said he was in a meeting. The GOP electors were redirected to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s office!
The release of a forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems software in Antrim County, Mich. has shown that it is “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
A Michigan judge ordered the release of the audit to the public on Monday after initially complying with the state’s request to seal the information. The findings are damning for fraud deniers who have tried to prevent an investigation into hundreds of credible allegations of irregularities on election day.
“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,”the forensic report reads.
“The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity,” it continues.
The forensic audit was performed by Russell James Ramsland, Jr. of Allied Security Operations Group. The report notes that “because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.”
Other excerpts from the report can be seen here:
The governor’s office is denying the truth of the forensic audit as they desperately attempt to deflect claims of voter fraud. Assistant Attorney General Erik Grill is claiming that the report is “inaccurate, incomplete and misleading.”
Big League Politics has reported on how Dominion voting system was brought into Michigan by a former Michigan Democrat Party voter protection czar shortly after the 2016 presidential election:
A former project manager for Dominion has been revealed as the Mayor of Lathrup Village, Mich., a small town right on the outskirts of Detroit.
Mayor Mykale “Kelly” Garrett is a veteran Democrat operative in the state of Michigan. New York Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax made the discovery in a Twitter post, noting that she has been earmarked by the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee.
Garrett also attempted to get onto the county commission in Oakland County. She lost her Democrat primary race but her comments in a pre-election interview show how deep her ties in the Michigan Democrat Party truly are.
“I also want to learn more about Oakland County government,” Garrett said during an interview with the Oakland County Times – talking up the “inclusion and diversity” she has brought to her small town.
“If anyone knows me knows that I put Lathrup where it’s at right now,” she arrogantly boasted.
The interview started to get interesting when Garrett started talking up her “professional experience.” She could not help but flaunt her credentials.
“I was the deputy director for voter protection for the Michigan Democratic Party,”she explained.
From her words, it seems like she supports policies like the ones that turned the absentee voter counting board in Detroit into a third-world style free-for-all.
“I’m very passionate about everyone that can vote, who wants to vote, should be able to cast a ballot and that ballot count and that is something that I still, um, fight for,” she said.
Garrett also leads Mothering Justice, a nonprofit organization that agitates for socialism and wealth redistribution. She continued to brag in the interview about her deep ties in the Democrat Party of Michigan.
“I was the vice chair of the Oakland County Democratic Party, and I just recently stopped being the chair of the Southfield-Lathrup Democratic Party,” she said.
“Because of some of the volunteer positions that I have, I actually know people across the state. I have a very good relationship with our governor, with our secretary of state,” Garrett added.
The shoe may be dropping in Michigan as proof of voter fraud becomes undeniable. Big League Politics will continue to report on the developments as Democrats try to keep the truth hidden from the masses.
Tulsi Gabbard, in her penultimate month as a US Representative from Hawaii, introduced a bill Thursday that would keep biological men from participating in women’s sports. House bill H.R. 8932, the Protect Women’s Sports Act, interprets Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments as protecting people from discrimination based on biological sex. Therefore, if passed, the bill would not give biological males who “transitioned” the protection under federal law to compete in women’s athletics. Gabbard, a Democrat, introduced the bill with Republican representative Markwayne Mullin (OK-02).
As amazing as it is for a Democrat to do something like this nowadays, H.R. 8932 was not the only bill she recently introduced that defies her party leadership. H.R. 8923, introduced Wednesday, would “amend title 18, United States Code, to ensure a health care practitioner exercises the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”
A similar bill had been struck down by Democrats earlier this year. They argue that the bill is redundant since the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 already ensures care for babies who survive abortions. But it does not impose criminal penalties on doctors who fail to provide it.
Tulsi Gabbard decided not to run for reelection in the House during her long-shot 2020 presidential candidacy. Although publicly progressive on certain issues, Gabbard has found an affinity among some nationalists and right-wingers for her anti-neoconservative, pro-America First stance on foreign policy. She previously held pro-life and pro-traditional marriage convictions before the Democratic Party made them untenable for any of their elected officials. She was also the only Democrat to not vote for the impeachment of President Trump.
The introduction of these two bills as a lame duck representative appear to show that Tulsi is sick and tired of her Democratic Party bosses and that she has more common sense on social issues than most every other leftist.
An email obtained by NBC News reveals that Hunter Biden declined to report $400,000 in income he received from Ukrainian gas company Burisma on his 2014 tax return. Biden raked in a cozy salary from the oligarch-owned company of up to $50,000 a month despite lacking experience in the energy industry, with many pointing to his association with then-Vice President Joe Biden as the purpose of his employment.
The email from Eric Schwerin, the president of an investment company founded by the younger and troubled Biden in 2009, succinctly reveals that Hunter did not report a whopping $400,000 from Burisma in his 2014 tax return.
“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income,” says the email dated Jan. 16, 2017. Schwerin goes on to reveal Biden had an income of more than $1.2 million in 2014. NBC News claimed that it was unable to “verify” the email, but a Hunter Biden spokesperson declined to dispute its veracity.
Biden’s suspicious dealings with Burisma were largely ignored by the mainstream media, even after files were published from the troubled drug user’s laptop detailing corrupt foreign business dealings. The Biden campaign admitted this week that the Department of Justice is actively investigating Hunter Biden for tax compliance, with federal sources going on to reveal after the admission that Biden is being probed for potential money laundering and corrupt business deals.
It’s very possible that the US Attorney for Delaware is investigating the younger Biden for trying to hide his suspicious Burisma income in 2014, which would’ve proved an embarrassment at the least for the Biden family if it were revealed while Biden was Vice President. The ongoing investigation stands to linger on as a shadow covering the Biden family, if Joe Biden is inaugurated as President.
Tucker Carlson voiced concerns about the financial inequality caused by pandemic on Friday night, noting that the same Democratic forces that are advocating for lockdowns and pushing small businesses out of the marketplace are propping up massive businesses that fray the social fabric and will destroy our free-market capitalist economy.
“Here’s another idea,” Carlson said in defense of the American taxpayer. “Why not make the people who benefited the most from the lockdown—the people who have encouraged them from day one—pay for the effects of those lockdowns?”
“Why wouldn’t you assess them a one-time COVID fee, take it out of their record profits, and make them pay for the next bailout? Why are you paying for it?”
Carlson noted the problems of income inequality that have been escalated by government’s refusal to allow people to earn a living on their own terms and to their own ability. As the pandemic debt grows, Amazon and other massive multi-national corporations are reaping the benefits while the average American taxpayer will be expected to foot the bill.
“The people in charge of our economy are discrediting our system,” he said. “They are giving capitalism a bad name, because what they are participating in is not a market economy, a free open market economy, it’s a closed game run for their own benefit and their benefit alone. Long term this is a disaster for all of us,” he said.
Where calls for socialism have escalated on the Democratic left, under the guise of believing government hand-outs can solve all problems, there has been a disproportionate strain on small businesses while lockdowns have choked the effectiveness of a market economy.
Carlson suggested that the big winners of the pandemic, large, Democrat-party backed corporations like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, should share in the burden of the economic devastation left behind by COVID-19 that has crippled business and markets that would have otherwise remained opened and operational.
“There’s no reason ordinary taxpayers should be on the hook for their spending, they have suffered enough,” Carlson said. He said that universities should pay off student loan debt with their massive endowments, and that the biggest companies should not be profiting at the expense of small businesses.
At its heart, capitalism is driven by a free and voluntary exchange of goods and services. This, per free-market thinking, will allow consumers to purchase products that bring them the most value while providers will endeavor to offer the best product possible at the lowest cost.
But due to shutdowns and restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, the space for a “free and voluntary” exchange has altogether disappeared for entire industries. With a greater demand to re-distributive, socialist policies, Carlson believes that capitalism—as a system—needs to be re-validated in the eyes of Americans. Carlson voiced frustrations that a market economy has been crippled by government restrictions and then given a bad name.
“What they are participating in is not a market economy, a free and open market economy—it’s a closed game, run for their own benefit and their benefit alone,” Carlson said.
It has been a long-standing GOP talking point to specifically not talk about income inequality, and Carlson appears to be breaking ranks over bringing it up on his show. But there’s a difference to Carlson, and to many on the new right that advocates for working class Americans over profit margins, between allowing corporate interests to run rough-shod over the American republic and advocating for a free and open marketplace where individuals can earn and succeed as a result of their own hard work.
The progressive politicians in the House, and at the state level, continue to advocate for the shuttering of our small businesses, while advocating for the giants of industry to stay open and operational. It is those same giants of industry that fill the Democratic party’s pockets, back their unfair policies, and claim they are doing it all for the public good.
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – JANUARY 05 2020: US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attends the No hate no fear solidarity march. As anti-Semitic incidents have increased in New York City as well as the United States, demonstrators held no hate no fear solidarity march. Representatives from various Jewish organizations as well as marchers from around the country joined the New Yorkers to call for an end to religious bigotry. / John Lamparski / Echoes Wire / Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Business owners in Queens, New York, are reportedly furious at Democrats and especially Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), after they chased Amazon out of the city, which is now struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Almost two years after Amazon pulled out from a proposal to build a massive headquarters along the Queens waterfront, the site is a vacant eyesore — and, to many locals, the squandered economic opportunity is even more painful amid the coronavirus pandemic,” the New York Post noted. “The world’s largest e-tailer abruptly canceled its projected 25,000 job-producing campus in February 2019 after being taken aback by ferocious opposition from local pols — including Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state Sen. Mike Gianaris.”
The Post called the vacant site “the scar that won’t heal.”
The following individuals spoke to The Post about the situation:
Eric Benaim, CEO of Modern Spaces realty:“It’s really crazy what’s going on. The city has no solutions. We have a do-nothing mayor. I’m watching AOC selling ‘Tax the rich’ T-shirts for $58 while businesses are leaving New York. That’s AOC’s solution. Who is going to pay $58 for a T-shirt when you’re out of a job?”
Donna Drimer, owner of the Matted LIC art gallery and gift store:“The site just sits there empty. It’s terrible. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. People say, ‘If we only had Amazon.’ We got nothing. AOC, Giannaris, [local Councilman Jimmy] Van Bramer — wake up! People are leaving. Businesses are closing.”
Gianna Cerbone, owner of Manducatis Rustica restaurant:“I’m angry at the stupidity. Everybody fears AOC, who has no idea what she’s doing. Opposing Amazon benefited other communities. Imagine if AOC did something positive with her big mouth. I believed in Gianaris. Mike believed in the community until he went so far up AOC’s ass she couldn’t s–t him out.”
Bishop Mitchell Taylor, pastor of the Center of Hope International Church:“It’s like we’re living in the 1970s. Things are worse for poor people now. The Amazon project provided a ray of hope to a lot of people. We didn’t want a handout. The largest public housing project in the country wanted the opportunity to do business with the largest retailer in the country.”
“Governor Cuomo, who with Mayor de Blasio helped negotiate the deal largely in private, blamed the State Senate, where crucial leaders opposed the plan,” The New York Times reported. “Ocasio-Cortez, who opposed the campus, blamed Amazon for seeking $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives that she said should have been spent elsewhere.”
The Times highlighted a Sienna College Research Institute survey that showed that New Yorkers pinned more blame on Ocasio-Cortez for ruining the deal than anyone else.
Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched efforts behind the scenes to try to bring Amazon back.
Ocasio-Cortez cheered sabotaging the Amazon deal, calling it “incredible,”claiming that the city was “subsidizing” the tens of thousands of jobs that the deal was going to bring to the area.
However, as Democrat New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explained, “that $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”
Earlier this year, as the coronavirus pandemic began to devastate the U.S. economy, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to cheer job losses in the oil industry. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “You absolutely love to see it. This along with record low interest rates means it’s the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet. *cough*”
Ocasio-Cortez wrote her statement while promoting a tweet that stated: “Oil prices now at ‘negative values,’ meaning oil producers have to pay people to take it off their hands and store it because when demand plunges (like now), that is less expensive for them than building more storage and/or shutting wells down.”
The Houston Chronicle had reported at the time about the thousands of jobs that were being lost in the oil and gas industry. AOC later deleted her tweet.
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.
Andrew Brunson speaks at a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom hearing on religious freedom issues in Turkey at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., on June 27, 2019. | The Christian Post
American pastor Andrew Brunson, who was imprisoned for his faith in Turkey for two years, predicted that persecution of Christians in the United States will intensify due to “hostility toward people who embrace Jesus Christ and His teaching.”
“The pressures that we’re seeing in our country now are going to increase, and one of these pressures is going to be hostility toward people who embrace Jesus Christ and His teaching, who are not ashamed to stand for Him,” Brunson said during a virtual event, called “Global Prayer for U.S. Election Integrity.”
“On my return to the U.S. just over two years ago, for the first time in my life … most of my life I’ve been focused overseas … I really, I have an urgency for this country, for the United States, and not just with this election,” continued Brunson, a Christian missionary who lived in Turkey for more than 20 years. “It’s not precipitated by this election, but it has been growing in me these last two years.”
He said his concern is that “we’re not ready for this pressure,” and warned that “not being prepared is very, very dangerous on a number of levels.”
“Whoever ends up prevailing in this election, I believe that persecution is still coming and it’s coming quickly and it’s coming soon. So if President Trump prevails, it will delay persecution at a government level, but this will not keep us from the hostility that’s rising in our society toward followers of Jesus,” he warned. “And I want to mention here that Jesus was the most loving, kind person in history, and yet He was called evil and people are not going to just disagree with us.
“They will say that we are evil and they will justify everything they do to us because they will paint us as evil people. What is heavy on my heart is that we need to prepare ourselves to prepare our own hearts.”
Pastor Brunson, who was taken into custody by Turkish officials along with his wife, Norine, in October 2016, said he thinks “one of the purposes God had for me in my imprisonment was that I learned perseverance at a deeper level again and again and again, as I was repeatedly broken and finally He rebuilt me.”
He added that helping prepare others to persevere was also one of the purposes.
The Facebook event was part of a series of special live prayer events for election integrity and against election fraud, the organizers said.
In Turkey, Norine was released soon after, but Brunson was thrown in prison, accused of plotting to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. Following two years in detention, Brunson was released last October after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the country.
Brunson shared details about his imprisonment in Turkey, revealing he experienced a crisis of faith while in detention. “I was actually very afraid,” he admitted. “The issue, actually, is what we do when we’re afraid. There are things to be afraid of.”
The pastor also warned in March that being a Christian in the U.S. might soon come with great personal risk with the culture becoming increasingly “hostile” to believers.
“There is a price to following Jesus. There is a price in other countries. We hear about that. But increasingly, I think that there will be a price to be paid here,” he told hundreds gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters Christian Media Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time.
“It is normal to be afraid. The issue is, will you stand in spite of your fear? Will you remain faithful? In the end, people are going to pay a price for the sake of the Gospel. Overseas, yes, but also here … there is a cost to following Jesus.”
A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson.
Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity.
“It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said.
These individuals are embedded in some of the largest companies and inside some government agencies around the world.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft. His posts have been retweeted by President Trump and have made the headlines at the Drudge Report. Joe worked as a corporate executive in Hong Kong and traveled the world for his work, which gives him a unique perspective of US and global current events. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.
Donald Trump Delivers Address To Joint Session Of Congress / (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The current 116th Congress will be the least productive with fewer enacted bills than any legislative session since the 1970s, while social media activity among members of Congress and the introduction of legislation skyrocketed in 2020.
A recent report published by the public affairs research group Quorum found that only 28 of the 5,117 bills introduced in the House and Senate this year were enacted. Congress by comparison introduced 8,364 bills in 2019 and 169 of those were eventually signed into law.
The number of bills enacted by the 116th Congress is notably smaller than that of its predecessor. While the 115th Congress introduced nearly 3,000 fewer bills during its session in 2017 and 2018, President Donald Trump signed 417 bills into law according to the Congressional record.
The primary reason for this could be attributed to Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress at that time. Democrats gained a majority of House seats following the 2018 midterm elections and current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replaced former Speaker Paul Ryan.
It is expected that periods of divided government can lead to less enacted legislation, according to Axios, but productivity in Congress is still the lowest it has been in decades.
Social media activity among members of Congress increased dramatically in 2020 as the number of bills passed declined, according to the Quorum report. Lawmakers posted on social media 784,614 times this year across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Researchers found that for every bill introduced in Congress, lawmakers posted 98 times on Twitter, 60 times on Facebook, 5 times on Instagram and 4 times on YouTube. Lawmakers also collectively released 13 press releases for every bill introduced.
For every bill signed into law and enacted, lawmakers posted 17,912 times on Twitter, 11,016 times on Facebook, 874 times on Instagram and 669 times on YouTube. Lawmakers also collectively released 2,312 press releases for every bill signed into law and enacted.
Members of Congress frequently posted about the coronavirus on social media as hashtags and key words related to the pandemic dominated user feeds among both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to the Quorum report. Other prominent events lawmakers posted about this year included the 2020 Census and civil unrest related to police violence.
Congressional job approval among voters remains low amid criticisms of gridlock and an ineffective legislative agenda, according to Gallup polling data. A Gallup poll released in November found that only 23% of voters approved of the way Congress is handling its job while 73% disapproved.
Inspector General Michael Atkinson Appears Before House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence For Closed Door Briefing / Pete Marovich/Getty Images
The New York Times does not appear to have covered a story detailing Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell’s contacts with an alleged Chinese spy. Christine Fang, the suspected spy, became close with Swalwell and even participated in his 2014 reelection campaign, according to a Dec. 7 report published by Axios. Fang, who is also accused of having an affair with at least two U.S. mayors, did not donate money and there isn’t evidence of illegal contributions.
Fang reportedly planted an intern in Swalwell’s congressional office, according to the report. Swalwell was informed of Fang’s suspected ties in 2015 by the FBI via a “defensive briefing,” cut ties with the alleged spy and has not been implicated in any wrongdoing.
The NYT did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.
Swalwell briefly addressed the Axios report after it became public. He condemned the leak and suggested that it somehow involved President Donald Trump while talking to CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Dec. 9.
“I was shocked,” Swalwell said. “Just over six years ago, I was told about this individual and then I offered to help, and I did help and I was thanked by the FBI for my help and that person is no longer in the country and I was a little surprised to read about my cooperation in that story, because the story says that there was never a suspicion of wrongdoing on my part.”
Swalwell’s view on this leak is a far cry from that of a 2017 Trump-Russia related leak considered to include highly classified intelligence information. In 2017, Swalwell pushed a leak about the FBI obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Carter Page, Trump’s former policy adviser. Swalwell did not condemn this particular leak and suggested that Page could be hiding something.
Republican Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner is now demanding the House Ethics Committee “immediately open an investigation” into the situation, as Swalwell sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – and still, the NYT is silent.
“Allowing an international spy to forge a close relationship with a member of Congress and then allowing personnel decisions to be influenced by a Chinese national does not reflect creditably on the House,” Sensenbrenner wrote according to Fox News.
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.
Mollie Hemingway: Swalwell Story Increases Concern That China Controls Democrats
Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said Thursday that recent revelations about California Rep. Eric Swalwell’s deep partnership with a Chinese spy heightens worries the Chinese have developed compromising influence on the Democratic Party.
“I think there’s a lot of concern that the Democratic Party, that the Chinese have too much control over the Democratic Party and its agenda, in the same way that they have too much control over Hollywood and the NBA,” Hemingway said. “This is a big issue for the entire party.”
“I think it’s important to note that Devin Nunes and the House Republicans tried to focus on China when they had control of the committee,” Hemingway said. That was before Democrats took control of the House in 2018 and shifted the conversation to Russia under the leadership of California Rep. Adam Schiff spinning conspiracies of Russian collusion culminating in a failed deep-state coup.
That senior members of the House intelligence committee might have known of Swalwell’s allegedly romantic relationship with a Chinese operative, Hemingway added, “makes that look even worse than it did at the time that they were trying to dissuade House intel from looking into China.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media
Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.
“We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”
Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.
“When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”
In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.
The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.
Hemingway also pointed out that this week’s news that Hunter Biden is under a federal investigation had already been reported, revealed days before the election.
“We actually also knew that there was an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election except that the media suppressed it,” Hemingway said, depriving the American people of being fully informed when casting their ballots to hand over the country to Joe Biden.
“This meddling on the part of big media and big tech, which banned people from even talking about this on Facebook and Twitter, is a very serious problem and a huge threat to the republic,” Hemingway said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh sees a grim future for the United States after the stolen presidential vote and the total institutional collapse of the nation. Limbaugh says that he sees the country on the road “toward secession,” with America being bitterly divided and roughly half the nation openly reveling in corruption and celebrating grotesque election fraud reminiscent of a third-world despotism.
“So during the obscene profit time-out mere moments ago, Mr. Snerdley, the Official Program Observer, peppered me with a question,” Limbaugh said during the Wednesday edition of his titular radio program.“Mr. Snerdley is asking if we’re ever going to be able to win. And he’s talking about elections. Votes,” he continued. “Are we ever gonna be able to win without taking back some of these cities? He’s talking about blue cities like New York, Philadelphia.”
“I thought you were asking me something else when you said, ‘Can we win?’ I thought you meant, ‘Can we win the culture, can we dominate the culture,’” Limbaugh added.
This is when Limbaugh dropped the bombshell that he thinks the United States is likely no longer salvageable as a nation.
“I actually think — and I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times because I’ve seen others allude to this — I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes,” Limbaugh said.
He added he has read blogs recently detailing “how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way.”
“There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way,” Limbaugh warned.
Although he is pessimistic, Limbaugh has not given up on the idea that conservatives can achieve national victory even amidst the most daunting odds.
“I still haven’t given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win,” he said.
Limbaugh added that the biggest problem “is the fact that there are just so many RINOs, so many Republicans in the Washington establishment who will do anything to maintain their membership in the establishment because of the perks and the opportunities that are presented for their kids and so forth.”
By joining in with the criminal vote steal to destroy the Bill of Rights and Constitution, the Democrats and other fraud enablers shown themselves to be enemy combatants. Secession may be the only answer for these sinister interests to be brought to justice. Limbaugh may be onto something.
US-POLITICS-OBAMA-NORTHAM (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam told Virginians Thursday that they don’t need to be in church for God to hear their prayers. The governor announced a new executive order Thursday expanding mask mandates, setting a curfew between midnight and 5 a.m., and lowering the number of people at social gatherings to 10 or less people, the Washington Post reported. The measures go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Monday.
“This year, we need to think about what is truly the most important thing,”the governor said. “Is it the worship or the building?”
“For me, God is wherever you are,” he continued. “You don’t have to sit in the church pew for God to hear your prayers.”
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“Worship with a mask on is still worship, worship outside or worship online is still worship,” Northam added. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Critics of Northam’s comments pointed out that in-person attendance at religious services is a fundamental aspect of worship for many religions, particularly Catholicism.
Earlier this year Northam banned gatherings of 10 or more people through initial stay-at-home orders, restrictions which effectively banned church services. Authorities have arrested multiple religious leaders for defying coronavirus orders, such as Pastor Tony Spell of the Louisiana Life Tabernacle church and Florida megachurch pastor Rodney Howard-Browne.
The DOJ filed a statement of interest with a Virginia federal court on May 3 supporting Lighthouse Fellowship Church, which serves recovering drug addicts and former prostitutes. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Eric Dreiband noted at the time that “for many people of faith, exercising religion is essential, especially during a crisis.”
“The Commonwealth of Virginia has offered no good reason for refusing to trust congregants who promise to use care in worship in the same way it trusts accountants, lawyers, and other workers to do the same,” Dreiband said.
Northam is not the only lawmaker who has been accused of restricting religious freedom during the pandemic. Governors and mayors across the United States have issued orders throughout the pandemic that restrict or prohibit religious services, and the DOJ has pushed back against such restrictions on multiple occasions.
“Houses of worship and religious services provide so much more than just a weekly meeting place — they are where so many Americans find strength, community, and meaning,” the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Director of Research Caleb Lyman told the Daily Caller News Foundation Wednesday.
He continued, “Findings from this year’s Religious Freedom Index—that 62 percent of respondents said that faith had been important during the pandemic — align with Gallup’s findings on the importance of religious services to Americans’ mental health.”
Religious organizations in New York most recently took Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the Supreme Court over his restrictions on houses of worship, accusing Cuomo of “targeting Orthodox practices.”
Conservative justices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sided with religious organizations in the 5-4 ruling the night before Thanksgiving, while Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal justices. Earlier this year, the court sided 5-4 in favor of the liberal justices on COVID-19 religious restrictions in California and Nevada, according to CNN.
Election officials in Coffee County, Georgia demonstrate why they are refusing to certify the results of the 2020 election based on their suspicions that voting machines made by a Canadian company called Dominion are not secure.
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Georgia’s Secretary of State announced Wednesday that he will be launching an investigation into what occurred in Coffee County.
There may be enough ballots adjudicated illegally in this year’s election to move Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan to the Trump column. Enough states for Trump to win the election.
The process for curing and adjudicating ballots during an election takes some time. Individuals mailing in ballots with issues must be contacted and certain steps must take place. We noted this previously where our focus was on Georgia.
The deadline for receipt of absentee ballots in Georgia, per Georgia election law, is “no later than close of the polls on Election Day … Ballots received after the polls close cannot be counted,” this per the Georgia Secretary of State Election Division’s Absentee Voting A Guide for Registered Voters. This deadline was affirmed by an October 2 federal appeals court ruling, which stayed a lower court ruling from August 31, stemming from a lawsuit brought by leftist nonprofit the New Georgia Project (NGP), founded by Georgia Democrat activist and failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. NGP’s lawsuit prevailed in extending the Georgia mail-in ballot receipt deadline for three additional days. However, on appeal, brought by the state of Georgia, Georgia election law held firm, with the higher court decisively re-establishing the deadline in 2020 as November 3, at the close of the polls.
Ignoring Georgia law, “start[ing] on Nov. 4, 2020, 2 p.m. and end[ing] Nov. 6, 2020, 5 p.m. EST,” according to their PR, the Georgia Democratic Party began the deployment of trained teams of volunteer activist operatives – “Ballot Rescue Teams” – to do phone banking and also to travel Georgia’s counties, knocking on people’s front doors – only Democrats’ front doors, that is – and cheerfully offering to help “cure” or fix absentee and mail-in ballots which, allegedly, had problems and were, allegedly, not being counted by county registrars.
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In a video we inserted in a later post we wrote:
In the video in the post above, Mr. Jones ADMITTED that they were doing ballot curing!
We believe Georgia election law only allows ballot curing if the voter gets a call or contact from a GA election official. The law doesn’t allow a Hillary Clinton operative to replace the election official’s position. We don’t believe Georgia election law allows ELECTRONIC curing of the ballot either, which is what the Democrat Ballot Curing Program did: they stated that the voter could email or text their ballot changes.
Thousands of ballots in Georgia were likely adjudicated electronically without underlying support to properly cure the ballot:
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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.
Pastor John MacArthur announced during the Shepherd’s Conference held earlier this month that next year’s conference will include a summit on biblical inerrancy. Photo taken March 7, 2014. | Grace Community Church
Grace Community Church Pastor John MacArthur has warned that today’s world is “perfectly suited for the Antichrist to come” amid the chaos and “lawlessness” stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
MacArthur, whose Sun Valley, California-based church has repeatedly sparred with authorities over COVID-19 worship restrictions, said on Sunday that world governments “have done something that’s never been done in human history” by making the pandemic issue and the response “global.”
“Now we are a global world. And that is a setup that we’ve been waiting for through redemptive history since the Lord promised that there would come, in the future, an Antichrist who would have a global government,” the 81-year-old pastor said.
“We literally have such power over people globally that we can shut them down so they can’t function,” he said.
“This suits the world of Antichrist. As you look at the book of Revelation, there’s the mark of the beast, the number, and if you don’t have that, you don’t buy, you don’t sell, you don’t exist. Everything about you, they know — the people who have access to all your data. They know all of it. You can go out of existence virtually any moment [and] somebody decides that. This is the kind of world that appears to be perfectly suited for the Antichrist to come, bring a certain amount of peace, [and] the world falls at his feet.”
MacArthur, who also runs a syndicated Christian teaching radio and television program, described the Antichrist as the “instrument of Satan,” adding: “And of course, all hell breaks loose, and in that time of the Great Tribulation, God’s judgment comes, at the end of which Christ returns.”
The pastor said that while he’s not predicting that “the Lord is coming soon,” the unrest seen today reflect those prophesied in Scripture.
“The Bible says in the End Times there will be lawlessness. And there is lawlessness [today] and an escalating lawlessness and an effort to create more lawlessness by taking restraints away,” he said. “This is a world that could find itself in such absolute chaos that the right satanic leader who promises to fix everything could be given the title of king of the world. That Antichrist, aided by the false prophet, is what we see in the book of Revelation.
“We have the kind of weaponry that could destroy a third of the population, a fourth of the population, as you see in the book of Revelation,” he continued. “We have the kind of technology that can literally erase people out of existence. So, it’s just up to us to be sure that we’re looking at the signs of the times.”
MacArthur and his megachurch have made headlines in recent months after the church decided to resume in-person services in violation of California’s ongoing public health and court orders.
“I’ve been here 50 years; the church is 63 years old, and this church has never had any kind of mandate from the government to close,” MacArthur said in an interview with Billy Hallowell in August. “So when they came up with this mandate it seemed to be so rare and so unusual that we were listening.”
Upon hearing dire predictions about the death toll, MacArthur said it was “enough to make anybody with common sense” pause and take steps to ensure no one was endangered. The church initially moved to a live stream model and closed down in-person services — but within a few weeks, MacArthur said parishioners started showing up again.
Despite facing the prospect of fines and the threat of jail time as a result of his refusal to comply with coronavirus regulations, MacArthur has maintained that it’s the church’s biblical responsibility to stay open and hold worship services.
“Of course, my biblical hero apart from the Lord Jesus Christ is the Apostle Paul,” MacArthur said in September. “And when he went into a town he didn’t ask what the hotel was like. He asked what the jail was like because he knew that’s where he was going to spend his time.”
“So I don’t mind being a little apostolic — if they want to tuck me into jail, I’m open for a jail ministry,” he continued. “I’ve done a lot of other ministries and haven’t had the opportunity to do that one. So bring it on.”
Churches across the U.S. have grappled with how to operate amid ever-changing circumstances presented by state government lockdowns in response to COVID-19.
Ed Young, founding and senior pastor of Fellowship Church, told The Christian Post that the spiritual ramifications of refusing to meet outweigh the hype of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Look at our culture. There is so much going on right now spiritually, especially among young people facing depression, anxiety, and attempting suicide,” Young, who leads the evangelical megachurch in Grapevine, Texas, said. “I have counted the cost of not opening our church versus opening, and I believe that risk and faith go hand in hand. It’s critical to reopen churches.”
But Christian geneticist and U.S. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins recently advised most churches to postpone in-person services due to COVID-19 until at least summer 2021, when most Americans are expected to have had the opportunity to get vaccinated.
“I know people are tired of hearing these messages and having to be acting upon them, but the virus does not care that we are tired. The virus is having a wonderful time right now spreading through this country, taking advantage of circumstances where people have let their guard go down. We need to be just absolutely rigorously adherent to things that we know work. But they don’t work unless everybody actually sticks to them faithfully without exception,” Collins said.
“Churches gathering in person is a source of considerable concern and has certainly been an instance where superspreading has happened and could happen again. So I think most churches really ought to be advised, if they are not already doing so, to go to remote, virtual kinds of services. That’s the way I’m having my experiences as a churchgoer,” he said.
A Pennsylvania elementary school principal is suing her school district after she was fired merely because she had shared right-leaning political posts on her personal Facebook page.
Amy Sacks, who have been an educator for more than 20 years, told her Facebook followers on Thanksgiving Day that she had been fired. Sacks wrote that the Perkiomen Valley School District and Superintendent Barbara Russell had “decided that the First Amendment Freedom of Speech has no place in public schools and that teachers and administrators are unfit to serve if they hold and express political beliefs that are right of center.”
Sacks says that she was fired in July with “little explanation” other than the superintendent’s claim that she was “racist” and her social media posts were “offensive, unacceptable, and unprofessional.”
Sacks had shared several conservative memes, including one reading, “Due to Covid, we’re gonna need people to riot from home and destroy your own sh*t.” And another that showed a photo of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer with a caption reading “the virus,” accompanied by an image of people voting reading “the cure.”
In yet another post, Sacks added a meme that showed a potato with a caption reading, “This is a potato. If this potato was running against Joe Biden, I’d vote for the potato.” Sacks shared many other memes of similar style and subject matter. But apparently her leftist boss didn’t like it.
On Thanksgiving Day, though, Sacks shared a message with her Facebook followers:
Many of you know that I am no longer the Principal of Evergreen Elementary at this time. However, the circumstances surrounding this situation have been kept quiet until now.
I am reaching out to you today to share with you that as Principal of Evergreen Elementary School I was terminated because I expressed right of center political views – PRIVATELY. Political memes caused me to lose my job. Nothing that I did was even borderline unacceptable – they were simply political viewpoints.
However, Perkiomen Valley School District and Superintendent Barbara Russell have decided that the First Amendment Freedom of Speech has no place in public schools and that teachers and administrators are unfit to serve if they hold and express political beliefs that are right of center. This cancel culture within the public school system has to stop.
I was Principal of one of the best performing elementary schools in Pennsylvania and still fell victim to being cancelled out by liberal bureaucrats who don’t believe in diversity of thought, speech, opinion, or political affiliation.
With the support of my husband and family, I have decided to challenge the school district by filing a lawsuit against them to save my job. I hope to lead by example and inspire others to stand against the erosion of our constitutional rights in America.
Sacks is now suing for improper separation. She claims that she was never warned, and never given a chance to defend herself before being summarily fired over her political views.
If you would like to see more of the memes that Sacks re-posted to her personal Facebook page, see them at the Daily Mail.
As the big tech tyrants tighten their grip, join us for more free speech at Parler—the anti-censorship social media platform.
California Health Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said in a video announcement on Wednesday that the lockdown rules in the state preventing outdoor dining are not a tool for safety, but rather a tactic to “keep people at home.”
“Turning to restaurants to deliver and provide takeout options instead really has to do with the goal of trying to keep people at home,” Ghaly said. “Not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining.”
Ghaly commented on the extensive steps which restaurants have taken with the government to make outdoor dining as safe as possible including “keeping tables farther apart, to ensuring masking happens as much as possible, to create opportunities for air circulation.” He pointed out “all of those factors make outdoor dining lower risk.”
“But right now,” Ghaly continued, “we advise against anything that you can do in another way, in a lower risk way, that avoids you either leaving your home, or only leaving your home in a way that doesn’t expose you and cause you to mix with others.”
California’s lockdown rules have come under extensive criticism by conservatives who have suggested that the restrictions put in place are arbitrary and draconian, while Democrats have mostly, although in Ghaly’s case not always, argued that they are necessary steps to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
Conservatives have also pointed the fact that some state officials and healthcare profession leaders, who have strongly supported lockdown measures, have flaunted the rules themselves. California Governor Gavin Newsom was photographed in November dining at a lavish restaurant in Napa, California with a small group of people even at a time when his own orders restricted such gatherings.
“Largely unnoticed,” purposely ignored, or actively suppressed? The Daily Beast’s reporting team on Hunter Biden’s legal woes sound somewhat surprised that the FBI’s money-laundering probe didn’t get noticed before the election:
The Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it was investigating Hunter Biden, for what he deemed to be “tax affairs,” took root several years ago with a much broader inquiry that includedpossible money laundering, according to a report by CNN.
That inquiry reportedly fizzled, leading instead to a probe on tax matters that is now being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. But evidence of the larger probe was apparent in the markings on a series of documents that were made public—but went largely unnoticed—in the days leading up to the November election, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.
The word “unnoticed” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Not only did it get noticed, it got reported by Sinclair TV’s James Rosen a few days before the election. A large number of online outlets — mostly conservative — picked up on Rosen’s report about the FBI’s criminal probe of Hunter Biden, including us. Rosen reported that Tony Bobulinski had cooperated in the probe, and that its focus was money laundering:
A U.S. Justice Department official has confirmed to Sinclair Broadcast Group that a 2019 FBI investigation into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is still active.
The 2019 criminal investigation looks into Hunter and his associates on allegations of money-laundering.
Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen spoke with a central witness in these allegations, who suggested that former vice president Joe Biden knew more than he has acknowledged about his son’s overseas dealings.
That witness was Bobulinski, who went public about Hunter’s business dealings after the Biden campaign tried sloughing him off as a malcontent business partner. Rosen himself addressed this last night:
This didn’t go “largely unnoticed.” It was widely noticed, everywhere except in the mainstream media. Why? It started with the New York Post exposé of Hunter’s laptop, which Biden’s team claimed was Russian disinformation and social media platforms actively suppressed:
MacIsaac also said he copied the contents of one of the laptops for Giuliani. And, sure enough, those contents quickly made their way to conservative media personalities and outlets. Giuliani and others, including Steve Bannon, appeared on network television, stirring conspiracy theories and pushing unsubstantiated claims about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
One of the main outlets pushing emails and pictures from the hard drive was the New York Post. And for one of its stories, the paper published what appeared to be federal law enforcement documents given to MacIsaac in return for his handing over the Biden laptops.
One of those documents—from the FBI— included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document—one with a grand jury subpoena number—appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.
Gee — you mean if media outlets had actually checked the details, they might have found a real story about corruption around Joe Biden? As in, acting like real journalistic organizations and speaking truth to power? The deuce you say. The excuse in this article for failing to report on this — even with Rosen’s report already made public — was that law enforcement wouldn’t comment and the Biden team stonewalled the Daily Beast. But the documents themselves apparently left that very big clue two months ago that they’re reporting …. now.
[Update: That’s too harsh in regard to the Daily Beast, actually. They did try to follow up. That puts them head and shoulders above other media outlets … like, for instance …]
As Glenn Greenwald says — memories …
It’s not just media outlets that should get the heat, either. Twitter and Facebook actively suppressed the New York Post article — and the New York Post itself — for days.Democrats called it Russian disinformation, and both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey nearly twisted their ankles in a rush to suppress it. Now, and only after Hunter Biden issued a press release acknowledging the accuracy of Rosen’s reporting, have all of these “institutions” suddenly cured their myopia.
The clear conclusion is that the national media didn’t want to report anything detrimental to Joe Biden, no matter how accurate it might have been. Now that the election is over, they’ll tell their readers and viewers that the story went “largely unnoticed” [see update above as to TDB, which did at least notice it] as a passive-voice dodge to avoid responsibility for their active decision to ignore and in some cases suppress it. It’s an utter disgrace.
White House Holds COVID-19 Vaccine Summit (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Kingdom of Morocco has agreed to normalize relations with Israel, making it the latest in a string of majority-Muslim countries to do so.
Senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner told reporters shortly after the president’s announcement that Morocco — like other signatories onto the Abraham Accords — will immediately open liaison offices in Israel, start scheduling direct flights from the country to Israel, and foster “cooperation” between companies in both nations. He confirmed that in addition to Morocco’s decision to normalize relations, Trump had also signed a proclamation recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara.
“This comes on four years of very, very hard work and diplomacy,” Kushner stated. “We have peace sprouting in the Middle East.”
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 11: (L-R) U.S. Treasure Secretary Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Advisor Jared Kushner, speak in the Oval Office to announce that Bahrain will establish diplomatic relations with Israel, at the White House in Washington, DC on September 11, 2020. The announcement follows one last month by Israel and the United Arab Emirates that they would seek to normalize relations with each other. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)
Kushner called the announcement a “part of the president’s efforts to bring peace and prosperity to the world,” and stated that other countries in the region “want to keep this progress going.” He claimed that the more majority-Muslim countries begin to interact with Israel, the less Islamic terror groups will be able to justify their actions.
Trump has touted the Israel “peace deals” as some of his administration’s greatest accomplishments. Prior to the Morocco announcement, the Trump administration had helped foster normalization negotiations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Somalia.
This is a developing story and will be updated with new information as it becomes available.
Yesterday the Department of Justice officially revealed Hunter Biden is under investigation. In October, it became clear Biden may have been involved in money laundering and illegal foreign dealings with hostile governments, including China. It’s all on his laptop, which he failed to pickup from a local repair shop in Delaware. The owner of the shop turned it over to the FBI after becoming concerned it could contain information about crimes.
Despite a computer hard drive, emails, texts, photos and a lack of denial from the Biden family, so-called newsrooms across the country ignored it and called it a “non-story.”
In fact, Twitter aggressively censored a damning New York Post story about the details of Biden’s laptop and dismantled accounts of individuals who dared to share it. The New York Post Twitter page was blocked for weeks as Twitter executives demanded the story be taken down. The New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, refused to do so and the details of their story were true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted during recent testimony on Capitol Hill that he has no proof the story isn’t legitimate.
In fact, former Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski came out publicly to explain how Biden, and his father Joe Biden, operated. He also revealed he was working with the FBI and a number of Senators on Capitol Hill.
“I’m making this statement to set the record straight about the involvement of the Biden family. Vice President Biden, his brother Jim Biden and his son Hunter Biden in dealings with the Chinese. I’ve heard Joe Biden say that he’s never discussed business with Hunter. That is false. I have first-hand knowledge of this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinksi said on October 22, 2020, adding he was warned about coming forward. “The evidence sits on these three phones. I don’t want to go into anything further. This will be discussed with Senator Johnson and his committee and the American people can decide what’s fact.”
Now, news outlets who deliberately refused to touch the story before the 2020 presidential election in order to protect Joe Biden, are finding new excuses for their dereliction of duty.
“Went largely unnoticed” is code for: Ignored and purposely censored. The evidence has been everywhere for months, even years.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Ben Gray
The media have been lying about voter fraud for 20 years. The New York Times and The Washington Post will tell you: Let’s get something straight. There are only two cases of voter fraud in history and they were both Republicans.
NEVER? No voter fraud ever?
Nope!
That’s your first clue they’re lying. Liberals don’t try to say partial-birth abortion never happens. They don’t say black men killing cops never happens. They don’t say immigrants ripping off government programs never happens. Only voter fraud NEVER HAPPENS.
I bet you couldn’t find EVEN ONE!
How about these?
— JOHN ASHCROFT, 2000
John Ashcroft absolutely had a Senate seat stolen from him in 2000 when a state judge ordered polls in heavily Democratic St. Louis to remain open for an extra three hours. Republicans didn’t even hear about it for another hour. Despite an appellate court striking down the ridiculously lawless order, St. Louis was given an extra 3 1/2 hours to kick out tens of thousands of additional votes. Ashcroft lost the election by 49,000 votes.
Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.
— WASHINGTON STATE, 2004
A week after the 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi was up by 3,492 votes against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Then Democratic King county began finding “misplaced” ballots, eventually producing more than 10,000 of them.
Hey, guys! I found another box of ballots under the sink!
So that’s another 800 votes for Gregoire.
Oh wait — you’re not going to believe this …
You found more votes?
Bingo! 600 votes for Gregoire.
An examination of the records later showed that about 1,800 more ballots had been cast than there were voters who had requested them.
Notwithstanding the miraculously appearing ballots, Rossi won the recount a few weeks later, but his lead was cut to 42 votes — easily within stealing distance. Democrat Christine Gregoire demanded a hand recount, and that put her ahead by 129 votes, whereupon she was promptly declared the winner.
Washington voters overwhelmingly believed the election had been stolen and wanted a revote. Democrats didn’t care. Nothing was ever done about the flagrant vote fraud. Washington now has 100 percent mail-in-ballots and no Republican has ever again won the governorship.
Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.
— AL FRANKEN, 2008
In 2008, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota won his 2008 reelection bid against challenger Al Franken by 725 votes. But for weeks after the election, Democratic precincts kept “discovering” new votes for Franken.
Day after day, votes were added to Franken’s column, while votes were taken away from Coleman. Random error would not continually benefit only one side.
On account of Franken’s charisma shield, Barack Obama, who was running for president that year, won hundreds of thousands more votes than Franken in the same election, on the same ticket, in the same state that year. But during the “corrections,” Franken was winning three times as many votes as Obama .
So the Democrats weren’t worried about believability.
Eventually, all these late-discovered ballots put Franken ahead by 312 votes, whereupon he was immediately certified the winner by the George Soros-backed Minnesota secretary of state.
A few years later, we found out that more than 1,000 felons, ineligible to vote, had cast votes in the 2008 Minnesota election. (To state the obvious, felons support Democrats by about 10-1.) There were 113 separate convictions for voter fraud in that election. That’s not easy: In Minnesota, a conviction for voter fraud requires proof that you broke the law knowingly.
More than 100 convictions for something that never happens, way, way back in the prehistoric days of 2008 — who could remember that?
Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.
Facebook: Final results may be different from the initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.
The Washington Post: There’s no evidence of even modest voter fraud.
The New York Times: The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud.
The Newspaper of (Broken) Record is also pushing the claim that that the real reason Republicans are questioning the vote in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia is … RACISM! So you know they have a good argument.
“All three … have large African-American populations. And in their respective states, they have long been targets of racialized charges of corruption.” — “The Cities Central to Fraud Conspiracy Theories Didn’t Cost Trump the Election,” The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2020
“As they try to somehow reverse Joe Biden’s victory, President Trump and his allies have targeted heavily Black cities, painting them as corrupt and trying to throw out huge numbers of votes.” — “Republicans Rewrite an Old Playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans,” The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2020
“The essence of the [argument], after all, is that Trump won the election, or would have, if not for mass electoral fraud, all in swing states and only then in those cities with sizable Black populations, specifically Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.” — “It Started With ‘Birtherism,’” The New York Times, Nov. 26, 2020
It’s as if everyone who writes for the Times just graduated from college with honors in “Spotting Racism.” Republicans aren’t complaining about the vote in Camden, New Jersey, or Memphis, Tennessee. They’re talking about cities with Democratic political machines, which were founded by Irish criminals long before black people showed up in large numbers.
Democratic machines have been stealing elections since before the Civil War.
This year, liberals told us that Trump is LITERALLY HITLER and his defeat the single most important event of our lives — something you’ll tell your grandchildren about someday! But we’re supposed to believe they decided, this one time, they wouldn’t cheat?
These are the people who tell you voter fraud is a crazy conspiracy theory.
Then, at 29, you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing Inflation, Unemployment, and Hunger.
At 33, the nazis come to power.
You turn 39 when World War II starts and ends at 45 During the Holocaust (Holocaust), 6 million Jews die.
There will be over 60 million deaths in total.
When you’re 52, the Korean War begins.
At age 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends at age 75
A boy born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and disasters.
A boy born in 1995 and now 25 years old thinks it’s the end of the world when his Amazon package takes over three days to arrive or when he doesn’t get more than 15 likes for her photo posted on Facebook or Instagram. ….
In 2020, many of us live comfortably, have access to different sources of home entertainment, and often have more than we need.
But people complain about everything.
However, they have electricity, phone, food, hot water, and a roof over their heads.
None of this existed before.
But mankind survived far more disastrous circumstances and never lost the joy of living.
Maybe it’s time to be less self-escaped, stop complaining, and stop crying.
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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.
California Restaurant Association CEO Jot Condie tells ‘Fox & Friends’ every day that passes restaurant owners and workers can’t pay their bills. Californiapublic health officials are closing restaurants without substantial scientific evidence, California Restaurant Association CEO Jot Condie said on Tuesday.
“For nine months now, we’ve listened to our public health officials tell us that these shutdown orders are based on or they are guided by evidence and science, and we have an L.A. health department who has essentially targeted the restaurant industry as if we are responsible for the latest outbreak in the pandemic when the evidence proves otherwise,” Condie told “Fox & Friends.”
Condie will appear in court for a third time on Tuesday and expressed optimism that a judge will rule against Los Angeles County on its patio dining ban. Last week, a California judge ordered health officials in Los Angeles to show scientific evidence to justify the recently enacted three-week ban on dine-in service.
“[The judge] basically said L.A. County has a lot of holes in their justification in order for them to come back and prove that it is justified … So we’re hopeful,” Condie said.
The decision came a week after a judge denied the California Restaurant Association’s request to block the measure until evidence was provided that showed outdoor dining at restaurants posed a risk to the public.
“We were successful in Los Angeles Superior Court today, where the judge agreed that LA County must show cause for its order to ban outdoor dining,” the California Restaurant Association tweeted on Wednesday.
The CRA has fought against the measure since it was enacted on Nov. 25, limiting bars and restaurants to take-out, drive-through and delivery services only. The group had accused L.A. County of relying on a “questionable national study” rather than local data to determine that establishments — which are already reeling from the pandemic — should be shut down again, according to a video posted on YouTube.
Condie said the restaurants “just want to open back up.” While indoor dining is restricted due to health concerns, “outdoor dining is their only lifeline” that they have to get through the pandemic.
“That has sort of been pulled out from under them by a health department that is essentially acting on a gut reaction,” Condie said. “Last time I looked, gut reactions aren’t part of a scientific method.”
Multiple states have thrown their support behind a Texas election lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin at the United States Supreme Court which alleges that those four states exploited “the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit late on Monday night, arguing that “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election.”
“The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution,” Paxton continued. “By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections. Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election. We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced late on Monday that his state would back Texas’ lawsuit at the Supreme Court.
“Election integrity is central to our republic,” Schmitt wrote on Twitter. “And I will defend it at every turn. As I have in other cases — I will help lead the effort in support of Texas’ #SCOTUS filing today. Missouri is in the fight.”
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry released a statement calling for the Supreme Court to consider the case brought by Texas.
“Only the U.S. Supreme Court can ultimately decide cases of real controversy among the states under our Constitution. That is why the Justices should hear and decide the case which we have joined representing the citizens of Louisiana,” Landry said. “Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court should consider the most recent Texas motion, which contains some of the same arguments. Louisiana citizens are damaged if elections in other states were conducted outside the confines of the Constitution while we obeyed the rules.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement that he expects the Supreme Court to “act quickly in deciding whether to grant the State of Texas’s request.”
“That decision will instruct me as to how the State of Alabama will proceed in our fight to ensure election integrity,” the statement continued. “The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states — of the entire United States. Every unlawful vote counted, or lawful vote uncounted, debases and dilutes citizens’ free exercise of the franchise. The State of Alabama will continue to pursue any legal remedy available to protect her people from such disenfranchisement. Both our rights and our republic demand it.”
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said that after reviewing Texas’ lawsuit: “I have determined that I will support the motion by the State of Texas in all legally appropriate manners.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The past nine months have seen more than a quarter-million Americans die from the coronavirus. Each and every death represents a tragedy — a life cut short, an empty place at the family table this holiday season, children mourning their parents, even parents mourning their children.
But a separate and ongoing tragedy has also struck at countless more than another quarter-million Americans: Children who have disappeared from school following last spring’s COVID-19 closures.A survey conducted by CBS’s “60 Minutes” found that among 78 of the largest school districts in the country, at least 240,000 students remained unaccounted for when school resumed, in many cases virtually, this fall. This number doesn’t, of course, include the many other children schools have lost in other districts.
Each and every one of those cases also represents a tragedy. Indeed, it’s a slow-moving crisis. Every child who doesn’t return to school to complete his or her education represents dreams unfulfilled. It means diminished career prospects, lower earnings, an increased risk of trouble with law enforcement or substance misuse, more expense to society through the criminal justice and welfare systems, and on, and on, and on.
Just as these students have fallen through the proverbial cracks, however, policymakers do not seem to be doing nearly enough to solve the problem.
Obstacles to Online Learning
In their reporting on these missing children, “60 Minutes” spoke with one of them, a high school senior in Tampa, Fla. named Kiara. Kiara said she had moved around town eight or nine times since elementary school; her stepfather lost her job when the pandemic hit, and she was currently living in a motel.
A school district administrator said Kiara had been a good student before the pandemic but started failing classes when learning went virtual. Listening to her describe her situation, it’s not hard to figure out why her performance suffered:
Not having that teacher to really talk to was kinda difficult and just me not having a laptop at the time was difficult doing it on my phone. Just such a small screen. …
[Doing virtual learning via her phone] was very difficult because my phone is really skinny. At the time, I didn’t have glasses so I’d have to, like, slide to the left and slide to the right and slide up. So it was just really iffy. …
Definitely, I definitely come outside [to escape her crowded motel room]. I’ll sit here and study. But sometimes, you know, the mosquitoes are coming, you know. It’s hard.
At times, Kiara would walk a mile to a nearby park to get some peace and quiet to complete her work — but the park didn’t have WiFi or an electrical outlet. She said she would “try to make it work as best I could,” but it doesn’t take a doctorate in education to realize why any student’s performance would suffer in that environment.
In some respects, Kiara represents one of the luckier victims of the school shutdowns. She has big dreams — she wants to become a dental hygienist, and eventually a dentist — and fought through the obstacles the COVID-19 closures put in her path. But it’s sadly understandable to see how some families and some children would just give up.
Enrollment Down, and It’s Not All Homeschooling
Across the country, public school enrollment has declined for the current academic year. Outside D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school enrollment declined by 3,300, or about 2 percent, this fall; on the other side of the Potomac River, Fairfax County, Virginia’s enrollment declined by nearly 5 percent. In Missouri, public school enrollment dropped 3.2 percent statewide, with a 31 percent drop in preschool enrollment and a nearly 10 percent decline in kindergarten enrollment.
These changes represent two distinct trends — both ends of the proverbial barbell. In Montgomery County, Fairfax County, and other wealthy enclaves, the enrollment declines come from affluent families enrolling their children in private schools to escape another year of virtual or hybrid learning in public education. At the other end of the spectrum, children like Kiara in families facing financial and other logistical difficulties dropped out of virtual learning entirely.
Open the Schools
The chaos children like Kiara continue to face with virtual learning — a national scandal if there ever was one — argues for a major expansion of school choice, so that no child faces these kinds of obstacles again. Thankfully, Ohio just enacted a major expansion of school choice, giving students an early Christmas present; other states should follow suit (in the interests of full disclosure, I have worked on a variety of projects advocating for school choice; however, no clients had input into this article).
Until every parent has access to school choice, school districts should start taking steps to reopen their classrooms to in-person instruction. There are fine and valid disagreements to be had over the necessity of business closures during the pandemic, but the idea that bars should remain open yet schools remain closed runs counter to any sense of logic, not to mention good public policy.
The future of hundreds of thousands of children lies in the hands of policymakers and school officials coming up with a plan to open their doors as soon as possible, and keep them open. Kiara and students like her deserve far better than what they have received during the past nine months — and they deserve it now.
Bill Bailey stands outside the Antrim County Building in Bellaire.
On November 16, several members of the MI State legislature sent a letter to Michigan’s Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson requesting that a full, independent audit of the accusations prior to the certification of the vote. This was after reviewing hundreds of sworn affidavits by GOP and Independent poll challengers and evidence of vote switching by Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. The radical Secretary of State, who has a problem with telling the truth, ignored their request.
On November 23, Matthew DePerno of DePerno Law Offices, LLC filed a lawsuit on behalf of Central Lake resident William Bailey, demanding Antrim County allow a forensic investigation of the Dominion voting machines after it was discovered that thousands of ballots cast for President Trump were counted as votes for Joe Biden.
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Additionally, ballots were re-run through the Dominion tabulator machine after a 262-262 tie on a vote for a ballot initiative that would allow a marijuana establishment to be located within the Village of Central Lake. While ballots were being inserted into the machine, 3 of them were destroyed and were not placed through the tabulator. At the conclusion of the recount by the tabulating machine and with three fewer votes, the result was 262-261, and the initiative passed. Of course, this result could only be possible after 3 of the ballots were destroyed.
Two more unexplainable vote counts in Antrim County also left voters questioning the outcome of the vote result by Dominion.
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In his lawsuit, Mr. DePerno asks the 13th Circuit Court to provide Mr. Bailey with the ability to perform a forensic study of the 22 Dominion Voting machines used in Antrim Co., MI to process the ballots in the November election. DePerno, who based his estimate of machines on the number of school boards in Antrim County, later discovered there were only 16 Dominion voting machines that were used in the election.
“Based on all the allegation of fraud, statutory violations, and other misconduct,” DePerno wrote, “it is necessary to immediately permit the plaintiff to take a forensic image of the 22 precinct tabulators, thumb drives, related software, the Clerk’s “master tabulator,” and conduct an investigation of those images, after which a manual recount of the election results and independent audit of the November 3 election may be ordered to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election.”
In his lawsuit, Matthew DePerno claims that based on the evidence they have provided to the court that Dominion Voting Systems “committed material fraud or error in this election so that the outcome of the election was affected.”
At 5:30 PM on Friday, December 4, 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer granted permission to William Bailey and his team of IT experts to conduct a forensic study of the 16 Dominion voting machines, tabulators, thumb drives, related software, and the Clerk’s “master tabulator.” In his court order, Bailey was also granted the ability to conduct an independent investigation of the images they obtained in their examination. According to DePerno, it would take approximately 6 to 8 hours to obtain the forensic copies, and it made sense to do the work on the weekend when most government employees and residents would not be in the building.
Matthew DePerno was able to quickly assemble a team of seven highly trained forensic IT experts who agreed to arrive the next day (Saturday) to conduct the forensic examination.
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Peter Garwood
Following Judge Elsenheimer’s order for the forensic examination of the Dominion Voting machines, the unelected Township Administrator Peter Garwood informed Mr. Bailey that he would not allow the machines to be accessed until Monday at 11:00 am. DePerno explained that Garwood also contacted Dominion officials and suggested they come to the Antrim County building where the court-ordered examination was to take place. As a result, DePerno and his client, William Bailey, were tasked with ensuring that the Dominion equipment inside the Antrim County building wouldn’t be tampered with before the team’s arrival. According to DePerno, Garwood was told by several elected county commissioners to stand down and allow the examination to take place over the weekend. A group of patriots from northern Michigan answered Mr. Bailey’s call for help. For two days and nights, in freezing cold weather, the group of brave, volunteer patriots stood ready and willing to protect the precious sanctity of our vote. On Sunday morning, the seven-people IT forensic team arrived; Mr. Bailey and his attorney Matt DePerno were given access to the county building and started gathering the forensic evidence. Shortly after the collection began, Antrim County Administrator Peter Garwood began to take photos of the seven IT experts. When one of the IT team members saw him taking photos of them, they demanded Garwood delete them from his phone. According to DePerno, Garwood reluctantly deleted them. While he couldn’t say for certain, DePerno believes Garwood was attempting to dox the highly-skilled IT forensic experts. Several photos of Mr. DePerno’s vehicle were taken by outside protesters as well.
An IT investigator enters the Antrim County Building on Sunday to inspect the Dominion voting machines. (Record-Eagle)
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After 8 hours, the collection was complete. With 16 CF cards (similar to SIM cards), 16 thumb drives, and forensic images of the Dominion voting machines in hand, the IT team was escorted to the local Antrim County Airport by two Antrim County Sheriff vehicles, where they boarded their jet plane with evidence in hand.
Two of the patriots followed attorney Matthew DePerno for at least half of his long drive home. Like many Americans, these patriots simply wanted to ensure the safety of a man who has risked so much to protect our right to free and fair elections.
Mr. DePerno expects to have the results of the study sometime tomorrow. He explained the forensic images of the thumb drives and the master computer would tell if machines were connected to the internet—and if they were, who were they communicating with? DePerno said the examination would be able to determine the algorithms used by the computer and will provide the number of ballots read through the machine compared to the actual number of paper ballots.
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Bill Bailey stands at the Antrim County Clerk’s office on Sunday (Record-Eagle)
DePerno told us that he doesn’t believe the issue of voter integrity should be a political party issue; he believes every American should want to ensure voter integrity in America, regardless of the outcome. He also explained how crazy it is that Americans are willing to allow Dominion to have complete control over the results of our elections. “When Dominion tells us to trust the results they provide us with, they are essentially taking away a meaningful ability to review the contents of the program or the algorithms,” DePerno said.
“My plaintiff only wanted to know if it’s fair to vote in Antrim County?” DePerno said, adding that William Bailey was simply asking for a forensic examination of the Dominion voting machines “to determine if the machine is accurate or not?”
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DePerno has also contacted the Republican members of the Michigan House Oversight Committee and several Michigan senators to discuss the Dominion voting systems, the oppressive and unconstitutional contract that brought it to Michigan, and the system’s ability to manipulate votes. So far, none have been willing to return his calls.
Here is the original complaint filed on November 23rd — William Bailey vs. Antrim County Michigan
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.
Arizona Republicans on Monday called for the decertification of their state’s false election results. As Cristina Laila reported — last week Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem issued a call to withhold the state’s Electoral College votes for Joe Biden because “he believes there is enough significant evidence of fraud to invalidate the state’s votes.” Finchem also blasted Doug Ducey.
“I believe Doug Ducey signed a fraudulent document and he knew it!,” Finchem said.
Arizona House Majority Leader Warren Petersen released a statement Sunday night ahead of Monday’s press conference: “The election should not have been certified with the number of irregularities and allegations of fraud. Especially troubling to me are the allegations surrounding the vendor Dominion,” Petersen said in the press release. “It is imperative that a forensic audit occur immediately of the equipment and software. Upon any showing of fraud the legislature should immediately convene to decertify the vote.”
On Monday Arizona businessman Daniel McCarthy (R-) told the patriotic crowd that legislators invoked Article 2, Section 1 meaning — Arizona is officially a contested election!
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.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment on a video deleted from Chinese social media of a professor saying that China “has people at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.”
The economics professor from Beijing made an appearance on a Chinese television show last week to discuss Wall Street’s relationship with China. The professor said that between 1992 and 2016, China and the US were easily able to fix quarrels because China had “people at the top” of America’s core inner circle of power and influence – but that all ended once Donald Trump was elected as US president.
Who are these traitors among us?
One Chinese agent was described as a vice president at a top Wall Street financial institution. Another double agent was described as an American woman who is now a Chinese citizen who helped the Chinese government with a propaganda operation in 2015.
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The professor suggested that the Obama Administration was easy to manipulate, however everything changed after Trump got elected. The professor lit up as he said, “now we’re seeing Biden was elected” and brought up Hunter Biden’s dealings in China!
“Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that?” the professor said. “Who helped him (Biden’s son) build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals in all these.”
So there you have it.
This is why the China-funded fact-checkers and China friendly Big Tech-Big Media complex blocked and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.
A new criminal complaint in Georgia, filed in the Fulton County Superior Court by State Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Donald Trump on Friday, alleges that tens of thousands of votes cast in the presidential election were fraudulent, thus violating state election code and creating “systemic failure.”
These votes, in congruence with the reduced scrutiny applied to mail-in ballots through “unconstitutional” litigation filed by Democrats in Georgia and difficulties contesting ballots during tabulation, the lawsuit states, have created “substantial doubt regarding the results of the election” and require a complete do-over election.
“Georgia officials who have fecklessly asserted that the general election was an ‘amazing success’ ‘with no credible evidence of irregularity’ are undermining public confidence in the integrity of our elections,” Shafer warned in his announcement of the lawsuit.
“Our lawsuit does not rely on theories about the voting machines. These theories will be explored in other lawsuits. Instead, we painstakingly show thousands of examples of ‘low tech’ voting irregularities and fraud sufficient in scale to place the election result in doubt,” Shafer continued.
According to the lawsuit, “a sufficient number of illegal votes” were “jointly and severally, improperly” counted by election officials despite their disqualifications. These votes violating Georgia state law, the plaintiffs argued, mostly fall on the shoulders of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who is “required to maintain and update a list of registered voters within this state.”
Instead of properly updating the voter registration lists, the lawsuit alleges that these fraudulent votes included:
2,560 felons
66,247 underage registrants
2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls
4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible
395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election
15,700 voters who had filed a national change of address forms without re-registering
40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering
1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address
98 people who registered after the deadline
10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted)
305,701 people who, according to state records, applied for an absentee ballot past the deadline (more than 180 days before the election)
92 voters whose absentee ballots were cast before they even requested one
13 people who weren’t registered voted with absentee ballots
2,664 absentee ballots were mailed from elections offices before the earliest date permitted by law
50 peoples’ absentee ballots were counted despite being returned and accepted before the earliest allowed date
2 people whose ballot applications were rejected voted anyway
217 people who voted by absentee ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day.”
Some of these numbers, the complaint alleges, could be higher but can’t be verified by the plaintiffs because the election officials responding in the lawsuit “have the exclusive capability and access to data to determine the true number of Double Voters.”
Instead, the lawsuit includes sworn affidavits from dozens of witnesses backing up these claims and lists out examples of acknowledged election incompetence and resignations by officials specifically in Fulton County, home to Atlanta.
It also shows comparisons of data from 2016, demonstrating the state’s extremely low rate of rejected absentee ballots in 2020 of .034 percent, compared to the 2.90 percent rejection rate in 2016, and the 3.46 percent rejection rate in 2018. They allege this is a direct result of the Democrats’ “Consent Decree” which changed the absentee ballot process and made it more difficult on election officials by tripling the number of people required to provide a ballot rejection.
“There will be irreparable damage to the Citizens of Georgia through their loss of confidence in the integrity of the election process by virtue of the illegal votes included in the tabulations of the Contested Election, which outweighs any potential harm to Respondents,” the lawsuit states.
According to Shafer, the number of these votes the lawsuit identified without the extra information held by the Peach State’s election officials still largely outnumbers Joe Biden’s just under 12,000-vote lead in the state, legally qualifying Shafer and Trump’s request for an audit of absentee signatures to ensure they match those on record with the Secretary of State’s office.
“Under Georgia law, we must show that the number of unlawful votes exceeds the purported margin of victory. It does not require us to show for which candidate the unlawful votes were cast,” he wrote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) And Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) Discuss Trump’s Meeting With Putin In Helsinki / Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
An alleged Chinese spy bundled campaign contributions for California Rep. Eric Swalwell and planted an intern in the Democrat’s congressional office, according to a new report. U.S. intelligence officials said that Christine Fang, the alleged Chinese operative, cozied up to multiple politicians in the California Bay Area between 2011 and 2015 at the direction of China’s Ministry of State Security, its internal spy agency, Axios reported Monday night.
Meanwhile, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, revealed in a Thursday opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that Chinese agents have targeted U.S. lawmakers more than any other country, including Russia and Iran, in order to shape U.S. policy in favor of Beijing.
Ratcliffe said in a Sunday interview that he had briefed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the influence efforts. Swalwell, who was elected to Congress in 2012, was appointed to the House committee on Jan. 14, 2015.
According to Axios, Fang began cultivating ties to American politicos through student organizations at California State University East Bay, where she enrolled in 2011. She was president of two groups at the school: the Chinese Student Association and the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs.
Chinese President Xi Jinping proposes a toast during the welcome banquet for leaders attending the Belt and Road Forum at the Great Hall of the People on April 26, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Nicolas Asfouri – Pool/Getty Images)
Axios also reported that Fang had intimate relationships with two mayors from cities in the Midwest.
Fang developed the closest ties with Swalwell, according to Axios, which cited unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials. She began supporting his political career in the early 2010s, when he was a city councilman in Dublin, California. Axios published three photos of Fang with Swalwell at political events. Fang raised money to help Swalwell’s reelection campaign in 2014 and placed at least one intern in his congressional office, according to Axios.
Axios did not report that Swalwell was aware of Fang’s covert activity. He has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Swalwell’s office issued a statement saying that he cut ties with Fang after the FBI provided him a defensive briefing on the matter in 2015.
“Rep. Swalwell, long ago, provided information about this person — whom he met more than eight years ago, and whom he hasn’t seen in nearly six years — to the FBI. To protect information that might be classified, he will not participate in your story,”Swalwell’s office told Axios.
According to the website, Fang suddenly left the U.S. in mid-2015.
Swalwell was a prominent fixture on television during the Russia probe, appearing in interviews where he pushed the now-debunked claim that President Donald Trump and members of his campaign of colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin previously opposed President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for surgeon general under former President Barack Obama. Biden has selected Dr. Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general under his administration, but Murthy will first have to get through a Senate confirmation vote, where Republicans currently hold a majority. Fox News first reported that Manchin was against Murthy’s confirmation in 2014, saying his politics could interfere with his job.
“After meeting with Dr. Murthy, I don’t question his medical qualifications; I just question whether the public will believe that he can separate his political beliefs from his public health views,”Manchin wrote in a December 2014 letter. “I am wary that his past comments and political involvement will have an impact on his leadership capabilities and effectiveness.”
Manchin’s office referred the Daily Caller to a Nov. 24 statement on Biden’s cabinet picks after being asked whether he would vote against Murthy again. The statement did not rule out voting against Murthy, or any other cabinet picks.
Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy speaks on the epidemic of prescription drug addition before the arrival of President Barack Obama at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit on March 29, 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
The two Senate runoffs in Georgia could make the confirmation process for many of Biden’s nominees much easier, as Democrats have a chance of being in control of all three branches of government.
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 federal agency is canceling congressionally mandated nationwide tests scheduled for 2021, ending the only way to reliably measure the effect of different school shutdowns across state lines until approximately 2023, the agency’s commissioner announced the day before Thanksgiving.
“The change in operations and lack of access to students to be assessed means that NAEP will not be able to produce estimates of what students know and can do that would be comparable to either past or future national or state estimates,” said James Woodworth, the commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in a Nov. 25 statement.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a biannual test in reading and math that Congress requires states to participate in to get federal K-12 funding. Because states water down their tests to hide how poorly many American children are educated, and NAEP uses higher standards separated from politically manipulated policies such as teacher evaluations, it is considered the nation’s “gold standard” test. It has operated since 1969, and its next test window is early 2021.
Usually the test results fully come out in the calendar year after they are collected, meaning the postponement likely eliminates this important window into national achievement until 2022. That’s three years of hiding the truth about how governors have damaged American kids and our nation’s future while foreign competitors have kept their children in school because COVID is a low risk for young people.
On July 31, the NAEP’s governing board passed a resolution urging the commissioner to carry out the tests as legally mandated. It noted “in a time of such unprecedented disruption to education and assessment, there is a need to collect reliable and valid data to understand and compare student achievement across the nation, states, select large urban districts, and various student subgroups to support effective policy, research, and resource allocation.” It also noted that NCES had developed plans to safely administer the tests, and Congress was considering additional funding to make that possible.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has continued to require states to follow the law and administer their own annual tests. Yet she wrote in a Nov. 24 letter to Congress that she directed NAEP to cancel the 2021 tests as a consequence of governor and schools’ decisions to create chaotic schooling environments that complicate testing.
“The 2021 NAEP tests would have shed light on the significant learning loss following the school closures last spring and the widespread failure to reopen schools this fall,” DeVos wrote. “While the data would have been helpful, the much more valuable and actionable measures of learning loss will be the annual assessments required of states by the Every Student Succeeds Act. I strongly believe that states should implement their own assessments on schedule in spring 2021, given that they do not face the same constraints as NAEP and have ample time to plan for successful test administration tailored to their unique circumstances.”
In addition to participating in the biannual NAEP, federal law requires states to administer their own tests annually as a condition of receiving federal funds. Woodworth noted that states will still be conducting their own tests this coming spring, asserting that is safer than having NAEP personnel do it.
He made no mention of having considered ways to still achieve the law’s objective of transparency in exchange for public funding for education by measures such as asking states to build NAEP questions into state assessments, having local teachers proctor their own classes for the NAEP tests, or using remote proctoring, which is common in higher education.
Historically, Republicans have made deals with Democrats to increase federal funding for K-12 in exchange for so-called “accountability” measures, most of which are tied to tests. With no consistent and reliable test results for nearing a decade now — testing was also both disrupted and rendered less useful with the massive Common Core overhaul President Obama forced on the nation — Democrats once again continue to achieve their objectives while requiring Republicans to forfeit theirs.
It’s long past time for Republicans to stop playing this game and release states from federal education meddling. It only works as a ratchet to the left. If states and federal agencies can ignore federal law “because pandemic,” and the Obama administration could ignore the law “because ‘progress,’” states can ignore federal education law because the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional.
A Big Tech-backed “fact” “checking” outfit claimed to debunk explosive evidence in support of Republicans’ claims of significant election problems at a Thursday Georgia Senate hearing. It didn’t. Not even close.
Newly discovered security footage from Georgia’s State Farm Arena showed dozens of ballot counters, media, and Republican observers leaving en masse at the same time from the ballot-counting area for Fulton County. After they left, a small remnant of about four workers began pulling trunks containing thousands of ballots from underneath a table with a long tablecloth and running them through machines.
The footage supported claims from Republicans that they were told counting had stopped for the night, only to find out hours later that it had kept going on. You can and should watch the 12-minute portion of the testimony from Jacki Pick here.
On Friday morning, a group called Lead Stories published a “hoax alert” falsely claiming to have debunked the security video. The Washington Post, Newsweek, and other outlets followed along, criticizing non-leftist journalists for giving the video traction. In fact, none of the claims made by the Republicans were debunked.
Lead Stories’ “fact” “check” says government officials told them everything was fine with the counting, that the ballots were in “containers — not suitcases,” and that “party observers were never told to leave because counting was over for the night.”
Leaving aside whether relying solely and uncritically on government officials’ claims constitutes anything close to a “fact” “check,” let’s look at the claim that party observers were never told that counting was over for the night. In Lead Stories’ regurgitation of the government officials’ claims, only the people who cut open the absentee ballot envelopes were sent home, while ballot counters and scanners were retained and kept working — and no one told the press or other observers they were done counting.
Were Republican Poll Watchers and the Media Told Counting Had Stopped For The Night?
Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer has consistently said that’s what happened at State Farm Arena, beginning hours after the election:
That claim, which he has repeated consistently, is backed by sworn affidavits from two Republican observers, who further allege they were kept an unreasonable distance from the ballots even while they were at State Farm Arena, making it completely impossible to meaningfully do their jobs. (The video, which shows the room from four different angles, fully supports the claim that poll watchers were kept away from meaningful observation of ballot handling.)
The observers say that they arrived for their observation jobs around 8 p.m. They say in the first half of the 10 o’clock hour, a woman with blonde braids who appeared to be a supervisor “yelled out” to those present in the room that they would stop working for the night and would resume in the morning. The Republican poll watchers said they asked Fulton County Elections Spokesperson Regina Waller questions about the status of the ballot count multiples times but that she refused to answer.
Lead Stories, however, says, “There was never an announcement made to the media and other observers about the counting being over for the night and them needing to leave, according to [Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State], who was provided information by the media liaison, who was present.” While Lead Stories doesn’t name the media liaison, the media liaison who was present that night, according to the affidavits, was Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections.
OK, so on the one hand you have sworn affidavits from observers saying that supervisors told ballot counters to go home for the evening shortly after 10 p.m. and a video showing everyone leaving en masse at that time. And on the other hand, you have two government officials promising that no one was told that counting was over. Is there any other evidence to consider?
Well, on election night, ABC News reported that ballot counters were sent home at the time that the Republican observers said everyone was told counting had stopped. Their source? Regina Waller:
They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.
‘As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days. Absentee ballot processing requires that each ballot is opened, signatures verified, and ballots scanned. This is a labor-intensive process that takes longer to tabulate than other forms of voting. Fulton County did not anticipate having all absentee ballots processed on Election Day,’ the county spokeswoman wrote in a statement.
Some debunking there, guys. The video supports the claim from the affiants.
Incidentally, most of the linked stories include mention of a major election day story of a burst pipe delaying vote counting. Some even said it was reportedly a water main.
In a new affidavit, the aforementioned Watson swore, “Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak late in the evening on November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed early in the morning of November 3rd.”
She also said that her investigation shows that the press and observers “simply left on their own,” although she later said workers put ballots underneath the table because they thought that counting was stopping for the evening. “This was done because employees thought that they were done for the night and were closing up and ready to leave,” she claimed.
Was a State Election Board Monitor Present While Partisan Observers Were Gone?
A Newsweek story quoted someone saying that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office claimed that a designated election observer was “at that spot all night, the entire time.” Lead Stories emphasizes that while partisan observers may not have been present, an “unnamed state election board monitor” was present:
A state election board monitor, who asked for his name not to be used due to safety concerns, told Lead Stories on the phone on December 3, 2020, that he was present at the vote counting location beginning at 11:52 p.m., after leaving briefly at earlier in the evening. He then stayed until about 12:45 a.m., when the work that night was completed.
The deputy chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office was present beginning at 12:15 a.m. November 4, he said.
The monitor only claims to have been present in the processing room from 11:52 p.m. on election night to 12:45 a.m., the following morning, or less than an hour. That means there were neither partisan monitors nor the state election board monitor for more than an hour after ballots began being scanned at 10:35 p.m.
What the “fact” “check” shows, then, is the monitor admitting he wasn’t present for much of the time in question, contrary to claims made by the Secretary of State’s office. For whatever it’s worth, the same monitor is the subject of an affidavit from another witness, devoted exclusively to concerns about the monitor’s conduct prior to the late hours on election day, according to a member of the Trump team. The claims include that he was sleeping on the job and staring at his phone.
Incidentally, Fulton County had such massive problems managing elections earlier this year that they were fined and forced into a settlement agreement that included a requirement that they be independently monitored, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
To avoid the fine, Fulton must maintain verifiable levels of operational competence by properly processing absentee ballots; keeping a force of 2,200 properly trained poll workers; providing at least 24 early voting sites; striving to process 100 voters per hour at any site; having a technical support staff member at every site; and creating a post-election audit.
The consent order also requires Fulton to regularly update the Board on its pool of poll workers.
The issue in the consent order requiring the most negotiation was over an independent elections monitor.
They agreed on Carter Jones, who spent time in Africa helping countries improve their elections…
Contrary to the media impression that a state monitor is sufficient oversight, the press and partisan observers are just as if not more important. The false public claims about a pause in counting led to the departure of the press and Republican observers.
As for the deputy chief investigator who arrived at 12:15 on Nov. 4, when the ballot-scanning activities were nearly completed, the video shows the person entering the large room, glancing around, and talking on his phone. At no point have the “fact” “checkers” or other media figures asked what prompted an investigator to be dispatched to the State Farm Arena at that time.
The Trump legal team, for its part, said the Fulton County situation violated Georgia laws that require election tabulation to be open to public view. The witness affidavits say the denial of meaningful access to the counting process kept Republican observers from being able to actually observe what happened. The Republican observers, the press, and the public were kept to a roped-off area too far from the ballot activity to matter, which doesn’t comply with Georgia law, they say.
There Are Much Bigger Georgia Claims
While conspiracy theories about election fraud abound — ranging from The New York Times’ claim that there was no election fraud anywhere in the entire country to dramatic claims of a global conspiracy involving voting machines, the Trump campaign’s official claims are sober and serious. State Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Donald Trump filed a criminal complaint in state court on Friday regarding tens of thousands of votes that they say were fraudulent.
Trump and Shafer allege, for example, that votes came from:
2,560 felons,
66,247 underage registrants,
2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls,
4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible,
395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election,
15,700 voters who had filed national change of address forms without re-registering,
40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering,
1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address,
98 people who registered after the deadline, and, among others,
10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted).
The lawsuit further alleges that mail-in ballots received nearly no scrutiny as standards for contesting questionable ballots were made unreasonably difficult.
A Note On Lead Stories
The “fact” “check” was originally written by Alan Duke and Hallie Golden, although Golden’s name was removed from later versions of the story. Golden is a freelance writer whose work regularly appears in The Guardian, a left-wing publication. Duke, a CNN entertainment reporter, retired from the left-wing outlet after 26 years.
Earlier versions of the story included a mathematical error about whether the votes that were counted after observers left State Farm Arena could have affected the outcome of the election. The authors falsely wrote that they couldn’t have, when they could have.
A later purported “fact” “check” said it wasn’t true that Republican poll watchers swore affidavits that they were told to leave the center, Lead Stories falsely stated that these claims were the “cornerstone” of Trump’s challenge of Georgia. In fact, the legal claim filed by the Trump team only mentions Fulton County telling the press and other election observers that they were going to stop counting ballots and resume counting in the morning once, on one page of the 64-page complaint. Again, those claims have been corroborated, not debunked, by multiple press accounts from election night. As for the affidavits, they make the same claim — that Fulton County election officials falsely said they were stopping the count when in reality they were continuing to count through the night after observers left. The affidavits further state that they were unable to get answers to basic questions from officials.
Lead Stories claims it is funded by Facebook, Google, and ByteDance. The latter is the Beijing-based and China Communist Party-linked company known for TikTok. Facebook and Google have suppressed journalism deemed harmful to Trump’s 2020 election opponent Joe Biden. The Trump administration has said TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist government makes it a national security threat.
NOTE: In a Kafka-esque twist, Facebook is now using Lead Stories to censor this story critical of Lead Stories.
Coaches at City of Refuge pose on the field | Stephanie Marquardt
God’s miraculous provision keeps Chicago’s City of Refuge ministry in business, but the most important part of the ministry is the way it draws community groups together, founder Stephanie Marquardt said.
City of Refuge started in 2018 after Marquardt, her husband, Kurt, and Chicago West Bible Church Pastors Jon Kelly and Kent Steiner experienced a calling to minister in Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods, she told The Christian Post.
Marquardt started sports leagues to teach youth valuable life skills through sports. Before COVID-19, the program had over 1,000 students who were learning archery, baseball and basketball. Each team receives coaching from a police officer, a faith leader and a local nonprofit leader, she said.
Marquardt is also a devoted sports fan, often using metaphors from sports to talk about her work.
“What’s distinctive is that we follow what we call the three-legged stool,” she said. “It’s getting civic, sacred and secular parts of society to work together. I think that’s very biblical.”
The combined approach allows each group to use their strengths most effectively, she said. It also lets community leaders form relationships and work together.
The ministry rapidly expanded to the Chicago neighborhoods of Austin, Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Englewood and Roseland. These neighborhoods have some of the city’s highest murder rates, worst schools and highest poverty rates.
Marquardt said she funds her work entirely by prayer. She takes her inspiration from Christian leader George Müller, a 19th century Christian who ran an orphanage without asking the public for donations. Her ministry’s first big challenge was to get baseball uniforms for her program’s participants before she even knew the number of kids who would enroll in the program. She estimated the uniforms would cost $150,000. On a plane trip to Florida with her husband, Marquardt prayed and read Müller’s writings, she said. One of his statements stood out to her.
“ … in leaning upon the living God alone, we are beyond disappointment, and beyond being forsaken because of death, or want of means, or want of love, or because of the claims of other work,” the passage reads.
Soon after she got off the plane, she received a phone call from a Chicago sports charity called Good Sports, Marquardt said. She had sent them an application for funds three weeks before. At first, she thought they wanted her to buy something.
“No, we’re going to give you everything,” she remembers the group saying over the phone. “The only thing we can’t give you is size youth medium pants and bats.”
Good Sports told Marquardt they had to know how many uniforms she needed quickly, but she did not know at the time how many kids would join the program, she said. She estimated the numbers during her devotions the next day.
“I needed to get an order for kids I didn’t have,” she said. “And it was absolutely right.”
Sergeant Jermaine Harris, an officer of Chicago’s 15th Precinct, said the programs provided by City of Refuge have resulted in lower crime in Chicago’s neighborhoods.When parks are deserted, drug dealers and gang members use them. But when children and families play in a park, criminals stay away because they don’t want to commit crimes in public, he told The Christian Post.
“We choose a location or a site that’s a hot spot. We declare and really make it a safe space. The gangs understand [that] these are kids playing. When there are kids out there playing, you can relate and understand,” he said.
Playing with youth and relating to the community also encourages police officers. Police often face emotionally grueling calls about murder, abuse and humanity at its worst, Harris said. Seeing good things happen in their communities encourages them to face the worst, he added.
“In the nature of policing day to day, we would never have an opportunity to engage with a family or do something positive like this. No one calls the police to tell them good news,” Harris explained.
He also said he appreciates how City of Refuge emphasizes the resources Chicago’s most desperate neighborhoods already have and helps residents use them. When people join the program, they make friends and create networks that allow them to help themselves. In some cases, people in need have met neighbors they can borrow from through the program, he said.
“We start to put people as outcasts and it further drives the division. What we start to do as a society is act as if they’re not there. Constant avoidance is one of the reasons young people join gangs. The more they feel avoided, the more they want that camaraderie,” Harris said. “These kids have bright futures. All it takes sometimes is that person to say, ‘I see you.’”
COVID-19 and the unrest after George Floyd’s death have made it difficult to care for Chicago’s communities, Marquardt said.
In response to the virus, City of Refuge adapted by focusing on baseball so children could remain far apart and still play. Consistent hand sanitizer use also protected participants. To further meet the needs of youth, City of Refuge opened safe locations where students could meet to access computers and the internet to attend school online.
“In COVID, you feel like a wide receiver because you get the ball and you have to spin and stop and dodge and do things you don’t think your body can do. It’s changed everything,” she said.
After riots following Floyd’s death destroyed local grocery stores, City of Refuge partnered with megachurch Harvest Bible Chapel to provide food for the families involved with the nonprofit, Marquardt said. Once again, the money and help came after she prayed.
“I wish everybody had the chance to know these people. My life is so much richer from the relationships I’ve made. It isn’t City of Refuge and it isn’t me; it’s all the people working together. There’s miracle after miracle after miracle,” she said.
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes announced Saturday that his agency would not enforce the new coronavirus-related lockdown enacted in California.
According to the Associated Press, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced a plan last week for the most restrictive lockdown since the beginning of the pandemic if the state’s COVID-19 metrics met certain thresholds, which has now happened.
From the AP:
The vast region of Southern California, much of the San Francisco Bay area and a large swath of the Central Valley are about to be placed under a sweeping new lockdown in an urgent attempt to slow the rapid rise of coronavirus cases.
The California Department of Public Health said Saturday the intensive care unit capacity in Southern California and Central Valley hospitals had fallen below a 15% threshold that triggers the new measures, which include strict closures for businesses and a ban on gathering with anyone outside of your own household. The new measures will take effect Sunday evening and remain in place for at least three weeks, meaning the lockdown will cover the Christmas holiday.
What did the sheriff say?
Barnes did not mince words: He said that compliance with the new order is a matter of “personal responsibility,” so his agency would not be enforcing the “ever-changing” nature of Democrat-imposed restrictions.
“The Orange County Sheriff’s Department will remain consistent in our approach,” Barnes explained. “Orange County Sheriff’s deputies will not be dispatched to, or respond to, calls for service to enforce compliance with face coverings, social gatherings, or stay-at-home orders only. Deputies will respond to calls for potential criminal behavior and for the protection of life and property. Our actions remain consistent with the protections of constitutional rights.”
The sheriff also criticized the restrictions because they hurt Americans who are “already struggling through difficult circumstances.”
“To put the onus on law enforcement to enforce these orders against law abiding citizens who are already struggling through difficult circumstances, while at the same time criticizing law enforcement and taking away tools to do our job, is both contradictory and disingenuous,” Barnes said.
“At this time, due to the need to have deputies available for emergency calls for service, deputies will not be responding to requests for face-coverings or social gatherings-only enforcement,” Barnes said.
Matthew McConaughey is fed up with Hollywood’s political hypocrisy.
“There are a lot [of people] on that illiberal left that absolutely condescend, patronize, and are arrogant towards the other 50 percent,” he said in a recent conversation with podcast host Russell Brand.
McConaughey noted that most Hollywood actors, directors, and producers’ are quick to criticize the right’s response to the 2020 election, but fall short when compared to their own response to the 2016 election.
“I’m sure you saw it in our industry when Trump was voted in four years ago, they were in denial that was real. Some of them were in absolute denial,” McConaughey said.
“[Now] it looks like Biden’s our guy. Now you’ve got the right that’s in denial, cause their side has fake news. And I understand, they’ve been fed fake news,” McConaughey said. “No one knows what the hell to believe, right? So they’re putting down their last bastion of defense.”
McConaughey also expressed frustration with celebrity campaigns rallying for people to vote. While the actor said that he thinks voting is something many people from both sides of the aisle can get behind, many stars have politicized it beyond simply doing your civic duty, tacking on political messages, or even telling someone who to cast their vote for.
“That’s, you know, part of why so much of the nation, that 50 percent, looks at us in Hollywood like ‘oh yeah, another celebrity over there and the West Coasters and the elite in the Northeast,’ and that’s just because, even from a just a sales point of view, don’t tab that gotcha on the end,” McConaughey said.
Instead of buying into either side of the extreme political polarization, McConaughey encouraged Americans to walk the middle of the road.
“I almost feel like it’s a move to say, ‘Let’s get aggressively centric. I dare you,’” he said.
“I have no plans to do that right now, as I said, that would be up to a lot of other people,”McConaughey said.
“Right now, no,” he continued. “I don’t get politics. Politics seems to be a broken business. Politics needs to redefine its purpose.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
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.
As the courts have become hyper-politicized over the past few decades, the judicial nomination process has deteriorated. With this presidential term drawing to a close, we should note the new depths of obstruction that have become a part of the Senate Democrats’ playbook these past four years.
Origins of Obstruction
Matters were already bad when a Democratic Senate rejected Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987 with such notorious vilification that “bork” was added to the dictionary as a verb denoting such unfair and harsh tactics. Four years later came personal vilification for Clarence Thomas before he squeaked by the Senate on a 52–48 vote.
Thomas nonetheless made it through a Democratic Senate that had not entirely shaken a long tradition of bipartisanship on judicial nominations. In fact, from the government’s establishment in 1789 through 2000, 97 percent of Senate-approved judges faced no recorded opposition, and 96 percent were confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent as opposed to roll-call votes.
Recorded votes tended to be lopsided. When President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court, instead of Republicans retaliating for past treatment, the nominees were confirmed respectively by margins of 96–3 and 87–9. This was despite a number of known controversial positions Ginsburg had taken during her career that Republicans chose not to highlight.
During George W. Bush’s administration, Democrats engaged in wholesale filibusters of circuit court nominees, a tactic that resulted in the defeat of several. Previously, only one judicial nomination fell apart after coming up short on a vote on cloture — the procedure by which senators, with a supermajority vote, could end debate and force a confirmation vote. That was the fate of Justice Abe Fortas, whom Lyndon B. Johnson tried to elevate to chief justice in 1968.
Whether Fortas could garner the simple majority of senators required for confirmation was unclear. His unusual case included bipartisan opposition and ethical questions — he actually resigned from the Supreme Court the following year — and did not leave even the most strident opponents of Bork and Thomas with a sense that they had the filibuster in their procedural toolbox.
In 2005, early in Bush’s second term, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed to change the supermajority requirement for cloture on nominations (then at 60 votes) to a simple majority, an idea known as the “nuclear option,” which would have effectively ended judicial filibusters. Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid threatened to retaliate with an unprecedented level of obstructionism that would freeze most Senate business. This scenario did not play out after a compromise, engineered by the “Gang of 14,” derailed any change to cloture.
Eight years later, however, Reid was majority leader, and with the shoe on the other foot, he orchestrated by parliamentary maneuver the very rule change that had once evoked his threats of senatorial Armageddon, essentially ending the filibuster for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court in 2013.
Unprecedented Partisanship During the Trump Era
Gorsuch Filibuster
That exception for filibusters on Supreme Court nominations was quickly put to the test after Donald Trump became president in 2017 and Democrats launched a filibuster of the new president’s first judicial nominee to reach the floor, Neil Gorsuch. Thanks to Reid’s handiwork in 2013, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell garnered support for adding Supreme Court nominations to the others that were subject to simple majorities to invoke cloture.
Abuse of Cloture Motions
Although Democrats were in the minority in the Senate throughout Trump’s term, they used the tools in their arsenal more than any Senate minority before them. While the simple majority threshold made it easier than before to invoke cloture, even when a cloture motion succeeded, a confirmation vote was not immediate but subject to a limit of 30 hours of further consideration.
That time notoriously went by with little-to-no actual debate on the nomination at issue, but of course, actual deliberation was not the goal. By forcing votes on cloture, Democrats could take up more of the Senate’s time and make it that much more difficult to process nominations, not to mention other business.
This the Democratic minority did indiscriminately. All three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees — Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were subjected to cloture votes. Adding Samuel Alito (a George W. Bush appointee) to those three, four of the six sitting Republican-appointed justices have faced cloture votes, in contrast to all four of the justices nominated by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Senate Democrats have also regularly forced cloture votes for even noncontroversial nominees to circuit courts, district courts, and even the non-life-tenured courts of federal claims. Eight district court nominees who had previously been nominated by Obama before Trump renominated them were subjected to cloture votes despite a lack of meaningful opposition; five of them received between 95 and 100 votes for confirmation and zero against, and another was confirmed by a voice vote.
It was only after the cloture rule was broadened in 1949, during Harry Truman’s presidency, to cover any pending matter that nominations could be subject to a cloture motion. Since then, there were a total of 136 cloture votes on judicial nominees through the end of the Obama administration. Trump’s nominees have considerably more than that entire total, at 192 and counting.
The Disintegration of Bipartisanship
The bipartisanship that used to attend most judicial nominations is also falling apart. According to the Heritage Foundation, more confirmed judges received more than 30 percent opposition votes during the Trump administration than during all previous administrations combined, from George Washington to Obama. Moreover, the majority of negative votes cast against judicial nominees in American history were against Trump nominees.
The three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices were confirmed with almost total Democratic opposition. Only three Democrats voted to confirm Gorsuch, one to confirm Kavanaugh, and none to confirm Barrett, making her the first Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed without any votes from a major minority party since 1869.
In Kavanaugh’s case, Democrats employed kitchen-sink tactics of obstruction that included repeated interruptions during his hearings and deluging him with more written questions for the record than the combined number of such questions to prior Supreme Court nominees in American history. All other tactics were eclipsed by the disgraceful last-minute attempt to destroy Kavanaugh, when Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual-assault allegation, after being buried for six weeks by ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was sprung on the committee after the initial hearings, a desperate tactic that flouted the process for handling sensitive matters.
Weaponization of the Blue Slip
On top of everything else, Democrats tried, in the words of long-serving Senate Judiciary Committee member (and former chairman) Orrin Hatch, to “weaponize the blue slip” tradition for circuit and district courts. That was the courtesy established in approximately 1917 in which a nominee’s home-state senators receive blue pieces of paper on which they could express their views about the nomination to the committee. It was a tradition (as opposed to a rule) intended to encourage pre-nomination consultation, but Democrats during this administration routinely withheld positive blue slips, especially for circuit nominees, as a workaround in the absence of a true filibuster.
“Today, Democrats are trying to turn the blue-slip process into a de facto filibuster,” Hatch charged in 2017. “They want a single senator to be able to do in the Judiciary Committee what it once took 41 senators to do on the Senate floor.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chaired the committee during the first two years of the Trump administration, noted that only two of 19 Judiciary Committee chairmen who served over the span of a century treated the blue slip as a strict veto that would preclude a hearing in the absence of two positive blue slips, and he was not going to allow Democratic obstructionism to prevent him from proceeding with hearings for circuit nominees. Still, the blue slip has impeded the advancement of district court nominations through committee, and many trial court judgeships in states with Democratic senators remain vacant due to the withholding of blue slips or the threat of doing so.
It is thanks to current Republican leadership in the Senate and specifically the Judiciary Committee that so many nominees have been processed and made their way to confirmation. As the repeated operation of the 30-hour rule took its toll on nominations, McConnell garnered a majority to reduce the post-cloture clock to two hours for district court nominations.
To date, the Senate has confirmed 229 Article III (life-tenured) judges nominated by Trump. That total includes 53 circuit court judges, which ranks second among all four-year presidential terms to that of Jimmy Carter, who, boosted by the creation of 35 new seats on the courts of appeals in 1978, holds the record at 56. For several months this year, there was no room for Trump to increase his appointments to the courts of appeals because every vacancy had been filled.
Historical Support for Lame-Duck Confirmations
There are now two more appellate nominees, Thomas L. Kirsch II for Barrett’s former seat on the Seventh Circuit and Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach to fill the First Circuit vacancy created by the death of Juan Torruella on Oct. 26. There is no reason they cannot be confirmed before Inauguration Day. Kirsch already had his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, as have 11 pending nominees to district or federal claims courts.
While any nomination that is not processed by Jan. 3, the end of the current congressional term and beginning of the next, is automatically returned to the president, it can be resubmitted and processed without the need for a new hearing. There is ample precedent for lame-duck judicial confirmations, from John Adams’ appointment of John Marshall as chief justice after his re-election defeat, to Carter’s appointment of Breyer to the First Circuit after his loss to Ronald Reagan.
There is an unmistakable dissonance between Joe Biden’s calls for national unity and his party’s judicial obstructionism over the past four years. As a Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden helped to lay much of the groundwork for this sorry state of affairs. For his Democratic successors in the Senate, obstructionism is an ongoing project that seems to find no limit.
Consider the exception that proved the rule: When leftist interest groups criticized Feinstein after she praised Graham’s handling of Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearings and gave the chairman a hug — never mind that every Democrat voted against the nominee — Feinstein’s party compelled her to step down as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. Is there any level of malevolence toward judicial nominations that would satisfy today’s Democratic leadership?
Frank Scaturro served as counsel for the Constitution on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee between 2005 and 2009, in which capacity he worked on the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch to the Tenth Circuit. He is the author of, among other titles, “The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction” (Greenwood Press, 2000). Follow him on Twitter at @FrankScaturro.
Alejandro “Al” Mayorkas is a left-wing Democrat with a history of doing favors for wealthy and politically connected people, including working to help suspected Chinese spies enter the country and convicted drug dealers get out of prison. Last time he was in power, he administered President Barack Obama’s most anti-congressional use of executive power to accomplish amnesty. He also earned zero votes from the Republican minority when applying for that job.
Some might suggest this makes Mayorkas just about the worst possible nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but not Joe Biden, who plans to put him in the post in 2021.
So why would Biden do it? The left wing of the party was promised a partnership in a Biden presidency, with Sen. Bernie Sanders claiming Biden personally told him he will “be the most progressive president since FDR.” So far, they’ve been disappointed, with nominees including a Clinton-mold liberal interventionist to the Department of State, and Janet Yellin (over, say, Elizabeth Warren) to Department of the Treasury.
And if Democrats succeed in Georgia to tie the Senate, a Vice President Kamala Harris can push Mayorkas across the finish line and earn the left a man on the inside. If they lose, the left gets a human sacrifice in their honor. Either way, the left gets a try, although it’s unlikely enough to satiate The Squad.
So who is Mayorkas, and why does the left seem to like him so much? In his role at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), he swiftly implemented Obama’s extra-congressional amnesty order. His work with legal and illegal immigration advocates earned their praise, and at least two awards from outside immigrant groups. In his eventual role as deputy secretary of Homeland Security, he led the president’s Cuba delegation. Combine this resume with his Cuban-American heritage and he stands in stark contrast with President Donald Trump’s DHS.
Now, why won’t he gain any Republican support? In addition to his politics, he appears about as corrupt as modern D.C. gets.
A 99-page report prepared for the U.S. Senate by the DHS inspector general (IG) details the allegations against Mayorkas during his tenure at the head of the USCIS. While he denies the allegations and prefers to talk about the orphans he’s helped in his letter to the IG, the three cases detailed involve trying to give citizenship to politically connected, wealthy foreigners, at the behest of powerful Democrats.
“I was praised for my leadership when I engaged with the poor and the needy,” he complained in a letter to the IG, maintaining that his influential Democrat buddies with direct access to him don’t deserve any less.
The meddling was allegedly on behalf of figures like Hillary Clinton’s now-deceased brother, Anthony Rodham, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, future Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, then-former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and the then-mayor of Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, Mayorkas says he can’t remember the substance of any of the private conversations he had with these players. Equally unsurprising: Every one of these outside players declined to speak with the IG.
The program in question, the EB-5 program, essentially trades U.S. citizenship for “job creation,” doling out the coveted passport to foreigners who can pull together $500,000 and demonstrate their money will create jobs in a specific area of the country. More than 80 percent of applicants come from China, The Daily Caller News Foundation reports, including those working with a casino represented by Reid’s son, Rory, and including the Chinese investors working with McAuliffe and Rodham.
The Chinese government doesn’t let its subjects go abroad without a promise to keep their party and loyalties in line, and Republicans have accused the Chinese Communist Party of specifically using the pay-to-play citizenship model to infiltrate the United States for low cost. Indeed, one of Rodham’s clients was a vice president of Huwaei, a company globally targeted for extensive connections to Chinese spying operations.
The three incidents of Mayorkas’s meddling were plenty sufficient to shock the IG, as were the number of people willing to report on his behavior.
“That so many individuals were willing to step forward and tell us what happened is evidence of deep resentment” stretching from the Washington office all the way to California, the IG report reads. These whistle-blowers included “current and retired career and non-career members of the Senior Executive Service, attorneys, all levels of supervisors, immigration officers, and those involved in fraud detection and national security.”
Mayorkas says he was just a good public servant trying to fix a broken system without regard to “the identity of the petitioners.” The agency, he said in justification for his abrasive attitude, “was failing in… administration of the EB-5 program, including failing to enforce the law, adhere to its own policies, promote sound policy, understand business facts and realities, correctly apply economic principles, and honor its own representations.”
Also, McAuliffe is a belligerent ass — and on that point Mayorkas is hysterically and believably adamant.
Mayorkas has a point about the bureaucratic difficulties in Washington, but according to a great number of interviews, his motives can’t be taken seriously. “Employees were afraid to speak up in meetings,” the report reads, “because if they had a different view, Mr. Mayorkas would ‘cut them up, take them apart, or put them in their place.’”
“Another high-ranking official,” it continues, “described going to a meeting with Mr. Mayorkas as feeling like ‘going into a lion’s den to justify our existence as a Christian… That scenario always comes to a predictable end.’”
“I fear,” one official emailed when the Reid deal began, “we are entering a whole new phase of yuck.”
It’s all in the IG report — a report that helped earn Mayorkas 41 Republican nays, four abstains, and zero yays when Obama nominated him for a promotion to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security — the department Biden now wants him to lead. Democrats were less concerned, voting unanimously for him with only his old friend Leader Reid sitting it out (a customary move when his vote is not needed).
The behavior detailed in the report isn’t a career standout: Favors for the powerful are no strange game to Mayorkas. As his term as President Bill Clinton’s attorney for Central California drew to a close, he used his power to become the most influential person in favor of commuting the sentence of Carlos Vignali, Jr., who was serving 15 years for trafficking massive amounts of cocaine.
“U.S. Attorney Alejandro Mayorkas provided critical support for the Vignali commutation that was inappropriate, given his position,”a 2002 House of Representatives report reads. “Mayorkas, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was asked by Horacio Vignali to call the White House in support of his son’s clemency petition.”
“His call,” the report continues, “conveyed support for the Vignali commutation … despite his knowledge that the prosecutors responsible for the Vignali case opposed clemency.”
So why would he make the call? In short, Vignali Sr. was a major Democratic backer, who made donations to powerful politicians in Los Angeles.
Once again a Hillary Clinton brother — this time Hugh Rodham — joined in on the fun, earning $204,200 for “working part-time for two months gathering materials in support of Vignali’s case and making telephone calls to White House staff.” When his sister and brother in law pressured him to return the money, the congressional report reads, he returned just $50,000.
These are the circles Mayorkas runs in, and has for decades. Even the Hunter Biden-China trouble doesn’t seem enough to dissuade Joe Biden from wanting him to defend the homeland.
He was “smart, charismatic, and persuasive,” his old employees said. “Full of emotion, impulsive, volatile, and tenacious.” In other words, he does well in Washington — and so do his friends. That is, if Democrats win in Georgia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on Twitter.
Two California megachurches pastors have rebranded their churches into temporary “strip clubs”in protest of the state’s closing down of places of worship due to the COVID-19 pandemic while permitting strip clubs to stay open.
In November, San Diego Superior Court Judge Joel R. Wohlfeil ordered California to end any actions that prevent clubs from “being allowed to provide live adult entertainment.” Meanwhile, several California churches continue to fight legal battles with authorities to reopen in-person indoor services.
Last Sunday, Godspeak Calvary Chapel Pastor Rob McCoy, who has sparred with local authorities over orders prohibiting indoor worship services, circumvented the restrictions by turning his church into a “strip club” of his own, RT reports. In a video circulating of the service, McCoy first plays a Fox News clip of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who quipped that churches should reopen as a “temporary strip club.”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with the strip clubs,” Huckabee says in the clip. “I do have quite a bit of experience with churches … and I would think it’s ridiculous to say that people are safer in a strip club than they are at church.”
Huckabee suggested churches must “announce their pastor will remove his tie during the sermon, and therefore he will take off an article of clothing making it a temporary strip club so that people will be able to go to church.”
McCoy, who was previously fined thousands of dollars for holding church despite restrictions, then breaks out in a clean version of a “striptease” before removing his tie as music plays in the background.
“This is insane!” McCoy said afterward. “Cannot America see the hypocrisy and the stupidity of all this? You’re being lied to.”
McCoy told pastors who “don’t do politics” to “get out of the church” because the church is “all about politics.”
“You’re contending for the welfare and the concerns and the livelihood of your neighbors. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Those that are abused are being quarantined with their abusers. The elderly are lonely and isolated for no reason. No one gets to attend the funerals of their loved ones … it’s our responsibility to support folks.”
“We are finished with your tyranny,” he declared.
Also in protest of the order, Senior Pastor of Awaken Church Jurgen Matthesius did a “striptease” before his sermon. In a video posted on social media, the pastor is seen removing his tie as music plays in the background.
“STRIP CLUBS (Not Churches) are exempt from the COVID lockdowns, and are deemed essential by our governor!” he wrote on Instagram.
“Soooooo… we decided we are NOW AWAKEN FAMILY FRIENDLY STRIP CLUB! (Where we strip the devil of his hold, power & authority over people’s lives!),” he captioned the video. “Enjoy the intro to the preach today!”
Under California’s current health order, indoor businesses in counties in the purple, meaning the area has more than seven COVID-19 new daily cases per 100,000 people, must remain closed. This includes indoor religious services.
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted temporary relief to the Pasadena-based Harvest Rock Church which sued over the state’s restrictions on in-person worship gatherings. Citing its recent 5-4 ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo to justify granting the relief, the high court sent the case back to the district court.
Harvest Rock had argued in its petition that for most of the year, Gov. Gavin Newsom “has continued to discriminate against Churches’ religious worship services while permitting myriad nonreligious entities to continue to gather without numerical restrictions inside the same house of worship and in other external comparable congregate assemblies.”
The church accused Newsom of “publicly encouraging and supporting mass protestors, rioters, and looters to gather without numerical restriction in blatant disregard for his own Orders[,]” and of personally disregarding his own orders, including an image taken of Newsom with a large group at a restaurant despite indoor dining restrictions.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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