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 Donald Trump.
Every time Brandon Showalter checks his inbox or listens to his voicemails, he’s dismayed by what he sees and hears. Since he began covering the battle over transgender ideology in 2016, he’s received countless messages from parents grieving over the mutilation of their daughters and the castration of their sons, photos from detransitioners regretting their irreversible surgeries, and firsthand accounts from families shattered by the medical scandal of transgenderism.
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
“Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many moms and dads have called me absolutely devastated, at the end of their rope, because … within 30 minutes of a telehealth consultation, their daughters and sons are given drugs that could render them sterile” or they’re encouraged to have surgeries that will leave their bodies disfigured. “They’re living in a world of confusion,” said Showalter, a writer and social commentator for The Christian Post.
“They sent them off to a university and they became indoctrinated. I’ve had some of them in my home for dinner to try and console them as they’re just grieving. This has just devoured and shattered their families, and that’s not being hyperbolic.”
As a journalist and Bible-believing Christian, Showalter knew he couldn’t just look away when faced with the horrors of the transgender movement. Over the years, he’s written countless articles and even launched a podcast raising awareness about the topic, and this month, releasedExposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens from the Transgender Industry. Showalter penned the free e-book with Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries.
“We wanted to be able to equip pastors and lay leaders, youth and youth ministers to be able to have the philosophical tools to understand this ideology. And most importantly, protect children and teenagers and young adults from its destruction,” Showalter shared.
“The book will show you the various ways in which this ideology has molded our understanding of what sex and gender is, how language is warped, and it’ll clue you in as to how pervasive this is.”
According to Showalter, most people are unaware of just how insidious the transgender movement truly is — or how much it is fueled by the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Terms like “gender-affirming” care and politically-correct euphemisms popularized by many in the media, he said, are both dangerous and misleading. He slammed the idea that children experiencing gender dysphoria frequently die by suicide as “manipulative,” adding: “Suicide is a very complicated phenomenon. You cannot reduce it down to just one cause.”
Showalter detailed how, after a prepubescent child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they are prescribed puberty blockers such as Lupron, a drug that has been used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis and women and has been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
“There’s never been an FDA stamp of approval for that use,” he said. “Even the FDA just last year slapped a warning label that this drug causes vision loss and brain swelling. There are disastrous side effects. It impedes brain development. It basically freezes your endocrine system from allowing the pubertal signaling in the brain to happen.”
Children are given cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone for girls and estrogen for boys, and then undergo surgery to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex. Showalter described this process as “grotesque,” involving the removal of healthy breasts and creating flaccid penises out of skin from another part of the body, such as the forearm or leg.
“These are highly complex, body-disfiguring surgeries with extremely high complication rates, and it’s in service to a material falsehood. You can’t change sex. Your sex is stamped in the nucleus of every single cell. All you’re doing is altering the body in a way that it was not designed to function,” he said. “Biomedical ethics seems to have just completely died with the incursion of this movement.”
Since speaking out about the horrors of the transgender movement, Showalter has experienced a good amount of pushback. He’s been called a “bigot” and a “hater” — but the insults and attacks seem insignificant when he grapples with what he sees as a “demonic” attack on God’s creation of male and female and, thus, on children.
“I don’t know exactly what might cause this ideology to end,” he said. “But I do hope and pray that God, in His infinite mercy, will bring it down. There are days when I just think the solution has to be supernatural because it’s just so wicked. It’s evil. And you don’t have to be a Christian to perceive that.”
Trans ideology has seen increasing visibility in the media, even in children’s programming. For example, an animated pride parade from the Nick Jr. show “Blue’s Clues and You!” featured a cartoon beaver wearing a pink and blue transgender armband and bearing chest scars from a mastectomy. The target demographic for “Blue’s Clues” is preschoolers, children ages 3 to 5.
“PRESCHOOLERS. CHILDREN 3 TO 5 YEARS OLD”
“They are marketing this by way of all media: TikTok, media programming, social media, YouTube, Tumblr, you name it, to get children to believe that somehow their bodies are not fine the way they are,” he said, challenging parents to pray tirelessly over their children and monitor their media consumption.
But despite the narrative pushed by many media outlets, it’s not just conservatives or people of faith opposed to the trans movement, he said. Working at CP, Showalter has heard from countless atheists, those who identify as gay and lesbian and even political leftists who share his and other Christians’ concerns for the next generation.
“The media continues to frame this as a right versus left kind of dynamic, when in fact, the polling indicates that many people across the political spectrum, left and right alike, do not want this done to children,” he said.
“The vast majority of doctors, I’m convinced, do not [support this], but far too few of them are actually being brave and speaking up about it. Many of them are keeping their head down because of this culture of fear we live in,” he added.
Showalter challenged other believers to stand up and declare a biblical worldview regarding sex and gender and urged churches to reach out to families hurt by the transgender movement and de-transitioners in need of recovery care.
“We need to understand the wickedness, the depravity that this is. And we need to be bold,” he stressed. “Now’s the time to show great courage and to be relentlessly honest about what’s happening. We can’t cover our eyes or cover our ears anymore. We have to ask God to give us His heart for hurting families and for children, and to stand up and be counted.”
He added, “I hope and pray that the day is coming soon when this great evil that has overtaken so much of our society will be brought to an end. But until then, and not one moment sooner, we have to keep pushing and keep declaring the truth with as much enthusiasm and boldness as we can possibly muster.”
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
‘Do NOT separate children from their families’- they said. ‘It doesn’t matter if they are criminals’- they said. ‘It’s not fair to cause stress on the family unit’- they said.
In fact, leftists said a lot of things about trying to save children from possible sex traffickers by temporarily separating children from adults. Barbaric, unacceptable, downright cruel. At least that’s their story when conservatives want to vett the illegal migrants crossing our border every day.
But guess what happens when the tables are turned?
For those of you waiting for me to spell it out specifically, it’s okay to separate children from their families, just as long as conservative Americans are suffering.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene retweeted a short video of two disappointed young children after they were denied visitation with their father, Kyle J. Young this past Sunday. The tweet from Kyle Young’s wife states the family drove over 12 hours in hopes of seeing her husband and the father of the two children.
Jack, age 3, excited to see his daddy after a 12 hour drive!
The federal prison in Arkansas that Kyle is held at permits visitation on both Saturday and Sunday. The family was allowed some visitation on Saturday, but on Sunday, they were turned away. No reason was given by the prison officials.
Kyle’s wife and two of their four children (the oldest is grown and living on their own) have only been able to visit him one other time previously, in January of 2022, since his incarceration. His son Jack, aged 3, was only 15 months old when Kyle was arrested and held in a maximum security side of the Warsaw Prison in Virginia. Kyle’s wife told The Gateway Pundit that he is the only J6 prisoner she knows of that was held in the maximum security wing of the prison. This is of course a much more difficult section of the prison to be living in and Young, who had not been convicted of anything at this time, was constantly in fear for his life.
These poor children and their mother! This is only one example of many of the heartbreaking circumstances these families are going through because of the two-tiered justice system and the political persecution of their loved ones.@GOPoversight has sent a letter to Mayor Muriel… https://t.co/apGxDy8cuC
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 13, 2023
According to AmericanGulag.org and confirmed by his wife, Young was charged with 13 separate charges relating to the questionable claims of Officer Michael Fanone, but pleaded guilty to just one charge in a plea deal: “Assaulting, Resisting, or Impeding Certain Officers”. Young was subsequently sentenced to 86 months of prison, or a little over 7 years, and 3 years of probation upon release. At first, it was unclear if Young would be eligible for early release under the First Steps Act, however, his wife informed us he is now signed up for the First Steps Act and taking classes for his recidivism.
Once Kyle took the plea deal, he was conveniently transferred out of maximum security and integrated into the same facility that housed other J6 political prisoners. It is believed that the maximum security holding may have been an effort to coerce Young into a plea deal rather than waiting for a trial date which would have taken substantially longer.
Deal or No Deal?
I’m not sure if the rules are universal, but where I come from, if you accept a plea deal, you are forbidden to ever appeal the decision. So, no matter what evidence comes out now, Young is stuck with this ridiculous criminal record AND jail time. Unless of course Congress decides to address the J6 prisoners with legislation that would right this magnanimous wrong. But even that wouldn’t restore the time, money, or the fundamental faith in America these patriots lost by simply exercising their constitutional right to protest.
Forget due process or equal protection of the law. These people are locked in solitary confinement, denied bail, and cheated out of legal discovery evidence that could effectively win their cases in court. Do you think these leftists care if Americans are incurring legal fees that will put them out of house and home? Of course not. They’re too busy making concessions for illegal immigrants here to drain the system, break our laws, milk our government, and leave this country looking exactly like the shithole they ran away from. That, my friends, is what happens when you trust a leftist to be in charge.
** If you would like to support Kyle Young and his wife and children, please consider giving at GiveSendGo.com/FreeKyle.
“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson
As a society, we understand very well the term, “free speech isn’t free.” This double-entendre statement has arguably been more applicable in the past several years than in any other time in history. That all freedoms come at a cost, most understand, but the freedom to say what you believe or think, is literally under siege these days.
In such cases, due to terms like, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ it need not even be a lie; an imagined slight is all it takes. This quote from “The Simpson’s movie” back in 2007 references an ideology that at the time, seemed far-fetched. However, as life imitates art in 2023, simply laughing at something funny or speaking unpopular truths can end a career.
During the last weekend of February 2023, the popular comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by nearly 80 newspaper outlets across the country after what many considered a ‘racist rant’ by its creator, Scott Adams.
According to News One, “It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a recent survey by Rasmussen Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams remarked, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away because there is no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”
According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:
February 22: Adams spends several profanity-laden minutes telling white people to “get away” from Black people after reading a Rasmussen poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”
February 24: Some newspapers and publishing groups, including the USA TODAY Network and Advance Local Group, decide to stop publishing Dilbert, removing the cartoon from over 200 papers across the country.
February 25: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Antonio Express-News, among others, drop Dilbert.
February 25: Adams expands on his remarks in an almost two-hour interview with online personality Hotep Jesus.
February 26: Adams links to Saturday’s interview and tweets he’s only accepting criticism from people who know the full context, claiming that much of the coverage against him is “fake news.”
February 26: Elon Musk tweets support of Adams, claiming: “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.
February 26: The National Cartoonists Society disavows “all forms of racism and discrimination” (Dilbert won the Society’s highest honor, the Reuben Award, in 1998).
February 27: Adams is dropped by publishing company Andrews McMeel Universal, whose chairman and CEO tweeted that the company supports free speech but not “commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”
February 28: Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, cancels the September release of Adams’ Reframe Your Brain, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cancel Culture Gone Crazy
Though Adams has been derided for his outspokenness before, this was something new. In a matter of only four days, an iconic comic strip with millions of devoted readers is erased from newspapers all over America. Amazing how damaging thinking aloud can be.
Whether audiences of media, social and otherwise realize it, we are at an inflection point. While it may appear hyperbolic, unless you’ve been sleeping- we should all be concerned. One of the best things that Americans and those seeking to be citizens of this country once appreciated was our Constitution.
Within that document sits a list of Amendments, and these contained rights that bestowed freedoms on every American. Among those are rights against illegal search and seizure, the right to bear arms, and of course- the freedom of speech.
No doubt most of us have watched over time as those rights (mentioned and not mentioned) have not just eroded, but rather, simply been taken away. If the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” tells us anything, our Constitution, as is, may have a shelf life, with a looming expiration date.
Weighing In
While this writer does not agree entirely with Scott Adams’ feelings or assessment, he has every right to say it, much like a Klansman in full-hooded garb, can, and has the right to walk into an all-black-neighborhood and yell, “I HATE NIGGERS!” from the top of his lungs- at his own peril. And while “The Simpsons” is not anyone’s paragon of virtue, hope or even familial example, Homer’s words still ring no less true.
As we watch black-and-white films of civil rights attacks from the 60’s, and cringe at the Holocaust atrocities of the 40’s, we dare not be so naïve to miss the fact that history is repeating herself. However, don’t be fooled. It isn’t through angry words and rhetoric that this is occurring, and not even because of those colleges and venues that boycott and allow the shouting down of speakers.
It won’t be due to judges being mocked and bullied from outside their own homes, or pro-lifers being accosted because of praying in front of abortion clinics. No, it will be because of those that knew it happened, those that heard it happened, those that saw it happen, and those sat by as it happened-and did nothing.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened; stay tuned.
Since Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s recent withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a widely used voter-roll management group with ties to left-wing activists — last week, America’s legacy media have been in freak-out mode. In uniform fashion, leftist outlets have labeled the legitimate concerns raised by the aforementioned states as “conspiracy theories” promoted by “election deniers” and “right-wing media.”
While painted as a nonpartisan venture by corporate media, ERIC is a voter-roll management system founded by far-left activist David Becker that was sold to states as a “quick and easy way” to administer their voter rolls. When states become ERIC members, they give voter data to the group — including the records of unregistered voters. Currently, ERIC has control of voter-roll data in more than half of states and the District of Columbia.
In addition to founding ERIC, Becker is also notable for launching the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of the major groups that received millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Such grants were then poured into local election offices throughout the country to push Democrat-backed voting policies. Analyses have shown these “Zuckbucks” were heavily skewed toward Democrat municipalities, especially in swing states, effectively making it a giant Democrat “get out the vote” operation.
As The Federalist reported, ERIC transmits the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR, which “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.”
While currently a non-voting member of ERIC’s board, Becker announced on Tuesday he “will not accept renomination” to the board “when [his] term expires this week,” citing Republican criticisms of the group.
Despite these alarming ties, there are still several leading GOP state election officials who continue to participate in ERIC. In light of Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s collective withdrawal from the coalition, The Federalist reached out to these officials to inquire whether they’re reconsidering their state’s ERIC membership.
Alaska
While speaking with state lawmakers last week, Alaska’s Division of Elections director Carol Beecher revealed she was reconsidering the state’s partnership with ERIC, citing membership costs as the primary reason. A spokeswoman from the Alaska lieutenant governor’s office confirmed this assertion but noted the state “has not decided on whether to continue” as an ERIC member.
“List maintenance is an essential process to ensure our voter list is as accurate and current as possible, and ERIC is one of the tools that Alaska uses to assist in this process,” spokeswoman Tiffany Montemayor told The Federalist. Montemayor did not, however, address whether Alaska shares the concerns about ERIC raised by Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia.
Georgia
When pressed by The Federalist on whether Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was reconsidering his state’s ERIC membership and if he shared the concerns espoused by the three aforementioned states, Raffensberger spokesman Mike Hassinger declined to answer, instead replying, “If you really believe that ERIC is ‘an interstate alliance controlled by Democrat operatives that encourages partisan outreach efforts under the guise of simple voter roll maintenance,’ you’re an idiot.”
Ohio
While once describing ERIC as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has reversed course and is threatening to withdraw his state from the organization. In a letter sent to ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin last week, LaRose demanded the group comply with his proposed reforms in its Friday meeting.
“I will not accept the status quo as an outcome of the next meeting,” LaRose wrote. “Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to an[d] including our withdrawal from membership.”
As The Federalist reported, “LaRose’s proposed reforms include removing ‘ex-officio membership positions’ from ERIC’s bylaws so as to cut left-wing activist David Becker from its board, as well as no longer requiring states to send out voter registration mailers to unregistered residents.”
Iowa
According to the Associated Press, Iowa GOP Secretary of State Paul Pate is among the nation’s leading Republican election officials “who said they [have] no intention” of leaving ERIC and who have “signaled strong support for the effort.”
“ERIC is an effective tool for ensuring the integrity of Iowa’s voter rolls,” Pate told the outlet.
Texas
In Texas, state lawmakers have introduced legislation that, according to The Texas Tribune, would end the state’s participation in ERIC. Under HB 2809, the Texas secretary of state would be required to “cooperate with other states and jurisdictions to develop systems to compare voters, voter history, and voter registration lists to identify voters: whose addresses have changed,” “who have been convicted of a felony,” or “who are registered to vote in more than one state.”
A companion bill (SB 1070) has also been introduced in the state Senate.
Virginia
Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, Virginia doesn’t have a secretary of state, meaning the state’s elections department is tasked with overseeing election administration. When pressed on whether the department is reconsidering its participation in ERIC in light of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia’s decision to withdraw, an agency spokeswoman didn’t provide a definitive answer on the matter.
“The Department of Elections engages in ongoing and extensive list file maintenance processes,” she said. “If there are any changes made to any of these processes, they will be announced publicly.”
South Carolina
In a statement provided to The Federalist, South Carolina State Election Commission spokesman John Catalano said that while the commission has “many sources of information to remove unqualified voters for a variety of reasons,” ERIC is currently their “only source for access to critical sets of data,” including the Social Security Administration’s death files and the “list of South Carolina voters who have registered in other states.”
“While our state’s health department provides us with reports of people who have died in South Carolina, these reports do not include South Carolinians who die outside the state’s borders. The Social Security Administration death data we receive through ERIC allows us to identify these voters and make them inactive,” Catalano said. “The State Election Commission’s view is that ERIC is a valuable and currently irreplaceable tool that allows us to remove unqualified voters from the voter registration rolls.”
Leading GOP state election officials from Kentucky, Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Utah did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
This article has been updated to include a statement from South Carolina’s state election commission.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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
It’s painful for me to watch so many smart pundits and politicians on both the right and the left buy into a media narrative that seeks to blame “wealthy speculators” or “tech bros” or venture capitalists for a banking crisis that ultimately started in Washington. Let me explain.
If you want to understand the context for the crisis, look at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair’s March 6 testimony — a week before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse — where he explains that banks were sitting on $620 billion of unrealized losses from long-dated bonds. This provided the tinder for the crisis.
The match was lit when SVB announced on Wednesday, March 9, that it had effectively sold all of its available-for-sale securities and needed to raise fresh capital because of large unrealized losses from its mortgage bond portfolio.
Screenshot: Wall Street Journal
On Thursday morning, the financial press widely reported SVB’s need for new capital, and short sellers were all over the stock. The CEO’s disastrous “don’t panic” call later that morning only heightened fears and undermined confidence in the bank.
The idea that one needed “non-public information” to understand that SVB was at risk is drivel being peddled by populist demagogues. Any depositor who could read The Wall Street Journal or watch the stock ticker could understand there was no upside in waiting to see what would happen next.
By Friday, the run on other banks had begun. This became abundantly clear when regulators placed Signature Bank in receivership, announced a backstop facility for First Republic, and temporarily halted trading of regional bank stocks on Monday. Even trading of Schwab was halted.
Some unscrupulous reporters and political types have even claimed that I somehow caused this through my tweeting. Dang, they must think I’m Superman! Or maybe E.F. Hutton. But the timing doesn’t line up at all, as I already explained.
In the never-ending quest for scapegoats, some reporters and political types are asking if @theallinpod could have influenced the bank run. We didn't publish until Saturday morning when banks were already closed! I also never tweeted about SVB until it was already in receivership… https://t.co/ryRP3qx0Kl
Once the run on the bank started, decisive action by the Fed was imperative. This meant protecting deposits (uninsured are 50 percent) and backstopping regional banks. No matter how distasteful you may find those things to be, preventing a greater economic calamity was necessary.
But back to SVB: Its collapse was first and foremost a result of its own poor risk management and communications. It should have hedged its interest rate risk. And it should have raised the necessary capital months ago through an offering that didn’t spook the street.
SVB doesn’t deserve a bailout and isn’t getting one. SVB’s stockholders, bondholders, and stock options are getting wiped out. The executives will spend years in litigation and may have stock sales clawed back. Anyone who thinks there’s a “moral hazard” isn’t paying attention.
But it’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things. It arose from SVB’s over-exposure to boring old mortgage bonds, which were considered safe at the time SVB bought them. Perhaps this is why SVB had an “A” rating from Moody’s and had passed all of its regulatory exams.
What turned the mortgage bonds toxic? The most rapid rate-tightening cycle we’ve seen in decades. You can see the connection here between rapid rate hikes and unrealized losses in the banking system.
So, what caused the rapid rate hikes? The worst inflation in 40 years. And what caused that? Profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington — all while Joe Biden, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell assured us inflation was “transitory.”
I warned two years ago that pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into an already hot economy was an unprecedented and likely dangerous experiment. But this was Bidenomics.
Bidenomics = pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into a rip-roaring economy. I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen next. AFAIK we’ve never tried this before.
So, when Joe Biden says he’s going to hold those responsible for this mess fully accountable, he ought to start by looking in the mirror. But I’m sure that’s not going to happen, just as I’m sure the hunt for scapegoats is just beginning.
David Sacks is an entrepreneur and author who specializes in digital technology firms. He is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital fund Craft Ventures and was the founding COO of PayPal.
Reports of book banning have proliferated throughout the media. Understandably, such claims should raise concern among free speech advocates. The ability to freely disseminate knowledge and challenge the status quo is a fundamental pillar of a free society. An illiberal act such as a book ban should be met with scorn by those who truly care about advancing society. However, behind claims of rampantly spreading censorship, a key question has been left unanswered. What’s a book ban?
The word ban is generally understood to mean a prohibition of a certain behavior, substance, or object. However, due to First Amendment constitutional protections and corresponding case law, it’s illegal for any government entity to outlaw the possession of a book. With very rare exceptions, there are no penalties for owning, buying, and selling books in America.
Yet media reports claim book bans are spreading like wildfires in states such as Florida and Texas. So how can that be?
Which Books Are Banned?
The issue is primarily a cultural tug-of-war taking place in public school libraries. The discovery of sexually explicit books on school bookshelves nationwide has sparked controversy.
Pen America is easily the most cited organization when it comes to book bans. The self-proclaimed “free speech” advocacy group is mentioned in almost every media report on the subject. Yet few Americans understand the very expansive definition of a “book ban” utilized by the organization. Pen America considers books “challenged for review,” but still available for student use, as “banned” even if the books haven’t been removed from the library. Pen America considers any book that’s available but age-restricted as “banned.” Moreover, several school districts have refuted the popular book ban list produced by Pen America, claiming the list contained books that were never removed from circulation in their respective libraries.
An expansive view of “book bans” creates a few problems. There’s an assumption that the government has a responsibility to produce and distribute every book in existence to school children free of charge. This may sound great until you consider that books often contain inaccurate, poorly sourced, or controversial information. I doubt anyone of reason would consider the exclusion of books such as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (a Nazi manifesto), “The Anarchist Cookbook” (a bomb-building guide), and “The Turner Diaries” (a white supremacy recruitment novel) from our public K-12 libraries to be an illiberal attempt to suppress free speech.
Does Ideology Influence Book Selection?
Nonetheless, there’s reason to believe some librarians have injected their own bias into the procurement process. Writer Kirk Cameron has had his Christian children’s books rejected by publicly funded libraries that openly embrace drag queen story hours featuring pro-transgender book titles. At the time of writing, Pen America’s website produced nothing on the aforementioned controversies surrounding the rejection of conservative-themed books.
Additionally, the American Association of School Librarians grants an annual “Social Justice” award of $2,000 to librarians and $5,000 for new books to school librarians for devising a “program, unit, or event in support of social justice using resources of the school library.” Although one may agree with the decisions of a publicly funded library to promote or demote a certain viewpoint, it requires a substantial degree of denialism to pretend viewpoint discrimination isn’t happening.
Who Should Pick the Books?
A 5-4 Supreme Court Decision in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) restricts school boards from removing books on the basis of subject matter, recognizing school libraries as special free speech zones. However, the dissenting justices argued that, because books can be obtained outside the school library and school board officials are democratically elected to handle affairs related to the management of the school, there are no First Amendment implications concerning the exclusion of certain materials. Furthermore, the view of school libraries as being crucial free speech zones seems antiquated in the age of social media and smartphones.
Maybe it’s time to question the idea that a government agency refusing to disseminate a book constitutes a ban of any sort. Public school libraries are taxpayer-funded entities. In our democratic society, we vote for policies that reflect our values and preferences. These voter preferences should manifest as we set priorities in public school education.
Just as many jurisdictions may refuse to provide bomb-building instruction, gunsmithing guides, and white supremacy manifestos to their students, school boards everywhere should be allowed to make reasonable value judgments concerning objectionable content.
Educators and librarians are humans with biases and policy preferences just like the rest of us. Deferring to them with no community oversight doesn’t prevent viewpoint discrimination; it just ensures it goes unchallenged.
Raheem Williams is a policy analyst at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE). He has worked for several liberty-based academic research centers and think tanks. He received his B.A. in economics from Florida International University and his M.A. in financial economics from the University of Detroit Mercy.
Tennessee Senate Republicans passed a bill Monday that could block transgender people from changing their listed sex on government-issued documents including driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The proposed legislation, known as House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440, defines the term “sex” for use in the Tennessee Code as a “person’s immutable biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth and evidence of a person’s biological sex.” It also clarifies that “evidence of a person’s biological sex” includes, but is not limited to, “a government-issued identification document that accurately reflects a person’s sex listed on the person’s original birth certificate.”
While it cleared the state Senate, the bill stalled in the state House due to potential budgetary impacts. In a floor speech Monday, its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Kerry Roberts, argued the legislation promotes “consistency” in the state code, rejecting concerns brought in a fiscal note, Axios reported. Krista Lee Carsner, executive director of the Tennessee General Assembly’s fiscal review committee, noted the proposed language “may result in increases to state and local expenditures associated with compliance measures, potential civil litigation and could jeopardize federal funding; however, due to multiple unknown factors, a precise fiscal impact cannot be determined.”
Tennessee Senate Republicans approved a bill defining “biological sex.” (David Underwood/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In the fiscal note, Carsner says the state Department of Education asserts that the legislation could risk federal funding awards for several programs amounting to nearly $1.3 billion in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. The state Department of Health, which receives more than $750 million in federal grant funding, notes Title X; Women, Infants, and Children; and various other federal grants specify an alternate definition of “sex.” The state could lose funding if found out of compliance with federal requirements.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently approved legislation restricting drag shows, gender reassignment surgeries for minors. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
In a statement Monday, Human Rights Campaign condemned the Tennessee Senate for passing the bill.
“Extremist Tennessee Senators are continuing their assault on LGBTQ+ Tennesseans’ ability to live their lives openly and honestly,” the advocacy group’s legal director, Sarah Warbelow, said. “This is their latest cruel attempt to stigmatize, marginalize and erase the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender Tennesseans. Let’s be clear: the goal of this bill is to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from nondiscrimination protections in the state of Tennessee and to perpetuate a false narrative of who transgender people are.”
Transgender advocates have condemned the Tennessee bill defining sex. (Getty)
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has not said publicly whether he supports the bill. However, earlier this month, Lee did sign legislation banning healthcare providers in the state from legally prescribing puberty blockers or hormones for minors and performing gender transition surgeries for minors.
He also signed off on a law that prohibits drag shows from public property within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks or places of worship and limits them to age-restricted venues. The law includes criminal provisions for “adult cabaret performances” held in public areas where they could be seen by children. Both laws take effect on July 1.
Fox News Digital reached out to Lee’s office Wednesday for comment regarding House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
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 Donald Trump.
Several Republican-controlled state legislatures have begun to push for expanded protections for mothers and children in low-income households, particularly in areas where abortion is now illegal or severely restricted after the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.
Following the overturn of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide last summer, an analysis by FiveThirtyEight shows that at least six of the 14 states where abortion is completely or almost entirely illegal have enacted or are considering various measures that would increase support for pregnant women, mothers or young children.
Meanwhile, seven other Republican-controlled states with less-restrictive abortion laws are considering similar measures.
For example, the Republican-controlled Mississippi state legislature passed Senate Bill 2212, with the lower chamber passing the bill last week. The bill awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
The measure would extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers from 60 days to a year. Following the court’s ruling last June, a trigger law went into effect in the Magnolia State outlawing all abortions, with exceptions for cases of rape or incest or if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.
In Wyoming, a law completely banning abortion went into effect in July and is currently being challenged by the courts. Last week, the state’s Republican Gov. Mark Gordon signed House Bill 4, extending Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers from 90 days to 12 months.
The legislation is expected to help between 1,000 and 2,000 low-income Wyoming mothers, according to a statement on the governor’s website. During a public signing ceremony for the bill, Gordon called the Medicaid expansion a “signature piece of pro-life legislation.”
Other Republican-controlled states, including Montana and Tennessee, have considered some additional benefits for women and families, though some have faced opposition.
Montana has weighed a permanent, refundable $1,200 per-child tax credit for working families that make $56,000 per year or less proposed by Gov. Greg Gianforte. The governor also proposed a $7,500 adoption tax credit. The proposed child tax credit was tabled in the House Appropriations Committee committee, although it initially passed the House Taxation Committee with bipartisan support.
According to Montana Public Radio, some Republican lawmakers would rather focus efforts on broader tax relief instead, as Gianforte’s proposed budget impacting low-to-middle-income residents that would more than double the state’s earned income tax credit has advanced in Senate Bill 121.
In Tennessee, where performing abortions is a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, Gov. Bill Lee has proposed adding a diaper benefit to the state’s Medicaid program so that the cost of diapers would be covered during the first two years of a child’s life for mothers eligible for Medicaid. Tennessee would become the first Medicaid program in the United States to enact such a measure, Lee said in his February State of the State address.
Lee also wants to create a $100 million grant program for nonprofit crisis pregnancy centers that assist women facing unplanned pregnancies, encouraging them not to abort their unborn children. He also seeks $18.7 million to increase the income threshold for pregnant women and caregivers to expand access to the state’s Medicaid services and $4.7 million to extend postpartum health coverage under TennCare. Lee seeks $10.25 million for grant funding to expand adoption and foster care services.
“Pro-life is much more than defending the lives of the unborn,” Lee said in his speech. “This is not a matter of politics. This is about human dignity.”
Regarding Republican support for spending plans aimed at women and families, polling shows that the political party remains divided about using government funds to fund social benefits for women and children.
According to an Institute for Family Studies survey conducted by YouGov of 2,557 American adults between Oct. 20 to Nov. 3, 2022, 41% of Republican parents said they’d support a plan to “increase state spending on low-income pregnant and new mothers, including expanded Medicaid coverage of prenatal and postnatal health care.” Thirty-eight percent opposed these measures.
Regarding paid family leave, 71% of all parents assessed in the survey and 54% of Republican parents somewhat or strongly supported a federal program to provide new moms six weeks of paid parental leave.
The study’s results were weighed based on age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education and region.
After Roe‘s reversal, Republican Mississippi State Rep. Becky Currie, who authored the state’s 15-week abortion ban that ultimately led to the Supreme Court taking up the case that overturned the 1973 decision, emphasized that legislators have a responsibility to enact pro-family policies.
Currie, who raised two daughters as a single mom throughout most of her working life, told The Christian Post in an August interview that she can empathize with women struggling to make ends meet without help from their baby’s father.
Currie called for lawmakers to ensure that pregnant women can access healthcare services, make adoption more affordable, and enforce child support laws, so men are held accountable for the children they help create.
During the interview, Currie advocated for extending Mississippi’s Medicaid for postpartum mothers from 60 days to a year, a proposal the legislature has now embraced.
“You know, when you have a baby, your life is turned upside down,” she said. “So we want that mother to get back to the doctor and get the care that she needs. She may have postpartum depression. These are just things that we need to be supportive of our moms more than we are.”
Maxine Waters, Mitt Romney, President Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and most other Washington politicians agree on one thing: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) executives should lose their jobs and equity holders should lose everything, but SVB depositors should get made whole.
“Failing to intervene and make sure depositors get all their money back will hurt normal people and destabilize the entire U.S. banking system,” they say. Not only that, but they’re assuring us this definitely isn’t a bailout! Even many on the nationalistright echoed these talking points.
Except they are wrong. At best, they don’t understand the banking system, banking regulations, and the incentives being created here. At worst, they are — as is certainly the case for Democrats like Eric Swalwell — arguing solely for the interests of large and wealthy investment firms that had money at SVB without regard for the interests of normal working Americans.
To understand why, we need to examine what happened with SVB in the run-up to the crisis.
Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse
SVB has had tremendous growth over the last 10 years as the Federal Reserve’s easy money programs flooded the tech industry with cheap capital.
Banks are tasked with managing assets and liabilities. Liabilities include deposits and debt, and assets include government securities and loans. SVB’s business revolved around serving Silicon Valley’s startups and the wealthy investment funds buying and selling these startups. That meant taking in an explosion of deposits from these investment funds as cheap money from the Fed flooded in — a liability — and making loans to startups and venture capital funds with those deposits — an asset.
But unlike most banks, where about 75 percent of the deposits are used for loans, SVB used its explosive deposit growth to plow nearly 60 percent of its assets into government securities — some treasuries but mostly mortgage-backed securities. While these securities are “safe,” meaning there is little to no default risk, these securities do move in price as interest rates change. So, most banks will hedge, or pay to remove, this interest rate risk.
The thing is, SVB’s massive bond portfolio wasn’t hedged. Put more plainly, SVB was using customer deposits to make a massive bet on lower rates. Obviously, that didn’t work out, as rates increased all of 2022. Once depositors figured out that any selling of the unhedged bond portfolio to meet depositor withdrawals would lead to big losses and be unable to cover all withdrawals, there was a rush to the exits — a bank run.
All of this has been covered by the financial media, but two things have been left out. First, nobody knows how solid the other 40 percent of SVB’s assets, given out as loans, are. At least some of these loans were given to now-failing speculative tech or cryptocurrency firms.
Second, SVB’s bank run wasn’t the type you see in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” SVB’s depositors aren’t small business owners — who are covered up to $250,000 by the FDIC — they are some of the most sophisticated and wealthy financiers in the world. They benefited heavily during the Fed’s easy money policies over the last 10 years, and now the reverse of these easy money policies is hurting them.
This is why the cast of characters above isn’t arguing for the FDIC-insured amounts to be met. They are specifically arguing that those with far more than the FDIC-insured amount be fully made whole.
Not only were these depositors sophisticated, but they were also purposefully taking a risk to get a higher interest rate on their deposits at SVB. They also had every reason to know that SVB was a risky bet, as publications like Grant’s Interest Rate Observer have been warning about SVB’s portfolio of bonds for some time. It just so happens that the vast majority of these depositors are also wealthy donors to the Democrat Party and other leftist causes, increasing the political expediency of the government’s action.
Yes, It Is a Bailout
When the Biden administration or the rest of the cast of characters insists this isn’t a bailout, they are playing word games. When they insist the taxpayer isn’t “on the hook,” that is a lie. The “taxpayer” isn’t paying, but “bank customers” across the country are. An FDIC fund that essentially taxes banks — including the small bank in your hometown — is being used. At the end of last year, the Deposit Insurance Fund had $128 billion.
But 89 percent of SVB’s $175 billion in deposits, or $156 billion, was uninsured because it was above the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit. Depending on how bad the SVB asset write-downs are, which is yet to be determined, the insurance fund could get completely overwhelmed. Again, “bank customers” would then make up the difference. So, the fact of the matter is that working Americans are once again subsidizing a bailout of the coastal oligarchs.
This creates a terrible incentive or moral hazard, where now large, deep-pocketed entities can search out the bank with the highest return on their deposits, no matter how irresponsible that bank’s behavior, and believe they will receive their money back in the event of failure. This is also why arguing that SVB depositors suffering a small reduction in their accounts with deposits above $250,000 would lead to a banking collapse is disingenuous. The fear is that because the Democrats’ 2011 Dodd-Frank legislation created a handful of large banks that were essentially deemed “too big to fail,” then money will flow out of deposits at banks like SVB or smaller regional banks and into the too-big-to-fail banks.
But the risks taken by SVB and its unhedged bond portfolio are extremely out of step with the rest of the U.S. banking system. If this is a risk, it could be combated in a number of ways that actually fix the fundamental problem without bailing out the rich and politically connected SVB depositors.
One solution could involve raising the amounts covered by FDIC insurance. Another solution could involve the government pledging to intervene if a run on a bank with sound financials occurred. Either way, pretending the world stops if rich SVB depositors weren’t made completely whole is not a serious position.
Any further market mayhem only serves to prove the point. For one, the U.S. is going into a large slowdown, more is at play than the banking system, and much of the stress on the banking system is because Fed easy money policies created excess (and inequality). This will continue to be exposed in the slowdown.
The government did the exact opposite of what it should have done. Going forward, they haven’t come out with a large enough program to solidify the system’s stability and protect responsible banks, but SVB depositors received immediate relief.
Throw the Bums Out
Said differently, the politically connected just received immediate relief from Washington, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the potential incoming wave of unemployment, market stresses, and other banking issues because none of the fundamental problems are being addressed here.
Politically, the problem is twofold. Despite being completely oligarchic, the Democrats still control much of the country’s underclass. The other junior party in this arrangement, the Republicans, practice buffet line-style libertarianism. Republicans like Romney pretend to believe in markets but always clamor to intervene when they or their friends are affected — even while they couldn’t care less about the economic problems facing their actual voting base.
The political system of the United States is then ripe for a crackup. The solution is a radical populism that makes Donald Trump look tame by comparison. Of course, any more bank bailouts should be paid for by taxes on the rich — they are the ones who benefit, after all. And, of course, we should let SVB fail, and its depositors take a loss, even while we rush to reintroduce manufacturing jobs into the heartland.
The government will always pick winners and losers. It’s time the roles were reversed.
Democratic activist Kal Penn interviewed Joe Biden for The Daily Show this week. Penn begins one of his questions by pointing out that the president had “codified” both gay marriage and interracial marriage — as if either was in any danger whatsoever — and asks him what his philosophical evolution on “marriage equality” looks like. After all, Penn notes, now that trans kids are dealing with “regressive” state laws (banning surgical and pharmaceutical mutilation), it’s important to know.
“I can remember exactly when my epiphany was,” the president says. And though Biden admits he hadn’t thought much about gay marriage as a senior in high school in 1960, one time, “my dad was dropping me off, and I remember I am about to get out of the car and looked to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other.” Biden goes on to say: “And I’ll never forget it; I turned and looked at my dad. And he said: ‘Joey, it’s simple; they love each other.’”
This, of course, never happened. As I’ve noted before, Biden is a practitioner of the George Costanza school of “it’s not a lie if you believe it.” Other people’s lives are passing before his eyes. We’re probably about a year away from Biden telling media about the time he dated a drag queen named Hedda Hair in college because his dad had told him, “Joey, gender is just a social construct.”
The story of a gay couple kissing on the streets of 1960 Wilmington has become a Biden standard in recent years. He probably invented it sometime in 2015 and then used it regularly at gay rights speeches. Though in other iterations, it is a bit more cinematic and detailed. Here it is in 2020:
And I was being dropped off to get an application in the center of our city; Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate capital of the world at the time. And these two men, I’m getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African American community because there was a big swimming pool complex.
And these two men, well dressed, leaned up and hugged one another and kissed one another. And I’m getting out of the car at the light and I turn to my dad. My dad looked at me and said, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”
Even if he believed this story, it would only mean that Biden had spent over 50 years ignoring his dad’s progressive outlook. In 1973, more than a decade after his epiphany, Biden said that his gut reaction to allowing gays to work in the federal government was that they were “security risks” — though he hadn’t “given it much thought.” More than 30 years after his Catholic working-class dad told him that love was love, Joey voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
Joseph R. Biden Sr. was probably devastated by this betrayal. In 2006, Biden was still defending the law, telling Tim Russert that “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that.” Asked if he would support gay marriage during the 2008 vice presidential debate, Biden answered, “No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.” The Reuters piece detailing the debate is headlined: “Palin, Biden agree on gay rights at debate.”
In 2019, Biden alleged that, unlike Obama, he “didn’t have to evolve at all” on gay marriage. It is weird that the first time Biden is on the record publicly supporting gay marriage was on Meet the Press on May 4, 2012, two years after Barack Obama said his views on gay marriage were “evolving” and 52 years after his alleged epiphany. In truth, as with virtually every issue in his 50-year political life, Joey takes whatever position makes him popular in the Democratic Party.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Parents — not the government — are responsible for teaching morals and fundamental values to their children. School administrators seem to have forgotten this. Throughout our commonwealth and country, local school districts are attempting to supplant parents with government officials, who they believe know what is best for our children.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
Parents are responsible for instilling moral, religious, personal, cultural and other values that they deem appropriate in order to prepare their children for success and happiness in life. Some parents, like us, believe this should be rooted in our Christian faith. No matter the source, we believe that parents are foremost responsible for establishing a moral foundation in their children.
With a strong moral foundation being built at home, parents then entrust their local school districts with educating their child in reading, writing and arithmetic. Parents do not, however, expect government bureaucrats to infiltrate their child’s classroom and teach them their own concept of morality.
In our own community, the West Shore School district has engaged with “CharacterStrong” to teach “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) to our children. This curriculum is aligned with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) whose chief priority is to implement SEL with “equity and excellence” in mind. This may sound relatively harmless to the untrained listener, until you find out more about these organizations and their disturbing goals.
CharacterStrong states that their goal is to “partner” with parents in teaching moral and fundamental values to their children. The organization’s overt goal is to co-parent children by helping them to identify their own “values and virtues” and to reflect on those values to “help guide their decisions.”
We, like the majority of parents across the country, are not interested in coparenting with a government contractor. The government is not the parent of my child. We raise our children consistent with the values of our Christian faith and expect those values not to be meddled with.
The West Shore School District should be focused on teaching rigorous academics and training our children to think critically. It should be focused on preparing our children for the academic rigors of high school, college, and the real world. Instead, it is focused on promoting the CharacterStrong curriculum which, through CASEL, has made “equity” essential to the SEL curriculum.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
My child’s school should not be focused on gender ideology, race, or undermining the core values I teach my children. Unfortunately, the school district has decided to continue to push this dangerous ideology and indoctrination scheme.
Thankfully, parents have strong parental rights here in Pennsylvania. Chapter four of the Pennsylvania School Code authorizes parents or guardians to “have their children excused from specific instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs.”
My fellow district parents recently exercised their rights under this provision but were met with denials. Worse, West Shore School District repeatedly demanded that our friends justify their religious objections to the chosen religion of the West Shore School District.
The school district has no discretion. It must grant the parents’ request and properly accommodate their children. Notably, the district did in fact permit some exemptions to the curriculum but denied others.
Parents who have decided to exercise their rights under both our state and federal constitutions should not be vilified. These parents should be praised for paying close attention to their children’s curriculum and ensuring that no one — especially the government — gets between parents and their children, before it’s too late.
Allison Shipp is the leader of the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Chapter of Moms for Liberty.
Republican lawmakers in Texas are pushing legislation that would make it a state felony to cross the border from Mexico illegally and establish a state unit of officers to assist with the arrests of migrants entering the state at places other than ports of entry.
Introduced by Texas GOP state Rep. Matt Schaefer, House Bill 20 would create a “Border Protection Unit” that allows its officers to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally including with the use of non-deadly force.”
Schaefer’s bill, which will have to pass both of Texas’ Republican-controlled legislative chambers before the end of May, notes that officers serving in the unit must be U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents, and have law enforcement experience.
The state House proposal would also give officers serving in the unit immunity “from criminal and civil liability for any actions taken that are authorized” under the proposed law. In addition, civilians who have not been convicted of a felony could also be invited by the unit’s chief, which will be appointed by the governor, “to participate in unit operations and functions, but such persons may not have arresting authority unless trained and specifically authorized by the governor.”
National Guard agents place a barbed wire wall on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on March 8, 2023. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
People arrested for crossing into Texas illegally would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines for each violation.
Another bill introduced in the state Senate by GOP state Sen. Brian Birdwell, would make it a state crime for people who forgo legal immigration proceedings and cross into Texas illegally.
Birdwell’s legislation, which has received support from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, would “jail a person for a year or two years if the person tried to enter the country a second time” and “also punish the person to life in prison if they had been previously convicted of a felony,” according to the Texas Tribune.
The offices of Schaefer and Birdwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the proposed legislation, all of which is seen as a direct test to federal immigration law.
Under current federal law, individuals who are arrested for entering the country illegally could face a misdemeanor charge. Those arrested a second time under current law, could then be charged with a felony and banned from entering the country for a number of years.
Texas GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement that “addressing our state’s border and humanitarian crisis” was a priority for lawmakers in the state and that the proposed border police — as well as a proposed Legislative Border Safety Oversight Committee, which would provide border safety policy recommendations and oversight to the new policing unit and work on issues in South Texas — was a “must-pass issue.”
The Republican proposals in the state legislature serve as an extended effort to advance Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to wrangle illegal border crossings known as Operation Lone Star.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference on Jan. 31, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The $4 billion border initiative from the governor has included an increase in patrols near the border with Mexico, gridlocking traffic with increased commercial truck inspections, and building more barriers along the international boundary. The effort also included directing officers to detain migrants who trespass on private property and bused thousands of migrants to Democrat-led cities, including New York and Washington, D.C.
Civil rights organizations and Texas Democrats were quick to denounce the legislation in the state.
“It is designed to create racial profiling,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told The Associated Press. “Something that is just horrendous.”
“I think the underlying fact that it is going to allow people to question our being American in our border communities and across Texas is unacceptable,” Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, chairwoman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said, according to The Associated Press.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital when asked about the proposals in the state.
Since taking office in January 2021, President Biden has watched as illegal border crossings have surged. Many migrants who have turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents and were released into the U.S. interior as they await federal immigration court proceedings.
Migrants illegally cross into the United States via a hole in a fence in El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 22, 2022. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
There were over 1.7 million encounters of migrants at the border in FY 21 and more than 2.3 million in FY 22. So far in FY 2023, which began in October, there have been more than a million encounters.
The House Homeland Security Committee announced last month that it would hold its first field hearing on the crisis at the southern border on March 15, giving Republicans a chance to highlight what they say is the direct link between the chaos and disorder at the border and the Biden administration’s policies.
Democrats on the committee, however, are reportedly bailing from attending the hearing that would provide lawmakers with a first-hand look at the communities affected by the influx of migrants.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw, Greg Wehner, and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
President Biden is expected to announce an executive order on Tuesday that would expand background checks to more firearm sales by expanding the statutory definition of a firearms dealer, the White House said.
Biden is set to sign the order during a trip to Monterey Park, California, where he will meet with families and the community impacted by the mass shooting that killed 11 and injured nine others in January. The White House said the executive order will bring the U.S. “as close to universal background checks as possible” without additional legislation.
Under the executive order, Biden is also directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to develop and implement a plan to prevent former federally licensed firearms dealers, whose licenses have been revoked or surrendered, from continuing to engage in the business of dealing in firearms.
President Biden speaks during the annual House Democrats Issues Conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel March 1, 2023, in Baltimore. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The order will also improve public awareness and increase the use of extreme protection, like “red flag” laws and safe storage of firearms.
Biden is directing his cabinet to encourage the “effective use” of those orders, by partnering with law enforcement, health care providers, educators and other community leaders. Biden is also directing members of his cabinet to expand existing federal campaigns and efforts to promote safe storage of firearms.
The order will also direct the secretary of transportation, in consultation with the Department of Justice, to work to “reduce the loss or theft of firearms during shipment,” and to improve the reporting of such losses or thefts by engaging with carriers and shippers.
The White House said the order will also hold the gun industry “accountable,” by providing the public and policymakers with “more information regarding federally licensed firearms dealers who are violating the law.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a news conference to announce recent law enforcement action in transnational security threats case, at the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters on Jan. 27, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The order directs the attorney general to publicly release ATF records from the inspection of firearms dealers cited for violation of federal firearm laws.
The order also requires the Department of Defense to develop and implement principles to further firearm and public safety practices through DOD acquisition of firearms.
Biden’s order would also help “catch shooters by accelerating federal law enforcement’s reporting of ballistics data.”
The National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) currently allows federal, state and local law enforcement to match fired cartridge casings to the guns from which they were fired, making it easier for law enforcement to connect multiple crime scenes and catch shooters.
The executive order will direct all federal law enforcement agencies to issue “rigorous requirements regarding NIBIN data submission and use of this tool.”
President Biden, under the order, will also accelerate and intensify implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act; improve federal support for gun violence survivors, victims and survivors’ families, first responders to gun violence, and communities affected by gun violence; and advance congressional efforts to prevent the proliferation of firearms undetectable by metal detectors.
Guns are displayed in a store during the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival on Oct. 9, 2022, in Greeley, Pennsylvania. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The White House said the president will also encourage the Federal Trade Commission to issue a public report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors.
A senior administration official touted Biden’s executive actions throughout his presidency related to reducing gun violence. That official said Biden will also continue to call on Congress to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
Biden, earlier this month, said he is going to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines “come hell or high water.”
Last June, after it was passed by both the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, Biden signed into law the most significant gun control bill in nearly 30 years.
Spearheaded by Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, the measure came in the wake of recent mass shootings at the time and provides funding for states to create programs, often called red flag laws, that could keep weapons away from people who are a danger to themselves or others. The legislation also provides equal funding for states without red flag laws, like Texas, for crisis intervention programs like drug and veterans courts.
In addition, the measure enhances background checks for gun buyers under 21, adds penalties for some gun criminals and provides funding for a variety of health and mental health-related programs. It also addresses closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” which is a gap in federal law that means spousal domestic abusers can have gun rights taken away but not unmarried ones.
With regard to working with Congress on gun control legislation, a senior administration official said, “I think when you do gun violence policy, you always have to have hope. And I think there always is hope.”
“The president is going to continue to fight for common sense gun safety legislation, and there are all sorts of pieces of legislation we need,” the official said. “But in the meantime, [the president] wants the federal government to be doing all we can with existing authority to reduce gun violence. And that is what this executive order does.”
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
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Transgender activists and their supporters were triggered after Jordan Peterson launched an online invective against vaginoplasty surgery for children.
Peterson was responding to videos posted to social media showing a doctor from Boston Children’s Hospital explaining the “penile inversion vaginoplasty” procedure for biologically male people.
“In this procedure the surgical team is creating the outer and the inner vagina,”explained Dr. Oren Ganor. “The reason it’s called penile inversion vaginoplasty because we use the penile skin and the scrotal skin in order to reconstruct the vagina. But in doing so, we break it down to all of its components and we use some of the tissue to reconstruct things the way they were supposed to be for that patient.”
Peterson responded to the video with a one-word tweet, saying simply, “Prison.”
And it's not a vagina. It's a hole for another man to f**k. And that's that. https://t.co/E03wxm8fCF
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 12, 2023
“And it’s not a vagina. It’s a hole for another man to f**k. And that’s that,” he added in another tweet.
Supporters and allies of the transgender agenda were angered by Peterson’s description of the operation.
“At this point Jordan is pure hatred and bigotry walking around in a trench coat, pretending to be an intellectual,” read one response.
“Oh this sad little pathetic man who needs to denigrate women to boost his fragile ego,”responded a woman identifying as a professor and a feminist.
“He’s claiming to be talking about and in defense of the bodies of children. The post is not age restricted, and would be disgusting even if kids couldn’t see it. You won’t find a single anti-trans crusader who doesn’t sexually harass children like this,”said another person identifying as a transexual communist.
“I’m tired of transphobes seeing parts of trans people’s identity (in this case, a trans woman wanting a vagina) and sexualizing it,”read another response.
Others inexplicably accused him of being homosexual over the comment.
Here’s more from Jordan Peterson:
Jordan Peterson Knows Why We’re Obsessed with Aliens | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 107 www.youtube.com
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Rebecca F. Rothstein, a teacher at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District, posted multiple controversial videos to her TikTok account – which has since been deactivated.
Rothstein, who stated that she is “proud as f*** to be liberal,” insisted that educators should not prioritize teaching students math and science but instead provide lessons on anti-racism and “how to be kind.”
“As a teacher, I wish we could do more with our students, like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like … we can skip the math, skip the science, like we’ll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist,” she said in one TikTok video.
In another social media post, Rothstein said, “F*** capitalism” and bragged about providing her students with “Marxist literature.”
“Tired after a long day of indoctrinating students,” she stated.
Rothstein told her more than 13,000 TikTok followers that she had to “un-brainwash” herself to “fall in love” with socialism and communism.
“If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything,” she said.
Rothstein insisted that “capitalism must go” and said that “revolutions involve violence.”
The teacher also defended the summer 2020 riots that destroyed cities and small businesses.
“There are so many a******* in my comments saying, ‘What about all the burning of the buildings, and the looting and the rioting?’ Why do you care more about buildings than human lives? It’s like you’re stomping around, being like, ‘All buildings matter.’ No, no, they don’t. And the fact that you don’t understand where the rage is coming from, why there is so much rage of burning buildings, that’s the exact problem,” Rothstein said.
She continued by stating that she is “f***ing angry” about “the patriarchy,” “racism,” and “police brutality.”
Rothstein shared that she believes “boys should get vasectomies at birth, or when it is safe to do so” and then asked, “Why is preventing pregnancy just on the woman?”
In another TikTok video, she claimed that “all white people experience white privilege” and noted that being “silent on Palestine” is “rooted in white supremacy.”
“I’m proud of my ability to recognize white privilege,” Rothstein said. “White privilege is not about work ethic. White privilege is about the color of your skin.”
Neither Rothstein nor Montgomery County School District replied to a request for comment, Fox News Digital reported.
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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 Donald Trump.
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We have no free market and never will have one so long as the Federal Reserve exists in its current form. It is the unelected judge, jury, and executioner of the economy that can pick winners and losers by manipulating credit and monetary policy to artificially inflate certain investments and investors at the expense of others. Years of unnaturally low interest rates have enriched well-connected woke elites at the expense of consumers and savers. Now that their Ponzi scheme is coming due, with the collapse of one of the wokest banks and the vicious cycle of stagflation and reliance on loose money, it’s time for conservatives and GOP presidential candidates to revisit the idea of either abolishing or severely limiting the role of the Fed.
For the past several generations, the Democrat Party thrived on class warfare. Democrats claimed that conservatives elevated the wealthy at the expense of the working class simply because they didn’t support free stuff and redistribution of wealth through an extremely progressive income tax on legitimately earned wealth. But it turns out that their policies have actually artificially enriched the wealthy and harmed middle-income consumers and savers, but unlike with our policies, the wealthy never earned these tendentious favors, nor are they constitutional.
In many respects, the Federal Reserve has more power than all three branches of government put together, yet the members never stand for reelection. For years, the Federal Reserve has created endless inflation and loose credit with near-zero interest rates and by buying up trillions of dollars of securities and treasuries. It distorted the market, allowed woke banks like Silicon Valley Bank to overextend themselves, and even become the primary lender for solar financing in America, based on Monopoly money.
Now that the Fed inevitably was forced to hike interest rates to curb some of the historic inflation it helped create, Silicon Valley Bank, along with Signature Bank in New York (the bank Barney Frank joined when he left Congress), collapsed and was taken over by the FDIC. But just like a frustrated teen losing a video game, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department are pulling the plug on the game so that their buddies don’t lose. Remember, until Friday, SVB’s CEO, Gregory Becker, was on the board of directors at the San Francisco Fed. It’s one big game of, by, and for the politically connected venture socialists.
Less than 10 hours after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised there would be no new bank bailout, the Federal Reserve issued a statement Sunday evening announcing a spectacular bailout of every penny of deposits both at SVB and at Signature Bank. Except this one, unlike in 2008, won’t even require a vote in Congress, because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have the backhanded tools to print money, even though we have reached the statutory debt limit.
“The financing will be made available through the creation of a new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), offering loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral,” wrote the Fed. “These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.
In other words, they are back to printing money. The Fed has already grown its balance sheet by $4.7 trillion during the frenetic COVID money-pumping scheme (in addition to Congress’ $5.5 trillion fiscal stimulus), and has only off-loaded roughly $600 billion over the past year.
This was after many preceding years of ultra-loose monetary policy. Finally, as inflation reached record highs last year, the Fed began to ease up on those policies. Not any more! The Fed is promising to buy the assets “at par,” not at market value, which will have the effect of loosening bank credit beyond belief.
Additionally, along with the Treasury Department, the Fed will make $25 billion available as a backstop to this quantitative easing scam. The debt limit is a complete mockery, because evidently the Treasury Department can come up with vast sums of money on the fly, and this is likely the tip of the iceberg. Once the initial shock of this policy sets in, the debate will merely be over how many hundreds of billions are offered to stem the panic from other banks.
The immediate effect of this bailout will be to halt all interest rate hikes. As of this morning, the yield on the two-year Treasury note was down more than 80 basis points since last week, in anticipation of the return to loose credit. So the government will crush consumers with record inflation to bail out the well-connected woke (ESG-supporting) elites who took advantage of the unnatural and manipulated easy credit. John Edwards was indeed correct that there are two Americas, except it’s not because of a lack of government involvement. It’s because of too much big government, and particularly an unelected fourth branch of government that should be abolished.
If it’s impractical to immediately abolish the Federal Reserve, we should at a minimum remove its power to serve as both the arsonist and the firefighter. Congress must repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins bill from 1978, which empowers the Fed with a “dual mandate” to achieve maximum sustainable employment and keep prices stable. The Fed should be forced to focus solely on price stability. This would take “the game” out of the Fed. If it has no ability to create stimulus and provide monetary morphine, Wall Street can’t anticipate it and build an artificial economy based on its nourishment.
Market-distorting monetary manipulations are no different from market-distorting fiscal policy from the government. This is how the statists have successfully dissuaded us from ever limiting government. “You really plan to pull the rug out from under such-and-such industry?” the forces of special interests groan, be it health care or the financial sector. The same applies to monetary policy. There is no reason why we should allow the Fed to use monetary stimulus in such an officious manner that the entire market would collapse without the monetary morphine, even during robust economic growth.
The Fed should also be banned from buying up other securities and bonds, such as mortgage-backed securities from Freddie and Fannie. We must stop distorting the markets by encouraging investments on the basis of how much capital is available instead of real growth in a specific industry. It’s time to go back to the days of real economic growth built on the fiscal equivalent of protein and healthy fats, not sugar and carbs for the well-connected elites involved in regulatory capture.
We have enough lawless, unelected branches of government. It’s time to stop creating asset bubbles and misallocation of resources and return to a true organic equities market that reflects the economic realities of America. That will not happen until the Fed is brought under the checks and balances of the republic. As Andrew Jackson warned of a central bank, “The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government … [is] but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R.) / Getty Images
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Less than one month into her first term as Arkansas governor, Sarah Sanders was tapped to deliver the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, a speaking slot typically granted to rising stars in the party with the intent to elevate them onto the national stage. But stepping onto the national stage doesn’t appear to be Sanders’s goal—at least for now.
In her address, she used Arkansas as the example of what Republicans are doing across the country. “Here in Arkansas and across America, Republicans are working to end the policy of trapping kids in failing schools and sentencing them to a lifetime of poverty,” Sanders said. ”We will educate, not indoctrinate our kids, and put students on a path to success.”
In an hour-long interview, the former White House press secretary dodged questions about the 2024 election, diverting the conversation back to what she’s doing in Arkansas.
She already has substantive accomplishments to point to. This past Tuesday, exactly one month after her State of the Union response, the state legislature passed Sanders’s signature legislation, an ambitious overhaul of Arkansas schools, and she has already signed it into law. Corey DeAngelis, a leading advocate for school choice, said Arkansas is now the “gold standard for educational freedom.”
The bill is a kitchen-sink approach to education reform—in addition to establishing universal school choice, it yanks obscene sexual materials and critical race theory from classrooms, sets stringent new learning standards, and raises the base teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000.
“This is what bold conservative education legislation looks like,” Sanders said from the governor’s office, where she monitored the debate on the bill taking place on the other side of the Capitol.
And Sanders says Arkansas as a whole can be the “blueprint” for what conservative states could do.
Sanders joins a crowd of superstar Republican governors making headway by focusing on schools, and armed with a legislature of staunch conservatives, she’s charging ahead of other states. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is still fighting to get the sorts of reforms passed by Arkansas in Sanders’s first few weeks over hurdles in his legislature—his universal school choice bill, for example, faces even some Republican opposition. Sanders came out of her long campaign in Arkansas eager to establish herself as the “Education Governor” and thus far is doing just that.
Sanders’s growing profile has also made her a target of Democratic activists and politicians. Washington Post columnists are writing hit pieces questioning why anyone would move to Arkansas: “Good luck recruiting Californians for Arkansas, Sarah Sanders,” wrote Philip Bump. Shortly after Sanders’s national address, California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom took aim at Arkansas’s crime rate and last week was taking shots on Twitter about local Arkansas pieces of legislation.
Sanders acknowledges that she’s drawing more scrutiny to her state, but she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “We outkick our coverage, frankly, in a lot of places,” she said.
“When it comes to politicians on the national stage for a small state, we have some pretty big names out there,” the governor said. “I’m sure you’ll find people that will disagree, but my opinion is that it’s a good thing for our state, and I plan on using that platform to better us.”
Sanders says the critics are unavoidable. “I try to tune it out and stay focused on the objectives in front of us. There are people who wouldn’t care what’s in the bill, they’re gonna hate it simply because I’m associated with it. They don’t want to see me be successful. Certainly, that’s disappointing, but not surprising, and it’s not gonna slow us down from doing things that we feel like are the right thing to do.”
Sanders sharpened her ability to drown out the critics as White House press secretary. Not only was Sanders the longest-serving Trump administration press secretary—she was the only person to hold the job for more than a year—she was also the most successful, taking over as the daily briefing became a media feeding frenzy and adding a semblance of order to the chaos. She remains beloved by staff, some of whom followed her to Arkansas, and her former boss, to whom she still talks regularly.
Though Sanders is taking advantage of lessons learned at the White House, former colleagues say she’s also developed the ability to talk fluently about policy.
“We used to tell her, you need to get more detail,” said a former White House colleague. “Now the opposite is the case. She’s gone from somebody who was laser-focused on communications with a thin understanding of the policy to somebody who is a policy expert. It’s impressive to me.”
It’s not the first transformation of her career, Sanders says. When she first joined the Donald Trump campaign, she never foresaw that she’d become the lead spokeswoman for Trump’s administration.
“I was much more on the strategy and political operation side, and really didn’t see myself as a front person or the public-facing individual,” she explained.
Sanders joined the Trump campaign in 2016 to do coalition-building in the South, but after a few TV appearances, Trump called her to say he wanted to see her on television every day. And at the White House, after Sanders filled in for then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer while serving as his deputy, Trump tapped her to fill the job.
Her rise to the Arkansas governorship is a different story. Sanders announced her run in January 2021 and, as the prohibitive favorite from the outset, had two years to prepare for the job. It’s during that time that she decided she wanted to be the “Education Governor”—she not only became an expert on the issue but also gained confidence that she had to make it her trademark legislation.
“I went to all 75 counties,” Sanders said. “Everywhere I went as I traveled on the campaign for two years, every community wants their kids to do better. If we don’t have a good education system in place, then we are not setting our kids up for success.”
On the ground in Arkansas, Republicans say Sanders has brought a “new energy” to the legislature. “The whole atmosphere and mood of everything is different,” said Bart Hester, who leads the state’s upper chamber. “It’s such a fun energy, an exciting and new energy. It’s fun to come in everyday.”
Hester says the onslaught of opposition from teachers’ unions against the education bill was no match for Sanders.
“We have a governor now where members are more scared of her than they are their superintendents or the teacher union—we’ve never experienced that,” Hester said. “They don’t want to disappoint her—they know that she’s super popular, they don’t want to be the guy that was against their number-one priority.”
Sanders scoffs at suggestions that her education plan was a “copycat” of legislation championed by DeSantis, another high-profile Republican governor. “Hard to copy when ours is much bigger and goes much further,” Sanders said. But she has nothing negative to say about her Republican counterpart in Florida, and says there’s a “great sense of camaraderie and willingness to share best practices” between her and DeSantis, who has emerged as Trump’s chief competition in the Republican Party.
Sanders is yet to weigh in on who the Republican presidential nominee should be in 2024—her “focus is solely on Arkansas,” she says, in the same way every ambitious and upwardly mobile politician does. And Trump, her former boss, reportedly called Sanders in recent weeks to ask for her endorsement, which still hasn’t come.
But she also said she “maintains a great relationship” with Trump, and left the door open for an endorsement in the future.
“When the time comes, maybe, but right now, I don’t want to do anything that takes away from the huge agenda list that we have to get done here in Arkansas,” Sanders said. “I don’t intend on slowing down on that front at any point soon. And so I don’t want to do anything that takes away, not just my attention, but also the attention of what we’re accomplishing.”
A former White House colleague who remains close to Sanders doesn’t expect her 2024 neutrality to change any time soon. “Trump’s not her boss anymore,” the former colleague said. “Her boss is the people of Arkansas, and that’s where I assume her priorities will lie.”
Republicans in the state appreciate her focus on Arkansas and recognize she’s putting the work they’re doing in the Capitol first. “Everyone wants a minute with her—she can be Sarah the national celebrity, or Sarah the governor, and she only has so many minutes in a day,” Hester said. “She is spending those minutes as Sarah the governor.”
Republican state senator Matt McKee says Sanders has the whole legislature bullish on Arkansas.
“I know Florida’s been at the forefront, Texas has done things, but Arkansas can be the place,” McKee said.
Sanders says her appreciation for Arkansas has grown since moving her family back to her home state. After traveling to each county for her campaign, she has enhanced her ability to sell the state to visitors. The governor boasts that she can point to the best place to eat in any Arkansas town—this reporter was sent to CJ’s Butcher Boy Burgers in Russellville.
When it comes to dining, things are going more smoothly for Sanders in Arkansas. Thus far, she says she hasn’t been denied service, as she was in 2019 at the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia.
“You know, knock on wood, I have not been asked to leave any restaurant so far,” Sanders said. “It’s amazing to be home.”
Friday, in Sacramento, Calif., a group of detransitioners, parents, and allies gathered at the state capitol building in honor of Detrans Awareness Day. They came together to raise awareness about the growing group of individuals who say they’ve been irreparably harmed by the gender industry.
Among them is Prisha Mosley, a female detransitioner who was prescribed male hormones as a minor and underwent a double mastectomy shortly after turning 18. Today at 25, Mosley describes feeling like a “medical monster,” suffering from a long list of prolonged side effects, including such severe vaginal atrophy that she can no longer use tampons.
The effects of the “mutilation” that Mosley describes falling victim to as a child is not unlike the horrific procedure of female genital mutilation, which involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia.
As a result of her medical transition, Mosley is unable to have a normal sex life, says she feels as though she’s “robbing” her boyfriend of her breasts, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to bear her own children.
According to data from the World Health Organization, more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM and, annually, more than 3 million girls are still at risk of being subjected to the procedure. FGM is nearly universally recognized as a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and a violation of the rights of children. And yet, in the U.S., under the guise of “gender-affirming care,” a modern-day version of the practice is being widely accepted and promoted to young girls.
Join me for Detrans Awareness at the California Capitol on March 10th! Dress warm it might be raining! pic.twitter.com/XOE9YbRvkK
Instead of calling it FGM, activists have bubble wrapped their modern-day mutilation in pleasant-sounding terms such “top surgery,” “bottom surgery,” and “reversible” hormonal treatments for children and adults who identify as transgender.
Yet, like FGM, procedures offered to those who suffer from body image issues and/or gender confusion incorporate medical interventions that can mutilate their sex organs. These effects aren’t limited to vulvoplasties and hysterectomies, which are two of the more extreme surgical procedures offered under “gender-affirming care.”
As Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who oversaw the treatment of thousands of minors at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, recently described:
“[G]irls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid.’
“There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.”
This is an atrocity. And disproportionately, it’s an atrocity that’s affecting the bodies of women, as girls account for a significant majority of minors receiving “gender-affirming care.”
While critics are quick to dismiss evidence of “social contagion” among teenage girls, even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its activist president, Dr. Marci Bowers, have recognized that social influences may be driving some transgender identification in youth.
This perhaps explains why detransitioners are a rapidly-growing group gaining more visibility and attention, despite claims by some transgender activists that detransitioning is rare or not a “real thing.” Yet the harrowing stories of former trans-identified individuals serve as a cautionary tale against medical transitioning, as professionals appear either unable or unwilling to treat the often-severe medical complications caused by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
At its root, gender ideology teaches vulnerable and impressionable girls to medicalize the natural insecurities that they face. In pursuit of “acceptance,” professionals then send them down a devastating path that includes drugs used to castrate male sex offenders and, in some cases, irreversible surgeries.
European countries such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and most recently Norway have moved to sharply limit these practices for minors after a systematic review of evidence found that the risks to “gender-affirming care” outweigh any benefits.
Here in the U.S., aside from a few brave states such as Florida pushing back on “gender-affirming care,” we’re moving in the opposite direction. Activists, medical professionals, and politicians are doubling down on their support for the mutilation of healthy bodies by smearing attempts to ban these procedures as bigoted and dangerous—attacks not unlike those once used to legalize and normalize FGM.
For his part, President Joe Biden has made his position clear: “Affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy,” he said in a 2022 video message speaking directly to parents.
To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back. pic.twitter.com/mD4F0m3rU1
But sadly for the Biden administration, it’s not enough to irreversibly destroy the future sex lives and reproductive abilities of youth by encouraging experimental drugs and treatments in the U.S. According to a leaked internal memo from Secretary Antony Blinken, the Biden administration may begin pressuring other countries to push vulnerable youth into hormones and surgeries.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Leor Sapir put it, “Under President Biden, it would appear that cultural arrogance and ‘colonialism’ (as defined in the contemporary academy) are once again staples of American foreign policy.”
With Detrans Awareness Day following on the heels of International Women’s Day this week, it’s time to stop mincing words. We must treat gender ideology as a human rights issue. And we must be clear, the Biden administration is on the wrong side.
The Biden administration announced Monday that it is moving forward with approving a massive 30-year oil drilling project in Alaska over objections from climate activists and Democratic lawmakers about its environmental impact.
The Department of Interior (DOI) approved three of the five drilling sites proposed by oil company ConocoPhillips as part of its Willow Project in the National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A) located in North Slope Borough, Alaska. ConocoPhillips previously stated that, for the project to remain economically viable, the federal government would need to approve at least three of the sites.
According to the record of decision published by the Bureau of Land Management, the administration is also flatly rejecting the two other drilling sites and associated infrastructure proposed by ConocoPhillips. And the Houston-based company agreed to forfeit about 68,000 acres of drilling rights that it owns for a separate project.
The decision noted that the approved option would produce the fewest greenhouse gas emissions compared to all alternatives and the DOI said, by denying two of the drilling sites, it was “substantially reducing the size of the project.”
President Biden is pictured next to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland at the White House on Oct. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
“The Record of Decision denies two of the five drill site pads proposed by ConocoPhillips, reducing the project’s drill pads by 40 percent,” the DOI said in a statement. “The concurrent relinquishment of 68,000 acres by the company of its existing northernmost and southernmost leases within the Bear Tooth Unit reduces the Bear Tooth Unit’s footprint in the NPR-A by one-third.”
“This reduces the project’s freshwater use and eliminates all infrastructure related to the two rejected drill sites, including approximately 11 miles of roads, 20 miles of pipelines, and 133 acres of gravel, all of which reduces potential impacts to caribou migration and subsistence users.”
While the DOI issued the final decision Monday morning, President Biden and senior White House officials have been actively involved in overseeing the approval process.
The final record of decision, meanwhile, comes years after ConocoPhillips first proposed the project. Willow was originally approved under the Trump administration before a federal judge ordered the government to conduct a more rigorous environmental analysis following a legal challenge from climate advocacy groups.
The company has forecasted the project will produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day, create more than 2,500 construction jobs and 300 long-term jobs, and deliver as much as $17 billion in revenue for the federal government, Alaska and local communities, many of which are Indigenous. The project will lead to the construction of up to 250 wells, multiple pipelines, a central processing plant, an airport and a gravel mine.
Over its three-decade lifespan, Willow is projected to produce up to 614 million barrels of oil. In 2022, producers in the U.S. drilled for 4.3 billion barrels of oil on federal lands and waters.
Oil pipelines stretch across the landscape outside Nuiqsut, Alaska, where ConocoPhillips operates the Alpine Field on May 28, 2019. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“The permitting and environmental review process encompassed a period of well over two years and included multiple rounds of public comment and public meetings with Alaska Native stakeholders,” Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) President Julie Kitka wrote in a letter to Haaland last year.
“AFN understands that the need for a proactive whole of government approach to deal with climate change; however fossil fuels will be with us for quite some time to come, and projects like Willow can help bridge the gap,” Kitka continued. “The Willow Project could jumpstart our economy with thousands of jobs and be a model in community and environmental stewardship for future opportunities.”
In addition to the AFN, the largest group representing Natives in Alaska, Willow also received strong support from the state’s entire legislature, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, labor unions, elected leaders of the North Slope Borough and Alaska’s entire congressional delegation — Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola — over the last year.
During an hour-long meeting between Biden and the Alaska congressional delegation at the White House earlier this month, Sullivan handed the president a unanimous bipartisan resolution passed by the state’s legislature in support of the project.
“I’m Yupik. We have Athabascans in this audience, we have Tlingits, we have Eyaks,” Peltola said during a March 1 event in support of Willow. “Across the board, Alaska Natives are standing in support with Inupiaqs … across America there is no issue that has 100% unanimous support but clearly there is the preponderance of Inupiaqs who are in support of this. The majority of Alaska Natives, and the majority of Alaskans are in support of this.”
Climate activists hold a demonstration to urge President Biden to reject the Willow Project at the Department of the Interior headquarters on Nov. 17 in Washington, D.C. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Sunrise AU)
However, environmentalists and climate-focused Democratic lawmakers have blasted the project and urged Biden to completely reject its permits. It is estimated to produce 278 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of the carbon footprint of two million cars. Groups like Earthjustice have labeled Willow as a “carbon bomb” and, following reports Friday evening that the DOI would sign off on it, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., characterized the decision as a “complete betrayal.”
THE WORDS OF CLIMATE TERRORISTS, AND THE CLIMATE RELIGIOUS CULT.
“If allowed to proceed, the Willow [Master Development Plan] would pose a significant threat to U.S. progress on climate issues,” several House and Senate Democrats wrote to Biden on March 3. “Climate damage is unlikely to stop with the first phase of the Willow project; your administration needs to draw the line now.“
“You can stop this ill-conceived and misguided project,” they continued. “We therefore ask your administration to reject the Willow [Master Development Plan], choose the no-action alternative, and fundamentally reconsider this unsustainable approach to managing the Western Arctic.“
Biden remarked in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7 that the U.S. would “need oil and gas for a while.” (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The letter — led by House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — added that the project alone would cause $19.8 billion worth of “climate-related damages.”
Progressive lawmakers Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., also signed the letter.
Though, in an apparent attempt to soften the blow of its Willow approval, the Biden administration announced Sunday that it would indefinitely block 16 million acres of federal land and water in Alaska near the site of the Willow Project from future fossil fuel drilling.
A former senior Bureau of Land Management official told Fox News Digital on Sunday the action was a “totally political decision” and not based in science. But activists said the move was not enough to blunt the impacts of Willow.
“These conservation decisions by the Biden administration are positive steps, but not nearly sufficient to blunt the impact of any version of the Willow oil and gas project,” Karlin Itchoak, the Alaska senior regional director for The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
“We cannot allow ConocoPhillips to accelerate the climate crisis.“
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
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 Donald Trump.
The Federal Government was forced to pause the “Proud Boys’” trial regarding J6 insurrection and you will never guess why.
Special Agent Nicole Miller accidentally revealed that her boss ORDERED her to destroy 338 items of evidence via chat logs that were leaked. That’s bad news for the prosecution. And now it’s official. We are living under the very government our founding fathers warned us against.
Apparently, Miller not only lied to the defense, but also may have spied on attorney-client communications (last I checked, these fall under the ‘privileged’ category) after also being asked to “edit out that I was present” during a meeting with a confidential informant. I guess this is the kind of ‘higher loyalty’ James Comey wrote about.
As part of her testimony, prosecutors shared with defense lawyers a set of internal FBI messages that Miller had sent and received from colleagues related to the case — a standard production of evidence in criminal cases. To compile those exchanges, FBI headquarters sent Miller a spreadsheet of her messages — culled from a computer network classified at the “secret” level. Miller then reviewed the messages and filtered them to ensure only relevant, unclassified exchanges were included.
Miller sent her final list to prosecutors, who then packaged the messages into an Excel spreadsheet that they provided to defense lawyers. But unbeknownst to them, the messages Miller initially filtered out — including some that DOJ officials say are likely classified — were left in the final document as “hidden” rows in the Excel spreadsheet. Defense counsel stumbled upon them and began grilling Miller about them in front of jurors in the case.
Overnight, Justice Department attorneys told the defense team they were concerned there had been a “spill” of classified information in the hidden messages they accessed. And on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly paused the trial — already in its third month — to determine how to handle the error.
It’s the latest hiccup in a seditious conspiracy trial that has been marked by excruciating delays and extended legal disputes. Prosecutors say Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio and four leaders of the group schemed to prevent the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The group, according to the Justice Department, split into teams that helped engineer the breach of police lines and, ultimately, the building itself, when one of the defendants, Dominic Pezzola, smashed a Senate-wing window with a stolen riot shield.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jocelyn Ballantine, who is supervising the case for the Justice Department, acknowledged the likely “spill” of classified information Thursday morning. She raised particular concerns about a message sent to Miller by another agent who works on covert activity — and who she said did not work on the Proud Boys case — describing a supervisor’s order to “destroy 338 items of evidence.”
“That could impact a classified equity,” Ballantine said.
‘describing a supervisor’s order to “destroy 338 items of evidence.”’
Likely Story
I find the timing of Ballantine’s “classified” claim to be pretty fishy. Just this week, Tucker Carlsen unleashed quite a bit of video from this so-called insurrection. However, there’s only one problem. The insurrection part is missing.
For example, we all know the story of the QAnon Shaman.
Jacob Chansley, the spear-carrying Jan. 6 rioter whose horned fur hat, bare chest and face paint made him one of the more recognizable figures in the assault on the Capitol, was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
However, Carlsen revealed that video captures Chansley’s movements in the capitol that day. He went from room to room, offering up prayers, thanking police for their hard work, while escorted at all times by capitol police. The idea that anyone else would face a prison sentence after Carlsen’s big reveal is preposterous.
No wonder the prosecutor had to employ a stall tactic. Their entire case is in shambles.
Politico continues:
Defense lawyers cried foul, though, noting that the government’s claims of “classified” material arrived just as the defense sounded the alarm about the content of some of the inadvertently disclosed messages. While Miller testified Wednesday she had produced about “25 rows” of messages, defense lawyers said there were thousands of rows of hidden messages that included contents they contended were directly relevant to their case.
Some of the messages appeared to reveal that FBI agents accessed contacts between defendant Zachary Rehl and his attorney, which led Miller to tell a colleague she thought Rehl would take his case to trial. In another message, an FBI agent tells Miller, “You need to go into that CHS report you just put and edit out that I was present.” After defense attorneys began to press Miller about the attorney-client messages on Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors objected, and Kelly halted the trial to permit the parties to debate the matter.
After hearing arguments Thursday, Kelly ordered defense attorneys to refrain from reviewing or disseminating the messages until the FBI was able to conduct a classification review, a process that Ballantine said could likely be completed by the end of the day Thursday.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Telling a group of lawyers not to look at those messages is like telling people not to look at a car crash on the interstate. Worse, it’s like telling people not to look at the files on the Hunter Biden laptop. Any attorney worth their salt is definitely viewing those chats, before they mysteriously vanish faster than a Clinton-accuser.
The flare-up comes as prosecutors are nearing the end of their case against the Proud Boys. They’ve laid out evidence showing that Tarrio and his allies developed a sense of existential dread about a Biden presidency and quickly embraced Trump’s claims of fraud in the days and weeks after his defeat in the 2020 election. As Jan. 6 neared, the group’s leaders grew increasingly disillusioned with police — who they accused of insufficiently acting to investigate a man who stabbed several Proud Boys at a December 2020 rally in Washington. And they set up a new chapter, dubbed the “Ministry of Self Defense,” that included men they believed would follow orders.
A week before Jan. 6, Tarrio received a document from a girlfriend titled “1776 Returns” that sketched out a plan to occupy federal buildings in order to derail and delay Congress’ proceedings to certify the 2020 election.
Defense attorneys have contended that the group is little more than a glorified drinking club that had no actual plan to either storm the Capitol or prevent Biden from taking office. Miller’s testimony portrayed the group’s march through Washington on Jan. 6 as an organized and concerted advance toward the Capitol that pinpointed weaknesses in Capitol Police defenses and exploited them to help facilitate the breach of the Capitol.
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Feminist author Naomi Wolf offered a formal apology to conservatives who “put America first” after reviewing newly-released footage of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day,” Wolf said in a lengthy post on Substack Thursday.
“Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry. I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and the New York Times,” Wolf also said.
“Anyone in leadership who misrepresented to the public the events of the day so as to distort the complexity of its actual history — must also be held accountable,” she added.
Wolf compared the release of the new January 6 footage to Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, noting that Leftists lionized the latter while condemning the former.
Everyone in my former 'tribe' is upset that @TuckerCarlson aired government-held footage of events off public interest, and I keep thinking about how we (on the left) rightly lionized Daniel Ellsberg after he released the Pentagon Papers…
Wolf, a “lifelong liberal and civil libertarian” is a prominent feminist, author, commentator, and periodic guest on Fox News Channel shows. She was a figurehead of 1990s “third wave feminism” and was once a “Democratic Party insider,” according to Business Insider. Wolf’s “impeccable” Democratic Party bonafides came into question when “The Beauty Myth” author gave an interview to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson in 2021 and later appeared on Steve Bannon’s “WarRoom” podcast, the outlet also said. Wolf was a vocal opponent of COVID lockdowns and related policies. The Yale alum lead a protest against her alma mater’s vaccine policy in December 2022.
Why is she apologizing now?
Wolf says her apology was spurred by the recent release of previously unseen footage of the January 6 Capitol riot. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, who aired portions of the footage on his nightly show earlier this week.
Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denounced the decision to air the footage.
In her letter, Wolf specifically cites footage of “Q-Anon Shaman” Jacob Chansley and Officer Brian Sicknick which appear to contravene the narratives she previously espoused.
How has Wolf’s apology been received?
“This is pretty courageous,” Jason Whitlock tweeted Friday in response to Wolf’s apology.
“I am one of those people who was targeted and brutalized in all of this horrific dishonesty. I still am,” Walkaway campaign founder Brandon Straka tweeted.
“This helps.”
I am one of the people who was targeted and brutalized in all of this horrific dishonesty. I still am.
“Amazing letter from Naomi Wolf. Well done to her. I do not define myself politically but these lies affected us all & it’s been years of frustration (agony at times) watching them play out & seeing so many be deceived,” journalist Lara Logan tweeted Friday.
Amazing letter from Naomi Wolf. Well done to her. I do not define myself politically but these lies affected us all & it’s been years of frustration (agony at times) watching them play out & seeing so many be deceived.
“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.
Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.
But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.
In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.
“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”
An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.
So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?
The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”
Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”
The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”
With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.
Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.
Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.
The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.
Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.
The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.
But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.
This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
President Biden finally released his budget on Thursday, more than a month after the Budget Act’s statutory deadline. The document should have come with a five-word warning attached: “Hold on to your wallet.”
The budget includes thousands of pages of arcana and technical details, all of which will come to light further in the coming days. But a preliminary review of the budget’s main summary tables illustrates a familiar pattern among Democrats — a tax, spend, and borrow vision designed to expand government further. Here are some of the “highlights” (more like lowlights) from the summary document.
Taxes Too Much
Overall, the administration says the budget proposes $4.7 trillion in tax increases — a staggering sum in any season, but particularly when the economy faces recession risks. Among the highest profile revenue hikes:
$437 billion from “a minimum income tax on the wealthiest taxpayers”
$493 billion from changes to the “global minimum tax regime”
$238 billion from increasing the tax on stock buybacks
$306 billion from applying Medicare taxes to pass-through income — a “loophole” that President Biden himself spent the past six years exploiting
$344 billion from increasing the rate of said Medicare tax from 3.8 percent to 5 percent for those earning over $400,000
$1.3 trillion from increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent
$200 billion from other “reforms” to business taxation
$549 billion from adopting the undertaxed profits rule regarding international taxes
$66 billion from “reform[ing] taxation of foreign fossil fuel income”
$37 billion from “modify[ing] energy taxes”
$235 billion from increasing the top marginal rate for high-income earners
$214 billion from higher taxes on capital gains
$23 billion from higher taxes on the retirement plans of “high-income taxpayers”
$77 billion from changes to estate and gift taxes
$50 billion from “clos[ing] loopholes”
$105 billion in revenue assumed by extending the IRS enforcement money included in last year’s Inflation (Reduction) Act. The proposal to extend and expand the IRS’ ability to audit and potentially harass taxpayers comes shortly after an analyst at the Tax Policy Center admitted that the Service let President Biden off the hook for failing to pay his own taxes.
Whatever anyone thinks about the merits of these individual proposals, they cumulatively would have a significant — and negative — impact on the economy. Taxing energy producers in particular would lead to less exploration and higher prices at the pump, at a time when American families are still suffering from high inflation.
These tax increases come with the added irony that Biden himself did not “pay his fair share” of Medicare taxes, according to numeroustax experts. On a budget preview call with reporters Thursday, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young refused to recognize Biden’s hypocrisy — but the American people will.
Spends Too Much
Where will all the budget’s new tax revenue go? In many cases, to more spending and an expansion of the welfare state. Among the proposals included are several from Biden’s failed Build Back Bankrupt agenda:
$200 billion for a government-run health program in the states that have not expanded Medicaid to the able-bodied under Obamacare
$96 billion to double the Pell Grant
$90 billion for “free community college”
$104 billion for housing subsidies
$150 billion for home and community-based services in Medicaid
$325 billion for “national, comprehensive paid family and medical leave”
$429 billion for an expanded child tax credit. However, according to Treasury’s revenue explanations, the higher credit would apply for 2024 and 2025 only. In December 2021, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the 10-year cost of a permanent extension of this policy at $1.6 trillion, or almost four times the amount included in the budget.
$156 billion for an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit
$76 billion for behavioral health care
$1 billion to “make permanent the income exclusion for forgiven student debt.” While this number seems like a comparatively small amount, in reality it would pave the way for a future administration to pass another massive giveaway in student “loan forgiveness,” without triggering federal income taxes on the amount of debt canceled.
Over and above the details of the specific proposals, the budget ignores the inescapable fact that subsidizing programs increases rather than decreases their costs. The proposals will encourage colleges, child care providers, insurance companies, and others to jack up their rates, knowing that the federal government will pay the difference. To put it another way, the budget’s spending will raise inflation, even as its tax increases will kill economic growth.
Borrows Too Much
Even with all the tax increases Biden has proposed, it still won’t begin to make up for the new spending he plans, and the cost of servicing the debt from Washington’s Covid spending binge the past several years. The budget also proves how the debt has worsened under this president:
Table S-2 of the budget states that, if enacted in full, the budget would reduce 10-year deficits by $2.857 trillion. But last month, the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the 10-year budget, which showed that since last May, the projected 10-year deficit has increased by $3.082 trillion. In other words, even if all the Biden “deficit reduction” gets enacted, our nation will still be $200 billion worse off fiscally than it was just 10 short months ago.
The budget as proposed would lead to deficits of at least $1.5 trillion in every year of the 10-year budget window. By the last year of the budget window, they would total $2 trillion — and rising.
By the time President Biden intends to leave office in 2029 (assuming he gets reelected), interest on the debt will total over $1 trillion per year. By that point, we will be devoting more than 10 percent of the federal budget just to pay the interest on our debt.
Deficits will remain near or above 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future — much faster than our economy can grow, meaning that debt will continue to rise and rise as far as the eye can see.
To say this budget ignores reality is putting it mildly. Here’s hoping lawmakers can finally restore some sanity to a perpetual Washington spending spree that has grown completely out of control.
It’s hard to believe the Biden administration’s Department of Education would refuse to punish a university for a flagrant violation of Title IX simply because they were confident the victim would prevail in court if they sued. The same would go if a school violated the civil rights of a racial minority or LGBTQ+ student. Everyone would expect the administration to take quick and decisive administrative action without requiring the victim to hire a lawyer and pursue justice in the courts.
So, why should it be any different when an educational institution violates a student’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion? It shouldn’t be, but a recent notice of proposed rulemaking from the Department of Education shows that the Biden administration fails to take threats to religious liberty seriously.
In November 2020, a Department of Education rule went into effect stating that, as a condition of receiving federal funding, “a public institution shall not deny to any student organization whose stated mission is religious in nature and that is at the public institution any right, benefit, or privilege that is otherwise afforded to other student organizations at the public institution… because of the religious student organization’s beliefs, practices, policies, speech, membership standards, or leadership standards, which are informed by sincerely held religious beliefs.”
That seems in line with the First Amendment, but Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Nassar Paydar says it has “caused confusion” and creates an “unduly burdensome role” for the Department because it must investigate complaints.
The proposed solution? The Department says your First Amendment rights are robust, so hire a lawyer and pursue a resolution through the courts. Don’t bother them; and maybe the issue will be resolved before you graduate.
Before the Trump administration rulemaking, religious student groups did not have any administrative options. The courts were their only avenue to combat discrimination based on their beliefs. The rule the Biden administration now wants to repeal changed that.
Today the Department of Education doesn’t have to use the rule for it to be effective. Its mere existence has forced schools to drop their hostility to religious groups on campus out of fear that it might be used.
There are countless examples of university administrators discriminating against religious student groups. No faith or belief system is exempt from hostility. Some of the worst examples are colleges trying to regulate what student groups can require their leaders to believe. It seems reasonable to most people that a religious group should be able to require that its leaders are adherents of that faith. Yet this is still a constant issue on college campuses.
One of the best-known — or perhaps we should say notorious — cases of this was at the University of Iowa. The school derecognized a religious student group, Business Leaders in Christ, after 25 years on campus in 2017 because it required its leaders to share its religious beliefs.
Without the regulation currently in place, the group was forced to file a federal lawsuit to regain its official recognition. They won in 2019 but the University, not wanting to lose control, appealed, and lost again at the appellate level in 2021.
Not wanting to stop at just one group, in July 2018, the University officially derecognized 38 other student groups for the same reason, including those for Muslim, Sikh, and Mormon students. This was after a preliminary injunction was issued against the school in the original court case. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals again ruled against the University of Iowa.
The appellate court said the University engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” by selectively enforcing its anti-discrimination rules against religious organizations but not other student groups with selective memberships. Between the two cases, the plaintiffs spent nearly $2 million over four years to defend their First Amendment rights, a sum the University of Iowa ultimately had to pay. It would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper for everyone if the Department of Education had had the ability to intervene at the university level.
The current public comment period for the proposed repeal of this regulation closes on March 24. I hope the Department of Education reconsiders its proposal, but I pray our colleges become more accommodating of diverse religious beliefs. The existing rule helps move us in that direction but repealing it empowers hostility towards religion on campus.
Sam Brownback is chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. He previously served as United States ambassador at large for international religious freedom, as governor of Kansas and in the U.S. Senate.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin defended the state’s policies on school bathrooms and sports on Thursday following a question from a transgender student.
Youngkin’s administration rewrote the state’s policies on transgender youths at public schools in September, requiring students to use bathrooms, locker rooms and join sports teams based on their sex at birth, not their gender identity. The policy updates also include forbidding students from changing their names and preferred pronouns at public schools without the consent of their parents.
During the audience Q&A section of Thursday’s CNN town hall, a 17-year-old transgender student, who went only by the name “Nico,” asked Youngkin about these policies.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks prior to signing executive actions in the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond on Jan. 15, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Look at me. I am a transgender man,” Nico said. “Do you really think the girls in my high school would feel comfortable sharing a restroom with me?”
Youngkin replied by first thanking the student for attending the event and engaging in the critical discussion.
“I believe first that when parents are engaged with their children, then you can make good decisions together, and I met your dad, and I’m glad that you’re both here together — it’s really, really important,” he said.
Youngkin then said that many students are involved in this decision and noted the importance of accommodating students, highlighting the need for more school bathrooms, including gender-neutral lavatories.
“People can use the bathroom that they in fact are comfortable with,” he added.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks after signing a House bill in the conference room at the Capitol in Richmond on March 2, 2022. ((AP Photo/Steve Helber))
Youngkin then gave a significantly more definitive answer to transgender men and women competing in sports.
“I think sports are very clear and I don’t think it’s controversial. I don’t think biological boys should be playing sports with biological girls,” he said. “There’s been decades of efforts in order to gain opportunities for women in sports. And it’s just not fair. And I think that’s non-controversial and something that is pretty well understood.”
“There’s been decades of efforts in order to gain opportunities for women in sports. And it’s just not fair. And I think that’s non-controversial and something that is pretty well understood.”
As Youngkin responded, Nico’s father could be seen in the audience shaking his head.
A picture of a gender-neutral bathroom in a public school. (Istock/ AndreyPopov)
Youngkin previously defended his state policies on CNN in October when he told Jake Tapper, “Let me begin with these basic principles, which is first, parents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives. And oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their lives. We needed to fix a wrong. The previous administration had had a policy that excluded parents and, in fact, particularly didn’t require the involvement of parents. And let’s be clear — parents have this right and children don’t belong to the state, they belong to families.”
Tapper pressed the Republican governor on whether the policies would actually exclude parents who are supportive of their child using facilities or joining sports teams based on gender identity and not biological sex.
“Certainly not. If parents actually want their child to be able to change a pronoun or their name or use a bathroom, if parents choose that, then legally that’s what the schools will do. With regards to sports teams, this is a different issue,” Youngkin responded.
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.
Nikolas Lanum is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, announced Friday he will block a key Department of Interior (DOI) nominee from moving forward over her climate activism.
Manchin noted that his decision — which effectively kills President Biden’s nomination of Laura Daniel-Davis to serve as DOI’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management — came in response to an internal agency memo that was leaked last week. The memo showed that Daniel-Davis, who holds a lower position at DOI, signed off on an explicit decision to prioritize climate policies over energy security.
“Today, I have also decided, as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that I will not be moving forward the nomination of Laura Daniel-Davis as assistant secretary of the Department of Interior,” Manchin wrote in an op-ed for The Houston Chronicle.
“Daniel-Davis approved higher royalty rates for the Alaskan Cook Inlet sale, which were explicitly designed to decrease fossil energy production at the expense of our energy security,” he continued. “Even though I supported her in the past, I cannot, in good conscience, support her or anyone else who will play partisan politics and agree with this misguided and dangerous manipulation of the law.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaks during a news conference on Sept. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
President Biden first nominated Daniel-Davis for the position in June 2021. Since then, she has appeared in two confirmation hearings before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but has failed two votes for her nomination to be passed to a floor vote.
The White House announced on Jan. 23 that it would again send the nomination back to the Senate.
Daniel-Davis, who currently serves as principal deputy secretary for land and minerals management, previously served in a leadership position for the National Wildlife Federation, a group that has advocated for far-left climate policies. Senate Republicans have consistently opposed her nomination and expressed concern about her views on energy issues.
“Laura Daniel-Davis’ nomination should have been pulled over a year ago when she first failed to pass committee,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., told Fox News Digital earlier this week. “The latest attack on oil and gas is no surprise. The Biden administration, his out of touch nominees and Senate Democrats have long put the cult of climate change ahead of energy security and local communities.”
On March 3, a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management memo addressed to Daniel-Davis was leaked, showing that the agency projected energy security would be bolstered if the administration charged lower royalty rates for an offshore oil and gas lease in Alaska.
“While a 16 ⅔ percent royalty may be more likely to facilitate expeditious and orderly development of [offshore] resources and potentially offer greater energy security to residents of the State of Alaska, a reasonable balancing of the environmental and economic factors for the American public favors the maximum 18 ¾ percent royalty for Cook Inlet leases,” the memo stated.
Daniel-Davis ultimately signed off on the maximum royalty rate option without publicly acknowledging the energy security implications of that decision. The memo resulted in a rebuke from Manchin and additional calls from Republicans like Daines for her nomination to be withdrawn.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital
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 Donald Trump.
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Dr. Robert Redfield testified before Congress Wednesday, noting three suspicious events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that strengthened his long-held conviction that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab — a belief, he says, that got him boxed out of transformative conversations.
Whereas there is now growing recognition that COVID-19 “most likely” originated in the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were routinely performed on coronaviruses, saying so in recent years prompted derision and censorship.
Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly received death threats from his fellow scientists for noting that human error and meddling may have resulted in the spread of a virus that claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” he told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
When addressing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on March 8, he did not hold back.
Redfield noted there were three things in particular that took place early in the pandemic that bolstered his suspicion that COVID-19 came from a lab.
First, “they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular. Researchers don’t like to do that.”
The New York Times reported that early in the pandemic, over 200 data entries from the genetic sequencing of early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan were erased from an online scientific database. The early suspicion was that these sequences were deleted because they revealed that the virus that ravaged the world may have predated the alleged outbreak at the wet marked in December 2019.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was able to track down 13 of the sequences online and determined that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”
Chinese researchers had requested that the National Institutes of Health delete the sequences, and the NIH complied, reported the Washington Examiner.
Redfield appeared to suggest that the deletion of sequences took place as early as September 2019.
Second, Redfield said, “they changed the command and control at the lab from civilian control to military control. Highly unusual.”
In 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted during a meeting of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019. … The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?”
The State Department noted in early 2021 that “the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biowarfare expert, formally took over the BSL-4 lab from a local communist party committee president on Jan. 31, 2020, sparking concerns that the virus not only originated in the lab but was linked to a biowarfare program.
Third, “which is very telling, they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. So I think, clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event that happened in that laboratory in September.”
Redfield ruffled feathers in March 2021 when he went on CNN and said, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped. … Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
Fauci’s skew
Redfield told the subcommittee that retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins both sought to push a “single narrative” about the virus’ origins.
Redfield noted that he “made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this and I let them know, as a virologist, that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS because they never learned how to transmit human to human.”
“I felt that this virus was too infectious for humans,” said Redfield. “There was a lot of evidence that lab actually published in 2014 that they put the ACE2 receptor into humanized mice so it could infect human tissue. I think, you know, we had to really seriously go after the fact it came from the lab and they knew that that was how I was thinking, although I thought we had to go after both hypotheses.”
Even though Redfield helmed the CDC at the time, Redfield intimated that Fauci elected not to involve him in the controversial Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with top virologists on account of his insistence on a possible lab origin.
TheBlaze previously reported that Fauci appeared keen to push the zoonotic origins theory, both on the conference call and in the correspondence that followed.
According to congressional investigators, just days after the call, Fauci commissioned an influential 2020 study suggesting COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese lab leak. The former NIAID director also reportedly edited and provided final approval for the document, which he later cited on the national stage without noting his involvement.
Redfield revealed he was not made aware of his exclusion from the conference call or the call itself until the correspondences was released following a FOIA request.
When asked why Fauci and others excluded him, Redfield answered, “Because I had a different point of view and I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative, which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield told Congress. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
Former CDC Director: Coming Up With a Single Narrative Is Antithetical to Science
Dr. Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, was excluded from a February 2020 call with doctors Fauci, Collins, and others discussing the origins of COVID.
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.
On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.
But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.
However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.
Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.
The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.
Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”
On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.
“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”
Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Fox News host Tucker Carlson now has access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance video from the Jan. 6 riot. It’s created quite a bit of consternation and anger in the media. Of course, if the Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack, handpicked by Nancy Pelosi, hadn’t withheld inconvenient evidence from the public in the first place, then McCarthy wouldn’t have had the chance to give the Fox News host anything. Republicans have Fox. The Jan. 6 committee has virtually every other outlet.
Mitch McConnell is also outraged by Carlson’s framing of the surveillance video. Perhaps if the Kentucky senator had voiced outrage when the committee handed unfettered access to a former producer of “Good Morning America” and “Nightline,” so he could create a slick, selectively edited program that made Jan. 6 look like the September Massacres of the French Revolution, we wouldn’t be here. It says a lot about McConnell that he’s more upset by a media personality sharing videos than he is about Chuck Schumer, a government official, demanding a private company censor journalism.
“I could take footage from World War II, find a little piece of it, and convince somebody it’s the moon landing,” former Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night. “There’s footage of soldiers [in Vietnam] at their bases hanging out in Saigon,” Cooper responded. “… You can take video of anybody in the course of a day.”
You can. And you can also take footage showing soldiers in Vietnam abusing civilians to create the perception that most servicemen abused civilians. The “mostly peaceful” formulation, typically used by liberals to whitewash leftist violence, is shameful. And so is the partisan fearmongering surrounding Jan. 6.
It’s difficult for me to muster any sympathy for the nutjobs who entered the Capitol building. It’s implausible that most of them didn’t understand what they were doing was wrong, dangerous, or illegal, whether they were just milling about or banging on doors or vandalizing offices. Many, of course, acted in threatening and violent ways. It was a national embarrassment.
None of that makes the dishonest political revisionism of the Jan. 6 committee any truer. It’s clear the QAnon Shaman wasn’t moments away from overthrowing the republic and declaring Donald Trump the king of America. It wasn’t anywhere close to “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” or the new Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Which is why Democrats conflate the actions of rioters with those of the thousands of people who protested the election results outside, the president who enflamed the crowd with conspiratorial rhetoric, and the politicians who were inside voting on certification. Wrong or right, conspiracists or not, the latter people did not do anything illegal.
Put it this way, the central difference between Jan 6, 2021, and the last day or two of May 2020, when Secret Service agents had to stick Donald Trump into a bunker for hours as a throng of “protesters” began overwhelming security at the White House, some throwing rocks and bottles and trying to break down barricades, was the effectiveness of the police.
Then again, QAnon Shaman, like anyone else accused of rioting, deserves a fair trial. If his lawyer is telling the truth, the defense had no access to video of cops peacefully escorting the man around the Capitol. We have no clue if that footage is exculpatory, but it is clearly relevant. QAnon Shaman was sentenced to over three years in prison, with another nearly three years of probation.
If Cooper were a member of a functioning press, he would have been grilling Kinzinger about his committee’s lack of transparency and denial of basic due process. Pelosi blocked members who could have asked for answers regarding security breakdowns or demanded the release of countervailing evidence or tempered the hyperbole and grandstanding that dominated the hearings.
Cooper knows that journalists “selectively” edit and cherry-pick video all the time. He knows that the Jan. 6 committee “selectively” edited and cherry-picked video, as well. Maybe seeing both narratives gives us a far better sense of what happened that day. There was a riot, not a coup d’etat. And the media should be elated that we have more footage for the historical record. Then again, that was never the point, was it?
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
On Sunday night, as I was doing laundry, I got a text message from a fellow Virginia mother with an interesting invitation: Ben Litchfield, a Democratic Party Virginia Senate candidate from Fredericksburg, was convening a statewide Zoom call of “parents, educations and pro-public school activists” to discuss education issues.
A “mama bear” activist from northern Virginia since June 2020, I thought it was a unique opportunity to brainstorm. A Democrat all my life, I moved to Virginia in December 2008 with my young son, then in kindergarten, only because the state elected Barack Obama to be U.S. president.
Born in India, I am an American Muslim immigrant and single mother, and I thought the state was finally progressive enough for me. With English as my second language when I arrived in the U.S. at the age of 4, I believe in the power of America’s public school system to empower a girl like me to become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of 23.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin gestures after signing a House bill at the Capitol, March 2, 2022, in Richmond, Virginia. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
That’s why I fight every day to support a public system where teachers are able to spend their time educating my younger self, not indoctrinating kids with divisive, distracting activist agendas.
This time, these activists were hosting a strategy session to develop “a coordinated opposition” to the Youngkin administration’s alleged “attack on public schools, educators, and students.”
The designated “Topic” for the call: “VA Dept of Education and Youngkin Town Hall.” Thursday night, CNN host Jake Tapper is hosting a town hall meeting with Gov. Glenn Youngkin. I know because I’ve encouraged many parents and students to join the town hall.
Suparna Dutta was smeared when nominated to the Virginia Board of Education in July 2022. (Fox News Digital)
When I joined the call, I recognized some names. Cheryl Binkley, a former northern Virginia teachers’ union leader, was guiding introductions. Mariane Burke, the local leader of the national activist group, Indivisible, was online.
I knew them well. They had led a successful hit, organized by the Virginia chapter of a national teachers’ union campaign – #RedForEd – to assassinate the character of a friend, Suparna Dutta, an American Hindu immigrant, with the “White supremacist” smear when Youngkin nominated her to be on the Virginia Board of Education. They won a 22-18 vote, with Democrats casting their ballots unanimously against Dutta.
On the call, another woman introduced herself, and then Binkley, a former Virginia Education Association union official, turned to me. I introduced myself fully: I’m Asra Nomani, and I’m a mother in northern Virginia, and I looked forward to learning from others.
While we may have a difference of opinion on a few – OK, many – issues, I thought we could benefit from a much-needed conversation, hearing each other out, at least virtually face-to-face. Binkley had another point of view.
She kicked me out of the meeting, and my only participation was left to my introduction and this note that popped up on my phone: “The host has removed you from this meeting.”
“…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” declared Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat’s gubernatorial candidate in Virginia in 2021. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Virginia Democrats’ removal of me – a Muslim immigrant single mother from India and “woman of color,” as U.S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez once described Rep. Ilhan Omar – symbolizes much more than the ejection of one person. It captures the utter failure of the Democratic National Committee to actually be inclusive to the millions of parents – many of them immigrant minority parents – who refuse its lockstep agenda with the country’s two teachers’ unions – the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
Even though President Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021, over Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who famously sealed his loss with the assertion in a debate that “…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
The arrogance, political corruption and myopia of Democratic Party officials to parents portends bad news for the Democratic Party in 2024 and good news for Republican candidates. On cue, every Republican presidential candidate, former Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former President Donald Trump – and those still unannounced, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Youngkin – have made education a key issue on their platform.
Take a bow. That’s the mama bear movement driving issues, not the other way around.
On Twitter the next day, the Democrat loyalists didn’t apologize and acknowledge the error of their ways. One user responded: “Good. You have no business in Virginia education.”
But I actually do have business in Virginia education. So does every parent.
Democrats will turn off more parents with their closed-door mentality, and that will drive a wedge issue between traditionally Democratic parents, like Black, Hispanic and Asian parents, and the Democratic Party.
Republicans have embraced a winning agenda item, and they will win the White House if they continue to translate their platforms with policy and legislative answers restoring parents’ rights in America.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Q. Nomani is the author of a new book, Woke Army. She is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Network. She is reachable on Twitter as @AsraNomani.
Texas rancher Debi Douglas spoke out Thursday about the escalating danger at the border after four Americans were kidnapped, and two killed, by a cartel in Mexico. Douglas’ ranch is located in Brownsville, a city that sits along the Mexico border adjacent to Matamoros, where the kidnapping took place. Douglas said on “Fox & Friends First” that living conditions in her area are only getting worse, and she doesn’t believe anything will improve even if the cartel members are arrested.
“The Mexican government is afraid of the cartel,” she reasoned. “If Biden does not do something, this is going to come more into our country.”
Douglas said the community is largely unaware of the severity of the danger, and she believes the two individuals killed in Mexico didn’t take the threat “to heart” when they traveled across the border. Douglas said she believes it’s only a “matter of time” before cartels attempt to take over border towns in her state.
Mexican National Guard prepare a search mission for four U.S. citizens kidnapped by gunmen at Matamoros, Mexico, on Monday. (AP)
“And unless we do something, everybody had better get ready,” she told co-hosts Todd Piro and Ashley Strohmier.
The Biden administration has called the death of Americans “unacceptable” and said U.S. officials will work with the Mexican government to pursue justice. Douglas, however, said the Democratic administration’s plan to address the problem is a “joke.”
“The Mexican government is either partially paid off by the cartels or they fear the cartels. So the fact that Biden is saying he’s going to work with them is absolutely a joke and an insult to the American people,” she said.
“Our administration is never going to wake up,” Douglas said, arguing that Biden does not care about the American people. “He’s a puppet, and he has been protected in this country. And with him not in turn protecting the people of this country, he basically is a traitor.”
She called Biden a “weak” individual and said she believes he wants “all these illegals” to enter the country. Douglas claimed Democrats want to allow illegal immigrants to vote to keep the party in power.
“If the border was even shut down today, we have an extreme problem with the illegals that are already in this country,” she said. “They are a lot of criminals, that’s been proven. There’s child molesters. There’s murderers.”
“It’s going to take the FBI, the CIA, ICE, everybody. Number one, shut the borders and then let’s get on this. Let’s deport them all,” Douglas said.
Douglas said she’s “more vigilant” now in protecting herself following the kidnapping of Americans.
“I’ve always been vigilant since the illegals have been pouring in,” she said.
With Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis busy running the third-largest state, enacting a magnificently conservative agenda, promoting a new book, and having to respond to endless demands that he run for president (not to mention banning the words “gay” and “slavery” — the man’s a whirlwind of activity!), I thought I’d jot down a few ideas for his presidential announcement speech.
Here are some of the main points I think he should hit.
— “We are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan!” (Donald Trump, 2023 CPAC)
During his first two years in office, Trump had a Republican House and a Republican Senate. He’d just won a stunning upset victory that should have scared the bejesus out of every Republican in Washington. The people had spoken! They wanted a wall, not more tax cuts.
But Ryan wanted to cut taxes, so Trump forgot all about the wall and gave them tax cuts. (In fairness to Trump, challenging Ryan and pushing for wall funding would have required making a phone call.)
HEADLINE: “Ryan gets big — and much-needed — win on tax cuts” — Politico, Nov. 16, 2017
From the article:
“Loathed by the Breitbart wing of the Republican Party — which sees Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as Trump’s biggest obstacle to making America great again — the Wisconsin Republican scored a major victory in Thursday’s 227-205 vote to pass a massive tax-cut package that dramatically alters the U.S. tax code … [T]he biggest legislative win so far for Trump is an issue that Ryan has been working on for virtually his entire career.”
— “Now we have complete chaos [at the border], fentanyl is pouring in and families are being destroyed. There is death everywhere caused by incompetence.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
In fact, drug overdose deaths in America skyrocketed during the No-Wall/Open-Borders policy of the Trump administration, going from an average of about 50,000 a year in Obama’s second term to more than 90,000 in Trump’s last year in office.
Even in his CPAC speech, full of preposterous, fantastical claims about all the great things he did, Trump couldn’t stay focused on the (now) 100,000 Americans who die of drug overdoses every year — something that is 100% attributable to not having a border wall. After briefly mentioning fentanyl, he got right back to something much more important — Syria and Iraq!
Trump said — no ellipses, this is exactly what he said — “Fentanyl is a big problem. In fact with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said, it can only be done in three years, it probably cannot be done it all, sir. And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq. Met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You heard that story.”
What on Earth? The man makes Biden look razor sharp.
— “I stood firm against the forces of anarchy and decay. I arrested the Marxists who toppled statues of our great heroes in Washington, D.C. I arrested them. They were knocking down the most beautiful artwork, the most beautiful statues of great heroes. They didn’t even know who they were, they just wanted anarchy.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
Under President Trump, hundreds of national treasures were destroyed, mangled, defaced, thrown into lakes, chopped up, melted down, hidden away or renamed. It was the greatest desecration of our country’s inheritance since the British set fire to the White House during the War of 1812.
Among the casualties were memorials not only to anyone who ever had anything to do with the Confederacy (on the plus side, black SAT scores immediately improved!), but also statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key and Christopher Columbus. Also, a statue of an elk in Portland, Oregon.
In DeSantis’ Florida, no monuments or statues were toppled or defaced — not even the Confederate ones. About a dozen park names were changed and statues moved to other locations, but 75 Confederate memorials still stand in the Sunshine State, including an obelisk at Florida’s state capitol.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who gave a damn about our country’s heritage and beautiful artwork?
— “Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win. That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and Election Day votes.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
Before the absolutely vital Senate runoff election in Georgia in January 2021, Trump did everything he could to discourage Republicans from voting.
The AJC reported: “Trump’s message that the election was stolen discouraged voters such as Craig Roland, a 61-year-old Rome resident. Roland said he didn’t believe his vote would count. ‘What good would it have done to vote? They have votes that got changed,’ Roland said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever vote again.’”
— “We will keep men out of women’s sports.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
It was during Trump’s first year in office that biological men competing in women’s events destroyed women’s soccer and track and field in Connecticut, an absurdity that quickly spread to the rest of the country. Trump did nothing about it, unless you count a strongly worded tweet. (Heard of Title IX?)
Gov. DeSantis signed a bill prohibiting biological males (according to their birth certificates) from competing in women’s sports in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural or club athletic teams or sports that are sponsored by a public secondary school, high school, public college or university institution in the state of Florida.
— “I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
The entire transgender craze kicked off during the Trump administration, and it continued unabated throughout the Trump administration.
By contrast, acting at the behest of Gov. DeSantis, Florida medical boards have issued rules prohibiting the poisoning and mutilation of youth under 18 years old, one of the first such policies in the nation.
— “[Fox News host] Sean Hannity should get a [Pulitzer] prize … Tucker should get a prize.” (Trump, 2023 CPAC)
Hmmm. After the election, Hannity was “privately disgusted by Trump … but was scared to lose viewers,” according to Rupert Murdoch. In texts, Tucker Carlson called Trump “a demonic force” and “a destroyer.”
I don’t know if having a tenuous grasp of the obvious warrants a Pulitzer Prize, but if those are Trump’s biggest boosters, he may want to go back to Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.
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 Donald Trump.
Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer is calling on the owner of Fox News to prevent network host Tucker Carlson from releasing any more footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that House Democrats hid from the public for two years. Carlson’s team reviewed more than 40,000 hours of video from that day and on Monday aired previously unseen footage that contradicts numerous falsehoods peddled by Democrat politicos and corporate media.
On Tuesday, Schumer melodramatically told reporters that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch “has a special obligation” to bar Carlson from airing more unedited footage from Jan. 6 “because our democracy depends on it.”
Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it." pic.twitter.com/uld6eaCl3C
The comments echo remarks Schumer gave during a temper tantrum on the Senate floor earlier in the day, in which he accused Carlson’s Monday night program of being “one of the most shameful hours … ever seen on cable television” and similarly called on Murdoch to prohibit the release of more Jan. 6 footage.
They're Freaking Out Big Time
Senator Schumer Went Down To The Senate Floor This Morning To
-Condemn Tucker Carlson's January 6th Tapes Segment Last Night -Call For Fox News And Rupert Murdoch To Stop Tucker Carlson From Releasing Another Report On The January 6th Tapes… https://t.co/nPqG7adQKxpic.twitter.com/e3z3YBwTFR
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) March 7, 2023
Why the demand for censorship? According to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Jan. 6 was supposedly“the worst attack on [American] democracy since the Civil War.” If the country were as close to forfeiting democracy as Democrats often claim, don’t the American people deserve to see as much footage as possible from that day? Not according to Democrats. That’s because the footage Carlson released shows their J6 narrative was not only overblown but in some instances completely false.
Within the footage Carlson released on Monday night were clips showing Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes the day following the J6 riot, walking around the complex “after Democrats and the media claimed he was brutally murdered” by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. The New York Times, for example, claimed in its original report on Sicknick’s death that he died — right there, big and bold in its headline — “From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.”
As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Democrats’ House select committee, which was used as a political show trial to their benefit, also helped fuel such conspiracies over Sicknick’s death.
In addition to surveillance footage of Sicknick, Carlson also released clips showing Capitol law enforcement giving VIP treatment to Jacob Chansley, known as the “Q-Anon Shaman.” As The Federalist separately reported, the footage shows Chansley being escorted by Capitol Police officers “to multiple entrances throughout the building,” with some clips appearing to show officers checking “for unlocked doors.”
“They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson said. “We counted at least nine officers who were within touching distance of unarmed Jacob Chansley. Not one of them tried to slow him down.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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
What if I told you that Officer Brian Sicknick, the cop supposedly murdered during the J6 “insurrection” at the Capitol, actually died months later from completely different causes?
Prepare to have your mind blown, because according to Tucker Carlsen, that’s exactly what happened.
The autopsy found no evidence of external or internal injuries and Sicknick did not have an allergic reaction to any chemical irritants.
The mainstream media, with The New York Times leading the charge, lied about Sicknick’s death and falsely claimed he died from injuries suffered after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the Capitol riot on January 6.
I’m guessing this determination will make it pretty difficult to prosecute Julian Khater and George Tanios for homicide, although the two still face charges for assaulting Officer Sicknick.
GP adds:
The DC Chief Medical Examiner earlier this month announced the cause and manner of death of the four people who died during January 6 riot at US Capitol.
Two men died of natural causes and one woman’s death was ruled an accident.
Ashli Babbitt’s death was ruled a homicide.
Video Proves Sicknick was actually walking around AFTER the insurrection.
BREAKING: Tucker Carlson has obtained footage of Brian Sicknick walking around the Capitol healthy after the media claimed he had been killed by Trump supporters pic.twitter.com/Vd5sEu6oqS
However, Biden and his regime continue to hammer down the lies of Sicknick’s death. I can’t help but wonder why Sicknick’s family was part of this lie. I recall an article in which their refusal to shake hands with GOP leaders was the focus.
“We got together and said we’re not going to shake their hands,” Gladys Sicknick, mother of the late officer, told NBC News.
She called out congressional Republicans who continue to support former President Trump, “go down to Mar-a-Lago and you know, kiss his ring or whatever the hell they do down there, you know.” She met with Republican lawmakers last year asking for them to vote in support of creating a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the Capitol attack. McConnell and McCarthy were opposed to the commission. The legislation passed the House, but it was blocked in the Senate due to a Republican opposition led by McConnell.
Ken Sicknick, brother of the late officer, told NBC News that their refusal to shake GOP leaders’ hands at the ceremony is “kind of self-explanatory.”
“They continue to perpetrate the big lie, or at least not denounce it, which is basically the same thing, and they refuse to condemn Donald Trump,” he said, referring to the former president’s false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.
Craig Sicknick, another brother of the late officer, also called McCarthy out for his initial condemnation of Trump after the Capitol attack, but ultimately remained a staunch supporter of the former president.
“I mean, they’re speaking here today in honor of the officers and what happened but at the same token out of the other side of their mouth, … they’re doing a lot to support what caused the events of January 6, instead of denouncing them,” Craig Sicknick said.
It’s not really surprising to see the brothers divided. That’s what leftism continues to do to this country. It brings a whole new meaning to the old adage “divide and conquer”.
Why Lie?
That’s the question that pretty much sums up the last three years. What’s the point of all this dishonestly?
Tucker also reported that this bit of video had been bookmarked. So those who had access to all the video but denied access to others were aware that this evidence disproved their “Sicknick was murdered” narrative, but hid it to enable their propaganda and false charges.
Let’s get real. If the chemicals sprayed in Officer Sicknick’s face caused his stroke, why not say that from the very beginning? If there existed a mix of both peaceful and violent protesters, why hide it?
You conspiracy theorist, you never heard of someone dying and still walk around afterwards???
You can apply that question across the board. Why lie about covid’s origin? Or Biden’s many crimes against America? It seems as though the lying is part of the scam. While leftists distract us by constantly forcing us to “prove” the truth, what else are they trying to pull off?
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended on Tuesday his decision to give Tucker Carlson the Jan. 6 tapes, fiercely responding to a CNN reporter who questioned him. CNN reporter Manu Raju asked McCarthy whether he regrets giving Carlson the tapes, accusing the Fox News host of using the footage to “whitewash” what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. McCarthy was clear that he does not.
“No,” the California Republican responded.
“I said at the very beginning, ‘Transparency.’ And so what I wanted to produce for everybody is exactly what I said, people can actually look at it and see what’s gone on that day,” he explained.
When the reporter asked McCarthy if he agrees with Carlson’s reporting, McCarthy responded, “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”
That’s when McCarthy zeroed in on CNN for allegedly exposing the secret location where congressional leadership fled on Jan. 6.
“I just wanted to make sure I had transparency, because I know on CNN, I mean, I had here where you guys actually wrote where we were,” McCarthy said. “This was a secret location: Fort McNair. I don’t know if you got concerned by that. I don’t even know from a point of view of security if we could ever be taken there again.
“But when you broke that at CNN, that was a real concern to a lot of people,” he added, referring to transparency in media.
Interestingly, McCarthy also revealed that he consulted the Capitol Police before releasing the tapes to ensure sensitive material was not released. He said the Capitol Police only raised concern about one piece of footage, which was protected before its release. On the other hand, the Capitol Police told McCarthy that the Jan. 6 committee did not consult with the agency before it released footage.
Last October, CNN exclusively reported that congressional leadership had established a command center at Fort McNair in Washington, publishing additional footage not shown by the Jan. 6 committee.
The committee had shown footage of lawmakers gathering there, but the committee did not disclose the exact location. Instead, it labeled the footage as having taken place at an “undisclosed location,” according to CNN.
Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”
Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence.
Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans
Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”
Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.
Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear.
Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.
If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.”
Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)
Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story
Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months.
Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.
Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start
Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.
Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.
Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?
Buckets of Scandals
The story will quickly progress from there, but how?
While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.
Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.
Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox
Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more.
What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why?
Twitter-Government Coordination
The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.”
Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success.
The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.
Non-Governmental Organizations
Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University.
What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have?
Disinformation About Disinformation
The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable.
Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public.
Funding Sources
Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.
Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?
Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots
After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.
Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved?
What Was the Media’s Role?
Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.
Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?
Specific Instances of Censorship
Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing.
While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.
However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.
The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth?
Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic?
That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Can we trust Congress to set politics aside and do the right thing?
I get that question from a lot of veterans and military family members.
I will testify on Wednesday as one of the initial witnesses for the long-awaited House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that will re-visit the botched Afghan withdrawal by discussing the Afghanistan collapse and the impact it’s had on our nation, the Afghan people, and our veterans.
The U. S. government may not have had the backs of our Afghan Allies, but our veterans did.
For as long as we’ve been a nation, our veterans have been a moral compass for doing the right thing, especially in hard times. When Kabul collapsed on August 15, 2021, thousands of veterans across the country watched the Taliban take back Afghanistan. Most of these men and women veterans had paid their dues and moved on with their lives. Jumping back into the quagmire of Afghanistan was certainly not part of their military retirement plans. Yet they did just that, and in a big way. Because they weren’t willing to break a promise that every warrior lives by: “I have your back.”
This hearing on Wednesday will be the first time that the voices of these volunteer veterans will be heard in this kind of public forum. It’s possible that the whole thing might quickly spiral into the polarized political grandstanding most of us have come to expect.
Even so, a few of us are going to walk in there, take that oath, and speak our truth on the off chance that our political system still honors its social contract with its veterans. Veterans know something about the impact of the Afghan withdrawal that our country seems oblivious to: we might be done with Afghanistan, but it’s not done with us.
For my part, I intend to drive home the fact that right now, veterans are still holding the line for our Afghan Allies. We are banding together, pooling our resources, and sharing information about best practices on safe passage and resettlement issues. We’re advocating for our Afghan partners.
Why?
Because veterans know something about the impact of the Afghan withdrawal that our country seems oblivious to: we might be done with Afghanistan, but it’s not done with us.
As Afghanistan re-emerges as a terrorist safe haven, our national security risk is higher than even pre-911 levels. And no one is talking about it.
Formerly, one of the most-trusted institutions in our civil society, public trust in the military was crushed by the Afghanistan abandonment, dropping from the mid-70s to 56 percent.
Consequently, this has impacted military recruiting and retention. Many recruits come from military families and many veterans. I’ve spoken with dozens of iconic veterans across America, who are advising their loved ones to think twice about joining up.
Humanitarian atrocities that go against every American value of human decency are happening against Afghan women, children, ethnic minorities, and at-risk members of Afghan society in broad daylight, while our government claims to stand for women and other under-represented voices. Our government left our allies on the side of the road to be killed and then turned the page like it never happened. There have been no efforts to take responsibility for this abandonment or to evacuate the most at-risk Afghans, such as the commandos who fought side-by-side with American troops.
As a result of this moral injury, a violation of what one knows to be right, veteran mental health is plummeting, with an 81% spike in calls to the VA suicide line one year after the withdrawal.
This is not a Democrat issue. It’s not a Republican issue. It’s an American issue. There is deep responsibility on both sides of the Congressional aisle to set politics aside and act responsibly for accountability and change.
Testimony by a few veterans won’t be enough. If you care about this issue, please contact the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and demand action. If Congress doesn’t step up in this hearing, this war will follow us home and haunt our society for decades.
Congress, your veterans are watching. Do what’s right.
A U.S. Marine Corps sniper was moved to tears as he recounted how his warnings about a potential suicide bomber were ignored by leaders just minutes before the deadly blast at Kabul airport during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a Marine sniper who served in Afghanistan during the American withdrawal, recounted the ordeal in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday, telling members about the moment he and a friend were hit with a “flash and massive wave of pressure” after a suicide bomb detonated at Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021.
“I’m thrown 12 feet onto the ground but instantly knew what happened. I opened my eyes to Marines dead or unconscious and lying around me. A crowd of hundreds immediately vanished in front of me and my body was catastrophically wounded with 100 to 150 ball bearings now in it,” Vargas-Andrews told the committee through tears.
Moments before the blast, he and his fellow Marines were providing security from a tower near the gate where the blast occurred. Armed with intelligence about a potential suicide bomber, Vargas-Andrews and those with him spotted an individual matching the suicide bomber’s description. The Marines observed as the man engaged in suspicious behavior and sent urgent warnings to leaders asking for permission to engage the suspected bomber.
Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews breaks down while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Fox News)
“Over the communication network we passed that there was a potential threat and that there an IED attack imminent, this was as serious as it could get. I request engagement authority while my team leader was ready on the M110 semi-automatic sniper system. The response, leadership did not have engagement authority for us, do not engage,” Vargas-Andrews recounted.
The Marines asked for their battalion commandeer to come to the tower as psychological operations confirmed the individual met the description of the suspected bomber. They presented the commander their evidence while assuring him of the “ease of fire” on the suspect and asked for authority to shoot, but were never given permission.
“Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded, no one was held accountable for our safety,” Vargas-Andrews said.
The team soon left their position on a mission to find allies on the ground among the crowd when they were hit with the suicide blast, which led to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.
A U.S. Air Force aircraft takes off from the airport in Kabul on Aug. 30, 2021. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)
Vargas-Andrews, who was appearing in front of the committee in a personal capacity and not as a representative of the U.S. Marine Corps or the Department of Defense, is one of several individuals testifying about the chaotic final days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
“Nobody wanted my report post-blast. Even NCIS and the FBI failed to interview me.”
The hearings are the first on the subject since Republicans took control of Congress earlier this year, with Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., telling Fox News Digital Tuesday that the proceedings will be aimed at providing the “transparency and accountability the American people deserve.”
Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews recounted how his warnings about a potential suicide bomber were ignored by leaders just minutes before the deadly blast at Kabul airport. (Fox News)
“I think these 13 Gold Star families deserve to know who was responsible for the loss of life. I think that the Americans who are left behind to perish without our own U.S. government’s obligated duties to provide safety and security to them need to have transparency,” Mills said. “We need to know where the decisions were being made, whether it was ignoring military strategy by the president. Whether it was failed strategies by both the DOD and the Department of State, whether it was not being properly carried out by the ground commanders… we get the necessary information to be able to take further steps and lessons learned.”
Vargas-Andrews said he personally observed some of those failures, including slow processing speed by State Department personnel.
A U.S. Marine grabs an infant over a fence topped with concertina wire during the evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 19, 2021. (Omar Haidiri/AFP via Getty Images)
“The troops on the ground had to tirelessly work to control the crowds, day and night. The Department of State staff at HKIA (Hamid Karzai International Airport) would completely shut down processing Afghans every evening and into the morning, leaving ground forces with a nightmare,” he said. “State was not prepared to be in HKIA.”
Despite the disastrous events, the Marine testified that he was not asked to provide his report after the blast and stressed the need for accountability in the aftermath.
“Nobody wanted my report post-blast. Even NCIS and the FBI failed to interview me,” Vargas-Andrews said.
“Our military members and our veterans deserve our best because that is what we give to America,” he continued. “The withdrawal was a catastrophe in my opinion and there was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence. The 11 Marines, one sailor, and one solider who were murdered that day have not been answered for.”
Michael Lee is a writer at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter @UAMichaelLee
Last night, we aired video from surveillance cameras on Capitol Hill. That video was recorded 26 months to the day before January 6, 2021, and for 26 months, that footage was held from the American public. The January 6 Committee made certain. Now, the Justice Department also kept a lid on that video footage and in fact, in some cases, DOJ did not share it with criminal defendants who had been charged on January 6 in violation of their constitutional rights.
We felt it was a public service to bring what we could to you. There was no justification for keeping the secret any longer and a powerful argument to be made that sunlight is always and everywhere the best disinfectant and in fact, because it was video evidence, it is to some extent self-explanatory.
Anyone could look at the tape and decide what he or she thinks of it. The tape we showed last night indicated very clearly that Capitol Hill police in some cases escorted protesters through the Capitol as if they were giving a tour. They did that with Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman. At one point, they even tried to open locked doors on Chansley’s behalf.
Chansley was sentenced to four years in prison for his crimes in the Capitol on January 6 and the video we showed you last night raises the obvious question: Why? On what grounds? The video we showed you last night also showed that Officer Brian Sicknick was not beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by protesters on January 6 as the media and Liz Cheney so often claimed. The video shows Sicknick walking around the building, apparently in good health, after he was supposedly killed. We showed you that video. You can make of it what you will. We also showed you video that proves Ray Epps, the mysterious protester who encouraged others to breach the Capitol, lied to the January 6 Committee about where he was on that day, but for some reason, the committee protected him anyway. He was not considered an insurrectionist. He was their ally.
Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, speaks during a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
So, once again, you can draw whatever conclusions you like from that video. We have ours and we shared them with you, but it’s really beyond debate that it is good for this country for Americans to be able to see it. The media and politicians, the people in charge, have talked about January 6 every day since it happened for 26 months and so at some point, the evidence should be presented to the public. In free countries, governments do not lie about protests as a pretext to gain more power for themselves. They don’t selectively edit videos for propaganda services and then lie about them and fake hearings and show trials, but that’s exactly what happened and every member of Congress should ask why that happened, but Democrats in the Senate, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is not asking why. Instead, Chuck Schumer went on the Senate floor today to explode and to say that showing that video evidence of wrongdoing by the federal government, including the security forces, the police department, that Nancy Pelosi personally controlled, letting the public see any of that is a threat to democracy.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: Last night, millions of Americans tuned in to one of the most shameful hours we have ever seen on cable television. Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a lengthy segment last night arguing the January 6 Capitol attack was not a violent insurrection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain.
“There’s nothing that shameful that has ever appeared on American television in the history of the media,” and so on the basis of that, the self-evident outrage of showing the public video that it paid for and has a right to see, Chuck Schumer called for the censorship of that video — any information, and he did not dispute that it was accurate — the damage is a storyline his party constructed and used must be squelched. And Schumer’s explicit on that point. Because that video contradicted lies told by the Democratic Party — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Chuck Schumer demanded that our bosses pull this show off the air.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., walks on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, March 15, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
SCHUMER: He’s going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch — tell Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. I urge Fox News to order Carlson to cease propagating the big lie on his network and to level with their viewers about the truth — the truth behind the efforts to mislead the public. Conduct like theirs is just asking for another January 6 to happen.
“It’s a threat to democracy. Pull him off the air.” A couple of obvious observations: You don’t often see the Senate majority leader openly call for censorship on the floor of the Senate as if that was totally normal and didn’t contradict the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment, but of course it does, but what’s really happening here? What you’re seeing is hysteria, the overstatement, the crazed hyperbole, the red-in-the-face anger. What is that? Well, it’s not outrage, of course. It’s fear. It’s panic.
Those videos, which we did not retouch, which we brought to you after running everyone by the Capitol Police to make certain that we didn’t imperil anybody, and we told you that last night, those videos touch a nerve because they’re a threat to the lies that Chuck Schumer has been telling for the last 26 months, and not just Chuck Schumer. We should also tell you that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was joined in this outrage by the Senate minority leader and that would be a Republican, Mitch McConnell, and they were joined by a cascade of other Republicans — Thom Tillis from North Carolina, Mitt Romney from Utah — all sharing the same outrage, and from this, we learn two things.
One: You’re getting close to what they really care about, and you have to ask yourself why? Why is it so important that they would degrade themselves by telling such obvious lies and calling for censorship? Why? What are they trying to protect? That might be worth exploring, and we plan to, and the second thing that we learn from this is that they’re on the same side. The Senate majority leader joins the Senate minority leader — Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney. They’re all on the same side. So, it’s actually not about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat. Here you have people with shared interests, the open borders people, the people like Mitch McConnell, who are living in splendor on Chinese money, the people who underneath it all have everything in common are all aligned against everyone else, and that would include almost all news organizations in this country as well.
So, if you’re watching, this might be kind of interesting to keep a list, because one thing we learned today is that they’re all in agreement with each other. They kind of outed themselves. They sort of showed their membership cards and whatever club this is to the public, so keep a list. If you want to know who’s actually aligned, despite the illusion of partisanship, we found out today. We have a little more tape for you tonight. If you take three steps back, you may notice that the one person really who was never blamed for anything that happened on January 6 was the very same person who was in charge of the police force, the Capitol Hill police, that was charged with securing safety on January 6, and that person was Nancy Pelosi.
If there was a security failure on January 6, and demonstrably there was, it was probably Nancy Pelosi’s fault, and after looking at thousands of hours of footage, we came to the conclusion that many others have reached, which is the Capitol Police were not prepared for what happened, and that’s fascinating when you think about it, because there was ample warning. The federal intel and law enforcement agencies knew perfectly well there could be a massive disturbance at the Capitol, but the frontline officers on duty that day didn’t know and yet the people who kept that information from the frontline officers were overwhelmed by thousands of people milling around the Capitol building? The people who fell down on the job, who didn’t do their job, they were not punished. They were rewarded, and you have to ask yourself, why is that?
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
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 Donald Trump.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied the number one tennis player in the world, Novak Djokovic, entry to America and his chance to compete in two renowned tournaments this month because he did not get the Covid-19 jab. Djokovic, who acquired natural immunity, something even the corporate media admits protects against virus severity and death, multiple times since lockdowns began in 2020, applied for a vaccine exemption through DHS with hopes of playing in the Miami Open and Indian Wells Masters in the U.S. this March and April. Even though he has natural immunity and the Biden administration plans to end its “emergency” pandemic requirements like covid shots for air travelers on May 11, the Serbian was barred by the U.S. government from pleading his case for exemption anyway.
THIS IS SOOOOO REDICULOUS. This is more proof of how stupid these Leftist “mental patients” think we are. They quibble over Djokovic, yet care nothing about the hordes coming over our Southern Border, bringing in diseases of how knows what.
This isn’t the first time Djokovic was forced to forfeit his chance to win elite competitions based on his Covid shot status.
Not only could he not participate in the 2022 U.S. Open, but Djokovic was also expelled from the 2022 Australian Open because the pro-jab Australian government canceled his visa and deported him. Djokovic didn’t regain his status as the world’s top tennis player until he was permitted into Australia under the country’s relaxed mandates, where he won the 2023 Australian Open.
Even though it’s abundantly clear that the jab does nothing to stop the spread of the virus, the U.S. is one of the only countries and is the only major Western nation still requiring foreign visitors to get the shot before entering. As Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio noted in a letter calling for the repeal of covid vaccine requirements for travelers, there’s no good reason for these senseless rules to live on.
Especially as other legislators have noted since even President Joe Biden admitted the pandemic is “over.”
The Biden administration tried to force the jab on illegal border crossers at the end of March last year. Of the 476,921 migrants that border agents took into custody in April and May of 2022, only 20,000 were given the shot. That means hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers who were caught and thousands more “gotaways,” migrants who evaded arrest from overwhelmed patrol units, entered the U.S. without the same stringent requirements DHS enforces for legal travelers.
In contrast, air travelers like Djokovic have to offer verified proof of vaccination upon their arrival to the U.S. or risk getting turned away.
Keeping an unvaxxed professional athlete and star out of the U.S. while border crossers of all kinds pour into the southern U.S. without the same scrutiny proves vaccine mandates were always a political pawn to strong-arm Americans, not a means to control a virus.
From very early on in the pandemic, it was clear that, contrary to leftwing SCOTUS justices and the president’s insistence, the jab doesn’t prevent the spread of the virus. Even if it did, most Americans haven’t cared about the pervasiveness of covid since 2021. Those who do care should understand that natural immunity is a better indicator of protection than shots like the ones DHS currently requires.
Barring legal travelers from entering the U.S. over their covid vaccination status has never been about reducing illness. Neither was forcing nurses, teachers, contractors, children, and many others to follow arbitrary pandemic protocols. Since the beginning of the bureaucracy’s pandemic panic, vaccine mandates have been about forcing conformity on people who felt like they had no other choice but to comply.
For three years now, Djokovic sacrificed his career so he wouldn’t have to bend a knee. Other countries like Australia have recognized their mistake in keeping him away, but the Biden administration, which knowingly lets millions of unvaccinated illegal border crossers into the country each year, wants to teach him a lesson by barring him from the country for just a couple months more. Until Djokovic’s entry is on their terms, when they say being unvaccinated is socially acceptable, the U.S. will sentence him to the sidelines.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
House Democrats lied when they said an investigation into an FBI whistleblower’s claim of retaliation had been dismissed, according to a letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist. On the contrary, an investigation into Special Agent Steve Friend’s claims is ongoing.
Last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee leaked a “staff report” that contained numerous misrepresentations to The New York Times, Monday’s letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz said. The letter — signed by Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, the legal services firm representing Friend — began by condemning the “Forward” from committee ranking member Jerry Nadler and subcommittee ranking member Stacey Plaskett that declared by fiat and without evidence: “[T]he three individuals we have met [including Friend] are not, in fact, ‘whistleblowers.’”
Friend is indeed a whistleblower, the letter said. Not only that, but throughout the report that Democrats crafted and peddled to multiple media outlets, they falsely and repeatedly claimed the Office of Inspector General (OIG) had rejected Friend’s whistleblower retaliation claims, Leavitt stressed. “These mischaracterizations in the Democrat staff report were subsequently parroted by multiple media outlets,” including CNN and The Washington Post.
Contrary to the Democrats’ claims, echoed by friendly media outlets, Leavitt’s letter says that Friend’s whistleblower retaliation complaint, originally filed in September 2022, remains pending with the DOJ’s inspector general. While Friend had also alleged “systematic abuses of the Constitution, laws, and policy by the FBI,” in December of 2022, those allegations were referred to the FBI’s Inspection Division. But in follow-up inquiries, the OIG made clear, according to Empower Oversight, that the referral did not apply to Friend’s whistleblower retaliation claims.
In fact, since then, “Special Agent Friend and Empower Oversight continued to furnish additional information” to the OIG, and the inspector general continues to receive and evaluate information, the letter said, explaining the attorneys’ understanding of the investigation’s status. Friend’s attorneys said they understood the OIG intended “to interview Friend in order to obtain a more complete understanding of his allegations and fully assess both his underlying disclosures as well as his retaliation claims.”
Yet some media, without seeking comment from the OIG, “uncritically repeated” Democrats’ false narrative that the inspector general had rejected Friend’s claims. Conversely, when other outlets sought comment and clarification on the status of Friend’s case, Horowitz remained silent.
“This suggests a disturbing situation in which your office’s silence is allowing its reputation for neutrality and objectivity to be hijacked by partisans and their media allies to leave a false impression with the public — all in the service of undermining a whistleblower for political purposes,” Leavitt wrote.
Given the inspector general’s silence, Empower Oversight requested an update on the status of his office’s investigation into Friend’s whistleblower retaliation complaint — something his attorneys should not have to request. But given the Democrats’ lies, apparently it’s necessary to correct the record.
Monday’s letter also chastised House Democrats for leaking excerpts of Friend’s deposition transcripts, “without authorization of the Committee.” This was in violation of the committee’s representation to Friend that it would treat the transcripts “confidentially,” the letter added.
The leaks will likely continue, however; and sadly, so will the blatant lies.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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