At least two people were killed, and six others were injured in a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday, with police saying the suspected shooter was found dead at the scene. During an update Monday afternoon, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said a teacher and a teen student were killed. Barnes added that two students are also in critical condition, with life-threatening injuries.
A handgun was used by the shooter and the shooting was confined to one space, Barnes said. A motive for the shooting has yet to be determined.
Emergency vehicles are parked outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)
“Every child, every person in that building is a victim and will be a victim forever. We need to figure out and try to piece together what exactly happened,” Barnes said.
Barnes added that the shooter’s family was cooperating with police.
He said he did not believe that the school, which serves 200 students according to the school’s website, had a resource officer.
Police say that they train for active shooter situations “almost quarterly,” and that they had most recently conducted the training roughly two weeks ago.
At roughly 10:57 am local time, police responded to reports of an active shooter at the Abundant Life Christian School. They identified a “juvenile” deceased at the scene who they believe was responsible for the shooting. They are encouraging local residents to avoid the area.
Emergency vehicles are staged outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Barnes said officers did not fire their weapons when responding to the scene.
“This is something you prepare for, but that you hope you never have to do,” a police spokesman told reporters. “Today is a sad, sad day.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers ordered the flags of the United States and the state of Wisconsin to half-staff across the state immediately until sunset on Sun., Dec. 22, 2024
“There are no words to describe the devastation and heartbreak we feel today after the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison this morning,” Evers said in a statement.
“As a father, a grandfather, and as governor, it is unthinkable that a kid or an educator might wake up and go to school one morning and never come home. This should never happen, and I will never accept this as a foregone reality or stop working to change it.”
My full statement on the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School today in Madison.
I'm directing flags across the state to be immediately lowered to half-staff as we honor those whose lives were senselessly taken in this tragedy. pic.twitter.com/HYIjVYcqaF
Police said this remains an active and ongoing investigation and more information will be released as it is available.
“We currently need people to avoid the area,” police added.
Students have been fully evacuated from the school, and police have conducted multiple clears of the building. Barnes said they were conducting a third check using bomb-sniffing dogs “just in case.”
Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., where multiple injuries and deaths were reported following a shooting, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (Google Maps)
Police say they set up a unification center for students and parents immediately following the shooting.
The school also acknowledged the shooting in a post on Facebook, requesting prayers from the community.
“Prayers Requested! Today, we had an active shooter incident at ALCS. We are in the midst of following up. We will share information as we are able. Please pray for our Challenger Family,” the school wrote.
Emergency vehicles are parked outside the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where multiple injuries were reported following a shooting on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)
A former student of the school, Aaron Nienaber, told Fox News Digital that he attended high school at Abundant Life Christian from 2000 to 2004 and was shocked and saddened to see this happen at a place he cherished.
“It’s very sad to see this happening at a place where I have so many fond memories with the students and faculty and especially playing on the sports teams. This is not something that anyone would have ever seen coming at this small tight-knit school and community,” Nienaber said.
The FBI’s Milwaukee bureau says it has deployed agents to the scene to assist in investigating.
The White House has also confirmed that President Biden has been briefed on the shooting.
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
Below is my column on Fox.com on the settlement of ABC News of the defamation case brought by President-elect Donald Trump. The settlement has enflamed many on the left as well as reportedly some at ABC News. However, ABC likely saw this as a no-win situation as it faced potentially embarrassing depositions.
Added by WhatDidYouSay.org
Here is the column:
The late Richard J. Daley famously declared that “we as Democrats have no apologies to make to anyone.”
That doctrine seems still to be alive and well with many in the party when it comes to President-elect Donald Trump. After ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos apologized to Trump this week to settle a defamation lawsuit, many Democrats were apoplectic.
Marc Elias, the controversial lawyer involved in the funding of the infamous Steele dossier by the Clinton campaign, denounced ABC News for bending a knee to Trump. He then trolled for contributions for his own organization as “unapologetically pro-democracy.”
Of course, ABC was not apologizing for advancing democracy but for alleged defamation. The network and the anchor expressed “regret” for stating that Trump was found “liable for rape” in a New York civil case. (The jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed E. J. Carroll). While Trump was never convicted of rape, Stephanopoulos repeated the claim ten times in his interview with Re. Nancy Mace, (R., S.C.).
What made the settlement interesting is that ABC was previously relying on the statements of the judge in the New York case, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who declared that the charge of rape was “substantially true…as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Stephanopoulos played up his defiance of Trump with CBS’s late-night host Stephen Colbert. To the delight of Colbert, who regularly attacked Trump on his show and openly supported both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Stephanopoulos proclaimed that he wouldn’t be “cowed out of doing my job because of a threat.” He added, “Trump sued me because I used the word ‘rape,’ even though a judge said that’s in fact what did happen. We filed a motion to dismiss.”
So what happened?
Well, two things and both are related to the timing of the settlement.
First, the settlement came just before ABC and Stephanopoulos were to be called for depositions, as ordered by U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisette M. Reid. That discovery was likely to prove more embarrassing for the network than it would Trump and could have revealed internal messages on the controversy.
The danger is on full display in another courtroom where CNN has been losing critical motions in a defamation case where punitive damages could result. Anchor Jake Tapper and CNN are being sued by Navy veteran Zachary Young after falsely suggesting that he and his organization were exploiting desperate Afghan refugees. Discovery uncovered malicious and unprofessional emails from producers promising to “nail” Young and making the segment his “funeral.” Disney was not eager to put its matinee personality, Stephanopoulos, through a similar meat grinder.
Second, the settlement occurred after an election in which Trump won the trifecta of the White House, Congress, and the popular vote.
Like most media, ABC was known for its unrelenting attacks on Trump and favorable coverage toward his opponents. The network’s iconic show, The View, has become an unhinged, partisan rave session against Trump, Republicans, and the majority of American voters. The show’s hosts now regularly read retractions or corrections to blunt allegedly defamatory screeds from its hosts. It has gotten to the point that the ABC General Counsel may soon need a chair at the table.
Disney is trying to adopt a more neutral stance after years of opposition for its stances on political issues and accusations of ultra-woke products. It is still struggling to appeal to over half of the country, including the most recent controversy involving the star of its soon-to-be-released remake of Snow White.
After the election, actress Rachel Zegler declared herself “speechless” over the results. That would have been a welcomed state for Disney, but the actress then found her voice in the most polarizing way, publicly praying “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.” Zegler was clearly miscast in the film. It was the evil Queen that was supposed to harken “a blast of wind to fan my hate.”
On top of these controversies, ABC News was attacked by many over its handling of the Trump debate with Vice President Kamala Harris and it’sbiased “fact-checking.” With networks like MSNBC and CNN in a ratings and revenue free fall after the election, Disney clearly wants to start fresh with the new administration. Both are facing possible sales at potentially bargain basement prices. The media echo chamber against Trump failed spectacularly in this election. With record levels of distrust of mainstream or legacy media, the public has increasingly shifted to new media.
In the meantime, Trump has been running the table on lawfare with the dismissal of the two federal cases and a victory on presidential immunity in the Supreme Court. The Georgia prosecution is falling apart over the conduct of the prosecutors rather than that of the defendant. The New York civil case faced a highly skeptical court over the grotesque award against Trump and his corporation. Even Democratic politicians like Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) now feel comfortable admitting publicly that the New York hush money prosecution was “bullsh*t.”
For many politicians and pundits, the election seemed to flip the magnetic poles of the country. We now have ABC News giving millions to the Trump Presidential Library as democratic donors move toward a boycott of the Biden President Library.
With networks like MSNBC and CNN struggling for their very existence, ABC is intent on having a chair when the music stops. While the ABC settlement may not be an admission of guilt, it is a recognition of the reality after this historic election.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee has triggered a controversy after adopting the alternative spelling of “women” as permissible. Students will now be allowed to spell “women” as “womyn.” Parody and reality seem to have emerged given a past Babylon Bee skit (below).
The new 2024-2025 school year study lists include the feminist term “womyn” as an acceptable alternate spelling for “women.”
“womyn” however, has itself now been criticized as offensive. While some feminists wanted to de-masculinize the word and use either womyn or womxn, transgender advocates oppose the term because it is used by feminists who exclude transgender individuals. They also reject the alternative of “wombyn” as referring to a person with a womb as an alternative. That has led some, such as Jennie Kermode, chair of Trans Media Watch, to reject the term “womxn” in favor of “women” as now encompassing trans women.
A Scripps spokesperson pointed to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which has now recognized the alternate spelling for “women.”
Shakespeare might respond, “Inanity, thy name is womyn.”
Babylon Bee, however, appears to have gotten here first:
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Investigators say they have found “substantial evidence that many of these companies have been submitting fraudulent claims for EIDBI services that were not actually provided or that were not covered by the EIDBI program.”
FBI searches Minnesota autism service providers in connection with fraud investigation
by Luke Sprinkel – AlphaNews.org – Dec 12, 2024
Federal agents searched two autism service providers on Thursday morning. One of the provider, Smart Therapy Center, is located in Minneapolis and reportedly has connections with Feeding Our Future, a now-defunct nonprofit at the center of another federal fraud investigation. According to a search warrant obtained by Alpha News, the federal government has reason to believe that Smart Therapy Center has committed wire fraud, healthcare fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire and healthcare fraud. Star Autism Center in St. Cloud was also searched by federal agents today in connection with the alleged fraud.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
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A drone fell out of the sky and crashed into a New Jersey homeowner’s backyard Thursday night — prompting the town’s mayor to even drive to the scene to survey the site himself. The aircraft smashed down in a residential area of Pequannock Township in Morris County around 8:45 p.m. Thursday, according to police and dispatch audio. Officials determined the craft was “a hobby or toy type of drone” and “not a large commercial or military grade drone,” the Pequannock Police Department told The Post.
A drone spotted flying over New Jersey this month.@MendhamMike via Storyful
It comes on the heels of New Jersey cops warning of possible “copycats.” The video player is currently playing an ad.
“What we think is it started as some sort of Picatinny Arsenal base surveillance drill or operation but once it exploded online, this became a copycat situation,” one Garden State police chief theorized.
The US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center is located at the Picatinny Arsenal and is one of the sites where several mystery drone sightings have been reported, which has prompted concern. As a highly secure facility that develops and tests new bombs, guns, ammunition and warfare devices for all branches of the military, it is a target for espionage by foreign adversaries.
When The Post arrived at the crash site Thursday night, the resident was putting his trash cans out and declined to comment. However, as paranoia grips the state, the report of one crashing into a homeowner’s backyard had the mayor rushing to the scene.
The mayor of Pequannock, Ryan Herd, pulled up in a Ford Econoline work van to survey the crash scene for himself.
Multiple drones are seen over Bernardsville, NJ, on Dec. 5. AP
In the middle of the Ocean on a ferry and nothing around and then bam- drones appear out of no where in the middle of the sea.
Our government knows what it is but they aren’t telling us.
Herd told The Post “It is definitely not” one of the massive, car-size drones that purportedly have been hovering overhead. He said he’s “absolutely” concerned that “nobody knows whose drones are flying over us and what they’re flying over us for and where they’re taking off and landing.”
“Drones are flying over our houses, which is our private property. My family is here,” he added.
The Morris County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the incident.
Meanwhile, there was a second report of a downed drone that hit a powerline in nearby Randolph Township less than an hour later. The report turned out to be unfounded, the Morris County Sheriff’s Office confirmed.
In a follow-up phone call Friday morning, Herd urged residents not to chase after, shoot at or attempt to catch any of the large drones.
“We can’t be putting up Class 1 and Class 2 drones trying to follow these drones. God forbid something happens and it crashes into the big drone, and the big drone crashes into a house and kills six people — that’s going to be a problem,” he said.
Suspected drones over the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey on Dec. 5.@DougSpac
Local officials have told The Post that many sightings farther afield could be either civilian copycats flying their own drones or people mistaking planes, helicopters or satellites for UFOs.
After receiving reports of drone activity last month near Morris County, New Jersey, the Federal Aviation Administration issued temporary bans on drone flights over a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey — owned by President-elect Donald Trump — and over Picatinny Arsenal Military Base. The FAA says the bans were in response to requests from “federal security partners.”518
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday that federal investigators have been unable to verify any of the 3,000-plus reports of car-size drones patrolling the nighttime skies in recent weeks. Pentagon officials have said they do not believe the drones are a foreign asset.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said earlier this week the aircraft are “very sophisticated,” noting that “the minute you get your eyes on them, they go dark” — but promised residents that the devices are not a threat to public safety. Murphy said New Jerseyans should not shoot them out of the sky — but welcomed federal authorities to take them down to study, NJ.com reported.
In the aftermath of the contentious Supreme Court arguments in United States v. Skrmetti over state bans on puberty blockers and gender-altering surgeries, the United Kingdom reaffirmed that it finds the risks far outweigh the benefits of such treatments for minors under the currently available scientific evidence. The move by the liberal Labour Party stands in sharp contrast with the portrayal of the Biden Administration and the treatment of the subject by the liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was widely criticized for analogizing puberty-blocking drugs to taking aspirin. It appears that doctors in the UK are not ready to tell minors to just “take two puberty blockers and call me in the morning.”
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said last week, “Children’s health care must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”
The decision follows the release of the Cass Review, which was raised by the conservative justices as contradicting the factual representations of the Biden Administration, even leading Justice Samuel Alito to suggest that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the government might not have fulfilled their duty of candor to the tribunal. He noted that the Cass study found scant evidence that the benefits of transgender treatment are greater than the risks. He then delivered the haymaker: “I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement in your position or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw your statement.”
🔥🔥🔥Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito presses Elizabeth Prelogar on the experimental nature of "gender-affirming care."
Streeting cited significant doubts about the benefits of puberty blockers while noting the “significant risks” to children.
The government will allow puberty blockers to be administered to children in clinical trials. It is not clear if the Supreme Court will take “judicial notice” of the new decision, but it can.
In fairness to Sotomayor, she was trying to argue that all treatments have risks in making her aspirin analogy. Yet, the comment was taken as trivializing the alleged harm and trauma raised by many in this debate. These studies clearly show greater risks than those associated with aspirin. However, what the Biden Administration was arguing (and the liberal justices were seemingly supporting) is that states would be barred by the Court from reaching the same conclusion as the UK and other countries. Indeed, Streeting echoed what the states argued to the Supreme Court that the government must “act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.”
Almost twenty years ago, the country was outraged by allegations of an African-American stripper that she was hired and then gang raped by white Duke Lacrosse players. The story followed an all-too-familiar pattern. The media, professors, and pundits immediately treated the allegations as true and declared the crime as a manifestation of our racist society. Many demanded immediate suspensions of all of the students as the racial and class conflicts were emphasized in the media. As I wrote previously, Duke University joined the mob against its own students and discarded any semblance of due process or fairness. Now, the accuser Crystal Mangum has admitted that she made the whole thing up in an interview on the independent media outlet “Let’s Talk with Kat.” The problem is that little was likely learned in higher education from the experience.
The students found themselves in a nightmare as the media flash mob formed to call for their punishment. They were arrested and subject to the unethical and unprofessional treatment of former Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong. Nifong pandered to the press and the community in public speeches despite criticism from some of us that he was fueling the rage against the students despite serious questions over this account. He declared publicly:
“The information that I have does lead me to conclude that a rape did occur. The circumstances of the rape indicated a deep racial motivation for some of the things that were done. It makes a crime that is by its nature one of the most offensive and invasive even more so.”
From the outset, there were obvious problems with the account, including a lack of supporting forensic evidence that would ordinarily be found at the scene.
Nifong was later disbarred for his misconduct, including withholding exculpatory evidence. Even after the allegation was shown to be a hoax, former North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took the easy way out and declined to charge Mangum despite her ruining the lives of these students. She was later arrested and convicted of murdering her boyfriend.
Now, Mangum is admitting, “I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong, and I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me…[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”
It is heartening to see Mangum come to grips with what she did and ask for forgiveness. However, there remains a lack of such remorse from many in the press and higher education who helped lead this mob against these students. Years later, many continued to resist efforts to afford due process protections to those accused in higher education.
The media followed its usual pattern of dispensing with countervailing facts to fuel the racial elements or play up the class differences. Nancy Grace declared, “I’m so glad they didn’t miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape!”
Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy, who praised Nifong’s handling of the case, said publicly that “I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth.”
Feminist and journalist Amanda Marcotte writes for publications such as Salon and Slate. She captured the blind rage even after ethics charges were raised against Nifong, stating:
“I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good f**king god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f**ked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.”
Marcotte later deleted the statement and criticized Nifong.
The greatest unfairness to these students came not from such extreme voices but mainstream media, which showed little interest or comfort in exploring contradictions and gaps in the account.
As is often the case, the hoax was later revealed and there was a collective shrug from most in the media as we await the next cathartic case or controversy.
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Although Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz determined the FBI did not deploy undercover agents at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he did reveal the agency had 26 confidential human sources from various field offices in Washington, D.C., that day.
Horowitz’s assessment was disclosed in a report released Thursday on the FBI’s handling of confidential human sources and intelligence gathering in the lead-up to Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. Horowitz wrote that three of the 26 confidential human sources were tasked by FBI field offices before Jan. 6 “to report on domestic terrorism subjects who were possibly attending the event.”
He wrote one was tasked “to report on the activities of a predicated domestic terrorism subject who was separately planning to travel to D.C.” for the election certification vote; another was “to potentially report” on two domestic terrorism subjects from another FBI field office who were planning to travel to D.C. that day; and a third who informed their handling agent they intended to travel to D.C. on their own initiative and who then was tasked “to potentially report” on two domestic terrorism subjects identified by other FBI field offices who were planning to travel to D.C. that day.
He added none of the three was authorized “to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on Jan. 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on Jan. 6.”
Of the 26, Horowitz wrote four entered the Capitol during the riot, an additional 13 entered the restricted area around the Capitol — a security perimeter established in preparation for the certification vote — and nine neither entered a restricted area nor entered the Capitol or otherwise engaged in illegal activity.
“None of the CHSs who entered the Capitol, or a restricted area has been prosecuted to date,” Horowitz wrote. “The WFO [FBI Washington Field Office] did not know that a total of 26 CHSs would be in D.C. for the events of January 6 because only 4 field offices had informed the WFO or FBI Headquarters that CHSs under the relevant field office’s jurisdiction — 5 CHSs in total — would be traveling to D.C. on January 6.”
Horowitz determined many of the CHSs provided information relevant to the certification vote before Jan. 6 “and that a few CHSs also provided information about the riot as it occurred.”
“In addition, FBI field offices collected CHS reporting relevant to the January 6 Electoral Certification from CHSs who did not travel to D.C. for the event,” Horowitz wrote.
The report revealed among the information CHSs provided to their handling agents was that “extremist members of the Oath Keepers or other groups may become involved in unplanned violent activity on January 6”; that the number of Oath Keepers headed to D.C. “is 200+ strong”; travel plans being discussed by the Proud Boys; an individual purporting to be the leader of a group that had “500 people willing to storm the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6th”; and concerns for the safety of members of Congress on Jan. 6.
Horowitz’s report referred to the Oath Keepers as “a large but loosely organized collection of individuals, some of whom are associated with militias.” It said the Proud Boys “describes itself as a ‘pro-Western fraternal organization for men who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world; aka Western Chauvinists.'”
You ever watch someone try to pass off a cheap knockoff as the real thing?
Like the guy hawking “Rolexes” with ticking second hands? That’s Joe Biden in politics.
He was supposed to be the Left’s ultimate weapon — the 81-million-vote man who would crush Trump like a Coke can. But fast-forward, and Biden is now the flat club soda Democrats found in the back of their fridge.
Disaffected Democrats , including some from within his own administration, are furious with President Joe Biden for shrinking into a political non-entity since his party was walloped in last month’s election , according to multiple reports.
“He’s been so cavalier and selfish about how he approaches the final weeks of the job,” a former White House official told Politico.
The outlet — which spoke to nearly two dozen officials, including current and former White House staffers— reported that, since the Nov. 5 vote, Biden has mostly avoided unscripted events and press questions while neglecting to address policy matters on Capitol Hill and Democratic Party.
Many party officials, Politico reported, no longer even bother to monitor Biden’s daily activities. His interactions with media have been similarly muted: In two weeks of foreign traveling since the election, Biden uttered a mere seven words to the press pack traveling with him, the outlet said.
The president is yet to hold — or schedule — a post-election press conference, something his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama did before leaving office.
“This is one of the lamest of lame ducks we’ve seen with a Democratic administration,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the progressive Justice Democrats PAC, told the Wall Street Journal . “A massive missed opportunity.”
But let’s not act like this was unpredictable, okay? Democrats handpicked the guy who needed a GPS to find his way off stage. Biden mistook reporters for lawn ornaments and fell asleep in NATO meetings. Now they want him to lead? That’s like handing a drowning man a bowling ball.
And Democrats act surprised? Come on! They spent four years hiding Biden’s mental fumbles behind teleprompters and careful choreography. Now the jig’s up, and they’re mad the Wizard of Delaware turned out to be all curtain, no magic.
Captain Demento Goes AWOL
Now, the question on everyone’s mind: “Where’s Joe?” Democrats wanted Biden to disappear during the campaign, and now they’ve got their wish. In a recent interview, Victor Davis Hanson nailed it. Hansen declared that Donald Trump is stepping in as the de facto president.
Trump visited Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame. While there, Trump arm-wrestled Macron into submission, and Prince Harry proved to be a Trump fanboy. Trump’s out here shaking hands with foreign leaders, fixing global crises, and looking more presidential than the guy who actually lives in the White House. Biden, meanwhile, is probably still trying to figure out which button calls the nurse.
Syria, Ukraine, and That One Time Biden Tried to Blink
As Hanson pointed out in his interview, Assad’s regime is collapsing, Hamas is imploding, and Russia’s war effort is more embarrassing than Biden trying to spell Mika Brzezinski’s last name. Yet here’s Biden, sitting this one out like a college kid with “senioritis.” The man has yet to make a statement about turmoil in the Middle East that has caused a world-shattering vacuum.
Meanwhile, Trump’s strides comfortably back onto the global stage like he’s hosting The Apprentice: Global Edition. And as with all Leftist messes, it will take a Trumpian effort for the “cleanup on aisle 45”.
Democrats knew what they were getting — a man whose elevator stopped going to the top floor around 1988. Three-plus years of feckless leadership culminating with 3 months of no leadership.
Frankly, nobody really misses Biden. However, they still wonder where he is. Thankfully, Trump has stepped in and stepped up. For him, this is business as usual.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren D-Mass. is under fire for her statement to Joy Reid on MSNBC explaining why Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Warren explained that this was a “warning” that “you can only push people so far.” After a public outcry, Warren walked back her statement. Yet, the statement captures the growing radicalism on the left, particularly among anti-capitalist, Democratic Socialists, and other groups. It is also notable how many of the same political and media figures who were apoplectic and unrelenting over the false claim about Trump’s “fine people on both sides” statement are largely disinterested in this and other extreme comments on the left.
Reid has long been criticized for racist and extremist commentary. Warren seemed eager to play to the far-left audience after first noting that “Violence is never the answer,” but then adding the warning to others that “you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
The senator explained that “the visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.‘
“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
The comments came after various pundits and citizens celebrated the killing, including the former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz, who expressed “joy” over the murder (only to walk that back like Warren). Some have defended Lorenz and explained how, while they may not express joy, they understand where “she is coming from” in celebrating the murder of a healthcare executive.
Wanted posters have appeared throughout New York with the images of other CEOs (and of Thompson with a red X across his face). It is the same moral relativism that we have long seen in higher education on the left where violent rhetoric against conservatives or capitalists is common.
It is unclear if Mangione’s anti-capitalist views brought him into contact with known violent groups on the left, including Antifa. Just days before the murder, I wrote about how a liberal media site was selling Antifa products in celebration of the anti-free speech, violent group.
The different treatment given the statements of Trump and Warren are striking. Notably, the false claim received endless coverage and is still reported by the media despite being debunked. The Charlottesville controversy occurred at the start of Trump’s presidency and showed how the media was not interested in whether stories were true in the shift to open advocacy journalism.
What was evident to many of us listening was that Trump was referring to the debate over the removal of controversial historical statutes and noting that there were “very fine people on both sides.” As Snopes belatedly recognized years later, “while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’”
None of that mattered (or continues to matter to some) in the media because the narrative was better than the facts. Many in the media did not even acknowledge that Trump denied the spin given by his opponents and said that he was referring to the underlying issue of the protest. The statement was treated as demonstrably and unequivocally endorsing violence. It is the same reason why the statement of Warren and many on the left have not been given the same level of public condemnation even in the face of an actual murder. It does not fit the narrative.
Many celebrated Warren’s warnings and the implied rationalization for the murder. Others praised her gutsy take. The far-left publication The New Republic reported the Warren statement in positive terms in an article titled “Senator Elizabeth Warren had an awfully real reaction to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.”
TNR has been one of the promulgators of this story and attacked Trump in 2024 in what it called a “new” defense over his comments despite the fact that he has always maintained that he was referring to the overall protest over the monument. TNR also attacked Snopes for its fact check and “helping Trump.”
As I discuss in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” politicians use rage rhetoric to ride waves of public anger and garner supporters on the extremes of our political system. The same motive has led some Democratic leaders to embrace Antifa in the past. However, these establishment figures often find that being embraced as a revolutionary today often means that you are viewed as a reactionary tomorrow by the same radical allies in these movements.
President Joe Biden, seen here on the South Lawn of the White House on Dec. 1 after pardoning son Hunter, on Thursday pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 other people. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images
President Joe Biden released a list of 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations of sentences Thursday, setting the record for presidential clemencies in a single day. The White House described the majority of those pardoned as having committed “nonviolent drug offenses.” The list did not go into detail on specific crimes. The pardon list includes Mikhail Zemlyansky, a Long Island, New York, man who committed a $35 million fraud. New York City’s WNBC-TV reported prosecutors called it “the largest single no-fault car insurance fraud scheme ever prosecuted.”
John Paul Garcia’s name also appears on the list. The Las Vegas Optic’s jail log from July 26 reports Garcia was booked into the San Miguel County Detention Center for battery on a household member, despite the White House describing his crime as a “nonviolent offense.”
The full list of pardons and commutations can be found here.
The president is reportedly considering issuing preemptive pardons to President-elect Donald Trump’s political opponents, some of whom could include Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a White House press release.
“As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for nonviolent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
Trump promised he is “going to be acting very quickly” to pardon those imprisoned from the Jan. 6 protests in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Joe Biden on Dec. 1 granted his son, Hunter, a “full and unconditional pardon” for every federal offense that Hunter committed or may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1 of this year. That reneged on the promise the elder Biden made multiple times that he would not pardon his son.
Biden concluded his statement on Thursday’s clemency list by stating, “My administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions” over the coming weeks. He leaves office on Jan. 20.
Top Stories • Sam’s Club Begins Selling Dangerous Abortion Pill That Kills Babies • Dobbs is Saving Thousands of Babies From Abortions, CDC Stats Confirm • Trump Admin Can Help Defund Planned Parenthood by Defunding Research With Aborted Baby Parts • Nativity Scene Will be Displayed at the US Capitol for the First Time in American History • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News
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A.F. Branco Cartoon – The world is already viewing Trump as the leader of the free world, and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet, trying to put out fires created by the Biden administration’s incompetence.
PEACE IS THE PRIZE: Trump Calls for Immediate Ceasefire and Negotiations Between Ukraine and Russia to ‘End the Madness’ – Zelensky and the Kremlin React and List Their Conditions
By Paul Serran – The Gateway Pundit – Dec , 2024
Remember just a few months ago, when it was still verboten to talk about peace negotiations in the Ukraine war? Well, how time changes… Nowadays, barely a day passes by without some big development in this issue. In fact, we can say that, while Donald J. Trump hasn’t yet been inaugurated and General Keith Kellog hasn’t officially started his work as envoy, the negotiations appear to have begun in earnest. Today (08), Trump called for ‘an immediate ceasefire’ and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in order ‘to end the madness’. Many relevant people can write things on social media and it’s of little to no consequence. But we are talking about the ‘mean tweets’, here – even if now they are… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
When Clementine Breen began getting puberty blockers at age 12, she had no idea she was agreeing to become a lifelong patient. Breen, now a 20-year-old detransitioner, filed a lawsuit last Thursday against prominent child-gender specialist Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, alleging medical negligence.
Breen says Olson-Kennedy pushed her into irreversible transgender medical interventions at only 12 without proper psychological testing or monitoring of her mental health and the side effects of hormone regimens.
“I think telling me that the only treatment for my body issues was transitioning was kind of the worst thing for me, because in retrospect, I just have PTSD,” Breen told The Daily Signal.“I just needed treatment for what happened to me when I was a kid.”
Breen, currently a student at University of California-Los Angeles, not only began taking puberty blockers at 12 and testosterone at 13; she then had “top surgery”—a double mastectomy—at 14.
When she was 12, Breen went to her school guidance counselor to discuss negative feelings about her body. She didn’t know that her history as a victim of sexual abuse could be causing her discomfort with her identity as a woman.
“I was sexually assaulted when I was really young,” she said in an interview, “so I had a lot of like negative feelings about being a girl and being female. When I first expressed those feelings and looked for answers about that online, the first thing that came up was gender dysphoria and possible gender incongruence.”
Breen and the school guidance counselor reached the conclusion that she was transgender. But the counselor told her parents and teachers before she was sure that was the identity she wanted to claim, Breen said. Breen’s parents took her to see Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The hospital told The Daily Signal it does not “comment on pending litigation; and out of respect for patient privacy and in compliance with state and federal laws, we do not comment on specific patients and/or their treatment.”
Although Breen said her parents expected Olson-Kennedy to conclude that their daughter wasn’t transgender, since Breen experienced no gender dysphoria as a child, the doctor immediately affirmed that the preteen was a boy.
“At first it was a lot of surface-level questions about how I fit in and how I felt with my peers and how I felt about being a girl and what I wanted my future to look like,” Breen said. “I had so many negative feelings about being a girl, so I felt weirdly very validated when [Olson-Kennedy] told me that there was a very clear diagnosis of something physically wrong with my body and that it wasn’t me that was the problem.”
Olson-Kennedy convinced her parents to allow her to begin taking puberty blockers by telling them that the process was reversible, Breen told The Daily Signal. Shortly before she turned 14, Olson-Kennedy started her on testosterone.
“She proposed the idea of ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or living son’ to my parents, and I was not suicidal at the time,” Breen recalled. “So, I think she was sort of presenting that and the really grave statistics that are actually somewhat inaccurate to my parents, to incentivize them to keep going with the treatment.”
But the drugs only made Breen’s mental health worse.
“I was never actively suicidal before testosterone, but I was actively suicidal post-testosterone,” she recalled, “and I was much more symptomatic of things like depression or things that they were saying to my parents that they were treating with the cross-sex hormones.”
At 14, Breen underwent a double mastectomy to remove her breasts. Her mental state immediately got worse, and her anxiety developed into what she describes as a “psychotic break.”
“What really, really upset me is that I will never be able to breastfeed, and I will have to get surgery every 10 years to replace the implants, and it won’t look as natural as it should have been,” she said. “I will never know what my body should have looked like.”
"I will never know what my body should have looked like."
🦎Detransitioner Clementine Breen, 20, is suing top child gender doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy for medical negligence.
She now regrets her double mastectomy and years taking hormones, which she was told were reversible.… pic.twitter.com/bre3ct3Bha
Earlier this year, Breen began to discuss the past sexual abuse in therapy and to accept her female body.
“It wasn’t until I had actually gone through therapy that I started thinking, ‘Why am I really doing this?’ And I started actually picturing my future and when I got to college and I was in an all-male dorm,” she said, “and I just started looking around me. And I didn’t feel like I was living as myself.”
“I was living as somebody I created to run away from myself,” Breen told The Daily Signal.
At first, the 20-year-old didn’t want to go public. But as she reflected on her experience with Olson-Kennedy and the specialist’s “egregious” standard of care, Breen said, she became sure she needed to speak out.
Detrans Law, also known as the Law Firm of Campbell Miller Payne, is the legal representative for Breen in coordination with LiMandri & Jonna LLP and the Center for American Liberty.
“It would feel great to know not just that I would be getting justice, but that in the future, children would be treated better,” she said. “Because I think every child is entitled to proper diagnoses, proper mental health care, and I really hope that this [lawsuit] can change something about the standard of care.”
The butchery of young girls in the name of transgenderism must stop, Mark Trammell, executive director and general counsel of the Center for American Liberty, told The Daily Signal.
“It’s alarming how many young girls have been victimized by the gender-industrial complex,” Trammell said. “It’s imperative that every American takes a bold stand in the face of cancel culture to defend these girls’ innocence and basic human rights. If they’re not old enough to consent to a tattoo, they’re certainly not old enough to consent to double mastectomies and cross-sex hormones that alter their future.”
Olson-Kennedy came under fire in October for admitting to hiding the results of a two-year, $10 million, taxpayer-funded study that showed puberty blockers don’t improve children’s mental health. The physician directed the study, which involved putting 95 children who struggled with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers. The data won’t be released because “the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi writes, summarizing Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning.
Based on her own experiences, Breen said, transgender medical interventions for children should be illegal. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Wednesday in a case that is expected to decide whether states may ban irreversible transgender medical interventions for children.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the high court will decide whether a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers, hormone replacement regimens, and transgender surgeries for children is constitutional.
“I think it is important to tell kids that there’s nothing wrong with them physically, they’re perfect the way they are. And if they feel ashamed of who they are and ashamed of their body, that’s not their fault,” Breen said. “It’s other people’s fault for making them feel that way and learning to love yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself.”
Breen is hesitant to say transitioning is the wrong choice for everyone. But she doesn’t think kids can consent to procedures that are so “life-altering and impact fertility, impact function, impact your health, cholesterol, [and] bone density,” she said.
“A child can’t consent to becoming a lifelong patient,” Breen said.
When Clementine started puberty blockers at age 12, she had no idea it would irreversibly impact her health, fertility, bone density, and more.
"A child can't consent to becoming a lifelong patient," she told @DailySignal
When Clementine Breen started on puberty blockers, she was a 12-year-old child with no idea she wanted children of her own one day, she said. She shouldn’t have been allowed to make a decision that would potentially make her infertile, Breen added.
“I really hope in the future I can just move forward from this and live a happy life as a woman,” she said. “I really hope to be a mother one day. Hopefully, that’s possible. I have no idea. I hope I can just move forward from this and spend the rest of my life as who I was supposed to be.”
Looking back, Breen told The Daily Signal, she wishes that rather than prescribing puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy had told her that puberty is uncomfortable for everyone, especially girls who experienced sexual abuse.
“If she had just asked me if I had gone through sexual abuse, or if I had weird experiences in my childhood that may change my opinions about gender, I think I might have come to a different conclusion,” Breen said. “So, I really wish she sort of interrogated my ideas about womanhood.”
Would you be shocked to learn that Americans now view Joe Biden as the worst president of the last nine?
Of course, not — unless you’re as disconnected from reality as Biden himself or his dwindling pool of supporters. The idea of “81 million votes” now feels as believable as a fair game of three-card monte on a New York City sidewalk. Biden may have ridden into office on the crest of an alleged “historic mandate,” but history seems to have had the last laugh.
Let’s set the stage for this train wreck. According to an exclusive Daily Mail poll, Biden has managed to plummet past even the least flattering benchmarks of modern presidencies. The voters have spoken, and their verdict is devastating. Biden ranks dead last among the nine most recent presidents. Yes, worse than Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after Watergate. Worse than Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was defined by skyrocketing inflation and the Iran hostage crisis. Worse than every other president you could name—and you’d have to work pretty hard to find another to match this level of public disdain.
Hard to believe why it took so long for Democrats to impose the fatwa on Joe that eventually took him out less than 90 days before his ass-kicking by Trump. Laughably, Biden gets to keep his consolation prize of pretending to believe he beat Trump in 2020.
Here’s the breakdown of the poll:
44% of voters placed Biden in the bottom two, while only a meager 14% saw him as one of the best two. The result? A net score of -30, which buries him below Nixon (-25) and even Donald Trump (-15), who Leftist want to believe is a divisive figure.
James Johnson of J.L. Partners, the group behind the poll, didn’t mince words, calling the results “diabolical.” I’d call them a public performance review so bad it should come with a pink slip.
From 81 Million Votes to Bottom of the Barrel
Remember, Biden’s presidency began with that allegedrecord-breaking 81.2 million votes, surpassing even Obama (Baby Black Jesus) during his peak popularity? Well, it didn’t take long for the wheels to fall off the Biden express. Voters were told Biden would “heal the soul of America”—a vague slogan that feels as ironic of Biden “bringing decency to the White House”.
Biden’s presidency has been a highlight reel of legislative blunders, geopolitical missteps, and the kind of verbal gaffes that would make even the most forgiving of public speaker’s cringe. Inflation spiraled out of control, the southern border became a sieve, Afghanistan collapsed in a catastrophic withdrawal, and his administration championed economic policies that have left Americans wondering if we’re all trapped in a decades-long rerun of The Jimmy Carter Show.
Lies, Lies, and More Lies
Biden’s downfall isn’t just about bad policies or poor results. It’s about the lies. From tales of his supposed civil rights activism to his fictitious encounters with Amtrak employees, Biden’s fabrications are legendary. His latest scandal—the controversy surrounding his son’s legal troubles—might just be the final nail in his political coffin.
Let’s not mince words: the Hunter Biden saga is the kind of ethical quagmire that would sink any other politician. Biden’s deflection, obfuscation, and refusal to come clean about his role in his son’s legal woes have turned a bad situation into a full-blown debacle. His pardon of Hunter was a move so tone-deaf it would make Nero fiddling while Rome burned look like a masterstroke of PR strategy.
Biden vs. the Big Picture
So, what does this all tell us? Simply put, Biden’s presidency is a cautionary tale of what happens when you ignore merit in favor of narratives. He ascended to office as the “anti-Trump,” a figurehead for unity, empathy, and stability. Instead, we got a leader whose performance has left Americans more divided, anxious, and skeptical of government than ever before. The poll results reflect this deep dissatisfaction, with voters saying, loud and clear, that they’ve had enough.
Clearly, Biden’s legacy will not be one of healing or leadership. Instead, he will likely be remembered as the president who squandered his so-called mandate, mismanaged crises at every turn, and alienated the very people he promised to serve. From legislative failures to moral lapses, Biden has managed to become a punchline in his own tragic comedy.
The bottom line? Biden’s presidency is a masterclass in how far a politician can fall—and how fast. Whether through incompetence, dishonesty, or sheer hubris, Biden has managed to turn “the most votes in history” into the most dismal presidency in recent memory. As for his supporters? Even they must feel like they’ve been left holding a very empty bag.
History will one day move Biden from the worst of 9 presidents to the worst president ever.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the news reports that outgoing Rep. Susan Wild (D. Pa.) was the person who violated the rules (and oath) of the House Ethics Committee and leaked information to the media this month. The information concerned the investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.). Wild embodies the collapsing ethical foundation of the Democratic Party as members struggle to justify the Biden pardon.
Here is the slightly expanded column:
“You must be wary of those seeking to use their influence and their expertise to wrongful ends.” Those words were spoken at the George Washington Law School commencement ceremony two years ago by the recently defeated Rep. Susan Wild (D., Pa.).
This week, the words took on a new meaning after Wild was accused of leaking information from the House Ethics Committee. Wild embodies a party that is in an ethical and political free fall this month. If news reports are accurate, Wild appears to have given our students a curious ethical lesson in how not to be a lawyer or legislator.
Wild was fighting to release the report of the investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.). When Gaetz decided to withdraw from Congress, the report was not released. That is when details from the committee were leaked to the media, and the press reported that “two sources said Wild ultimately acknowledged to the panel that she had leaked information.”
Keep in mind that this is the House Ethics Committee, and she is a member. She is also a member of Congress who took an oath as part of the panel’s rules that “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will not disclose, to any person or entity outside the Committee on Ethics, any information received in the course of my service with the Committee, except as authorized by the Committee or in accordance with its rules.”
Wild herself has not publicly confirmed or denied the alleged leaking of the information. If the reports are true, Wild knowingly violated an oath that she took not to release information from the Ethics Committee because she was unhappy with losing votes on the release of information.
Her office seems to have shrugged off media inquiries. As in the past controversy, Wild has avoided public comment on the report that she was the leaker.
This controversy speaks to more than one unethical former representative. This month, we have seen Democrats line up to support one of the most unethical and abusive uses of presidential pardon power in history. President Biden not only pardoned his son but pardoned him for any crimes over a decade, including some that many felt implicated President Biden himself.
The President issued the pardon after repeatedly lying to the public when he was a candidate that he would never do so. In the previous election, Biden lied to the public about not having met Hunter Biden’s clients or having knowledge of his dealings in the influence-peddling scandal.
Biden’s lack of ethics surprised no one. However, even today, the support that he received from Democratic leaders over the pardon has been shocking. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate majority whip, even called it a “labor of love.” Indeed, much of the corruption in Washington is a labor of love, from nepotism to influence peddling to corrupt pardons. Indeed, faced with overwhelming opposition of the public to the Biden pardon, Democratic members look like the comical choreography of “Prisoners of Love” from the movie The Producers. (“Oh, you can lock us up and lose the key; But hearts in love are always free!”).
The distorted view of ethics in the Democratic Party was vividly on display during an embarrassing moment recently at the White House when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that a poll showed “64% of the American people agree with the pardon — 64% of the American people. So, we get a sense of where the American people are on this.” That poll actually showed the majority of Americans opposed the pardon. Yet, it was 64 percent of Democrats who favored a president giving his own son a pardon. It is all about the ends rather than the means in today’s politics of rage.
The 2022 words of Wild were particularly poignant because they were used as part of a false attack made by Wild at my own school. In a speech to the law students on living an ethical life as a lawyer, Wild accused me of testifying falsely in the Trump impeachment that only criminal acts are impeachable after saying the opposite in my testimony in the Clinton impeachment. The only problem is that Wild’s statement was demonstrably and undeniably false. I testified in both the Clinton and Trump impeachments that an impeachable offense need not be an actual crime. Ironically, Wild’s own Democratic colleagues and later the House managers in the Senate Trump trial repeatedly cited my testimony on that very point.
None of this matters in the Wild world of Democratic ethics. It is very simple. Whatever Democrats are attempting cannot be “wrongful ends.” More importantly, it is the ends, not the means, that are the measure of ethics. Since they are only fighting for what is right, the ends justify the means from cleansing ballots of Republicans (including Trump) to supporting a massive censorship system to ignoring court decisions to count invalid votes. It is the same sense of ethics that led someone at the Supreme Court to leak a draft of the Dobbs decision. Even though the leak shattered court ethical rules and traditions, the leaker was lionized by many on the left.
For years, the “by any means necessary” wing has dominated the Democratic Party. Ironically, the collapsing of the party’s credibility with the public has left little to show beyond a litany of unethical means used to achieve unrealized ends.
Below is my column in USA Today on states and cities joining the “resistance” to the Trump Administration and its immigration policies. Last week, California Attorney General (AG) Rob Bonta joined that alliance after issuing new guidance to courthouses, healthcare facilities, universities, schools, labor agencies, public libraries and shelters on opposing federal enforcement efforts. However, the costs of the resistance will be borne by the citizens of these states and cities in a confrontation with federal authority.
Here is the column:
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston recently became the latest Democratic leader to engage in a chest-pounding call to arms in resistance to the incoming Trump administration’s plan to deport people who entered the United States unlawfully. While a post-election poll by YouGov for CBS News shows that a massive 73% of adults want President-elect Donald Trump to prioritize the repatriation of illegal migrants, the mayor pledged to not only have Denver police “stationed at the county line to keep (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) out” but also that “you would have 50,000 Denverites there.” Johnston said it would be like a “Tiananmen Square moment” and answered yes when questioned whether he’d be ready to go to jail.
That moment soon passed, however, as lawyers apparently explained to the mayor that armed resistance to the federal government is often called – wait for it – insurrection. It appears that Johnston was not keen on becoming the Jefferson Davis of the left, so he backpedaled, stating, “Would I have taken it back if I could? Yes, I probably wouldn’t have used that image.”
Yet, Johnston is not alone in pledging resistance to repatriation efforts. Cities are reaffirming or adopting sanctuary city status, including most recently Boston. The cities pledge to continue their ban on any cooperation with the federal government in detaining or removing unlawful migrants. Other mayors are pledging to use city funds to pay for the defense costs of those fighting deportation. The doubling down on sanctuary city promises will likely draw more migrants to those communities, which some mayors have welcomed despite the heavy costs of housing, education and other city services.
Immigration proved to be one of the top issues for voters in this year’s election, which brought control of both houses of Congress and the White House to the GOP. Citizens overwhelmingly supported new tough immigration measures, including deportations. With Democratic cities joining the “resistance,” they may find the costs even higher. Congress cannot compel cooperation without triggering constitutional concerns. In Federalist #46, James Madison recognized the right of state officials to oppose federal policies, including “the refusal to co-operate with officers of the Union.”
In cases such as Printz v. United States (1997), which involved federal requirements that states cooperate on gun control measures, the Supreme Court enforced an anti-commandeering line that allowed states to refuse such federal orders.
Cities rely on federal money to pay for migrant services
However, this is a two-way street. Just as cities and states do not have to carry water for the federal government, the federal government does not have to supply the water to the states. The second Trump administration and Congress can play hardball by barring federal funds in various areas for these cities. With their status as sanctuary cities, housing, law enforcement and social programming costs will continue to rise. Many of those budgets are heavily infused with federal funding. However, if cities resist or frustrate federal policy, there are ample reasons why the federal government might restrict funding.
Such measures can go too far. The Supreme Court has warned that financial penalties can be so coercive that they effectively commandeer states. However, the federal government is not required to spend money on services where costs are rising at least in part because of resistance to federal law. Under constitutional law, the federal government cannot be a bully, but it does not have to be a chump.
It’s clear that elected leaders like Johnston did not think very long or well before starting a war with the incoming administration. In addition to the possible loss of federal funds, acts of resistance can trigger criminal liability if they amount to actively shielding or hiding unlawful migrants sought by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under federal immigration law, it is a felony when anyone in “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.”
That is not triggered by a simple refusal to cooperate, but some officials have been accused of crossing the line, including state judges. It also could endanger private groups that work closely with these cities in housing and transporting unlawful migrants.
Obama defended federal government’s power over immigration
Moreover, as I wrote recently, Trump can cite a curious ally in this fight: Barack Obama. During the Obama administration, the federal government largely triumphed over states in barring their interference with federal immigration policies. Back then, Democrats supported President Obama in claiming that the federal government had overriding authority on immigration in cases like Arizona v. United States.
The pressure on cities could grow if the Trump administration prioritizes members of violent gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or Tren de Aragua for deportation. To resist those efforts would be politically unpalatable in cities dealing with crime associated with such gangs. It could take years to hash out these efforts. However, if Denver’s Mayor Johnston is any measure of the resistance, the chest-pounding may decline when the federal funding dries up.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Biden’s parting gift to President-Elect Trump is what could be the beginning of World War 3. Biden’s domestic and foreign policies have been a disaster, leaving a major mess for Trump to clean up when he returns.
World War 3 Watch: “Globalists Want Hot War Between NATO and Russia to Prevent Trump Presidency”
By Collin McMahon – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 18, 2024
The failed Biden Regime is in full-on panic mode as there seems no way to prevent Donald Trump’s team of MAGA superheroes from pursuing the Biden crimes to the full extent of the law. Now the only option left seems to be full-on nuclear war. After Don Jr., politicians from around the world are warning of the dangerous escalation in Ukraine planned by the lame-duck Biden administration. Sven von Storch is the chair of Germany’s largest pro-Trump grassroots patriotic organization, the Berlin-based Civil Alliance, with approx. 200.000 members, which was one of the precursors of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. He and his wife, AfD vice-chair Beatrix von Storch, are allied with Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage and Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro. Born and raised in Chile, he moved to block the new woke Chilean constituton, which was defeated by referendum 2023… READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Now that Joe Biden is on his way out, what is to become of Hunter’s painting career now that it can’t be used in their pay-to-play scene? It may be time for a close-out sale.
Hunter Biden Uses Shady Art Dealer with Strong Ties to China to Sell His Garbage Artwork For Up to $500,000 Per Painting – Buyers Will be Kept ‘Confidential’
By Cristina Laila – The Gateway Pundit – Jun 15, 2021
Tell us you’re laundering money without telling us you’re laundering money. Crackhead-turned international bagman-turned hipster artist Hunter Biden is working with a shady SoHo art dealer with strong ties to China to hold an exhibition in New York this fall. According to the New York Post, Soho art dealer Georges Bergès has strong ties to China and was once arrested for “terrorist threats.” Bergès will host a “private viewing for Biden in Los Angeles this fall, followed by an exhibition in New York.” Bergès told Artnet. Hunter’s artwork will “range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.” Bergès says ‘sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector.’ How convenient… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Trump Names Pro-Life Attorney Harmeet Dhillon Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights • Trump Won’t Commit to Restricting Abortion Pills That are Killing Women and Babies, But “Things Change” • Biden Denied Timely Health Care to Veterans While Turning VA Clinics Into Abortion Centers • She Was in the Waiting Room for the Abortion, But When Her Name Was Called She Left. Now Her Son’s an Adult • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News
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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Top Stories • Nancy Pelosi Brags About Defying Her Bishop to Receive Communion • 29 Abortion Centers Closed This Year, Now 14 States are Abortion-Free • Trump Appointment of Harmeet Dhillon to DOJ is a Huge Pro-Life Victory • Pro-Life Leader Says Donald Trump is Open to Limits on Dangerous Abortion Pill • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News
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U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Syria in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 8, 2024, following a crisis meeting to discuss the sudden overthrow by Islamist-led rebels of President Bashar al-Assad. | CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden said the United States is monitoring rebel groups in Syria following the downfall of the Assad regime and is concerned for the safety of Americans living in the country.
In remarks given on Sunday afternoon, Biden addressed reports that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had fled Syria as rebel forces took over the capital of Damascus.
“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” Biden said. “This regime brutalized, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians. The fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice. It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria.”
Biden acknowledged that there was much “uncertainty” facing Syria, noting that there is a chance that extremist Islamic groups might “take advantage” of the power vacuum to take over. Biden promised to continue military efforts against Islamic State elements in the country, to work with regional leaders to maintain stability, and “engage with all Syrian groups” to create “an independent sovereign Syria.”
“We will remain vigilant,” he continued. “Make no mistake: some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” he added, likely referring to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.K., among other groups. In 2018, The U.S. imposed a $10 million bounty on the head of HTS’ leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who has been designated as a terrorist since 2013.
“We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days. They’re saying the right things now, but as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”
Biden added that his administration was “mindful” that there were Americans present in Syria, including individuals who have been taken hostage, such as Austin Tice, a Marine-turned-journalist, who was abducted by jihadist militants over 12 years ago.
“It is now incumbent upon all the opposition groups to seek a role in governing Syria,” Biden added. “To demonstrate their commitment to the rights of all Syrians, the rule of law, and the protection of religious and ethnic minorities.”
Late Saturday night, after more than a decade of civil war, rebel forces successfully forced Assad to flee the country, ending around 50 years of his family ruling Syria as a dictatorship. Following Assad’s departure, crowds flooded the streets of Damascus, chanting “Allah is great” and shouting anti-Assad slogans, reported The Associated Press.
“My feelings are indescribable,” said Omar Daher, a 29-year-old lawyer, in comments given to the AP. “After the fear that [Assad] and his father made us live in for many years, and the panic and state of terror that I was living in, I can’t believe it.”
Despite the celebrations, some have expressed concern over the potential fallout from the regime collapse, especially for the nation’s vulnerable Christian community and other minority groups. Since the violence began in 2011, Syria’s native Christian population has declined considerably from around 10% of the country, or 1.5 million, to approximately 300,000 at present, reported Crux Now.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, indicated she will confirm Pete Hegseth as the next secretary of defense on Monday. The announcement marks a stark pivot for Ernst, who has been leading a behind-the-scenes effort to tank Hegseth’s nomination.
“I appreciate Pete Hegseth’s responsiveness and respect for the process,” Ernst said in a press release. “Following our encouraging conversations, Pete committed to completing a full audit of the Pentagon and selecting a senior official who will uphold the roles and value of our servicemen and women — based on quality and standards, not quotas — and who will prioritize and strengthen my work to prevent sexual assault within the ranks. As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources.”
The statement was issued following Ernst’s Monday afternoon meeting with Hegseth on Capitol Hill. The Iowa senator previously met the Army veteran to discuss his nomination to lead the Pentagon last week. When asked about his most recent talk with Ernst, Hegseth told reporters it “was a very good meeting,” and expressed appreciation for “her commitment to the process.”
“We look forward to working together,” Hegseth said.
Ernst has faced immense backlash throughout the past several days for refusing to support Hegseth’s nomination. Multiple sources within Trump world with direct knowledge of her efforts told The Federalist last week that Ernst has been waging an “aggressive” personal jihad against the former Fox News host. Her reported actions have included making personal calls to Trump to urge him to dump Hegseth ahead of her meeting with the Army veteran last week, and enlisting Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to lobby Trump to replace Hegseth with Ernst.
“She’s waging a campaign to replace Pete with herself,” a Trump source familiar with her phone calls with Trump said.
Who is Sen. Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican trying to tank Pete Hegseth’s defense secretary nomination?
A deep dive into her record reveals a pattern of repeatedly betraying her voters’ interests. 🧵1/ https://t.co/ApXej8zZyh
Hegseth has come under a barrage of unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing during his time working at Fox News and spearheading veteran-related nonprofit organizations. Numerous former colleagues and associates have come out stronglydisputing the accusations from anonymous sources.
A woman also previously accused Hegseth of sexual assault following a purported 2017 sexual encounter between the two.Prosecutors declined to press charges due to a lack of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to reports.
Trump reaffirmed his support for Hegseth to lead the Pentagon in Truth Social post on Friday. He also stood by the Army veteran’s nomination during his recent interview with NBC News hack Kristen Welker.
“He’s a young guy with a tremendous track record. Actually, went to Princeton and went to Harvard. He was a good student at both. But he loves the military, and I think people are starting to see it,” Trump told Welker. “I’ve had a lot of senators call me up saying he’s fantastic.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Democrats love promising a “peaceful transition of power,” but history—and their actions—tell a different story.
When Obama handed the reins to Trump, he made a big show of professionalism while his DOJ quietly sharpened its knives. Four years of investigations, conspiracies, and obstruction later, the Democrats finally ousted Trump using their COVID-19 coup, complete with ballot-stuffing, midnight counting, and media complicity. But their victory was short-lived, leaving Biden with the unenviable task of ushering in yet another “peaceful transition”—this time back to Trump.
Biden’s Legacy of Chaos
Let’s take stock of what Joe Biden is leaving behind. Start with Bidenflation:
Interest rates that discourage investment, particularly for small businesses. Families struggling to stretch their dollars farther than a triathlete on a treadmill.
Instead of financing our recent $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit by issuing 10- and 30-year bonds, Janet Yellen has instead loaded up on two-year Treasury bills in a what has been described as “a nakedly political effort to avoid a massive jump in mortgage rates.” Mortgage rates created by Bidenflation, I remind you.
Aristotle wrote about “moderation in all things,” but he didn’t anticipate Joe Biden or Leftism. Biden’s economic policies aren’t just unmoderated; they’re unhinged. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is drained to critical levels, energy prices are volatile, and Biden’s administration seems to think solar panels is the answer.
And what of the military? It’s in shambles. Recruitment numbers are dismally low, matched by our stockpile of weapons. We can thank Biden for his proxy war in Ukraine and his failure to manage the Middle East, where Iran and its proxies, including a resurgent Al Qaeda that recently took control of Syria flex their muscles. In short, the world is a much less safe place under Joe Biden.
And then there’s the Department of Justice, which under Biden and Obama transformed from an institution of law to a political cudgel. Public trust in the DOJ is at an all-time low, but Biden isn’t addressing the problem—he’s doubling down, reportedly planning to pardon key players in his administration to shield them from accountability.
The Irony of Democrat Spending
If Biden’s administration were a business, it would be Enron. Trillions of dollars are unaccounted for across multiple agencies. The CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were boondoggles, diverting taxpayer money to pet projects that failed to deliver. Even Biden admitted the IRA was less about reducing inflation and more about funding the global climate agenda. John Podesta, the man controlling $375 billion from the IRA, might as well be handing out blank checks at a lobbyist convention.
Let’s not forget Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who burned $7.5 billion on eight electric vehicle charging stations. That’s a cost-per-station that would make Elon Musk burst out laughing—or crying. And Kamala Harris, armed with $42 billion for rural internet, has accomplished as much as she did at the border: absolutely nothing.
Funding the Resistance?
A recent exposé from Project Veritas revealed EPA adviser Brent Efron bragging about funneling money to tribes, nonprofits, and states as quickly as possible before Trump’s team could intervene.
“It feels like we’re on the Titanic and throwing gold bars off the edge,” he said.
For once, the metaphor fits: Democrats are sinking, but they’re determined to take everyone else down with them.
“We gave them the money because it was harder if it was a government-run program, they could take the money away, if Trump won.”, Efron exclaims.
Even Elon Musk weighed in, calling the video proof that “the U.S. government is actively working to undermine the American people.”
Trump’s Transition Team: From Chaos to Competence
Trump has made it clear that his second term will prioritize results over rhetoric. His administration will cut through the debris of Biden’s failures with laser focus, appointing experts—not diversity freaks—to tackle America’s most urgent problems.
Energy independence will be restored.
Government employees will be expected to actually show up to work as President Trump dismantles Biden’s attempt to prevent 42,000 workers at the Social Security Administration from having to return to the office.
Wasteful spending on unproductive programs will be slashed.
Gone will be the carnival of incompetence that defined the Biden administration. Trump’s team will hit the ground running, undoing four years of damage in record time.
Peaceful Transition This!
Aristotle said, “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” The Biden administration proved to be a masterclass in hypocrisy and self-destruction. And their transition has been no different.
Despite inheriting the worst administration in history, Trump’s first 100 days will be epic. And the transformation of America back to greatness will begin on Day One. A short of adrenalin is about to hit America, and it will last 4 years, challenging the boom of the Clinton years.
If Trump performs as I predict (and he will), Democrats will be hard-pressed to win major elections for the next decade at least.
In short, Trump doesn’t care about the so-called “peaceful transition”. He has a man on his team who can replace NASA. And he appointed others who are equally talented in their own ways. Gone are the DEI appointments, and freak show of the Biden administration. This transition team knows it’s at war with Biden. And like the election, this too will be an easy victory.
Below is my column in The Hill on the calls for “blanket pardons” for hundreds and even thousands of people. Despite Trump’s ill-considered statement about how the J6 Committee members should go to jail for what they did on NBC this weekend, Trump has also insisted that he wants “success” to be his revenge. Many in the media are also omitting that Trump immediately said “no” to whether he would direct either the Attorney General or the FBI director to indict or investigate. While I have been a vocal critic of the J6 Committee, I know of no crime that could be credibly pursued against the members, as I have written. More importantly, presidents do not just send people to jail. There will be no round-up of opponents and democracy will survive. We have an entire constitutional system designed to prevent arbitrary prosecutions or authoritarian measures. These White Knight pardons are meant to preserve a collapsing narrative of how Trump wants to round up his enemies and end democracy. It has resulted in a strange and uniquely Washington phenomenon: pardon envy.
Here is the column:
Liberal pundits and press in Washington are facing a growing nightmare in Washington. No, it is not the victory of President-elect Donald Trump or the Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress and the popular vote in this election. It is the possibility that democracy may not collapse as predicted, and Trump might not even round up his opponents en masse.
For months, liberals have been telling voters that this will likely be their last election and that democracy is about to end in the U.S. ABC host Whoopi Goldberg declared on “The View” that Trump will immediately become a dictator who will “put you people away … take all the journalists … take all the gay folks … move you all around and disappear you.”
Many predicted they would be on the top of the enemies list and the first to be rounded up.
Now, the moment is nearly here, and pundits are dreading that the public may notice there is no line of democracy champions being frog-marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. Faced with such a scenario and a further loss of credibility, many are coming up with the next best thing — pretending they stopped the roundup by having Biden pardon everyone. The spin will be that Trump would have gone after rivals but was prevented from doing so by Biden.
The idea is to portray yourself as a white knight, riding down to protect the vulnerable and timid from the coming hoard.
Even if democracy inconveniently survives, Biden can preserve the narrative with sweeping pardons. The White House is reportedly exploring giving preemptive pardons to figures ranging from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
Cheney previously declared that this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” A pardon would preserve her persona as a modern-day Joan of Arc who avoided being burnt at the stake only by the grace of a Biden pardon. Others seem to be panicking that there may be a list of pardoned people, but they will be left off. Call it “Pardon Envy.” The only thing worse than not being on a Trump enemies list is not being on a Biden pardon list.
Before the election, MSNBC host Al Sharpton and regular Donny Deutsch warned viewers that they would likely be added to an “enemies list.” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow ominously told her viewers that, “Yes, I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us.”
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin seemed apoplectic that she and others might be omitted from both lists. One has to be somewhat sympathetic to Rubin. To be left both unpardoned and unarrested is to lose all standing among the “save democracy” social set.
Rubin, once dubbed the Post’s Republican columnist, has called for the Republican Party to be burned down and recently advised people how to keep panic alive despite the election: “You can’t talk broad themes. You have to boil it down to nuts and bolts, and you have to be pithy. What do I mean by pithy? How about this: Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s true.”
In a podcast, Rubin explained that Biden should pardon “thousands” to blunt Trump’s “initial round of revenge” from journalists to the “little guy and gal” counting votes. She advised that he should pardon whole “categories” of people to pardon anyone Trump may have “identified by name or type” to offer “protection from a maniac.”
In her most recent column, Rubin repeated the call for Biden to pardon “scores of Americans” due to a “reasonable fear that a weaponized FBI directed by a vengeful president will carry out threats to pursue his enemies.”
The key is to issue broad pardons to suggest that, absent such extraordinary action, “this maniac” would have purged whole areas of blue states. It is like telling everyone that you are wearing a tin-foil hat to prevent aliens from snatching you. When someone points out that they have not seen any aliens, you can respond, “See, it worked!”
The Biden White House is considering the use of such white-knight pardons to claim that the president did not protect just his son (and himself) with the pardon power but many others. Biden wants to remove the stain of his abuse of the pardon power to benefit his own family by turning it into a literal party favor for other Democrats and Trump critics. Even though Trump has denied any interest in retribution, saying that “my revenge will be a success,” preemptive pardons leave the impression that they did in fact preempt something that would have occurred.
A white-knight pardon can also work when you are protecting someone who does not want to be saved. That is the case with a Trump pardon. Such a pardon is absolutely not needed and would constitute the most hostile pardon in history. The federal cases against Trump are effectively dead. Even though they were dismissed without prejudice, it is extremely unlikely they would be resumed. Moreover, the cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith were riddled with constitutional problems and unlikely to be sustained even with a conviction.
The only ongoing legal threat to Trump is from Democratic prosecutors on the state level, such as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. A pardon would not apply to such cases anyway.
Yet, to pardon Trump for nonexistent federal cases would be to suggest that Biden saved him from prosecution. This is the same president who did nothing for years until the cases collapsed. He would now claim that he worked to bring the nation together after calling Trump a virtual Nazi and his supporters “garbage.”
Trump may be the only one who is not interested in a trophy pardon. What is the value of being part of the resistance if you are not being pursued, persecuted or pardoned?
It seems like some of the same people who had hoped to be on the list for the Biden Inaugural balls are now making calls to make the Biden pardon list. If Biden were to yield to calls for hundreds or even thousands of pardons, the loss of political standing for those not making the list could become intolerable. For any self-respecting armchair resistance fighter in 2025, a Biden pardon could become the latest status symbol.
We previously discussed the defamation lawsuit brought by Navy veteran Zachary Young against CNN and anchor Jake Tapper. Young has been doing well in court and last week he won on additional major issues against CNN. In a pair of orders, the jury will be allowed to award punitive damages, and his experts would be allowed to be heard by the jury on the damages in the case. It also found that the Navy veteran was not a public figure and thus is not subject to the higher standard of proof associated with that status.
The punitive damages decision is particularly interesting legally. It could prove financially onerous for the struggling network, which has plunging ratings and has reduced staff.
The court found that CNN’s “retraction” was insufficient to remove punitive damages from the table. In my torts class, we discuss retraction statutes and the requirements of time and clarity. I specifically discussed the CNN case.
The report at the heart of the case aired on a Nov. 11, 2021 segment on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” and was shared on social media and (a different version) on CNN’s website. In the segment, Tapper tells his audience ominously how CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt discovered “Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success.”
Marquardt piled on in the segment, claiming that “desperate Afghans are being exploited” and need to pay “exorbitant, often impossible amounts” to flee the country. He then named Young and his company as an example of that startling claim.
The damages in the case could be massive but Young was facing the higher New York Times v. Sullivan standard of “actual malice,” requiring a showing of knowing falsehood or a reckless disregard of the truth. Judge Roberts previously found that “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages.”
The evidence included messages from Marquardt that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” After promising to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!” Likewise, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan described Young as “a shit.”
As is often done by media, CNN allegedly gave Young only two hours to respond before the story ran. It is a typical ploy of the press to claim that they waited for a response while giving the target the smallest possible window. In this case, Young was able to respond in the short time and Marquardt messaged a colleague, “fucking Young just texted.”
That record supports a showing of actual malice. However, CNN wanted to avoid punitive damages with a claim of retraction. Under Florida’s Section §770.02(1), a publication seeking this protection must publish a “full and fair correction, apology or retraction.” While the statute does not define “full and fair” it does specify that the retraction shall be “published in the same editions or corresponding issues of the newspaper or periodical” where the original article appeared and ‘in as conspicuous place and type’ as the original, or for a broadcast “at a comparable time.”
In this case, Jake Tapper made the following statement on March 25, 2022:
“And before we go, a correction. In November, we ran a story about Afghans desperate to pay high sums beyond the reach of average Afghans. The story included a lead-in and banner throughout the story that referenced a black market. The use of the term black market in the story was in error. The story included reporting on Zachary Young, a private operator who had been contacted by family members of Afghans trying to flee the country. We didn’t mean to suggest that Mr. Young participated in the black market. We regret the error and to Mr. Young, we apologize.”
However, the court noted:
“The retraction/correction was not made during the other television shows in which the Segment aired. No retraction, correction or apology was posted on any online article or with any social media posting. Defendant’s representatives referred to the statement made on the Jake Tapper show as a correction rather than a retraction.”
Not only did the court find that insufficient, but it menacingly added, “the Court finds that there is an issue of material fact as to whether Defendant published a full and fair retraction as required by §770.02 for the televised segment and no retraction for the social media and online article postings, which could be additional evidence of actual malice.”
This is relatively new ground for the Florida courts and will undoubtedly be appealed in time. For now, punitive damages will remain an option for the jury. The message to news organizations is that minimizing retractions can produce a critical loss of the coverage of the common statutory provisions protecting the media.
It is also worth noting that Young was found to be a private individual and not a “public figure.” After the Supreme Court handed down New York Times v. Sullivan, it extended the actual malice standard from public officials to public figures. In Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 345 (1974), the Court wrote:
“Hypothetically, it may be possible for someone to become a public figure through no purposeful action of his own, but the instances of truly involuntary public figures must be exceedingly rare. For the most part those who attain this status have assumed roles of especial prominence in the affairs of society. Some occupy positions of such persuasive power and influence that they are deemed public figures for all purposes. More commonly, those classed as public figures have thrust themselves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved. In either event, they invite attention and comment.”
The Supreme Court has held that public figure status applies when someone “thrust[s] himself into the vortex of [the] public issue [and] engage[s] the public’s attention in an attempt to influence its outcome.” A limited-purpose public figure status applies if someone voluntarily “draw[s] attention to himself” or allows himself to become part of a controversy “as a fulcrum to create public discussion.” Wolston v. Reader’s Digest Association, 443 U.S. 157, 168 (1979).
In creating this higher burden, the Court sought to create “breathing space” for the media by articulating that standard for both public officials and public figures. Public figures are viewed as having an enhanced ability to defend themselves and engaging in “self-help” in the face of criticism. The Court also viewed these figures as thrusting themselves into the public eye, voluntarily assuming the risk of heightened criticism. I have previously written about the continuing questions over the inclusion of public figures with public officials in tort actions.
However, the court found that Young did not trip this wire.
“Young’s limited posts do not constitute him thrusting himself ‘to the forefront’ of the Afghanistan evacuation ‘controversy.’ In total, Plaintiffs worked for four companies and evacuated 22 people from Afghanistan. Per Defendant’s Segment, ‘[t]here [were] fewer than Page 13 of 34100 American citizens in Afghanistan who [were] ready to leave’ and ‘countless Afghans, including thousands who worked for or aided the US . . . who are frantically trying to leave.’ While Young was clearly trying to advertise his services, it can hardly be said that he played a sufficiently central role or was at the forefront in being able to influence the resolution of all those unable to escape Afghanistan. He was not going to get all these thousands of people out, nor was he ever intending to as he (according to his posts and testimony) was only assisting those with sponsors. He also was not going to convince the Taliban to let these folks leave the country. As such, Plaintiffs do not meet the test for this second suggested controversy to be labeled as limited public figures.”
The court also ruled that Young would be allowed to keep his economic damages expert witness, Richard Bolko, a ruling that, in conjunction with the punitive damages matter, could spell real trouble for CNN.
When now President-Elect Donald Trump was convicted, the thrill-kill atmosphere around the courthouse and the country was explosive, but no one was more ecstatic than liberal columnist and former prosecutor Harry Litman. The then L.A. Times columnist told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it was a “majestic day” and “a day to celebrate.” A lawfare advocate, Litman excitedly laid out how Trump could be barred from office, declaring that the raid in Mar-a-Lago was the “whole enchilada” in ending Trump’s political career. Now, Litman has resigned from the L.A. Times because the owner wants more diversity of opinion in the newspaper. Litman went on MSNBC to declare that “this is not a time for balance.”
Those seven words sum up much of what has destroyed American media with millions turning away from the echo chamber created by the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and other publications. Litman is not alone. Many liberals are dispensing with the pretense of declaring opposing views “disinformation” and are now openly fighting to preserve ideological echo chambers and media silos.
In my new book, The Indispensable Right, I write about the decline of newspapers as part of the “advocacy journalism” movement. Opinion pages became little more than screeds for the left, including legal commentators who have been consistently wrong and misleading on merits of challenges or cases.
Last year, Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Litman has been one of the most unabashed lawfare warriors. Even when the Justice Department was seeking to dismiss the Flynn case, Lipman wrote an L.A. Times column advising Judge Emmet Sullivan how to “make trouble” for the administration. Litman admitted there is “very little leeway to reject the government’s decisions to dismiss charges” but encouraged Sullivan to “accomplish what Congress, multiple inspectors general, and a majority of the electorate have not been able to do — hold the president and his allies accountable for their contemptuous disregard for the rule of law.”
On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Litman declared to Nicolle Wallace that Trump’s victory is “an absolute five-alarm fire.” He called the effort to restore a diversity of viewpoints as little more than an attempt “to curry favor with Trump.” He then added:
“And I just think this is not a time for balance when you have someone who’s not telling the truth on the other side. And it’s a deep responsibility. And instead, I think they cowered and are worried about their personal holdings and just being threatened by Trump. And that’s a really shameful capitulation, I think. So, I just felt I couldn’t be a part of it and had to resign.”
It was a telling moment. Litman appeared on a network that has lost half of its viewership and is fighting for its existence in an effort by NBCUniversal to unload it. Readers are fleeing to new media after papers like the L.A. Times and the Washington Post literally wrote off half of the country. Yet, these figures would rather lose their jobs and media platforms than their bias.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Missing ballots put Minnesota House at 67 – 67 tie. An investigation into ballot discrepancies in Scott County is still ongoing, but preliminary conclusions released today from the county attorney state that 20 ballots were likely thrown away without being counted.
20 ballots likely ‘thrown away’ in Scott County, preliminary investigation says
By Luke Sprinkel – Alpha News – Nov 27, 2024
After a recount, Democrat Brad Tabke leads Republican Aaron Paul by just 14 votes. An investigation into ballot discrepancies in Scott County is still ongoing, but preliminary conclusions released today from the county attorney state that 20 ballots were likely thrown away without being counted. Earlier this month, the county announced that its elections manager “identified a discrepancy in the count of ballots, in which 21 more absentee records than ballots were counted in the City of Shakopee.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon – If you can’t join them, beat them. Trump will use his tariff club to negotiate better deals and positions for the U.S… Even before becoming president, you see countries falling in line. What America needed all along is a strong leader like Trump.
MEAN TWEETS ARE BACK: Trump Puts BRICS on Notice, Threatens Countries With 100% Tariffs if They Try To Replace the ‘Mighty’ Dollar
By Paul Serran – The Gateway Pundit – Nov 30, 2024
And so, we’ve come to the point where the ‘mean tweets’ are fully back, and President-Elect Donald J. Trump is dishing out policy initiatives and warnings to actors around the world via his own postings. Today (30), Trump’s target was the BRICS countries: – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. The ‘multipolarity’ initiative, while almost a decade old, took great impulse during Joe Biden’s Administration from hell, in which the absolute lack of leadership and national project opened the doors for other solutions in the… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
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Pete Hegseth has the combat leadership experience, academic pedigree, and profound love of country necessary to make our military great again. I served with him in the 34th Infantry Division and succeeded him in leading Concerned Veterans for America, and I wholeheartedly endorse his nomination to be our next secretary of defense.
President Trump knows that the Pentagon is in desperate need of reform, and the best way to accomplish that is to send a true outsider to run the show. The Make America Great Again movement has no better outsider to fix our broken military than Pete Hegseth, and he will also be a true loyalist to President Trump’s agenda.
Hegseth’s leadership will ensure our military returns to the basics of defeating our adversaries, rather than pushing a social justice agenda. Our military is in the midst of a readiness and recruitment crisis, and reform is needed fast. Hegseth and I served as infantry rifle platoon leaders in combat. Warfighters don’t have the luxury of being distracted by frivolous matters during combat operations. We focused on what I called the Big Four: shoot, move, communicate, and stop bleeding. Transgender surgeries and understanding white rage didn’t quite make the list.
I served as the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), succeeding Hegseth, who brought this group to national prominence. Contrary to media reports based on anonymous sources, I can confirm that Hegseth was not fired. It was common knowledge within CVA that he was going to Fox News. This is nothing more than another tired media attack from an apparatus hell-bent on destroying his nomination.
The media have falsely portrayed CVA as a dysfunctional organization under Hegseth’s leadership, but the executive team and strategy I inherited from him were world-class. The proof is in the policy victories we helped President Trump deliver for veterans by reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2017 and 2018.
The president agreed with our strategy. I quickly deployed the CVA grassroots army, which Hegseth built, to pressure Congress to pass these critically needed reforms. Our volunteers made thousands of citizen contacts by knocking on doors, hosting phone banks, and calling their members of Congress.
In less than six months, President Trump signed the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act. This would allow the government to fire bad and underperforming VA employees, especially the ones who allowed vets to die on secret waitlists. The next summer, President Trump signed the VA Mission Act, which provided vets with a choice in their health care.
Thanks to the policy vision of Pete Hegseth and the leadership of President Trump, these reforms brought the VA into the 21st century and likely saved thousands of lives.
That is the Pete Hegseth I know — a warfighter and visionary who loves his country. He will make a tremendous secretary of defense.
Mark Lucas is the executive vice president of the Article III Project. Lucas served as an infantry officer in the Iowa Army National Guard and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan during the deadliest year of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the authority to pardon offenses against the United States, a power intended to provide fairness and avoid prosecutorial abuses. Alexander Hamilton envisioned this clemency as a tool to “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.” But in the hands of Joe Biden, the pardon power looks less like a tool for justice and more like a sledgehammer wielded to shield a crumbling empire of corruption.
Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter has spotlighted the blatant hypocrisy of the Left’s use of clemency. After years of moral grandstanding, claiming the high road on justice and accountability, Democrats are now orchestrating mass pardons to shield themselves from the fallout of their own malfeasance.
Pardons as Preemptive Damage Control
During Trump’s presidency, Democrats practically dared him to issue preemptive pardons for his family, projecting their own propensity for guilt on the former president. When Trump pardoned Jared Kushner’s father, the media spun it as though he had pardoned Kushner himself. That narrative stuck, fueling the perception of Trump as corrupt, even as his actual record on pardons tells a different story.
Trump, notably, did not pardon his children or any close associates preemptively or otherwise. Why? Because they weren’t guilty of anything. Contrast that with Biden, whose pardons aren’t just reactive—they’re preemptive damage control for an administration rife with misconduct.
Leaks suggest Biden is for a laundry list of allies, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6th Committee. These aren’t minor players; they are key figures in the systemic abuse of power targeting Donald Trump and his supporters. The January 6th Committee alone violated so many laws it could be a semester-long case study at any law school.
Then there’s Fauci. A pardon for Fauci essentially extends to the entire health bureaucracy—NIH, FDA, CDC—that oversaw the disastrous COVID-19 policies. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of dissent, and the mishandling of public trust—it’s no wonder Biden would want to sweep this under the rug.
A Record-Breaking Abuse of Power
Historically, presidents have used pardons sparingly, often to right specific wrongs. Franklin D. Roosevelt holds the record with 2,819 pardons and 3,796 total acts of clemency, largely for people convicted under Prohibition laws. Barack Obama granted 1,927 acts of clemency, including a controversial commutation for Chelsea Manning.
But Biden’s pardon spree could make FDR’s record look modest. Biden’s administration isn’t dealing with isolated cases of injustice—it’s mopping up the collateral damage from years of systemic corruption.
Consider the scope:
The FBI: With over 37,000 employees, including 10,000 special agents, the agency’s involvement in targeting Trump and MAGA supporters is well-documented.
The CIA and NSA: These agencies, with a combined workforce exceeding 50,000, played their parts in surveillance and misinformation campaigns.
IRS and FISA Courts: From targeting conservative groups to enabling dubious investigations, their roles can’t be ignored.
Biden’s pardons could easily extend to thousands of individuals across these institutions, creating a tsunami of public outrage. This isn’t about restoring tranquility; it’s about cementing a legacy of corruption while protecting a broken system.
Democrats: Masters of Projection
The hypocrisy is staggering. Democrats who lambasted Trump for imagined abuses of power are now actively orchestrating the largest clemency cover-up in history. When Joy Reid and Adam Schiff criticized the idea of preemptive pardons, they framed it as an admission of guilt. Yet here we are, watching Biden prepare to issue blanket pardons to his political allies without a shred of irony.
Biden is now considering preemptive pardons, including one for Adam Schiff.
That makes this clip one of the best ever. 🤣
December, 2020. Joy Reid and Adam Schiff discuss family member and preemptive pardons. 🤪 pic.twitter.com/9oorNUFT79
Hunter Biden’s pardon set the tone: a sweeping, decade-long absolution for crimes ranging from tax evasion to illegal firearm possession. The message? Rules are for the little people.
Trump: A Study in Contrast
Trump’s approach to pardons highlights the glaring differences between the two administrations. While Biden’s pardons shield the guilty, Trumps were measured and purposeful. Trump used his clemency power to address specific injustices, such as Alice Johnson’s over-sentencing or the persecution of Michael Flynn. More importantly, Trump didn’t shield himself or his family. His restraint underscores the integrity of his administration compared to the flagrant abuses we’re witnessing now.
Rebuilding Trust in Justice
Biden’s pardon spree will leave a lasting stain on America’s institutions. But it also presents an opportunity for renewal. When Trump returns to office, he will face the monumental task of rebuilding trust in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This starts with accountability. Anyone receiving a Biden pardon should be immediately dismissed from public service. A pardon may erase legal culpability, but it doesn’t absolve moral or professional failure. The system must be purged of those who abused their positions for political gain.
Restoring faith in justice won’t be easy, but it’s essential. Americans need to believe that no one—not even the president—is above the law.
The Firestorm to Come
Biden’s mass pardons will ignite a firestorm in the American psyche. The fallout will resonate for decades, exposing the depth of corruption in our government. But it also serves as a rallying cry for reform.
The Left’s strategy of weaponizing clemency to protect their own has backfired. Instead of tranquility, they’ve sown chaos. And as the dust settles, what America will see is the scattered carcasses of Democrats who participated in this farce.
Justice must prevail, not as an act of revenge, but as a restoration of the principles that made this nation great.
It appears no liberal Christmas is complete without the ultimate stocking stuffer: an actual stocking to wear over your face while rioting. While not yet selling face coverings for anonymous violence, Crooked Media, co-founded by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, is selling a line of Antifa items for liberals wanting to make a statement against any “Peace on Earth.” (As of this posting, Antifa items were still being sold on the “Crooked Store” site). You can now proudly wear your “Antifa Dad” hat to signal your support for political violence and deplatforming. It is the ultimate naughty gift list for putting the slay back into your Sleigh Bells.
These liberal hosts and their “POD SAVE AMERICA” show have been featured on various shows and courted by figures like Hillary Clinton. There is no apparent backlash for their support of one of the most violent groups in the world, which routinely attacks journalists and anyone who holds opposing views. Imagine the media response if a conservative site started selling “Proud Boy” items. Yet, Crooked Media is now offering liberals the chance to buy “ANTIFA” onesies for babies, a T-shirt for toddlers reading “ANTIFA” and other items.
Just to make sure that everyone understands the support for the violent group, a spokesperson for Crooked Media told Fox News Digital that the clothes it has listed on its website “are not a joke.” The spokesman added that “all toddlers are antifa until their souls are broken by capitalism.”
“Antifa originated with European anarchist and Marxist groups from the 1920s, particularly Antifaschistische Aktion, a Communist group from the Weimar Republic before World War II. Its name resulted from the shortening of the German word antifaschistisch. In the United States, the modern movement emerged through the Anti- Racist Action (ARA) groups, which were dominated by anarchists and Marxists. It has an association with the anarchist organization Love and Rage, which was founded by former Trotsky and Marxist followers as well as offshoots like Mexico’s Amor Y Rabia. The oldest U.S. group is likely the Rose City Antifa (RCA) in Portland, Oregon, which would become the center of violent riots during the Trump years. The anarchist roots of the group give it the same organizational profile as such groups in the early twentieth century with uncertain leadership and undefined structures.”
Despite the denial of its existence by figures like Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), I have long written and spoken about the threat of Antifa to free speech on our campuses and in our communities. This includes testimony before Congress on Antifa’s central role in the anti-free speech movement nationally. As I have previously written, it has long been the “Keyser Söze” of the anti-free speech movement, a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association. Yet, FBI Director Chris Wray has repeatedly pushed back on the denials of Antifa’s work or violence. In one hearing, Wray stated, “And we have quite a number” — and “Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a fiction.”
Some Democrats have played a dangerous game in supporting or excusing the work of Antifa. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence, and its website was banned in Germany.
Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer. During a prior hearing, Democratic senators refused to clearly denounce Antifa and falsely suggested that the far right was the primary cause of recent violence. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”
It is at its base a movement at war with free speech, defining the right itself as a tool of oppression. That purpose is evident in what is called the “bible” of the Antifa movement: Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
Bray emphasizes the struggle of the movement against free speech: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase that says, ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’”
Bray admits that “most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists… From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
Now, liberal families can bring a small part of that political violence into their homes for the holiday to pledge that there will be no peace or silent nights so long as opposing views are heard. Antifa has gone retail, and there is no better way to celebrate political violence and rage than your Antifa onesie.
With tensions rising after the election, the embrace of organizations like Antifa will only fuel calls for violent action. Liberal figures like ex-Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz have even conveyed support for the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan.
It is not the time to go full naughty list to celebrate a group that regularly beats reporters and others with opposing viewpoints. While this may appeal to your own special smash-mouth Santa, tis the season for political violence.
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US Representative Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., a member of the US Representative Jared Moskowitz D-Fla., speaks to the press after touring the shooting site at the Butler Farm Show Grounds on August 26, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans to cut waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government’s nearly $7 trillion budget through President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is beginning to attract support from a notable group: Democratic lawmakers.
Democratic Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz is the first Democratic lawmaker to join the House’s Department of Government Efficiency Caucus helmed by Republican Reps. Aaron Bean of Florida and Pete Sessions of Texas, according to a Tuesday press release.
“Today. I will join the Congressional DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] Caucus, because I believe that streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” Moskowitz wrote. “I’ve been clear that there are ways we can reorganize our government to make it work better for the American people.”
The Florida Democrat is asking the Department of Government Efficiency to examine the Department of Homeland Security’s budget and has suggested that the commission recommend establishing the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency—currently under DHS control—as independent agencies, according to Moskowitz’s press release.
“For the people at DOGE, if Vivek and Elon are listening, you need to look at Homeland [Security Department],” Moskowitz said during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Nov. 19, where the Florida Democrat advocated for DHS reform.
Moskowitz’s Democratic colleague California Rep. Ro Khanna has also voiced support for the Department of Government Efficiency, particularly regarding the commission’s potential to trim the Department of Defense’s nearly $900 billion budget.
“Let me provide an area where there could be bipartisan collaboration. I mean—the defense budget which is nearly a trillion dollars,” Khanna told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Nov. 25 in an apparent endorsement of the efficiency department. “There has been tremendous reporting about the waste, fraud and abuse within that budget. The Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit—it has failed the last six or seven audits.”
“If they find areas of truly wasteful spending across the government, they will get support,” Khanna added.
On the other side of the Capitol, independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed Khanna’s support for the Department of Government Efficiency reforming the DOD’s budget.
“Elon Musk is right,” Sanders wrote in a post on X on Sunday. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its seventh audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”
The Republicans who joined Sanders in voting against the fiscal year 2024 national defense authorization act included Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Mike Braun of Indiana. Most Republican lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, incoming chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, advocate for increased military spending.
The Senate Department of Government Efficiency Caucus, led by Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, currently contains no Democratic members.
The Department of Government Efficiency has no statutory authority to reform the government’s budget and is planning to collaborate with the White House Office of Management and Budget to provide cost-cutting recommendations, according to an op-ed published by Vivek and Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 20. Given that Congress appropriates the money that constitutes the president’s budget, the Department of Government Efficiency will likely need congressional support to accomplish the commission’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government and eliminate wasteful spending.
Sanders and Khanna’s offices did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s inquiries about whether the two plan to join the House and Senate Department of Government Efficiency caucuses.
One of the campaign mantras by Leftists is that tariffs don’t work. Nothing works if you allow an idiot to manage it. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a competent person in the Biden administration. Actually, almost any Democrat administration for that matter.
As usual, Leftists dismiss solutions that work because they’re too busy clinging to their ineffective policies. And when your specialty is chaos, solutions are the last thing you want. Remember when Democrats screeched that President Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on goods was essentially a tax on Americans? Turns out, Trump doesn’t use tariffs as just a revenue tool, but in fact as a strategic weapon.
Trump’s tariffs weren’t about economic isolation—they were about leveraging America’s market powerto negotiate better deals and, more importantly, to protect U.S. interests.
A Masterclass in the Art of the Deal
Does anybody miss the idea of a President Kamala? Only the more ardent Democrat (idiot) would want Harris as POTUS, while watching President Trump work. To witness Trump at work is akin to watching Bobby Fischer play chess with novices.
Each tariff threat is calculated and targeted, crafted to address specific grievances while opening pathways to resolution. No blanket strategies, no one-size-fits-all nonsense. Every country is handled based on its unique relationship with the U.S., its trade practices, and—most importantly—what America needs to maintain its edge. This isn’t policy-by-template; this is The Art of the Deal in action.
Take Canada and Mexico, for instance. Trump recently turned his attention toward these two neighbors with a bold ultimatum: curb the inflow of migrants and drugs or face the economic hammer of a 25% tariff. Both nations immediately scrambled to the negotiating table, recognizing that this wasn’t just posturing—it was a genuine warning backed by action.
Canada’s Hasty Retreat to Florida
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been known for his progressive rhetoric. But even he couldn’t ignore the gravity of Trump’s tariff threats. Just days after Trump floated his proposal, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, bringing along Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc. According to reports, Trudeau’s visit wasn’t just a diplomatic courtesy call—it was a desperate attempt to stave off Trump’s wrath. Trudeau had high-tailed it to Trump’s Florida base after the president-elect threatened to slam America’s northern neighbor with a 25% tariff on its goods, accusing Canada of being lax on immigration and drug enforcement at the border.
Fox News’ Peter Doocy reported on the exchange Monday, citing two sources who sat at the same table with the leaders during their meal.
“We are told that when Trudeau told President-elect Trump that new tariffs would kill the Canadian economy, Trump joked to him that if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the 51st state and Trudeau could become its governor,” Doocy reported.
Imagine the scene: Trudeau, fresh off his plane at Palm Beach International Airport, knocking on Trump’s golden door to plead Canada’s case. The stakes? Canada’s economy could take a massive hit from tariffs, particularly in sectors like fuels and vehicles. All toll, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada is over $50 billion.
Mexico’s Patriarchal Predicament
Meanwhile, Mexico’s Leftist female president finds herself in an unenviable position. Trump’s no-nonsense approach threatens to expose the vulnerabilities in Mexico’s governance, particularly its inability to control drug cartels and illegal migration. Mexico’s leader knows that public humiliation by Trump could shatter her domestic credibility in a patriarchal society. Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum says Canada “could only wish they had the cultural riches Mexico has” following a threat by President-elect Donald Trump to impose tariffs on both countries over the flow of migrants and drugs into the U.S.
Trump’s discussions weren’t about “cultural riches”, and they weren’t limited to tariffs. The discussion involved restoring accountability. Trump has made it abundantly clear that if Mexico doesn’t step up, America will act unilaterally—and decisively. Border partners carry a far greater responsibility, particularly given America’s border issue that ebbs and flows based on the party in office.
Why Tariffs Work: The Bigger Picture
Critics often claim that tariffs lead to higher costs for consumers, but that argument ignores the broader benefits. Trump’s tariffs on China, for example, reduced the trade deficit and brought billions back into the U.S. economy. In the same vein, the proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada serve a dual purpose: curbing illegal migration and fighting the scourge of fentanyl and other deadly drugs. When you understand that in 2023 illegals cost America $182 billion. Given our trade deficit with Mexico was roughly $130 billion in 2022, you can see the magnitude of illegal immigration in comparison.
The tariffs aren’t just punitive—they’re preventative. They incentivize countries to clean up their acts, knowing that the alternative is economic pain. And let’s not forget, the revenue generated from these tariffs can be reinvested into American infrastructure, industries, and workers. If Mexico expects to continue to enjoy the benefits of America’s economy, then they will capitulate. Or else.
America’s Economic Champion
Elections indeed have consequences. And the American voter knows who we needed as a country for our survival. Imagine the economic toll we would continue to suffer if Trump hadn’t been re-elected. In a budget where trillions are mentioned without flinching, it’s nice to watch a leader who understands how to bring billions back into the economy, and simultaneously cut government waste, abuse, and spending.
When you add all these incremental items together, Americans could see trillions returned to the treasury. A strong America allows for even better negotiations with other countries. Trump doesn’t just talk about putting America first—he does it, one tariff at a time.
More countries will get in lockstep with Trump or get kicked out of the band.
Next, we will discuss how President Trump plans to dismantle BRICS.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is under fire today for seemingly dismissing medical concerns over the risks of puberty blockers and gender surgeries for minors with a comparison to taking Aspirin. In the oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, Sotomayor pointed out that there are risks to any medical procedure or drug. However, the analogy belittled the concerns of many parents and groups over the research on the dangers of these treatments. It also highlighted how the Biden Administration and liberal justices were discarding countervailing research inconveniently at odds with their preferred legal conclusion.
The Biden administration is challenging Tennessee’s law banning gender-changing drugs and procedures for minors. That state cites studies that indicate serious complications or risks associated with the treatments for children.
While the conservative justices acknowledged studies on both sides of the debate over risks, the liberal justices seemed to dismiss studies that were inconsistent with striking down the law as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. That issue produced a difficult moment for Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito confronted her about statements made in her filing with the Court.
Alito quoted Prelogar’s petition to the Court that claimed that there was “overwhelming evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments as safe with positive results for children. Justice Alito, however, cited extensive countervailing research from European countries showing significant risks and potential harm. The World Health Organization has recognized these risks and lack of evidence supporting these procedures and researchers in Finland recently published a study showing that suicides among kids with gender dysphoria are extremely rare in contradiction to one of the common arguments made for adolescent treatment.
Alito also cited the United Kingdom’s Cass Review, released shortly after her filing. The Cass study found scant evidence that the benefits of transgender treatment are greater than the risks. He then delivered the haymaker: “I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement in your position or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw your statement.”
🔥🔥🔥Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito presses Elizabeth Prelogar on the experimental nature of "gender-affirming care."
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangio (who has previously argued that children as young as two years old can identify themselves as transgender) seemed to later acknowledge that very few gender-dysphoric children actually go through with suicide but insisted that the procedures reduce suicidal inclinations.
Justice Sotomayor seemed intent on defusing the problem with the opposing scientific research in her exchange with Tennessee Solicitor General Matthew Rice. In his argument, Rice stated that “they cannot eliminate the risk of detransitioners, so it becomes a pure exercise of weighing benefits versus risk. And the question of how many minors have to have their bodies irreparably harmed for unproven benefits is one that is best left to the legislature.”
That is when Sotomayor interjected: “I’m sorry, counselor. Every medical treatment has a risk — even taking Aspirin. There is always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that is going to suffer a harm.”
According to studies, aspirin can have potential side effects that are largely quite mild. The studies cited by the state are raising far more serious risks and medical changes, including irreversible double mastectomies, genital surgeries, sterilization and infertility. There can also be long-term effects in bone growth, bone density, and other developmental areas. Those risks have led European countries to change their policies on the treatments pending further study.
Rice: "How many minors have to have their bodies irreparably harmed for unproven benefits?"
The point is not that the justices should resolve this medical debate, but that it is properly resolved elsewhere, including in the state legislative process.
Sotomayor’s aspirin analogy seemed gratuitously dismissive for many and reminiscent of the response to scientists who questioned Covid protocols and policies from the six-foot rule to mask efficacy.
Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (who is now nominated to lead the National Institutes of Health) and others were vilified by the media over their dissenting views on the pandemic and efforts to show countervailing research. He and others signed the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.
All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.
Some scientists argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”
Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.
Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.
Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.
Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.
For scientists attacked and deplatformed for years, Sotomayor’s statements were painfully familiar. They also cited European and countervailing studies that the media dismissed as fringe views or conspiratorial viewpoints. In the same way, Justice Sotomayor’s analogy seemed to treat those raising these concerns (including parents) as akin to questioning the risks of aspirin. The import seemed to be that stopping taking aspirin based on minor concerns would be ridiculous and so too are objections to gender changing treatments and procedures.
The fact is some analogies are poorly chosen or misunderstood. However, the thrust of the comments from the justice were dismissive of the science supporting Tennessee and the 23 states with similar laws. That is roughly half of the states which want to adopt a more cautious approach. No one was arguing against adults being able to opt for such treatment, but these states do not want children to be subject to the treatments in light of this ongoing debate.
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A.F. Branco – RINOs and Democrats are Kavanaughing the Trump nomination for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, with a lot of anonymous accusations right out of their dirty playbook. The military complex swamp monsters are terrified of this guy.
“Bullsh*t. 100 Percent Bullsh*t. Actually… Horsesh*t.” – Will Cain DESTROYS NBC’s Latest Bogus Anonymous Hit Piece on Pete Hegseth
NBC News, known for its many Trump conspiracies and fake news reports, published a disgusting hit piece against Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary. The knives have been out for Pete since his nomination since he is not a member of the military-industrial complex and does not believe in blowing trillions of dollars on losing war war after war and surrendering to 8th-century barbarians. Hegseth scares the hell out of the Deep State so they are trying… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government has the authority to deport illegal immigrants even if local leaders try to impede the process. The case arose after King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an executive order in 2019 that instructed county officials to prohibit “fixed base operators” (FBO) on a county airfield from servicing flights chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport illegal immigrants who are lawfully removable. FBO’s “lease space from the airport and provide flights with essential services, such as fueling and landing stairs,” according to the ruling.
The Trump administration sued because the order impeded ICE from enforcing the law and removing illegal immigrants. The administration argued that the order violated the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and a World War II-era agreement that gave the federal government permission to use the King County airport.
The three-judge panel affirmed both contentions. The panel ruled that the executive order was a violation of the Supremacy Clause’s intergovernmental immunity doctrine because it “improperly regulates the way in which the federal government transports noncitizen detainees by preventing ICE from using private FBO contractors at Boeing Field.” The court also held that the executive order discriminated against the federal government by “regulat[ing] them unfavorably on some basis related to their governmental ‘status.’”
King County said it would not appeal the ruling, according to The Seattle Times.
The incoming Trump administration has vowed to solve the border crisis and deport illegal immigrants who are draining taxpayer resources, while hordes of so-called “sanctuary cities” nationwide oppose enforcement of federal immigration law and go so far as to refuse to comply with ICE authorities.
Tom Homan, dubbed the incoming “border czar,” has already warned sanctuary city officials not to resist or impede the federal government’s deportation activities.
“It is a felony to knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal immigrant from immigration authorities. Don’t test us,” Homan said.
One Democrat, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, has already vowed to mobilize police and residents “stationed at the county line” to “keep” federal immigration authorities “out” of the city. Johnston likened the hypothetical to Tiananmen Square but later tried to walk back the comparison.
Homan responded to Johnston’s open defiance, saying he is “willing to put [Johnston] in jail.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy traveled to Qatar and Israel to kick-start the President-elect’s diplomatic push to reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal before he takes office on Jan 20, a source briefed on the talks told Reuters.
Steve Witkoff, the incoming envoy, met separately in late November with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Qatar’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the source said. The meetings signal that the Gulf state of Qatar has resumed its role as a key mediator after suspending its role last month, the source said.
The Gulf country had worked alongside the U.S. and Egypt for months on fruitless indirect talks that have not achieved a lasting ceasefire between Israel and militant group Hamas in Gaza or the release of dozens of Israeli hostages held in the enclave. The source added that Hamas negotiators would likely return to the Qatari capital Doha to facilitate a fresh round of talks “soon.”
A U.S. official confirmed that Trump’s team has been in touch with Middle East officials.
“They are supportive of a Gaza ceasefire deal,” the official told Reuters.
Trump’s transition team and representatives for Witkoff did not immediately respond to a request for comment the meetings. The White House National Security Council did not immediately respond to questions on whether they were aware of Witkoff’s trips in recent weeks to Qatar and Israel.
Trump said on Monday there would be “hell to pay” in the Middle East if hostages held in the Gaza Strip were not released before his Jan. 20 inauguration
Witkoff, a real estate investor and Trump campaign donor with business ties to Qatar and other Gulf states, but no prior diplomatic experience, met Sheikh Mohammed, who also serves as foreign minister, in Doha on Nov 22.
“Both agreed a Gaza ceasefire is needed before Trump’s inauguration so that once the Trump administration takes office it can move onto other issues, like stabilizing Gaza and the region,” said the source, who had been briefed on meetings between Witkoff, Qatar and Israel and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Qatar’s foreign ministry did not respond to Reuters’ request for confirmation or comment.
Witkoff met Netanyahu in Israel the next day. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Witkoff met families of Israeli hostages, an Israeli official told Reuters.
He “spoke with them about Team Trump’s efforts to try and broker the deal before inauguration,” the official said.
Sheik Mohammed traveled to Vienna on Nov 24 to meet the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency David Barnea, who has led Israel’s talks with Qatar over the past 14 months.
“There are plans for a subsequent round of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas to take place potentially in Doha soon, but no specific date has been set,” the source said.
“Hamas’ negotiating team are likely to return to Doha to facilitate such talks.”
Qatar had been a key mediator of the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas until it announced last month it was suspending its role until they the two parties show “willingness and seriousness” to resume talks.
The Democrats find themselves in a mess of their own making—and what a glorious mess it is. They’ve managed to redefine political self-sabotage, creating a masterpiece of ineptitude that would make even the most bumbling bureaucrat blush. Let’s recap their genius strategy: after Biden’s stumble-filled tenure, they thought the solution was to parachute in Kamala Harris—the candidate nobody wanted. The woman who polled at a whopping one percent in her own party’s primary now carried the banner of “saving democracy.” Irony, thy name is the Democratic Party.
A Billion-Dollar Blunder
Kamala’s campaign wasn’t just a train wreck; it was a bullet train flying off the tracks at full speed. In a compressed timeline, she burned through $1.5 billion. Imagine the fiscal irresponsibility she could achieve with a full campaign cycle. Her penchant for turning campaign funds into Monopoly money is well-documented, but this time she truly outdid herself.
And for what? To lose spectacularly while leaving the Democratic coffers emptier than Hunter Biden’s alibi folder. The MSN article sheds light on this debacle, and it’s a doozy. It turns out that instead of crafting a message to connect with actual voters, the Democrats treated Harris’ campaign like a giant piggy bank for their wealthy consultants, donors, and advisors. Everyone was taking their skim, and Kamala was the unwitting ATM.
The Elite Bubble and the Working-Class Void
Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ senior advisor, hit the nail on the head when he described the Democrats’ elite bubble. This is a party that loves to talk about the working class but wouldn’t dare let them anywhere near the decision-making table. Instead, they hand the reins to billionaire donors like Reid Hoffman and corporate types like Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal officer. Because nothing says “fighting for the little guy” like having billionaires whispering sweet nothings in your campaign’s ear.
Hoffman, Cuban, and their ilk didn’t just fund the campaign—they steered it. According to reports, they watered down policies that might have resonated with actual voters, like a billionaire tax. Their advice? Tone it down. Don’t rock the yacht.
The result? A candidate with no coherent ideological framework, propped up by charisma alone, and a campaign that hemorrhaged money while alienating the very base it claimed to champion.
The Fallout: A Democratic Winter Is Coming
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Kamala’s campaign was a disaster for the Democrats, and the ramifications will echo for years. Their donors are disillusioned, their coffers are depleted, and their credibility is in tatters. The party of “fiscal responsibility for thee but not for me” now faces the grim reality that even its wealthiest backers are questioning their investments. After all, why pour billions into a party that can’t manage a basic campaign, let alone a country? MSN wrote:
According to Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt however, the problems with the Democratic Party’s structure and the way it runs campaigns go beyond just media consultants and the party’s love of paid ads. The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party-political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input.
“We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren’t in the elite bubble,” Shakir said. “You can be a good person with good character trying to do the right thing to try and help Kamala Harris win but when you are surrounded by monied interests you have to figure out how you don’t become bubblized.”
(…)
Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.
Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.
The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.
In Tobias’ opinion, the Democratic Party needs to put forth candidates who either outright turn down business executives with divergent interests from working-class Americans or candidates who will at least force them into a position where they are not influencing policy or the campaign. He says the seats at the table currently occupied by people like West, Cuban and Hoffman should instead be occupied by people that, at the very least, represent popular constituencies, like the president of the AFL-CIO.
The MSN article rightly points out the Democrats’ need to reconnect with their working-class roots. But Democrats haven’t cared about the working class since unions stopped being their ATM. Until they stop treating billionaires as political demigods and start listening to the people they claim to represent, their woes will only deepen.
Trump: The Wild Card
And then there’s Trump. Like a hawk circling a wounded rabbit, he’s watching the Democrats flail with glee. If Trump performs as expected in his second act, the Democrats are staring down not just one or two lost election cycles, but potentially four. A political winter is coming, and the Democrats are woefully unprepared.
They can’t rely on their old tricks anymore. Trump’s ability to expose their hypocrisy—like their claims of defending democracy while coronating Harris—has resonated. The contrast between Trump’s America-first policies and the Democrats’ donor-first priorities couldn’t be starker. And voters are noticing.
Lessons in Leadership (or Lack Thereof)
In the end, Kamala Harris put Democrats in a major pickle for two reasons: (1) she lost, and (2) she spent money like a crackhead who hit the Power Ball.
If there’s one takeaway from this fiasco, it’s that leadership matters. The Democrats bet the farm on Kamala Harris, and it backfired spectacularly. They didn’t just lose; they exposed themselves as a party more interested in appeasing elites than addressing the concerns of everyday Americans.
As Trump gears up for what promises to be a scorched-earth campaign, the Democrats have their work cut out for them. But if their strategy involves more coronations, more billion-dollar blunders, and more catering to the billionaire class, they might want to stock up on blankets. It’s going to be a long, cold winter in the wilderness of irrelevance.
Below is my column in The Hill on the Biden pardon and how it might not prove as complete a protection for Hunter Biden — or Joe Biden — as the President had hoped. Ironically, the greatest protection for President Biden in continuing investigations in the influence-peddling scandal could prove that very case that he has denounced that recognized presidential immunity for matters that arise during a presidency. Nevertheless, the action confirms the suspicion that Hunter’s bizarre criminal defense strategy may have been based on the assumption that he had a pocket pardon as insurance against any losses in court.
Here is the column:
The most shocking aspect of President Biden pardoning his own son, Hunter, may be that it was not in the least shocking, given the history of the Biden family. This abuse of the pardon power was widely anticipated even by his allies as the president repeatedly denied that he would ever do such a thing as he ran for reelection. Indeed, it may be the single most premeditated unethical act in political history.
However, it may not achieve what President Biden most hopes for: a clean slate for his son and himself in this massive corruption scandal.
Roughly two years ago, I wrote about how Biden might suddenly withdraw from the presidential race in 2024 and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act,” I wrote.
I further noted: “Everyone in Washington would win — except, of course, the public: The Bidens would keep alleged millions in influence-peddling profits; Hunter would not even have to pay his full taxes; members of Congress and the media could avoid taking responsibility for burying the reports of corruption.”
I wrote about the pardon option repeatedly because none of Hunter’s bizarre (and ultimately unsuccessful) criminal defenses made sense unless he felt confident that his father would pardon him in the end. Hunter’s taunting Congress with open contempt of a subpoena and his ridiculous defenses in court were not the actions of someone who feared consequences from these investigations. They were the actions of someone with a pocket pardon.
NBC is reporting that Hunter’s pardon was being discussed in the White House for a long time, even as Biden and his staff were steadfastly denying that he would issue a pardon. As with his years of denying knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and meeting his clients, Biden simply lied over and over again to the public.
The eventual pardon restored what was a sweetheart deal reached with Special Counsel David Weiss that would have given Hunter immunity to the immediate charges and any unnamed criminal charges. It collapsed in court when Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed shock at such a deal and asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal offered to any other defendant. He admitted that he had not.
Now, President Biden has recreated an even more sweeping immunity grant through his own powers by pardoning his son not only for the crimes of which he was convicted, but of any crimes committed between Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Think on that. It would cover anything from perjury to murder.
Now it makes sense why Hunter seemed to be engaged in what I described as a “game of chicken with himself.” As a criminal defense attorney, I noted that wild moves in and outside of the courts would make sense only if he knew that his dad would cover him in the end if everything went poorly — even as the president was assuring the public that he would never do such a thing.
In a final show of contempt for the American people, President Biden waited until a Sunday before an international trip to commit this unethical act. He brushed over his past lies by saying that “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word.” What he actually said, over and over again, was that he would never pardon his son.
For many in the media who helped bury this scandal and showed no interest in pursuing the influence-peddling operation of the Biden family, the pardon was met with uncomfortable shrugs. It is a measure of what you can call “Biden ethics.” In the curious world of Joe Biden, a lie that no one believes is treated the same as the truth. It is likely to work. There may be little interest in pursuing this corruption scandal with so much to get done in the new administration. However, it is not the absolute “get-out-of-jail-free” card that President Biden would like.
Hunter could still be called to testify before Congress or with investigators on the influence-peddling efforts. If he lies, it will be a new crime for which this pardon would not bar prosecution. He would no longer be able to count on a pocket pardon as an insurance policy.
Short of such continued investigation, the Bidens will have achieved something that would have made John Gotti blush. They were able to pull in millions of alleged influence-peddling proceeds. Hunter was showered with gifts and benefits, from a diamond to a luxury sports car. Various Biden family members reportedly received money from the operation. President Biden was himself accused of knowledge and possible benefits from the influence peddling. He will also be protected by this official act.
This is why I once wrote that the Bidens are the GOATs of influence peddling. While influence peddling is the most common form of corruption in Washington, this city has never seen the likes of the Bidens. The only thing greater than their appetite was their sheer audacity.
In this statement on the pardon before fleeing the jurisdiction for a foreign trip, President Biden notably stated that “in trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me.” Indeed, this corruption scandal is as much about the president as it is about his son. And, as the president previously declared, “No one f—- with a Biden.”
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her case against President-elect Donald Trump continue to trip wires in the courts with delays and losses. The latest is a fight with the organization Judicial Watch, which won a major records fight to gain access to any communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6th Committee. While it is not clear what records exist, it is the type of demand that most offices fight vigorously to protect their confidentiality and privileges of deliberation. Willis, however, lost by default after failing to make a substantive argument against the claim.
The Judicial Watch lawsuit was based on the Open Records Act (ORA), and Willis had defenses to make, but she failed to make them. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to hand over records within five business days. McBurney found that Willis violated Georgia’s Open Records Act by failing to respond to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit.
He wrote that Willis did not make any “meritorious defense” and that “Plaintiff is thus entitled to judgment by default as if every item and paragraph of the complaint were supported by proper and sufficient evidence.”
The case against Trump is on appeal after the court decided not to disqualify Willis from prosecuting the case.
Willis will also now have to pay Judicial Watch’s attorney’s fees. The hearing on the fees will appropriately come just before Christmas for Judicial Watch on Dec. 20, 2024. That will add to the towering costs for the people of Atlanta in funding this high-profile adventure.
Of course, she can insist “it is not my fault, it’s the default.”
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Contrary to what corporate media want you to believe, President Donald Trump’s decision to name Kashyap “Kash” Patel as his choice to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray is a good one — perhaps one of the best he could have made.
When Trump announced over Thanksgiving weekend that Patel was his pick to “bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI,” journos lost their minds. Some outlets framed Trump’s choice as frowned upon by the president’s aides and Republican legislators. Others publishedlists of bureaucrats who they claimed could fall prey to “Patel’s crosshairs.”for partisan reasons. Those did not compare to the hordes of corporate media coverage dedicated to tarnishing Patel and quashing his nomination.
Even before the election, the Associated Press painted Patel as a conspiracy theorist while noting how he was “poised to help lead a Trump administration.” Shortly after Trump made it official, MSNBC claimed that “Kash Patel could be Trump’s most dangerous pick yet.” The New York Times took it further by besmirching the pick as “concretely dangerous.”
In the NYT article lead, the author deems Patel “supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.” He warns that if Patel takes over, his “directorship would probably corrupt and bend the institution for decades, even if he served only a few years.”
“He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against those he sees as his political enemies and domestic critics,” the article continues, without mentioning how the FBI under Christopher Wray has done exactly that.
These descriptions of Patel suggest Trump pulled a random guy off the street to weaponize the agency on his behalf. In reality, Patel is familiar with both the bureaucracy and intelligence agencies, having worked as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff, a U.S. National Security Council official, and principal deputy to the acting Director of National Intelligence. Most importantly, Patel had a front-row seat to the deep state’s ploy, aided heavily by the propaganda press, to overthrow Trump when he served as a senior aide to former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. Patel and Nunes’ efforts to blow open the Russia collusion hoax made them victims of the DOJ’s spying and targets of a years-long corporate media smear campaign. Patel even sued multiple outlets and reporters, including the NYT, for smearing him as a criminal who acted as a “Ukraine Back Channel” for the Trump White House.
The problem with the NYT article and every other outlet fearmongering about Patel’s nomination is they refuse to acknowledge that the FBI is already corrupt to its core and weaponized beyond belief. Polling indicates that more than half of the nation, 63 percent, want to see the FBI reformed or “shut down” and “rebuilt from scratch.”
Naming another deep-state swamp creature like Wray to run the FBI would guarantee that would never happen. Nominating someone like Patel, who promises to make ridding our constitutional Republic of the people trying to destroy it priority number one, however, puts the Trump administration in a much better position to accomplish those goals.
As Patel noted in his 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference speech, he saw firsthand how the “government gangsters” in the DOJ, DOD, and FBI are “crippling” the nation by weaponizing themselves against Americans. He told The Federalist last year, after corporate media accused him of trying to “target journalists for prosecution,” that a second Trump administration would have no choice but to address the corruption swiftly and effectively.
“We’ve been saying the DOJ and FBI need [to] be fixed. We’ve been saying prosecutors and judges shouldn’t weaponize justice. We’ve been saying you shouldn’t leak information for media to rig political elections and curry favor with the American electorate. We’ve been saying it the whole time and we’ve been saying anyone that breaks the law in doing those things … should be prosecuted, whether it’s government officials, civilians, and the media,” Patel said. “Our position has never changed. We’ve been saying to use and restore the Constitution, to follow and enforce the rule of law, not to violate it. That’s what they do.”
The only reason the propaganda press oppose Patel as Trump’s FBI pick is because he is a threat to their ability to continue colluding with the deep state to advance their partisan agenda. Every new article or TV segment corporate media outlets devote to complaining and criticizing Patel’s nomination proves to the Trump team that he is the perfect man for the job.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
While Hunter Biden enjoys the privileges of a sweeping presidential pardon, Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother of eight, is spending the holidays locked away from the people she loves. While President Joe Biden’s corrupt son enjoys a get-out-of-jail-free card erasing a long list of felonies and potential offenses, Powell, marked as an “insurrectionist” for a property damage crime at the Capitol, languishes in a federal prison.
It’s the punctuation mark on the perversion of justice that has defined the Biden years, an era of lawlessness in which “no one is above the law” but this president, his grifting family and his constitution-ripping cronies.
Biden’s unconditional pardon of his ne’re-do-well progeny, issued as Americans were still drowsy from their Thanksgiving leftovers, covers more than a decade of felonies and sundry crimes that Hunter “committed or may have committed.” Legal experts are calling the act of absolution “unprecedented,” exceeding President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the man he succeeded, Richard Nixon, post-Watergate. Even that wide pardon only covered Nixon’s presidency — Jan. 20, 1969 to Aug. 9. 1974.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
The only thing surprising about Biden’s broad act of leniency gifted to his crack-addled son is that anyone is surprised by it. But Never Trumpers like Joe Walsh sound absolutely heartbroken that Biden has once again been shown to be the unrepentant liar he is after insisting on multiple occasions that he would not pardon Hunter, who faces sentencing on gun-related and tax evasion felony convictions.
“I said I would abide by the jury’s decisions, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” the president told ABC News’ David Muir, press puppet for the Democratic Party and their presidential candidates, in an interview in June.
After hearing that Biden is breaking his word, a dispirited Walsh sounded like a cuckolded lover.
“They’re all like that,” the Trump-hating former Republican congressman from Illinois moaned Sunday evening on MSNBC. “So, the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this — this pardon is just deflating. For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump — ‘nobody’s above the law,’ we’ve been screaming.”
Walsh and his fellow Never Trumpers have joined Democrats in their full-throated support of one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — the politically-driven witch hunts of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. For nearly four years, Biden’s Department of Justice, led by his Javert, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning hundreds of political prisoners. Like 44-year-old Rachel Powell. The Biden administration and their pals in the Pravda press continue to paint the eventual riots over a rigged 2020 election as a coordinated “insurrection” driven by their No. 1 political enemy: Donald J. Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States.
‘You’re Going to Take Eight Years of Her Life Away?’
Nearly 1,600 people have been caught up in the Biden Justice Department investigations. More than 500 people“have been sentenced to periods of incarceration,” some on an “obstruction of an official proceeding”charge tossed out earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, the high court’s ruling found the DOJ employed an “inappropriately broad interpretation” of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The DOJ hit Powell, who became known as the “bullhorn lady” in the press, with the obstruction charge. She also was charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, destruction of government property, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon — the “ice axe and battering ram” that law enforcement officials say she used to break through a window and “breach the Capitol” as Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes. Powell told Newsweek that she “used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces,” and a bullhorn “to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered.”
Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth threw the book at her in October 2023. Before that, Powell spent years on strict house arrest awaiting trial and sentencing.
“She had an ankle monitor. She was not allowed to leave her home,” said Cynthia Hughes, founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit organization providing support to J6 political prisoners and their families. Hughes was interviewed on an upcoming edition of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Her nephew, Tim Hale, spent three years in prison on J6-related, trumped up charges, including a year in solitary confinement.
Powell “missed her daughter’s wedding. She missed the birth of her two grandchildren. She couldn’t even go to a doctor appointment if one of her children needed the assistance of her mother,” Hughes added.
Powell’s youngest child was just 7 when she was sent to prison.
While Powell did damage government property, Hughes said she didn’t assault anyone or hurt law enforcement officials during the riot and she had no previous criminal record. Yet, the mother of eight received harsher treatment than many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engaged in riots that burned down government buildings, destroyed private property and brutally assaulted police.
“Yeah, she broke a window but you’re going to take eight years of her life away?” Hughes said. She’s lost her home, she lost custody of her children for a small minute. She had a terrible public defender.”
And now Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence followed by 36 months of supervised release. Hunter Biden, who faced years in prison and more than $1.3 million in fines is a free man. He owes nothing. If it’s any consolation to the J6 political prisoners learning of the pardon from behind prison bars, the younger Biden says he will never forget the kindness bestowed on him by his powerful father and that he will commit himself to “helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
He remains defiant, despite his father’s forbearance.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter said in a statement to the press.
‘Miscarriage of Justice’
Biden defended his son and his sweeping pardon, insisting that “Hunter was treated differently” under the law. Well, welcome to the club, Hunter. The hundreds of J6 political prisoners his father’s administration has persecuted over the past four years know what disparate treatment feels like.
President-elect Trump has met with some the families of the people he has described as hostages. He has said that he would pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted on federal charges related to the Capitol riots. On Truth Social earlier this year Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next president” will be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
Following Biden’s generous gift to his repugnant son, Trump asked on his Truth Social account, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Joe Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter for the gun crimes for which he was convicted. He pardoned Hunter for *EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL CRIME HE COMMITTED* over the last decade—including several years during which Joe Biden was VP and the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency. pic.twitter.com/wjvwXTL8r6
The president-elect raises a good point. Trump could and should pardon the J6 political prisoners as one of his first acts in office, or at least commute sentences. He likely will stop the prosecutions and end the witch hunt that the Biden administration has carried out. But Biden should spend the last days of his shameful presidency rectifying of the bigger injustices of his time in office. He should pardon the political enemies his DOJ has prosecuted as “insurrectionists.”
He claims his disgraced boy is a victim of politics, “singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.” Many of the protesters who showed up to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are victims of vendetta political politics. That was wrong. It remains so.
But Biden is as political as he is corrupt. So the people locked away on political crimes will have to await deliverance from the man the Biden regime desperately tried but failed to defeat, imprison, even murder.
Trump, unlike Biden, is a man of his word, Hughes said. “He keeps his promises,” the Patriot Freedom Project founder said.
And when Trump does follow through on his promise of pardons, Democrats, Never Trumpers and their accomplice media friends will have no standing to complain.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, dismissed legacy media’s histrionics over the nomination of Kash Patel for FBI director but told Newsmax she understands why the far left is “freaked out.”
Van Duyne joined “National Report” on Tuesday to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Patel, who she says is a reformer who will help root out the deep state from the FBI.
“Legacy media has gone the way of the dodo bird. Nobody’s listening to legacy media. Their narrative fell flat this last election cycle. They’re going to continue to say the worst things ever,” Van Duyne said. “But the legacy media is freaked out, as are a lot of these far-leftists, because they recognize that a new sheriff is in town.‘
“Kash Patel is another strong, very strong individual that Trump has nominated to do a job that should have been done for decades and has not been done. [Trump] is putting very strong people in these positions that are going to change the deep state. And the deep state is going to fight like hell to keep it the way it is.”
Van Duyne also acknowledged a possible connection between the nomination of Patel and President Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon for first son Hunter Biden a day later. It’s possible, she said, that Joe Biden was not going to leave anything to chance with Patel potentially in charge of investigating the Bidens.
“As a parent, my heart goes out. And I don’t know that anybody being honest with themselves can say as a parent they wouldn’t have done the same thing,” Van Duyne said of the pardon. “But the fact is, is that you have an individual who he is pardoning for all crimes that have not even been charged against him for almost an 11-year period.‘
“[H]e has pardoned his son, a son who has pled guilty, who has been tried and found guilty by a jury. This was not politically motivated. These were crimes … that were held against him that he actually committed; he admitted to committing. And this was under the Biden DOJ. This was not under a Trump DOJ.”
Van Duyne added: “Legitimately, this is covering up, again, the crime family that we have seen from the Biden … family now for decades that the deep state has continued to cover up.”
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Several Republican governors said they will help the incoming Trump administration carry out mass deportations. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox last week announced a targeted effort to aid with the deportations. Cox’s office said Utah’s public safety and corrections departments will coordinate with federal, state, and local agencies to identify and deport undocumented immigrants “who have committed crimes and pose a threat to public safety.”
“Utah will continue to welcome refugees and immigrants who enter the country lawfully, and we will continue pushing for reforms to the asylum process and for more visas to support our workforce needs,” Cox said in a statement. “We have zero tolerance, however, for those who demonstrate a threat to public safety while in the country illegally.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on social media last week that “states and localities should be required” to assist with deportations “as a condition of receiving federal funding.”
The Texas General Land Office offered President-elect Donald Trump a 1,400-acre ranch near the southern border to assist with deportations, Axios reported. Texas, run by Gov. Greg Abbott, passed a law that allows police to arrest people for entering the country illegally, though it was declared unconstitutional.
Democrat mayors have resisted the mass deportation efforts, with Boston’s Michelle Wu and Denver’s Mike Johson saying they will not cooperate. The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance barring city resources or personnel from being used to help federal immigration enforcement, Axios said.
The federal government faces some logistical hurdles to pull off mass deportation, Axios said, including a large backlog in federal immigration court and facilities to house immigrants before removal.
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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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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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What Did You Say? 
“This is Not the Time for Balance”: LA Times Columnist Resigns in Protest . . . Over Balanced Commentary
By: Jonathan Turley | December 9, 2024
Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/08/this-is-not-the-time-for-balance-la-times-columnist-resigns-in-protest-to-balanced-commentary/
When now President-Elect Donald Trump was convicted, the thrill-kill atmosphere around the courthouse and the country was explosive, but no one was more ecstatic than liberal columnist and former prosecutor Harry Litman. The then L.A. Times columnist told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it was a “majestic day” and “a day to celebrate.” A lawfare advocate, Litman excitedly laid out how Trump could be barred from office, declaring that the raid in Mar-a-Lago was the “whole enchilada” in ending Trump’s political career. Now, Litman has resigned from the L.A. Times because the owner wants more diversity of opinion in the newspaper. Litman went on MSNBC to declare that “this is not a time for balance.”
Those seven words sum up much of what has destroyed American media with millions turning away from the echo chamber created by the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and other publications. Litman is not alone. Many liberals are dispensing with the pretense of declaring opposing views “disinformation” and are now openly fighting to preserve ideological echo chambers and media silos.
In my new book, The Indispensable Right, I write about the decline of newspapers as part of the “advocacy journalism” movement. Opinion pages became little more than screeds for the left, including legal commentators who have been consistently wrong and misleading on merits of challenges or cases.
Last year, Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Litman has been one of the most unabashed lawfare warriors. Even when the Justice Department was seeking to dismiss the Flynn case, Lipman wrote an L.A. Times column advising Judge Emmet Sullivan how to “make trouble” for the administration. Litman admitted there is “very little leeway to reject the government’s decisions to dismiss charges” but encouraged Sullivan to “accomplish what Congress, multiple inspectors general, and a majority of the electorate have not been able to do — hold the president and his allies accountable for their contemptuous disregard for the rule of law.”
On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Litman declared to Nicolle Wallace that Trump’s victory is “an absolute five-alarm fire.” He called the effort to restore a diversity of viewpoints as little more than an attempt “to curry favor with Trump.” He then added:
It was a telling moment. Litman appeared on a network that has lost half of its viewership and is fighting for its existence in an effort by NBCUniversal to unload it. Readers are fleeing to new media after papers like the L.A. Times and the Washington Post literally wrote off half of the country. Yet, these figures would rather lose their jobs and media platforms than their bias.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
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