And now, apparently, Harris has reversed herself on many of these issues. But we haven’t actually heard her explain these flip-flops, of course. Instead, these reversals are being leaked to the press from her campaign via “unnamed sources.”
Which begs another question: It’s been more than 10 days since Harris secured enough delegates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, so why exactly hasn’t she taken one question from an actual journalist yet about any of her past positions on policy? She did “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” as her first interview as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, and her handlers continue to give her the Biden treatment… where basically the strategy is to plead the Fifth all the way to Nov. 5th.
This strategy is unsustainable, of course. Team Kamala believes they can simply ride the current sugar high for the next 95 days or so without doing one single press conference or real interview. But here’s the thing: She still trails Trump on average nationally and in almost every swing state. The Harris team is allowing Trump to define her, which is quite easy to do, given her own comments in the past.
The Republican nominee was treated with outright hostility by Rachel Scott of ABC News straight out of the gate, but Trump hammered home his points around illegal immigration impacting minorities through social services being drastically cut regarding sanitation, education and police to help pay to support those in the country illegally. Trump also underscored the cruel tax that inflation is to all communities, regardless of color.
Meanwhile, Harris decided to blow off the event and instead will do it by Zoom instead.
Why? Because her people know that if she ever had to take questions from an objective, prepared moderator, someone for example, like Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, it would be utterly disastrous to her campaign. She simply does not have the ability to think or speak extemporaneously. And her policy positions are almost indefensible.
Ultimately, this race will come down to any debates Trump and Harris have. But here’s a prediction: Trump is arguing, rightly so, that he agreed to debate Biden, not Harris, on ABC in September. But now Harris is saying the debate agreement still stands.
No, it does not. Trump and Harris are supposed to debate now, making the prior agreement with Biden null and void.
Harris says she’ll still show up to the ABC debate regardless if Trump is there. I predict the former president will hold his ground, and the vice president will declare he chickened out while also declaring that there will be no more debates because Trump is “afraid” of her, with the media cheering her on every step of the way.
And that’s the goal: Avoid Trump, and any substantive questions, at all costs. And try to eke out a win without ever being held to account.
So, who is Kamala Harris?
We may never truly know. At least not until after Election Day.
Former President Donald Trump’s outreach to minority voters and willingness to take tough questions is starting to pay off, according to Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley on Newsmax.
“I think it’s terribly important that we have a former president who has done events in the Bronx, in downtown Philadelphia,” Whatley told “Newsline.” “He has been to Detroit, then he goes to this [National Association of Black Journalists] event in Chicago and takes the tough questions. You have to ask yourself, where was Kamala Harris? If there was ever an event for her, this would have been it and she was not there.’
“She will not talk to the press. She will not take any tough questions. Donald Trump is communicating directly to every American. He’s reaching out to every single community. And I think it’s going to pay off.‘
“We are starting to see already massive shifts in Hispanic voters and Black voters and Asian American voters that are coming from the Democratic Party and supporting Donald Trump 20 points higher than they did back in 2020, because he is listening to them and cares about the issues that they care about,” he added.
When asked why the national conversation pivots so often to the topic of race, Whatley said it is because “that’s what the Democratic Party wants to talk about” and “that’s what Kamala Harris wants to talk about.”
“What Donald Trump wants to talk about is how to make America better for every American family,” Whatley said. “How are we going to lift this economy up so that it can lift every family up? How are we going to protect our southern border? How are we going to shut down this immigrant invasion that we have seen coming across into Texas and Arizona?‘
“What is it that we’re going to do on the world stage? Under Donald Trump, China was in check, Russia was in check, and we didn’t have the attacks in the Middle East that we’re watching right now. The whole Middle East is really on fire. So, we want to get back to a strong America. I think the entire country does and those are the issues that the voters care about. So, that’s what we’re going to continue to talk about.”
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
Katelynn Richardson covers courts as a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill on Thursday intended to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity. The New York Democrat’s “No Kings Act” bill has more than two dozen Democratic co-sponsors and comes as a direct response to the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States ruling, which found that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts taken in office, according to ABC News. The bill would clarify that it is Congress’ responsibility to determine who federal criminal law applies to, not the Supreme Court, according to NBC News.
President Joe Biden unveiled multiple proposals on Monday to reshape the Supreme Court, including a constitutional amendment to make it clear “no president is above the law or immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.”
He also proposed placing term limits on Supreme Court justices and called on Congress to pass a code of conduct for the justices.
Schumer said in a statement to NBC News that the Supreme Court’s ruling “threw out centuries of precedent and anointed Trump and subsequent presidents as kings above the law.”
“Given the dangerous and consequential implications of the Court’s ruling, legislation would be the fastest and most efficient method to correcting the grave precedent the Trump ruling presented,” Schumer said, according to NBC News. “With this glaring and partisan overreach, Congress has an obligation—and a constitutional authority—to act as a check and balance to the judicial branch.”
“We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the July 1 decision.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed the majority’s decision meant “the president is now a king above the law.”
Schumer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last year, we discussed the free speech case of Matthew Garrett, formerly a tenured history professor at Bakersfield College who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives. Bakersfield College has one of the worst records on free speech in higher education and has been repeatedly sued by faculty. It will now pay another $2.4 million in a settlement to subsidize the anti-free speech actions of its administration. The question is why California taxpayers continue to allow faculty and administrators to burn through millions in these efforts to punish divergent or dissenting viewpoints. Matthew Garrett will reportedly receive $2,245,480 over the next 20 years as well as an immediate one-time payment of $154,520 as “compensation for back wages and medical benefits since [his] dismissal.” Unfortunately, the college got its way in insisting that he resign from the Kern Community College District. So, it achieved greater uniformity and orthodoxy in viewpoints at the cost of millions in damages.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression supported his case and detailed in 2023 how his criticism of DEI programs made him a target of faculty and administrators:
Animosity toward Garrett by some faculty and administrators increased over the past couple years as Garrett and several other faculty members associated with the Renegade Institute for Liberty — a Bakersfield College think tank Garrett founded — joined the faculty diversity committee. Other committee members say that the Renegade faculty have made it difficult for the group to get anything done by stalling campus diversity initiatives. But it was Garrett’s comments regarding a proposed racial climate task force during a diversity committee meeting last fall that led Bakersfield to recommend Garrett’s termination.
At the October 2022 meeting of the Bakersfield Equal Opportunity and Diversity Advisory Committee, Garrett criticized a proposal by professor Paula Parks to create a racial climate task force he felt might usurp the jurisdiction of the diversity committee. He also contested the student survey data cited as justification for the proposed task force and questioned the survey’s objectivity and the lack of evidence connecting the data presented and the proposed solutions. Several other faculty members in the meeting also challenged the veracity of the survey data. But ultimately, the committee voted to approve the creation of the task force.
On Nov. 15, Parks published an op-ed in Kern Sol News accusing Garrett and other Renegade Institute-affiliated faculty of a “disturbing pattern of actions” that “created negativity and division in the name of free speech.”
We previously also discussed the case of History Professor Daymon Johnson who was put under investigation after he commented on the extremist comments of another professor. Professor Andrew Bond denounced the United States as a “sh*t nation” and then invited conservatives to quote him. In August 2019, Bond posted a statement on Facebook that:
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh*thole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f**king piece of sh*t nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives. This country has yet to live up to the ideals of its founding documents.”
[Text changes added to profanity from the original]
Johnson proceeded to do exactly what Bond suggested and quoted him on the Facebook page for the Renegade Institute for Liberty. He asked others “Do you agree with this radical SJW from BC’s English Department? Thoughts?” He then posted on his own Facebook account the following statement according to his complaint:
“Johnson then used his personal Facebook account to comment on what he had reposted: ‘Maybe he should move to China, and post this about the PRC in general or the Chinese Communist Party and see how much mileage it gets him. I wonder, do they still send the family the bill for the spent round?’”
Johnson said that the college would not allow him to read the complaint but subjected him to months of investigation.
After the investigation was finally concluded with no action by the Kern Community College District (which oversees the college), it stated that it would “investigate any further complaints of harassment and bullying and, if applicable, [taking] appropriate remedial action including but not limited to any discipline determined to be appropriate.”
That threat took on a more menacing meaning given the controversy involving John Corkins, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Kern Community College District Board. Corkins declared in an open meeting that critics of Critical Race Theory should be “culled” from the faculty and “taken to the slaughterhouse.”
As shown by Corkins, it remains popular in California to pledge to wipe out conservatives and dissenters from faculty. There are comparably few left. Conservatives and libertarians have been gradually purged from many institutions.
A survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
Likewise, a study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools. Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. Another study found that 33 out of 65 departments lacked a single conservative faculty member.
Some sites like Above the Law have supported the exclusion of conservative faculty. Senior Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” by arguing that hiring a conservative law professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach at a university. So, the views of roughly half of the judiciary and half of the country are treated as legitimately excluded as intellectually invalid.
We have also seen administrators and faculty treat public or private funds as a subsidy for radical policies. For example, Oberlin College abused a small family grocery store for years and racked up millions in costs and damages that it expected alumni to cover. There was no blowback for its president or administrators.
These cases continue unabated despite a long litany of losses for universities and colleges over free speech limits and faculty discipline. The reason is that it is still personally and professionally beneficial for these professors and administrators to attack those with dissenting viewpoints. While faith in higher education is at an all-time low and these schools are gushing money in litigation, there are few remaining dissenting voices on faculties and even fewer willing to resist retaliation by speaking up.
Settlements are now just a cost of doing business for the anti-free speech movement in higher education. The costs are born by taxpayers or donors who are expected to foot the bill for intellectual intolerance.
Texas won a big victory in the United States Court of Appeals in the long struggle over floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River to help block unlawful migration. In United States v. Abbott, the court ruled 11-7 in an en banc decision against the Biden Administration over the barrier. It is an interesting decision that included a sharp disagreement over the claim that the large numbers of migrants across the border constitute an “invasion” under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 (“[n]o state shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay”).
In its challenge, the Biden Administration claimed the placement of the buoys violated the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. The appellate panel and trial court previously ruled in favor of the federal government. However, both were overturned. The majority found that the specific stretch of the Rio Grande that was chosen by the state is not covered by the Rivers and Harbors Act because it is not “navigable.” The definition of navigable waters has long been a matter of dispute in the courts.
Yet, it was the invasion issue that had many of us watching for this decision. I have previously expressed doubts over this theory. I agree with Texas on its criticism of the Biden Administration’s disastrous handling of the border. The impact on Texas is devastating. However, I do not believe that it qualifies as an invasion under Article I.
The opinions deal with this issue in dicta rather than the central holding. Some judges felt that the court should have addressed the issue.
What is interesting is the concurring opinion of Judge James Ho that the meaning of “invasion” is a “political question.” As such, he believes that courts must defer to the Texas governor’s assertion that there is an invasion, at least so long as the governor is acting in “good faith.”
In his concurring opinion, Judge Andrew Oldham maintains that Ho is wrong about the necessity of the court in taking up the issue.
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Dana Douglas objects that this approach would have sweeping and destabilizing effects and “would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon—Biden is to pass the Democratic torch of destruction to Kamala, a woman to the left of Burnie Sanders. The country is on the verge of collapse with the Democrats’ policies of open borders, high crime, high inflation, and disastrous foreign policy.
Don’t Let Them Rewrite History: Kamala Harris Remains A Deeply Flawed Candidate With A Terrible Record
By Paul Ingrassia – July 31, 2024
Kamala Harris has always been a weak candidate, and it is imperative Republican voters never lose sight of that fact, even as the mainstream media enters overdrive and hypes her to the moon. At first blush her candidacy, which in recent weeks has been buoyed by fake news and inflated polls combined with contrived optics – make it appear as if a groundswell of support exists in the real world. But that could not be further from the truth.
That is not to dismiss the powerful forces of propaganda and the malleability – particularly of the current body politic – to readily adopt the opinions spoon-fed to them by regime agitprop outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and Google. And it is oftentimes true that in politics perception is reality – but facts are also stubborn things. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Trump Slams Democrats for Supporting Abortions That Kill Babies “in the Ninth Month” • New Data Proves Biden Weaponized Justice System to Target Pro-Life Americans • Kamala Harris Has a Long Record of Attacking Pro-Life Americans • Conservatives Vow to Kill “Pathetic” Biden-Harris Plan to Pack the Supreme Court
More Pro-Life News • Biden Wasn’t Polling Well on Abortion, So Democrats Picked the Abortion Cheerleader • Pro-Life Mom Will Appeal 3-year Prison Term for Protesting Abortion • Donald Trump Pledges to “Go After” Censorship From Google, Facebook • Pete Buttigieg Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: Abortion Enables Predators and Irresponsible Men • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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It’s no wonder Leftists and other Democrats have tried to whitewash Kamala Harris record on the border from history. It’s abysmal.
Democrats apparently have short memories. They spent the last four years trying to cover for Joe Biden’s senility. And while it worked for a short time, ultimately Biden bit the dust; politically. Now Biden’s record of failure become Harris’ record of failure. And how much have these two ass clowns invested in Bidenflation?
Harris became the side-chick of Bidenflation, stupid enough to hit the road and vouch for it. Her ramblings on the virtue of massive inflation are legendary.
Below is her response to a reporter from Bloomberg, when asked about the untenable inflation caused by the Biden administration. Listen until around 1:20.
In this video, Harris promises to deal with the inflation crisis created by her and Captain Demento by “lowering the cost of prescription drugs”.
So, you may not eat or be able to afford to gas up your vehicle to get to work, but drug prices are low! I get the feeling that Biden-Harris doesn’t understand that people need some things every day, and not necessarily meds.
Grocery bills have doubled, and we are told that inflation is 12 percent. During the Biden years, the average family spent almost $11,000 per year more than under Trump. But help is on the way in the form of prescription drugs. So, hang in there America!
But what of Harris’ other failures. For example, look at her failures with electric vehicles (EV): The Biden Administration’s $7.5 billion effort to jump-start the electric-vehicle charging landscape is moving very, very slowly. Now more than two years after the program was signed into law in late 2021, only eight chargers have been put in place.
In April, with some fanfare, cars plugged into a station in Bradford, Vermont. Defenders encourage patience, saying the pace will quicken rapidly later this year. The allocated dollars are $5 billion through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program and $2.5 billion in Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary grant funding via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
In the video below, Harris appears giddy to announce this new bill that delivered 8 charging stations!
Did Biden forget and accidentally build the rest in Ukraine?
How can one even account for the waste and mismanagement that would have to occur to build only 8 charging stations two years?
But there’s more. Biden-Harris were to save the poor. Considering that the Biden administration put many more people into poverty, why not “help” them more. But not with food or shelter; instead, the help comes in the form of fast internet.
Largest Internet Funding Announcement in History Kicks Off Administration-Wide Investing in America Tour
High-speed internet is no longer a luxury – it is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school, access health care, and to stay connected with family and friends. Yet, more than 8.5 million households and small businesses are in areas where there is no high-speed internet infrastructure, and millions more struggle with limited or unreliable internet options. Just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act brought electricity to nearly every home and farm in America, President Biden and Vice President Harris are delivering on their historic commitment to connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed internet by the end of the decade.
The results so far? The FCC Chairman tweeted: In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.
In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans.
Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.
And adding insult to injury, the Biden Admin has been layering a partisan political agenda on top of this $42.45B program that has nothing to do with the original project. Now the initiative has been loaded with climate change mandates, DEI requirements, and other nonsense that favors government-controlled entities.
Now all these problems belong exclusively to Harris. And as I stated years ago, she wanted this job and plotted against Biden. I explain here, what most missed:
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Let’s see how long Harris can keep hers; particularly as people continue to showcase her long list of failures.
U.S. Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump leaves the stage after speaking during a rally at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center on July 27, 2024 in St Cloud, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Following Kamala Harris’ week of honeymoon media coverage, our latest poll shows she has failed to move the needle.
The new national survey ending July 29 shows former-President Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris 47% to 45% — as a historic number of Americans say the nation is on the wrong track.
The poll shows Trump is up +2% — just as he was in our national poll detailing the Trump vs. Biden race.
In that June 26 poll President Trump led Joe Biden 46% to 44%.
Since then, much happened in this unprecedented election. Let’s recap:
June 27: President Trump so soundly defeated Joe Biden in the earliest presidential general election debate that the liberal media and Democratic party bosses began the drumbeat to have Joe Biden withdraw as their candidate.
July 13: An assassin’s bullet misses its mark by less than an inch, and Pres. Trump miraculously survives.
July 15-19: Trump unites the Republican Party in a well watched and seamlessly successful Republican National Convention.
July 21: After unrelenting pressure from Democratic Party bosses and Obama acolytes, Joe Biden withdraws from the campaign and hand picks Kamala Harris to replace him. Now, after a week of the media re-inventing Kamala, we are back to square one: Trump still leads.
On June 26 we had President Trump leading Kamala 47% to 42%, Harris has merely moved the Biden vote into her column. There are some differences in the different voter segment in the two-way ballot from Trump vs. Biden in June to Trump vs. Harris in July.
Here are some:
Among African Americans Trump received 28% to Biden’s 64%. Among Blacks it’s now Trump 18% to Harris’ 74%.
Among Hispanics Trump received 42% to Biden’s 45%. Among Latinos it’s now Trump 37% to Harris’ 53%.
Among white voters, Trump was leading 51% to Biden’s 40%. It’s now Trump 56% to Harris 38%.
Among married voters Trump was leading 52% to Biden’s 38%. It’s now Trump 56% to Harris 37%.
Among rural voters Trump’s lead over Biden has increased from +14%, going from 52%-38% to now Trump up +29%, with Trump at 62% and Harris 33%.
With Robert Kennedy, Jr. and others on the ballot, it’s Trump 42%, Harris 41%, Kennedy 8%.
Last month President Trump was leading 39%, Biden 37% and Kennedy 10%.
Harris appears to have taken Democrats back from Kennedy.
However, the majority of all voters believes Trump will win 51%-39%.
The biggest positive change is for Kamala Harris is that her net favorability increased by 8%.
Last month Harris had a favorable to unfavorable rating of 40% to 54%, that’s a minus 14%.
Now her favorable to unfavorable rating has improved to 45%-51%, for a minus 6%, for a total net increase of +8%.
Still 75% say the country is on the wrong track. Only 18% say it’s in the right direction.
This is an all-time high wrong track in our national polling.
Among the undecided presidential voters, 79% say we are on the wrong track.
After his withdrawal Joe Biden’s job approval got worse, going in June from 41% approve, 57% disapprove — moving now to 38% approve and 60% disapprove.
Among the undecided presidential voters, 68% disapprove of Joe Biden’s job as president.
No wonder Kamala Harris is trying to rewrite her role as Vice President where she was a cheerleader for Joe Biden failed policies.
Economic issues remain the top concerns 45% (specifically inflation 29%), 22% social issues (specifically abortion only 6%), 17% security issues (specifically border 10%).
Most voters, 64%-29%, say that the economy is getting worse versus better.
And 84% have been negatively impacted by inflation- including 50% who are struggling to afford basic necessities.
And the Republicans maintain a lead in the generic ballot for Congress over the Democrats 46%-44%.
With less than 100 days to go, it seems that not much has changed — other than the Democratic candidate is now younger, more foolish and more radical than Joe Biden.
Note: The findings of our just completed national poll of 1,000 likely voters +/-3.1% at the 95% confidence interval was taken between July 23 and July 29.
Our latest national poll results may be found here.
John McLaughlin has worked professionally as a strategic consultant and pollster for over 40 years. Jim McLaughlin is a nationally recognized public opinion expert, strategic consultant and political strategist who has helped to elect a U.S. president, prime ministers, a Senate majority leader, and a speaker of the House. Read John and Jim McLaughlin’s Reports — More Here.
Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered Iran to strike Israel directly in retaliation for the killing in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, sources told The New York Times. Haniyeh was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran early on Wednesday morning, an attack that drew threats of revenge on Israel and fueled further concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.
The Palestinian Islamist militant group and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Haniyeh’s death. The Guards said it took place hours after he attended a swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president. Although the strike on Haniyeh was widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government made no claim of responsibility and said it would make no comment on the killing.
Haniyeh was killed by a missile that hit him “directly” in a state guesthouse where he was staying, Khalil Al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told a news conference in Tehran, quoting witnesses who were with Haniyeh. “Now we are waiting for the full investigation from the (Iranian) brothers,” Al-Hayya said. Haniyeh, normally based in Qatar, had been the face of Hamas’ international diplomacy as the war set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 has raged in Gaza. He had been taking part in internationally-brokered indirect talks on reaching a cease-fire in the Palestinian enclave.
The assassination occurred less than 24 hours after Israel claimed to have killed Hezbollah’s most senior military commander in the Lebanese capital Beirut in retaliation for a deadly rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Two Lebanese security sources said on Wednesday that the body of Hezbollah operations chief Fuad Shukr had been found in the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Netanyahu made no mention of Haniyeh’s killing in a televised statement on Wednesday evening but said Israel had delivered crushing blows to Iran’s proxies of late, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and would respond forcefully to any attack.
“Citizens of Israel, challenging days lie ahead. Since the strike in Beirut there are threats sounding from all directions. We are prepared for any scenario, and we will stand united and determined against any threat. Israel will exact a heavy price for any aggression against us from any arena,” he said.
The latest events appear to set back chances of any imminent cease-fire agreement in the nearly 10-month-old war in Gaza between Israel and the Iran-backed Hamas. Hamas’ armed wing said in a statement Haniyeh’s killing would “take the battle to new dimensions and have major repercussions.” Vowing to retaliate, Iran declared three days of national mourning and said the U.S. bore responsibility because of its support for Israel.
ISRAEL INVITES ‘HARSH PUNISHMENT,’ KHAMENEI SAYS
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel had provided the grounds for “harsh punishment for itself” and it was Tehran’s duty to avenge Haniyeh’s death. Iranian forces have already made strikes directly on Israel earlier in the Gaza war.
Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer told a briefing with journalists that Israel was committed to Gaza cease-fire negotiations and securing the release of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, at an event in Singapore, sidestepped a question on Haniyeh’s killing, saying a cease-fire deal in Gaza was key to avoiding wider regional escalation. He told Channel News Asia that the U.S. had neither been aware of nor involved in the killing.
Qatar, which has been brokering talks aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza along with Egypt, condemned Haniyeh’s killing as a dangerous escalation of the conflict.
“Political assassinations and continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side?” Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said on X.
Egypt said Haniyeh’s assassination showed a lack of political will on Israel’s part to calm tensions.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the killing and Palestinian factions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank called for a strike and mass demonstrations.
In Israel, the mood was buoyant as Israelis welcomed what they saw as a major achievement in the war against Hamas. Residents in besieged Gaza feared Haniyeh’s death would prolong the fighting that has devastated the enclave.
“This news is scary. We feel that he was like a father to us,” said Gaza resident Hachem Al-Saati.
MESHAAL IS LIKELY SUCCESSOR TO HANIYEH
Haniyeh’s most likely successor is Khaled Meshaal, his deputy-in-exile who lives in Qatar, analysts and Hamas officials said. Under Meshaal, Hamas emerged as an ever more important player in the Middle East conflict due to his charisma, popularity and regional standing, analysts said. Meshaal narrowly survived an attempt on his life in Jordan ordered by Netanyahu in 1997.
Appointed to the top Hamas job in 2017, Haniyeh moved between Turkey and Qatar’s capital Doha, escaping the travel curbs of the blockaded Gaza Strip and enabling him to act as a negotiator in the truce talks or to talk to Hamas’ ally Iran. Three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike in April.
His deputy Saleh Al-Arouri was killed in January by Israel, leaving Yehya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza and the architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and Zaher Jabarin, the head of the group in the West Bank, in place but in hiding.
That assault by Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israeli communities and some 250 people were taken to Gaza as hostages, Israeli tallies say.
In response, Israel launched a ground and air offensive in the coastal enclave that has killed more than 39,400 people, according to Gaza health officials, and left more than 2 million facing a humanitarian crisis.
No end appears to be in sight for Israel’s campaign there as the cease-fire talks falter.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on the South Lawn of the White House on July 22, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
So, Kamala Harris is the new Democratic candidate for president.
And, we’ve been told, she is incredible.
Not merely serviceable, a middle innings relief pitcher brought in when your starter suddenly implodes in the third inning. She is the Mariano Rivera of politics. She’s lights-out. She’s charismatic, fascinating, quick on her feet, charming. She is, in the words of the legacy media, a historic candidate—not just because she’s a black woman, a fact that explains her lightning-fast political ascent but that only Democrats are allowed to mention, and only then in the context of explaining why America requires a black female president—but because she is, apparently, so good at this.
Apparently, Harris was the candidate America needed all along. As in a bad romcom, all we needed to do was remove her glasses, brush out her hair, and put her in a better outfit—and she would transform from high school weirdo nerd into prom queen.
The media’s shift in position regarding Harris has been whiplash-inducing. After all, we were told in 2020 that she had run one of the worst campaigns in modern presidential history—mechanical, off-putting, unpleasant, incompetent, and arrogant. Then we were told that she was one of the worst vice presidents in modern history—free of accomplishment, running a completely dysfunctional office with extraordinary rates of staff turnover, so wildly unpopular that even a senile Joe Biden worried about whether Harris could compete with Donald Trump.
But now all is forgiven. All her oddities—coconut trees and electric school buses, Venn diagrams, and the significance of the passage of time—are delightful TikTok memes. Her strangely incoherent word salads, topped off with a heavy helping of smugness, are now evidence of her rhetorical brilliance. Her wild hand motions, so reminiscent of a drunken tarmac operator attempting unsuccessfully to usher a jumbo jet toward the gateway, are actually enchanting symptoms of her enthusiasm. And her positional dishonesty—the fact that she has now shifted virtually every position she ever held—is not evidence that she is a liar, but that she is astute and clever.
So, precisely what happened to turn Kamala Harris from a deeply disliked politician (35% approval rating) into an Obama-esque talent (44% approval rating)?
Joe Biden dropped out.
That’s it.
That’s the whole thing.
When Biden dropped out, the legacy media could finally end the rock-in-the-shoe discomfort of cognitive dissonance from which they had been suffering since Biden’s brain-dead debate with Trump. They had been forced by circumstance into doing something they despise: objective journalism, in which Democrats are treated as normal figures subject to cross-examination.
Since Barack Obama’s ascent nearly 20 years ago, the media have avoided just this sort of thing. Biden’s collapse onstage compelled them to do some journalism, just to cover their asses—otherwise, they would have been implicated in his health cover-up.
So, they did.
But they didn’t like it.
Now, Biden is gone. They can declare victory. And they can go right back to bathing in the warm, urine-filled kiddie pool of Democrat-media coordination they so enjoy. They’ve eaten their vegetables. Now it’s time for dessert: a heavy helping of Kamala cake. And they’re going to enjoy it.
The only question is whether the American people will fall for this quite obvious and heavy-handed routine. So far, some have. But presidential campaigns have a way of sanding off the varnish lacquered on by the friendly media. After all, at one point, the legacy media gave Hillary Clinton the same treatment. It didn’t work out well.
In the end, politicians tend to stand or fall on their own merit. Which is terrible news for Kamala Harris, since she has none.
Barbara Butch, the LGBTQ activist who was the center figure in the controversial “Last Supper” Paris Olympic scene is threatening to sue those criticizing her. Butch played the role (wearing a Christ-like halo) viewed by many as a spoof on Christ in the Last Supper. The creators insist that they were going for a type of “pagan party” of Olympic gods and sent a message of tolerance. Art experts have supported the creators and pointed to paintings that inspired the pagan motif. That is not exactly what was seen by millions of Christians who were deeply insulted by the parody.
The question is not the intent of the creators, but the intent of critics in denouncing the display and its participants.
The threat of legal action would not be especially serious in the United States where opinion is given robust protection in both criminal and civil cases. In France, however, free speech is in a free fall with the left pushing for the censorship and criminalization of an ever-expanding range of political and religious speech.
The ceremony itself had some truly powerful and stunning elements. I enjoyed the mix of music and imagery as well as the effort to show the diversity of France. However, other elements were more divisive or excessive. For example, the producers decided to use the ceremony to feature such elements as three young people hooking up for a “ménage à trois.” With many families watching with kids, many of us thought the scene was inappropriate for such an event. However, it was the supper scene that led to protests from clerics and critics. While claiming a message of “tolerance,” the scene was taken as yet another slap at religious elements in society. That is a debate that has continued to rage, particularly on the Internet.
Audrey Msellati, Butch’s attorney, posted a statement on Butch’s Instagram account that the DJ and activist will seek legal action after being “the target of an extremely violent campaign of cyber-harassment and defamation.” She is promising to file “several complaints against these acts.”
Clearly, any direct and intentional threats of violence against Butch should be prosecuted, as they can be prosecuted in the United States. However, the French laws sweep far more broadly in criminalizing opinion and what I have called “rage rhetoric.”
Once the cradle of individual liberty, France long ago became a global leader in the crackdown on free speech.
These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
That is why the homage in the Olympics to Liberté rang hollow for many of us in the free speech community. The French leaders have long been hypocritical in claiming to support free speech, such as marching in support of the Charles Hebdo magazine after the massacre after cracking down on its editors and writers.
Thomas Jolly, the artistic director for the opening ceremony of the Olympics, clearly wanted to be provocative in these scenes. He succeeded. Clearly, such provocative elements will spur debate and discussion, including heated opinions. Use of criminal sanctions for those expressing opinion would make a mockery of the display of fealty to French liberties that Jolly features in his ceremony.
A.F. Branco Cartoon—We now know that Biden hasn’t been mentally fit to run the country since he took office, so who has been running the country, and who is running it now? Obama? Kamala? Dr Jill? Hunter? The CIA? WHO?!
Majority of Americans Question Biden’s Mental Fitness – Who’s Running This Country?
By Joe Hoft – July 6, 2022
Old and senile Joe Biden has a difficult time saying mental fitness so it’s no surprise that most Americans question Biden’s mental fitness in a new poll. Back in December, Joe Biden had a difficult time saying “mental fitness”. This did not bode well for a guy who shows a lack of mental fitness daily in front of the whole world. At a recent speech, Biden ended by turning to his right and attempting to shake hands with someone who wasn’t there. His handlers know of his senility and often attempt to hide his mental fitness even if they have to dress up as the Easter Bunny to do so.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The left has nothing to attack J.D. Vance with, so they send out a memo to their media to say he’s “weird,” as though their radial agenda of Late-Term Abortion, Trans Surgery for Kids, and Drag Queen story hour isn’t.
LIBERAL NARRATIVE FAIL: WSJ Poll Finds JD Vance is More Popular Than Kamala Harris
By Mike LaChance – July 29, 2024
Democrats and the media are in a mad dash to define Trump’s running mate JD Vance. For days now, they have been pushing a dumb narrative that Vance is ‘weird’ but it’s clearly not working. According to a new poll from the Wall Street Journal, Vance is more popular than Kamala Harris. Harris has never been popular as Biden’s VP, so why do Democrats think her likability would change just because she’s no running for president? Polling shows that Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (OH) is more popular than presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris, shattering the establishment media’s narrative.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Biden Wants Term Limits for SCOTUS After Spending 56 Years as a Politician • Pete Buttigieg: Killing Babies in Abortions is a Great Thing “So Men Can be Free” • Biden-Harris Launch Assault on Supreme Court to Impose Abortions Up to Birth on America • We Must Fight Amendments for Abortions Up to Birth
More Pro-Life News • Shocking Report Shows 137 Babies 28 Weeks or Older Killed in Colorado Abortions Last Year • National Day of Remembrance on September 14 Will Remember 63 Million Babies Killed in Abortions • Nebraska Supreme Court Upholds Law Saving Babies From Abortions • Top Conservative Attorney Slams Biden-Harris on SCOTUS: They’re “Destroying a Court They Don’t Agree With” • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
There is “absolutely no doubt” in the FBI that former President Donald Trump was hit with a would-be assassin’s bullet on July 13 during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate testified Tuesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“There is absolutely no doubt in the FBI’s mind whether former President Trump was hit with a bullet and wounded in the ear,” Abbate said in the hearing, after he was asked by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., if the FBI had doubts that the Republican presidential nominee had been shot in the ear with a bullet.
“There is no doubt and there never has been,” Abbate stressed. “I’ve been part of this investigation from the very beginning. That has never been raised.”
“You are sure?” Kennedy asked him. “It wasn’t a space laser?”
“No,” Abbate replied.
“It wasn’t a murder hornet?” Kennedy asked.
“Absolutely not,” said Abbate.
“It wasn’t Sasquatch?” said the senator.
“No, senator,” the witness replied. “It was a bullet, senator.”
“Fired by [Thomas] Crooks at President Trump in the air and almost killed him?” Kennedy further pressed Abbate, who replied “100%, senator.”
Tuesday’s hearing is being held one day after the FBI released further details about its probe of the shooting, including information that Crooks had sought information online about power plants, improvised explosive devices, mass shootings, and an assassination attempt in May of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as a crime victim, the agency said, after reporting last week that he had been hit in the ear either by a bullet or a fragment.
The former president said he expects the interview to be held Thursday.
Rep. Mary Miller’s proposed legislation would codify the definition of biological sex. (Jamie Grill/Getty Images)
A Republican congresswoman from Illinois has introduced a bill to clearly define sex based on biology, rather than ideology.
“As a mother and grandmother, I am deeply concerned by the Biden administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX, endangering our daughters and granddaughters in sports and locker rooms,” Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., told The Daily Signal. “My bill simply recognizes the most distinct differences of our humanity—our maleness and femaleness.”
“The Defining Male and Female Act will enshrine these definitions in federal law, preventing future departments and administrations from redefining this fundamental characteristic,” she explained.
The Defining Male and Female Act of 2024—co-sponsored by Republican Reps. Debbie Lesko of Arizona, Lisa McClain of Michigan, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Claudia Tenney of New York, Barry Moore of Alabama, Greg Steube of Florida, Doug LaMalfa of California, Keith Self of Texas, Michael Guest of Mississippi, and Alex Mooney of West Virginia—is intended to combat the Biden administration’s attempted Title IX rule change.
President Joe Biden’s April revisions to Title IX—the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs—include adding “gender identity” to the list of sex-based protections. That would allow males in female sports and private spaces.Biden’s proposed changes were supposed to take effect on Aug. 1, but they have been blocked by a number of federal court injunctions across the country. The Miller bill establishes that there are only two sexes—male and female.
“To prevent further efforts to undermine the long-standing meaning and understanding of sex—male, female, and related terms—it is necessary for Congress to reaffirm and codify the meaning of these terms,” the bill says.
Rare sexual development disorders are not exceptions to the binary nature of sex, the bill establishes. The legal equality of men and women does not mean that they are the same in every respect, so it’s not unequal treatment under the law to have separate male and female facilities, the bill’s text says.
A female is “an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes eggs for fertilization,” and a male is an “individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes sperm for fertilization,” according the bill.
Miller’s legislation establishes “gender” as a synonym for sex, not a synonym for “gender identity,” “experienced gender,” “gender expression,” or “gender roles.”
Chinese sailors and naval officers stand April 23 at the end of an open house celebrating the Chinese navy’s 75th anniversary in Qingdao, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
As Americans focus on the presidential election campaign and domestic political uncertainty, China’s large-scale military exercises loom on the horizon after an unusually provocative summer of such activity. Tensions across the Taiwan Strait simmer and a standoff with the Philippines persists in the South China Sea, and China is becoming more direct with America and its allies, indicating its approach is evolving quickly.
First, activity over the Taiwan Strait by China’s air force (the People’s Liberation Army Air Force) has remained at elevated levels since 2021, but recently set new records.
On July 11, for example, 66 Chinese aircraft were detected over the Taiwan Strait, the highest single-day activity this year. Even more concerning, 56 of the aircraft crossed over Taiwan’s side of the strait, constituting the highest single-day crossing of the median line since recordkeeping began in 2020.
China’s increased military activity also led to the highest recorded 10-day average median line crossing: 23.4 aircraft. Such crossings are highly provocative. That said, activity over the past few months continues an upward trend.
The recent wave of intimidation by the Chinese air force, known as PLAAF, began soon after a July 10 meeting between the top U.S. envoy to Taiwan, Raymond Greene, and Taiwan President Lai Ching-te. Greene pledged increased measures to defend Taiwan, and his visit remains the most plausible reason for China’s response, given historical precedent.
But it’s worth noting that the Chinese escalation also coincided with NATO’s 75th-anniversary summit in Washington, which ran from July 9 through 11, where China was mentioned on multiple occasions. With surprisingly stern language, the NATO summit’s communique warns that “the stated ambitions and coercive policies [of the Chinese Communist Party] continue to challenge [NATO’s] interests, security and values.”The alliance’s communique reiterates that China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.”
In all, China is mentioned 14 times in the document, demonstrating NATO’s first clear acknowledgment that transatlantic security is now deeply intertwined with issues emanating from the Indo-Pacific.
Participation by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand in the NATO summit further signals the alliance’s deepening concern for the region and how a war there would affect European security.
In response to NATO’s statements, China’s Ministry of Defense offered stern words of its own on the same day as the communist regime’s record aircraft activity over Taiwan. China insisted NATO’s statements constitute “belligerent rhetoric,” making clear that China “will firmly uphold its own sovereignty, security and development interest.” China’s dissatisfaction with the U.S.-led world order and its reach in the Indo-Pacific is well known, and that animosity is being played out increasingly in military shows of force.
Chinese and Russian forces also gathered June 25 near the Blagoveshchensk–Heihe Bridge, which connects Russia and northeast China. According to China Military, a publication funded by the People’s Liberation Army, priorities included “encirclement and capture operations” within the domains of “aerial reconnaissance, surface interception, and ambushes on the shore.”
China said the motivation for the military exercise was to combat separatism—a justification especially significant considering that China quickly labeled Lai, Taiwan’s president, a “separatist” after his May 20 inauguration.
China’s summer activity is expanding to include a variety of other military exercises. On July 13, China carried out multiple waves of missile tests in Inner Mongolia. China’s Rocket Force, responsible for the tests, likely will play a critical role in the regime’s military operations in a war over Taiwan’s future. As such, these tests also serve as preparation for a potential Taiwan war scenario and for more provocative exercises with the Chinese navy and air force during exercises expected soon in the South China Sea. If these missile tests are deemed successful by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, he may decide to execute a more complex and provocative challenge in the region.
NATO’s concern is reinforced by China’s increasingly apparent support of Russia in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. More directly, China and Belarus began joint exercises July 8 dubbed Eagle Assault 2024. This coincided with a visit to Warsaw by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which Ukraine and Poland signed a security agreement. The China-Belarus military exercise took place just 17 miles from the Ukraine border and 2 miles from Poland.
Like Russia, Belarus is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian economic and security coalition. This partnership provides China with an impetus for a greater military presence in Europe, but how it serves China’s strategic interests is less clear. However, this military exercise, planned well in advance and coinciding with the NATO summit in Washington, certainly underscores China’s dismay with Europe’s demurring on Chinese trade and increasing realization of it as a threat.
Earlier this month, China also deepened military cooperation with the United Arab Emirates and Laos, respectively, through two exercises: Falcon Shield 2024 and Friendship Shield 2024. While noteworthy, neither exercise raised a red flag militarily. But the exercises did demonstrate China’s continued willingness to engage favorably with partners who are amenable to accepting its position on Taiwan.
In the South China Sea, a familiar hotspot, China and Russia are increasing joint military engagement, as they are elsewhere. On July 14, Joint Sea 2024 began at a naval port in Zhanjiang, southern China, headquarters for China’s South Sea fleet. Both countries conducted a variety of anti-submarine and air defense exercises.
At the same time, a separate Chinese-Russian naval patrol entered the South China Sea, passing close to Japanese islands, in what the two nations described as a routine operations unrelated to the geopolitical climate. The joint forces simulated missile firing and cross-deck landing operations and carried out gun drills. Military exercises are routinely scheduled during the summer months. But the recent activity amid regional and global tensions demonstrates an unusual increase in Beijing’s risk-taking not seen in previous years.
China also is finding ways to test the United States more directly.
Case in point: Chinese and Russian bomber aircraft were detected July 25 and intercepted by NORAD as they flew into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone off the coast of Alaska. This is the latest example of China and Russia’s deepening defense ties and marks the first time two U.S. adversaries deployed strategic bombers together near the United States. The Chinese aircraft in question was the H-6 bomber, capable of carrying nuclear weapons and sometimes active over the Taiwan Strait.
This latest Alaska incident came just weeks after Chinese warships were detected July 6 and 7 near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. While steering clear of territorial waters, the Chinese vessels passed into the exclusive U.S. economic zone. This marks the fourth consecutive year that China’s naval assets have been detected near Alaska—another component of China’s upward-trending assertiveness in the Pacific.
Only days after that, the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong, along with two missile destroyers and a frigate, made headlines as they passed close to the Philippines on the way to the Western Pacific to carry out another set of drills.
In a departure from the norm, the carrier group didn’t pass through the Bashi Channel separating Taiwan and the Philippines, but instead went through the Balintang Channel, which runs between two groupings of some of the Philippines’ northernmost islands. This diversion, while subtle, signals continued aggression toward the Philippines, where U.S. Marines recently held joint exercises.
Vietnam also has seen tension before with China in the South China Sea, but unlike the Philippines, Hanoi’s most recent Chinese-style artificial island expansion hasn’t drawn noticeable displeasure from Beijing. Since its positive diplomatic developments with both the U.S. and China last September and December, Vietnam has rapidly pursued island reclamation in the South China Sea. Discovery Great Reef, South Reef, Namyit Island, and Pearson Reef all received dozens of acres of land expansion since November, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.
Barque Canada Reef continues to be Vietnam’s largest outpost and recipient of recent efforts, gaining 174 acres of land over the past six months. In all, 692 acres have been added since November. This is up from 404 acres the prior year and represents a 100% increase in land reclamation since 2022.
Manila’s seemingly minor actions prompted violent responses from Beijing and Western states’ diplomatic activities triggered military posturing, but China hasn’t condemned Vietnam’s sweeping reclamation campaign.
Why is China choosing not to back down over the Philippines while simultaneously turning a blind eye to Vietnam’s recent surge of island-building in the same region?
China’s selective enforcement of its own standards points to the likelihood that its reactions are reserved for the U.S. or actions that Beijing perceives to be prompted by or indirectly benefit the U.S.
As tensions over Taiwan and features in the South China Sea reach a boiling point, efforts to understand Beijing’s thinking are paramount and could offer ways to better address and mitigate its escalations. America’s lack of strategic direction is commensurate with China’s recent threatening actions. Beijing’s timing, location, and choice of willing partners lessen the probability that its activities happen at the same time by coincidence and hold no greater meaning.
Washington must be alert in the coming months, particularly around Thursday, Aug. 1, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army—a symbolic date that China often uses for strategic messaging. The United States has been in China’s crosshairs for years. But given its recent conduct, Beijing is more likely than ever to double down on its posturing and take on added risks with Washington and allies such as the Philippines.
Below is my column in the New York Post on President Joe Biden’s call to reform the Supreme Court by ending lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.
Here is the column:
President (and Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft once said, “presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.” But not if Joe Biden has his way. Indeed, both the president and Court as we know it could be gone.
In a failed attempt to save his nomination, Biden offered to “reform” the Court by imposing an 18-year term limit that would jettison the three most senior conservative justices. ith only six months left in his presidency, Biden’s efforts are likely to fail, but, unfortunately, could set the stage for activists under a Harris Administration in seeking to change the Court forever.
For more than 50 years, Biden staunchly refused to play politics with the Supreme Court and support calls for “reforms” from the left of his party.
For a politician who has long been criticized for changing positions with the polls on issues from abortion to criminal justice to gun rights, the Court was one of the few areas of true principle for Biden. Even though he refused to answer questions on packing the Court in the 2020 election, he ultimately rejected the call as president.
Yet Biden’s final principle fell this month when facing the premature and involuntary end of his candidacy. Faced with being a one-term president, the Supreme Court would have to be sacrificed. Biden opted for the least of the evils in pushing for term limits rather than court packing. It was the more popular option for Biden to yield on. Voters have always loved term limits.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 67% of Americans, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, support a proposal to set finite terms for justices. But there were few law professors and even fewer Democratic members clamoring for term limits until conservatives secured a stable majority on the Court. Then, suddenly, the Court had to be “reformed” without delay.
It is no accident that the first three justices who would be term limited off the Court are conservatives: Clarence Thomas (after 33 years on the Court), Chief Justice John Roberts (after 19 years), and Justice Samuel Alito (after 18 years).
Think, however, about the iconic decisions we would have lost with term limits in place. Liberal Justice Williams Douglas’s 36 years on the Court would have literally been cut in half. He would have been kicked off in 1957. His famous opinions like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), striking down bans on contraceptives, would not have been written — an ironic result for those seeking limits after the Court’s ruling in Dobbs.
Likewise, liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s tenure would have ended in 2011 before she wrote her famous dissent Shelby County v. Holder (2013), defending voting rights.
Anthony Kennedy’s term would have ended in 2011 rather than 2018, before he wrote opinions such as United States v. Windsor, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act.
Obviously, other justices could have written opinions in these cases, but the point is that many justices wrote their best opinions after 18 years on the Court. Moreover, the Framers clearly wanted these positions as lifetime appointments as an added protection against political pressure or influence.
For more than two centuries, presidents have struggled with the Supreme Court, but none (until now) have attempted to end life tenure on the Court. Presidents have served as the firewall for the anger and radicalism that has periodically engulfed the Court. Now President Biden is leading the mob for changing this institution for the first time since its founding.
It is a testament to what I call “an age of rage” in my new book. After years of supporting the Court when it was setting aside conservative precedent, liberals now want the Court changed to dump or dilute the majority. It is unlikely to end there. After sending Thomas, Roberts, and Alito packing, many want to go further and pack the Court itself.
Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have called for outright court packing — a proposal that Vice President Kamala Harris has suggested that she might support. Where Biden is a political opportunist in belatedly joining this movement, Harris is a true believer from the far left. If she is elected, the Congress is still likely to be closely divided. That will only increase pressure to convert the Court into an alternative avenue for social and political reform.
Harvard professor Michael Klarman warned that all of the plans to change the country were ultimately dependent on packing the court. With the 2020 election, he stated that Democrats could change the election system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.”
Notably, if Biden were to seek this change as a legislative matter without a constitutional amendment, future Congresses could short terms further from 18 to 8 years or even less.
In his speech, Biden declared that he wanted the membership of the Court changed with greater “regularity.” If Congress has this authority, it could change the occupants of the Court faster than a South Beach timeshare condo. That is clearly the opposite of what the Framers intended, but Biden insists that these times are different, and democracy will only be safeguarded by attacking one of our core stabilizing institutions.
According to the Washington Post, the president made his pledge in a Zoom call to the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus, chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and co-chaired by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). It did not succeed in resuscitating his candidacy.
The pledge will be dead on arrival with Congress. What is left is a King Lear-like tragedy of a president, betrayed by those closest to him, and wandering the land for continued relevance. History will show a pitiful figure who offered up the Court as the cost of staying in power, only to lose his candidacy and his legacy.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Top Stories • Donald Trump Slams Kamala Harris for Targeting Christians • Kamala Harris is a Radical Abortion Activist With a Long History of Targeting Christians • Abortion Activists Who Vandalized and Threatened Pregnancy Centers Face 10 Years in Prison • Biden and Harris Want Supreme Court Term Limits Because They Hate Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito
More Pro-Life News • J.D. Vance Endorses Child Tax Credit to Help Families • We Have Three Months to Save America From the Worst Abortion Extremism It Has Ever Seen • Abortion Pill Has Killed One Woman in Canada and Seriously Injured Over 100 Women • MSNBC Panel Trashes Christians Who Pray at Trump Rallies • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
BUTLER, Pa. – Text messages revealed that law enforcement responsible for monitoring former President Trump’s Pennsylvania rally spotted his would-be assassin and flagged him to colleagues as suspicious at least 90 minutes before he opened fire.
The messages, obtained by Fox News Digital from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who obtained them from Beaver County Emergency Services Unit, showed that officers flagged 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks after he was spotted using a range finder – but did not approach him.
The first screenshot is a group chat of Beaver ESU officers, while the second is from one Beaver County sniper departing his shift at around 4:30 – approximately an hour-and-a-half before Trump took the stage. The New York Times first reported the text screenshots.
Undated file photo of Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks is alleged to be the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Texts messages reveal local snipers saw gunman earlier than previously known. (Fox News)
In a group chat, around 4:36 p.m., when one of the officers texted that his shift was ending, he warned that a man, later identified as Crooks, had parked nearby their vehicle.
“Someone followed our lead and snuck in and parked by our cars just so you know,” the text from an officer read.
The messages, obtained by Fox News Digital from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who obtained them from Beaver ESU, provided an updated timeline of when law enforcement first spotted Thomas Matthew Crooks. The texts included a picture of Crooks. (Fox News)
A follow-up message said that Crooks was about 50 yards from the rally’s exit, sitting at a picnic table. Two other counter-snipers responded with a thumbs up emoji and responded, writing, “Roger that.”
Approximately 45 minutes later, at 5:10 p.m., officers flagged that Crooks was on the move and had positioned himself near the American Glass International (AGR) building. Crooks would later perch himself on top of the AGR building to target the former president.
Law enforcement circulated a picture of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the texts showed. (Fox News)
Screenshots of text messages between local law enforcement officers. (Fox News)
While Crooks waited, an officer snapped a picture of the 20-year-old suspect. The picture showed Crooks leaning against the AGR building with his signature greasy shoulder-length hair and gray t-shirt.
“Kid learning around building we are in,” an officer wrote in a text message, along with an image of Crooks. “AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out.”
“I lost sight of him,” the officer added.
A follow-up message said: “Call it in to command and have a uniform check it out.”
Law enforcement officers stand over the body of would-be Trump assassin, Thomas Crooks on Saturday, July 13, 2024. The gunman killed at least one person and injured the former president in his attempt. (Todd the Driller)
The newly surfaced texts show that authorities knew about the suspicious person, later identified as Crooks, close to 90 minutes before the shooting – updating the previous known time of about 60 minutes.
By 6:11 p.m., approximately 1 hour after the last text message was sent, the “kid” would be killed by a counter-sniper after he opened fired on the rally goers.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump kisses the helmet of Corey Comperatore during the Republican National Convention Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
James Copenhaver and David Dutch were shot and injured at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally. (Allegheny Health Network)
Trump was grazed by a bullet on his ear, while three rallygoers were also shot, including Corey Comperatore, 50, who was killed protecting his family from danger. David Dutch and James Copenhaver were injured after being shot at the rally. Copenhaver was recently released from the hospital on Friday.
Dutch was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday, July 24.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Secret Service for comment.
Sarah Rumpf-Whitten is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.
She is a native of Massachusetts and is based in Orlando, Florida.
Story tips and ideas can be sent to sarah.rumpf@fox.com and on X: @s_rumpfwhitten.
Jamie Michell, founder of Gays Against Groomers, speaks with The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil on July 18 at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (The Daily Signal)
MILWAUKEE—Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.
She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”
The SPLC—which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—accuses Gays Against Groomers of amplifying “dehumanizing anti-trans rhetoric” and of perpetuating “anti-LGBTQ+ stereotypes by falsely claiming that LGBTQ+ supporters of trans rights are dangerous to society.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which critics fault for a left-wing bias, also brands Gays Against Groomers “anti-LGBTQ extremist.” ADL claims the group “peddles dangerous and misleading narratives about the LGBTQ+ community, focusing on false allegations of ‘grooming’ by drag performers, ‘indoctrination’ by LGBTQ+ educators and ‘child mutilation’ by gender-affirming care providers.”
These attacks on Gays Against Groomers echo the Southern Poverty Law Center’s suggestion that parents who complain about books with pornographic images in school libraries are “book banners” and reminiscent of the “uptown Klans” that opposed desegregation in the 1950s.
Many defenders of explicit books and children’s drag shows suggest there is nothing inherently sexual about images of naked teens or middle-aged men who are scantily clad and gyrate in front of young children.
“We fight the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children happening under the guise of LGBTQIA+, plus, plus, plus,” Michell tells The Daily Signal. “Nobody will ever say what the plus stands for. I think they’re trying to incorporate the ‘P’ for ‘pedophilia.’”
Michell also highlights the experimental nature of “gender-affirming care,” a euphemistic term for medical interventions aimed at forcing a male to appear female or vice versa. These interventions stunt natural development, may sterilize patients, and have been linked to cases of liver cancer in teens.
“Gender-affirming care” aims to address psychological distress—the feeling of identifying with a gender opposite one’s sex—through bodily alterations, rather than therapy.
Michell particularly notes the fact that some “gender-affirming care” involves “amputating the healthy body parts of young girls.”
“I can’t imagine having to be stuck with the decision I made as a 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-year-old [girl]—like, it’s absolutely insane,” she adds. “It’s been common sense and common knowledge for all of human history that no child can make permanent, lifelong decisions up until like 5 minutes ago.”
Michell describes herself as a former “tomboy” and says she would be quite susceptible to claims that she might be transgender were she growing up today.
“I would have absolutely been preyed upon by this cult, this cultish agenda,” she says. “If my parents bought into that, they would have medically transitioned me, without a doubt.”
Many gay or lesbian people might be convinced that they are “really” transgender because they don’t follow masculine or feminine stereotypes, Michell says. She calls gender ideology a form of “conversion therapy,” referring to efforts to induce a person with same-sex attraction to reject a homosexual lifestyle.
“It is a form of conversion therapy, except it’s way worse—it’s like a thousand times worse,” Michell says. “Regular, old-fashioned conversion therapy is just trying to change your mind, right? This conversion therapy leaves kids with missing body parts and sterilized, so it’s much worse.”
While the legacy media and most LGBTQ groups suggest that everyone who identifies as LGBTQ supports porn in schools, “gender-affirming care” for minors, and “Drag Queen Story Hours,” Michell says: “Every single gay person I know—and even trans people—we’ve all been staunchly against this.”
“It was very important to me to create a group to fight back against it from inside the community, to differentiate, draw a big red line between us and them, show that not all gay people, not all trans people want to hurt children,” she says.
She pushes back against the idea that pornographic materials in school are important to “normalize” LGBTQ individuals.
“I’d say that we already feel normalized,” she says. “We are so welcome in society, we’ve overdosed on tolerance. You see every major corporation panders to us, bends the knee to us, every major politician on the Left.”
“No, children don’t need to learn how to become inclusive by reading pornographic material,” Michell adds. “No, they don’t need to see a man dressed scantily, nearly nude, with fake breasts, to learn about tolerance and acceptance.”
“Our community has been hijacked, they’re using us to push this pornographic filth in our name,” she says.
Although many on the left end of the political spectrum suggest that conservative Christians pose the greatest threat to LGBTQ individuals, Michell says the Left itself poses a far worse threat.
“What the gay alphabet mob is doing is hurting us more than even the Westboro Baptist Church could hope to,” she says, referring to a church that is notorious for obnoxious protests of military funerals, LGBTQ events, and political gatherings.
Due to recent activism, “people are equating all gay people, all trans people, with child predators,” Michell laments. “Gay people fought for a very long time to rid themselves of that stigma. I truly believe that they’re hurting us more than even the most extreme bigots could ever dream to.”
She argues that the SPLC and ADL attacks have put a target on their backs.
“Our inbox is filled with death threats,” Michell says. “I’ve been doxxed, which worries me. … Is today the day I’ve got to use the Second Amendment?”
JD Vance is a marked man. After accepting the nomination for vice president, Vance has been the subject of endless media attacks. Recently, Vice President Kamala Harris even questioned his “loyalty” to the country despite his serving as a Marine in the Iraq War. Yet, one of the most chilling attacks came from Germany where the publishing house Ullstein Buchverlage has stopped printing the sold-out German translation of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 autobiography.
As we have discussed previously in this country, it is the modern left’s equivalent of book burning. After all, why burn books when you can simply prevent their being printed under blacklisting campaigns?
In this country, we have seen the left successfully force book bans for writers and even justices who espouse opposing viewpoints. We have seen actual calls for book burning recently (here and here).
Ullstein is facing a high demand for Vance’s best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, but has refused to print more copies due to his political viewpoints (unrelated to the book).
First published in 2016 and made into a movie in 2020, the book returned to the top position on The New York Times‘ bestseller list after Trump chose Vance as his running mate.
Some in the United States are already balking at the selling of any book by Vance. Seven Stories Press wrote, “Seven Stories Press is extremely thrilled to have never published JD Vance.”
Ullstein published the German translation of Hillbilly Elegy in 2017 and held the rights to reprints.
The company cited Vance’s allegiance with Trump and his politics as the reason in a statement to German media:
“At the time of its publication, the book made a valuable contribution to understanding the drifting apart of US society…In the meantime, he is officially acting alongside him and advocating an aggressively demagogic, exclusionary policy.”
German author Gerd Buurmann posted a mocking response that we should be happy that Ullstein had just thrown Vance’s book out of its catalogue and not into the fire – a reference to the notorious Nazi book burnings of the 1930s.
Other Germans have raised the same objections and referenced the painful history of book bans and burnings in Germany under the Nazis.
German readers want to read the book, which Ullstein acknowledged is one of the most influential works of this generation. However, because the company disagrees with his political viewpoints, it moved to block others from reading the book.
We have seen similar campaigns leading to the banning or burning of books by figures like JK Rowling because of her opposition to some transgender policies. The left now protests any programs on Rowling’s work and opposes the selling of her enormously popular Harry Potter series or even video games based on the series. When authors have defended her right to be published, they have also been subjected to cancel campaigns.
Yet, Ullstein’s decision is particularly chilling as a publishing house. Again, we have seen editors at publishing houses sign petitions to bar books by conservative figures like Justice Amy Coney Barrett from being published.
In 1933, thousands of books by Jewish and leftist writers were burned throughout Germany. Publishing houses further banned the printing of these books. The books were announced as corrupting the minds of German citizens. Many books were banned or burned on the basis of the authors being Jewish or known socialists or anarchists.
Now the left has developed a taste for censorship and blacklisting. Editors and publishing houses are blacklisting those with conservative or libertarian views as forms of dangerous viewpoints or disinformation.
Ullstein will, of course, not stop people from reading the work of JD Vance. While it may make it more difficult for Germans to find copies, ideas like water have a way of finding their way out. Blacklisting and censorship have not succeeded in killing a single idea. What it does is reveal the true character and values of those who want to prevent others from hearing opposing viewpoints.
I hope that our readers have read the response of NewsGuard’s Gordon Crovitz to my recent criticism of the company’s rating system for news sites. He makes important points, including the fact that the company has given high ratings to conservative sites and low ratings to some liberal sites. I have mutual friends of both Gordon and his co-founder Steve Brill, who have always sworn by their integrity and motivations. I do not question Gordon’s account of past ratings for sites.
However, I also welcome the opportunity to further this discussion over media rating systems and to explain why I remain unconvinced by his defense. It is a long overdue debate on the use and potential misuse of such systems.
As a threshold matter, I want to note that I am aware of conservative sites reviewed by NewsGuard that have been given favorable ratings. That is a valid distinction from past rating sites like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
Moreover, while I noted that NewsGuard has been accused of bias by conservatives and is being investigated in Congress, my primary objections are to rating systems as a concept for media sites. Before addressing that opposition, I should note that I still have concerns over bias from the email that was sent me, particularly just after a column criticizing the company.
Now to the main concern.
A Shield or a Sword?
In his response to me, Gordon argues that “I would have thought, including based on your recent book, that you’d especially welcome an accountable market alternative to censorship.”
I disagree with Gordon’s suggested dichotomy. As I argue in the column, rating systems are arguably the most effective means to silence opposing voices or sites. These systems are used to target revenue sources and have been weaponized by the current anti-free speech movement. They are used more as a sword than a shield by those who want to marginalize or demonetize a site.
We have seen such campaigns targeting various sites and individuals, led by political groups opposed to their viewpoints, including figures such as Joe Rogan. This includes Elon Musk and X after the reduction of censorship systems and the release of the “Twitter Files.” After being targeted by these campaigns for years, rating systems have been denounced by Musk as part of an “online censorship racket.”
Moreover, the use of private entities like NewsGuard is precisely what makes the current movement so insidious and dangerous. Whether by design or by default, rating systems are effective components of what I have described as a system of “censorship by surrogate.”
What NewsGuard is attempting is potentially far more impactful for the funding and viability of websites. Rather than an alternative, it can be an avenue for censorship.
I have also written about my concerns with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and its use of rating systems to deter advertisers for targeted sites. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”
As the column discusses, NewsGuard seeks to position itself as a type of Standard & Poor’s rating system for media. The role would give the company unprecedented influence over the journalistic and political speech in America. The rating can be used to discourage advertisers and revenue sources for targeted sites. Just as S&P scores can kill a business, a media rating could kill a blog or website.
That is an enormous amount of power to be wielded by any organization, let alone a for-profit enterprise started by two self-appointed monitors of media. That is not meant to disparage Gordon and Steve, but to acknowledge that this is not just a hugely profitable but a hugely powerful enterprise.
It is also not a criticism of the founding principles. We have seen many organizations that began as faithful to principles of neutrality only to see those principles corrupted with time. Indeed, as we have previously discussed, the very principles of objectivity and neutrality are now rejected in many journalism schools.
The Criteria
While NewsGuard insists that its criteria is completely objective and neutral, that does not appear to be the case. The site’s standards include key determinations on whether some sites run statements that NewsGuard considers “clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading.” (That appears part of the most heavily weighted criteria for credibility at 22 points).
The staff will determine if it believes that a site shows a tendency to “egregiously distort or misrepresent information.”
The staff decides if information is false and, if it is considered false by NewsGuard, whether the site “identifies errors and publishes clarifications and corrections, transparently acknowledges errors, and does not regularly leave significant false content uncorrected.” Thus, if you disagree with the claims of falsity or view the statement as opinion, the failure to correct the statement will result in additional penalties.
The site will also determine if it finds the sources used by a site to be “credible” and whether “they … egregiously distort or misrepresent information to make an argument or report on a subject.”
If the site decides that there are errors, it will lower ratings if the site does not “transparently acknowledges errors, and does not regularly leave significant false content uncorrected.”
The company pledges to combat “misinformation” and “false narratives.”
We have seen mainstream media use these very terms to engage in highly biased coverages, including labeling true stories or viewpoints “disinformation.”
Given these terms and the history of their use in the media, NewsGuards assurances boil down to “trust us we’re NewsGuard.” GDI made the same assurances.
This is not to say that some of these criteria cannot be helpful for sites. However, the overall rating of media sites is different from Standard & Poor’s. Financial ratings are based on hard figures of assets, earnings, and liabilities. “Liquidity” is far more concrete and objective than “credibility.” What NewsGuard does is fraught with subjectivity regardless of the motivations or intentions of individual raters.
The Res Ipsa Review
The inquiry sent to this blog reflects those concerns. The timing of the inquiry was itself chilling. I had just criticized NewsGuard roughly a week earlier. It is not known if this played any role in the sudden notice of a review of Res Ipsa.
One inquiry particularly stood out for me. The reviewer informed me:
“I cannot find any information on the site that would signal to readers that the site’s content reflects a conservative or libertarian perspective, as is evident in your articles. Why is this perspective not disclosed to give readers a sense of the site’s point of view?”
The effort of NewsGuard to label sites can have an impact on its ratings on credibility and transparency. Yet, sites may disagree with the conclusions of NewsGuard on their view of the content. What may seem conservative to a NewsGuard reviewer may be less clearly ideological to the host or blog.
Moreover, despite noting that it asked MSNBC to state its liberal bias, it is not clear if the company has suggested such a notice from many other sites from NPR to the New Republic. For example, is Above the Law supposed to warn readers that it takes a liberal perspective and regularly attacks conservatives? What about other academic blogs like Balkinization?
The point is not to say that they should be required to label their own views (though some sites choose to do so) but to ask whether all sites are asked to do so. If not, when is this demand made for sites? For some reviewers, a liberal perspective may simply seem like stating the obvious or unassailable truth.
Labeling
In fairness to NewsGuard, we all often engage in labeling as part of our discussions — both labeling ourselves and others. For example, I often acknowledge that I hold many libertarian views. However, I continue to write columns that run across the ideological spectrum and I continue to be attacked from both the right and the left for those columns.
Identifying yourself as a libertarian does not convey much information for readers. Many readers have erroneous views of libertarians as a monolithic group. (The public high school teacher of one of my kids told the class that libertarians were just conservatives who did not want to call themselves Republicans). In actuality, it is a group that runs from liberal to conservative figures who maximize individual rights. Labeling your site as libertarian is about as helpful as saying that it is utilitarian.
The suggestion in the email is that readers should be informed that anything they read is coming from a libertarian or conservative on the site. Yet, most law professor blogs are very liberal, but do not make the same type of warning.
We often discuss these labels in judging the diversity of faculties. Yet, that is based largely on surveys of professors self-identifying or the political registration of academics. It is admittedly a blunt tool, but there is little debate that faculties around the country are overwhelmingly liberal. Indeed, even sites like Above the Law have strived to defend “predominantly liberal faculties” as just reflecting the fact that most conservatives are simply wrong on the law.
There is always an overgeneralization in the use of such labels, but we try to take that into consideration in discussing the overall lack of diversity of viewpoints on campuses today.
Conclusion
Rating media sites is vastly different. You are often relying on the views of the reviewers that may be challenged by the site. Postings that challenge popular narratives are often denounced as false or disinformation by critics.
I am particularly concerned over the reported government contracts given to NewsGuard by the Biden Administration as well as agreements with teacher unions to help filter or rate sites. The Twitter Files have shown an extensive system of funding and coordination between agencies and these companies. The funding of such private rating or targeting operations is precisely what I have warned about in congressional testimony as a type of “censorship by surrogate.” The government has been attempting to achieve forms of censorship indirectly that it is barred from achieving directly under the First Amendment.
Consider those bloggers and scientists who were censored and denounced for voicing support for the lab theory on Covid 19 and other subjects from the efficacy of masks to the need to shutdown schools. They spent years having mainstream media figures denouncing them for refusing to admit that they were spreading disinformation or conforming to general views on these issues.
Political and legal commentary are rife with contested opinion over the facts and their implications. Having a company sit in judgment on what is fact and what is opinion is a troubling role, particularly when the rating is used to influence advertisers and financial supporters.
Once again, there are many people on the other side of this debate who have good-faith reasons for wanting a standardized set of criteria for news sources and commentary sites. I simply believe that this is a degree of influence that is dangerously concentrated in a small number of groups like NewsGuard.
N.B.: After this response ran, NewsGuard wrote me that Above The Law actually was marked down for failing to clearly delineate between news and opinion. It further said that the New Republic acknowledges its liberal take, so there is no issue on labeling. What is not clear is whether every site, including academic blogs, are asked to label themselves and who makes that decision on what label should apply.
Below is my column in The Hill on the recent notice that this blog is now being formally “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a company that I just criticized in a prior Hill column as a threat to free speech. The questions from NewsGuard were revealing and concerning. Today, I have posted the response of NewsGuard’s co-founder Gordon Crovitz as well as my response to his arguments.
Here are is the column:
Recently, I wrote a Hill column criticizing NewsGuard, a rating operation being used to warn users, advertisers, educators and funders away from media outlets based on how it views the outlets’ “credibility and transparency.” Roughly a week later, NewsGuard came knocking at my door. My blog, Res Ipsa (jonathanturley.org), is now being reviewed and the questions sent by NewsGuard were alarming, but not surprising.
I do not know whether the sudden interest in my site was prompted by my column. I have previously criticized NewsGuard as one of the most sophisticated operations being used to “white list” and “black list” sites. My new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” details how such sites fit into a massive censorship system that one federal court called “Orwellian.”
For any site criticizing the media or the Biden administration, the most chilling words today are “I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.”
Conservatives have long accused the company of targeting conservative and libertarian sites and carrying out the agenda of its co-founder Steven Brill. Conversely, many media outlets have heralded his efforts to identify disinformation sites for advertisers and agencies.
Brill and his co-founder, L. Gordon Crovitz, want their company to be the media version of the Standard & Poor’s rating for financial institutions. However, unlike the S&P, which looks at financial reports, NewsGuard rates highly subjective judgments like “credibility” based on whether they publish “clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading” information. They even offer a “Nutrition Label” for consumers of information.
Of course, what Brill considers nutritious may not be the preferred diet of many in the country. But they might not get a choice since the goal is to allow other companies and carriers to use the ratings to disfavor or censor non-nutritious sites.
The rating of sites is arguably the most effective way of silencing or marginalizing opposing views. I previously wrote about other sites supported by the Biden administration that performed a similar function, including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI then released a list of the 10 most dangerous sites, all of which are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers that they were accepting “reputational and brand risk” by “financially supporting disinformation online.” The blacklisted sites included Reason, a respected libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. However, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
When NewsGuard came looking for Res Ipsa, the questions sounded like they came directly from CGI. I was first asked for information on the financial or revenue sources used to support my blog, on which I republish my opinion pieces from various newspapers and publish original blog columns.
Given NewsGuard’s reputation, the email would ordinarily trigger panic on many sites. But I pay not to have advertising, and the closest I come to financial support would be my wife, since we live in a community property state. If NewsGuard wants to blacklist me with my wife, it is a bit late. Trust me, she knows.
NewsGuard also claimed that it could not find a single correction on my site. In fact, there is a location for readers marked “corrections” to register objections and corrections to postings on the site. I also occasionally post corrections,changes and clarifications.
NewsGuard also made bizarre inquiries, including about why I called my blog “Res Ipsa Liquitur [sic] – the thing itself speaks. Could you explain the reason to this non-lawyer?” Res ipsa loquitur is defined in the header as “The thing itself speaks,” which I think speaks for itself.
But one concern was particularly illuminating:
“I cannot find any information on the site that would signal to readers that the site’s content reflects a conservative or libertarian perspective, as is evident in your articles. Why is this perspective not disclosed to give readers a sense of the site’s point of view?”
I have historically been criticized as a liberal, conservative or a libertarian depending on the particular op-eds. I certainly admit to libertarian viewpoints, though I hold many traditional liberal views. For example, I have been outspoken for decades in favor same-sex marriage, environmental protection, free speech and other individual rights. I am a registered Democrat who has defended reporters, activists and academics on the left for years in both courts and columns.
The blog has thousands of postings that cut across the ideological spectrum. What I have not done is suspend my legal judgment when cases touch on the interests of conservatives or Donald Trump. While I have criticized Trump in the past, I have also objected to some of the efforts to impeach or convict him on dubious legal theories.
Yet, NewsGuard appears to believe that I should label myself as conservative or libertarian as a warning or notice to any innocent strays who may wander on to my blog. It does not appear that NewsGuard makes the same objection to HuffPost or the New Republic, which run overwhelmingly liberal posts. Yet, alleged conservative or libertarian sites are expected to post a warning as if they were porn sites.
NewsGuard is not alone in employing this technique. Mainstream media outlets often label me as a “conservative professor” in reporting my viewpoints. They do not ordinarily label professors with pronounced liberal views or anti-Trump writings as “liberal.”
Studies show that the vast majority of law professors run from the left to the far left. A study found that only 9 percent of law school professors at the top 50 law schools identify as conservative. A 2017 study found only 15 percent of faculties overall were conservative.
It is rare for the media to identify those professors as “liberal,” including many professors on the far left who regularly denounce conservatives or Republicans. It is simply treated as not worth mentioning. Yet, anyone libertarian or right of center gets the moniker as a warning that their viewpoint should considered in weighing their conclusions. Yet, NewsGuard is in the business of labeling people . . . and warning advertisers. It considers my writings to be conservative or libertarian and wants to know “Why is this perspective not disclosed to give readers a sense of the site’s point of view?”
It does not matter that my views cut across the ideological spectrum or that I do not agree with NewsGuard’s label. Indeed, while I clearly hold libertarian views, libertarians run a spectrum from liberal to conservative. The common article of faith is the maximization of individual rights, while there is considerable disagreement on many policies. Steven Brill is considered a diehard liberal. Would it be fair to add a notice or qualifier of “liberal” to any of his columns or opinions?
It does not matter. Apparently from where NewsGuard reviewers sit, I am a de facto conservative or libertarian who needs to wear a digital bell to warn others.
It is a system that includes what Elon Musk correctly called “the advertising boycott racket.” Musk was responding to another such group pushing a rating system as an euphemism for blacklisting. For targeted sites, NewsGuard is now the leading racketeer in that system. It makes millions of dollars by rating sites — a new and profitable enterprise with dozens of other academic and for-profit groups. They have commoditized free speech in blacklisting and potentially silencing others. If you are the Standard & Poor’s of political discourse, you can rate sites out of existence by making them a type of junk bond blog.
Yet, the fact that I have no advertisers or sponsors to scare off does not mean that NewsGuard cannot undermine the site. The company has reportedly received federal contracts, which some in Congress have sought to block. It is also allied with organizations like Turnitin to control what teachers and students will read or use in schools. The powerful American Federation of Teachers, which has been criticized for its far left political alliances with Democratic candidates, has also pushed NewsGuard for schools.
This is why my book calls for a number of reforms, including barring federal funds for groups engaged in censoring, rating or blacklisting sites. NewsGuard shows that such legislation cannot come soon enough.
N.B.: The original version of this column included MSNBC as an example of liberal sites that do not post their own ideological bent or label. I later heard from NewsGuard that they did indeed mark down MSNBC for failing to make such a disclosure, so I removed it from this blog column. I posted a response today on why I continue to oppose rating systems such as NewsGuard.
On the weekend, I ran a column critical of NewsGuard and its recent notification of this blog that it was being “rated.” NewsGuard co-founder Gordon Crovitz responded to that column the next day. We have previously exchanged emails on my concerns over rating systems generally, including the Global Disinformation Index (which is not related to NewsGuard). I noted the concerns over bias from conservatives and members of Congress, but my primary concern remains with the concept of a rating system for media sites and blogs. While NewsGuard has given high ratings to some conservative sites, I generally oppose media rating systems due to free speech concerns and the use of these systems by the current anti-free speech movement.
I have always found Gordon to be open and frank about these subjects and I wanted readers on the blog to hear the opposing view from him directly. He was kind enough to consent to my posting the following. I will be posting a response to Gordon separately in the hopes that we can use this controversy as a foundation for a much needed discussion of rating systems and their impact on free speech.
Here is his response:
Jonathan:
We welcome the publicity, but your complaints in your July 27 commentary in the Hill about NewsGuard seem based on some misunderstandings.
First, we launched NewsGuard in 2018 as an alternative either to the Silicon Valley platforms secretly putting their thumbs on the scale for news and information sites or for calls to have the government censor social media and other online speech. Digital platforms were (and are) secretly rating news and information websites, with no disclosure about their criteria and no way for the people running the websites even to find out how they were rated. The only other entity rating news and information sites at the time we launched was GDI, which as you have written is a left-wing advocacy group–which like the digital platforms does not disclose its criteria or let publishers know how they are rated (except when information escapes such as the top 10 list of “risky” sites, which as you noted are all conservative or libertarian sites).
As I have written as a (libertarian-leaning) conservative former publisher, including in this recent Washington Examiner article https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3091369/advertisers-fear-supporting-journalism-heres-how-to-fix-that/, I wouldn’t trust the platforms or a left-wing advocacy group either. We launched NewsGuard as the transparent and apolitical alternative, with the goal of giving news consumers basic information about websites they encounter online.
We reach out to the people running news and information websites for several purposes. We want to be sure we correctly assess sites based on our nine criteria. We’re a journalistic enterprise, so would always reach out for comment before concluding a site fails any of our criteria. We often quote the people running websites to provide more context about their site, whether they fail any criteria or not. More than a quarter of the websites we’ve rated have taken steps, usually relating to greater transparency, to get higher ratings.
In your column, you asserted that NewsGuard treats liberal sites preferentially compared with how we treat conservative or libertarian sites. This is false, as the many high scores for conservative and libertarian sites–and low scores for liberal sites–makes clear. You’ll see examples in the Washington Examiner article I linked to above. (There are right-wing sites like OAN that get low ratings such as for its Dominion Voting Systems claims, and there are left-wing sites that get low ratings for false claims such as about Donald Trump.)
In your Hill article, you claimed that “it does not appear” that we expect left-wing sites to disclose their point of view to readers. You gave the example of MSNBC. I am attaching our publicly available rating for this website. You will see it fails our criterion relating to news/opinion for failing to disclose its orientation. The MSNBC website scores lower than Fox News using our criteria because MSNBC fails to disclose its orientation whereas the website for Fox News does disclose its. (MSNBC also fails our criterion for gathering and presenting responsibly due to claims it made about Trump, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon and others.)
We also anticipated even back when we launched that there would be calls for government censorship if secret and partisan ratings were the only ones available in the market. I would have thought, including based on your recent book, that you’d especially welcome an accountable market alternative to censorship.
Finally, I appreciated your obituary for Bob Zimmer and your calls for the Chicago Principles to be widely adopted. (Whether our UChicago fully lives up to them is a topic for another day–I prefer the more energetic approach of Ed Levi to today’s more appeasing practices.) More information about websites is an exercise of free speech, and when done with transparent apolitical criteria equally applied seems to me a market solution you should support, not criticize or fear.
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Kamala Harris hasn’t been the presumptive Democrat nominee for even a week, and already the press is desperately trying to insist perfectly valid criticisms of her are illegitimate. If you think the media were complicit in attempting and failing to hide Joe Biden’s senility, the attempt to retcon her political career into something that resembles respectable and competent is even more brazen.
“She was never the border czar.”
“She was never considered the most liberal senator.”
“She was never a DEI hire.”
“She doesn’t owe her political career to her powerful boyfriend.”
The dishonesty surrounding all of these issues is worth highlighting, but let’s focus on that last point involving Harris’ relationship with California’s powerful political boss Wille Brown, for no other reason than The New York Times has provided a terrific example of how the lies are coming in hot.
The Times’ “On Politics” newsletter Wednesday — think of it as political talking points for affluent wine moms, a.k.a. the Democrats’ base — was dedicated to combatting “the sexist and racist rumors that have followed Harris for years” with “the facts behind several conspiracy theories and misleading claims about Harris that have spread widely in recent days.”
Nearly the whole thing is an orgiastic recitation of errant nonsense, starting with the fact that the Times is quoting disgraced “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz to make the case that Harris is the victim of a disproportionate amount of online attacks. (Harris’ competitor in the presidential race was shot in the head less than two weeks ago, and, unsurprisingly, there’s been a dearth of media handwringing about the rhetorical climate that may have enabled an actual assassination attempt. That’s because an honest discussion about hateful rhetoric would involve asking basic questions such as, “Why did The New York Times win a Pulitzer for stories based on the false premise that Donald Trump stole an election by treasonously colluding with Russia?”)
But I digress. Again, the real lowlight of the Times article is its discussion of Kamala Harris’ relationship with Willie Brown. One of my favorite things “fact checkers” do is introduce a proposition as false and then try to confirm that falsity by desperately spinning a bunch of inconvenient facts that confirm the proposition is actually true. The entire section on Harris and Willie Brown is a textbook example:
The sexist insinuations point in part to her brief relationship in the 1990s with Willie Brown, who was 60 and the speaker of the California Assembly when Harris was 29 and rising in the Bay Area legal scene. He appointed Harris to two well-paid state board positions and introduced her to his political connections.
When she was campaigning to be San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, her opponents repeatedly commented on her link to Brown — references that she told The New York Times in 2019 were “frustrating” and “designed to degrade, frankly, the conversation about why we needed a new D.A.”
During the 2003 race, which she won, she told SF Weekly that there was nothing improper about benefiting from her ties to Brown, although she described the relationship as an “albatross hanging around my neck.” She said she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” to the board roles, adding that “whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work.”
She said that she had “no doubt that I am independent of him” and that “I do not owe him a thing.”
Just so we’re clear, The New York Times is confirming Harris did in fact have a relationship with Willie Brown, who was 31 years older (and, for what it’s worth, still married at the time). Harris herself admits her career benefited significantly from said relationship. Other Democrats shared the perception she did not earn her positions. And Harris, a lawyer who initially failed the bar exam, can only say that she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” rather than actual qualifications to the jobs Brown appointed her to. But it’s a sexist insinuation to insist these facts are rather unflattering to Kamala!
And this is just what The New York Times is admitting. In actuality, the details are far worse than the Times is letting on. Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist who has worked with The New York Times in the past, details quite a bit on the corrupt nature of the Harris/Brown relationship in his book, Profiles in Corruption, which has been out for four and a half years. And the facts as he lays them out are damning.
Brown, who was repeatedly investigated by the FBI for corruption, was far more involved in Harris’ career ascent than appointing her to two board positions. He was a kingmaker in California, and he was heavily involved in helping Harris get elected as San Francisco district attorney. Brown didn’t do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Harris was working for the previous district attorney, Terence Hallinan, and quit when she got passed over for the No. 2 position in the DA’s office.
Hallinan found himself as the subject of criticism from other city officials, but others suggested the controversy was manufactured. “This whole thing is about Kamala Harris,” a source close to Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Cross one of Willie’s friends and there will be hell to pay.” Eventually, Harris ran for DA with Brown’s powerful backing — a former Brown aide managed her campaign, and Brown played a key role in her fundraising, which was incredibly successful. After starting the race polling a distant third, she won the election.
Once in office, Harris then dropped or pled out corruption charges against friends of Willie Brown that Hallinan had been pursuing. There were a number of Brown’s friends let off the hook, but most notably this included a sweetheart plea deal for a notorious city contractor caught defrauding the city by using inferior recycled concrete in sensitive projects such as parking garages and the Bay Bridge. This compromised the structural integrity of those projects and endangered lives. But Harris dropped all the fraud charges and accepted a guilty plea on a single count involving an environmental violation.
“Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” reported the Chronicle. A better explanation is that the contractor in question was generous with campaign donations and had previously been popped for making an illegal $2,000 donation to, yup, Willie Brown.
Anyway, there’s a lot more alarming reporting in Schweizer’s book that’s worth revisiting, and it’s not a stretch to say Kamala Harris has engaged in outright corruption in her career. Suffice to say, when The New York Times takes Kamala Harris at her word that her relationship with Willie Brown was not “improper,” they’re erasing the functional difference between lying and profound ignorance. And when she’s credulously quoted saying, “I do not owe him a thing,” it’s journalistic malpractice to believe her.
To say that Kamala Harris had an affair with a man more than twice her age, leveraged his fundraising prowess and connections to launch her political career, and once in office did his corrupt bidding isn’t sexist. It’s well-grounded in fact.
But facts aren’t something The New York Times is much interested in. Kamala Harris’ late entry into the presidential race means they don’t have much time to use what’s left of their institutional clout to try to dishonestly sway a presidential race.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Former Attorney General Bill Barr did not improperly pressure prosecutors to reduce sentencing recommendations for political activist Roger Stone, according to a new government watchdog report. The exoneration of Barr came more than four years after a deluge of media reports alleging wrongdoing.
However, J.P. Cooney, a Justice Department official now serving as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s top deputy, cultivated a politically toxic environment, disseminated baseless conspiracy theories about Trump and his political appointees, and engaged in unprofessional conduct as he oversaw the team making sentencing recommendations, according to the same report.
Cooney is mentioned (as the “Fraud and Public Corruption Section Chief”) a whopping 394 times in the 85-page report released from the Justice Department’s inspector general on July 24. Cooney supervised a team of four attorneys who prosecuted Stone for what the government successfully argued in front of a Washington, D.C., jury were lies and obstruction during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign officials. Mueller’s two-year, $32 million investigation was itself spun up by anti-Trump officials in the Justice Department after the Democrat National Committee and Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton bought and paid for an information operation falsely alleging the Trump campaign was in cahoots with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Two members of Cooney’s team also worked on the Mueller investigation.
The Fraud and Public Corruption (FPC) team sought an unprecedented sentence of seven to nine years in prison for Stone, dramatically beyond what others convicted of similar crimes faced. When developing that sentencing goal, the team by its own admission thought the “closest analogue” to the Stone conviction was that of Scooter Libby, a target of a previous special counsel in a highly controversial prosecution. Libby’s proposed sentencing range was 30-37 months and he was sentenced to 30 months, which was derided as “excessive” by former President George W. Bush.
Yet the Cooney team larded up the Stone sentencing memo with every escalatory adjustment it could find, however disputable, to achieve a much harsher sentence and treat Stone differently than the Justice Department treats other defendants.
As soon as Cooney’s supervisors saw what he and his team had planned, “they all agreed that the sentencing recommendation was too high” and expressed grave concern about the situation. Interim U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea, who had started on the job just that week, said he “had never seen [perjury] cases produce a sentence that high, and that he was aware of many violent crimes that did not result in sentences ‘anywhere near’ the sentence the team was recommending for Stone,” according to the report. He noted that the escalatory adjustments were arguably made in error, in at least one case, and that the guidance was completely “out of whack” relative to other cases. Further, Stone was a “first-time offender, older than most offenders, and convicted of a nonviolent crime,” and “comparable cases” were sentenced around two to three years.
Cooney responded to the criticism of his extreme sentencing proposal by spreading an elaborate conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence that Trump, Barr, and Shea were being improperly political. Cooney admitted to investigators that “he had no information suggesting that anyone from Main Justice (i.e., DOJ leadership offices) was involved in the Stone sentencing at this time and no evidence pointing to improper motivations influencing these discussions” when he spread the conspiracy theory with his underlings.
In phone calls and other conversations with his prosecution team, Cooney spread his evidence-free conspiracy theory that “Shea was acting out of fear of then President Trump and, more particularly, fear of the consequences of not seeking a lower sentence for an influential friend of then President Trump.” He continued his conspiracy theories in other conversations. “Prosecutor 1 said that when he asked [Cooney] what was going on, [Cooney] replied that ‘this is coming from Main Justice. Tim Shea is getting pressure from Main Justice about the Stone sentencing recommendation, and Tim Shea is terrified of the President,’” according to the report. Cooney acknowledged he had no evidence to support these statements.
Another prosecutor said Cooney told him that “Shea did not care about Stone or the Stone case, but that Shea was ‘afraid of the President’ and that this fear was driving Shea’s actions,” according to the report. That same prosecutor said Cooney said multiple times that “Shea was afraid of the President and said it ‘with substantial conviction.’” Cooney later acknowledged he had no evidence to support his false claim.
At the same time, reporters began calling the Department of Justice to ask about the sentencing guideline dispute. That meant that at least one person within the department was getting information to reporters at left-wing media outlets to bully Trump appointees to acquiesce to their demands. Partisan bureaucrats had commonly used that tactic throughout the Trump presidency. While strict guidelines opposed unauthorized disclosures to the press, DOJ and FBI officials rarely bothered to investigate such leaks, much less hold employees accountable for them. In many cases, they were the worst offenders. For example, former FBI Director James Comey leaked to the media by disclosing information to an attorney who then passed the information on to The New York Times. The investigative report on the sentencing memos discusses how various DOJ employees denied leaking to the media while also noting they spoke about the sentencing controversy with other attorneys.
Unsurprisingly, the sentencing dispute became a major news story, with the perspective of Cooney’s team adopted by the recipients of the leaks. After the Justice Department issued a second sentencing guideline memo, the four prosecutors all removed themselves from the case and were lavished with praise by left-wing media outlets. Prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky went on to testify in front of Congress about the situation. His claims that the sentencing dispute was guided by politics were untrue, but investigators blamed Cooney for spreading the falsehoods.
The second sentencing memo did not call for a specific jail time but left it to the judge’s discretion. Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed with the second sentencing memo and ordered Stone to serve 40 months in prison, many years fewer than Cooney’s team had aimed for. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence before he was taken into custody.
In its report, the Justice Department IG said that Cooney’s “speculative comments in meetings with the trial team about the political motivations” of Trump officials “in connection with their handling of the Stone sentencing contributed to an atmosphere of mistrust” that “unnecessarily further complicated an important decision in the case.” It further determined that his baseless comments to the trial team formed a substantial basis for Zelinsky’s explosive but wrong testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on June 24, 2020.
Cooney’s Checkered DOJ Record
Cooney’s track record at DOJ includes many other controversial political actions.
For example, one of the primary instigators of the Russia-collusion hoax was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor. In April 2018, federal investigators issued a criminal referral for just some of the criminal leaks and lies he had engaged in while at the FBI. After sitting on a criminal referral for nearly two years, Cooney announced on Feb. 14, days after the Stone sentencing memo situation, that he had decided to let McCabe get away with the lies and the leaks.
Those who aren’t political allies of Cooney’s receive different treatment. Cooney prosecuted Steve Bannon in 2022 for a contempt of Congress charge related to him not complying with a subpoena from the controversial Jan. 6 Committee comprised exclusively of members hand-selected by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Bannon, who hosts the popular alternate media program “War Room,” is currently serving his four-month prison sentence. Civil libertarians are concerned about the Biden administration’s imprisonment of powerful media voices during the election season.
Incidentally, Attorney General Merrick Garland was found in contempt of Congress earlier this year for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, which unlike the Jan. 6 Committee is a real committee with members appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, but the Department of Justice has not charged him.
Thwarting Election Integrity
After the extremely controversial 2020 election, Attorney General Barr issued a memorandum allowing the Department of Justice to investigate election irregularities if they were serious and substantiated. “While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship,” Barr wrote.
While many Americans would hope the Justice Department would investigate election irregularities in a timely fashion, particularly in an election as unprecedented as 2020, Democrat activists were livid. In response, Cooney cooked up a letter of outrage that quickly leaked to the media and helped shut down any meaningful investigations into the election. When The New York Times wrote about the letter, it was clear that Trump officials had already figured out Cooney’s mode of operating.
“On Thursday, [Cooney] said in an email sent to Mr. Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against longstanding practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email,” The New York Times wrote. “In response, Mr. Donoghue told Mr. Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Mr. Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials ‘that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.’”
Somehow the letter simultaneously made it to Cooney’s political allies at left-wing media outlets.
Rabid Pursuit of Trump
Weeks after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Cooney was still stinging over not being able to put Stone in prison for nearly 10 years. He cooked up a plan, which appeared in The Washington Post and New York Times, to once again go after Roger Stone and other Trump associates in a new Jan. 6-related investigation.
His supervisors noted, “Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure.” Further, his investigative plans were “treading on First Amendment-protected activities.” Nevertheless, he continued pursuing various plans to target Trump affiliates, and the U.S. attorney’s office began pursuing investigations along the lines of what Cooney had proposed, according to reporting.
President Biden and corporate media continued to pressure the Department of Justice and Garland to go after former President Donald Trump, who was widely expected to become Biden’s 2024 opponent. The famously conflict-averse Garland finally relented and put together a special counsel team heavily focused on Cooney and his extreme theories.
Democrat activists have cheered the special counsel for its aggressive actions against Trump, including a shocking raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, exhaustive investigations into communications and finances of Trump and many of his associates, and relentless pushes for courts to rush judgments ahead of the November elections.
Cooney and Smith’s approach has been less successful outside Democrat conversations. “It’s almost hard to believe how comprehensively the hubris and zealotry of anti-Donald Trump lawfare have blown up in their practitioners’ faces,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jason Willick after one major defeat. “Not only did the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling in Trump v. United States create new and enduring presidential immunities against criminal prosecution, but it also eviscerated the fiction of an ‘independent’ Justice Department and even inadvertently threw the validity of Trump’s New York hush money conviction into question.”
Left-wing media outlets such as Talking Points Memo have praised Cooney, noting that he was a partisan activist in college. Cooney, who was president of the College Democrats at Notre Dame University, wrote a column in the school newspaper that regularly praised President Bill Clinton and criticized Independent Counsel Ken Starr and his investigation of Clinton. Cooney once wrote of Starr as a “partisan political hit-man” for investigating Clinton and complained about the $30 million price tag of the investigation. He lamented the country’s “insatiable craving for controversy and scandal” regarding Clinton and worried it would destroy the country.
Former President Donald Trump said his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been warm as the two leaders met Friday, and the Israeli leader said he hoped progress was being made in talks on a Gaza ceasefire. Netanyahu traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, to meet Trump, the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential race, after meeting Democrat President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the Nov. 5 U.S. election.
Trump greeted Netanyahu and his wife Sara and criticized Harris, who had voiced concern in public comments after meeting the Israeli leader about the toll on Palestinian civilians from Israel’s 9-month-old campaign in Gaza.
“I think her remarks were disrespectful,” Trump said.
Netanyahu said he hoped his U.S. trip would lead to a quicker ceasefire deal.
“I hope so. But I think time will tell,” he told reporters. He said he thought there had been movement in efforts to forge a ceasefire because of Israeli military pressure and said he would dispatch a team to talks in Rome.
Trump dismissed any suggestion of tensions with Netanyahu.
“We have a very good relationship,” he said, noting policy changes during his presidency including moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and pulling the United States out of the international nuclear deal with Iran.
Netanyahu had angered Trump when he congratulated Biden on his victory over Trump in the 2020 election. Trump claims the election was stolen from him by voter fraud.
Trump more recently criticized Netanyahu for Israeli security failures that enabled Hamas to carry out an Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Opinion polls put Harris and Trump in a close race for the White House, prompting world leaders like Netanyahu, traditionally more aligned with Trump’s Republicans than Biden’s Democrats, to strike a balance in dealings with the U.S.
Harris had pressed Netanyahu on the suffering of Palestinians in the enclave in talks on Thursday that were watched for signs of how she might shift American policy if she becomes president.
“I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there,” Harris said. “I will not be silent.”
“Israel has a right to defend itself. And how it does so matters,” she said.
An unnamed Israeli official said it was to be hoped that Harris’ comments would not be interpreted by Hamas as indicating a gap between the United States and Israel “and thus push a deal into the distance.”
In defiant remarks to Congress on Wednesday, Netanyahu defended Israel’s military and dismissed criticism of a campaign which has devastated Gaza and killed more than 39,000 people, according to health officials in the Hamas-ruled enclave.
Dozens of Democrats boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday, voicing dismay over the thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza and the displacement of most of its 2.3 million people.
In Wednesday’s speech, Netanyahu praised Biden’s support for Israel.
But to cheers from Republicans, he touched on Trump’s pro-Israel record as president. He praised Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-held goal of conservatives that infuriated Palestinians.
He also cited the Abraham Accords, landmark U.S.-brokered agreements signed during Trump’s White House years that normalized bilateral relations between Israel and both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Hamas and its allies killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage in the Oct. 7 attack, according to Israeli tallies. Some 115 hostages are still being held though Israel believes one in three are dead. Israeli officials estimate that some 14,000 fighters from militant groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been killed or taken prisoner out of a force they estimated to number more than 25,000 at the start of the war.
The former member of Congress once rated “most politically left” of any U.S. senator — Vice President Kamala Harris — appears to be on the verge of capturing the Democratic nomination to take on former President Donald Trump.
So, just how left-wing is she?
Well, the answer seems to depend on which phase of her career is under scrutiny. When Harris’ ticket to political ascendance in California as a district attorney in San Francisco and later as attorney general required a crime fighter, she offended liberals by putting law-breakers behind bars. At the time, some activists on the left even branded her “right-wing.”
Harris eventually was able to overcome her moderate image by consistently casting far-left and “progressive” votes as a senator, and later by serving as President Joe Biden’s vice president.
Here’s some highlights of her ratings:
In its 2019 report card on Harris, the nonpartisan GovTrack.us watchdog ranked her “most liberal compared to all senators.”
Liberal-activist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) group gave her a perfect, 100% score based on her Senate voting record in 2017 and 2018 — although in other years she did take a few less progressive, more moderate policy stances.
Harris received a 90% ACLU record in the 116th Congress, from 2019 to 2020.
The ACLU gave Harris a 100% voting record for her votes during the 117th Congress, just before she became Biden’s vice president.
Her lifetime ACLU approval rating stands at 93%, and she has received a perfect 100% lifetime rating from both the NAACP and Planned Parenthood.
Harris also has received the endorsement of Emily’s List, a nationwide champion of abortion. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Democratic strategists are counting on Harris’ pro-abortion stance “to invigorate voters in November.”
When the Supreme Court in June 2022 issued its Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, overturning Roe v. Wade’s federal protection for abortion, Harris referred to abortion as a “constitutional right.” “This is a healthcare crisis,” she stated. “Millions of women in America will go to bed tonight without the healthcare and reproductive care that they had this morning.”
She has been an outspoken advocate ever since on an issue that Democrats hope to revive to weaponize against Trump, who has steadfastly reiterated the Supreme Court’s view that abortion law is determined by the states.
The Sacramento Bee reported in August 2020: “Sen. Kamala Harris’ voting record has been one of the Senate’s mostly liberal throughout her three years in Congress, according to congressional watchdog groups.”
Among the votes that put her back in good standing with progressives: Voting to enhance the power of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) and electing to terminate the state of emergency that President Trump used to begin building the border wall.
Conservative groups’ ratings echo GovTrack.us evaluation of Harris as extremely liberal, including:
Club for Growth, for example, has given her a moribund 4% lifetime rating, reflecting her support for higher taxation.
CPAC gives her a lifetime voting record of 4.45%.
The conservative Heritage Action for America rating gave her a 0% rating from 2019 to 2020 in the 116th Congress, and a lifetime rating of just 4%.
Assuming she wins the nomination, Harris will have to defend her record in a way that hasn’t been necessary since the 2020 campaign. One of Harris’s last votes before leaving the Senate cast in December 2020, for example, was in favor of the massive $2.3 trillion omnibus funding and COVID response package.
That federal largess has been blamed for touching off the sharp inflationary spiral that was experienced during the first two years of the Biden administration.
“We are pleased with the court’s decision recognizing that students can, in fact, challenge unconstitutional policies implemented by school boards in Virginia,” America First Legal attorney Andrew Block told The Daily Signal.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Northern Virginia requires all students to refer to “students who identify as gender-expansive or transgender by their chosen name and pronoun, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent pupil record.”
Conservative public interest law firm America First Legal sued the district on behalf of a Roman Catholic student who believes the policy opposes her religious beliefs. The student believes God made only two genders—male and female—and that to reject one’s biological sex is to reject the image of God within that person.
The school district argued that the student, who was followed into the girls’ bathroom by a boy and is compelled to use preferred pronouns under the school district’s policy, did not have standing to sue. In Wednesday’s hearing, the court overruled that motion, recognizing that students can challenge unconstitutional policies. The court held that the student did not allege “discriminatory purpose or intent.”
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax County mom of three who has followed this issue closely, celebrated the decision.
“I’m joining other parents across Fairfax County today as we collectively inhale the fresh scent of common sense with the court’s verdict,” she told The Daily Signal. “We knew all along that it was tyrannical and completely wrong to try to compel our children’s speech with forced pronoun usage in their public schools. It is such a relief that justice has prevailed this time to preserve our children’s constitutional rights.”
Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Brett Kassabian gave the plaintiff 21 days to file responsive pleadings.
For years, former CNN Anchor Lynne Russell was the familiar face of Headline News for the country. She may soon be making headlines again as the lead plaintiff in what could prove a major Second Amendment challenge in Washington, D.C. Russell is challenging the city’s prohibition on “off-body” carrying of weapons, including keeping a handgun in a purse. That type of off-body carry is precisely what may have saved Russell’s life in a shootout with an armed assailant in 2015. Russell’s nightmare began when the armed assailant grabbed her outside of their motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico and forced her into her room. He then threw her across the room on to the bed as her husband, Chuck De Caro, a former CNN correspondent, was coming out of the shower.
Russell then had the amazing calmness and control to suggest to her husband that there might be something in her purse that the man would want. Inside was her gun and De Caro pulled it out and exchanged fire with the man. He was shot three times but survived. The assailant did not.
Both Russell and De Caro showed amazing courage. The fact that De Caro could come out of a shower naked and immediately engage a gunman in a shootout is worthy of a Die Hard sequel.
Russell is now leading the fight for others, particularly women, who use off-body carry for self-protection. For many women, a holster is not a convenient option with dresses and other outfits. Indeed, there are guns and purses specifically designed for women to blend into clothing styles.
2344.1A licensee shall carry any pistol in a manner that it is entirely hidden from view of the public when carried on or about a person, or when in a vehicle in such a way as it is entirely hidden from view of the public.
2344.2A licensee shall carry any pistol in a holster on their person in a firmly secure manner that is reasonably designed to prevent loss, theft, or accidental discharge of the pistol.
It is not just a matter of style. A holster on a dress outfit is more likely to stand out and could serve as an attraction for felons who are seeking to steal a weapon.
The Russell challenge seems quite strong to me. Under the post-Bruen jurisprudence, it will be difficult for the District to show historical support for limiting gun rights to on-body-carry situations. While the District is citing a contemporary New Jersey law, that is not quite the historical support that the Court has previously demanded. The Court held that “when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.” To overcome that presumption “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
It is doubtful that any early gun laws barred carrying weapons off body. Indeed, the most common weapons like muskets necessarily were carried on horseback or kept at arm’s reach.
I have previously written how New York, D.C., and Chicago are examples of Democratic cities that routinely commit lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures. In 2008, the District of Columbia brought us District of Columbia v. Heller, the watershed decision declaring that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of gun possession. In 2010, Chicago brought us McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court declared that that right is incorporated against state and local government.
These cities are the gifts that keep on giving for gun rights advocates. Politically, local officials are heralded for any gun control legislation, and they are rarely blamed for major losses that come later in the courts — losses that often expand the reach of prior cases.
The case is Russell et.al. v. District of Columbia et.al. Case number 2024-cv-1820.
Top Stories • Obama Refuses to Endorse Harris Because He Thinks She Can’t Beat Trump • Biden Says Americans Should Vote for Radical Leftist Kamala Harris to “Save Our Democracy” • Ted Cruz Warns: We Have to Work Hard to Defeat Radical Leftist Kamala Harris • Don’t Believe the Hype: Not All Democrats are Enthused About Kamala Harris
More Pro-Life News • Army’s “Apology” For Calling Pro-Life Americans Terrorists Just Makes It Worse • Planned Parenthood Loves Kamala Harris, Abortion Biz is “Thrilled” About Her • Suspect Arrested Who Brutally Assaulted Elderly Pro-Lifers Outside Planned Parenthood • Woman Devastated by Abortion Helps Other Post-Abortive Women Find Healing in Christ • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
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House Republican leaders told lawmakers in a meeting Tuesday to stop bringing up Vice President Kamala Harris’ race and gender and to focus on her record, Politico reported. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. created a firestorm when he attacked Harris as a DEI candidate after President Joe Biden dropped out and Harris announced her candidacy, quickly becoming the presumptive Democrat nominee. Harris is of Black and South Asian descent.
“The incompetency level is at an all-time high in Washington,” Burchett wrote on social media. “The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president.”
Burchett said he regretted the comment, even though he said, “it was the truth.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., said Democrats were sticking with Harris because of her “ethnic background.”
Republicans are hoping to criticize Harris for her record on the border and for skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress.
“This should not be about personalities. It should be about policy. And we have a record to compare,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. said to Politico after the meeting. “This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the competence of the person running for president, the relative strength of the two candidates and what ideas they have on how to solve America’s problems. And I think in that comparison, we’ll win in a landslide.”
An unnamed House Republican told Politico the DEI attacks need to stop. DEI initiatives aim to promote inclusion of women, minorities, and other marginalized groups.
“We have everything going our way and you just can’t handle that?” the lawmaker said. “We’ll give you a cheat sheet if you don’t know what else to talk about.”
Former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, also weighed in, saying calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI candidate” is “stupid.”
“This DEI, that seems like a petty … look, I disagree with DEI, but she is the vice president of the United States, she is the former U.S. Senator,” McCarthy said. “These congressmen that are saying it, they’re wrong in their own instance.”
Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., who chairs the Main Street Caucus, said Republicans should focus on Harris’ record as vice president rather than “make allegations,” Politico reported.
Star Parker, a columnist for The Daily Signal, is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
In President Joe Biden‘s announcement on social media of his decision not to run for reelection, he ticked off the many wonderful achievements during his three and a half years in the nation’s highest office. But if things are so great, as Biden seems to think, why are Americans so dispirited?
Biden’s polling is horrible. General polling shows an American public in a sour state of mind. Per Gallup of a few weeks ago, only 41% say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, compared to 70% only 20 years ago.
In Biden’s own Democratic Party, only 34% say they are “extremely proud” to be an American.
America’s first president, George Washington, was urged to run again after serving two terms. He declined, motivated by the ideals of America’s founding that the nation would be about individual freedom informed by moral ideals, not by government and politics. Washington feared the politicization of the nation, that it would become everything that Joe Biden now represents.
Washington expressed this concern in his farewell address in 1796, warning that “unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
This, of course, is exactly what has happened.
We know that Biden did not quit voluntarily. His overriding motivation, clearly, has been the retention of power and glory. He is leaving only because he has been pushed out by party leaders and major donors. What are the chances that a major corporation would leave in control a chief executive officer in Biden’s physical state? The answer, of course, is zero.
Further, as Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance has pointed out, “If Joe Biden doesn’t have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn’t have the cognitive function to remain as commander in chief.”
Worse, it’s not just about Biden. Those who pushed him out the door did so not because of their concern that he isn’t fit to govern. Their concern was the polls show he can’t win.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in October 2021, Biden went to Capitol Hill to lobby congressional Democrats to pass the trillion-dollar infrastructure legislation. Per the Journal: “According to Democrats in the room,” Biden spoke “disjointedly” for 30 minutes “and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers.”
Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., noted, also per the Journal: “It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen.”
Clearly, it has been well known for a considerable amount of time, by a considerable number of individuals in the president’s party, that the man sitting in the most powerful office in the world isn’t capable of doing his job.
George Washington’s concerns two and a quarter centuries ago were well founded. A powerful political class has arisen in Washington that exists to further its own interests at the expense of the welfare of our nation’s citizens.
This, of course, follows the dramatic expansion of government. The federal government now takes some 25% of gross domestic product, compared to a little over 14% in 1950.
My own first exposure to Joe Biden came in 1991 when, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Biden permitted a circus by allowing the airing, with live national press coverage, of the unsubstantiated, pornographic allegations of one woman, Anita Hill, to besmirch the character of a man of who would become one of the nation’s great and most articulate defenders of our Constitution. Biden’s behavior then, as now, was motivated by calculations, first and foremost, of personal political interests.
Let’s hope and pray that, somehow, America finds its way back to the ideals of the founders and George Washington.
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We previously discussed the free speech lawsuit of Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.” The court just granted a preliminary injunction holding that there was a substantial likelihood that he would prevail on the merits against the University of Oregon.
Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley was excluded from a Diversity Twitter page by the Communication Manager of the Division of Equity and Inclusion at the University of Oregon. (The manager is identified as “tova stabin” who the court notes “spells her name with all lowercase letters.”). Stabin has now left the school.
In Gilley v. Stabin, Judge Hernández previously offered this background:
On or about June 14, 2022, Defendant stabin, in her capacity as Communication Manager, posted a “racism interruptor” to the Division’s Twitter page, @UOEquity. The Tweet read “You can interrupt racism,” and the prompt read, “It sounded like you just said_________. Is that really what you meant?”
Plaintiff Bruce Gilley, a professor at Portland State University, responded to the Tweet the same day it was posted with the entry “all men are created equal.” Plaintiff is critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) principles, and intended his tweet to promote a colorblindness viewpoint. Plaintiff tagged @uoregon and @UOEquity in his re-tweet. Also on June 14, 2022, Defendant stabin blocked Plaintiff from the @UOEquity account. Once he was blocked, Plaintiff could no longer view, reply to, or retweet any of @UOEquity’s posts….
Plaintiff later filed a public records request with the University of Oregon to inquire about the policy VPEI uses to block Twitter users. … The University initially responded that there was no written policy and that “the staff member that administers the VPEI Twitter account and social media has the autonomy to manage the accounts and uses professional judgment when deciding to block users.” …Plaintiff also asked whether other Twitter users had been blocked from @UOEquity, and the University responded that two other users were blocked. … Plaintiff asserts that “[b]oth of the other users have expressed politically conservative viewpoints, including criticizing posts of the @UOEquity account.” Am. Compl. ¶ 70.
On June 27, 2022, Defendant stabin responded to an email from University of Oregon employee Kelly Pembleton, who was helping respond to Plaintiff’s public records request. Defendant stabin sent the following in response to Pembleton’s request for a list of the users she had blocked on @UOEquity:
“Doesn’t take real long. I’ve only ever blocked three people. Here is the list. I’m assuming the issue is this guy Bruce Gilley. He was not just being obnoxious, but bringing obnoxious people to the site some. We don’t have much following and it’s the social I pay least attention to. Here’s a screenshot of everyone I’ve ever blocked. I hardly do it (and barely know how to).”
Minutes later, Defendant stabin sent another email to Pembleton about the records request. The email reads, in pertinent part:
“Oh, I see. It is Bruce who brought it. Not surprising. He was commenting on one of the “interrupt racism” posts, as I recall talking something about the oppression of white men, if I recall. Really, they are just there to trip you up and make trouble. Ugh. I’m around at home for a quick zoom about it.’
The court previously denied the university’s motion to dismiss. The University of Oregon then continued to spend public dollars to try to defend its right to censor academics and students in this arbitrary way. Now it has lost the key fight over the preliminary injunction.
In his decision, Judge Hernández zeroed in on the guidelines allowing for the censorship of offensive or hateful speech:
“Plaintiff has shown that the two provisions of the social media guidelines he challenges create a risk of censoring speech that is protected by the First Amendment. As Plaintiff points out, speech that is “hateful,” “racist,” or “otherwise offensive” is protected by the Constitution. Pl. Br. 3 (citing Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443, 454 (2011); Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 25 (1971); Am. Freedom Def. Initiative v. King County, 904 F.3d 1126, 1131 (9th Cir. 2018)). The Court held that the @UOEquity account was a limited public forum, meaning that any restrictions on speech must be reasonable and viewpoint-neutral. Op. & Ord. 25.5 Plaintiff is correct that the provisions allowing the Communications Manager to block “hateful,” “racist,” and “otherwise offensive” speech create a risk of viewpoint discrimination because “[w]hat is offensive or hateful is often in the eye of the beholder.” Pl. Br. 4. If Plaintiff was blocked for posting “all men are created equal” because the post was viewed as hateful, racist, or otherwise offensive, such blocking would violate the Constitution. Deleting or hiding the post for that reason would also violate the Constitution.”
That is why this decision could have a lasting impact for higher education. The Oregon language is not dissimilar from many schools limiting campus speech under vague guidelines.
Notably, we have discussed how these schools have been losing in federal courts in their effort to maintain censorship systems. Yet, administrators continue undeterred in pursuing these policies with the support of their faculty.
Oregon has long been known for radical viewpoints in academia. I previously criticized the school policy to monitor student speech on social media and off campus as part of its speech regulations.
It is unlikely that the legislature will object to this expensive fight to preserve the right to censor speech. The state itself has moved aggressively against free speech rights of doctors and others in areas like abortion. However, the people of Oregon should consider the use of their tax dollars to seek to limit the “indispensable right” of free speech and to give figures like stabin such discretion over what speech to allow on campus.
District Court Judge David Carter delivered a crushing blow against free speech rights in elementary schools in an outrageous case out of Orange County. Principal Jesus Becerra at Viejo Elementary punished a seven-year-old girl named B.B. in the lawsuit for writing “any life” under a “Black Lives Matter” picture. Judge Carter issued a sweeping decision that said that she has no free speech rights in the matter due to her age and that the school is allowed to engage in raw censorship. He is now being appealed.
The message from the school seems to be that black lives matter but free speech does not. The school found a kindred spirit in Judge David Carter.
After a lesson on Martin Luther King, B.B. gave her picture to a friend, believing the inclusive image of four shapes of different races and the words would be comforting to a friend. However, when that child showed the picture to a parent, a complaint was filed that B.B.’s picture was insensitive and offensive. Becerra responded by disciplining the child for her inclusive picture.
Becerra should be fired, but his extreme views and lack of judgment is hardly unique in education. The far greater damage was created by Carter’s opinion.
Judge Carter ruled that B.B. has no free speech to protect due to her age, but that “students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school.”
Judge Carter added that “an elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downside of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.”
The court leaves a vacuum of protected rights that he fills with what seems unchecked authority for the school: “a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.”
In my view, Judge Carter is dead wrong, though I expect he will find support among some of the judges on the Ninth Circuit.
The Court applies the famous ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969), as a license for sweeping censorship and discipline. Yet, the Court held in Tinker that students have free speech rights and that any restrictions require evidence of “interference, actual or nascent, with the schools’ work or collision with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone.” It then imposes a high standard that it must “materially disrupt[] classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” This disruption must be “caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.”
However, what is more disturbing is the disconnection of the right from anything but a narrow functionalist view of free speech. In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I criticize the functionalist approaches that tie the protection of free speech to its function in advancing a democracy.
I argue for a return to the view of free speech as a natural or human right — a view that was popular at the beginning of our Republic but soon lost to functionalist rationales. Those rationales allow for the type of endless trade-offs evident in the Carter decision.
Carter’s functionalist or instrumentalist approach makes it easier to simply discard any free speech rights in elementary students. In my view, they have free speech rights as human beings as do their parents. Under Carter’s approach, schools can engage in a wide array of indoctrination by declaring opposing political and social views to be “disruptive.”
Ironically, my book criticizes Judge Carter in another case over his failure to consider free speech concerns. In his decision in the January 6th case involving John Eastman, Carter dismisses his arguments that he had a right to present his novel theory against certification of the election.
While many of us disagreed with Eastman, there was a concern over efforts to strip lawyers of their bar licenses and even use criminal charges against such figures. However, what concerned me the most was sweeping language used by Carter in his decision.
Carter’s narrow view of free speech and his expansive view of state authority is hardly unique. B.B. is devoid of free speech protections even in this outrageously abusive case. The reason is that she is not of an age where her speech is viewed as worthy of protection. It is an example of the distortive and corrosive effect of functionalism in free speech jurisprudence in my view.
The inbred nature of Leftism has created lemmings incapable of rational thought. Thus, Leftists say the dumbest things without even realizes it.
Take for example this exchange between Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner. The two discuss how Governors Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley both former opponents of President Trump in the primaries endorsed him at the Republican Convention:
The disconnect by the Left boggles the mind.
What a compliment to have two opponents whom Trump ridiculed during the primary change course. Now both DeSantis and Haley support Trump 100 percent.
I discussed this as it pertains to JD Vance, Trump’s new VP. This man was a Never Trumper. Go ahead, read it again. Never Trumper. And now JD Vance is Trump’s successor, chosen to be Trump’s VP.
Back to MSNBC’s attempt at ridicule
Who do you think hated Biden, but now is willing to be a “ride or die” for the man? While Trump just solidified the Republican Party even getting NeverTrumpers to support him, Joe Biden’s party strategizes to get rid of him.
Put another way, while Trump remakes the Republican Party adding all flavors of Americans, Joe Biden loses Democrats like a Husky sheds hair in an Arizona summer.
These Leftist clowns want to ridicule Trump’s leadership; leadership that causes people to abandon their biases about him and ultimately follow him.
Watch as this union leader endorses President Trump:
Check out this video where a brother from the streets discusses “My president”. Moreover, he advises on how Black people have Trump’s back.
This Video Is Blowing Up Approaching 150k+ Likes. Black Americans Warning To Donald Trump
“Say President Trump, my President, the United States President. You know who I'm talking to. This can even go to Trump Jr. Hey. If you're gonna continue to do these debates in these states… pic.twitter.com/WrA8etGKL3
And what about this brother who warns of a landslide:
Black American Has A Message For Democrats & The Deep State
“Hey. I would like to thank the powers who thought that would be a great idea to try to harm president Trump. We'd like to thank you for The House, The Senate, and The Presidency. And boy, are the numbers gonna be earth… pic.twitter.com/7DvVGmoiCy
These Black voters are not outliers. Instead, they represent the real voice of a large swath of Black America.
Sadly for Democrats, nothing they do will change this. No Baby Black Jesus to bail them out, and Sista Girl Harris won’t move the needle at all in the Black community. More Black people than ever will vote for Donald Trump; the most in the modern era.
Still people like Hayes and Wagner will miss the mark, too blind to see reality. The thing they ridicule about Trump is the trait that makes him successful. Leftists should want this in their leaders; people willing to fight it out and hug at the end of the fight.
But as Hayes said, [pp] “My ego is too big for that.” Egos are the major problem for Leftists. They hate being wrong. And when they are wrong, they lash out at those who expose them. Hayes and Wagner showcase this to the hilt.
Asking the simple question, “How does Trump gain such admiration from those he ridiculed?” might have created some clever discussions. Instead, they chose the one-dimensional approach of looking at the issue from only their perspective. By their standards, Haley and DeSantis are dumb, easily led, and easily influenced. They clearly can’t think for themselves, according to Hayes and Wagner.
Democrats’ ideas are indeed incestuous. Because Leftists don’t allow critical thinkers who bring new ideas, they radicalize the old deals. And while they scoff at people like DeSantis, Haley, and of course Trump, they will get another 2016-style awakening soon.
Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris “border czar,” corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.
Biden first charged Harris with leading “our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border” in March 2021. At the time, he claimed the former California attorney general and senator was “the most qualified person to do it.” Harris didn’t do much with the title and task. Yet, even her delayed first and only(and heavily staged) visit to the border received celebration from her allies in the press.
This kid-glove treatment intensified recently when corporate media accused those critical of Harris’ failure to do anything but exacerbate the Biden administration-incentivized invasion of making the VP a “convenient scapegoat.”
“Harris’s job was meant to be narrow,” The Wall Street Journal insisted, “and over the years Harris has fulfilled it by announcing tranches of private investments by companies like Pepsi, Cargill and Nestle in Central America.”
Axios insinuated in an X post on Wednesday that Republicans are wrong to point out Harris’ border failures because the Democrat “never actually had” the title border czar.
The outlet’s complaints that the Trump campaign and Republicans like House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik have unfairly labeled Harris’ role, however, fall short in the face of its own reporting, which repeatedlyreferred to Harris as Biden’s border czar.
Axios added an editor’s note to the storyshortly after publication with a notice stating three years later it “was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar.’”
Why, other than the usual motivations for the corporate media to deliberately distort the narrative, would publications like Axios lie about something its own pages contradict? It’s because the border has been and continues to be a “political grenade” for the Democrats who wrecked it. Stef W. Kight explicitly stated in her latest story thatshe aimed tosignal it “has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.”
“Making a clear immigration pitch to voters could be critical for Harris’s campaign,” Kight repeated, before noting that illegal border crossing activists are invigorated by Harris’ rise on the ticket because she is “personally well-versed and invested in the issue.”
Politifact, known for aiding Big Tech’s censorship efforts by printing fake fact-checks designed to demonize political dissenters, even joined in the propaganda dogpile when it claimed that Harris was merely “assigned to tackle immigration’s causes, not border security.”
USA Today, similarly, published a “fact-check” that deemed the claim that Harris was the presidential pick to oversee the skyrocketing number of illegal crossings “exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border.”
One quick look at Biden’s border czar pronouncement in 2021 suggests the opposite.
Biden noted that he was tasked with a “similar assignment” to “determine the best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave” during the Obama administration.
“The Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”
Harris also explicitly emphasized in her acceptance that “we will enforce the law.”
The real border story continues to be that the Biden administration ushered in the deadliest invasion in the world without facing any accountability. Corporate media, however, are more interested in running propaganda to help Democrats’ 2024 election chances instead of covering how Americans are suffering the consequences — like violent crime,fatal drugs, and infrastructure problems — that are directly linked to the ongoing influx of illegal border crossers.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
Many lawmakers and donors have come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris following President Biden’s exit from the 2024 race. However, one Biden megadonor is not “enthusiastic” about the president’s endorsement and is cutting his fundraising efforts.
“You have to be enthusiastic or hoping for a political appointment to be asking friends for money. I am neither,” attorney John Morgan wrote Sunday on X. “Its others turn now. The donors holding the 90 million can release those funds in the morning. It’s all yours. You can keep my million. And good luck.”
Morgan further explained why he won’t support the Harris campaign on “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” on Tuesday.
“To go out and have a fundraiser raise 3, 4 or $5 million. It sounds easy, but it’s not easy,”he stressed. “It’s very difficult to do that. You have to have motivation. You have to really believe, or you have to really want something. There has to be a driving force inside of you.”
You have to be enthusiastic or hoping for a political appointment to be asking friends for money. I am neither.
It's others turn now.
The donors holding the 90 million can release those funds in the morning.
On Sunday, Biden announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential election despite affirming his intentions to stay in the race following his concerning debate performance. The 46th president endorsed Harris, who quickly garnered support from top Democratic voices, including the Clintons and actor George Clooney.
The Morgan and Morgan attorney argued, however, that Democrats are “squandering” an “unbelievable” opportunity.
“Every year people gather to play fantasy basketball or fantasy football or whatever, and you get to pick the best players on the team,” he told host Neil Cavuto. “The Democratic Party has that type of opportunity, but they seem to be squandering it by taking a lesser pick.”
FOX Business host Larry Kudlow breaks down Vice President Kamala Harris’ record as she runs for the presidency on ‘Kudlow.’ According to the results of a new Quinnipiac University poll released Monday, former President Trump has the support of 49% of voters, compared to 47% who prefer Harris. In five post-debate national polls, the vice president ties Trump with support from 47% of registered voters.
“The Democratic Party has that type of opportunity, but they seem to be squandering it by taking a lesser pick.”– John Morgan
Another March poll from USA TODAY and Suffolk University found that approximately 52% of registered voters disapprove of Harris’ performance as vice president. This compares to only 36% of respondents that believe she is handling the office well. Significantly, 10% of respondents remain undecided about their feelings towards her performance.
Morgan explained his primary reason for pulling back fundraising for Harris is that she is not the best the party has to offer Americans.
“Harris brings a lot of great things to the table. Women, she’d be the best speaker on abortion, her heritage… Very good things. But is she the best messenger or is she the best person? [Are] her ways the best ways to go forward? And for me, I don’t think so,” he said.
One Biden megadonor announced he would not be fundraising for Kamala Harris as the vice president vies for support ahead of the Democratic National Convention. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“The president has backed out, and we have the opportunity to get the best candidate who has the best chance of winning. It’s an unbelievable opportunity… I think the deal is done. I don’t think there’s anything more that can be done,” he concluded.
FBI Director Christopher Wray arrives Wednesday to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on his agency’s investigation into the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, offering scant new information on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Wray sat down before the House lawmakers and, in his opening remarks, described the “complex threat environment” that the FBI is facing. He also emphasized the need for the agency to understand what happened at the July 13 Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by authorities, shot at Trump, hitting him in the right ear.
Wray promised that the agency will “leave no stone unturned” in its investigation.
Lawmakers grilled Wray throughout Wednesday morning and into the afternoon about the incident, but a number of lawmakers also brought up related and unrelated topics, such as gun control; Jan. 6; diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Wray revealed that Crooks, using a laptop computer, had Googled “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” on July 6, a little more than a week before the July 13 attack on Trump’s life. The FBI director said that Crooks became “very focused” on Trump around that date, though he stressed that the FBI has not yet uncovered Crooks’ motivations for trying to kill the former president.
Wray says that Trump's attempted assassin, somewhere around July 6, became "very focused" on Trump and the Butler rally.
On July 6, he did a google search on a laptop: "How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?" pic.twitter.com/UcTl8LoOhQ
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 24, 2024
Wray also discussed how Crooks’ devices showed that the gunman had looked at other political figures, but he stressed that there is no indication that Crooks had another target. He told lawmakers that federal agents found three “relatively crude” explosive devices in Crooks’ possession—two in his car and one in his house.
The FBI director said that Crooks had been flying a drone about 200 yards from the stage where Trump stood and was livestreaming the video about two hours before the Pennsylvania rally began.
He did not offer insight into whether Crooks was conspiring with anyone else, citing the ongoing nature of the FBI’s investigation into the attempted assassination.
“We’re still in early stages, but we have not seen anything so far that would suggest to us that he acted with others,” Wray said.
Director Wray says that the FBI has not uncovered any other particular targets of the Trump shooter: pic.twitter.com/8EYmpkGOx6
The FBI director blamed “an uptick in threats about judges … including a case we helped investigate involving a threat to a sitting Supreme Court justice” (apparently meaning Justice Brett Kavanaugh) to “a reflection of a broader phenomenon that we’re seeing in this country.”
Wray expressed understanding for those who are “again very passionate, I respect that; very angry, I respect that. But there is a right way and wrong way to express yourself when you are angry. And violence and threats of violence just can’t be it.”
The FBI chief clarified that someone at the Butler rally saw Crooks on the roof a “handful of minutes” before he began shooting at Trump at about 6:11 p.m. on July 13. According to Wray, it’s unclear whether the person could see that Crooks had a gun.
Wray also described how a local police officer saw Crooks in a “prone, shooting position” on the roof before the gunman turned and faced the officer with his gun “seconds before the shooter took his shots.”
The FBI chief said that local police had also seen the shooter with a range finder “in a way that was odd and suspicious” about an hour before Crooks tried to kill Trump.
We have been following the controversies surrounding professors commenting on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Some of those responses have ranged from celebrations to spreading bizarre conspiracy theories. The latest controversy concerns Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd, who posted a Facebook message saying” Let’s hope today’s events inspire others.” These postings raise difficult questions for universities in balancing free speech rights against statements viewed as endorsing violence.
“We are living in an age of rage. It permeates every aspect of our society and politics. Rage is liberating, even addictive. It allows us to say and do things that we would ordinarily avoid, even denounce in others. Rage is often found at the farthest extreme of reason. For those who agree with the underlying message, it is righteous and passionate. For those who disagree, it is dangerous and destabilizing.”
Like many on the left, Budd mocked the assassination attempt and seemed to regret that it was not successful. She added, ”They shot his wig. Sad.”
For most of us, the comments are shocking, but shock is a relative concept in an age of rage. Budd, like many, does not appear to view Trump as a human being as much as a symbol or object. He is treated as devoid of human components from feelings to family. It is easier to call for the killing of a caricature than a person.
Budd is obviously part of the radical chic in higher education discussed in my book. She has worked at the Rutgers University Writing Program for 22 years.
Conservative sites like Campus Reform have noted that her Facebook account features a poster at a protest that reads: “Capitalism will kill us all. Gender is fake. Eat garbage. Be free.” The posting is an example of the difficult questions that arise on social media. This was a comment made outside of the campus as a private person, not as an academic.
My inclination is always to err on the side of free speech in such circumstances. The university can condemn it, but punishing political speech can place a university on a slippery slope. Moreover, Rutgers is a public university subject to the First Amendment. I do not believe that disciplinary action would be upheld under these circumstances. Rutgers could argue that this is a call for political violence. However, Professor Budd can insist that this is mere hyperbole and bad humor.
My concern is not with allowing Budd’s hateful speech, but the lack of consistency in how universities respond to such controversies.
The most analogous case is that of University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. Yet, those extreme statements from the left are rarely subject to cancel campaigns or university actions.
Faculty and students often have little tolerance for even jokes from conservatives as they do alleged jokes by liberals like Budd.
For example, conservative North Carolina professor Dr. Mike Adams faced calls for termination for years with investigations and cancel campaigns. He repeatedly had to go to court to defend his right to continue to teach. He was then again targeted after an inflammatory tweet. He was done. Under pressure from the university, he agreed to resign with a settlement. Four years ago this month, Adams went home just days before his final day as a professor. He then committed suicide.
What are often portrayed as harmless jokes from the left are treated as threats from the right. That is the long reality of rage rhetoric; it is either righteous or dangerous depending on your perspective.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the ruling against Nina Jankowicz in her defamation case. It turns out that calling opposing views defamation is no better than calling them disinformation.
Here is the column:
For free speech advocates, there are few images more chilling than that of Nina Jankowicz singing her now-infamous tune as “the Mary Poppins of Disinformation.” The woman who would become known as the “Disinformation Czar” sang a cheerful TikTok parody of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to rally people to the cause of censorship.
When the press caught wind of President Biden’s plan to appoint Jankowicz as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s new “disinformation board,” Fox News said she “intended to censor Americans’ speech.” The backlash was swift. Plans for the board were suspended, and Jankowicz resigned in 2022. She then sued Fox News for defamation.
On Monday, the case was dismissed. But Chief Judge Colm Connolly, a Delaware Democrat, didn’t just say it was legally unfounded — he demolished the claims of figures like Jankowicz that they are really not engaged in censorship.
These figures gleefully worked to silence others with the support of millions in public dollars for years. Yet, when exposed to criticism, they often portrayed themselves as victims with an obliging and supportive media.
They all took a page from Mary Poppins, who “taught us the most wonderful word!” In this case, the word is “disinformation”, and it is certainly not connected to “censorship.” Rather you are supposed to call the barring, blacklisting and throttling of opposing views “content moderation.”
Jankowicz took that not-so-noble lie to a new level. After losing her job, she launched a campaign soliciting funds to sue those who called her a censor. I was highly critical of these efforts as trying to use defamation as another tool to chill critics and shut down criticism. It was a telling lawsuit, as Jankowicz simply labeled criticism of her as “defamation” — just as she labeled opposing views “disinformation.” The objections to her work were called false and she insisted that she was really not seeking to censor people with her work.
Connolly made fast work of that effort. After holding that people are allowed to criticize Jankowicz as protected opinion, the court added:
“I agree that Jankowicz has not pleaded facts from which it could plausibly be inferred that the challenged statements regarding intended censorship by Jankowicz are not substantially true. On the contrary … censorship is commonly understood to encompass efforts to scrutinize and examine speech in order to suppress certain communications.
“The Disinformation Governance Board was formed precisely to examine citizens’ speech and, in coordination with the private sector, identify ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ … that objective is fairly characterized as a form of censorship.”
Of course, in America’s burgeoning censorship infrastructure, the entire decision is likely to be viewed as some form of disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. After all, even true facts can be deemed censorable by the Biden-Harris administration.
I testified previously before Congress on how Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” — described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Thus, referring to Jankowicz as engaged in censorship on this defunct board may be true, but could still be treated as “malinformation.”
As I discuss in my book, these setbacks are unlikely to deter the corporate, academic and government figures aligned in our current anti-free speech movement. Millions of government and private dollars are flowing to universities and organizations engaged in targeting or blacklisting individuals and groups. It is now a growing industry unto itself.
The new censors have gone corporate and mainstream. Silencing others is now a calling, a profession. They have literally made free speech into a commodity that can be packaged and controlled for profit.
Yet Confucius once said that “the beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.” This opinion takes a large step toward such wisdom.
If figures like Jankowicz want to continue to make money silencing others, we can at least call them for what we believe they are: censors.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” (Turley appears as a legal analyst on Fox, but nothing in this column is written on behalf of Fox Corp.)
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Kamala Harris’ office has had a staggering 91.5 percent turnover rate since she became vice president, an investigation from government watchdog organization Open The Books (OTB) revealed on Monday. Of the 47 staff members hired when Harris took office in 2021, only four reportedly remained in her employment as of March 2024.
The report comes as Biden’s X account announced he will “stand down” from his reelection campaign and “fully support” Harris as the new nominee. OTB utilized U.S. Senate disclosures to obtain records from the vice president’s office, including 2021 and 2024 payrolls.
“Chaos reigns on the vice president’s staff,” wrote OTB founder Adam Andrzejewski. “Our auditors at OpenTheBooks quantified an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate.”
Payrollsprovide further insight into the “staff exodus” in Harris’ office. As The Atlantic reported in October 2023, Harris’ communications director, national security adviser, chief of staff, and numerous aides left within a year and a half of her taking office in January 2021.
“Furthermore, the turnover chaos isn’t getting better. In the trailing 12-month period, 24 staffers left — that’s almost half the employees,” Andrzejewski wrote.
OTB’s investigation also revealed budget discrepancies and a lack of transparency from Harris’ office. As Andrzejewski said, “Kamala Harris, Office of Vice President, is committed to the opacity of its payrolls and all other office information.”
When OTB filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Harris’ staff payroll in September 2021, a spokesman reportedly declined the request and claimed the vice president’s office was not subject to FOIA. When OTB replied with a request for any transparency Harris’ office could provide, the spokesman said Harris did “not have any information to share at this time.”
“The VP’s rejection makes her the least transparent elected office holder in the country,” Andrzejewski wrote in a 2021 Forbes article detailing the interaction. “Citizen’s ought to be concerned that the person next in line for the presidency is so unwilling to disclose how she spends their money.”
OTB’s investigation also revealed an over $2 million discrepancy in Harris’ allocation of taxpayer dollars.
“We calculated that for VP Harris’s 28 staff listed in the Senate report, the 2021 salaries added up to $2,334,223,” Andrzejewski wrote. But the vice president’s office “got $5 million for 23 full time staff in 2021 and requested over $6 million for 27 full time staff in 2022.”
Harris’ office reportedly refused to answer any questions from OTB regarding this inconsistency. OTB says its analysis reflects the dysfunction widely reported in the corporate media, which he says have called Harris’ office a “revolving door” where there’s been a “‘staff exodus’ of key aides ‘heading for the exits.’”
Staffers in Harris’ office have reported a toxic work environment since 2021, when The Washington Post spoke with 18 individuals in Harris’ orbit. Descriptions ranged from “uncomfortable” to “soul-destroying.”
“One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” former Harris aide and Democrat strategist Gil Duran told the Post. Back in 2013, after just five months of working for Harris, he quit. “Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have [them] pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons.”
Others said Harris blamed staff for her lack of preparation.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” a former anonymous staffer told the Post. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
With some hard work, pluck, the right boyfriend, and a bit of genetic luck, Kamala Harris has found her way onto the presidential ballot without having to secure a single primary vote. Don’t tell me the American Dream is dead.
Sure, Harris is a demagogue who speaks in cringy, swirling, impenetrable platitudes. And sure, according to Joe Biden, Kamala was an identity hire. But “Morning Joe” says we’re not supposed to talk about any of that. So, let’s discuss her record and stated positions.
It seems like a lifetime ago that Biden named Harris his running mate. What you may not recall is that the media tried to gaslight us into believing the California senator was another apolitical dealmaker.
Former Clinton fixer George Stephanopoulos said Harris was “the middle-of-the-road, moderate wing of the Democratic Party.” The New York Times called her a “pragmatic moderate,” while the Associated Press focused on her “centrist record.” And so on.
A “small c conservative,” one Washington Post columnist wrote. The only problem was, according to GovTrack, Harris’ record in the Senate was to the left of red-diaper baby Bernie Sanders. She was least likely of any senator to join in any bipartisan bills.
That’s fine. Bipartisan bills are the pits. Harris wasn’t handed a Senate seat by her former beau and California political kingpin Willie Brown to waste her time legislating with a bunch of pinheads. She was there to run for the presidency. In her truncated first term, few excelled more at smearing their political opponents. Remember when Harris moderately accused Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape?
This false perception of moderation stems from Harris’ time as prosecutor and AG. Harris liked to brag about using “a huge stick” as a prosecutor in San Francisco, where she regularly threatened poor parents with jail time in her efforts to craft social policy — which wasn’t her job. It’s true that Harris threw a lot of people in jail to bolster her political fortunes. Some of them likely innocent. And judging from her disposition, she would throw a lot of more people into jail, if she could.
When pro-life journalist David Daleiden published videos of Planned Parenthood executives nonchalantly discussing the selling of body parts, Harris had his home raided, seized evidence, and then tried to throw him in prison. She later teamed up with the abortion mill to write legislation that would squash the free speech rights of other pro-lifers.
Like any good authoritarian, Harris enforces whatever laws she sees fit to enforce whenever she sees fit. One of the reasons Kamala allegedly opposed the nomination of Neil Gorsuch was that the judge “consistently valued legalisms” — which is to say, respected the Constitution — “over real lives.”
Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,’” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.
As a national candidate, Kamala said she believed immigration laws should be treated as civil, rather than criminal, offenses. So, of course, Biden gave Kamala the job of border czar — she did not perform admirably, to say the least — where she noted that one of the “root causes” of the problem was a “lack of climate resilience,” before sending corrupt regimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
As a candidate, Harris supported abolishing private health insurance — “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on,” she told CNN. In addition to nationalizing health care and education, Kamala wants the government to control the manufacturing sector, the auto industry, food … and any industry that emits carbon.
Harris was in favor of getting rid of the filibuster to overturn state voting laws, nationalizing abortion on demand until birth, and passing the Green New Deal — an authoritarian takeover of the economy written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which would not only ban all fossil fuels force Americans to retrofit every building in in the country, eliminate air travel and meat, create government-guaranteed jobs, among many other authoritarian measures.
Perhaps the only thing that grosses out the vice president more than individual rights are practicing Catholics.
Kamala is the kind of person who will raise money to bail out race rioters out of prison but try to stop orthodox Catholics from serving on the bench. “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Knights of Columbus?” is basically what Kamala asked Brian Buescher, a Trump judicial nominee.
It wasn’t a big jump for a senator who treats charitable Christian organizations as fifth columnists to co-sponsor of the “Equality Act,” which would have compelled religious hospitals to perform gender transition surgeries and shut down religious foster care organizations, among other things.
On foreign policy, we don’t really know, though we can guess. This week, Harris wouldn’t even greet Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. She reportedly won’t sit behind him during his speech to Congress. A few weeks ago, the same Kamala said antisemitic pro-Hamas campus protesters showed“exactly what the human emotion should be.” In the past she has openly protested with Islamic Republic propagandists from the National Iranian American Council. To be fair, in some ways her disposition comports more with the latter than the former.
When I say Harris is an authoritarian, I’m not contending she’s Hitler. I am saying she is a fan of obedience to authority, especially of Democrat-run government, at the expense of personal freedom in ways that are deeply un-American. That’s a bad trend in politics, in general, but it’s difficult to think of many politicians more wedded to the idea than Kamala Harris.
BETHEL PARK, Pa. – Thomas Matthew Crooks’ father was spotted in public on Monday for the first time since the 20-year-old gunman opened fire at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a local business employee and a neighbor who identified a picture of him.
Snipers killed Crooks after the Bethel Park resident nicked Trump’s ear, killed bystander Corey Comperatore and injured two others at the July 13 rally, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. Investigators have spent the last week visiting Crooks’ family home in their suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood. The man locals identified as the father and a masked woman he was with declined to answer questions when approached by Fox News Digital.
Matthew Crooks, left, leaves a store on Monday, July 22, 2024. He was seen in public for the first time since his son, Thomas Crooks, attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
Matthew Crooks said, “we just want to try to take care of ourselves right now.” (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
Matthew Crooks, right, was seen in public more than a week after his son killed one man and injured three others at Trump’s rally. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
“We’re going to release a statement when our legal counsel advises us to do so – until then, we have no comment,” he told Fox News Digital before beginning to load items into the vehicle. “We just want to try to take care of ourselves right now. Please, just give us our space.”
Crooks’ family members have cooperated with the FBI as the agency tries to pin down a motive for the near assassination.
Fox News Digital previously reported that Crooks’ parents, Matthew and Mary, called police hours before the shooting, saying that he was missing and that they were concerned about his welfare. It is unclear whether they knew that he was in possession of the AR-15 registered to his father.
Both Matthew and Mary Crooks are licensed as professional counselors, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State Licensing System Verification Service.
An undated image of Thomas Matthew Crooks. (Handout via AFP)
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2020. In May, he earned an associate’s degree in engineering from the Community College of Allegheny County. Crooks reportedly planned to enroll at Robert Morris University after being accepted there and at and the University of Pittsburgh.
Two investigators, who appeared to be federal agents, enter Trump shooter Thomas Crooks’ home. (Derek Shook/Fox News Digital)
Investigators are trying to piece together how Crooks was able to evade security around the site of Trump’s rally on July 13 at the Butler Farm Show property. He climbed onto the roof of an AGR manufacturing building about 150 yards from Trump’s podium and fired off several shots before snipers killed him.
Undated file photo of Thomas Matthew Crooks in a yearbook photo. Crooks is alleged to be the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder before the shooting, and investigators are looking into how he was able to avoid law enforcement and climb onto the roof with his father’s rifle.
Lawmakers visited the shooting site on Monday as Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before Congress about the security failures for the rally.
A motive for the shooting remains unclear. Crooks was a member of a local gun club, and he bought ammunition before the attack.
FBI agents canvas Thomas Matthew Crooks’ neighborhood in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania on Monday, July 15, 2024. Investigators are speaking with neighbors about Crooks, who was killed on Saturday after attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital )
A former classmate of Crooks told Fox News Digital the killer had confronted him years earlier about his support for Trump and expressed a “smug” dislike for politicians.
Crooks’ online searches before the shooting included dates and times of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, photos of Trump and President Biden, and major depressive disorder.
Christina Coulter is a U.S. and World reporter for Fox News Digital. Email story tips to christina.coulter@fox.com.
It wasn’t the plan, and it wasn’t smooth. But when the cover-up of President Joe Biden’s physical infirmity fell apart, the left wing of the Democratic Party, led by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama and supported by the American Left’s vast “dark money,” carried out a coup. Out with Joe and in with Kamala. The out-of-power Clinton clique tried to prop up Biden but to no avail. The American Left is nothing if it isn’t ruthless in its drive for political power.
The Democratic Party is lurching left, just as it did in 1984. That year the Democrats gathered for their convention in San Francisco; this year it will be in Chicago. But no matter the city, the leftist pull of the Party’s power centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan and the Beltway is never out of power within the party, though it prefers to pretend that there are moderates in the leadership.
With the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, the American Left will openly and inarguably be at the controls. Then candidate Barack Obama pretended on 2008 to be a centrist, but he governed from the left and shifted the entire party to the left. President Biden’s disastrous term cemented the left and its ideology into the driver’s seat of the Democrats. What Kamala Harris says over the next three months as she rhetorically tries to tack to the middle does not much matter. She and her party are from and for the American Left’s vision for the United States.
We have rarely seen that agenda on full display. It’s been 40 years in fact since the mask was last off the Democrats in a presidential election. It was a different set of radicals atop the party then. The country was bitterly divided in the 1980s over how to confront the Soviet Union, and the American Left’s embrace of appeasement was on full display.
President Reagan had run and won in 1980 on a platform of “Peace Through Strength” and his first four years had been confrontation over confrontation with a Democratic Party being taken left by its activists demanding a “nuclear freeze.” Reagan began the Defense build-up that would eventually cause the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Democrats did their best to stop both the defense build-up and Reagan’s full-throated opposition to communism.
A young activist named Randall Forsbergissued a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” in the same year as Reagan’s first of two sweeping victories. The insurgent left wing of the Democratic Party, picking up the pieces of the rout of Jimmy Carter, embraced the “Nuclear Freeze” as a central tenet of their party. In the early 1980s, a staff writer for The New Yorker, Jonathan Schell, wrote a series of essays for the magazine about nuclear weapons and then published a revised form of them in a best-selling book, “The Fate of the Earth,” which soared up the best-seller lists. One of his colleagues, Bill McKibben, wrote a memorial to Schell in the magazine not long after Schell’s death in 2014, which revealed that Schell was ahead of his time in anticipating what the left would do in the aftermath of the triumph of Reaganism.
“Some months ago, I phoned Jonathan,” McKibben wrote. “By then gravely ill, he’d abandoned work on a book in part about climate change, a subject of great mutual interest.”
Schell was in the final months of his life when McKibben called. “But he hadn’t stopped mulling over, with his characteristic penetration,” McKibbon continued, “his great topic, which really was the fate of the earth.”
The “nuclear freeze” movement was an umbrella for the American Left, which had sprung up during the Vietnam War. That movement was busy burrowing into academics and thereafter into public education and beyond. Christopher Rufo in his best-selling book of last year, “America’s Cultural Revolution” laid out in extraordinary detail the left’s “long march through the institutions.”
Demonstrators hold hands and vocalize as they march towards Central Park during a massive nuclear disarmament rally where 750,000 gathered to demand a freeze on nuclear arms, New York, June 12, 1982. (Lee Frey/Authenticated News International/Getty Images)
The nuclear freeze movement was the organizing slogan of the American Left in the Reagan years. It was based on the fundamentally flawed belief in appeasement of enemies. Whether because they are socialists like the European left, or even Leninists like China’s Xi Jinping, Democrats don’t like their core beliefs on full display. So, America rarely gets a full-frontal exposure of what the left edge of the Democratic Party really wants. Even today, when climate change theology permeates everything on the left, rarely does the American Left spell out what its agenda means for the average voter.
Democrats spelled it out in 1984 when Walter Mondale and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro went all in with the American Left. “MONDALE PLEDGES IMMEDIATE EFFORT FOR ARMS FREEZE” was the headline in the September 6, 1984, New York Times.
The American electorate did not care about the Freeze Movement’s mass marches. It did not buy into the rhetoric of the left which captured the Democratic Party during the 1980s. “Under Mr. Reagan,” the Democratic Party’s platform to stop Reagan in 1984 read, “the nuclear arms race would continue to spiral out of control. A new generation of destabilizing missiles will imperil all humanity. We will live in a world where the nuclear arms race has spread from earth into space.”
President Reagan, in the mind of the Democrats, “has contributed to the decline of U.S.-Soviet relations to a perilous point. Instead of challenges, he has used easy and abusive anti-Soviet rhetoric as a substitute for strength, progress, and careful use of power.”
Former President Ronald Reagan, the late Henry Kissinger and Howard Baker laughing during a GOP fund raising dinner. (Photo by Larry Downing/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
The “San Francisco Democrats” as then U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick labeled them at the Republican Convention in 1984, got crushed by the American electorate that year. But “leftism light” under the banner of Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis fooled no one four years later and Vice President George H.W. Bush brushed Dukakis aside.
The American Left would remain dominant within the Democratic Party until Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council drove it out of sight before his successful campaign for the party’s nomination in 1992. The thumping the Democrats had at the polls in 1994 after “Hillarycare” crashed and burned reminded the Manhattan-Beltway media elites, again, that ours is a center-right country.
When Ambassador Kirkpatrick took the stage at the 1984 GOP convention, she reminded the audience that she was herself a Democrat as President Reagan had once been and began by quoting Harry Truman who had said four decades earlier that the “elements of our strength are many. They include our democratic government, our economic system, our great natural resources. But the basic source of our strength is spiritual. We believe in the dignity of man.”
Kirkpatrick then contrasted the Democrats of Truman’s era with those of 1984:
“That’s the way Democratic presidents and presidential candidates used to talk about America.”
“These were the men who developed NATO, who developed the Marshall Plan,” Kirkpatrick continued, “who devised the Alliance for Progress. They were not afraid to be resolute nor ashamed to speak of America as a great nation. They didn’t doubt that we must be strong enough to protect ourselves and to help others.”
“They didn’t imagine that America should depend for its very survival on the promises of its adversaries,” Kirkpatrick added.
“They happily assumed the responsibilities of freedom,” she said, approaching the defining moment of her speech.
“I am not alone in noticing that the San Francisco Democrats took a very different approach.”
So was born the term “San Francisco Democrats” and it has endured, though the fortunes of the American Left ebbed from that moment until now. Perhaps it is a forty year cycle: Every four decades the Democrats openly go “full San Francisco left wing extreme” and get blown out in the November election.
Their cover-up of Joe Biden’s infirmity blown by the debate with President Trump and their lawfare strategy proven an enormous mistake, the American Left has gone all in again, with Vice President Harris replacing the infirm incumbent. No matter whom Harris picks as her running mate —even if it is the old school liberal Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, there will be no blurring of the edges of the socialism the Democrats wholly embrace, no watering down of their appeasement policies of the four years of Biden and the eight of Obama.
Democrats are going to put a choice before the American people: A mangled “managed decline” of the U.S. overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris or a renewal of American strength under President Donald Trump.
It’s as clear a choice as America has had since 1980 and 1984. Pray our center-right join with the old school liberals in the FDR-Truman-JFK-LBJ mold to finish the American realignment away from the American Left.
Prayer is in order because we really don’t want to live under the control of Kamala Harris, the Squad and the dark money web behind them. That they are planning a radical agenda isn’t in doubt. If the American Left somehow pulls off a miracle out of the wreckage of their bait-and-switch coup from “Scranton Joe” Biden back to the San Francisco Democrats, the bell will be tolling for all of us as well as our allies like Israel, NATO and in the Asian Pacific theater.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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